Friday, July 20, 2012
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
IMDB plot summary: A bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery.
Directed by Sergio Leone. Starring Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef.
I was not enthused about seeing this at the beginning. It was a western, and I generally hate westerns. And then I went to play it and discovered it was 3 hours long. But, you know what? An excellent movie is an excellent movie and can totally move past my genre biases enough for me to enjoy it. My previous movie viewing was The Hurt Locker, which was *not* good enough to conquer those biases. This one was. It reminded me of when I watched The Seven Samurai for the first time - equally long, equally bad genre for me, and while this one wasn't not *quite* as rewarding in the end, it was still good. It was great fun to watch this movie unfold, with all the unexpected twists and turns and completely expected double crossings. What a fun viewing experience. 3.5 stars.
Best Part: The ending. That was awesome. Also, the soundtrack was phenomenal.
Worst Part: It was *so* long, and while most of it was enjoyable, there were parts here and there where I just wanted it to get on with the story.
Flickchart: #656, which is a tad bit too low, because Fantasia 2000 is too low. So right now it's below Fantasia 2000 and above Million Dollar Baby.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I recently saw the entire Dollars/Man with No Name Trilogy for the first time myself, actually. My favorite was For a Few Dollars More, largely because of the Lee Van Cleef character. It was a bit confusing for me at first to see him playing an entirely different character in this film.
I did like that this film took its time. I never felt like anything was drawn out for the sake of throwing in the kitchen sink or anything like that. The story just happened to take this long to be told, and that's why its run time works.
Post a Comment