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TRUE GRIT (ehm, EL GRINTA) by the Brothers ETHAN & JOEL COEN from 2010
I'll be very brief (this writing is not meant to be a summary, although someone might claim it is...)!
Ever since I was little (back in the days of black and white TV, you know) I've always loved westerns or cowboy films and TV shows. I remember The Bonanza, The High Chaparral, Ringo, even Rin tin tin, Zorro and The Fort Courage with a pinch of nostalgia and that's it.
I don't want to make comparisons with the great American cinema and our domestic spaghetti westerns, from "Red River" by Howard Hawks to "Little Big Man" by Arthur Penn or from "A Fistful of Dollars" by Sergio Leone to "They Call Me Trinity" by Enzo Barboni.
I had seen in the past "True Grit" directed by Henry Hathaway in 1969 and "Rooster Cogburn" also with the incomparable John Wayne but directed this time by Stuart Millar in 1975, which I can say don't have much in common apart from being loosely based on the novel of the same name by Charles Portis from 1968.
It is said that this latest "True Grit" is much more faithful to the book compared to the two previous ones, and I have no reason not to believe it even if I haven't read it and don't even intend to. Of books on the western theme or epic on the American history of past centuries, I tried only once to read "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper from 1826 but at the time I was seven or eight years old (ehm, not in 1826 but when I tried to read it...) and I didn't read beyond a dozen pages, while as for comics between Tex, Zagor, Capitan Miki, Il Grande Blek, Lone Ranger, etc., I binged on them until I was 15 years old...
I must correct myself because I did enjoy reading several books by Cormac McCarthy, including the one considered as "The Ultimate Western" by an American critic, which is the novel "Blood Meridian" from 1985 (really great, I highly recommend it...).
To return to the beautiful film seen last night here in Morocco on Aicha's laptop after dinner, I must say that not remembering the main actors, I was amazed at how much the actors Kurt Russell in the role of El Grinta and Brad Pitt as the ranger La Boeuf had changed, only with the end titles did things get sorted out, reading what in the end I had to admit even to myself (since Aicha didn't know who any of them were), that the actual actors were none other than the great Jeff Bridges and the equally talented Matt Damon, much to my ehm, good peace...
The End
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