Ruptured Reasoning: The Burrowers (2008)

by Chris Marshall:

Director: J.T. Petty

Cast: Clancy Brown, David Busse

Netflix Synopsis: When the men on a pioneer homestead are brutally murdered and the women and children go missing, a posse sets out to find them, assuming they've been abducted by Indians. But they soon discover that the truth is much more horrific.

Chris: I was mostly interested in The Burrowers because it fell into a genre I had never seen before: horror western. I guess I just hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I realized I couldn’t really think of any other examples of the genre. I’m sure it exists—Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series could sort of be considered horror western, I suppose—but I had never seen such a movie.

As it turned out, the film had plenty to offer outside the peculiarity of its subject matter. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. Sure, there were some flaws, but for a movie that never saw a theatrical release, it was quite well made.

The Oscar Project #65: Unforgiven (1992)

by Chris Marshall:

Unforgiven is a work of genius, one of those rare films where I felt like I was experiencing greatness while I was watching it. I expected it to be good, but I was completely taken off guard by how much I loved it. It was nearly perfect.

Clint Eastwood is one of the immortal legends of American cinema, and his very presence in a film means something. That’s not to say that every one of his movies is good; that’s far from the truth. But particularly in the latter part of his career, his face carries such a heavy symbolic weight that he hardly needs to say anything at all. Of course, Eastwood is typically at his best when he’s silent.

Eastwood, as the “reformed” outlaw William Munny, has plenty of lines in Unforgiven, but he delivers them in a way that lets us know that he never says anything without contemplating it deeply. He has acquired a deep wisdom, both from his worst days and from his best days. But he knows he will never truly be a good man, for he has committed unspeakable atrocities, sins that he can never atone for.

The Oscar Project #63: Dances with Wolves (1990)

by Chris Marshall:

I went into Dances with Wolves absolutely expecting to hate it. I’ve never liked Kevin Costner, and nothing about the plot seemed really appealing to me. But then something happened that I never could have anticipated: it was really good! I found myself becoming absorbed in the story, and I couldn’t pull myself away.

Costner, who directed and starred in the film, certainly had some Costner-y moments, but on the whole, he did a fine job as Lt. John Dunbar, who is eventually given the name Dances with Wolves by the Lakota Sioux tribe he joins. After the first few minutes of the film, which are preposterous, he finds his comfort zone, and once he is assigned to his outpost on the frontier, everything starts to flow naturally.

Because of his courage/stupidity during a Civil War battle, Dunbar is given his choice of where he wants to be assigned. He picks an isolated “fort” on the frontier, claiming he wants to see it before it’s gone. While he’s there, he develops a friendship with the local Sioux tribe and a romance with a white tribe member (she had been adopted as a child after her family was killed). When the white men inevitably come to appropriate the land for themselves, Dunbar, known at this point by Dances with Wolves, sides with the Indians.

The Oscar Project #4: Cimarron (1931)

by Chris Marshall:

Wow, where to start with this one? Most likely, modern viewers will be too preoccupied with the casual and gratuitous racism pervading the film to see anything else. That was certainly my first reaction. I stopped watching at the halfway point[1] the first night I turned it on, and I told my roommate the next day that I still needed to finish my “racist Western.”

To be fair, I’m not sure if the film itself was racist or just the characters within it. It’s an important difference, of course, and there was evidence of at least some progressive views on race. But it’s hard to take the hero’s pro-Indian rights stance seriously when he makes “black people sure do like watermelon” jokes to his young black servant, or when his wife tells their son to stay away from the “dirty, filthy savages” (aka Osage Indians).