BEFORE: Back with another film in my "teens in trouble" series. It looks like this one's going to fit in with this week's theme rather well...
Fred Hechinger carries over again from "Eighth Grade". In the last two films, he managed to play the most annoying character - and in "Eighth Grade" there were SO MANY of those. So let's see where he's cast today...
THE PLOT: A Civil War veteran agrees to deliver a girl taken by the Kiowa people years ago to her aunt and uncle against her will. They travel hundreds of miles and face grave dangers as they search for a place that either can call home.
AFTER: I've been trying to get to this one for a while now - I keep thinking of this one as "that new Tom Hanks film I've been trying to watch", but it's not new at all any more, is it? It's three years old, and most everyone seems to have forgotten about it. Hanks has been in like FIVE films since then, including "Elvis" and "A Man Called Otto" and now I guess those films are going to become "that new Tom Hanks film I've been trying to watch". I guess this happens because they tend to put only ONE mega-star in a movie, and then the rest of the film gets filled with scrubs who won't outshine the lead - so that just makes my linking task that much more difficult, doesn't it? I really wish I could link to "Elvis" after this one, but then I won't make it to my Memorial Day film on time, believe me, I tried to make that work and it just won't.
So I put this one on a DVD with "Hostiles" a few weeks ago, and if people have mostly forgotten about "News of the World" from 2020, you'd better believe they've really forgotten about "Hostiles" from 2017. The world of movies is kind of divided into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic releases, and I can confirm that DURING the pandemic, it was a lot easier to get a film made eligible for an Oscar - I did it for an animated short, and there were all kinds of exceptions to the rules. You could, for example, screen a film in a movie theater for a week in one of SIX cities, where previously you only had one option, Los Angeles. And then since a lot of movie theaters were closed, instead of a letter from a movie theater manager saying that the theater DID screen your film for a week, the letter only had to say that they WOULD HAVE screened it for a week, had the theater been open, which it wasn't. Well, damn, that's easy, you only had to know somebody who runs a theater and can sign a basic letter! This must be how "News of the World" got nominated for four Oscars...
Notably, though, it did NOT get nominated for Best Picture, and I now agree, that was the right call. This film is WAY too boring - sure, "Dances With Wolves" and "Unforgiven" were sweeping Westerns, but a lot HAPPENED in those movies. This is just Tom Hanks crossing Texas with a young girl in tow, and...that's it. All the thrills and excitement of a long car trip, just transposed back to a covered wagon in 1870 or so. Are we there yet? Are we anywhere? Sure, there's a sandstorm, there's the threat of Native Americans (that never turns into a threat) and the threat of terrible white men who want to buy the girl. There's also an encounter in Erath County, which apparently is located in the racist part of Texas (formerly known as "Texas") and it's run by a man who has expelled all the non-white residents removed (one way or another) and doesn't much care for the news stories that Captain Kidd reads to his residents. This man is probably a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, I'm guessing.
Yes, the main character here is a former newspaper printer who travels from town to town and now reads the newspapers in front of crowds. I guess maybe there were a lot of people in Texas back then who were illiterate (there probably still are) and they needed somebody to read and explain the events of the day (or more likely, two weeks ago) from New York and London and other places. You can kind of see how this job (assuming it existed) kind of evolved into the modern day news anchor, which we have in every major city in America, reading the same national news though - keeps a lot of people employed, but how efficient is that? A few years down the road, a news-reader would probably travel in a covered wagon with a weather woman and a sports guy would follow behind on horseback. This would only last for a short time until the telegraph got invented, though.
Here's the problem, though - I kept falling asleep during this film! It just didn't hold my attention, and I kept dropping off at the same spot, waking up 10 minutes later, rewinding back to that spot, trying again, falling asleep again... Now, maybe part of the problem was that I had put the film on DVD, and that meant that the subtitles didn't work, and with my bad ear I've become more dependent on the subtitles - so without them, it's harder for me to follow along. And yeah, I've been working long shifts all week, so my body is definitely tired, that could have been part of the problem also. But usually when this happens at least part of the blame has to be placed on the movie. Not much happening in a film over a long-ass period of time is a killer, and naturally my attention is going to drift.
Like the main character here, I have driven across Texas - twice, in fact, on BBQ Crawls in 2017 and 2018. The first time, we started in Dallas and after three days drove off to Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville, but the second time we started in Dallas and then went south to Austin, San Antonio, then over to Houston and ended up in New Orleans. Yeah, Texas is big, and there's still a lot of big, empty space there. But my wife and I had a clear advantage over the travelers in the 1800's, and it's a glorious thing called truck stops. The big chains down there were Love's and Buc-ee's, and I think we preferred the latter, but on those big drives, either one will do. There was one Buc-ee's outside Houston that was a godsend, it seemed to go on for miles inside, and outside you could get your propane tanks refilled and there was a welcoming display of bacon grease for sale - because Texas. Inside there was also a wall of beef jerky, tons of candy, t-shirts, hats, decorative items for the home, and fresh BBQ sandwiches. The BBQ portion of the crawl was carefully curated, I took care in choosing which restaurant we would patronize in each city, but I wasn't above grabbing a brisket sandwich at a rest stop, I must admit.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Helena Zengel, Ray McKinnon (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Mare Winningham (last seen in "Geostorm"), Elizabeth Marvel (last seen in "Swallow"), Michael Angelo Covino, Gabriel Ebert (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Clint Obenchain (last seen in "The Kid"), Thomas Francis Murphy (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Neil Sandilands, Winsome Brown, Bill Camp (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Chukwudi Iwuji (last seen in "Barry"), Christopher Hagen (last seen in "Hostlies"), Tom Astor, Andy Kastelic, Brenden Wedner, Bob Knowlton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 skinned buffaloes
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