Hollywood Should Bring Back the Western!

Hola Cowboys and Cowgirls! You know what we need more of? Westerns! Hell yeah! Hollywood needs to start making good westerns again. I think Westerns is what’s missing from the movies the studios put out each summer.

Yeah, I know they still make some every once in a while. Maybe one or two a year, but that’s not enough and the ones they make aren’t that good. When was the last great Western? Silverado back in 1985? Really? It’s been that long? Yeah, Unforgiven was made in ’92, but I didn’t really like it that much.  I haven’t seen Django Unchained, but that’s not what I would really call a Western.

Oh yeah, they did remake True Grit in 2010. I almost forgot about that. It was definitely better than the John Wayne version from back in the day. The Coen Brothers proved that really good westerns can still be made today. Jeff Bridges was better than John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon was WAYYYYYY better than Mac Davis as Le Bouf and Hailee Steinfeld was considerably better than Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In fact, Kim Darby annoyed the shit outta me in the original.

I was watching Big Jake the other night when I started thinking about the need for more Westerns. Big Jake is my all-time favorite John Wayne movie. I never cared for his war movies, but his Westerns were cool. In fact, let’s rank them …

1. Big Jake
2. Rio Bravo
3. The Shootist
4. Chism
5. El Dorado
6. McClintock
7. Hondo
8. Rooster Cogburn
9. The Undefeated
10. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Of course, as good as those John Wayne movies were, lots of other actors made great and even better Westerns. Jimmy Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, Bert Lancaster, Glen Ford, Alan Ladd and the list goes on and on and on. In fact, let’s list the 10 Best Westerns of all Time, shall we?

1. Big Jake
2. True Grit (2010)
3. The Magnificent Seven
4. The Outlaw Josey Wales
5. Silverado
6. High Noon
7. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
8. Rio Bravo
9. The Shootist
10. Brokeback Mountain

Anyway, the reason they don’t make Westerns anymore is because they can’t blow shit up and cowboys aren’t super heroes and all that crap. All the big studios want to do is fancy special effects and CGI. They don’t tell stories anymore.  Stories about a cowboy out on the range, rounding up the doggies, working hard from dawn to dusk and fighting for truth, justice and the American way!

You can’t use fancy automatic weapons in Westerns either. No Glock .40’s with eleven shot clips or Bushmaster AR-15’s or any of that stuff. Cowboys carried six-shooters and had to be fast and accurate. These guys today just open fire willy-nilly, blasting away hoping to hit someone. That doesn’t take any skill!

HBO made Deadwood with Timothy Olyphant and that was a good show. Olyphant is tall and lean and makes for a good cowboy. Also, I guess you could make the case that Justified which also stars a cowboy hat wearing Olyphant as a US Marshall is a kind of a modern western. I love that show. So obviously Hollywood is still capable of making a good western, they just don’t. And that’s sad.

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