Any of you guys big readers? I read this book called Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy recently. It was amazing. Horribly violent though. It's sorta like, the Apocalypse Now of the Western genre. It doesn't romanticise it like the old John Wayne movies etc.
It would be a difficult book to adapt, because it is just so dense and violent. But if done right, it could be amazing.
Any of you guys read it?
A movie adaptation is still very much in development, and I see no reason it shouldn't/wouldn't get made, considering that Hollywood has gotten their hands on pretty much everything Cormac has ever written.
I don't get how people go ape **** for ninjas and samurai but not for westerns
It's largely political.
And a backlash against both what the western stands for (or is purported to stand for), and against oversaturation in the 40s-60s.
Those decades mark the "golden age" of Westerns, but those films and TV shows have to be viewed through a filter that allows you to recognize that attitudes toward the genre back then were quaint and outdated (at best), and downright backward and racist (at worst).
Revisionist westerns, from the late 60s onward, have tried to address or downplay now unpopular notions about Indians as "savages;" about Mexicans as ogrish bandidos; about the "conquest" of nature; the "civilization" of societies that were already civilized; the romanticization of vigilante "justice" and the gun as "peacemaker"; among other themes.
After the "golden age" of Western movies & TV died in the late 60s, the genre was considered old-fashioned, unhip, and very right-wingy; all of which meant very unpopular in Hollywood.
Even today, Westerns are still trying to shake that John Wayne image, while at the same time trying to reconcile with it.
I have no doubt that the genre still has life left in it, and could be commercially viable again, if Hollywood would grow some balls and give the genre a shot and some fresh approaches, and realize that Westerns don't have to begin and end with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
I'm hoping that the immense popularity of Red Dead Redemption as a video game might be a good indicator that there's still an audience out there just waiting for the genre to be reborn.
)
t: What can I say, I love Westerns.
