Sunday Laughs

Today my little lady was flipping around the TV and found Bridesmaids (2011) and I later watched True Grit (2010).

Bridesmaids

It might be that we're getting married very soon, that we both needed a good laugh or that there was something funny about the TV version of this, but it was an especially fun viewing experience. First off, this was the TV version and that meant they dropped the sound out for almost all of the swears which was nicer than changing the words around to make things Monday Friday snakes or Yippee Kiyay Mr. Falcon (there was no Mr. Falcon). USA gave us a little treat adding in a deleted scene not in the blu-ray cut of the film where Kristin Wiig goes on a first date with a divorcee with a strange little son. The little boy has a string of great lines including "Are you afraid to die? Because my mom is going to kill you," and "my grandma died where you are sitting." The son would have stolen the movie, but I'm not sure it would have fit in the movie's pacing, even though it's a movie that's almost more of a string of sketches than a narative. It helps that the scene can be slid into the movie without breaking up the movie BECAUSE of the commercial breaks that naturally break up the movie between scenes. The fitting scene gave us huge belly laughs as well and that was not new to us. It very well might be one of the classic comedic scenes of all time and it doesn't lose anything to be cut out of the TV version.

True Grit

I was thinking and this might be my favorite western of the last five or six years. Thinking back Django Unchained, The Revenant, Hateful Eight, and True Grit are the biggest westerns of the last few years and True Grit is just ahead of the others. That may change if I watch the other three in recent succession.

It's odd that they all seem to have a similar feel to them all that is different from the feel of the westerns of the era of John Ford as well as Spaghetti Westerns. There was also a weird in between period of Young Guns, The Quick and the Dead and the TV series' of Briscoe County Junior, and The Magnificent Seven which were less realistic but more fun movies than those that preceded them. They were followed by the films that were inspired by Unforgiven that spawned a seemingly unending string of depressing and cold feeling Westerns that lasted until around the time of this True Grit.

It has been written over and over again that Superhero movies will go the way of the Western, but the heyday of Westerns lasted decades, had a strange dip that included a best picture win for Unforgiven, and now averages around one great Western per year that is popular as well. The difference is that Superhero movies can live in almost any genre, but even with that in mind, Westerns have never gone away and have simply gone through different movements in tone and style.