Hi-Lo Country

The Hi-Lo Country: Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picture In his tale of two cowboys whose lives twist and fray, director Stephen Frears casts a nostalgic eye on the postwar West but falls short of reinventing Hollywood's most circumscribed genre, the Western. Although The Hi-Lo Country is set in northern New Mexico, its soundtrack soun...	All the Pretty Horses Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's award-winning novel, All the Pretty Horses cries for epic length but runs only 112 minutes for theatrical release. Drastically shortened during a lengthy stretch between production and release, this operatic drama feels as if huge chunks are missing...	You Know My Name Cromwell, Oklahoma, 1924: an oil boomtown full of saloons, cathouses, mud-and-crude-oil streets, bootleg whisky, and gun-toting roughnecks. Technology had overpassed the Old West, in the form of Model T's and oil rigs, but the mentality had stayed much the same. Add to that a pop...	Conagher A cattle ranch gunman battles a gang of rustlers. Studio: Turner Hm Entertainm Release Date: 05/17/2005 Starring: Sam Elliot Katherine Ross Run time: 117 minutes Rating: Nr	The Rounders Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somew...
Hud Newman is the materialistic son of a texas rancher who doesnt ride to the occasion when the ranch falls on hard times. Instead he pursues an uninterested neal in this western for modern times and changing morals. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 01/17/2006 Starring: ...	Louis L'Amour's The Sacketts Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 05/30/2006 Run time: 193 minutes Rating: Nr	Lonesome Dove Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones star as Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, aging cowboys and former Texas rangers and who organize a 2,500 mile cattle drive for one last great adventure in this excellent 1989 miniseries adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel. The best friends, who stea...	There Will Be Blood Unmistakably a shot at greatness, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood succeeds in wild, explosive ways. The film digs into nothing less than the sources of peculiarly American kinds of ambition, corruption, and industry--and makes exhilarating cinema from it all. Although ...	3:10 to Yuma (Widescreen Edition) Here's hoping James Mangold's big, raucous, and ultrabloody remake of 3:10 to Yuma leads some moviegoers to check out Delmer Daves's beautifully lean, half-century-old original. That classic Western spun a tale of captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford)--deadly but disarmingly affa...

The fragility of friendship.
Hi-Lo country's plot has already been summarized here a few dozen times, so I'll get right to the element that followed me after I finished this film. The principle friendship, between Crudup's and Harrelson's characters, appear like many of our own at first glance: rock-solid, inseparable, and fixed upon the strongest loyalties. They fight for one another and watch each other's backs like hawks; and yet, when a woman comes into play and divides them, the wheels of their loyalty come unhinged and a crashing course of events takes place. I found this to be the chief factor of the film, and one that has essentially been the downfall of many friendships in my own circle of influence. Hi-lo country doesn't show us the way it should be when faced with divided loyalties; it shows us the way it actually is, and I applaud the film for that, if nothing else.

well-acted but mediocre story
There was nothing inspiring or heart-warming about this mangled love triangle; the femme fatale was unworthy of the viewer's sympathy and Woody Harrelson was the consummate big-hearted, hot-tempered heavy-drinking loyal-to-the-end type with a big heart; his untimely demise only makes the film seem to spiral downward even more relentlessly.

How typical!!!!....
Without the perfect cast, this movie could easily be a flop.But Patricia Arquette is here so beautiful and Woody Harrelson had never played better. Buy Buy Buy!!!!!Finish... (:

A tribute to Sam Pekinpah and Walon Green...
This movie is basically for affectionados of Sam Pekinpah and Walon Green. The message of this film is that the nature of western life is underscored by the propensity of its people to live with recklessness and violence in generational terms. Think of it as sort of like, "The Wild Bunch" aftermath, about forty years beyond. While the "Wild Bunch" was about the west during the period of industrialization around the turn of the century, "The Hi Lo Country" deals with the period of superindustrialization following World War II.Woody Harrelson and Billy Crudup play two cowboys who fall for the same woman, Patricia Arquette. Harrelson as the violent "Big Boy" shows no sense of morality or humilty as the film's main protagonist, while Crudup as "Pete" is almost the exact opposite. Sam Elliot portrays a villanous rancher/industrialist, while the desirable Penelope Cruz is the overlooked, unrequitted love in Pete's life. All of the actors turn in solid performances, but what makes this film special is the story itself, the direction, and Jerry Goldsmith's subtle, forceful soundtrack.

A Blank Spot on the Map
The plot may creak a bit, but the film itself remains a superbly done period piece. It is Northeastern New Mexico, circa 1945, and the prairie vistas are wide open with an unbounded sense of freedom, but one that stretches out to monotonously barren horizons. Homesteading cattle is no easy task in the hardpan Hi-Lo country, and certainly no place for the Hollywood glamor factory. Except for a few questionable touches (Sam Elliott's leering villian, for one), the viewer gets a real sense of time and place, and of what goes on with the hard-bitten folks living there. The movie's core, however, remains Woody Harrelson's Big Boy whose boisterously callous behavior develops so slyly, you may not notice your own shifting responses. The jut-jawed Harrelson is near perfect, as are the cow town atmospherics with their smoky Saturday night honky-tonk. Seldom has anyone gotten a cowboy so right, and seldom has any film blended landscape of place with landscape of character more successfully than this one. Both demonstrate how sheer surface expanse can overwhelm frail emotional depth. Martin Scorese ( a most unlikely source for a Western theme) was a background producer, and I suspect it is he we have to thank for getting this very non-commercial story onto the video screen. Stephen Frears directs at a leisurely but revealing pace, allowing the occasional quiet but necessary moment to creep in. This minor gem should satisfy anyone curious about those obscure backwaters of the American West that appear mysteriously as blank spots on the road map. Despite undeniable concessions, Hi-Lo Country remains truer to its prosaic sources than the mock heroics and contrived mayhem of the traditional western, and is thus well worth a look see. Give it a try.