Happy New Year!! To everyone out there. :D I wish y'all a good new year and that you'll all have the fortitude to follow through with whatever new year's resolutions you've saddled yourselves with. I also wish the same fortitude for myself, naturally.
Movie Review Time! (I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible)
I went to go see the second telling of True Grit.
And there's a reason I call it a 'second telling' and not just a 'remake'.
I was the little girl that woke up every Saturday morning to watch Bonanza. My movie diet at a young age was a strong mixture of western movies and Disney films. Mixing gunslingers with Cinderella might seem like an odd childhood concoction, but there you have it. Mostly my western movies featured John Wayne; who rightly only ever played that charismatic persona of 'John Wayne' that so many people in the mid 20th century couldn't help but feel drawn to. There's a reason those movies were famous. I can quote just about any of the films he featured in, from 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' to 'Rio Bravo' to 'The Cowboys' to 'Tall in the Saddle'. I can quote True Grit. In my sleep. I loved that movie and I still do, even if the only thing Glen Campbell had going for him in that flick was that his hair looked nice.
Now, I must say that I have never read the book. I hear it is quite different in the telling. This new version of True Grit tried to stay by the book, I'm told (no pun intended). That's why it's more of a retelling.
I'd have to say that they had me into it in all but a few regards. I did my very best to walk into that theater and remind myself when the lights went down and the opening credits moved me into the dim dramatic glow of the first scene, that this was going to be different. That it would be prudent of me to keep an open mind. To give Jeff Bridges a fair go at playing a character that I know I enjoyed even if the drunken marshal had never been played by the Duke in the first place. As I watched the film, I noted that several things were a bit different in this film that were present in the telling before it. In truth I don't know if these things were present in the book. Mostly they were parts that John Wayne specifically had made very quotable in the public memory. Various lines of Marshal Rooster's were omitted and some of the situations that might lead into them (like fully introducing the Chinese man who's grocery store he lived in). I don't begrudge the writers anything for doing this, however, because you can't do John Wayne twice. Trying to go back and just make the first film 'more pretty' would be fruitless in an artistic and money-making view. The directors wanted to tell this story differently. So, to judge the second film by the first in that regard is unfair.
As a whole, the movie turned out to be a dark tale of post Civil War western justice with wonderful cinematography. The character of Rooster J. Cogburn was still enjoyable to me, along with Maddi Ross and the Texas Ranger. Some of the other actors left a few things to be desired (save for Lucky Ned Pepper, who was more memorable in this rendition than even Robert Duvall made him out to be in the first) and I think the dialogue can be seen as the real culprit. In various places along the way (with characters Moon and Quincy) and in about the latter fourth of the film (when we first really see villain Tom Cheney's face) the dialogue seemed to...turn. Change. Instead of listening to the growls of hardened criminals and lawless men, these men were growling...in clear and complete sentences with almost no contractions used and very little accent inflection.
What on earth was going on?
We'd moved from the wilderness of Choctaw Indian territory to a formal tearoom. Or so it seemed. Later I was informed by someone who as much better acquainted with the book than I that it was an artistic move on the directors' part. Because, in the book, the character Maddi tended to grammatically correct everything people around her said for her own ruler-backed benefit and that of the reader's. How was I supposed to know? It's not an intuitive conclusion unless someone tells you, or if you pick up on it after reading the book. And my guess is, most people that are going to pay to see this movie haven't read the book. It's not like a Harry Potter film, in which most of the viewers who pack into the theater are fans that fought tooth and nail to get their hands on each new book. True Grit is an older book that has had a long time to gather dust. It's not something like Gone With the Wind, which was sealed in a golden case to last forever in the modern human's schema. Art, especially art in the form of movies, is a form of communication. Most certainly in this case it is story-telling. If your viewer doesn't understand why your vicious looking criminals are suddenly speaking like well-educated men, then there's a problem. That's bad communication, and by dent, bad storytelling that put a nasty gash in the movie as a whole.
Three stars out of five for True Grit (second rendition)
