Posts Tagged ‘westerner’

Short Take: Decent fun, but only mildly engaging and not altogether memorable

Director: Jon Favreau

Screenwriters: Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Steve Oedekerk; Scott Mitchell Rosenberg (comic)

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano

Length: 1h 58m

Synopsis: One day in 1873 outlaw Jake Lonergan (Craig) finds himself awaking in a desert, unaware of who he is or where he has just been. A strange device is strapped to his wrist that he can’t remove, but it would seem that it isn’t there to harm him. Stumbling into a nearby town he gets recognized and thrown in jail, sentenced to wait until local boss Dolarhyde (Ford) returns and decides what to do with him. When Dolarhyde does return he is followed shortly by strange UFOs that proceed to abduct and terrorize the townspeople. The next day Jake, Dolarhyde, and a few other survivors form a search party to find the abducted, with Jake leading the way because the device on his wrist turned out to be the only viable weapon against the inscrutable invaders. A woman named Ella (Wilde) tags along to impart knowledge about the aliens, as she has personally dealt with them before. In a toilsome search the group must find and free their lost loved ones, armed only with six-shooters and iron wills. Yippy ki yay.

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The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight: Batman Becomes a Westerner

The character of Batman as presented in director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight represents many of the iconographic elements that comprise what is known as the Westerner. The caped crusader can more accurately be distinguished as being more medieval (that is, consisting of character traits more attuned to medieval literature) in most of his filmic representations, such as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and such a connection does not completely stop with Nolan’s most recent feature as even the film’s title outright labels its hero a “knight.” But despite this, Nolan has introduced the character of Batman to the world of cinema in a new way that displays him more as a western idol reminiscent of the days of John Wayne. American audiences gorged themselves on this newest version of the classic superhero, amassing a domestic box office revenue of over $530 million (second only to Titanic‘s $600 million+), and the reason for this may be found in the social structure of its viewers. Read the rest of this entry »