True Grit (4/5 Stars)

Papa Ross must have been one hell of a man.

It’s a good thing. Joel and Ethan Coen have now made four movies in as many years. Earlier in their career it always took them two or three years to string together a movie. This was because they always insisted on Creative Control and made movies that never made a lot of money. But that has changed. The word has gotten out that the Coens make good movies. They may be oddball at times but always good. I would suspect that people going to see True Grit (which is the Coens highest grossing movie ever) aren’t going because they fondly remember the original 1969 version or the book it was based upon or even the stars (Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon). I would suspect they are interested because it is a Coen Brothers movie. There are some filmmakers that plain don’t suck. The Coen Brothers are a couple of them.

It is an unwritten rule of the Coens that each movie they do should be unlike any movie they’ve already done. “True Grit” is no exception. It is purely Coenesque in that it isn’t. Get it? It’s an outright Western. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl out to avenge the death of her father by the hands of an outlaw named Tom Chaney, played by Josh Brolin. She sets out to hire a U.S. Marshall to go after Chaney. Given a list of names, she decides upon the roughest one, a man by the name of Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. He is a man of True Grit, a whiskey guzzling grizzly bearded cantankerous itchy-trigger fingered old fool. A real character as they say. Jeff Bridges, aka The Dude aka the most comfortable actor in the world, is the perfect casting choice for the role. Also on the trail of Chaney for a completely different murder is a Texas Marshall named LeBeef, played by Matt Damon. Damon plays the role as if he's never seen a Western. Here, he’s striking surprised and neurotic nuances that rarely come from cowboys. Then again his character has to deal with Mattie Ross, one of the smartest and most confident girls ever to exist in a western. She’s throwing everyone for a loop here. That includes the bad guys too, both Tom Chaney and the Pepper Gang, led by none other than Mr. Pepper, played appropriately by Barry Pepper with the help of a really nasty set of dentures. Chaney by the way is one of this year’s stupidest sounding bad guys. Brolin plays the guy as if he’s more likely to use a book as toilet paper than read it. He murdered Papa Ross for the stupid sum of two gold pieces. There are no qualms about going to kill him.

“True Grit,” is true to its name in that it has a lot of grit, but let it be known that this movie is also very funny. It’s not a Comedy mind you, but most of the characters are what you would call witty and their different styles make conversation a minefield of quick insults and comedic insights. Cogburn is blunt, abrasive, and clumsy. Mattie is saracastic and a smart-aleck. Damon seems to have self-esteem problems, which regularly pokes holes into his Texas Ranger Pride. They spend most of the time on the trail arguing with each other. Mattie regularly gets the best of Damon. Damon picks on Cogburn. And Cogburn, well he’s got a bottle of whiskey and will not be ashamed.  All of this is done in 19^th Century Western talk, which is different but still decipherable if you listen closely.

Here’s a good question: Is the character Mattie Ross realistic? Forget that she’s a girl. What fourteen year old do you know, boy or girl, can intelligently discuss areas of the law with adults, negotiate deals with horse traders and bounty hunters, or have the confidence and wherewithal to hunt down their father’s killer upon their own initiative. What were you doing at the age of 14? Parents back then must have expected a bit more pluck and self-reliance from their kids, that and Papa Ross in particular must have been one of hell of a educator. Give credit to her church as well. Most of her righteous confidence comes straight from the Bible, which she quotes many times. Anyway, someone somewhere did something right.

“True Grit” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it is a good one and may get some Oscar nominations simply because it does an extremely competent job at being good. It would not surprise me if the Coen’s longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins got his 9^th Oscar nomination or if the movie itself got a Best Picture nomination. Don’t ask me if this is better than the original movie because I haven’t seen it.

Flags of Our Father 11/27/06

Clint Eastwood's new war movie left something to be desired. Most of it was good enough, definitely the battle scenes and the subsequent publicity tour. The biggest problem was the over abundance of voice over narration and the subsequent confusion. 
It was very confusing as to who was tellling this story, when, and how. Only at the end did I finally understand that it was the son of one of the soldiers that was visiting other veterans and interviewing them. If that's so then this story is being told by that son. So it's his story. Therefore Eastwood should have made that clear up front and then given the son more background. That way when the end of the movie come around, and it happens to be mostly about the son, I the viewer shouldn't think that the final scenes have very little to do with the movie. The movie was a bit anti-climatic. It's what's stopping this movie from becoming something other than run-of-the-mill. 

The battle scenes have a weird look to them. This isn't really a complaint, but it sort of looked like a video game and when it didn't look like a video game it looked like 'Saving Private Ryan.' On that note I really liked the casting of Barry Pepper. As one may remember he was the sniper in 'Saving Private Ryan.' Having him in this movie gave it a more authentic feel. Ryan Phillipe does a fine job too I guess. Most of the other guys I plain didn't recognize. 
There is so much talk about the flag-raising and how it was paticularly meaningless to the men who did it. But Eastwood also makes such a big deal over the flag-raising also that it completely substitutes the rest of the battle. This begs the question I think. Why didn't Eastwood make a movie about the battle of Iwo Jima and not about the flag-raising if he thought the flag raising wasn't that great. There's a look and feel to Eastwood's movies that makes them seem great, but I find that I look closer and I can never quite find the heart. The movies don't go to much farther than skin-deep. That's why I rarely watch an Eastwood film twice, although this one is definitely worth seeing once. I hope it doesn't win any oscars.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 03/04/06

Tommy Lee Jones is one tough sonofabitch, and so is this movie. Riding through the desert with a dead decaying mexican, trying to find his home town, and risking everything to do it because he's his friend. It's a noble cause, and to the credit of the movie this cause stays noble, even after alot of dead guy joke's. The kind you may see in a black comedy like "Weekend At Bernie's" which was also about time spent with a dead guy. 
Wow, what to say about this movie. I laughed quite a bit, and there were alot of jokes, but I'm not about to even come close to calling it a comedy. Is it a western? I wouldn't say that, at least not in the traditional sense. Most westerns don't have big screen TV's showing soap operas. Or viagra jokes for that matter. So I really don't know what to say about this movie. I think it could've been shorter, especially near the beginnning where the plot had alot of flash forwards and flash backwards,which overlapped and described the same plotline.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed Barry Pepper's performance. There's alot of subtlety in this movie, and perhaps that's good, and perhaps that's bad. If anything, it's completely original and shows a place, The Texas border, that we usually never see in the movie's. Is it fresh? Yeah I think it is. That Tommy Lee Jones is one tough sonofabitch.