The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 1:27 am

Rented it last week; I still wonder how come we didn't hear more and more often of this movie : it really is a piece of art, it's incredible. In my eyes it's at the same level as There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 2:17 am

I wanted to see it but it never played at any theaters near here for what ever reason. For awhile it got some hype but no one brought it to the people. I hear its kinda slow, tell me susan?

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 2:32 am

It is slow, it's no action flick, and it's like 3 hours, but just as with There Will Be Blood, if you can let yourself get sucked in, get in the story, you will completely forget about it being long. The music is great, and the movie is very well directed. And the casting is pretty good : I hate Casey Affleck but he's just the man to play Robert Ford. At the beginning you like the kid's guts, but as the movie goes on and you discover of what he's really made and you really despise him.

Some scenes are like paintings; in some way that reminded me of the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring, in which some scenes are based of Vermeer's paintings, and they start off still, with nothing moving, looking exactly like a painting, and slowly it starts moving.

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 6:58 am

I'd say one reason it didn't recieve more critical attention was because it stole a shitton from Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Samuel Fuller and a whole laundry list of other directors. There is homage and then there is theft, this film falls into the latter category. When it was original it was brilliant, when it was stealing it was lackluster. Also the voiceover was completely superfluous and they ruined an amazing ending by kicking a dead horse long after they had made their point. Not bad at all but not as great as alot of other things that came out this year.

Casey Afflect stole the fucking show though, he did a hell of a job (same with the guy who played Dick Liddel).

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 1:01 pm

That's way too bad.

So nobody else noticed that sundance shit itself over a movie that was singularly unspectacular if you don't count the parts of the movie that didn't make it into the preview reel and were thus left unfilmed?

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 1:11 pm

Nearly all of the porno films & Charlie Chaplin films that i`ve ever seen. icon_eyebrow

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 7:19 pm

That's way too bad.

So nobody else noticed that sundance shit itself over a movie that was singularly unspectacular if you don't count the parts of the movie that didn't make it into the preview reel and were thus left unfilmed?

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 7:29 pm

Anoran doesn't like movies. See: Blade Runner.

Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 11:54 pm

I'm in the same boat...

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:28 am

He totally has the Thousand-Yard Stare when it comes to movies :subhuman:

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:53 am

That's way too bad.

So nobody else noticed that sundance shit itself over a movie that was singularly unspectacular if you don't count the parts of the movie that didn't make it into the preview reel and were thus left unfilmed?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:04 am

thanks for this review - me and a friend were going to rent it tonight but it's already getting late and 3 hours? Meh, I'll save it for later.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:11 am

Usually when a movie doesn't suck I like it. That's my metric. Blood and No Country for example kicked major ass. Zodiac and Michael Clayton were also way underrated.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:13 pm

maybe you just don't have enough moxie to enjoy a good movie cyclops

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:59 pm

To put it in a crass unpoetic manner, yes.

Yes I thought No Country for Old Men sucked.

I felt that the entire movie served as a classic exemplification of how cinema has so degraded that a person decided to "emperor's new clothes" sundance and it raped a hole in the judges like Pyramid Head in a pile of human skin.

The director is clearly capable of shooting scenes with way over the top ability. His power level is proverbially over 9000. That being true, knowing as he must the wiles of today's terrible, cavemen at home "avant-garde" (this term is used very spitefully, having read it in the way I intended it should give you eye cancer.... exactly now.) movie audience, he decided to pull the wool over the minds of the entire country by delivering exactly what they hate shot so well that they fucking loved it.

I think he? did it on purpose to spend long cold winter nights at home laughing his fucking ass off. He delivered a plotless, contentless series of trivial scenes that were predictable in the extreme, and even pulled the huge "fuck you audience" by deliberately including the cliched "Every single long scene in the movie will be shown in the previews" that usually earmarks a movie as "typical hollywood trash". No surprises, no hidden message... Just a terrible movie that was shot so well that people forgot it was almost a self-referential commentary on why movies fucking suck.

So yeah, well done buddy.

I noticed you noticing that movies are trash, and saw what you proverbially "did there". Hope you make a million zillion fucking dollars, because you clearly deserve to be a quite wealthy man. In fact, I'm hoping you turn into exactly the kind of shitty film exec that you used to poo-poo over rented movies and bonghits in film school so the cycle of "thanks for the memories" can fuck itself into a black hole creating mass reaction and kill us all.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:05 pm

No Country sucks, here I'll use PYRAMID HEAD as a metaphor for why. Thanks, bro.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:09 pm

You need to calm down. Your theory on No Country is completely paranoid. First of all, most of the people who saw the movie felt rather let down and disappointed by the ending. I read the book and was disappointed with the movie's end. It's no conspiracy. Critics loved the movie because it was beautifully put together. The villian was epic. It was an excellent dramatic western. So critic's enjoyed it and guess what, critics are paid to tell people their opinions on movies. In this case, people followed their advice and I know that there were alot of people who were let down.

I enjoyed the movie despite the ending. The Coen Brothers usually come through and here they did. You have to be crazy to believe that just because you didn't like it, the whole world must have been brain-washed in order to enjoy this film.

and the movie follows the book almost to the letter, so its more the authors fault if you didn't care for the storyline.

And you sound like a real prick when you say that the movie was made so well that people forgot that it was a movie that they should hate. How does that make sense? If a movie makes people think it's good, whether through excellent camerawork or subliminal hypnosis, then isn't the movie good?

Thank you for freeing me from this delusion I have been under. To think that all these years I have been calling movies good when I really have no idea whether or not I've watched a good movie.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:56 pm

the book isn't all that good either, maybe a blood meridian movie would be more interesting icon_google

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:04 am

Well the Hollywood Jewglomerate is working on adapting both Blood Meridian and The Road, just for you. They both should be out by the end of '09.

Ridley Scott directing Blood M.
and the guy who did The Proposition is in charge of The Road.

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:29 am

I often find that people lose sight of the story in the face of an epic retelling.