Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon: Junior Bonner

The Steve McQueen blog-a-thon begins today over at Jason Bellamy's place, The Cooler.  Make sure to keep checking in as it runs through Friday, and there are sure to be a lot of great entries submitted throughout the blog-a-thon's run.  The full review of the 1972 western Junior Bonner can be found at the western blog I contribute to, Decisions at Sundown.

"I'm workin on my first million. You're still workin on 8 seconds."

This line spoken by Curly (Joe Don Baker) Bonner to his brother Junior (Steve McQueen) gets to the heart of Sam Peckinpah's elegiac western.  This bit of harsh insight comes after Junior, an aging rodeo star, says he can't accept Curly's, an opportunistic entrepreneur looking to exploit the nostalgic charms of the Old west in an emerging culture, job offer because he has to walk down his own road. But what does that road look like for an aging rodeo star in a world that is clearly passing him by?  That is the central question surrounding Junior Bonner, Peckinpah's misunderstood western.

Click here to read the rest of the review with comments

Mosey on Over to Decisions at Sundown...

Yup...that's the western blog I've mentioned in the past. It hasn't been updated by me in a long while, but thankfully the incredibly smart people I share blog duties with over there have picked up the slack. The most recent entry being Ed Howard -- of the deeply rich and resplendent movie blog Only the Cinema -- and his take on the classic Hawkes helmed El Dorado. Check it out. Also, check out Jon Lanthier's (the creator of Decisions at Sundown) essay on one of my very favorite films of the year, The Limits of Control. Ed's take on this fine Jarmusch film can be found at his site, here. I'll be chiming in with some western reviews soon enough...but first I need to take care of my daunting must-see list of 2009 films. Until then acquaint yourself with these fine pieces.

The Long Riders (Walter Hill)

How appropriate that fresh off a viewing of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds I sat down to watch Walter Hill’s The Long Riders. Two totally different movies made by two totally different filmmakers actually have one thing in common: they take their liberties with history. However, Tarantino does it in a way that fleshes out fictional characters while providing factual situations as a backdrop – filling in the peripheries of his altered take on WWII with historical figures. Hill just says “damn the torpedoes” and chucks the whole James-Younger gang mythology into the trash. Tarantino’s film compounds on history – using it as a spring board (and tweaking it along the way) for a more interesting film; Hill’s film demystifies the legend of the James-Younger gang by simply making a film of nothing by bullet points, rushing along through every scene until the viewer is left wondering “that’s it?” when the credits role. The only interesting thing about The Long Riders is how badly it fails.

Read the full post with comments at Decisions at Sundown

Blog Pimpin': Decisions at Sundown (Created by Joseph 'Jon' Lanthier)

There's a new blog I'd like to promote, and not just because I'll be contributing to it every now and then. Two of the best bloggers in the 'sphere, Ed Howard of Only the Cinema and Joseph 'Jon' Lanthier of The Powerstrip, are also writing (no doubt better pieces than I could hope to produce) for the blog. What kind of blog you ask? Well, Jon created a blog called Decisions at Sundown (great Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott movie by the way), a blog dedicated entirely to the Western. I realize that I haven't spent a lot of time talking about this particular genre here on the blog, but the Western is actually my second favorite genre behind Italian horror...so contributing to a blog about Westerns seems like a natural fit -- plus it will force me to become more adamant about watching Westerns, as I haven't made the effort of adding them to my rotation of DVD viewing in quite some time.

So anywho...mosey on over to Decisions at Sundown. Jon already has up a handful of great reviews on some of Anthony Mann's best work. Check it out.