kiev4am

Once in a while there's a film that makes me glad to be a geek. I finally saw 'Cowboys and Aliens' and loved it. I loved the way it was an absolutely straight-down-the-line western complete with a Man With No Name, scrubland, canyons, stray dogs, Biblical-named town, cowed townsfolk, wastrel rich boy shooting up the place, heartless cattle baron and a whole fistful of 'Searchers'-style empty-house, open-door-to-sepia-daylight shots. And then it had aliens, and it was still a completely straight-faced, dusty, deliberate western. With aliens. Oh, and a beautiful upside-down paddle steamer.

I liked Daniel Craig doing his best Lee Van Cleef and Keith Carradine doing his best Sam Elliott and I especially liked Harrison Ford getting to play his real age and be the evil-tempered old bastard of the piece. He barely cracked a smile, but he snarled and cragged and grouched and gnawed the scenery like a true Leone stalwart and generally looked like he was having enormous fun not being personable any more. I also sort-of appreciated the way the enigmatic, otherworldly beauty you so often find in washed-out backwater ghost towns (cough) really was otherworldly. It helped explain Olivia Wilde's eerie perfection and Keanu-like blankness.

It was an affectionate, daft, flashy mash-up of a film that meandered a bit towards the end, pulled every western trope out of the bag and closed with the classic 'Time Machine' gambit of blow-them-all-up-and-run-like-hell. But who cares. It had grizzled Harrison Ford, on a horse, shooting spaceships with a Colt - what more could you want?

...no matter how often I watch it. I love every single shot and every single line, and the chemistry and bickering of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, and all of the gnarly and stellar supporting players, and the ridiculously assured racking-up of foreshadowing and tension. I just love this film to pieces. It makes me want to swill whisky while singing bad sea shanties and shooting barrels at all life's obstacles.

Paraphrase of a talkboard comment that made me grin:

"Watching a scene with Smiley and Control I thought, I remember when they were Sid Vicious and Caligula. Crap, I feel old."

Aheheh.

I am SO stoked for this film. I'm a huge John Le Carré fan, and I must have re-read 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' dozens of times - it's one of the touchstone books I pick up when I feel like I need to relearn how to write again. He's just a wonderful stylist and novelist, in or out of the thriller/spy genre. I loved the original TV adaptation of 'Tinker Tailor' with Alec Guinness, and when I first heard about the new film I wondered how much of the book's dingy, harried, melancholy atmosphere would survive, or whether the new George Smiley would have the necessary gravitas and tragedy about him. Having watched two trailers, though, I don't think I'm worried any more. Wow. Gary Oldman is perfect, right down to the milk-bottle glasses, and the rest of the cast looks amazing - just like the old TV series, it's a roll call of powerhouse British character actors. And exactly as it should, it seems to happen only in tobacco-brown, smoke-filled rooms or on the rundown fringes of European cities. Can't wait to see it.