The Western Thread

I watched For A few Dollars More yesterday and it was twice as good as Fistful of Dollars. It's. . . bigger and smaller at the same time. It feels more epic, but the story is simpler and easier to follow. The dueling bounty killers is awesome And the text at the beginning gives the whole thing an epic feel.

I'll probably buy The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on Friday.
 
Spaghetti westerns are great. Man, there's nothing quite so good as a Sergio Leone picture.

As for seeing Young Guns AND Young Guns II, but none of the Man With No Name trilogy or Once Upon a Time in the West? That's just terrible. Absolutely terrible. Neither of the Young Guns movies should have even made it onto the list. That professor should be ridden out of town on a rail.

And Magnificent Seven is a better movie than Seven Samurai. I'm sorry, but it is. The cast is just too great. Yul Brynner? Steve McQueen? Charles Bronson? James Coburn? that awesome German dude? M7, along with the Dirty Dozen, are everything that the new Ocean movies wish they could be. Those two movies literally define all-star ensembles.

moonmaster said:
The whole trilogy is great and Clint Eastwood shows why he's just the definition of badassery. Clint Eastwood kicks Chuck Norris's *** for breakfast. And that didn't even make sense. Because it doesn't have to.

For a Few Dollars More is probably the weakest of the trilogy and looking back, I actually don't remember that much about it. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly takes it to a whole other level though. A Fistful of Dollars is an excellent, tightly made action movie. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is just ****ing epic.

Hm.... See, I never looked at it that way. I saw the whole trilogy together in a rather short period of time, and I find it hard to extricate the individual pictures from the trilogy. What was so beautiful about those movies is how they formed such a seamless evolution of the new western. Fistful is the tight, sparse film that cuts away the frills and redefines the gunslinger archetype (Incidentally, M7 is better than 7S, but Yojimbo is better than Fistful). Few Dollars takes what's been established and weaves the basic ideas into a more complicated heist story. And then GBU puts it all together into something incredibly epic and morally dour. Together, they feel like the embryo for Once Upon a Time in the West, which may be the greatest western film ever produced.

Now that that's all said and done.... Has anyone seen Django? And moving direction just a little bit, can we get some discussion on how absolutely brilliant Shane was? Or how about some supernatural westerns? Has anyone else here seen Pale Rider or Blood on the Moon?
 
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What do you guys think is the greatest Spaghetti Western theme (i.e. "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" by Ennio Morricone, "Ecstasy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone, "Ghost Riders in the Sky" by The Sons of The Pioneers, "The Magnificent Seven" by whoever scored "The Magnificent Seven," "A Fist Full of Dollars" by Ennio Morricone, "For A Few Dollars More" by Ennio Morricone, etc.)?
 

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