Westerns With Dad

After watching new and/or weird versions of the Western, this week we’re returning to what can only be described as a classic, Howard Hawks and John Wayne’s most popular team-up, Rio Bravo. Featuring Dean Martin as a drunk, this beloved genre favorite has been remade both loosely and explicitly near half a dozen times, and … Continue reading RIO BRAVO!

The attempt to focus on Halloween/Horror based Westerns in October continues with the cult classic Ravenous! A cannibal horror yarn, talking place in the wilds of Northern California during the Mexican American War, this 1999 feature balances a lot of craziness within its runtime. From the impressive ensemble cast to the strange, discordant musical score … Continue reading RAVENOUS!

Because there’s an exciting new HBO television series based on it, we decided it was time to take an in depth look at the Michael Crichton SciFi classic, Westworld! Featuring Yul Brynner, playing off his Magnificent Seven performance, this dry run for Jurassic Park features a Western-themed amusement park of the future, where guests can … Continue reading WESTWORLD!

Brand new, in theaters right now, we’re doing the big Western release of 2016, Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven! The is remake brings the podcast to the movie theaters, and even flirts with relevance for a moment, as we discuss in detail something one rarely gets to look at when discussing Westerns, a … Continue reading THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 2016!

This episode focuses on a film (barely) released earlier this year, Gavin O’Connor’s Jane Got a Gun. Imagined as a star vehicle for Natalie Portman, this attempt at a Western from a feminine perspective had a long and tortured route to the big screen, going through various cast changes and a director who abandoned the … Continue reading JANE GOT A GUN!

The essential Mountain Man adventure, Sydney Pollack’s 1972 Jeremiah Johnson, is the subject of this episode. Starring Robert Redford as the titular trapper, this film is an ecstatic rumination on man’s relationship to nature, as represented by some of the most gorgeous nature photography ever seen in a film. Sometimes, wistful, sometimes bleak, and always … Continue reading JEREMIAH JOHNSON!

The first of Sergio Leone’s famous Man With No Name trilogy, featuring the breakout movie star performance that launched Clint Eastwood’s career, A Fistful of Dollars is one of the more revered Westerns out there. Credited with popularizing the Anti-hero and establishing the Spaghetti Western as a cultural force, it’s undoubtedly a famous an important … Continue reading A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS!

Hondo! This is the episode on Hondo! Your basic John Wayne studio western, Hondo adapts a Louis L’Amour novel about a noble drifter coming to the aid of a single mother and her son living on the outskirts of civilization. The plot resembles Shane in some superficial ways, but this film also has a bit … Continue reading HONDO!

After several previous mentions, we finally get to Tombstone, the superlative one, the magnum opus, the towering classic by which all others shall be judged. Perhaps that’s a bit of hyperbole, but by our own standards, it’s hard to come up with a Western that we just purely enjoy more than this 1993 Kurt Russell … Continue reading TOMBSTONE!

For the first time on our podcast about Westerns, we review a movie that just isn’t a Western, Michael Mann’s frontier epic, The Last of the Mohicans. It is, in fact, about half a dozen other genres before it’s a western, and we discuss it at length, as well as why this film about Native … Continue reading THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS!