Awesome/Stupid/Pointless: The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Awesome:

  • Sam Shepard in a western is always awesome. Even that silly one about history’s most famous gunslingers stuck in purgatory.
  • Brad Pitt is a pretty menacing and unstable Jesse James.
  • Casey Affleck’s Creepy Nervous Smile™.


Stupid:

  • Molasses slow pacing made me want to shoot Jesse James way before Affleck actually did it.
  • Could they have smeared more Vaseline on the lens?
  • Perfect placement of bathtubs plus heavy use of post-processing evokes erectile dysfunction drug commercial.

Pointless:

  • James Carville loves attention. Thanks for taking work away from a character actor who probably could have used the paycheck, Jimmy.
  • Lots of extended takes of characters with watery eyes staring at things.
  • Narration started out as an interesting choice then became tiresome, then annoying.

Final Word:
An interesting story with some good performances, but excessive post-processing and coma-inducing pace ultimately fails to hold my attention. I guess long, inward-looking-to-the-point-of-almost-crying-all-the-time westerns aren’t for me. (IMDb)

3 thoughts on “Awesome/Stupid/Pointless: The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)”

  1. Heh, heh, heh. Caught the end of this on cable recently, and Affleck and Pitt were great* (which is isn’t always true) but it was obvious the pacing was planned by a tortoise. I was thinking of catching the whole thing, but you have reinforced my gut reaction and dissuaded me.

    * But not as great as Todd is in his man-on-the-street-interviews commercial, which I totally recognized him in

    1. At over 2 1/2 hours I simply can’t recommend the movie. If it was a tight 90 minutes, I bet I would have liked it. But Hollywood (with the exception of George Clooney) seems incapable of making economical features anymore.

  2. I LOVE Westerns, and will watch anything with Sam Shepard, but I couldn’t get past the first 20 min of this one. 🙁

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