Notes from the sketch book

Gene Hackman, in a performance that rightly earned him an Oscar, carves Little Bill Daggett into something far more unsettling than your run-of-the-mill villain. In fact it wouldn't be a stretch to see this movie as having two main protagonists akin to another 90s film ‘Heat’, Daggart fancies himself a keeper of the peace, a man who lays down the law – no guns allowed in his town and takes a certain gruff pride in wearing that sheriff’s badge. He’s even building a house, a solid, grounded thing, a symbol of settling down, of domesticity. Except, like the man himself,...

Clint Eastwood, grizzled and carrying the weight of a violent past like a worn saddle, plays William Munny, a widowed pig farmer coaxed out of retirement for one last, bloody job. Two cowboys have disfigured a prostitute, and her fellow women have pooled their meager earnings to hire someone to deliver justice – or rather, revenge.   The opening and closing images of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) linger: a lone house, a solitary tree, silhouetted against a vast, indifferent sky, often bathed in the melancholic light of sunset or twilight. Most importantly there's a grave marker, Claudia’s name a constant...

Ryan Coogler, a filmmaker who has already demonstrated a keen eye for the intersection of genre and social commentary, now plunges us into the humid, fraught landscape of the 1930s Mississippi Delta with Sinners.  The following are kind of spoilers if you haven't seen the trailer or know nothing about the plot of the film. Sinners follows twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both embodied with a simmering intensity by Michael B. Jordan who delivers Smoke and Stack with distinct personalities while also hinting at the unbreakable bond between them. They return to their rural hometown ostensibly to escape a past...

It's the penultimate film in my Western series and this time we are looking at Eastwood's, The Outlaw Josey Wales. It's a tale that starts off with revenge through violence that morphs into one about survival. Josey Wales, a farmer and family man whose life is irrevocably shattered by the senseless violence of some Union forces in the waning days of the Civil War. His response is not one of reconciliation, it's a deep, simmering rage that propels him away from any notion of a negotiated peace. A sole outlaw, hunted. Initially we are dropped into Josey Wales's world in...

Eastwood, fresh from his Leone collaborations, was already a force to be reckoned with, but with this his second directorial effort, it was a clear assertion of his artistic independence. He wasn’t content to merely inhabit the stoic, laconic cowboy; he wanted to shape the entire landscape. He wanted to mold the narrative to his own unsettling vision. The script was written by Ernest Tidyman, the man behind The French Connection, was already a dark brooding affair. Eastwood, ever the revisionist, injected it with his own brand of moral ambiguity. The stark, wind-scoured terrain of High Plains Drifter offered Eastwood...