How the West will be re-won

I've been on a bit of a bender lately, watching Westerns.  Now I'm no movie buff (like this guy or my buddy who got me turned on to them - thanks Asha) so I can't entirely speak as to why these kind of pictures don't get made as frequently as in their golden era, and to be fair I haven't seen anything with John Wayne in it yet.  I do think though that as you go through chronologically, I can figure out what happened and why the Western genre has lost some of it's edge.  And why I think it'll never be like in the days of my dear ole dad, why I think the Western is making a comeback.

Here's what I've seen so far of the old westerns (in order of seeing them):

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Outlaw Josey Walles
A Fistful of Dollars
For A Few Dollars More
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Then you throw in what I guess we can call "90's Westerns:"

Tombstone
Maverick
The Quick and The Dead

And then what I'm going to call the Millennium revival:

No Country for Old Men
3:10 to Yuma (remake - I know, I need to see the original)
There Will Be Blood

Now I'll start off by saying that I've enjoyed every one of these movies, though certainly some more than others.  "The Man With No Name" trilogy is just incredibly well done - I never really understood why everyone thinks Clint Eastwood is such a badass until now, and I think he actually does an even better job in Josey Walles as far as having a much more compelling character and developed story beyond being just a drifter bounty hunter (and I can't even get started on how much it made me think of Cowboy Bebop - nerd cred).  And Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is also very well done as any Redford/Newman collaboration is, made slightly later that some of the other movies on the list and reflecting the cinematic ground covered by them.

But the 80s and 90s were a different time, where the moral ambiguity and fine line tread by characters in older westerns gets wiped away and replaced with clear-cut, lighter, drier characters.  The Quick and The Dead, while I find it to be a very well shot and scored movie, has a plot and characters that are blatantly stereotypical.  Maverick with Mel Gibson is amusing, but so much lighter than earlier films that its more of a comedy in the Old West than anything else.  Tombstone, the only of the three that really makes an attempt at jumping into the vein of its predecessors, but seems so commercially stock that it never reaches its potential.

I think the western is making a comeback though, though in a very different incarnation than the classic westerns of yesteryear.  Granted, Bale and Crowe's 3:10 to Yuma is a remake, but it is incredibly well done and the characters are not the one-dimensional cutouts that we've seen in westerns the past few decades.  Look at Daniel Day Lewis and his performance in There Will Be Blood - not a traditional shootout western but evolved to show the politics, the grittiness of the old west and characters with very conflicted moralities.

And then there is No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers epic.  This is what I think defines the new future of westerns - not necessarily set in the old west but a modern representation of what made those old westerns so great: complete drama, good guys doing not so good things, bad guys being boldly bad, suspense, and really not knowing how good was going to overcome the bad in the end (if at all).  While the western genre will never be as prominent as it once was, I would much rather see infrequent, high quality dramatic westerns come out of Hollywood than what has been passed of for it over the last quarter century.

The Coen's have another western coming out soon, a remake of John Wayne's True Grit with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin, and the trailer for it looks great.  I know - I'm a hypocrite because I rant about Hollywood only remaking movies and not having any original ideas anymore, but tough.  Here's to hoping the Western can be re-won: