All the Pretty Horses: (2000. dir: Billy Bob Thornton) The rule is: you don't make great movies out of great books. The art forms are weirdly incompatible, refusing to transition smoothly except in the hands of a genius. You make great movies out of schlock potboilers: M*A*S*H, Jaws, the Godfather, the Exorcist. The reasons for it are probably more complicated than I'm allowing, but my best guess is that it's because schlock potboilers are heavy on story and sensation and devoid of all things more delicately ineffable and high-falutin', whereas great books are usually great not primarily because of story but because they're beautifully written. And All the Pretty Horses is one of those.
That said, I read the book so long ago and so quickly (the only thing I remember clearly is "Scared money can't win, and a worried man can't love") that watching the movie was almost like going in fresh. I recall a Matt Damon interview talking about meeting Paul Newman when he was just cast as John Grady Cole; Newman looked at him intently and said, "That's a big responsibility, you know," or something daunting like that. No pressure, right? As it is, both Damon and Henry Thomas as Lacey comport themselves very well, as does a young Lucas Black as the star-crossed outlaw boy Blevins.
Thornton brings a whimsical sensibility and a relaxed timing to the piece, both of which are necessary to conjure up some of the book's magic. There's a moment late on when Cole is making a desperate, last-ditch phone call to the woman he loves, a woman he may easily never see again, and when she relents, the cowpoke waiting in line to use the phone grins a silly grin and does a little jig, bringing to mind the dancing soul in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, or possibly something out of David Lynch's playbook.
Alas, the story is shaped wrong for a movie. It trails off toward the end, although its meanderings are certainly engaging, and convincing love stories, tragic or not, are hard as hell to communicate on film. What we get are the trappings, without the numinosity, without the awkward radiance.
Robert Patrick plays Cole's dad in a single scene (everyone wanted to be in this: Sam Shepard and Bruce Dern also have single scene roles, lending an air of gravitas to this 20th-century, fading, "Old" West), and, between the makeup and the mastery of the actor, this is one of those wasting, etiolated characters who, when he pulls on the cigarette, looks alarmingly like the cigarette is pulling on him.
Balls of Fury: (2007. dir: Robert Ben Garant) Irreverent, madcap zany-fest about a washed-up ping pong prodigy hired by the FBI to infiltrate the inner circle of a criminal mastermind (Christopher Walken, donning the Yellow Peril drag).
Robert Patrick's character is dead within the first five minutes. Did I watch the rest of the movie? are you crazy, asking me a thing like that? I fast-forwarded to Christopher Walken, pausing for anything else I thought might be vaguely entertaining, and was generally disappointed in the hope.
We Are Marshall: (2006. dir: McG) This is Sentimental Hogwash, no question, unabashedly so, but well-meaning, and remarkably well-handled hogwash. In a nutshell: a West Virginia college's entire football team dies in a plane wreck, and both school and town have to find a way to recover from the devastating blow. A bumbling but good-hearted school president, an enthusiastic new coach, and a player who stayed behind due to injury join forces to create a miracle.
The editing is dynamic enough, the music well enough chosen, and the acting good enough that this is better than most entries into the Sentimental Hogwash genre. Also, there's more actual "sportsing" in it than in most "sports films", always a great frustration to me in my search for the perfect football movie (football in the true sense of the word). This one is about American Tackleball, and it doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the game, but the footage itself is well filmed and edited.
It's also filmed using the Teal-and-Orange palette, but it's a boldly warm version which evokes memories of Super 8, which in turn evokes the '70s.
Robert Patrick plays the tough old coach, and, again, is dead by five minutes in.
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