Living Dangerously: Best Western I've Seen In Years

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Friday, June 9, 2017

Best Western I've Seen In Years - In A Valley of Violence

So, In A Valley of Violence was on one of my pay-per-view channels and I DVRd it. We watched it last Sunday and I was so impressed, I immediately went out and bought the Blu-Ray.

The director didn't set out to do anything special or different with the plot. It's a stock plot we've seen many times. Drifter comes into town, runs afoul of the local marshal, gets in trouble, then comes back to get his revenge. High Plains Drifter, right? Two things make this movie different. The first is the is the dialog. Instead of stock characters doing stock thing while a squint-eyed stranger spouts one liners, these characters were self aware. And when I say self aware I mean it in a Shakespeare-type self aware where they have asides or monologues, talking about the violence and how it affects them. The movie starts with a slow burn that eventually gets to an ending that is as violent as any western you've ever seen. The second thing that makes this movie different is the dog.

"I also really love the absurdist nature of many great spaghetti westerns, and while I think In a Valley of Violence has plenty of those fun elements, it also tells a story about how violence affects different people in different ways. It is a movie much more about characters than it is plot. It takes a group of archetypes and sorta flips them upside down and forces the characters to confront things not usually seen in westerns." - Director, Ti West (from a Filmmaker Magazine interview)

Also, the opening and closing credits were a total homage to 1970 Spaghetti Westerns with their garish colors and blocky lettering. I just loved it. I recommend you give this a try. I might like it more than you, but this isn't your average Western.

What it's like working with a dog: “Jack Lemmon, who I worked with when I was younger [in 1989's "Dad"], said it was like working with Marilyn Monroe,” Hawke continued. “They were always going to use the take that Marilyn was good in, never the take that you were, so you had to be good all the time. So that’s what it’s like working with a dog.” - Ethan Hawke (from an LA Times interview)