3:10 To Yuma (2007 version)
It takes someone like Christian Bale to sell a speech like this:
If I don't go, we gotta pack up and leave. Now I'm tired, Alice. I'm tired of watching my boys go hungry. I'm tired of the way that they look at me. I'm tired of the way that you don't. I've been standin on one leg for three damn years waitin for God to do me a favor... and He ain't listenin.
And this isn't bad at all, not at all. Even though it's not really "my" sort of Western film. You can tell that it's a remake (and apparently a very faithful one) of a movie made before Leone, before Eastwood, before all of that; without having seen the original I keep referring back to
High Noon, except through a modern-day filter of grime, blood and sweat. While there's some attempts at symbolism and the like - our hero was supposedly wounded defending the US capital - the gist of it is a pretty classic 50s western, with a hero who tries to do the Right thing for his reasons, villains unerringly loyal to being evil and yellow-bellied sidewinding sidemen who run away when the going gets tough. But it's so beautifully done, and then there's the actors... Bale! Crowe! Fonda! Tudyk! Foster! Especially the eternal struggle between Bale's ex-soldier and Crowe's stone-cold killer never stops finding new levels.
Unlike many modern westerns, they know to keep the tempo down, and the gunfights even look marginally realistic; sweaty, unshaved men shooting with bad aim and rusty revolvers. This doesn't really change the western genre in any way, doesn't add anything new, but when everything's been said I suppose it can't hurt to go back and say some things again. 4/5.
Sweeney Todd (2007 version)
Tim Burton is back. His last few movies have left me cold, but this? Vintage Burton/Depp.
It's very black humour, obviously, but I love that Burton doesn't hold back; it's a story about murder, madness, cannibalism, child abuse, and buckets of blood, and so **** PG13; this is going where it's supposed to go. It all starts in almost black and white, washed-out colours with nary a trace of life, and then slowly gets brighter and more lively as people start to die...
I'm not really a huge fan of musicals, but damnit, Depp carries this movie (if he built his Willy Wonka on Michael Jackson, he seems to have built his Sweeney Todd on David Bowie). And it doesn't hurt that Burton lets the actors use the characters and let them carry the story rather than the grisly things they do; take the scene where Mrs Lovett and Sweeney are on a picnic, she's dreaming of a future and he sings along with an absolute dead face and voice, seeing only blood and insanity... yikes. And if we add Alan Rickman in full-on villain mode to that, you've got yourself a ride.
I can even forgive them the constant singing, that the story is all a little convenient (comes with the territory) and that Bonham-Carter will never be a great singer or a fantastic actress in my book (this could almost be her Fight Club character 20 years on and 200 years back). It's beautiful, it's grim, it's a bucketfull of fun and I give it
4/5 written in blood.
