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Appaloosa by Ed Harris
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DVD detailsActor: Ed Harris, Jeremy Irons, Ren?e Zellweger, Robert Jauregui, Viggo Mortensen Director: Ed Harris Brand: NEW LINE HOME VIDEO Producer: Ed Harris Writer: Ed Harris Producer: Caldecot Chubb Producer: Candy Trabuco Producer: Ginger Sledge Writer: Robert B. Parker Writer: Robert Knott DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled) Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: 2.40:1 Running Time: 115 minutes DVD Release Date: 2009-01-13 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: New Line Home Video Product features: - In Marshal Virgil Cole and deputy Everett Hitchs line of work, you shoot quick, you shoot clean, and you reload straightaway. No remorse. No looking back. No feelings. Feelings get you killed. Paired as rivals in A History of Violence, Ed Harris (who also directs, produces and co-scripts) and Viggo Mortensen stand together as longtime friends and for-hire peacekeepers Cole and Hitch in this charac
DVD Reviews of AppaloosaDVD Review: Best Western In Years Summary: 5 StarsThis fine western is more like the classics such as 'Shane' from the 40's and 50's, when the genre reached its artistic peak, than the ultra-violent post-Wild Bunch school. This is a refreshing and welcome change of pace. The progressive increase in violence, misogyny and sadism since the 1960's, although yielding some admitted classics such as 'Unforgiven,' is an ultimately an artistic dead end.
'Appaloosa' is a western that contains interesting and plausible characters, some of whom you will identify with, struggling with the human condition in various aspects, as the plot unfolds in an interesting manner. There are some good gun fights, there is horseback riding, there is wonderful scenery, excellent photography, and fine acting.
This movie is paced more like the classic westerns than today's action movies, where someone gets tortured, killed, or blowed up about every 2 minutes because the director thinks all the 14 year old ADHD boys in the theater will go to sleep if he does otherwise. In my opinion, this is a great improvement over the recent '3:10 to Yuma,' which was too oppressively hyperactive and stupid for someone over 30 to enjoy.
My wife, who is not nearly as keen on westerns as am I, enjoyed this movie almost as much as I did. As a fan of westerns, I give this movie an extra star because there are so few good westerns made anymore. A person not interested in westerns would probably give this a 4.
Nonetheless, this is a very good movie for adults who like good movies, and a real treat for fans of classic westerns.
DVD Review: All the pieces ... Summary: 3 Stars... of a classic gunfighter western: stark desert canyons, ember sunsets and silvery moonlight, windswept shanty town with plush velvet&oak saloon, Indian ponies silhouetted against forever blue sky. Snaggle-toothed desperadoes versus weary-eyed sun-chapped drifters still dragging their good-souled baggage from the Civil War. Ed Harris is a great actor, one of Holloywood's true professionals, while Viggo Mortensen and Jeremy Irons ain't exactly chopped liver as actors either. Renee Zellweger manages a slyly subtle performance as a not-quite-pretty hopelessly sluttish 'respectable' woman. The script is moderately pretentious - sententious is a more precise word for it - but that too is within the tradition of great westerns -- Shane, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. There's lots of laconic whiskey-fumed squinty humor! Even the hint of inevitable contamination of the pure and free West so dear to American nostalgia, by "Eastern" bankers and poiliticians, is within the rubric for the genre. This film really has all the elements to be a classic...
...and yet I didn't respond to it. My heart didn't pump. I never snatched at my pocket for my own Colt revolver. I couldn't smell the sagebrush and I didn't start digging out roadmaps for a trip to the High Country. Shucks, wranglers, I was modestly bored.
Perhaps the moment is past in America for the classic gunfighter western...
DVD Review: Picture quality is very bad Summary: 3 StarsI started watching this movie last night. The dvd quality is not good. Its smeary and color is off.
DVD Review: Great Western Summary: 5 StarsThis movie starts off with a bang (literally). The action doesn't stop and you become part of the movie. I enjoyed it a lot.
DVD Review: Westerns Summary: 4 StarsI like all the actors in this film and was surprise to learn that Ed Harris had more then just acting parts in the film. If you like; Westerns this film worth rental fee, not enough gun fightening to fit my personal needs.
Description of AppaloosaIn Marshal Virgil Cole and deputy Everett Hitchs line of work, you shoot quick, you shoot clean, and you reload straightaway. No remorse. No looking back. No feelings. Feelings get you killed. Paired as rivals in A History of Violence, Ed Harris (who also directs, produces and co-scripts) and Viggo Mortensen stand together as longtime friends and for-hire peacekeepers Cole and Hitch in this character-driven, bullet-hard Western based on Robert B. Parkers novel. Blood will spill in the town called Appaloosa. The Western has been an endangered species, on and off, for something like 40 years now. Welcome to Appaloosa, Ed Harris's film of the Robert B. Parker novel--first because it exists at all, but even more because Harris as star, director, and co-screenwriter (with Robert Knott) has managed to bring it to the screen with no hint of fuss or strain, as if the making of no-nonsense, copiously pleasurable Westerns were still something Hollywood did with regularity. Harris plays Virgil Cole, one of those ace gunfighter-lawmen whose name need only be mentioned to make a saloon go still. Cole and his shotgun-toting partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) accept a commission to enforce law and order in the New Mexico town of Appaloosa. That basically means protect it from rapacious rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons, looking right at home on the range), who murdered the previous town marshal like swatting a fly. Life becomes complicated when, about the time Bragg has been jailed to await trial, a fancy-dressing piano player calling herself Mrs. French (Ren?e Zellweger) steps down off the train. Cole commences to have feelings, and as he ruefully reminds Hitch, "Feelin's can get ya killed." In his second directorial effort (following the 2000 biopic Pollock), Harris takes his cue from novelist Parker's often deadpan-comic touch, allowing action and character to accumulate in accordance with an overall eccentric rhythm. (The film's main disappointment is that it would benefit from more running time to allow things to stew a bit longer, especially in the second half.) The character work is choice, from the moment Tom Bower, James Gammon, and Timothy Spall step into view as Appaloosa's civic leaders; the director's father Bob Harris contributes a cameo as a mellifluous-tongued circuit judge, and an age-thickened Lance Henriksen turns up midfilm as gunman Ring Shelton, trailing affability and menace. In collaboration with Dances With Wolves cameraman Dean Semler, Harris sets up shots and scenes in such a way that we often see into and out of Appaloosa's various buildings simultaneously, to excellent dramatic and atmospheric effect, and there's a thrillingly vertical dynamics to a scene involving a train at an isolated water stop. The action is lethal when it needs to be, but never dwelt upon. "That was over quick," Hitch observes after one gun battle. Cole's response says it all: "Everybody could shoot." --Richard T. Jameson
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