Unforgiven

Let me just take a moment to acknowledge David Peoples, a screenwriter who without me realizing it until now has written screenplays for three movies I've liked and blogged about in the last year and a half; this, 12 Monkeys, and Blade Runner. That's a pretty diverse and impressive list. Good on you, Peoples.

Anyway, Unforgiven is probably the best western I've ever seen. It's not the normal easy moral tale where some kindhearted gunslinger saves the township from evil bandits. There's no good guys or bad guys in this movie, just people on opposite sides of things. Clint Eastwood directed and stars as a former tough son of a bitch who got domesticated by his now-dead wife, but has to return to killing for the money. Morgan Freeman is his old partner who agrees to come along. Gene Hackman won an Oscar for his performance as the sheriff of the town the story revolves around, and he's equal parts dedicated lawman and vicious bastard. Richard Harris shows up as a dishonest gunman known as English Bob, and he's mostly there to give Hackman something to do while Eastwood and his posse take their good damn time getting to the plot. The movie seemed a bit slow in places, but I find that to be a common malady of the western genre, and the movie is well-written and well-put together enough to keep it from ever getting too dull.

Basically, some whores put together some money for a bounty on a couple cowboys outside Hackman's law, and Eastwood makes the long journey to try and collect. Obviously they end up at odds, and despite it not being the reason for the journey, the resolution of their conflict is the story's climax. It's an interesting, dark movie, one that shows the supposed violence of the time without ever once glorifying it. It's heavy without being heavy handed, and both manages to convey a message and simply deliver a clever, violent western if that's all you're looking for. I found it to be well deserving of its many awards, and got me interested in some other work by Eastwood.

12 Monkeys

Another time travel movie. I've never seen any of Terry Gilliam's non-Monty Python work before, but it's really not too different in feel. The plot is an interesting, violent science fiction story, but there's a fair amount of silliness in certain scenes. There's something odd about the way he films things. I don't know if it's a lens or what, but just like his short before Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, it feels flat and contained or something, not exactly low budget, just a little antiquated in the apparent scope of the image. It doesn't make the film worse, it just seems unusual. The performances are odd, too. Bruce Willis is totally not his in his standard mode for serious movies, and Brad Pitt's character is completely nuts. A couple of his quirks seemed forced to me, but otherwise it was an extremely entertaining job.

Basically Willis lives in a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by a deadly virus, and he's sent back in time to gather information about what happened. I like how the plan isn't to change the past, just to help make the future better. Of course, things in time can become distorted and everything's not quite what they assumed, as the plot gets more and more convoluted. What I found interesting was how the main characters became more mentally disturbed and confused as they went on. In movies like this the characters always take things more in stride than we might realistically expect, but here they begin to seriously question whether they're imagining everything or not. It all leads to the inevitable circular ending. Really enjoyable film.

Blade Runner

I probably shouldn't have waited this long to see it, although at least it's basically the definitive version. Blade Runner's been regarded as a classic of the science fiction genre for a long time, and it's nice to see the roots of a lot of work that borrowed from it. It's also fun to watch Han Solo, Admiral Adama, Cardinal Rourk, and Elle Driver run around a dark, dystopian city when they were younger (or in Solo's case, basically the same age). Having now seen four different adaptations of Phillip K. Dick's work, it's really interesting how different they can turn out in style, although I guess it can be expected when your leading men include Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Blade Runner has a couple action scenes, although that's not really the film's focus. It's about the story, as the movie raises questions about the true nature of life and the morality of killing off "Replicants", which are basically exactly the same as Cylons and even also nicknamed "skin jobs". The movie's very darkly lit and a bit of a slow burn, which doesn't make it very conducive to watching at night, but I wouldn't call it boring, as it's pretty well put together as a film and never lost my attention. Harrison Ford gives an interesting performance as Deckard, a man who isn't sure about what he has to do anymore. When it gets near the end and Deckard goes after the last couple Replicants, the movie gets genuinely disturbing, as Rutger Hauer plays the psychopath villain quite well, as he is known to do. The resolution is a bit weird, but everything about the movie is a little different, which I kind of like. Ridley Scott used to really know what was up with the genre. Apparently previous version of the movie had some terrible narration by Ford, and I'm curious about that, because it definitely didn't need it.