Westerns

Thursday

The Spectator

This month in culture: January 2025

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl January 3, Netflix The panic that gripped the McMorris household in November 2023 was rivaled by that of the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. Greater even, for this crisis could not be solved with a credit card and the willingness to fight hand-to-hand against fellow Costco members. Aardman Animations, the last bearable producer of children’s entertainment, was running out of clay. The sole remaining British factory that produced the stuff behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep had shuttered. Only a pitchfork would suffice. The advent of CGI has fried parental eyeballs with neon ever since Toy Story and only Aardman has resisted the trend, delivering us stop-motion Stan and Ollie routines.

culture

Monday

Aaron Gwyn

Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece

In June, Cormac McCarthy — our greatest living writer — slipped from this world to the next and joined his forebears Melville, Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor in the American literary pantheon. By noon the following day, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, his magnum opus, had reached number eight on Amazon’s Top 100 Books, assuring that, for the first time, it would hit the New York Times Paperback Bestseller List; a curious development for a novel that, when it was first published in 1985, failed to sell its initial print run of 1,500 and was quickly remaindered.

blood meridian

Thursday

Suhail A. Khan

Before Yellowstone there was The Big Valley

One of the most popular shows today is the Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, which follows the Dutton family, led by Kevin Costner's John Dutton, who owns and runs one of the largest ranches in the country, the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana. The sprawling cattle ranch, owned by several generations of Duttons, is under constant threat by scheming developers, environmental activists and Native Americans seeking historical justice, not to mention the forces of globalization that threaten to run the family legacy out of business. Writer and director Taylor Sheridan’s hit series has been praised for its breathtaking cinematography, complex characters, gritty realism and modern relevance.

big valley yellowstone

Monday

Nicky Otis Smith

John Wayne behind the blue line

Stars don’t sell movies anymore. They’re even becoming hard to distinguish. Which Chris is in Guardians of the Galaxy and which one plays Captain America? Is Emma Stone in Harry Potter or Cruella? Interchangeable entertainers are nothing new, and I’m sure moviegoers in the 1940s got the Roberts Walker, Taylor, Young and Montgomery mixed up, but those names still sold the movie. Why would anyone pay money to see something called The Clock in 1945 unless it starred Robert Walker and Judy Garland? Could a movie really be that good unless it had Bette Davis or Marlon Brando, Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis or even Adam Sandler?

Wayne

Monday

Alex Perez

Eternal Eastwood

No other actor epitomizes traditional masculinity and classic cool quite like Clint Eastwood. He long ago ceased being human and transformed into the American Man. When you watch an Eastwood movie, your understanding of Clint as the ultimate symbol of a bygone America is so potent that an otherwise mediocre movie like Gran Torino feels greater than the sum of its parts because of his mere presence. This is what an American man is supposed to look and sound like, you think, as Clint snarls and puts up his dukes. These young whippersnappers, they’re no good now, you hear. Which is to say that when you watch one of his films, you’re not watching the actor become a different character, but rather hoping to see ‘Clint Eastwood’.

eastwood