journal features

movie review - 3:10 to Yuma

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2009.04.25

I ennoyed this miserably violent Western about a group of men who try to bring a notorious robber to justice. Included in this group is a local citizen who helped track the robber. It's somewhat more psychological than movies of this genre go, and what I found interesting was how the relationship between the two leads developed.

Aside from that, it's a straight-up formula piece with stage-coaches, riders on horses, rifles, whisky, the odd female presence, and psychopaths for hire. So many psychopaths. I will say, as god-awful as many of the characters are, you can believe their motivations and you get a sense of their relationships through natural dialog rather than exposition or clumsy spoon-feeding.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner