True Grit, the Coen Brothers & Jeff Bridges version

[Xavier_Onassis]

As much as I liked the original True Grit with John Wayne, the latest version with Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn  and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie is a much better and more interesting film. I read the book long ago, but it seems to me that this version is more true to the original novel than the first one.

There really is a Yell County Arkansas, where Mattie was from. There was really a Judge Parker in Ft. Smith. Cole Younger and Frank James really did run a Wild West show, though in this film, Frank James is shown as rude, since he does not stand up and take his hat of when Mattie comes looking for Rooster in Memphis. Everyone who knew Frank James in his later years describes him as polite and cultured, as they also say about Cole Younger.

If you have not seen this film, it is really an excellent and historically credible Western.

If you don't mind subtitles, A Bad Day for Fishing is a great and unpredictable film from Uruguay.
(un mal dia para pescar)

[BSB]

Ok, you talked me into True Grit, I'm pushing On Demand as I type.


BSB

[Xavier_Onassis]

What I particularly liked about it is its authenticity. The set actually LOOKS like Ft Smith in 1878, the soundtrack music is based on the sort of music that Mattie and Rooster would have been familiar with: songs sung in Protestant churches of the period.

The film seems to have been shot in NM rather than OK, but the scenery looks like OK. Rooster acts like a real Marshall might act: he sees a couple of Indian boys pestering a mule with a stick, and he throws them off the porch as he goes into the store. When he comes out, he boots one off the porch again out of sheer orneryness. It has the authentic atmosphere of the period, like "O Brother How Art Thou", "Cold Mountain" and "The assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford".