Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.

Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.

In short: The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Centerville, an American small town populated by Jim Jarmusch characters played by Jim Jarmusch’s actor and musician friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Zombie Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Selena Gomez and so on and so forth), suffers under the results of slight changes in the Earth’s axial rotation certainly not at all caused by polar cap fracking, no sir. Namely, some ever so slight troubles with electronic devices, the day night cycle, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song to the film, and the return of the deceased as flesh eating zombies. Needless to say, things are going to end badly.

Even among fans of the great Jim Jarmusch’s late-ish – the kind of late that makes a boy hope the director’s gonna live long enough this will actually turn out to be the mid-period of his career – period, this expedition into the realm of the horror comedy (or really, the realm of what a horror comedy would look like when made by Jarmusch), has a bit of a marmite effect. Also, there’s the “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson. It’s great.

It’s no surprise, really, for here, Jarmusch’s typical love for the laconic and the dead-pan turns even deader (which seems curiously appropriate for a zombie movie), exclusively featuring humour so dry, it’s situated in one of the world’s great deserts. This extra dry approach feels pretty hilarious in itself, like an attempt to really dance on the edge where something can actually still be called humour and not just the in-jokey product of a bunch of friends who somehow got paid for farting around in front of a camera. Me, I found myself amused by this approach more often than not, chuckling quite regularly about some of the running gags, even finding myself snorting about the many, many scenes of Murray and Driver trying to out-dead-pan each other (Murray’s winning, of course, because he’s not been moving his face or his voice much for a few more decades than driver), the throw-away side gags, and of course, Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”.

Plus, how many other films do you know in which Tilda Swinton is playing a perhaps somewhat weird Scottish coroner with an old school samurai thing and turns out to be…something spoilerish? Or whose theme song is Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”?


Seriously, I love the film dearly, but I can’t really blame anyone coming out of this with a puzzled and mildly annoyed expression on their face, because that’s just the kind of horror comedy The Dead Don’t Die is.

In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.

Predator 2 (1990)

In the far-flung future of 1997, LA’s early 90s gang wars have taken on apocalyptic dimensions, with a semi-militarized well-equipped police force apparently unable to even win straight shoot-outs against half naked but at least properly armed gang members. Perpetually enraged Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is still trying, mind you, but really, his only ability as a policeman seems to be shooting people really well, so it’s difficult to be impressed by him, or his bunch of doomed side-kicks (including characters played by Bill Paxton, Rubén Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso).

Things in Los Angeles don’t get better once a very rude alien (Kevin Peter Hall) starts murdering gang members, police, and anyone else who isn’t pregnant. Because this was made in 1990, a shady group of government male models under the less catwalk-ready leadership of Gary Busey and Daniel Baldwin gets in on the action too. Time for Harrigan to get even more angry.

Where John McTiernan’s Predator is one of the central masterpieces of US action cinema with a brain, the second film as directed by Stephen Hopkins is just a damn mess that squashes action movie clichés, violent conservative wish fulfilment, and a terrible looking version of the titular creature into a film that manages to be loud and obnoxious yet still pretty damn boring for most of the time. Hopkins just doesn’t have a hand for flair and pacing, and while his mass shoot-outs are competently shot, they never have the impact they should. Which of course might have something to do with the fact that on paper, the cast may be low budget action movie heaven, full of actors to put a smile on every action movie lovers’ face, but in practice could be any group of guys and one gal getting killed for our entertainment, for all the depth and interest these one-note characters have. Somehow the film manages to make me not care about characters played by Bill Paxton and Danny Glover, for Cthulhu’s sake!

Confusingly enough, the script with its pretty damn racist insistence on comparing the black parts of an American city with a jungle in the worst possible ways and gangs exclusively built on the worst stereotypes is by the same guys who wrote the first film, who apparently haven’t understood what they did there, nor how to use the alien monster they created well. But then, the various attempts at more Predator films following all have demonstrated a surprising inability to understand what works about the Predator and why. Though they, at least, won’t have monster suits that look as crappy as this one here, nor a director who is quite as inept at keeping it out of sight as Hopkins here turns out to be. Though they all seem to agree with this film that what the Predator really needs is to be less mysterious and dangerous, and more like a space prick.


Glover’s Harrigan is a pretty sad excuse for a protagonist too. Sure, the film is obviously trying to present him as a man broken by repeated attempts to change the state of the city he is living in for the better, but it never actually seems to understand itself that he’s failing because he’s the proverbial guy who only has a hammer so everything looks like a nail to him, and so can’t actually come up with another direction for him to go into than to stay perpetually angry, shooting at somebody. Which a cleverer movie (say, Predator) might have realized and used to say something profound (or at least mildly clever), or something nihilistic, or perhaps even something hopeful. Alas, Predator 2 only uses it as an excuse for another (and then another) pointless shoot-out, but then doesn’t even have the ability to make that shoot-out at least actually entertaining to watch.

In short: The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) may be elderly, but he’s also the brains behind the operations of a triple old man bank robber gang (also consisting of characters played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, so they’re pretty awesome). Because they are keeping a low profile with non-violent, polite heists on small banks in different states where typically nobody but one teller does even realize what’s happening before Forrest (who is also the face of the operation) is gone, nobody has connected the dots about these robberies being perpetrated by the same men yet. Until, that is, police detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) doesn’t notice a thing about a bank he is in with his daughter getting robbed. This bugs him enough he starts to investigate further, and finally puts two and two together until it adds up to “elderly bank robbers with style”.

At the same time, Forrest starts a romance with horse rancher Jewel (Sissy Spacek) who just might be the person that could finally make him grow up into the “proper” life of normal people and retire.

I admit I didn’t really get along with director David Lowery’s much praised A Ghost Story; that one just stepped over my line where a film turns from slow to glacial. Nobody would confuse The Old Man & the Gun with an action movie either, and even though this one even has a kinda-sorta car chase, it is very much another slow-paced exploration of character much more than of plot. However, The Old Man seems appropriately slow, not just for the age of its main characters, taking its time but taking exactly as much time as it needs.

A part of the film is clearly an homage to 70s cinema, a natural road to go for a film starring Redford and Spacek, but it’s never an attempt at empty nostalgia. There is a melancholy quality to the film, for sure, but it’s not a nostalgic one but one belonging to a film looking at the final act of someone’s life and casting actors in the final stretches of their careers. There’s a clear love for his leads and the movie world they come from in Lowery’s visual language, and while he’s never quite being so boring as to just copy the visual style of 70s movies, he manages to achieve the same feel this period of cinema had in a slightly more contemporary way.


The film’s main thematic drive examines another very 70s idea: the meaning of freedom, as embodied in the happy, smiling Tucker who has turned his life into a series of escapes and never stopped to become a proper grown-up, not even for love, and Affleck’s Hunt who has done so, and is now, despite a family he clearly loves deeply, bored and a bit sad and decidedly grumpy. Lowery doesn’t really attempt to show up any of these character’s lifestyles; rather he seems more interested in exploring the space between them, the strange intimacy between the hunter and the hunted (even when the hunt like here is a rather sedate one), and the ways Forrest and Hunt are more alike than it might first appear, both looking at each other with the wistfulness of looking at the road not taken.