Brush up on your western trivia in Rango

Rango exists in a strange paradox: It’s animated, so children will naturally be interested, but it’s themed for adults with very mature references. Get a sitter or take the kids? Here’s a third option: take the sitter. They’ll appreciate Rango’s humor more than the kids.

And if you do take the little ones, expect them to ask questions after the movie. Like why did the doctor put on a rubber glove and stick his finger up in the air when the other character mentioned a sore prostate? “What’s a prostate? Tell us, daddy, please.” You’ll never hear the end of it from the backseat. Tell them what it is, in all the scary details, and you’ll never get them to the pediatrician again. You don’t tell them, and next thing you know they’re Googling “finger in prostate” — young eyes can’t un-see that.

Prostates don’t belong in films for children. Is that me coddling the children of the 21st Century? Maybe, but that’s not all that’s out of place in Rango, Gore Verbinski’s ode to westerns: swearin’, murderin’, tobaccy, cee-gars, references to other western films and the water-infused plot, which draws so heavily from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown that Robert Towne deserves a screenwriting credit. Adults will be amused; their children might be missing half the jokes.

Rango begins with an aquarium-based chameleon who fancies himself a master thespian. During a move, the little lizard (voiced with whimsy by Johnny Depp) is bumped from his aquarium and tossed into the Mojave Desert, where the local wildlife acts like they’re stars on an episode of Deadwood. The lizard adopts the name Rango — short for Durango, the name on a food label — and struts into town looking for water, the currency of the desert. He meets all kinds of grizzled beasts — bearded mice, spectacled tarantulas, wrinkly chickens, toothless horny toads — who fulfill all the western roles: shopkeeper, bartender, gunslinger, town drunk and bandits. A mariachi band of burrowing owls act as the film’s Greek chorus.

The character design and animation are terrific. The film has a one-of-a-kind look to it; the style is a mixture of photo-realistic textures with oddball animal caricatures. It's not as cartoony and vibrant as a Pixar; the animation is dirty and dusty like the Old West. The characters are harshly lit under the Nevada sun, creating dense shadows under hat brims and overexposed vistas over their shoulders. Indoors, the shadows dance around sunlight that falls through the windows and those swinging saloon doors. The look of Rango is that of a real western, which adds an authentic pop.

As Rango stumbles around town a mystery begins to unfold: a greedy turtle serving as the mayor — suspenders holding his shell up — may be hording the town’s water in some kind of nefarious plot to hike up the water rates. Rango takes out a posse (on riding roadrunners) to investigate, which results in double-crosses, a rattlesnake showdown, a chase with a covered wagon and a sequence with moles riding bats like they’re the air cavalry.

The voice casting is fun, though I tire tremendously of Johnny Depp doing Johnny Depp impersonations. Isla Fisher does a remarkable western shtick, as does Harry Dean Stanton and Alfred Molina. Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name makes a cameo, though he’s voiced by Timothy Olyphant doing a noteworthy Eastwood impression. If Slim Pickens were alive, he would have found himself right at home with all the crusty western talk. I really enjoyed Fisher's character, called Beans, who delivers a rapid-fire bumpkin speak: "Git yer fee-langes offa dem dare bottles."

I especially enjoyed the placement of music and sound effects throughout the film. “Ave Maria” as Rango falls from his aquarium is clever. A mariachi-tinted version of the Raising Arizona soundtrack (the song with the yodeling) plays during an enthusiastic hawk chase. “Ride of the Valkyries,” a parody of a similar scene in Apocalypse Now, plays during the bat air-assault. It’s overused in aerial sequences, but Wagner’s famous song somehow never gets old. And if you listen real carefully you’ll hear that famous windmill squeak from the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.

I enjoyed most of Rango, especially its western look, but it ran out of things to do just after the halfway mark. And it didn’t balance the humor through the entire film. Was it for adults or children? I’m still confused. A Pixar film would aim between the two, but Rango’s aim was a little high. Not that all films have to be Pixar films; it's just that Pixar has mastered its audience. Rango not sure who its audience is.

Hollywood close to perfecting the western

Westerns are so rarely action vehicles anymore. Yes, they have action in them, but so more often nowadays they have deeper motives that can’t be cheapened or invalidated with extraneous gunplay.

Modern westerns are metaphorical journeys, or simply a scorched landscape by which these journeys can sprawl. Recall Unforgiven or The Wild Bunch, westerns that seemed self-aware of their time and place in their setting’s histories. The characters aren’t so much playing for a plot, but reacting to the time in which they live and how it has changed their perception of violence and decency. Last year’s 3:10 to Yuma drew on similar principles. Then there’s Open Range, Kevin Costner’s realist cowboy movie that focused not on the bloody gunfight but the drama that frames it like rustic punctuation. Consider also one of my favorite movies of 2006, The Proposition, which allowed us to acknowledge the painful betrayal of two brothers in a land without rules or laws — only a strict, and often amoral, code of conduct existed. Sergio Leone made his westerns into great operas of our time, framing his leads into claustrophobic close-ups amid the howls and hauntings of Ennio Morricone’s scores.

Someday soon the genre will again be cheapened back into action nonsense — Die Hard in the desert — but until then please consider these films as masterpieces of the genre, the oldest genre in cinematic history.

Falling into this topic — classy and unforgettable westerns — is a film released early last year to a quiet applause and poor box office receipts. By and large it was neglected, but after viewing it on DVD this past week it reminds me why westerns are so important. The film, Seraphim Falls, is an explosive adventure through the Old West. Although not quite El Topo or anything else by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Seraphim Falls is a surreal and nearly abstract journey across several frontiers. The people we meet along the way exist partly in reality and partly in a dream, and sometimes we’re not so sure of either. At one point a character seems to not exist at all, yet she offers the necessary tools to move the characters forward … and they accept.

The movie stars Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson. They have names, but I’m tempted not to print them only because they’re barely ever said. In fact, very little at all is said by Brosnan, and Neeson repeats the same line several times — “You will not be paid if he is dead.” Neeson is the hunter; Brosnan the hunted. The movie begins with Brosnan setting up camp in the high woods amid a blanket of snow. A shot rings out and the chase is on. The hunter has four others with him; the hunted is alone. Remember the Super Posse from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? That’s pretty much all of Seraphim Falls: it is a cat-and-mouse chase that lasts the entire film. The chase begins so abruptly that its sudden movement is jolting. Nothing is explained to mark the beginning and nothing is said to mark its end. The film simply comes and goes; beginning in emptiness and ending in emptiness — a most efficient picture.

As Brosnan, caked in mud throughout, runs down snow-covered mountains, across vast plains, through steaming deserts and amid settlements of various kinds, he is relentlessly inventive: he carves out traps for those who prey on him, steals horses, pays off Indians and summarily ends the lives of those who threaten his path. He is often without a horse and gun, but several times he finds ways to reacquire them. Neeson is not required to be as resourceful, but he knows how to track, which allows him to cross entire landscapes following an exact trail of bent grass or brushed dirt. He lunges forward with a momentum that suggests this chase is his personal vendetta. Eventually, flashbacks reveal the reason for the chase and its violent push forward.

Seraphim is a chase, yet it finds time to stop and offer strange encounters: A terse father and his two children, a wanted man with a temper, a congregation of Christians in need of food and water, an Indian with wise prose who controls a tiny puddle of water and a gang of railroad workers who don’t take kindly to horse thieves. One of the more controversial characters is that of a woman in a tiny cart who sells a cure-all elixir. She provides the two men with a bullet each as the gap between them shrinks. As she rides away her wagon says her name is Louise C. Fair. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to read “Lucifer.”

The casting is fantastic. The elixir woman is played fiendishly by Anjelica Huston. Other characters are played by the great creepo Tom Noonan (Manhunter), impish Kevin J. O’Conner (There Will Be Blood) and Native American actor Wes Studi (Last of the Mohicans). Michael Wincott (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), whose geologically painted voice radiates with each word, plays one of the posse. And Brosnan and Neeson are exceptional as well. Brosnan, still fresh out of a Bond franchise, is very convincing with his character’s plight. Much of his dialogue is reduced to shrieks and yells, like when he falls into an icy river or when he strips his clothes in the snow to remove a bullet from a gaping wound in his arm. Neeson holds his secrets close to his chest, but more is revealed as his chase grows more desperate. His flashbacks reveal that his entire family was killed in the confusing days after the Civil War. Anger controls him, yet he does something very curious at the end that seems to change the meaning of what we’ve just seen. It’s not a twist ending, but it comes close.

I should also mention the beautiful cinematography by gifted cameraman John Toll, who succeeds at not only capturing magnificent shots of snowy mountains, forests and deserts, but manages to fit them all into one film with a seamless energy. I can't think of a better movie in recent memory that was filmed in real snow and on a real mountain.

Seraphim Falls occasionally guides its plot by the hand with too much force — a bullet conundrum is solved too quickly, a horse thief is discovered with no evidence against him, a henchman is knocked unconscious too easily — but because some of the scenes are surreal and almost allegorical we can suspend disbelief for the film’s target effect.

This is by no means a perfect western — some would argue it’s not a western at all except for the horses — but Seraphim Falls is a wonderful film, one that adds another element to a genre that hasn’t made a misstep in a very long time. Let’s hope it doesn’t stumble anytime soon.

Duck, Sucker: A review 36 years in the making

And from the heavens fell a film. A great film. A Sergio Leone film. And the world was good.  


Many audiences have found and enjoyed Leone’s “lost” film Duck, You Sucker or, as it’s been widely known, A Fistful of Dynamite. But not until June, with the release of the Sergio Leone Anthology, did us silly ’Mericans get a good, long glimpse of the original edit of the quasi-western. Since its 1971 release, it’s been hacked up, gutted and pretty much devoured by a variety of editors, and even then it still never landed a wide-scale American release. Maybe movie enthusiasts didn’t make enough of a fuss about it in ’71 to make it a classic, or maybe moviegoers were still gushing about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West for Sucker to get its share of praise. Maybe, dare I say it, people didn’t like it … (gasp here). I wasn’t around, so I can’t speculate further. But I can recommend it now that it has an official release inside the Leone Anthology, which also features Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Sucker stars James Coburn as John Mallory, an IRA explosives expert, who is drawn to Mexico as a hired demo-expert during a Mexican revolution (or maybe the Mexican Revolution). Rod Steiger — in the form of a smelly bare-footed peasant with the ferocity of a lion and the accent of Tony Montana off his medication — plays the sucker, Juan Miranda, a Mexican bandit pillaging under the skirt of a great frontier. The Irishman and the Mexican meet during a hold-up on a lonely road. Juan shoots out John’s motorcycle tire, so John returns the favor by blowing up Juan’s stagecoach. The explosion is preceded by the first of three references to the title: “Duck, you sucker,” John tells Juan as his various sons and fathers, all bandits as well, run for cover. In typical Leone style, this chance encounter makes up the entire first act of the movie, stretching to the absolute breaking point when Juan exhaustingly convinces the IRA thug to join in on a bank robbery.

Just as the movie saddles its burros (do burros even where saddles?) to head off for a bank heist, it drastically switches gears as John and Juan find political prisoners, not bags of gold coins, inside the bank’s vaults. Leone, with that sleight of hand worthy of a Vegas table, follows his cowboy opera Once Upon a Time in the West, a moving musical picture about railroads and redemption, with another movie about loftier goals than gold bars or bags of loot. In a way, it’s a buddy picture set against the Mexican Revolution, the same way Good/Bad/Ugly was a buddy flick amid the Civil War. Although it was lost in time and space somewhere between video stores and the Spanish frontiers where it was filmed — and after better pictures nonetheless — Sucker is the quintessential Leone picture: the music, of course by Ennio Morricone, is rich and layered deep within Sucker’s dirty skin; the plot is an allegory involving race and friendship, and the trust that binds them together; the tempo is methodical and intricate, not the kind of 158-minute movie you step into halfway through; and the cinematography is picturesque if “picturesque” can also describe dusty, blistering landscapes chock full of machine gun nests, pre-planted explosive packs and ambushing revolutionaries.

It should also be noted that the body count of Duck, You Sucka is high enough to get mentioned on a United Nations watch list. As soon as the two protagonists arrive in the bank’s keeper city, an Orwellian western town called Mesa Verde, armed patrols start executing political dissidents. And once they start, they don’t stop. Soldiers are mowed down with machine guns, revolutionaries (including children) are blasted mercilessly in a cave and a derailed train makes for a bloody turkey shoot. In one uninterrupted long take, the camera pans across several concrete corrals of political prisoners as soldiers rain hot lead down onto their heads in a genocidal rage. Before that John and Juan stage a firefight that ends with results so conclusive that it may be the only time in cinematic history an entire army is defeated in a fraction of a second. For comparisons to other films, I consulted Movie Body Counts, a morbidly fun site that counts the dead in action films. The top five body-count movies: two Lord of the Rings movies, where computer war sequences rack up nearly 1,200 dead; John Woo’s Hard Boiled, in which bad guys inexplicably shoot evacuating patients as they flee a hospital under siege; We Were Soldiers, with lots of dead American and North Vietnamese soldiers; and Equilibrium, with Christian Bale dispatching sci-fi cops with geometrical kung fu. Duck, You Sucka isn’t listed on the site … yet. If it were, I would put its body count well into the 500s, thus high in the top five list.

Body count aside, though, this sweltering hunk of a film is a wonderful addition to your Eastwood/Leone pictures. Don’t expect it to be like the Eastwood pictures, or even so much like its sister film, Once Upon a Time in the West; just expect a truly unique Leone experience. He brings it to you gift-wrapped from 1971.