Give Me a Black Hat!
Someone in Hollywood, please give James Lileks what he wants!
Someone needs to reinvent the reinvented Western: give us a bad guy who’s just plain bad, without leavening attributes like Bible-quoting, skill with a sketchpad, courtly manners and a tearjerker backstory. Just make him mean. Mean as a snake. A low-down, no-good sidewinding snake what ain’t had a decent thought in his mind since he first grabbed for his mama’s teat. Trust me, we’d still find something to like about him.
Can I get a hallelujah? There hasn’t been a real villain in a western since Brian Dennehy ruled Silverado with an evil and grasping hand as Sheriff Cobb. What is so hard about writing a bad guy who is so abidingly low-down and dirty that you’re nearly hopping up and down in your seat waiting for him to get his comeuppance? Is it that Hollywood screenwriters just don’t have the skill or is it that they have no freaking idea what evil looks like these days?
I sometimes think it’s the latter but, given the current lineup on primetime television, I grant that it could be the former. No one who regularly churns out drek like…that show…crud. I can’t even think of a prime time TV show. Seriously. I suppose that illustrates just how craptacularly bland the bulk of work coming out of the ginormous entertainment machine is these days. Like room-temperature mayonnaise on an unsalted rice cake.
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Category: It's Entertainment!
Well being a western fan I agree Brian Dennehy was a fabulous villian and you're right, they just don't make them like that anymore.
I'd love to see a real Honest to God villain again in the near future. It's kind of sad that the last truly wicked villain I've seen in a movie was a robot who turned into a gun (wait..in the movie it was an airplane).
Where's Jack Palance when you need him?
Well I don't know if you're a Tombstone fan, but that movie had some good villians in it too! Not to mention Val Kilmers best performance ever.
I love that movie. I've seen it at least a dozen times.
There is no honor among thieves…they keep forgetting that.