U: Unforgiven *90's Pop Culture Favorites* #AtoZchallenge
Which camp do you fall into---are you an Unforgiven or a City Slickers?
Which camp do you fall into---are you an Unforgiven or a City Slickers?
In which I get rated R...eh, maybe NC 17...
Before I start talking dirty, guess what happened---I hit 200 followers! My 200th follower is Tony VanHelsing (who I'm going to assume is a descendent of you-know-who, and if anyone knows differently do not tell me). To celebrate this milestone, how about I put Three Daves on sale for only 99 cents in Nook , eBook, ePub , and even Kindle until September 30th. ;) For today's feature post, visit Irish beauty Carol Oates . This talented author and I discuss Adult versus Young Adult and where the line gets crossed.
Comments
So weird that both you and Alex should mention that movie in the last couple days, because I honestly had scenes of it in my head yesterday morning (and it's not exactly something I think about every day). Had Jack Palance as Curly on the brain...I think because I was doing Pilates push-ups very, very pathetically and thinking of how that man could do still do one-arm push-ups into his 70s.
and cameron diaz was the nineties!
she's still great, but i think she needs to grow up now... just saying
almost done!!
Also, you should see Silverado. Great actors, good script.
Blazing Saddles, of course.
Okay, that out of the way.
Unforgiven is one of my top 10 movies of all time. It was written by David Peoples, who came from Middletown, Connecticut, and who also wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner. Both movies rewrote their respective genres.
What I love about Unforgiven is its brutally honest camera. The camera doesn't flinch away from the horror of callousness, and it doesn't make love to the old Romantic West. Maybe it makes love to the grittily realistic West, but it is such a relief to watch a film where people are on the screen, not robots (or in the case of Blade Runner, where robots are on the screen, but at least they're alive and we care about them, moreso than the people on the screen). It's a relief to see real choices with real prices for making them, and those are paid in full. There are no cheap shots in this film, everything costs dearly, and everybody loses.
And in so losing: trying, dying, or, worse: living, we win. We're not treated like idiots where we have to swallow the stupid "Gryffindor wins" because the happy ending must occur, regardless of the shattering cost of sacrificing disbelief for a cheap feel-good ending.
There is no feel-good ending, life was hard. There were no heros, just whores, who were the ennobled ones because they looked out for a fallen sister. And they were still dead wrong.
Unforgiven is a movie to watch to take a break from the movies that, at their endings, say: 'you are an idiot to have bought what we just sold you.'
THEN you can go back to watching the Disney-rewrites-Hans-Christian-Andersen because making all the wrong choices throughout an entire movie gets you a consequence-free happy ending, just like it does in the real world for everybody today. But people don't want to own up to the fact that by not doing anything to salvage their future, by ceding their choices to the Man or Big Brother will get them the lottery ticket out of bills and misery.
Unforgiven was unforgiving, every choice was bought and paid for in full, and one man stood at the center and accepted what he was, just simply bad, and accepted that only he could do something, so he could ride home, or kill every sumbitch who stood in his way, because why? Because He's William Munny, murderer of women and children, and he did what he did because he was just a mean cuss, and because nobody else would.
Unforgiven.
HTH LiLa