The MoFo Movie Club Discussion - April

Jesse James we understand
Has killed many a man
He robbed the union trains
He stole from the rich
And gave to the poor
He had a hand and a heart
And a brain

Now Jesse had a wife
Lived a lady all her life
And children they were brave
But history does record
That Bob and Charlie Ford
Have laid poor Jesse in his grave

Well it was on Saturday night
The stars were shining bright
They robbed the Glendale train
And the people they did say
For many miles away
It was those outlays
Frank and Jesse James

Now Jesse had a wife
Lived a lady all her life
And children they were brave
But history does record
That bob and Charlie Ford
Have laid poor Jesse in his grave

Well it was Bob and Charlie Ford
Those dirty little cowards
I wonder how they feel
For they ate of Jesse's bread
And they slept in Jesse's bed
And they laid poor Jesse in his grave

Now Jesse had a wife
Lived a lady all her life
And children they were brave
But history does record
That Bob and Charlie Ford
Have laid poor Jesse in his grave

Well the people held their breath
When they heard of Jesse's death
They wondered how he came to fall
Well it was Robert Ford in fact
Who shot him in the back
While he hung a picture on the wall

Trad.

A song that I've known for over 20 years (since it appeared on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash) and the one sung by Nick Cave in the bar near the end of the film.

As mythical as the Dime Store novels, no doubt...

I think that the movie has a similar elegiac tone to Unforgiven but that's, for me, where things stop in their tracks. ...Jesse James... just can't hope to compare with one of the best Westerns of any era. Not to say that it's a bad film, I liked it well enough after all.

The telling thing might be this - The DVD has been sitting on my shelf for a week now (I bought it) and I've not come close to watching it again...

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Yeah, you know I listened to that song and when I heard the "he steals from the Rich and gives to the poor line, I just thought to myself. "Self. What an atypical lyric for a song about an American Outlaw".

And I'm with you on the last thing too, it may be years before I watch this again.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

Heh! I appreciate your 'splaining; that makes a lot of sense, now.

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Review: Cabin in the Woods 8/10

I had the feeling that James knew what time it was. His increasing paranoia would have killed him before long, had not Ford pulled the trigger and I think James was feeling the strain of that to the point of exhaustion. Sooner or not much later, he was going to catch one and at the point where it happened, I think he'd made peace with that and just wanted it over. That was my sense of it, anyway.

Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford


Unfortunately time and patience is not going to allow me to watch this movie a second time.

I've read some of the prior postings and agree with some people that the movie was difficult to follow, but that didn't really irritate me. At all times I knew what the overall tone was supposed to be which I think was most important. Feelings and relationships were negotiated under the table until the final show-down with Jesse fixing the picture.

Another thing I liked were the various bits of narration from a present point of view. For me it helped to support the idea that these were real people with real baggage and real pasts. When the characters did something or acted a certain way without a back story I was fine with it, because I knew that in reality they had a past which would support their actions.

The cinematography was excellent. Like mark f said, the scene with the night time train robbery was beautiful and unique.

I'd recommend it as a tone piece with lots of atmosphere.

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Who else, besides Holden and me, has seen Henry King's Jesse James (1939) and Fritz Lang's The Return of Frank James (1940)? Those films are pure hokum, but they seem to contain as much insight into westerns and their character's mythos as this film, plus they are actually fun. Tyrone Power plays Jesse and Henry Fonda plays Frank. Thirty-two-year-old John Carradine plays Bob Ford as a snake in the grass.



I would never suggest this new film as a way to introduce anyone into the western genre because it barely even seems like a western to me. I mean, I accept that it's a western and a worthy attempt to try something different, but it just doesn't feel like a western. For a modern, psychological approach to the western genre, I believe that Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks blows this film away.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Do I win a prize if I say 'yes'?

Thanks Cinderella, for answering my little questionnaire.

Sooo, I saw this in theaters months ago, and thus I'm going to go off of memory with my comments here, mainly because I don't have 7 and 1/2 hours to dedicate to watching it again. I kid, I kid...I kid because it's true.

Anyway, like many of you this one's a bit of a split decision for me. On one hand, the film is often gorgeous to look at. On the other, it is quite slow-moving, and I don't always feel there's a particularly good reason for that fact. To be sure, this was never going to be a 90-minute breeze, but sometimes the lingering shots feel a bit like padding.

Brad Pitt's good as James, though I didn't feel he was required to do too much. Obviously the entire movie rests on Casey Affleck, who I was very impressed by. He goes a little over the top once or twice, I thought, but for the most part I found him completely believable as the needy, confused, but randomly aggressive Robert Ford. His voice and mannerisms seem to lend themselves to this sort of role, and he exploits the living daylights out of that fact. Of course, we know from Gone Baby Gone that he can play more confident characters, as well, but the role of Ford plays more to his natural strengths, I think.

Whatever analysis I offer on the story is going to be marred by the fact that I saw it months ago, but I think the fact that I'm struggling to remember parts of it acts as an analysis in and of itself. There are twists and turns, but none of it feels fully-formed or completely coherent. We all know the ending going on, and in my case that seemed to detract from some of the happenings leading up to it. Only when the "event" seemed imminent did I feel myself perking up and taking notice.

All in all, I was fairly disappointed by this film. Not just because it could have been great, but because, for a moment, I thought it would be. The moment I'm referring to is during the robbery early in the film, when James steps onto the track as the train barrels towards him.



The shot (not quite accurately captured in the image above...but nearly so) is so gorgeous and breathtaking that it gave me hope that the movie might turn out to be something really special. And while the cinematography was lovely throughout, that was its peak, and I felt the film's technical aspects regularly outpaced its story and structure.

So, put me down for a , maybe a . I would really, really love to see a director's cut of this film at some point. It has to be long, because the entire point of the film is showing Ford's development from admiration to obsession, and you can't do that in an hour and a half...but it's longer than it needs to be, and I feel it gets bogged down in entire sequences apart from what the film is ultimately building towards.

I'd like to hear a director's commentary on the movie, actually. Dominik's was great in Chopper and I was expecting one when I bought the ...Jesse James... DVD.

It's a vanilla.

But it was cheap...

mark. I just wanted to say that there are genres that I'm partial to, so I think I know how you feel about not holding it up as a standard of westerns, but that said, I wouldn't knock a weird chinese movie with martial arts but that doesn't "feel like a kung-fooey flick", or at least I wouldn't judge an individual flick as being poor because it's not a good introduction to the genre. You had some other insightful complaints about The Ass of JJ up thread, but I am just not understanding that last post or what/who exactly you were responding to, so I'm a little perplexed.

Also, I would never watch a movie, or take a recomendation to watch a movie based on how much it "feels like a western". But I'm impartial when it comes to westerns.

I saw One Eyed Jacks and wouldn't say it kicked The Ass. of JJ's ass (of JJ), but I was a pimply yob of 17 when I saw it, so maybe you have something there.

Oh, oh! And.

Since a lot of people posted about Brad Pitt as Jesse James, I thought he was excellent, and completely disagree with people who thought his character wasn't just as important as Bob Ford in this movie. In the voice over narration, I think there were as many words spent on J.J. as on Ford, for instance.

I thought that he (Pitt) came across as equal parts philosophical/resigned to fate, sardonically self-aware and frustrated by his own larger than life persona. He was kind of hard to guage some times with the unpredictable violence. It seemed like the movie made a lot out of his attempts to go over the edge before being pulled back by associates, though I can only think of two scenes. I'm wondering if he would really have killed Ed Miller if there had been a third person present, because while he could be rough it didn't really take much to calm him down in those scenes depicting his violence.

I'd just like to say that I agree with Yods on two points, Affleck's acting and the cinematic highlight with the train scene. But I really don't understand how anyone (apart from Mark maybe but his ratings are a little weird) could give this film a 2/5...that's a bad film people, one step away from "so bad it's hilarious" category.

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I think we just rate films differently, then. Since it's a 0-5 scale, I think of 2.5 as average, and thus 2 out of 5 is just a bit below average, which is a pretty good description of how I felt about tAoJJbtCRF. I'll admit, however, that my rating took my own expectations into account a little. And it might have lost half a popcorn because I felt some of its problems were especially avoidable.

Ah, I always thought it was a 1-5 scale which would make 3 the average. Fair enough...

In a somewhat vague way I think of it like this:
.5-1 = F
1.5-2 = D
2.5-3 = C
3.5-4 = B
4.5-5 = A

So 2 is still a passing grade, just not a good one.

Maybe this doesn't make sense, but then I never thought the 100 point system that most of my professors used made much sense either (a larger gradient for the failing grades [0-59%] than for passing [60-100%]). Quantification of movies is always gonna be somewhat arbitrary, but in terms of how much thought I'm gonna put into grading, I want more gradient for the movies I like (and would therefor be spending time thinking about). Or, if it's a waste of time, are you really going to want to have those extra points to think about just how much of a waste it really is?

My last post was just trying to compare this version of Jesse James with two other existing versions. My personal opinion is that this version attempts to be art, while the earlier versions were made mostly for entertainment. I then made a personal observation about how I compare this film to another one and went off into my own little world implying that I believe our current movie is more of an arthouse entry than an attempt to expand the western genre. I don't really like to explain what I mean after I say it, but I'm not actually debating anybody else's points, just reinforcing some of my earlier ones.

I grew up with a 1-4 scale, so when there are two extra ratings above 4 and two extra ratings below 1, I tend to use those ratings to differentiate levels of "greatness" and "crappiness". I rarely give anything higher than four or lower than one, so that means that I find something "special" about those films. If I give a film 4/5, that's a very strong recommendation from me, a definite suggestion to see a film at the cinema. If I give a film a three, that's also a recommendation, but one more closely aligned to "watch it at home". A two is a mediocre film to me, so a 2.5 would fall into the zone where it's on the fence whether I recommend the film.

I personally use a 1-10 scale, with increments of .5, so that makes all the ratings fit comfortably into an appropriate "letter grade", but here I sometimes have to combine up some "grades" to fit in the number. As far as translating to the grades used here:

5/5 = A+
4.5/5 = A
4/5 = high B+/A-
3.5/5 = B/low B+
3/5 = B-
2.5/5 = C/C+
2/5 = C-
1.5/5 = D/D+
1/5 = D-/"high F"
.5/5 = no doubt about it being an F
0/5 = this film doesn't deserve a rating or a grade

Okay, well I thought this movie was awesome. Sort of a throwback to the revisionist westerns of the 70's, (which I'm not all that big a fan of) it's definitely got its own tone and flavor going for it. Neat way for Dominik to expand on the themes he already addressed in Chopper about the myths we create in our minds about our heroes and legends, the fickleness of fame and whatnot and the strain of celebrity. Oh, and I thought Pitt was amazing, but I'll get back to him in a sec.

What I love most about the film is what a lot of people have said they hate about it. It is long and maybe at times it gets distracted by its b-stories and ancillary characters, but those are the things that just make me like the film even more. Watching it feels like you're reading this really epic, all-encompassing novel. It's immersive and engrossing and just endlessly fascinating. And yeah, that train sequence sure is purty to look at, but so is the rest of the film. Very Malick-esque in its obsession with the natural world and it definitely rivals Malick's films in sheer beauty. I had the opportunity to catch this on the big screen and I'm glad I did. It's a gorgeous movie.

The film is at its absolute best for that thirty or forty minute stretch when the Fords are travelling and living with Jesse. Those scenes are perfect. Unlike a couple of you folks, everything felt a little hollow for me after the titular assassination. And I think that speaks volumes, in my eyes at least, for Pitt's performance and his characterization of Jesse James. I don't think Robert Ford is the heart and soul of the film. I don't think Robert Ford had a heart or soul (though Casey Affleck was very good). Pitt's Jesse James is such a forceful character who commands the screen every scene he's in. For all his flaws, Jesse James is still able to orchestrate every single thing that happens in this movie. He's always in full control, all the way to the end. And a lot of that is Pitt's performance. He makes Jesse into such a fascinating and interesting character. What makes the man tick? How does he really feel about his fame and legacy? And (this is THE question of the picture for me) why on earth does Jesse James allow Robert Ford to hang around with him for all that time? Is it really just because he enjoys having his ego stroked? I don't think so, there's a ton of other junk going on there.

So yeah, I thought this movie was the cat's pajamas. Top notch stuff.

I, too, liked the narration because it filled in a lot of historical facts that most people don't know today. Most younger viewers aren't even aware of the James myth much less the facts of his life, so the narration filled in the necessary background of what is known about Jesse James and the people around him. Although it's the most realistic of the dozens of Jesse James films I've seen over the years,
I agree it's still a rather average oater.

As for focusing on Jesse James rather than Robert Ford, that's the essence of assassination: Such killers are remembered only as a footnote in the lives of the famous people that they killed. Had it not been for shooting Jesse in the back, Robert Ford wouldn't be remembered at all today, just like Boothe killing Lincoln, Sirhan shooting Bob Kennedy, or the fruitcake who wounded Reagan in hopes of impressing Jodie Foster. Ford was a nobody until he killed Jesse, and then had his "15 minutes of fame" and would have long ago been forgotten if not for the traditional folk song about "The dirty little coward / Who shot Mr. Howard / And laid poor Jesse in his grave."

Since it's a folk song, there are many variations in the lyrics of The Ballad of Jesse James. The chorus that we sang back when I was a boy, said:

"Now Jesse had a wife / Who mourned for his life / His children, they were brave / But the dirty little coward / Who shot Mr. Howard / Has laid poor Jesse in his grave."

Mr. Howard, of course, was supposed to be the false name under which Jesse was living at the time of his death.

The 1939 film with Tyrone Power as Jesse and Henry Fonda as Frank James is the least historically correct and most fun of all the films about Jesse James.