Cool man, that sounds like a good start.

I'd make your second to last western "Once Upon a Time in the West".  This was the last Sergio Leone Western.  It sorta turns the genre on it's thumb a bit.  Not as far as Unforgiven does, but it's a nice slow yarn of a western.

I have to admit I'm really surprised that so few of the forum members appear to have watched many westerns. Mainly because as a kid, one of the most obvious toy or roleplaying games was to play cowboys and indians and movies of that genre were the inspiration for new characters and stories etc. Like others, I was born long after the genre's heyday but I was still able to watch a fair amount of them due to the fact that they were often shown on daytime TV here in the UK. The afternoon film on one of the 4 terrestial TV channels over here would invariably be an old movie - either a WW2 film, a Western or perhaps a black and white adventure film.

It's tempting to think of Unforgiven as a landmark but it wasn't entirely a new approach - the Western genre has always had 'darker' revisions over the decades. The Searchers for example was not a typical Western at the time (compare and contrast to Stagecoach), and others like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue and the Wild Bunch have all had different takes on the genre. Even Eastwood himself had been in several movies which were far removed from the typical John Wayne adventure long before Unforgiven came around (Pale Rider, Outlaw Josey Wales), and the Spagetti Westerns are a very different take on the standard set of tropes. Young Guns and Dances with Wolves both preceded Unforgiven as well.

Good Westerns worth a watch (no particular order):
Wild Bunch
The Searchers
Young Guns
Tombstone
True Grit
Geronimo (both Wes Studi and 1962 versions)
Gunfight at the OK Corral
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Last Outlaw
The Quick and the Dead
Maverick
Silverado
A Man Called Horse
Broken Arrow

And then there's Deadwood, which is a fantastic series.

"Those who exchange cookies for safety deserve neither!"
-Michael "Dorkman" Scott

This needs to be a DiF shirt. Kinda now.

Unforgiven didn't do much for me, but this could warrant a rewatch-along when it's released. I haven't seen much japanese film outside of Kurosawa, they don't seem to have a movie making presence in the rest of the world besides their celebrated animation and ridiculed kaiju movies. I've heard somewhere that their movies generally aren't very good, but this certainly looks promising.

....you just blew my mind, Marty