Jason Bailey: Put Your Weight On It

originally published on Flavorwire - November 14, 2014 The label “revisionist Western” has been thrown around for so long that it’s all but meaningless now. From Peckinpah’s  Wild Bunch  and Altman’s  McCabe and Mrs. Miller  through Eastwood’s  Unforgiven  and Jarmusch’s  Dead Man  to Dominik’s  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  and Reichardt’s  Meek’s Cutoff , the outlier/atypical exception has become the norm, and these days, the truly daring move would be to make a straight-up oater without the frills. That’s not what Tommy Lee Jones does in  The Homesman , but it’s not exactly revisionism either; he’s partaking in a sort of sub-sub-genre, the eccentric Western, and he may be our most accomplished current practitioner of it. It’s not that Jones’ direction is all that peculiar — indeed, there is a sparseness and simplicity to his style that (much like the films of his contemporary and occasional co-star Robert Duvall) matches his acting. He made his feature

  originally published on Flavorwire - May 16, 2015 Today marks the 107th anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles, one of the cinema’s foremost artists — and one of its greatest tragedies, personifying as he does the industry’s predilection for chewing up great filmmakers and spitting them out, leaving them to scrounge for scraps. The tale of Welles’ post- Citizen Kane  career has been told and told (his masterpiece debut all but blackballed by a bitter William Randolph Hearst and an indifferent industry, its follow-up massacred by a nervous studio, his remaining films scraped together on the cheap and treated poorly by studios, distributors and audiences), and these days, there’s nearly as much ink devoted to the films he didn’t make or complete — due to financial troubles, rights issues, and the like — as those he did. But for this fan, the most fascinating of the Welles movies that never happened would’ve been his first feature: an ambitious film adaptation of Conrad’s  Heart of Da