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Movie Review - Dead for a Dollar (no spoilers)
November 07, 2022
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Finally sitting down to watch Dead for a Dollar, I didn’t quite know what to expect. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen a Walter Hill movie (I know, I know) and the IMDB parents’ guide makes it sound pretty rough. However, I love a good western, Dead for a Dollar looked interesting, and the since it’s only available on DVD it’s pretty cheap.

I liked it?

Even at a lean hour forty-seven, the story is difficult to summarize. Christoph Waltz plays Max Borlund, a bounty hunter tasked with tracking down the kidnapped wife of an aspiring politician. The woman, Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), has been taken to Mexico by a deserter Buffalo Soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott), which also makes this a military operation. Rachel’s husband, Martin Kidd (Hamish Linklater, oozing evil like Alan Rickman in Quigley Down Under) wants things kept on the DL, but refuses to pay her ransom. So Borlund heads down to Mexico with another Buffalo Soldier, Sergeant Poe (Warren Burke), who has a lead on where Jones is hiding out.

But wait, there’s more!

The film opens with Borlund visiting a prisoner, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), due to be released. He warns Cribbens not to come looking for him.  We know that these two will most definitely meet again and one of them will die. The story follows Borlund and Cribben’s trajectories until they intersect. Old wounds never heal in the grime of the old west, and Hill’s old west is as grimey as they come.

Hill obviously had Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome in mind, even dedicating to film to the famed director.

Westerns are often old men stories. Not for old men, specifically, but about them. Westerns are often about outsiders, men called to sacrifice themselves for a world to which they can never belong. A man on the downward slope of life still has much to offer, but a righteous man understands his mortality and works to leave a legacy for the young. Evil men are selfish, looking toward their own self-interest at the expense of others.

Good and evil can be evident at any age.

I’ve some complaints online that in Dead for a Dollar Hill goes woke, and I don’t see it. Just because there’s an interracial romance doesn’t mean he’s pushing a progressive ideology. Just because there’s a strong woman, a proto-feminist, doesn’t mean, well, anything. We’ve seen these things long before the woke scolds started insisting on their inclusion, and as long as we tell human stories we will continue to see them.

We need human stories.

Once out on the trail, Poe tries to get to know Borlund, asking about his nationality. “I’m an American,” Borlund says. He’s surrendered all past allegiances and taken on a new mantle. He is the hero. He is not racist. He is American. And he is honorable. I don’t see the wokeness, perhaps because I choose not to see what I hate. 

Lesson in that.

The movie has also gotten some hate for coming across as low-budget. Well, it is. But also, it’s an homage to the B-westerns that Boetticher made. Not every new western is going to have the glitz of Tombstone, nor should it. Everything has a yellow tint and Hill even uses wipes, encouraging us to set aside our pretentious attitudes and see his film for what it is: a B-western with an A-story. 

Dead for a Dollar isn’t as aggressively violent as I feared, though there is some nudity and plenty of violence. The language is harsh, and the end result is something with hints of a grindhouse movie. But unlike those, I didn’t come away feeling dirty.

Yes, I did like it. Yes, I’ll watch it again.

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The most honest analysis I've seen.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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Going Back to 1995

Maybe I’m just getting old, but it doesn’t feel like we had the thriving and distinct pop culture of past generations. Has there been a look or stye, or feeling, that defines this moment? Everything seems to have stagnated for the last twenty years. And it’s not as if I don’t pay attention. 

It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

So over on Criticless, I made a list.

Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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