Like Dislike Thanks for rating! mike | 29 Jul 2011 | 43 Views | 2 Likes | 0 Dislikes

WTI: Cowboys and Aliens

The western genre, at this particular point in cinematic history, is a pair of boots a filmmaker can slip on when he wants to dance a certain dance - an ideas dance - and this metaphor is getting weird. Westerns, like a lot of strongly constricted genres with narrowly defined stylistic palettes, are the tool that storytellers use when they want to talk about certain of those ideas: freedom, the "American Dream", pluckiness, retributive justice or the flip side of those coins: death, cruelty, the randomness of fate and the pointlessness of violence. 

So when you just make a straight-up old-fashioned plain-jane western (even if it does have aliens), it's kind of annoying, because the whole thing seems pointless... and then you start wondering, "Hey, if there's no ideas, here, beyond the idea 'hey what if cowboys fought aliens heh heh huh huh', then what's the point? Oh yeah, to make money." And then you wind up shivering, violated once again by the system, wet in your cold mind-shower.

So, instead, watch a Western with big Thoughts and cool Ideas: Jim Jarmusch's masterpiece, Dead Man.