True Grit

Remember how I said that actors and directors sometimes travel in packs?  Here it is again...Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, and Steven Spielberg.  Together in Saving Private Ryan and back again here.  All good.

True Grit is a 2010 remake by the Coen brothers of the 1969 original.  They can be credited with doing a ton of quality stuff and really kind of skewing things in intriquing ways.  This is a watchable film, but man, it takes so long to get going to the last 30 minutes or so and then, it becomes bleak and depressing in the end and really makes you question why you suffered through the first 70%. 

Okay, maybe not suffer.  The acting is great and Jeff Bridges has and always will be one of my favorite actors.   Matt Damon does well, but for the most part, the script was really kind of interesting.  Just about every character seemed to be some sort of mix between Ted Levine's Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lamb's and John Malkovich's Lenny in Of Mice and Men: just on odd but deliberate speech tempo spoken by people with a low IQ.  That is of course except for Hailee Steinfeld who played Mattie Ross.  She had it down and was smart as a whip.  She reminded me of the know it all type of girls I despised in junior high school.

So a girl's father is killed and she sets off to enlist a Marshall to hunt down the killer and kill him.  They do, the end.

The directing was good, the acting and script were great, and the cinematography was really good too.  However, there was something so lacking that I can't really recommend it.  The four key components that either add or detract from a movie were all there, but they were like a really nice paint job, sweet rims, Ricaro racing seats and a killer stereo all placed within and on a '71 Pinto.