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Book and Movie Review - Last Stand at Saber River
August 04, 2023
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I recently finished reading my second Elmore Leonard western, Last Stand at Saber River, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first. Honestly, I find the plots in the crime writer’s earlier genre easier to follow, which may help. With crime novels, there are so many crosses and double-crosses, I have trouble keeping up and just let the words wash around me. Westerns are, by their nature, more straightforward.

And I like straightforward.

Though the Civil War rages on, after two and half years of fighting for Confederacy and multiple wounds, Paul Cable was sent home to his wife, Martha, and their three children. They’d stayed with her parents in Texas, but now Cable intends to resume his life in Arizona, with a small head of cattle in the largely unsettled frontier. Unfortunately, in his absence, the Kidston brothers have taken over his land for grazing their horses, which they supply to the Union, and use his house for their hired hands. 

There’s a new war on his doorstep, and it looks a lot like the old war.

The general store is now being run by a one-armed man named Janroe, who has his own battle going. He’s been supplying guns to the South, and without knowing it the Kidstons are making his illegal trade difficult. Goading Cable into killing his enemies seems like a good plan. And if Cable dies instead, he figures maybe he can win over Martha. A little insane, Janroe is an agent of chaos in an already unstable situation.

Leonard loves doing that.

In the other western I read, The Law at Randado, the protagonist’s struggle was persevering through a difficult task and maintaining his honor. Here, Cable must weigh the morality of taking the easy way out (violence) with protecting all that he holds dear. The war made him into a soldier, he thinks like a soldier and fights like a soldier, but he no longer wants that identity. So he’s forever trying to untrain himself and get back to being the man he was and desires to be again. Janroe is still fighting the War, and cannot comprehend Cable’s leaving it behind. 

One of the Kidston brothers still wears his uniform and treats his men like a military unit.

In 1997 Tom Selleck starred in a made-for-TV movie adaptation. I like Selleck (he reminds me of my dad), so I went ahead and ordered a DVD collection that includes it, along with two of his other westerns, all based on novels. While I had no doubt of Selleck’s ability to play a world-weary solider, I was curious to see how the screenwriter would handle his being twice the age of the literary Cable. 

For the most part, it’s a nonissue, though some concessions are made.

The two biggest changes involve Martha and the way the violence is portrayed. In the book Martha supports her husband every step of the way. The movie turns her into a bitter, angry woman who never wanted him to go fight, and doesn’t entirely trust him to make good decisions now. I understand adding some conflict, but Leonard found better ways that aren’t so tired. And of course, she gets in on the action at the end in a way that’s far less satisfying than the way Leonard wrote it.

But made-for-TV movies have to streamline things and milk them for melodrama.

Speaking of the action, Leonard wrote his violence with the precision of a chess match. Any further description I could offer wouldn’t do it justice. I saw hints of it in The Law at Randado, but what he does in this novel is simply magnificent. It would take a skilled filmmaker indeed to transfer that to the screen, and I don’t blame Dick Lowry a bit for taking a more simplistic, conventional approach. 

The movie is different, but satisfying enough so as not to ruin the book. 

I’ve got one more Leonard western on my shelf, Hombre, which has also been made into a movie. Not sure when I’ll get around to it. But my expectations are high. And as long as I’ve got those other Tom Selleck movies laying around, maybe it’s time I re-read those books too. Westerns are, after all, the American myth. And I want more of that in my life.

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Is Ladyballers Doomed from the Start?

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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