Westerns are very tricky now, because most of us realize that previous "tales of the West" have been exaggerated, fabricated, and skewed to be about white heroes conquering the "savages" of the plains, making this country safe for democracy.
So filmmakers have a problem. They can either go the bull**** route and get called on it by every activist group you can mention (and rightfully so, because that myth seriously does not need to be perpetuated any further), or the deconstruction route, which has already been done incredibly well in films like the Oscar-winning "Unforgiven."
So how do you tell a Western story in today's world have it be anything new? Or anything "real?" Either way, you will disappoint people. The ones who love the myth, or the ones who love the truth.
Sounds like this movie suffered from a huge identity crisis. It didn't know what it wanted to be.
By the way, for any of you in the L.A. area, I strongly encourage you to visit the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. It's so much better than I thought I was going to be, and after I discovered it, I went several times. It's an elaborate representation of the West, broken up into several (huge) sections: the Legendary West (with all the mythological heroes many of us know, including Annie Oakely, Buffalo Bill, and the TV and movie heroes and their costumes, etc.), the Romanticized West (by people like Remington and other painters and sculptors), and the Real West, that depicts what actually happened, including the cultural and religious diversity that shaped the West (the Chinese workers, aka "Coolies" who built the railroads, the free African Americans, the Mormons, the Jews, the Native Americans, the Latinos, etc.).
If you put all of these things together, Legends, Romance, Reality, you get a great overview of what the West "really" is and "really" means to people.
Check it out sometime if you're in the area.
"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
blocked: logan2, Diamonds3, Hamilton22
Updated On: 7/8/13 at 07:50 AM