that era of russell crowe movies, bookended by the ridley scott movies ‘gladiator’ and ‘robin hood’ is best watched through a headcannon where russell crowe, the australian actor and real life person, is trapped in some kind of quantum leap scenario where he inexplicably wakes up in the body of various historical figures from different periods. i feel like there is always at least one scene in all of them that could plausibly be read as russell crowe experiencing a new, unknown type of consciousness for the first time
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You haven’t read the Nick Cave Gladiator sequel script.
"In 2009, details of Cave’s ultimately-rejected script surfaced on the internet: the script having Maximus being reincarnated by the Roman gods and returned to Rome to defend Christians against persecution; then transported to other important periods in history, including World War II, the Vietnam War, and finally being a general in the modern-day Pentagon. "
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I have not read it but I have heard about it! Weirdly this idea occurred to me when I was watching Robin Hood while so stoned that I couldn’t understand anything about it. Iirc it begins with Russell Crowe like emerging from the ocean and discovering that he is Robin Hood. Now that I think of it Gladiator 2 might have been subconsciously influencing me
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In my memory, he’s actually just immortal, and at the end of the film we’re treated to a montage of wars he fights in, eventually, throughout time. No transportation required! Like the opening of that Wolverine movie only eventually it gets to spaceships.
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paul w.s. anderson’s gladiator 2: soldier 2
Was that Nick Cave western any good?
The Proposition? I liked it a lot when I last watched it.
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it’s VERY dark. it’s like almost a horror western thing. i mean it’s not supernatural but it is super violent. i guess i should not have expected anything too light hearted from nick cave but it still caught me kind of off guard when i saw it.
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fun fact: nick cave was involved in the production of both westerns rockstar ripped off to make the red dead redemption games lol
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the menu of Until the End of the World linger on shots of a car crash as seen through a hologram over this song
I should check out these Nick Cave movies
although I think Red Dead 2’s primary influence is Deadwood
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everyone watch Man of the West
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red dead 2 really likes the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford (watch the train robbery scene especially)
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yeah, that’s a good one
Obviously the goal of Red Dead, as the sole big-budget Western videogame, is to encompass all specific fantasies players bring to it. I think one of Rockstar’s successes is that enough parts in this utterly massive and bloated project hold on to specific visions that there’s still personality inside it, alongside the everything-to-everyone approach.
My parents used to play this soundtrack all the time when I was little. This song was part of damn near every long car trip.
At least they hired hillcoat to make that machinima for the first game
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Oh yeah, its definitely one of those post westerns that interrogates the brutality of the genre (but its good I know this description makes it sound shitty but)
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it occurs to me that rather than ‘horror’ a better way to describe it is that it’s more cormac mccarthy than clint eastwood. i guess hillcoat later did the road so it makes sense.
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the one western like this that I really like that no one has seen is fucking Walker, which is maybe one of the angriest films ever made. A studio executive tried to get Alex Cox to direct a movie about a disaffected cool guy who runs away to go to Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas after he did Repo Man so he decided to tell America to go fuck itself instead. Like a decade ago he wrote a book about westerns where he talks about how spaghetti westerns at their core are pretty anti-imperialist and anti-American, and Walker is very much him trying to prove that thesis. He shot on location in Nicaragua and used Hollywood money to revitalize the economy of a suffering town during an actual civil war. It’s amazing that something this left-wing ever got made with big money, and Alex Cox destroyed his career making it, so everybody should basically have to see it.
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Eastwood made a handful of westerns in the 70s/80s (High Plains Drifter, especially, the movie that made John Wayne so mad he vowed to never work with Clint) where he pushed “anti-hero” to the point I honestly wasn’t sure what his/the film’s moral read on the character was. He might not have had one at all, based on every story I’ve ever heard about him making a movie!
But then he made Unforgiven, after holding on to the script for at least a decade, as an allegedly conscious coda to all those horse movies, so he must have had some self-awareness at some point in his now 90 years of terror.
excuse me I blind bought this on forgotten disc formats when you were probably a toddler
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shrug I’m 23 how often do you really think I get to talk to people who have seen Walker, or give a shit about westerns at all
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