Moya is out of food, and the crew is starving. Zhaan (Virginia Hey) in particular needs to eat. She needs to eat meat to stop her budding cycle. She’s been spewing spores around the ship, and everyone seems to be allergic, except Aeryn (Claudia Black). Chiana (Gigi Edgley) leads them to a massive world-sized corpse…
Tag: western
The Magnificent Seven (2016) – Antoine Fuqua
I’ve enjoyed most interpretations of The Seven Samurai I’ve come across, but there’s a special place in my heart for the 1960 film with it’s iconic score by Elmer Bernstein. So, when I heard back in 2016 that there was yet another iteration coming I wasn’t quite ready to jump in and see how this…
The Bass Reeves Trilogy: Follow the Angels Follow the Doves (2020), Hell on the Border (2021), and The Forsaken and the Dead (2023) – Sidney Thompson
After watching Paramount’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves and seeing in the opening credits that it was based on two books in a historical fiction trilogy written by Sidney Thompson, I had to hunt them down and dig into this historical personage that no one seems to know about. Over the course of three novels, Thompson documents…
Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) – Steve Carver
With a musical score by Francesco De Masi and an opening credits sequence that feels very much in line with a Sergio Leone western, expectations surrounding Lone Wolf McQuade on my initial viewing went up a little. Despite the fact that I know Chuck Norris isn’t a very good actor. Norris plays the titular McQuade,…
High Plains Drifter (1973) – Clint Eastwood
High Plains Drifter marked the first time Eastwood directed a western. Keeping in line with the work he put in on his spaghetti westerns, the movie is a darker, grittier style western, as opposed to the type of film made prior to them. To illustrate that the Stranger he’s playing is a bad dude, Eastwood…
The Lone Ranger (2013) – Gore Verbinski
Gore Verbinski is a vibrant visual director, but the casting of Armie Hammer as John Reid aka The Lone Ranger, doesn’t do the film any good, and the whitewashing of Tonto with the casting of Johnny Depp makes things worse. There are some wonderful sequences, some great images, and some fun comedic moments, as the…
Quigley Down Under (1990) – Simon Wincer
Simon Wincer is a hard-working director, his efforts can be hit or miss, but I loved his work on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Lonesome Dove, and D.A.R.Y.L. Starting with Quigley Down Under, he’s worked with Tom Selleck a number of times, but this was their first feature film…
Galactica 1980 (1980) – Space Croppers, and The Return of Starbuck
The penultimate episode of the short-lived series, Galactica 1980, is Space Croppers, and it is the last time we see Troy (Kent McCord), Dillon (Barry Van Dyke) and Jamie (Robyn Douglass) in the series. Written by Robert McCullough, this episode debuted on 27 March, 1980, and once again lets the series lean into a little…
TIFF ’23: The Dead Don’t Hurt
Viggo Mortensen wrote and directed this Western drama that is filled with recognizable Western tropes but Moternsen neither completely rejects them nor subverts them, he simply uses them to fill out his story about an immigrant couple that finds themselves living and loving on the edge of a corrupt Nevada town in the 1860s. The…
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) – Simon Wincer
I saw Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man the summer it opened in ’91, while I was working in Toronto. Something about it just clicked for me. I like the sense of history to the characters and the world they live in. Set five years down the road in 1996, the world is going to…
The Mind Reels 