Tombstone 1993 Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott
The OK Corral story has been told in so many movies. Going back to 1946 with My Darling Clementine. It starred Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp. Heck, even Star Trek did a OK Corral episode.
I wasn’t particularly interested in watching Tombstone or Wyatt Earp wih Kevin Costner.
I watched Tombstone for the first time tonight at a friend’s home. I was very surprised. Excellent movie.
I think they embellished the story and made stuff up. But, I don’t care. Tombstone is very entertaining.
Can I say it’s the best modern Western made in the past 30 years?
That doesn’t include the 1970’s era of tv Miniseries Westerns. They’re in a totally different class.
I saw Left-Handed Girl a few nights ago and really liked it. It’s about a woman and her two daughters, one twenty years old and the other five. The older daughter acts like a sullen, rebellious teenager, and the younger is not quite so innocent as she seems. The movie starts with the three of them moving to Taipei to work in that city’s famous night market. The mother has financial problems because she’s covering the medical expenses of her ex-husband, who’s on his deathbed. Their other relatives also live in Taipei, and as the movie goes on the relationships between them grow more tense.
Left-Handed Girl was directed by Shih-Ching Tsou, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sean Baker (director of Anora). You can feel Baker’s influence. It feels a lot like one of his movies set in another culture.
The whole movie was shot on an iPhone. It’s amazing how much that technology has progressed.
I remember some good ones in recent times, though often very bleak: The Homesman (2014), Hostiles (2017), News of the World (2020), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Dead for a Dollar (2022) and at least a few I can remember rough plots of but can’t locate on google.
Apparently this movie ended up being mostly directed by Kurt Russel and the cast itself after the original director was replaced. You can find some discussion about it here:
Thanks for the suggestions, I LOVED 3:10 to Yuma so I’ll have to check out the others. Two other “modern” westerns that I love: Unforgiven and True Grit
The TV series “Godless” on Netflix is a masterpiece of a modern western, but brutally bleak, and has one of the best end episodes of a series I’ve seen. I’d add that to your list if you have not seen it.
I get a kick out of reading the imdb reviews. For Tombstone the reviews are “this movie sucks. For an accurate representation and great movie, see Wyatt Earp” And on the page for Wyatt Earp, the reviewers are “this movie sucks, For an accurate representation and great movie, see Tombstone.”
It’s like reading Amazon product reviews.
(Disclosure: I have not yet seen Wyatt Earp. Nor My Darling Clementine, Hour of the Gun or Gunfight At The OK Corral. But I own them. And I have seen Spectre of the Gun. )
eta: Will someone please explain, in small easy to understand words, what “I’ll be your huckleberry” means? KTHX
There is a vocal contingent who insist the line was “I’m your huckle bearer”, or that “huckleberry” came from this phrase. A huckle was supposedly the handle on a coffin, so a huckle bearer would be a pallbearer; i.e., I’m a gonna kill you. This is BS. There are no records that people in the 1800s ever used the term to mean pallbearer.
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