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.