You wretched slugs, don't anybody have a guess to play for fun? I'm Huckleberry. That's just my game. I'm Sean Fantasy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with one of my oldest friends, Chris Ryan.
The Ringer's Chris Ryan. Chris, what's up? I'm kind of Doc Holliday, dear Whiter. Wow.
I don't know, what does that really mean? I'm the tuberculosis-suffering, wildly talented, but problematic sidekick in your quest for justice in the West. Hopefully we're not sickly today, but hopefully we'll have bars. We're doing a top five, Chris.
Top five is becoming a part of this show, and we did one last week with Bill Simmons about horror movies, and we're doing one today about Westerns since 1993. And the reason we're doing that is because, and maybe this will seem a little stupid when I explain it, Red Dead Redemption 2 came out last week, and it made $750 million in the opening weekend, which is approximately five times the amount of the most successful movie of the year. So we've made a strategic mistake with the show. However, we do love Westerns, and Red Dead has us thinking a little bit more about Westerns.
You edited a piece on the site about what you're calling the new Western canon. The modern Western canon, yeah, sure. So explain what that is. I decided to take it from Unforgiven on, because I remember growing up, when Unforgiven came out, there was almost a sentiment like, we don't have to do this anymore.
He made the ultimate Western, he closed the book on the Western. Everything that you ever wanted to say about the Clint Eastwood character, about the lone gunman, about all these ideas about the Western revenge, and modernization, and civilization versus the sort of rough-human natural world. Eastwood did it, best picture, we can move forward now. And obviously, that's not the case.
We've continued to make Westerns since then, really good Westerns, and there have been modern Westerns, and there have been movies like The Revenant that are kind of almost colonial, but it's just this genre that is constantly open to reinvention. And I think that the reason for that is that it puts characters, if you're making a Western, you're putting characters in a place where there are real consequences to decisions and to moral actions, and that's going to always be an incredible backdrop for drama. Before we go into the kind of modern Westerns, what are some of your classics? I am a real Bravo fan.
I'm actually a Howard Hawks Westerns guy. I can be a Howard Hawks Westerns person or a John Ford Westerns person when it comes to the classics, or you can be an Anthony Man person, it'd be difficult. But I think that... What about Bunker?
Yeah, right. I love Sergio Leal movies, but when it comes to the very classic ones, I think I go more Red River, Rio Bravo than The Searchers and Chiwari Elridden. But I love Hangout Westerns. I love any Westerns that use the trappings of a Western narrative, whether it's a cattle drive or these guys are stuck in a jail and have to defend it, as a place to have characters interact with each other.
I love that. I'm probably more of a Peckinpah person than I think about it, though. I love the Hawks movies, too. Let's get right into this.
Why don't you start with your number five? Yeah, okay. So my number five movie is Lone Star. Forty years ago, under Sheriff Charlie Wade, Rio County was as corrupt as they came.
Then, Buddy Dean showed up. How about you lay that shield on this table and vanish? You're a dead man. Directed by John Sayles, a 1996 film starring Matthew McConaughey, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Chris Christopherson, a great cameo from Frances McDormand.
I don't know if John Sayles is a very fashionable director right now, but it's weird. We always talk about, like, oh, I wish they would just make movies like they did in the 90s. And strangely, I think we talk about that in relationship to, like, The Hand That Rocks the Creed. We only talk about it when we're like, we want these thrillers.
But all the things that most people claim to love about movies, like the ability to go deep into a set of characters, to tell this story in a contained space, to use visuals to emphasize the narrative. Sayles was really, really good at that. He still is good at that. And this was sort of his, I don't know if you call it his Hollywood movie.
He made it for Castle Rock. And it's a mystery that unfolds in a couple of different timelines, or two timelines, really, a present and a past. And it's about dealing with the past and sort of finding resolution with your past to move forward into your future. It takes place in this border town in Texas, where Chris Cooper has come back to become the sheriff of this town called Frontera, where his father is sort of this famous figure in the town's past.
And he meets up with his whole old high school sweetheart, played by Elizabeth Peña. And it's this beautiful love story. It's a beautiful mystery. And it definitely grapples with a lot of the myths and legends of the West.
It's great McConaughey. It's amazing McConaughey. It's kind of in that sweet spot of McConaughey's time to kill, days to confuse, still an indie darling, not a super duper star. And he's also kind of sparingly used in this movie.
And he's used as like the myth maker because he plays that father role. I really like that movie. What's John Sayles up to right now? I think he's still making films.
And I think he's making films in that way that he always has, which is that maybe he does work on a couple of other things in the shadows that he's a legendary rewriter and ghostwriter in Hollywood. He usually did mostly like genre stuff for B-movies. And then he would take the money he made doing a pass on a script and go make very small, independently funded movies that he had complete creative control over. And I was watching an episode, actually, before we did this, I watched an episode of Charlie Rose last night from when Lone Star was released.
And it's Chris Cooper and John Morton who were in the movie with John Sayles. And they're just talking about like, yeah, we only have three takes. You have to keep it moving because we only have X amount of dollars. So everybody's on the top of their game because we're basically moving as fast as possible to make this film the way we want to make it.
It's a great recommendation. People probably know Sayles from Eight Men Out. I would say that's his most well-known on Return of the Secaucus 7. I'm trying to think of what are some of my favorites.
I mean, he's actually had a fairly quiet century. His last film was Go for Sisters in 2013, which I haven't even seen. No, I didn't. And I mean, you know, this was around the time when I think that he was, yeah, you're right.
This is his sort of peak in terms of notoriety. He had me passion fish around this time. Yeah, secret run-ish, yeah. So I think Eight Men Out was probably his commercial peak.
But this was, you know, probably his most critically acclaimed film. Janet Maslin wrote this absolute rave about it in the times. I just remember seeing it and it made me feel, it has really one of the great who's going to regulate a town that's on the verge of lawlessness, while also just telling a very simple, beautiful story. So I really love that movie.
I like that one a lot. One thing that's going to happen here, in part because Chris and I are tight, but also because there is some notion of objective truth in this conversation, we're going to have some crossover. So I'm going to give you my number five. If it's not on your list, I'll die on the spot.
My number five is No Country for Old Men. Is it on your list? Let's use this as an opportunity to talk about No Country. You stopped to watch your backtrick.
You're going to shoot my dumb ass. But if you stop, you stop in shape. No Country, of course, is the Coen Brothers' Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, essentially about A Bag of Money and Murderous Man and A Chase to Elude Him. Is it the second best movie of the century?
Is it the first best movie of the century? It's in the conversation. I was thinking about how we have not done this movie as rewatchables before. Yeah, it's also...
Is it rewatchable? It's very tense. I mean, the performances in it are electric. It's basically a three-hander, and the three hands are all playing Django Reinhardt.
It's wild how good these guys are in this movie. Is this the origin of your love for Josh Brolin? Well, this is the Brolin stance. It definitely is when it starts, because he had been begging...
He basically had to beg to get into this movie. He shot his own audition tape and sent it to the Coens. And I think I've talked about this before, maybe on other podcasts with you even. You know, when you read that book...
So I read the book, and then the Cormac McCarthy novel, and then the second that they announced the casting, I was like, oh, yeah, but I don't need my imagination. Perfect, yeah. It's absolutely perfect. It's like, oh, man, Tommy Lee Jones is a grizzled sheriff.
I don't know. I was like, this is exactly right. Even Kelly MacDonald, who's like, does a pretty good job with a Texas accent. Always had a crush on her.
Yeah, she's great. And, yeah, I mean, this movie is a great example of why I think Westerns are so... They can never really go out of style, because this is a film that I think... It's hard to tell, but I think it's set in the early 80s.
In the book, I think. You never really can tell in the movie. He's a big non-veteran, and he's still pretty young. So I think it has to be around that time period.
But it doesn't matter when it's set, because it could be set in 1870, or it could be set in 2015. There's certain elements to it that are just like, this is what happens when you build civilization on the edge of the wilderness, and this is what happens when concepts of civilization are seen as constructs, and they just start to fall away. And when you actually get out there in the desert, you're really just what you amount to as a person, and the choices you make. And that's what I think fascinates me most about this genre, and it's certainly a major theme of McCarthy's work.
It's a lot more poetic than other books that he's written. This is a much more straightforward, almost hard-boiled thriller. That's actually why it's my favorite of his books, because it's not working so hard to send you the message of the book. Even though McCarthy obviously is a wonderful writer and amazing, but it's this high-level grand scheme of humanity, life, death, the devil, everything that's happening in the cosmos, and this is just on the surface.
It's on the ground. Get the money. Quick thing about this movie. I feel like it has been, in the last 10 years, Silence of the Lambs a bit, which is to say, Silence of the Lambs comes out, it's a huge hit.
It's celebrated by everyone who saw it. It wins the big five Oscars. And then slowly over time, it just becomes a Hannibal Lecter movie. Yeah.
And the only people can really remember or talk about from it is, I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti. And I feel like Bardem's character, Incense Chigurh, and Call It, all of those iconic moments, are kind of how this movie is slowly being remembered. Does that sound right to you? Yes, which is a shame, because there's moments like, what amounts to essentially a cameo, but in basically zero playing time, Woody Harrelson almost steals the movie.
There's a really memorable scene. I mean, honestly, the last scene between Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Corbyn is remarkable. And Brolin's performance is so great. And he's, I guess, the Clarice in this movie, but it's actually, they invert how it's supposed to, how you're supposed to feel about that hero because of what they do with him towards the third act and how he kind of disappears.
It's a really fascinating movie. How do you feel about it just really quickly in relation to other Coen Brothers movies? I was thinking about this. I mean, obviously, the Coens are returning to the West in November with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
And it's interesting to look at the Westerns they've made. True Grit as well. I think you make it as simple as kind of a noir Western also. And it has nothing to do with any of those movies, I don't think.
In a very odd way. It feels like they're most like studio hack job, like they're most for higher work. But it also is the culmination of a lot of their powers, too. It's kind of funny when Woody Harrelson is on screen and there's something kind of sickly funny about Bardem.
He runs the trailer park. He's just like, you want to leave a message. That's very Coen Brothers. But yeah.
But Brolin and MacDonald is deathly serious. Everything happening between them is real. And Bardem is brutal. Yeah.
And brutal in a way that it's not like Sam Raimi funny, we got our start making evil dead way. It's like, it is viscerally unnerving. And I don't know. I mean, it doesn't really fit.
And that's part of what makes it special. They have only made like one movie that I think is not interesting, which is remarkable over 25 or 30 year career. But this is definitely the sore thumb in a good way. Yeah, absolutely.
What about number four for you? So I did pick Unforgiven for number four. You'd be way of money out of Missouri. Kill women and children.
That's right. I killed women and children. Which I don't mean to say, like, in a way, I don't want to say that it's not a masterpiece. Because I think it is.
This is, I guess, cheating a little bit because it's 92 and you're talking about since 93. No, no, but it's inspired by the framework you're setting. When's the last time you've seen this movie? Long time.
Long time. I remember Cameron Collins, he's right for the site. You know, he's a huge Clint Eastwood fan. And we had talked about Unforgiven a bit.
He wrote a big piece about Unforgiven for this, like, a year and a half ago or so. And I had been, you know, desiring to sit down and really watch it. I think it's on Netflix right now, actually. Yes, yeah.
But I just haven't done it in maybe five or ten years. So I think that one good way to sell this movie is if you're not interested in Clint Eastwood reckoning with his lifetime of violence on screen, which I think the years since Unforgiven have kind of changed it because it's like, but you're still doing that. You know what I mean? Like, you're still making these kind of, this kind of was like a career renaissance for him around the time of In the Line of Fire.
And I think that then he kind of really went on this run where he just was directing a movie every 15 months, pretty much, and legendarily being done at lunch for the day of shooting and stuff. He really kind of took off as a director after this. This is A.G. and Hackman, Masterwork.
And if you watch it for that, yeah, it's a great way to re-approach the movie is just to go back and watch this guy just give the thesis statement. Yeah, the back and forth at the beginning of the movie with Richard Harris is like one of my favorite exchanges. I mean, that's such high-level, incredible actors going toe-to-toe. That's an interesting movie.
It's weird that the lesson he took away from it was not the tragedy of Eastwood's character, but the triumph. Any time he acts in a movie now, he kind of wins in a weird way. Even in Million Dollar Baby, Grant Torino, these movies he appears in, I think one of the reasons that Unforgiven resonated so much is because it kind of dismantled The Man with No Name or The Outlaw of Josie Wales. It kind of deconstructed a lot of that mythology that he had been such a big part of.
And it feels weirdly like he's turned into the guy talking to the chair at the convention. That's not true through every film, but American Sniper 2, I feel like there's something a little unexamined going on in that movie. Unforgiven is the one where he really seems to be trying to take apart every aspect of everything he's been a part of. Clasius' Westerns are actually quite brutal.
If you go back and watch Outlaw of Josie Wales or High Plains Drifter or some of these movies, they're not actually good hangs. Not in the way that Rio Bravo is. Not in the way even something as throwaway as Young Guns is. But they're so dark that to see him actually wait around in that darkness and unpack what's going on in them is kind of a fascinating moment.
And I think just in terms of technical accomplishment and everything from the music to the cinematography to the screenplay to the performances, it is a perfect movie. It's just not one I watch a ton, but it is worth revisiting. My number four is The Hateful Eight. That's Marco's missing?
Processing, yeah. Good shit. Now that I've blown his face off, Marco ain't worth a peso. And I thought about Django Unchained and Django Unchained is not aging that well for me.
And Hateful Eight is aging very well. And I think that's interesting because Django Unchained was much more lauded. I think it was considered a much bigger deal. More movie star parts.
You know, Chris Paul Wilson won his second Oscar for his performance in that movie. Obviously there was a lot happening with the concept of race or something modern using like Rick Ross songs in Django. Hateful Eight is like one of the most fun kind of murder mystery chamber pieces in years. And I think all of the Agatha Christie inside the Old West stuff that it was pitched as is true and is good.
Kind of what's great about Tarantino is he's still able to turn the knob ever so slightly to the left-hand genre. And if he already made one Western and he's going back to make another and it was announced, we're kind of like, okay, cool. You know, Jennifer Lawrence will be in this and that was the original break on this. But I rewatched Hateful Eight also streaming on Netflix and I was in Rapture.
It's two hours and 40 minutes. Yeah, I remember we saw it together. I think we saw it at the DGA so it was like the equivalent of the roadshow production so there was intermission and everything. It's such a flex that this movie is almost entirely shot inside of a cabin but anytime he's like, yeah, I'll show you the Montana skies behind it.
It's like he could have just shot this in Culver City and he just froze all these people's asses off shooting it in a cabin in like Alberta or wherever it was. It's crazy. I mean, there's obviously two incredible just moments. One is the opening of the movie with a close-up on the Jesus Christ and then later on the famous sequence where Samuel L.
Jackson's telling the story about his dingus and we kind of see the expanse of the Old West and it's interesting too because Tarantino famously hates John Ford and has always been very critical of John Ford who he thinks is a racist and it seems like, and obviously Quentin Tarantino has not been invulnerable to certain accusations but he is always making Westerns working to empower people who are not always empowered even if those people are as disgusting as Daisy D'Hombergue. I mean, the Jennifer Jason Leigh performance in this I think has become, it's kind of been forgotten and it's a shame because it is such a powerhouse that the abuse she takes but also the abuse she dishes out and it has one of the great gasp I can't believe this just happened moments in recent movies so I'm glad you put it on there. How do you feel about Django? Have you rewatched that recently?
Yeah, I think obviously Tarantino's a master and he's able to do things that are incredible. I find along the same lines as No Country it's not super rewatchable and it's not very exciting and I find the conclusion the kind of hardcore shootout at the end of the movie a bit of a drag, a bit of a bore. Can I just want to say I don't actually think that Tarantino's denouement set pieces are actually usually that good. I guess that may sound weird but they're cathartic and anything can happen within them but just in terms of their staging I often find them kind of lacking.
Yeah, I think in Reservoir Dogs there was something wow about that where doing the standoff in that way was sort of confusing and thrilling and you were trying to get a sense of what had really happened and then obviously that cut to black and you can still hear the cop cars and the cops descending up on the warehouse. And I know people love the Crazy 88 stuff and love Kill Bill but I actually was like this movie is great for lots of reasons. reasons aside from this giant homage to martial arts films and sword fighting definitely yeah it's an interesting way to put it i mean hatefully it doesn't have quite the same big bang there is there is a there's a melodramatic ending i suppose but um what's your number your number three so my number three is no country so i can give you my number two or do you want to do your number three my number three is broke back and i'll say just once go ahead tell you what we could have a good life together fucking real good life that's a place of our own but you need one ass what we got now is broke back now great there's two guys staring at each other from across the podcast recording table talking about broke back broke back is beautiful it's and it is beautiful for all of the sort of um you know sort of extra reasons this is what it meant to have a gay western what it meant for um a filmmaker to make a movie like this but it also is great for all the performances are amazing you know it's based on the sire mcmurtry story that is beautiful can you just give a quick shout out to larry mcmurtry who wrote broke back last picture show and linds and dove i mean he's a he's a titan i feel like many a saturday i've stumbled into your house and you've just been reading a 900 page mcmurtry novel that i've never heard of and i'm like wow chris where does he find the time um what is it that you like about mcmurtry um empathy like deep deep deep empathy for his characters he has um what better example in this movie yeah and i think that he has a way of finding the heart and even the heart most heartless people um even stuff that feels like it's ripped from like a five set comic like a lot of stuff in linds and dove is just like and then rooster shot that engine you know it's it still has like these layers and layers of depth and every character has humanity and i don't know it's uh larry mcmurtry stories especially the ones that don't take place in the world of like texas rangers are the kinds of stories that i hope still get told 20 years from now it's funny you know this broke back is based on an april story and i haven't read he wrote the screenplay for you he wrote the screenplay with diana osana and they collaborated many times together and i it's interesting to me i wonder what the differences are in that story i'm sure someone will tweet at us that like in fact uh jake john hall's character goes on to become a great hero or something um but i wonder if there are what he and osana put in the story to change it a little bit um one of my favorite i still remember her chipped fingernails oh man her bad like manicure that she has i i love her so much i love her in basically every movie um but she's very very funny brassy interesting complicated and she's only on screen for 15 minutes but she's wonderful um were you on ang lee i mean ang lee's a great craftsman i don't like a favorite ang lee movie do you i guess i love the ice storm it's probably between us and the ice storm no you're not a non-hulk i'm not a big hulk revivalist well i remember this being an interesting thing when it was announced that ang was going to make this because he had made ride of the devil which was a huge failure yeah and kind of derided at the time in 99 and so he was you know he's obviously an admirer of all different kinds of films and he's known for being this incredibly varied uh genre hopper but you know he's perfect for the same reason you know that empathy is sort of like sensual and um i don't know admiration for the physical world we could do an entire other podcast that's probably less popular than this one about um great failed westerns like cold mountain or you know even heaven's gate obviously i like cold yeah but like movies that just didn't quite you know live up to their box office expectations yeah and broke back for the record made 178 million dollars which is insane uh i'll never get over that anyway give me your number your number two christ let's skin that smoke wagon and see what happens john tombstone you want to do something or just stand there and bleed go um this is the rounders of westerns yeah every scene every line has something quotable everybody is going at 105 and a 65 um val kilmer maybe i think you make the argument that this is a mount rushmore westerns performance oh i'd love to talk about what the mount rushmore of western performances is wow but val kilmer as doc holiday in tombstone is uh it's like an anthony davis night it's just like a 45 25 and 11 it's so incredible and um you know a very troubled production kevin jerry was uh wrote it was supposed to be his first film that he was directing as sort of a longtime screenwriter he fell behind on shooting wasn't getting coverage uh left the project and this guy named george p because models came on and he was more of like a hard knuckled action director he'd done some rambo movies he um was very obsessed with like period detail but behind the scenes legend has it this movie is largely directed by kurt russell i was just gonna say that's exactly right and it's really fascinating to read about this movie because um you know you got these movie stars a lot of their careers are tied up in choices that they make and how much screen time they get and what kind of lines they get and one thing you hear about russell on tombstone is that he was so generous allowing other people to get shine in these scenes when it's like in fact he was directing doing a lot of shot lists and he could be like it's important that wyatt does this or it's important that we do that and you know they were doing a lot of rewriting on the set um you can tell that this was a movie in which the actors felt incredibly empowered um sometimes in the case of steven line maybe too much uh where they're just like really overacting but then when it's like billy bob thornton as johnny tyler who's just like this car cheat uh that scene doesn't have to do anything and those guys put so much into it and it's just such an exciting movie um is pretty stupid in places but man i will if you put tombstone on right now i guarantee you it's gonna be difficult to get up it's so funny that you compare it to an anthony davis game with kilmer because it's sort of like an nba all-star game the way that it plays out it's sort of like everybody gets their moment to have a crazy dunker and al uber break somebody down one-on-one i mean if you just go down the list of names in this movie especially for the kinds of movies that we like it is full of our people michael bean powers booth dame delaney sam elliot shout out to sam elliot steven like who you just mentioned hacks bill paxton of course your boy jason priestly yes shout out to bill simmons michael rooker john tenney who i feel like has now forgotten the time but at the time was like john tenney's gonna be the one really zane charlton heston i mean this is just an incredible and it's also it's a movie that i think isn't it narrated by robert bicham yes yeah there's a vo on it and it's a movie that has been it's a story that's been told many times many times in movies later in why erp for six hours i'm not a fan of that yeah um although that's quite very good that is uh yeah tombstone is a great one also tombstone watch what are we doing how are we not you die first not before i turn your head into a canoe okay my next one number two and i'm surprised i haven't heard from you is the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford for the incarnation i just don't give a damn i'm glad i fall in her i only wish we'd won i ain't ask any pardon or anything i don't chris you're signaling to me that it might be on your list that is my number one um let's let's have that conversation let's do it why is it your number one um i think it might be the most beautiful thing i've ever seen i almost spit out my coffee i i don't think there's a western like this um i don't think i've ever seen a western that looks like this that combines the idyllic fantasy that we have of what it must have looked like back then with the harsh reality of what it must have really been like to live there um i can't possibly explain the plot it's actually kind of um a boring like a lot of boring minutia about like infighting the james gang and like backbiting and like a couple of like romantic love triangle type things but not nothing that's really clear and then it's like a completely other movie and it's coda when after the assassination actually takes place and this guy living with the i adore that stuff in the movie yeah i think it's fascinating and i remember when that happens and you're kind of looking at your watch and you're like oh wow thank you all just because this movie's probably done soon and it just keeps going and then at a certain point you're like i just feel like i'm floating like this movie could go on for seven more hours and i would watch it uh speaking of casts what a cast on this movie crazy one among my favorite two or three performances actually underrated possibly the best athletic performance and then the ensemble around them paul schneider sam shepherd um jeremy renner incredible jeremy renner performance sam rockwell is phenomenal mary louise parker zoe deschanel um just in terms of the way it looks i think it's actually like if you just watched the trailer you're like this is kind of terrence malick ripoff stuff i think the only comparable director working like andrew dominic or the only person i compare this stuff to more is bertolucci because compositionally in terms of every single frame maximizing what it's showing you it's unbelievable i could just watch a still image of brad pit watching a field burn for an hour you know i think that magic he conjures out of these well-worn landscapes is incredible we had so much andrew dominic stock oh my god it was like ibm in the 70s i was like we did it we found we got rich and i remember loving killing him softly too i think he liked it as well and it just has not happened for andrew dominic which is sad you know this movie had a famously tortured production it cost about 30 million dollars and it made less than half of that and it was produced by pitt and it also is not unlike unforgiven this amazing deconstruction of mythology around brad pit you know it's a movie star movie even though he has very little dialogue he's speaking in a famously weird brad pitt accent where he's testing the limits of how ridiculous he can sound while also being having gravitas and you know it's a movie about what happens when somebody goes into the slipstream of fame yeah and how they feel themselves and how the world and if you want to add on all sorts of intertextual layers casey affleck being obsessed with a more famous person big brother type yeah uh this idea that he thinks brad pitt that he thinks jesse james is this mythological figure and it's got that great line you know they're all stories it's all just made up you know um but the the sort of almost homoerotic attraction he has to this and then the sort of catastrophic aftermath once he finally does this thing that uh is the only thing he'll ever be known for even though he had all this other stuff in his life um i would very highly recommend if people enjoy the uh the voiceover parts of assassination jesse james they check out ron hansen ron hansen wrote the book uh ron hansen also has an novel called desperados which i think is really incredible it was very influential in scott frank when he made godless for netflix and it's a beautiful beautiful book it's really really good also randrew dominic stock not dead yet because he's directing half of season two of mindhunter oh no kidding yeah i had no idea he's got like three episodes what a perfect fit yeah this is also one of those movies uh assassination of jesse james that kind of features all the all-stars behind the scenes too nicky warnell's doing the score i think it's their best score uh don't titchener famously uh pta's editor edited this movie um roger deacon shot it uh it's just it's incredible collection of people you know produced like brad pitt and dd garner and plan b and that whole group of people who produced it's a movie that uh i'm obsessed with unhealthily and now i don't even really know why and it's called rango hark who goes there he's i the much anticipated hero returning to rescue his emotionally unstable maiden i'll hand her you jailers of virtue or taste the biggest sting of my vengeance oh good i'm glad we're doing this yeah rango is an animated movie yeah and it is directed and conceived by gore verbinski he was on the show a couple of years ago and he's such an interesting filmmaker to me and has made simultaneously some of the biggest and most important blockbusters of the last 20 years and also some of the biggest most ill-conceived bombs of the last 20 years he's very uh instrumental in the caribbean franchise he made his first movie's mouse hunt um rango is essentially a meta commentary on westerns told through the eyes of a chameleon voiced by johnny depp which sounds very stupid and in some ways it's very stupid but is also really brilliant and funny and knows everything about everything we just talked about it knows all about the tropes it knows which tropes should be burnished and which should be thrown away it knows how to make you laugh it knows how to get you invested in the high tension of a sort of solitary town and what heroism means and what it doesn't mean it's an amazingly weird movie and i don't even know how it happened it's like akin to your conversation about the hand of rocks the cradle like most animated movies are made for children and the exception of pixar they don't treat them like they deserve to be made for anybody else and they treat kids like idiots and rango is a movie that i think entertains children it was a big hit and it was paramount and nickelodeon it didn't really have anything to do with dreamworks or pixar disney or any of the traditional animation powerhouses and verbinski was just like bet on me yeah bet on me that i can make this cool and he's totally right and i love that story and i love this movie so much have you ever seen this movie i have not i've seen one ranger which is another gordon vinsky western which i'm actually surprised to not make this list yeah it's kind of nipping at six or seven or eight you know rango's just more fun to talk about because it's different um but yeah if you haven't seen rango check it out with an open mind is it funny it's really funny it's written by the great john logan oh wow i'm trying to picture him verbinski sitting in a room breaking down what does and does not work about westerns that would be an amazing podcast so check that out you want to do any shout outs to some some i got like 10 other movies i thought were interesting yeah i mean we can just go back and forth if you want um i mean we talked django like somebody pitched the idea of mad max fairy roads of western what do you think about that i'll allow it yeah i mean i think that there's a there's a whole australian post-apocalyptic western thing where you could talk about the rover oh yeah and you could talk about mad max fairy roads i'll certainly allow that i thought i'll put a meek's cut off on here which is a similarly uh slow deconstruction that is along the same lines as sort of like the colonial revenue western where there's much more about the push towards the west and what happens when you're on a wagon trail as opposed to a lone man defending a town when there's a shoot at the end it's a very different movie um from 2013 i believe but if you haven't seen meek's cut off check that out the proposition speaking of nick gavin warnellis on another australian film absolutely what else uh it cheats a little bit on the year it's a little bit earlier in 92 i believe yeah it's not that much earlier than unforgiven um el mariochi the robert rodriguez yeah great one uh which i feel like because it kind of got they did a bunch of variations on that over the course of of the 90s pretty much like it kind of got forgotten but in terms of seeing like early sam raimi coen brothers style diy you know let's do all these tricks with like swinging a camera around meets leon meets john woo action it's really really cool uh check that out i'm pro desperado too i like this all up which sort of is just a big budget remake of mariochi yeah and you know i'll be totally honest i put it on this list to start just to kind of flex i'd like to have a conversation about this movie um i think it's better as like a stunt than as a movie which is something i felt about a lot of rodriguez movies in the last 15 years but there's some incredible shots some incredible moments also really weirdly interesting during that performance yeah that's a blind guy yeah right uh i would say we got to talk about taylor sheridan yeah we do sort of the poet of the way he is our living bard yeah um somewhat controversial but very successful screenwriter of your favorite film sicario and he's a filmmaker now and also a tv maker yeah and you know i haven't seen yellowstone i watched the first couple episodes of yellowstone it does exactly what it says on the package um i would say that if you like westerns like taylor sheridan definitely shot this like a movie so there's like a lot of like wide-angle landscape shots they did not just do all the interiors in in pasadena and then shoot a couple of montana exteriors he spent money yeah he really did and um you know it's part of this collection of films and tv shows i guess uh hell or high water wind river and uh the two sicario films which i guess i don't know if i would put sicario as a western but i would not put it as a western david soldado does remind me a lot there's a lot of kind of black hat and people friends turning on each other stuff that is very resonant throughout those hawks and a third of uh of soldado is pretty much western yeah coming back from the dead to avenge you know is killing yeah i'd love to know what taylor sheridan's favorite western is that's a great question any guesses probably the searchers right yeah problematic yeah brilliant classic yeah classic yeah um any others i've got slow yeah i was gonna ask you about that yeah i don't know i only saw the one time i remember admiring it and you and i both love michael fassbender and it's interesting to cast michael fassbender in western he's probably the least westerny guy of all time um an irish german yeah but yeah that's good point at least he's playing german yeah um yeah that movie is interesting it's made by john aclain who some people may recall was a member of the beta band yeah and also was the director of a lot of videos has an incredible eye it's a very odd movie that feels brain dead to the cohen's um speaking of no country and it features a truly great ben mendelsoon performance and a truly great performance by a coat that ben mendelsoon wears so if you haven't seen that yeah it's like it's one of those movies like it's over 80 minutes yeah and it's fun can i ask you one other question please where would deadwood rank if it was available since it's a film it's a tv show obviously we're talking more exclusively about movies but where would deadwood place against all the stuff that you put here it would rank number one yeah i mean you know i like i put no country number five but no country could be number one tomorrow um and i feel similarly about deadwood it's at the top but you know of course you and i we really care about deadwood one day we'll do a deadwood recapables podcast for 120 minutes chris thank you for doing this this has been the big picture top fives see you next week We'll be right back.