i haven't seen the Old Men yet, but i appreciate Westerns in the sense of the frontier thing, how people develop in a void without "civilized" influences and having to survive, and as a vanguard of events in history and technology. Not so much into Westerns except for them coloring the background of my childhood with Clint Eastwood and landscapes along with Space.

I haven't seen NCFOM either, so I can't really say anything about that.

One thing about "the west as frontier" thing, though, is that heading west was a way for people to re-create themselves far far away from their previous lives. This might play into the lack of backstory you mention.

It's been awhile since I saw "Unforgiven", but I seem to recall plenty of backstory in that one. Bill Muny is a man who wants to move beyond his past as a killer, but the world won't let him. I read it as Eastwood's attempt at putting an end to the Man With No Name/Dirty Harry violent role he was feeling trapped in.

Have you seen Quigley Down Under? Tom Selleck and Alan Rickman in Australia. It's a non westerny Western but watchable, or was.
Haven't seen it in a while but Tom Selleck makes a great cowboy.

Westerns, especially older ones, also clearly define the concepts of "good" and "evil." It's much simpler than the real world. I used to hate Westerns, but when I saw that piece of it, I could enjoy it for that reason.

Ehh, just see the spaghetti ones, especially the Man With No Name series, heh. Great fun. Maybe see Shane, too. It's not my namesake and I'm not huge into it, but I audited a film class once that said it was the basis of all westerns after. It really has been remade, formally or informally, dozens of times.

I grew up in the West (specifically Wyoming and Colorado), so there are whole layers to the genre that just feel incredibly natural to me. I think, ultimately, they must be understood as stories grounded in the land -- the sheer, incomprehensible vastness of the place, which is both liberating and isolating. Above all, the landscapes are harsh -- obliterating winters and unforgiving summers, with beautiful terrain that can be, quite literally, deadly. It is a place of endless possibilities that are constantly tempered by forces beyond your control. It is the place where you make order out of chaos, or you die.

The people who came west were tough -- they had to be. My ancestors, for example, were all ranchers and railroaders and carpenters and the like (the women, too!). It's a no-nonsense kind of place; people who came there had to be physically and mentally hard in order to survive. The social structures of the west reflect this -- there was (and still is) its legendary wildness (believe me, you don't know wild till you've been in a cowboy saloon on a Saturday night), but there is also simultaneously a definite order to things: a strict moral code that is, at many ways, libertarian in the classic sense: you stay off my land, and I'll stay off yours, and since we know we're both armed, we'll call it even.

Bill Muny is a man who wants to move beyond his past as a killer, but the world won't let him.

See? There's Shane.

Have you seen Quigley Down Under?

Probably the only movie I'll ever see with this winning line of dialog: "Thanks for the lizard."

About NCFOM, I disagree with the "no past" thing. You learn that Brolin is/was a welder who did two tours in Vietnam. Harrelson, I believe, is briefly referred to as a "former Lt. Col." at one point, now somehow involved in a heroin deal. Whether he has had prior run-ins with Bardem, knows him by reputation only, or has only seen his handiwork in this particular clusterfuck is unclear. Bardem implicitly has a past, likely one so bad it falls into the "you don't wanna know" category (and he's more a force of nature than a man, anway.) I'd guess all three already bear the mark of Cain at the film's start. After all, they aren't the "old men".

Jones I'm not so sure about (whether he's ever killed anyone, I mean - I may be forgetting some reference to serving in WWII or Korea.) He's definitely a native though, not someone who went west to remake himself. So you know that about him. You also know the west has changed on him. Anyway, that's how I understood it.

Well, I think there's a kind of Western myth, and the movies are either about that myth, or a response to that myth.

The myth is about the Wild West as a place of freedom and danger, where you can carve out your own life without a boss, with only your own talents.

"Shane" is part of that myth. It's one of my favourites, but might be a bit dull for some people now.

"Unforgiven" is basically a response to that myth: instead of being free everyone is trapped by their circumstances, their history and problems into playing certain roles.

I'm not sure "No Country For Old Men" really fits as a Western though. It has a very anti-Western ending.

ahhh, Westerns. love 'em. Seconding scody. They're all about good and evil too, mind you.

Maybe it was all those Zane Grey books I read as a kid [not that I remember any of them today] or the Winnetou movie I saw then, but it's also about the landscape for me.
Love all those old Westerns for that. The horses. The music, from Ennio Morricone, a classmate of Sergio Leone's, to country & western oldies like Hank Snow [Yodeling Cowboy, Blue Steel Blues], Jim Reeves [Streets of Laredo], Jimmie Rodgers [Mule Skinner Blues]...to today's Calexico, who's music reflects the country [Tucson, Arizona], the wilderness. I've never been, but intend on seeing it in person.

Deadwood I really like. Haven't seen No Country, yet.

I think some like Westerns and others just plain don't and it's not that they don't get it, it's just not their cuppa.

Yeah, the characters in westerns are usually more like symbols, or archetypes, than they are like standard dramatic characters. Westerns are myths and legends, not just stories.

I second the recommendation of Sergio Leone's movies with Clint Eastwood (the "man with no name" trilogy), esp. The Good The Bad & The Ugly. Also, Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West is almost a meta-western... watch it on as big a screen as possible, and if that doesn't appeal to you on some level, you probably aren't going to like any western.

(Also, I didn't think of NCFOM as a western, either... I thought of it more as film noir.)

Thanks guys. That's all affirming - I don't think I'm missing anything - the land, the good vs. evil stuff, I get that. Scody, that was a very lovely comment.

trondant, the back story stuff comes very late in NCFOM for Brolin, although the husband (who loved it), pegged Brolin as a Vet early on. I just lack that insight. And it started with Jones' exposition, but then he didn't show up for ages. I loved when Jones was on, because just by watching him, I could see his past. Not the others, but as stated, that may be part and parcel of the genre.

I did think of two I liked, Badlands and Desperado. They both had featured female characters, and were newer, so didn't have that time disconnect of the John Wayne stuff, so that probably had something to do with it.

I feel the same way, but about mob movies. I just can't find the characters sympathetic, I guess.

Westerns, especially older ones, also clearly define the concepts of "good" and "evil." It's much simpler than the real world.

Must beg to differ from you there. Sure, in a John Wayne western that's the case. However In a Sergio Leone movie, especially The Man With No Name Trilogy, there are no Good Guys or Bad Guys, only opportunists.

I have a strong fascination with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I can't get enough of it. Everyone is a gargoyle. The quick cuts from wide panoramas to extreme close-ups of eyes. The soundtrack is without equal and becomes a character of its own.

But best is the incredible tension building. The standoff in the cemetery alone lasts five minutes before a shot is fired. Five minutes of watching the faces of the principles as they study each other and weigh their odds, doing calculations without a word being spoken, just Morricone setting the mood. So perfect.

Also, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, not exactly a Western, also destroys barriers, between good and bad--as does other older ones like The Magnificnt Seven.

Stop watching the new westerns.

rainbaby: I know you mentioned movies specifically, but you might want to try a novel called "Lonesome Dove". It's long, but it touches on some of the same things - heading west to make a new start, the west itself changing, cross-border Tex-Mex lawlessness, etc. I don't know if you'd identify with the characters, but I think you'd enjoy it. Incidentally, it was made into a miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones among others. I haven't seen it, though, so I can't vouch for it. As BPC points out, the genre leans to myth, so this book I'd read with, say, The Odyssey in mind. And I'll second sourwookie on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If I had it to do over here, Arch Stanton would make a nice username.

But I'm really curious - how did Mr. Rainbaby know that so early on in NCFOM? Has he read the novel? Was it Brolin pocketing his shell after taking a shot when hunting at the beginning?

But I'm really curious - how did Mr. Rainbaby know that so early on in NCFOM? Has he read the novel?

Nah, he doesn't read for pleasure. He didn't know, but he guessed (aloud) around when he got back to his trailer the first time. He didn't mention the shell, he said, "I get a 'Nam Vet vibe from him." He's really good at that stuff in movies. He knew Bruce Willis was. . .well, you know. . . in The Sixth Sense at the restaurant scene - very early. He's learned to shut up about stuff unless I ask him. In this case, I asked him, because I felt like I didn't know who the guy was supposed to be. I seem to have that blind spot in Westerns.

His people reading in real life, although above average, isn't spooky freaky or anything. Intuition + Watching Many Many Movies + Theatre background, I guess.

A short master class in film making - the cemetary scene from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly that sourwookie mentioned.

Once Upon a Time in the West is one of my favorite movies ever.

TheophileEscargot captures one of the things Westerns are so good at- Westerns are as much about limitations and futility as about freedom. You're only as free as you are strong, but in the movies, anyway, there is a pretty clear cut moral code that's enforced because you wouldn't want to live next to people who didn't have it. (Probably not just because the climate and terrain is hostile- especially if you didn't grow up in it- but pioneers were the first (or second if you're talking Spanish-occupied California and the southwest) wave of the occupation of a hostile land and they needed to be able to depend on each other at least against the native inhabitants. You'll also only as free as dumb luck lets you. You can prepare all you want but a snake bite, a blizzard, a broken leg... you're done and gone and all you've worked for evaporates.

"Civilization" is bureacracy, lawyers, and all sorts of other ways to get weasel you out of money and property that you sweated and fought for. Bob Dylan's line sums it up: "to live outside the law you must be honest." You fuck up you get killed.

Once Upon a Time in the West is especially poignant because you can see that civilization is coming coming coming... that's the build up you feel in this movie, even more than the obligatory shoot out. You realize that the Wild West was a short and atypical period in history and that civilization, though noisy, rushed, and corrupt, is inevitable... and necessary if you want something more out of life than dog eat dog. But when civilization does arrive you'll also lose something precious. (Honesty? Clarity? Simplicity? I'm not sure. Once Upon a Time in the West starts out very very slowly and speeds up by fits and starts. You'll get impatient with it if you try to watch it just to plow through it.)

Good westerns are the same as the Shakespeare stories (and of course they're the same as the samurai films). Basic human stories told with a minimum of distraction.

this is really long. sorry

Check out Silverado. It's got a great cast--Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, a non-annoying Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, John Cleese, Rosanna Arquette, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, and Jeff Goldblum--plus it's entertaining and funny.

Was it Brolin pocketing his shell after taking a shot when hunting at the beginning?

I liked that - good attention to detail from the Coen brothers. Showed his character was not littering/and or saving it to reload.

Why he went hunting in that sun without any drinking water is another matter.

Yeah! What kind of idiot goes ANYwhere in the desert without water?