When The Wild West Really Was The Wild West- “Wild Bill”- A Jeff Bridges Retrospective

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Wild Bill Hickok.

DVD Review

Wild Bill, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt, directed by Walter Hill, 1995

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s in the early days of television, black and white television, got our heroes, our Western heroes strictly in white hat, and our bad guys strictly in black. And the Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans) well, the less said about the treatment of those benighted and betrayed people the better. Of course this view was all hokum, or worst. It took the likes of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCormack and others in literature to give us a more realistic view of the rawness, untamed rawness of the Old West. And the likes of Walter Hill to give us a more truthful cinematic view, a view with muddy streets, whiskey breathe, fistfights at the drop of a hat, or less, treachery among enemies, treachery among friends, many social diseases and all. And that was on the good days. The good director here has taken on the legend of Wild Bill Hickock, generally given the better of it in Western lore as an associate of Buffalo Bill, a civilizing influence, and a king hell gunfighter.

Of course, the subtext for this review is that the actor playing Will Bill is none other that last year’s Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges for his “modern” cowboy role (singer-songwriter, okay) in Crazy Hearts. My argument underlying the choice of subtext is that Bridges was born to play theses good old boy Western parts and has done mainly stellar work in the genre ever since he cut his teeth on the modern Texas good-old-boy-in-the-making Duane Jackson in the film adaptation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. And at the acting level that is true here, although the existential characterization and the Bridges cool wit is perhaps a little over the top for the nitty-gritty West of the late 19th century.

One comes away from this film feeling, and maybe not incorrectly, that the distance between hero and villain (here in this contrived concoction about the manner of Bill’s untimely end, as villain, the son, the driven son of “spurned” mother whom was once Wild Bill’s lover) is who is left standing at the end. And for most of his life from his service in the Union Armies during the American Civil War until that fateful day that Bill was just one step too cool Will Bill was the last one left standing. But, see there was that little matter of the spurned woman, and that driven son to lay old Bill low. In any case if you have not seen a Western since the 1950s (although I guess I would want to know where you have been) you will be hard-pressed to sort out the heroes from the villains here. The Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans) as usual, in real life or fiction, get short shrift.

A Jeff Bridges Retrospective- “Stick It” (Yes, Stick It)- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Stick It, starring Jeff Bridges.

DVD Review

Stick It, starring Jeff Bridges, Missy Peregrym, Touchstone Films,2006

Over the past year or so, since he won the Academy Award for best actor for his role as broken down country singer/songwriter Bad Blake in Crazy Hearts I have been reviewing the cinematic work of Jeff Bridges as his films have come into my hands. Most of my reviews have been positive reflecting the very real talent and flare that Jeff Bridges brings to the movies. That said, I am at a lost for why he did the film under review, Stick It, that while marginally entertaining at times is an incredible waste of his time and talent. Now I am not, and never have been, privy to the decisions that actors make about taking on scripts. Maybe they see something in the plot line, maybe they are looking for something a little edgy, or maybe just for the dough, not an unimportant consideration in fickle movie land. But now I can add Jeff Bridges to the vast number of very talented actors that have been in “turkeys”, for whatever reason.

Strangely, it is not the subject matter, the trials and tribulation of a troubled, ex- or maybe not so ex- gymnast (Haley Graham, played by Missy Peregrym) trying tot find her place in the world, the non-monastic gymnastics training world that is off here but the subtext that the teenage rebellion of a gymnast attempting to dramatically change the way the sport is conducted has enough energy to fill an hour and one half film. It really doesn’t since an amazing amount of time is spent in various clips of gym activity. And Jeff Bridges as a washed-out (kind of) gym camp owner is in the thick of this thing as Haley’s substitute father/confessor. There are plenty of issues (sexual, physical, psychological) that could have been raised by a close look at the cult-like elite gymnastics world (or any high-level sports training) but none, other than a silly attack on the scoring system, are by a film which decided that it did not want to tackle them and played instead to a kind of campy teenage melodrama. And high talent (although poor gymnast and sage) Jeff Bridges got caught in the middle.