The Tall T

Actor, writer, and all-around great guy Jim Beaver turned me on to THE TALL T. After seeing the film, I found that I couldn't add much to his comments, so I asked if I could reprint his review. Being the all-around great guy that he is, Jim gave me the go ahead. So, here's Jim Beaver on THE TALL T:

My third favorite Western is, like SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, a Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott collaboration: THE TALL T. It's from an Elmore Leonard story and while it's an apparently simple good guys/bad guys movie, it resonates with me wonderfully.

Scott is the protagonist, of course, minding his own business as a rancher. He has a delightful bantering relationship with a stage driver played by Arthur Hunnicutt (Oscar-nominated a few years earlier for THE BIG SKY). It seems sort of leisurely until Richard Boone and his two dim-but-dangerous cohorts show up and commit what must have been (and even now still is) a shocking act of violence. Also caught in the whirlpool thus created are Maureen O'Sullivan, playing her age (or greater) as the plain(!) daughter of the local rich guy, and John Hubbard as the cad who married her for her money.

Burt Kennedy's script is tight, with wonderful dialog lifted straight from Leonard's story. (About O'Sullivan, Hunnicutt says, "She was scheduled to be an old maid, till Willard come along." A bad guy talks about about a pretty girl he once knew: "She was wild as mountain scenery." Another heavy is asked his age. His answer: "I don't know. Young, mostly.") The complexity (surprising in a 78-minute movie) comes mostly from the relationship between good guy Scott and bad guy Boone. Boone is drawn to Scott, almost yearning to have someone of Scott's intelligence and breeding in his life, instead of the scum he travels with. It's a fascinating angle on the white hat/black hat tradition.

THE TALL T has only been available infrequently on TV till lately, or in lousy 16mm prints. But Sony is releasing all the Columbia Boetticher/Scott films (of the seven films of the collaboration, only WESTBOUND and SEVEN MEN FROM NOW were for other studios) sometime soon. It's about time. THE TALL T is a small film, with nothing resoundingly profound about it, but I think it's one of the best Westerns ever made.

The Dark Knight

I went into THE DARK KNIGHT skeptically, wondering whether the ballyhoo surrounding Ledger's performance was justified or sentimental. It was justified.

The Joker, as written in this film, is a high wire character. The actor who plays him will either fail or succeed spectacularly, and Ledger succeeds. His Joker is terrifying and sad and sickly funny and wholly compelling, the Joker by which other incarnations of the character will be judged. As for Batman and Gordon and Dent and Dawes, well, they're all fine, but the fact is that I can barely remember them. That Joker, though, he gives me the shivers. And not in a good way. From voice to mannerisms to makeup to worldview, he's a complete character, one who espouses chaos while wreaking it through meticulous planning; one whose backstory shifts and morphs with each retelling; one you can't put your finger on, but who stays with you.

Wow, what a performance. What a movie. I look forward to seeing THE DARK KNIGHT again.

Hancock

What if Superman had poor social skills?

What if he had no social skills? What if he was a drunk, an outcast? What would a world like that look like?

Well, I don't know what that kind of world would look like, but I know that that kind of pitch looks like: a winner. Cast Will Smith as the Superman manque, and now we're talking sure-fire winner. HANCOCK works because Smith is the kind of movie star we love even when he's playing the jerk: the kind of guy we know will come around in the end. And who better to bring him around than Jason Bateman, perhaps the world's finest straight man, and Bateman's "Arrested Development" costar Charlize Theron?

Granted, this is not the kind of movie that'll change your life, but HANCOCK doesn't aspire to be. It aims for big, pulpy entertainment in the "Astro City" vein, and it hits its mark. Good work, Mr. Berg.

Tropic Thunder

I didn't so much as smile at any point in TROPIC THUNDER's run time. The whole enterprise felt like a labored, inside baseball comedy for the kind of people who laugh really hard at blooper reels. At no time did I feel like any of the characters were, on any level, actual people, and the child actor who played the villain was such a one-note performer that I found him to be quite distracting.

This film, a film that appeared to want to deflate vanities, felt like a vanity project. I don't ever need to see it again.