Guns, horses, the West, a few whistles, the back of a man leaving. Some people say that this is a movie made for men, but I don't think so. The charm of this movie, which can be said to be a new starting point in the history of Westerns, goes far beyond this definition of gender.
Westerns came from the United States, prospered in the United States and did not fall in the United States, and on the other side of the ocean, the Italians successfully sent Westerns to a new height, thanks to director Sergio Leone and actor K. Lynt Eastwood, also thank them for bringing us this movie - "Red Dead Redemption". In fact, it is not just spaghetti westerns (there is another name for spaghetti westerns here), westerns have been made in many places such as Korea and Japan, and they are called kimchi westerns and sukiyaki westerns. The more representative westerns in our country should be Ning Hao's "No Man's Land" and He Ping's "Wheat Field". This "Red Dead Redemption" is a spaghetti western, in which the western scenery does not actually come from the real American west, and most of the filming locations are in Europe.
Compared with traditional American westerns, the protagonist cowboys in the film are no longer the embodiment of pure justice, although the temperament of bravery and wit is still vividly reflected in them. But comparatively speaking, the protagonist in spaghetti westerns is closer to a bounty hunter, a ranger, a prodigal son. They fight for money, but not just for money. The usual American westerns are always used to express the western myth of the Americans, but in this film, this expression is not very clear, more like a foreigner watching the American western culture from the outside to the inside.
Music is a great achievement of this movie. Good music can add a lot of brilliance to a movie. When I mention this movie, apart from the back of the hero riding away and the desert that looks very barren, my mind is What's left in the middle is the loud and distant human whistle, accompanied by the rhythmic drum beats and the harmony of various instruments, as well as the seemingly non-existent clatter of hooves. The accompanying music echoes the style of the entire film. The tone of the picture is also so cold, and a good movie cannot be separated from the cooperation of every detail. The seamless cooperation between these elements has made such an immortal classic.
The male tension shown in this film is greater than any film I have ever seen that advertises itself as a "man's play", and the image of Clint Eastwood has left an indelible shadow in the history of film, He didn't have to take off his shirt to reveal his eight-pack abs to show his charisma in front of the audience. The pistol that killed countless villains, the desolate whistle in the background music, the indifferent expression, the dashing and provocative words, and the silent but powerful back quietly showed all this to the viewers. His name is rarely mentioned in the film, and I, an incompetent moviegoer, didn't even remember until the very end of the film that he seemed to be called Joe, such a cosmopolitan, brave and witty cowboy , like a drifting wind, with his vicissitudes and a pistol that has a hundred shots, it stops in one place after another, but never stops. This is the male tension that belongs to Clint and Leone.
In comparison, women are completely weakened in this film, and they are not even heroines. This film completely gets rid of the hero and beauty model, without any emotional clues between men and women, and the most dazzling female characters are Completely materialized into an object that was arbitrarily plundered. Another female character is the powerful lady in the American gangster. This lady has also changed the image of women in the minds of most people. Domineering, scheming, and decisive, she lacks some Feminine traits are instead masculine. I don't go into the director's intentions here. The director may just want to describe a story that belongs to a man. But it is undeniable that women have always been vulnerable and helpless characters in most film and television dramas, waiting to be rescued, which has also left a stereotype on people. Because they are fragile, they are gentle, and because they are helpless, they are weak. And those stronger women would appear "manly," and I couldn't convince myself that it wasn't a prejudice. But it's not the director's prejudice, it's the society's prejudice.
Western films, as a unique type of Hollywood films, have a deep cultural symbolic meaning behind them, which is the myth of Americans developing the west. Traditional American westerns always portray the natives of the West, such as the Indians, as absolutely negative characters, which contains a certain kind of deep colonial consciousness. land, but is portrayed in the film as a savior who rescues and saves the uncivilized Indians, as has been shown in countless histories from ancient times - history is always written for the victors. Those blood and tears were quietly wiped out, leaving only the heroic and enterprising righteous cowboy - "Pioneer". This is a stealing exchange of concepts, which is a defense of the rationality of aggression. When the unjust aggressor becomes the incarnation of justice to punish those who have become the evil side of the aggression, our normal logic has been changed. Rewritten in a twisted way - aggression is justice. In "Red Dead Redemption", this point has also been weakened. The focus of the ink is no longer on the issue of race, but more on the confrontation between the two sides. The "American Dream" doesn't seem to be advertised so much as a priority in this story.
A good movie will bring people a lot of thinking and a lot of beautiful feelings. These are the value of a good movie. What a movie can bring us is not only its plot, its spirit and its beauty. Aesthetic value and its social significance, able to travel through time and space. This is what we define as the classic, the classic comes from eternity.
View more about A Fistful of Dollars reviews
