Up front is Westward the Women, a 1951 film starring Robert Taylor as Buck Wyatt, a wagon master who is hired to guide 140 women from Chicago to a California valley in order to marry settlers. In 1851, this is no easy trip. Wyatt tells the women up front that a good third of them will perish on the trip, but they are desperate for new lives in the frontier.
French-American actress Denise Darcel co-stars as the saucy French showgirl hoping to outrace a bad reputation.
The film is brutal in its honesty. The romance subplot is marginal; the center of the movie is a slow slog through incredibly hostile territory where nobody is safe. Do they arrive at the California valley? You’ll have to see it to find out. I’m shocked nobody has remade this movie, but maybe, these days, they can’t.
Sticking with westerns, of sorts, is Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West. MacFarlane stars as Albert Stark, a sheep rancher eking out a life in the 1886 Arizona desert who loses his girlfriend to the local moustachier, Neil Patrick Harris. Giovanni Ribisi plays his best friend and fiancé to Sarah Silverman’s brothel girl; Charlize Theron is the outlaw woman who arrives in town to change Stark’s life, and Liam Neeson plays her bandit husband.
It’s… just not that funny. I respect MacFarlane actually trying to get the death count to a million; he definitely knows how to lean into a joke, and then ride it into the ground.
The title, I think, is meant to remind folks of the much better movie, Once Upon a Time in the West, the Henry Fonda/Sergio Leone collaboration that just oozes danger and Charles Bronson from every pore.
I didn’t know anything about Marty Supreme going in; Kevin O’Leary, who plays an evil financier in the movie (not too far a stretch from what he plays in real life) talked about the movie a bit when he guested on the NPR panel show, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. But I didn’t give it another thought until I saw the thumbnail with Timothee Chalamet’s starved body on Netflix.
Chalamet plays a “based on real life” 1950s ping pong hustler who’s willing to do pretty much anything to beat the deaf Japanese player who uses an unfamiliar grip and humiliated him in their first meet-up. It was very intense; Chalamet was surprisingly good, and it might be his best performance in any film I’ve seen him in, and that includes both Dune and Willy Wonka.
Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin play a separated couple brought together by the end of the world in Greenland. An interstellar comet has zoomed into the solar system and Earth is in its sights. Armageddon and Deep Impact this isn’t. There’s no plucky crew of astronauts to save them this time.
Butler (using here his natural Scottish accent) plays an engineer whose visit to his ex-wife and diabetic son is interrupted by a presidential alert for his phone only (as far as he knows). The president requires he, his ex and his son to report to a military base with others deemed important to reconstruction afterward, where they will be flown to an undisclosed location to wait out the comet’s impact. The impact is described in the news as a “K-T level extinction event”, larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. When they finally do make it through traffic and minor fragment impacts to the military base, they are refused entry due to the hitherto undisclosed fact, to them, of the son’s chronic condition. This sparks a mad rush by Butler to keep his family together and find his own way to the Greenland base.
I found the situations trite, and not sure how they were going to survive the thousands of years in the base until Earth stopped being molten. But it turns out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
The movie had some exciting parts, particularly once they make their way to Canada on a promise of a distant airfield that may still be their ticket to salvation. But most of it depends on how much you like looking at Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin.
I wouldn’t even really mention this movie except that I followed it up immediately with the sequel, Greenland 2: Migration. When they opened the bunker after nine months, the land was still in too much turmoil to leave. Five years later, the ash has all fallen, the radioactivity has diminished, but wild “pressure storms” strike random death, and Greenland itself has become volcanically unstable; they have to leave. A scientist theorizes that the gigantic impact crater in the south of France may have become a verdant paradise during the previous five years. When earthquakes destroy their Greenland bunker, they are forced to take a lifeboat across the ocean to England and then to France to find there either paradise or extinction.
A 9 mile diameter comet impacting the Earth would make the planet uninhabitable; clouds would cool the planet and kill all the plants, and everything else would soon follow, but in G2:M, southern England is, aside from the higher water level, fairly untouched. The Channel has evaporated and become a treacherous canyon, but Calais on the north coast of France has trees and grass and plenty of life. Being a couple hundred kilometers from an extinction-level impact left precious few signs.
All that said, I found the movie fascinating, and enjoyed it far more than the first one.
You have to feel at least a little masochistic to watch Waterworld, with Kevin Costner as “the Mariner”, a mutant inhabitant of a future Earth where the ice caps have melted and there is no dry land, anywhere. Maybe. Rumors of “Dry Land” abound, and a woman caring for a young girl with Chinese characters tattooed on her back that give the coordinates for this mysterious land. Dennis Hopper plays the leader of the band of “Smokers” based on an old oil tanker with a mysterious past, searching for the girl so that he can claim this land (which looks like Hawai’i when they finally arrive, but in the movie is intended to be Mount Everest).
The movie had amazing special effects. It had a stupidly high budget, but that money is all on the screen. They actually filmed in the ocean off Hawai’i.
Too bad they couldn’t have used some of that money to hire writers. It’s meant to be a Mad Max homage, but they came up short.
Okay, so that’s some of the movies I’ve watched lately. I’m kinda scared to start writing about all the books.
Leave a Reply