My friend Mike and I caught "The Good THe Bad and The Ugly" on the big screen last year during the Clevland Cinema in the Square event. I haven't seen most of Eastwoods Westerns so this was a lot of fun. My favorite however, is still the first eastwood western I ever saw (Also with Mike); Unforgiven. It's just a masterpiece and Eastwod could have retired right after that. Glad he didn't, but still.....
I love unforgiven...it packs such a punch at the end,your always wondering if he is really the cold blooded killer the movie try's to make you believe he is and boy he is,he's also a great director.
I didn't grow up with these movies, but by the time I was in my late teens I felt like there were something I really needed to see, it's part of our cultural lexicon. I still haven't seen that many, but I at least have a passing familiarity to them now.
What I think makes Unforgiven so brilliant is that it successfully deconstructs the western tropes, specifically those of the Eastwood spaghetti westerns, without invalidating them. Far too often when we see fiction deconstruct a character, it completely wipes out everything good that had gone before - it's one of the things that has been so difficult about rebooting the Lone Ranger BTW. Every reevaluation of his character leaves him as less of a hero. Dynamite has managed to figure that out and gave depth without dragging him through the mud. Eastwood does the same. He turns the ideas of a traditional western on their heads and creates a very different kind of movie, but at the end, he still makes it clear, the traditional violent spaghetti western is just as relevant as the more souls searching kind of story he's just spent the last two hours telling us.
What I think makes Unforgiven so brilliant is that it successfully deconstructs the western tropes, specifically those of the Eastwood spaghetti westerns, without invalidating them. Far too often when we see fiction deconstruct a character, it completely wipes out everything good that had gone before - it's one of the things that has been so difficult about rebooting the Lone Ranger BTW. Every reevaluation of his character leaves him as less of a hero. Dynamite has managed to figure that out and gave depth without dragging him through the mud. Eastwood does the same. He turns the ideas of a traditional western on their heads and creates a very different kind of movie, but at the end, he still makes it clear, the traditional violent spaghetti western is just as relevant as the more souls searching kind of story he's just spent the last two hours telling us.