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I have a good guess for this Also R&H did the Cinderella we watched a few turns ago! But actually that makes me more stoked for this...

Well, I can't believe we haven't covered a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical yet! So I give you....

Not sure I've even heard of this one. My only quibble with R&H is every show gets very dark for a while. Jud Frye in Oklahoma, Billy being an utter crook in Carousel, etc.

Alert! Paul and Nicole Byer were on the Good Place this week. (West Coast, you still have time to see it live.) I was unprepared for how much I would squeal when I saw Nicole.

My bad!

I’m very much looking forward to this

Well we only have 2 days to watch it so flip a coin!

K, I’ve got a couple of candidates in mind. I’ll my pick as soon as I stop flip flopping!

Was coming here to say the same thing. Seeing them made an already amazing show that much more forking great.

I agree to an extent that it isn't super revisionist but I'm also not an expert on westerns. I think one thing that is revisionist is making the characters a bit more grey morally. Most classic westerns are very good guys versus very bad guys. Characters are either white hat or black hat. Even the shady characters are definitely one or the other. But here, everyone is somewhere in the middle. Clint is our hero (I guess?) but he's an assassin who really can't do anything else since he's failing at raising his family. The sheriff is normally a flawless, perfect character but here he's unmarried with no potential suitor, bad at carpentry, and brutality beats English Bob. Normally, if a character puts up a bounty, they have the money instead lying about it to get someone killed. And so on with every character. But further, death is a real problem. In most westerns, there's no real after effects. The sheriff may not want to kill but he's justified because he only kills bad guys. But here death has consequences beyond stopping evil. Schofield kid is transformed by killing. That kid who gets gut shot has a long, drawn out death and he is not a main character. Clint is going to hell (metaphorically but he acknowledges it) for what he's done. I don't know that these are huge changes to westerns but filling in the gaps is unusual. But I also think there are westerns that kind of addressed this stuff (The Good The Bad and The Ugly doesn't have any true heroes, High Plains Drifter has a...not great protagonist, for example, and Blazing Saddles is of course a commentary on westerns but in a different way). But it's a lot of little things like a conversation that absolutely wouldn't happen in a normal western. Unforgiven isn't to westerns what Scream is to slashers (which is also a slasher despite subverting slashers)but there's some subversion going on.

The January 19 live shows at Largo gonna be: "The Snowman" with Michael Fassbender, and "Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance"!

It's short notice but the movie is available through Amazon Prime. I'd be willing to host a Rabbit showing tonight at 9 Eastern if there's any interest.

7 appearances: Jason Statham - Fast Five, In the Name of the King, Fast and Furious 6, Furious Seven, The Fate of the Furious, The Meg, Cellular 2 appearances: Kim Basinger - My Stepmother is an Alien, Cellular

Yup, and the fact of the Schofield Kid desperately wanting to be such a gunslinger while also being literally myopic.

Tom, do you want to ahead and give us your pick so we can talk about it next week?

I don't understand how you've ever enjoyed this podcast.

So, The Searchers. I watched this for the first time about five years ago and am only revisiting it now. Coincidentally, I finally watched Unforgiven for the first time shortly before also around five years ago. This is my first rewatch of both now. I had decided to give Unforgiven a chance because a sibling said they thought I would like it because I *really* liked No Country for Old Men - seen quite about seven years before. The Searchers was watched because of intermittently working my way through the two BFI lists and having watched Unforgiven, it seemed like the time to watch The Searchers would be appropriate. Oh wait. This is getting a bit meandering and I wish to finish this post in less than five years. I’m voting yes on the poll, but if I’m being honest with myself, there’s a good chunk of deference to the BFI critic’s list going on there. I’m not well versed on Westerns of the era. This is the only John Wayne or John Ford movie I believe I’ve seen, and really don’t have a larger context to really judge it against. To be honest, that’s probably how I’m going to be when we get to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (and how I feel about The Passion of Joan d’ Arc). But all three of those movies, while weren’t movies that I loved, were movies that while watching, I felt there is something there. So even if I couldn’t connect to them fully, I got the sense how other people could. I say that because I didn’t get that with L’ Atalante or Battleship Potemkin. And The Searchers, Sunrise, and Passion of Joan d’ Arc are all movies that are from eras and genres that I’m not really that well exposed to. So if the really well regarded critics list says there good and I sense at least something, I have at least some deference. Though I approached going through that list not so interested in making rulings of, “does this movie belong on the list of all time greats,” but rather as, the critics list seems like a canonical representation of world cinema throughout the decades (I think I’ve said before, I find the BFI director’s list more in line with the movies I enjoy and love. They just seem less diverse of types of movies - appropriately with that statement, The Searchers is way down near number 50). Many of which are blindspots for me. Let me see these and see which ones click. Some will, some won’t. And having seen all but two movies of the top 50 in the list, I’ve found they usually had some hook to put in me or were interesting. Even the ones I didn’t really click with. Extrapolating from the movies on the AFI list from which I feel more comfortable saying, “yeah, I don’t think this is very good,” I don't feel as much deference to it. I say all this because, deference to some other list as belonging on a list of great movies isn’t a great argument in and of itself. And yet, here I am, doing it. Maybe if I did a deep dive on classic westerns, I’d change my opinion. Anyhoo. I will say, the first time I saw it, I did get the ambivalent sense of, this isn’t the full throated subversion I was expecting. Though it did seem to be there, and yet, possibly not as much there as people lead me to believe. Wasn’t entirely positive if people were reading more into it than was there. And that was the better half of the movie. The other half seemed trapped in the style of how I imagined John Wayne westerns - the type of westerns I’m not really interested in. So, I am sympathetic to, well, this, opinion: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/17/most-overrated-films-the-searchers Because it’s quite possible it’s correct. I think this is close to the place where Paul landed. However, on this second watch, John Wayne does seem much more the anti-hero. And I mean the Dustin Hoffman Straw Dogs anti-hero, i.e. the villain who happens to be the protagonist, but because of narrative conventions, it isn’t really obvious unless you’re paying attention. And it just worked a lot better for me this second time around. That other half of the movie that seems not so good. Not so good, but maybe expecting the bad parts dulled it a bit. Maybe having seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 3 or 4 times in the past two months has made Mose (and Vera’s suitor) seem less grating (just an attempt at humor that really doesn’t work for me). They really seem like something out of a Coen brothers' movie. Well, something in that vein. Just not one that works for me. Actually, I need to hit the hay, but some notes I scribbled down relistening to the podcast. * Them going over the original ending with Natalie Wood - yeah. That is way more interesting. But I wonder if the talk of people reacting very strongly emotionally to the ending - I wonder if that's in reference to the door shutting, not the not-shooting of Natalie Wood. The shot of the door ending is the most iconic thing about the movie to me. It's what always gets shown/talked about when summarized in a short line/one shot. It's the first/only scene I knew of the movie going in 5 years ago. There's something emotional about the hero no longer having any place in the world and having the door shut behind him, heading off to the isolation of the open plains. * Paul talking about Scar being offscreen and it being anti-climactic... Actually, I took Martin killing Scar to be a thematic point of, John Wayne is no longer the hero of this world and has no place in it when I first saw it. But if we go with the anti-climactic interpretation. No Country for Old Men also did this (even more offscreen!) - and would have been a lesser film if it hadn’t. For this, it would be to emphasize that Scar isn’t the villain, and the building up of him is the mislead/subversion/critique. The character you’re used to being the hero always needs someone to chase, so let’s deflate that myth by not giving him the showdown. * Amy said there's nowhere in Texas where it goes from Martin being shirtless in the morning and then it's snowing in the afternoon. I took that to be something like a six month time lapse. There’s some dialogue to the effect they had been searching for a year. It did make me think of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian because they had a situation where it went from being really hot to snowing very shortly. I assumed they were in mountains though. Also not sure where. Unforgiven went from raining weather to snow in just a single day though. * Them coming back in time to interrupt the marriage, eh... Other stories did the concept of these obsessive pursuits ruining lives better. Namely coming back in time. Usually the quest is something more obviously shallow though, like the quest for money, power, skillmanship (usually at killing people) - I think Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu is coming to mind. This could have been potentially a stronger part of the movie. I did like the meandering aspect of this movie though. If a movie is about a multi-year search with lots of false leads and dead-ins, then if it isn’t meandering, I would think that’s a false representation of the journey. * I think Paul said, "Death wish came out a few years later." Um... Death wish came out nearly 20 years later. But then again, The Ox-Bow Incident came out in 1943 (nearly 15 years earlier). That’s a western I channel surfed across once in high school. I would like to revisit that one. Watching it as an adult, it could very well turn out to be heavy handed virtue signaling, but it also seems like it could be subversive seeming to this day. * Amy mentions that the treatment and death of Martin's wife was cruelly handled. She focuses on the breadcrumbs that maybe she was going to betray them, but I'd point out that he also bemoans that she was killed for no reason. I feel like, there’s something about killing the Other who was dehumanized as comic relief that points out the savagery of the white soldiers is kind of subversive in a weird kind of way. Even if it is at the same time problematic because it dehumanized a Native person for comic relief, and even more problematic in the sense that I suspect the film was that smart and did it on purpose. Which I guess also goes to the situation of subverting a genre by resembling it in many ways. And I think I was planning to write more on that when I first started this. It’s a topic that might come up in the discussion of Unforgiven as well. And I do wonder if it lands better to viewer who are fans of the genre being subverted - and to those it isn’t, it’s just, “okay, you have some subversion in here, but you’re also just kind of another entry in this genre, I don’t like.” Because there are instances where it really works for me, e.g. No Country for Old Men, Let the Right One In, Straw Dogs And there are others where it did not - A.I., Unforgiven, and I think, The Searchers. And it is something I do wrestle with and can only leave it at, I do wonder about it. Oh, and I left off one aspect on me voting yes. When I went into Unforgiven, I was told there were shots in it that were just beautiful. I was mostly unmoved. Maybe because I existed in a world where I had seen movies such as There Will be Blood, No Country, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford. I went into The Searchers having read that Ford was known for his majestic filming of the southwest. I’m not that big on the terrain of the southwest, but I was fairly impressed by the landscape shots. So that is worth something. I can’t compare to Lawrence of Arabia though, because the last time I saw that was in college. On VHS. On a 12-inch CRT tv/vcr combo. I think that’s the only time I’ve seen it. Maybe in high school. That said, in terms of westerns, I still think McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the best western (and Altman) I've seen. I'll save my thoughts for Unforgiven for when it comes up, but, oh boy. It seemed to go the opposite route of The Searchers for me on the rewatch. The flaws seemed even worse this time around. Okay. Too many words and meandering thoughts.

my list 1. Cool World 2. Cool World 3. Cool World 4. Cool World 5. Cool World