Tag Archives: Kevin Costner

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July 2, 2024

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Horizon An American Saga Chapter 1 (2024)

I’m a fan of westerns, a genre that doesn’t get much love these days. It’s rare when a Western shows up in a theater, although there seem to be a plethora of them on streaming services. Actor/director Kevin Costner seems to be a fan of westerns also, he made two terrific westerns in the past, one of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I have yet to catch up with the various seasons of Yellowstone, and having seen only the first three episodes of the first season I’m not sure how closely it hones to traditional westerns, but from what I saw it sure felt like a contemporary version of some of those old style films.

“Horizon” attempts to do something that is very ambitious, tell a story about the settling of the West, through multiple characters in simultaneous time settings. It also attempts to do this by making the characters complete and the stories unique. As a result of this attention to detail, there is a vast amount of information and story play out. This means that even a 3-hour movie will be insufficient to provide the canvas that screen writer Kevin Costner and his co-authors have come up with. Thus, this movie is only Chapter one. Chapter 2 is complete and will be coming in August, and Chapter 3 is being filled now. It doesn’t look like the films will be making back the money that was invested in them, so I have some doubt about whether the fourth film in in The Saga will be completed. That is neither here nor there though, today we are talking about the first film.

From my point of view “Horizon” is managing to do something that is terrific, giving us an engaging story with a multiplicity of plot lines that all managed to engage us but in completely different ways. Some of the stories involve a mystery, that will certainly be explained as we go along. Some of the stories are a bit of a quest, mostly with characters seeking vengeance, or defying the inevitable wave of immigrants seeking a home in the West. It also looks like we are going to get some love stories, a little bit of political intrigue, and definitely more gunfights.

This first chapter opens quietly with a few souls trying to survey property that they hope to turn into a homestead. Then later, as a larger group has assembled in this particular spot, there is a massive Indian raid and and dozens of homesteaders are killed, and the animosity between the Apache’s and the new immigrants is set up. Sienna Miller plays a woman whose family is decimated in the attack, and with her preteen daughter, she seeks security and safety with a troop of Calvary men not too far from where the massacre took place. Sam Worthington is the lieutenant who back ends into managing the aftermath of the Indian Massacre, he also looks to be a potential romantic partner for the newly widowed Miller.

It takes more than an hour before Kevin Costner’s character appears on screen, but the roots of the conflict that he’s going to become involved in were set up early in that first hour with the character played by Jenna Malone. It actually becomes quite complicated, because it is uncertain what Malone’s character has done, and why. Let’s just say that a toddler, a lady of the evening, and a saddle tramp are about to be connected in a very unusual way. Meanwhile we are also introduced to a wagon train filled with immigrants headed toward Horizon, which is the name of the future town that they hope to establish. They will be facing cultural disputes, personal antagonisms, along with water shortages and hostile indigenous people.

We are not seeing this story merely from the perspective of the new immigrants however. The Native Americans are having their point of view illustrated on screen as well. There is no unanimity among the natives as to how the indigenous peoples want to confront the newcomers. The oldest chief, seems ready to cave to the inevitable tide of white men coming into his territory. Two of his sons and the band of followers however have a vastly different approach to the influx of a new population.

The film looks spectacular, it was shot in Utah which has some of the most beautiful landscapes in the West. Director Costner is taking full advantage of the diversity of physical settings that are available in these locations. His character Hayes Ellison, is traveling through these vistas, accompanied by a temporary family, and pursued by another family who are out for vengeance. You can see the tension building in all of the stories, but you will not find a complete plot in this movie. It literally is a single chapter in a much larger tome.

It looks like the general critical word on this movie has been negative, but that’s the polar opposite of my view. This is going to be one of the finest films of the year, and it has more ambition, interest, and compelling characters than any of the other films that I’ve been seeing this year. Although the movie is 3 hours long, it flies by because some of the action scenes are so compelling that you don’t realize how much time has gone by. We never stay too long with one story, before another story starts playing out its events, and then we’re on to the next story before you know it. As we come back to each set of characters we have an expectation that something new is going to take place, and it is usually enough to keep us wanting more.

Admittedly director Costner has cribbed substantially from The Works of John Ford, but if you’re going to steal from someone it makes sense to steal from the best. Long live the Western, I can’t wait for chapter 2 in August.

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April 10, 2024

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The Untouchables (1987) Revisit

This movie is as hypnotic as any DePalma film, with the added advantage that it is straightforward and to the point. Maybe it is just good guys versus the bad guys, but when the Good Guys are lead by Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, I don’t know how anyone can turn away. Throw in DeNiro as Al Capone and you have a heavyweight fight that would break pay per view records if it were a boxing match.

Even before the first scene, the movie is pulling you in with a haunting and propulsive theme played over artistically rendered Titles. Ennio Morricone was Oscar Nominated for the score of this film and it should have been his. The background themes are  great at accentuating the heroes in their glory moments, and the action scenes are supplemented with exciting motifs that come up in various sections of the film. There are plenty of opportunities for the music to make an impact on you.

The botched opening raid is a nice way to set our expectations at a different place. Later, when the group of Untouchable Law Enforcement agents swoop down on smugglers at the Canadian border, we are amped up to see the results after the earlier futile effort. The key set piece is the train station shootout with the slow build and all the closeups. DePalma has studied the Serio Leone films meticulously and lets those beats play out at the same agonizing and tension filled pace as we got in the Spaghetti Westerns. Every complication adds to the suspense, every effort to get the accountant and keep him alive makes our anticipation of Andy Garcia as Stone worthwhile. Costner plays it so cool in this scene in comparison to some of the early moments of the film. You can see the character arc in his demeanor here.

Of course Sean Connery is the lynchpin for the film. His world weary folksiness and Chicago cantankerous nature were a perfect realization of the character. The combination of his story and that of Charles Martin Smith gives license to Eliot Ness to get a little dirty, in spite of his white knight image. Charlie Martin Smith and Billy Drago are the unsung heroes of the cast, one showing the exuberance of a puppy dog and the other reflecting the darkest elements of the Capone organization. Maybe Capone doesn’t go flying to his death, but we know that his empire has crumbled because of the turning of his own tactics against him.

Filmed in the 80s, DePalma and Company make Chicago look like fifty years earlier, and the soundstage sets match up so well with the exteriors, you can believe it was all shot in the time and place depicted. This movie is just a lot of fun. Fidelity to the real story is lacking, and the conclusion in the court is a bit baffling, but you won’t care because everything else is so rousing.   

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August 25, 2019

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The Art of Racing in the Rain

If you look at this film from a cinematic perspective, you are unlikely to be impressed. It is well shot but there is nothing innovative here. The story is melodramatic, male weepy material, and the dog narrates. Those would be things that turn off serious film buffs but they are exactly the kinds of things that would sell this movie to a specific audience and make it work. Well, I’m that audience and guess what, on an emotional level it works. Movies where the dog is a featured character have been around forever and they usually are designed for one purpose, to wring as many tears out of a person as possible. Check that off the list, this movie brings the tears for dog lovers everywhere. From the opening scene, we know how the movie is going to end, and that includes not just the metaphorical puddle but a real one as well.

I’ve never seen “This is Us” the television series that features the star of this movie Milo Ventimiglia. He is apparently quite strong in that role since he has been Emmy nominated three years in a row, but this is my introduction to his work and he is fine. I don’t know that there is much he can do with the role because he is basically a human punching bag with a side kick. The character of Denny Swift is an aspiring race car driver, who has opportunities snatched away from him and side roads in his life that turn into bad trips. All of that is tolerable because he has a dog with him to remind himself of the possibilities in life that he talks about regularly.

Amanda Seyfried has reached the stage in life where she has gone from playing the ingenue to playing the young mother. Her romance with Denny is swift and their life together is beautiful, until it is time for more stuff to hit the fan, then she becomes another plot point in the story. Human characters elicit empathy in movies when we are engaged in their lives, so the events that overtake her don’t have the same impact as the third major character in the film. That third character is the one we will have all the emotional connection to. That third character is the dog.

Enzo is the name of the dog. He is played by at least three different golden retrievers, as a pup, a young healthy dog and the older wiser pooch we meet at the beginning of the story and at the end. In the first five minutes, the conclusion is foreshadowed and we get an hour and a half to gird ourselves for the denouement. It’s still not enough time. In addition to being the world’s friendliest looking dog, Enzo has the gravelly and still slightly whiney voice of Kevin Costner. The actor never appears on screen but he is the star of this movie, telling us the story from the perspective of the dog. I hope he got paid well because he earns all the emotional beats for the film’s narratives. Speaking of getting paid, I am looking in the mailbox for our residual check. Look at these pictures.

Our dog may very well have snuck off and filmed this movie while we were not looking. The number of times there was an expression on Enzo’s face that I have seen on our own dog’s face is too numerous to catalog. If you control for lighting, these dogs are the same and even have the same inner voice (dog owners know what I mean).

There is nothing subtle about where this is heading. The manipulative plot devise that involves a custody dispute aside, the dog’s arc is the backbone of the story. Kathy Baker and Martin Donovan have the thankless roles of antagonists in the later part of the story and Gary Cole provides his usual welcome presence in i small part as a mentor of sorts to Denny.  The best acting however is done by the dog and everyone knows that this is his film and let him walk away with the movie on all four paws. Bring your tissues because you will weep if you are a person who loves a dog.art_of_racing_in_the_rain

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January 7, 2017

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Hidden Figures

I am a sucker for movies based on historical events. I don’t mean those that are just inspired by true events, I mean stories about history. All narratives are subjective so I recognize that the emphasis of some stories is going to change from one story teller to another, but the key events , they stay the same. A battle is won, a President is Elected or killed, or a human achievement is accomplished. You don’t have to make those things up. It is one of the reasons that I look forward to “Dunkirk” next summer. It is a key incident in the outcome of WWII, and even though the story may be dramatized, the events are real. “Hidden Figures” is exactly that type of movie.

For kids of my generation, the American Astronauts were the biggest heroes we could imagine. As a child, I never much paid attention to the technicians I’d see on television,  at their stations, monitoring all that could go wrong. I did however come to recognize them from mission to mission. This movie tells the story behind the scenes of the behind the scenes of the early space missions. The fact that it is an empowering women’s film and an important achievement in civil rights is what helps make it so much more interesting and worth telling. A movie about people sitting at desks doing math, sounds almost like the equivalent of watching paint dry. It may be important but it is only going to be of interest to someone who knows the numbers. The people who put those numbers together here are what the story is all about.

Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae are three bright math whizzes, working at doing computations for NASA, and facing two strikes. In 1961, women were largely excluded from the military and science community at NASA and these women happen to be black. They are not however, shrinking violets, they are empowered by their talents and more importantly their mission. Although there is a civil rights story here, it is largely powered by the exigencies of trying to build the math and engineering required for Americans to gain a foothold in the space race. There are a few of the traditional symbols of the movement, MLK speaking on television, violence in the south, and protests about segregation. The two obvious illustrations in this story are not however overtly about a struggle to achieve equal rights but to build an effective team. Henson’s character Katherine, has difficulty doing her job because of the bathroom situation. She is excluded in an overtly racist manner by a coffee pot. When Kevin Costner’s program director confronts these injustices, it is for building meritocracy, not to correct a social injustice. All of the women characters certainly want social justice, but first they want to be allowed to do their jobs and do them to the best of their ability. That is the most ennobling part of the story that I saw.

 

This is a film that could easily be a prism viewpoint of the space race as told in “The Right Stuff“. Many of the events and characters repeat in the time periods covered. Just as the movie focusing on the Mercury astronauts rightly pointed out, this film amplifies why the recently deceased John Glenn was a national hero. As the three women represent the hidden struggles of the space program and America’s self defeating institutional racism, Glenn represents the best in all of us. We want the talented and professionals to do their jobs so everyone else ca. These women showed that there were barriers preventing that from happening, and those barriers shackled our potential. We may not be completely out of the woods on these problems, but thank goodness we don’t have the same attitudes with the same prevalence today.

The film manages to be highly entertaining and accessible to all groups. There may be a few small children who would not enjoy it much but everyone else should be happy to see this. There is humor, tension, and heroic drama throughout the film. The few characters that might be seen as villains of the piece are mostly just trapped in the mindset of the time and need some opportunities to grow, just as the oppressed women did. Americans of all races should be proud of the accomplishments of the space program in the sixties. It should be a unifying experience to take the steps to the stars, and this movie reminds us that it would not have been possible if we did not all move forward together.