Thirty six years after it was made, the wife and I realized we had never actually watched “Heaven’s Gate,” the 1980 Michael Cimino film that pretty much burned everything it ever touched except, somehow, Christopher Walken’s career. The movie is now viewable on Netflix. I thought, well, it has a solid cast and that famously huge budget and much of it was filmed in my homeland of […]
Raised on guns and dynamite
I was on the treadmill yesterday watching Rio Bravo on AMC. It’s been called Howard Hawks’ finest film, and that may be, but sweating through my fifth mile I was struck mostly by how cheaply life was regarded in the glory days of the Western. In one scene, John Wayne and Ricky Nelson gun down three outlaws who have been distracted by a flower pot tossed out […]