3:10 to Yuma

I am not the biggest fan of wild west films. I don't particularly care for Russel Crowe (although I can appreciate that he is a good actor) and I am just so over Christian Bale. Still, I ended up watching 3:10 to Yuma (Alan Tudyk! Peter Fonda! Kevin Durand!) and enjoying it throughout.

Russel Crowe plays the outlaw Ben Wade, who gets himself caught and is set to be brought to the train going to Yuma prison. Yes, yes, it leaves at 3:10. The raga tag band of unlikely characters to get him there include the Doc (a vet, actually), a bounty hunter and farmer Dan Evans, who really needs the money promised him for getting Wade on that train.

Evans' motives go beyond that as he also wants his young son William to respect him (he doesn't). William himself wants in on the trail because he believes himself to be a great shot, even at 14, and also considers his father to be a wimp. Hot on their trail (after a cleverly devised delay) is Wade's gang of outlaws, now led by the trusted Charlie, who wants desperately to fee his boss and keep the gang together.

Many a shootout and several casualties later (Alan Tudyk! Peter Fonda! Kevin Durand!) the good guys almost made it. They are hiding out in a hotel room, having recently obtained the assistants of the local marshal and his two best men. They hightail it soon enough though, because Charlie offers anyone a reward of $ 200,-- if he just shoot and kill one of his boss' captors. Quite effective in making things way harder for Evans, who is the only one left that really wants to put Wade on that train. This not only wins him the respect of young William, but that of Wade, as well.

The final shootout is quite exciting, with only very few survivors.

Not bad at all.

7/10

The Lone Ranger

Went to see The Lone Ranger spontaneously today. Mainly, because nothing else was showing that my friend and I could go and see together (she doesn't like horror films so The Conjuring was out, but that's ok because I'm seeing that tomorrow).

What I knew about the story beforehand is that it exists. What I knew about the cast is that it has Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer in it and I was dimly aware of Ruth Wilson's and Helena Bonham Carter's presence. Turns out....added bonus....Tom Wilkinson and William Fichtner (!), although it did take me a second to recognize him.

I gather from this showing that the story is a full-on comedy more than a western. The adventure part kicks in massively in the end, when I lost track of who was on what half of the train, which took away from the experience a little. Also, it went on way too long in my opinion (the train scene in the end, I mean).

The story is this: a group of greedy bad guys raids farms dressed as Native Americans to start a war in hopes of wiping out the Native population in the area to secretly (sort of) mine for silver (and transport it to San Francisco with the newly built railroad). The silver mine was shown to the two main baddies a long time ago by young Tonto, which cost his entire tribe their lives. That is why Tonto is a bit 'out there'. In the process all but one local rangers get killed, the one becoming (you guessed it) the Lone Ranger, no seeking justice together with Tonto.

Tonto and the Lone Ranger together are pretty funny (mostly Tonto, Ranger is hapless), the white (spirit) horse is even funnier.

Entertaining, nothing to write home about.

6/10

Django Unchained

This film is totally insane, very bloody and way over the top. It's a Quentin Tarantino film so this was to be expected.

Bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (played by the always awesome Christoph Waltz) frees slave Django from a chain gang - in the most hilarious manner - to help him find identify three brothers he intends to kill for money. They draw a lot of attention because Django is on horseback and that is a very unusual sight in a land where slavery is the norm. Schultz and Django arrange to work together as bounty hunters through the winter and then go and free Django's wife Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, that is her name) from the clutches of Monsieur Candie (the farm is called "Candie Land").

That is basically the story.

Everything else is vintage Tarantino - violence, fountains of blood, extended shoot-outs, hilarious dialogue and cameos galore (including original Django Franco Nero).

As for the acting - Waltz is brilliant, as is Jamie Foxx. DiCaprio is as good as he's ever going to be in any given film (read: ok). My very favorite of them all, however, is Samuel L. Jackson as house slave Steven, who has made himself a comfortable living sucking up to his white owners and pretending to be a limping, hard-of-hearing imbecile, when really he is a conniving SOB.

8/10

Unforgiven

Normally, I am not much of a fan of wild west films. The cowboy romantic doesn't do it for me. What I require for me to enjoy this type of film is one of two things - (1) humor, (2) a good story. Unforgiven, luckily, covers (2) nicely.

A prostitue in a small Wyoming town gets her face cut up by one of her costumers. When the sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) doesn't punish the cutter and his friend to the other prostitutes liking, they throw their money together and offer a $ 1,000,-- reward to have them killed. One of the groups gunning for the money are one young wannabe killer ("Schoffield Kid"), and two retired ones, played by Clint Eastwood (William Munny) and Morgan Freeman (Ned Logan).

The main problem anyone trying for the reward money face is the no-nonsense sheriff, who takes anyone's gun in his town and beats them up - sometimes for no reason other than them not having noticed the sign specifying that no guns are allowed in town. A real asshole, that one.

After the trio kill the first of their targets, Ned Logan gets captured by the sheriff's men and eventually tortured to death. The Schoffield Kid finishes off the second target (his first ever kill), the climax sees William Munny facing (and killing) Little Bill Daggett.

A sometimes brutal, sometimes sad film, that won the best picture award at the Oscars and established Clint Eastwood as a great director.

from Roger Ebert's review:A lot of the shots are from the inside looking out, so that the figures seem dark and obscure and the brightness that pours through the window is almost blinding. The effect is to diminish the stature of the characters; these aren't heroes, but simply the occupants of a simple, rude society in which death is an everyday fact.

6/10