sporadic belly laughs not enough to forgive the banal slog of an extended metaphor that was somehow both painfully obvious and entirely opaque
this is the kind of script that the assistant a few desks down asks you to read as a favor, and the whole time you’re just thinking “where the fuck do I even begin?”
a narrative in zero g. a bunch of satirical flotsam and jetsam floating around the irradiated hull of the SS High Concept
color me disappointed!
cartoonish and deeply-racist depiction of the Apches is a given. this, like almost every Western, is of course primarily concerned with establishing a certain American mythos - a mythos that we are then invited to enjoy as nostalgics longing for a return to an era where adventure still existed and romance ruled the day.
but being such, and taken on its own terms, Stagecoach is a beautifully pure exercise in myth-making. I know this was not the only prism through…
enthralling directing, visually sumptuous, but a script that needs to repent
there’s a germ of something truly interesting here if you give the film a deeply political reading - ideas are weapons, virtues are signals, and who is really responsible for corrupting all these red-blooded, God-fearing Americans? - but the plotting is far too perfunctory (and frankly, convenient), and the characters far too depthless to make good on the thrilling promise of what is undoubtedly one of the best trailers in…
of two minds.
on the one hand, I have a tremendous amount of respect not only for what borgli is taking as his object of critique, but also the aesthetic inclinations with which he tackles the project. several laugh out loud moments and clever satirical devices that, if not totally fresh, were executed well in context. take your swings.
on the other hand, the swings missed. was this really the right story for exploring shit as heady and of-the-times as…
