Hombre

Apache Paul Newman does not give a crap about this white man’s review.

Hombre is the story of a Paul Newman raised by Apaches, then adopted by the movie Stagecoach.  Right down to the Hierarchy of Races (White>Mexican>Apache) established in the first ten minutes of the movie, this is the same movie.  An eclectic group of travelers get on a stagecoach and ride off to an uncertain future.  To be fair, the non-titular stagecoach is stolen part way through the movie, so it’s more like No Stagecoach from that point on, but that’s just picking nits.  And we all know I only pick nits when they’ve achieved full ripeness for baking my famous nitpie. 

The movie is called Hombre because nobody knows Paul Newman’s name.  No wait, that’s not true.  It’s John Russell.  Everybody knows his name, except this one, unimportant, guy.  Heck, he has three names, though they never tell us the other ones.  Maybe Hombre is one of them?  I don’t know.  This is supposed to feed into the mystery of a man raised by Apaches, but as far as I can tell, all being raised by Apaches does is make you an asshole.

After Newman cuts his hair, he speaks in nothing but monosyllabic phrases that can be Google translated as “Screw off.”  He studiously avoids doing anything, ever, because he, like, doesn’t care man.  So he’s less like an Apache warrior and more like a high school senior.  He’s an excellent shot with a gun, always knows what to do, and can survive in a desert with nothing but the glint in his deep blue eyes. 

Naturally, he uses these superpowers to make a nice woman destitute, get an innocent man who tried to help him killed, let a woman be kidnapped, and leave six people to die in the desert.  He presumably does this because white people were so mean to his Apache friends.  So really the movie is all about the most aggressively passive-aggressive case of White Guilt ever.  So that’s different from Stagecoach.  Everything else is the same, so just watch Stagecoach instead.  Or The Mummy.  I hear that’s good.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: No

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

They could rob my bank any day.

I’m not really sure what the point of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is.  The movie covers the very tail end of the outlaws’ career as they flee America for Bolivia.  We’re not given any reason to care about the characters or events of the movie, any more than I care about the dump I took just because I spent two hours with it.  The movie relies on Robert Redford’s Redfordiness and Paul Newman’s Newmaniness to give the main characters personality.  While their charms are not inconsiderable, I’m trying to watch a movie here, not be bedded by them.

Most of the action revolves around the outlaws being chased by a posse that we never get to see up close.  There’s like half an hour of Redford and Newman riding a horse, stopping, breathlessly saying, “I think we lost ‘em,” then widening their eyes as they see silhouettes on the horizon, and saying, “Oh my stars, they are still coming, the game is afoot!”  When they finally have to fight after fleeing the country, Redford kills like thirty Bolivians.  This is after spending the whole movie hemming and hawing over fighting the mere six Americans that were chasing them before.  I guess that clears up the exchange rate on posses at the turn of the century, but it feels incongruent.

The movie’s not unpleasant, a quote that probably won’t make the movie poster (“Not Unpleasant” – Musty Movies), but it’s not really memorable either.  The beginning is pretty good, but then the movie muddles along until the over the top ending.  One watching tip though: Mute the movie whenever a musical montage of riding a bike or a slideshow of Our Trip to New York starts.  There hasn’t been a soundtrack this inappropriate since I hired a barbershop quarter to sing “God Save the Queen” at my 4^th of July barbeque.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No

Stagecoach

More like "Clowncoach"

If you’ve ever been watching a Western and thought, “Man, I wish instead of all the shooting and chasing and excitement there was more talking about feelings and scenes of childbirth,” Stagecoach is the Western for you.  That’s not to say that the genre stand-bys are completely absent.  There’s plenty of hats, saloons, and casual racism (for those of you keeping track at home, White People > Mexicans > “Savages.”)  There’s also a surprisingly large amount of historical context.  I suspect the filmmakers wanted to make a History Channel documentary, but it was 1939 and no one had invented dramatic voiceovers yet.

Around half the movie is just shots of a stagecoach traveling through a desert, so you can’t accuse the movie of false advertising.  Inside the stagecoach are too many people for its actual size.  Like an episode of The Real World: Dodge City, they are carefully picked to stir up conflict with each other.  One has a drinking problem, one pretends to be shocked by all the debauchery around her, and one is probably going to come out of the closet later on.  Unlike The Real World, only one seems likely to have drunken sex with her coachmates.  For this, she’s shunned by the more puritanical members of the coach, who believe you should only seduce married women through your genteel Southern charms.

Not Young John Wayne though.  I didn’t recognize him at first since he actually showed roughly two and a half emotions over the course of the movie.  He’s more than happy to defend the honor of the good-time gal and proposes marriage to her the first time they’re alone.  Sure, it seems rushed, but he’s been in prison for years and she’s just happy someone wants her despite her road-tested vagina.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward:  Barely.  There was this bit with a “savage” singing and I just couldn’t take it.