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I'm sure the fact that she uses the word "iconoclasts" in a sentence, and then goes on to define it correctly, doesn't do anything to diminish your crush.

Oh, I can't believe I forgot to mention Pale Rider. It's a very interesting one. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you get the reference, the title is a big clue.

This is off the top of my head, so it will be so very incomplete. Buuuut …

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Two Mules for Sister Sara

High Noon

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Searchers

Those'd probably be on my short list of essential westerns. Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not really a western in any meaningful sense, but it captures the aesthetic and the tone really well, I think. I mean, any sensible person would put the Man With No Name trilogy on the list, but I'm not doing that because mumblemumbleneverseenthemshutupmumblemumble.

It's always tough to take a genre that's been thoroughly deconstructed for decades and have an interesting and useful conversation about the movie/novel/whatever that did the deconstructing in the first place. I think I ran across a page at the TV Tropes site one time — like you do — that was called "Seinfeld isn't funny" or something like that. The idea is that sometimes a work comes along that so thoroughly changes a genre or medium that it becomes hard to evaluate it fairly in retrospect, because if you look at it through a contemporary lens it just looks conventional or ordinary, or even derivative. But the whole point is it wasn't conventional or ordinary at the time; at the time, it was a big fucking deal. It's just that that work was so successful that the next morning sort of everybody woke up and collectively said "Oh, that's just how that genre is supposed to be," even though the day before it had been radically different.

That's sort of the role Unforgiven plays in the western genre. Somebody who's 25 today and who's only seen things like the Coen's True Grit remake or Deadwood on TV would likely find Unforgiven to be, well, unsurprising. The protagonist is an antihero who wrestles with the morality of his way of life, you say? Knock me over with a feather.

But in 1992, that was new. It was, at the time, a deeply postmodern take on the classic western, subverting every trope in the book and doing it with such subtlety that the audience might not realize at first that they've been tweaked. Take English Bob, for example. He's clearly the bad guy of the film. His introduction blasts his antagonist status across the screen in 50-foot-high letters of fire. He's even wearing a black hat, for chrissakes. Only what happens is that Bob gets humiliated and run out of town without doing a single thing that affects the plot in any way … and by whom? Why, the wise old town sheriff who's just doing his best to keep the town from eating itself. Little Bill — who is in many ways a through-a-glass-and-darkly reflection of Gary Cooper's character from High Noon would've been the protagonist of any other pre-1992 western, or at the very least a stakes-raising good-guy character whom the audience likes and with whom the audience sympathizes. But in Unforgiven he's the unequivocal bad guy of the movie … whom the audience likes and with whom the audience sympathizes. That alone is a complete inversion of one of the inviolable constants of the genre.

And now let's talk about the plot. I mean the actual sequence of events that unfolds. The inciting incident leads to a reward being posted; the Schofield kid knows of Munny's reputation and tries to recruit him to help collect on that reward. Munny agrees, eventually, because he needs the money to save his catastrophe of a hog farm and take care of his kids. Munny rustles up (ha) Ned and the three of them ride off to war.

So far, fairly standard, yeah? There's bad men out there, and good men must rise reluctantly from their beds to confront them. Nothing challenging there. In any other western, this would all be leading to a low-key confrontation with the well-meaning sheriff, the townsfolk boarding up their windows, and a gunfight in the thoroughfare in which the marked outlaws are killed, and Ned gets winged … but he'll be all right. Slugs of whiskey all 'round, then literally ride off into the sunset.

Oh but no.

What actually happens is that Munny shows up at the town sick with the flu, and Little Bill beats him up and runs him out of town. The nominal antagonists of the movie — the two outlaws with the price on their heads — never even appear in the sequence. Instead, Munny, Ned and the Kid leg it off into the wild to patch up and regroup.

Now, Munny, Ned and the Kid do eventually kill the marked men. But the way it plays out subverts western tropes twice. First, there's a case to be made that these two men do not deserve to die. Yes, they did a bad thing, but they attempted restitution and went on to mind their own business after that. I mean, these guys aren't Liberty Valance here, intimidating the townsfolk and shooting up the saloon. They're just ranchers. But the thing is, none of the protagonists ever stop to reflect on this fact. They don't invest any time in thinking about who these men are or why they're wanted dead. They just lie in wait and kill 'em. And how do they ever lie in wait and kill 'em. Two ambushes, one of which happens in an outhouse. And after it's all done — this happens at the end of the second act in the movie, it's worth mentioning, not the third act where it belongs in a traditional western — there's no triumph or catharsis. All three of the protagonists just make faces of distaste and decide this killin' business ain't fer them, and resolve to go back home and put all this ugliness behind them.

Which is what the Kid does — rides off into the, well, conspicuously not the sunset anyway, having won nothing worth the price and having learned only how to feel regret. But Munny can't do the same because he has to go avenge Ned's death.

Oh, did we not mention? Yeah, Ned, the sidekick character you liked so much, was tortured to death. Off-screen. By the sheriff. Who was the good guy last time we saw this movie.

What follows is a quiet, thoughtful, deliberately paced rampage. The first person Munny kills is Skinny, who runs the saloon. Munny shoots him in cold blood. Then he kills half a dozen deputies, mortally wounds the sheriff, and sidles up to the bar for a drink before delivering the coup de grace. Then he intimidates the townsfolk, threatening to come back and murder them all, before riding off into the night.

Let's go over that again. A notorious killer of men rides into town to collect a bounty, gets run out of town by the sheriff, goes off to ambush and kill two men, then returns to town to shoot up the saloon, murder the saloon keeper, six other men, and the sheriff himself, then threatens the townsfolk and makes his escape. And this man is the hero of the film.

I want you now to imagine — any of those reading this who've seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — what kind of movie this would've been if Eastwood had played Little Bill and Munny had been played by (let's say for the sake of argument, not dead) Lee Marvin. Completely different movie. Maybe a successful one and maybe not, but it would've been very much a stereotypical, by-the-numbers western with only the twist that it's told primarily from the point of view of the bad guy and not the good guy. But instead, in the film we got, Eastwood's character is very much the good guy! Despite all the things he's done in his backstory — which is a major thematic element in the movie — and all the things we actually get to see him do on screen, he's still the protagonist, and we still want him to win, even though his winning involves murder and loss.

Today we're used to that level of ambiguity in our entertainment. It's practically de rigueur. But in 1992, in a western, this was all very holy-shit. It was challenging. It got in your face. It was like "Oh, you want a good old-fashioned western? Here's your good old-fashioned western. Choke on it."

It's like George Lucas going back and making a Star Wars movie where we're supposed to feel like Darth fucking Vader is the hero, and feel bad for him when he loses at the end. I mean, it's that crazy.

spelt |spelt|

noun

an old kind of wheat with bearded ears and spikelets that each contain two narrow grains, not widely grown but favored as a health food. Compare with einkorn, emmer.

[Triticum spelta, family Gramineae.]

ORIGIN late Old English, from Old Saxon spelta. The word was rare until the 16th cent., when it was readopted from Middle Dutch.

"Boring?" Are we talking about the same movie?

This was the pinnacle of Demi Moore's human form. This movie is when it peaked.

I—

Wha—

Something—

Dicks.

Okay, I'm coming to this late because I don't check the fuckin' forum every fuckin' five minutes like apparently I should, because you guys are in here having great conversations without me which sounds impossible I know but somehow you manage it.

There are three things I haven't seen emphasized hard enough here: potential, mood and the I'm-not-doing-anything-else factor.

It's not a black-and-white thing. I mean, obviously it is: you either watch an hour of television or you don't. But whether you choose to watch a particular hour of a particular show isn't a black-and-white decision. It's got nuances to it. It's not "I'm hooked" or "fuck this." There's a middle ground there that can best be summed up as "I'm going to give you some latitude in this, counselor, but you better get to your point quickly."

Everybody's favorite example is "Lost" and it's mine too, but probably not for the same reasons. By the time that show went off the air, it seemed like all humans were watching it. Not me, though. I stuck through the whole first season and a big chunk of the second before I just stopped watching. Why? Because I thought the show had potential. Not in the sense of "You could be something great someday, kid," but just in the simple sense of "This doesn't interest me too much right now, but I suspect it may interest me more, therefore I shall give it some latitude and see if it comes to a point."

I wasn't hooked-or-not after the cold open. My interest was piqued. And that was enough to get me to stick with it for a while. Because it is my opinion that not everything has to be perfect in order for me to like it, and it's possible for me to find virtue in a thing while recognizing its flaws.

Which brings me to my second point: mood. I am one moody son of a bitch. Seriously. I'm like a completely different person from day to day, hour to hour. There are times when nothing is going to entertain me. Everything sucks, everybody's stupid, I'm basically Stan Marsh. When I'm in that kind of mood, you could sit me down in front of fuckin Amadeus and I'd be all "This is dumb, F Murray Abraham's makeup is shitty, Tom Hulce is chewing the scenery so hard he's spitting out chunks of plaster."

But I know this about myself. I've made peace with it. And what it basically boils down to is that I don't trust my own opinions. A few months ago I saw a movie that made me angry. I was so frustrated that it was almost good but not quite that it literally pissed me off. I called up my best friend to rant at him about it over the phone. I was infuriated.

Last weekend, I watched it twice. Once on Saturday, and again on Sunday. And I really loved it.

I'm an idiot, basically. I don't know what the fuck I like from minute to minute. So if I watch something and hate it, I may just be inclined to give it another chance — ten more chances — because I know I'm a moron who's constitutionally incapable of having good taste.

Which brings me to my third and final point: If I like something, I like it. If I hate it, that might mean I secretly like it, because I'm a weirdo. But the one thing I can't abide is to be bored. Roger Ebert — and he might be quoting somebody, I dunno — likes to say that the fundamental test for a movie, the bar it has to get over before it can aspire to anything else, is whether watching it is a more enjoyable experience than staring at a blank screen for the same amount of time. If a movie or a TV show or a book or whatever can't hold my attention, if my mind starts wandering, if I just can't be bothered, then I might as well be staring at a blank screen. In fact, staring at a blank screen can be better than a boring movie, because at least you can enjoy the peace and quiet without distractions.

But there are times when I've had all the peace and quiet I want for a while, and nothing else is going on, and I tune in to some variety of entertainment with the sole criterion that it be better than staring at a blank screen. If the choices are I can watch this thing that's happening in front of my face or I can count ceiling tiles, I'm going to watch the thing in front of my face as long as it's more interesting than the ceiling tiles. If that thing, after some weeks of being bored at the same time and having it just sort of happen in my presence, turns out to elevate itself from inoffensive distraction to genuine entertainment, great. But it doesn't have to. The fact that it's better than nothing is, sometimes, entirely sufficient.

So if I were running a network, I'd air anything that I loved, anything I hated, or anything that didn't bore me.

Which I guess is a really good argument for why I should never be allowed to run a network.

Nope, you guys are all wrong.

The correct answer is Gandhi. Which I just watched again last night. My god, that's a good movie.

I propose a double-feature: Brick and Winter's Bone. Call it the "new noir."

Last I looked, it's got a ninety-one percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That doesn't mean much, but it means something.

Trey, as for your quibboiler:

I will totally go along if somebody says this could've been clearer. But within the mythology of the movie, it actually makes perfect sense. Every time the Source Code was run, a new parallel universe was created, cloned in a sense off the original one. In one of those parallel universes, the soul, for lack of a better word, of the guy whose body Jake G. "leaps" into doesn't make the copy; Jake G.'s soul gets copied in instead.

That's part of what I loved so much about the movie. The last act was incredibly suspenseful to me, not just because of the does-he-live-or-die thing, but because the magic bean was about to be revealed. Is it all-just-a-dream? Is it time travel Terminator-style? Time-travel BTTF-style? Or something else entirely? And it turns out it was something else entirely, and I thought that was awesome.

End of spoilification.