Most Popular
-
The Demise of Hyphy
Thizzle, bling, and blunts may have helped bring down the overhyped hyphy movement. But KMEL pulled the trigger.
-
The USF Dons Have Gone from National Champs to National Chumps
-
Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco
-
Gonzalez/Nader Hysteria
They're actually out to stop spoiler candidates.
-
SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin's Message to Newsom: Quit Attacking Me!
-
Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco (87)
-
The Demise of Hyphy (53)
Thizzle, bling, and blunts may have helped bring down the overhyped hyphy movement. But KMEL pulled the trigger.
-
New College Out of Money: Teachers Unpaid, Not Teaching (14)
-
The 24 Real Reasons Matt Gonzalez Chose to Run with Ralph Nader (8)
-
Gonzalez/Nader Hysteria (4)
They're actually out to stop spoiler candidates.
-
Definitely, Maybe Rejects the V-Day RomCom Bliss
-
Personal Foul
Will Ferrell's umpteenth sports comedy is only half bad. His half.
-
Finally, a Jason Statham Movie Not Headed Straight to DVD
-
The Media Is a Mess Age in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
-
Sister Act
Sibling rivalry in all its royal glory in The Other Boleyn Girl.
-
MASTERMINDS Finalists To Be Announced Next Week
05:22PM 03/12/08 -
CD Review: She & Him -- Volume One
01:48PM 03/12/08 -
A Boy Named Sue
04:40PM 03/12/08 -
Walter The Singing Concerned Citizen Returns To City Hall
10:53AM 03/12/08 -
Food Critics Free To Write Scathing Reviews, Court Rules
10:07AM 03/12/08 -
Iron Chef America: Coming To Wii Near You
09:39AM 03/12/08
What we are writing about
- AC/DC
- Andy Beta on Modeselektor
- A weekly listing of...
- Blade Runner
- Call of Duty 4
- December Boys
- documentaries on DVD
- Evan James on Fag Fridays
- Ford at Fox
- French movies
- Grindhouse
- Guitar Hero
- Interview
- Jim Ridley on...
- Jordan Harper on Crazy...
- Michael Alan Goldberg...
- New Restaurants
- Nosferatu
- Our critics weigh in...
- Robert Wilonsky on...
- Rock Band
- Saturday Night Live
- Superbad
- The Bourne Ultimatum
- The Girl Next Door
- The Wire
- Tony Ware on Matthew Dear
- Tony Ware on Superpitcher
- Undead or Alive
- Wii
Recent Articles By J. Hoberman
-
Sk8ter Boi
Gus Van Sant returns to disaffected youth and shoestring budgets in Paranoid Park.
-
CJ7
-
Judgment Days
The circus of the '60s, from the streets to the courtroom, in Chicago 10.
-
California Burning
An epic gusher, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood strikes oil, and then some
-
Mr. Schrader Goes to Washington
A gay escort finds himself at the center of a classic D.C. scandal in The Walker
National Features
-
Houston Press
"It Was Like an Armageddon Movie"
For days after Hurricane Rita, a Texas prison was hell on earth.
By Chris Vogel -
The Pitch
How Not To Be a Rap Star
First of all, lay off the Ecstasy.
By Nadia Pflaum -
Village Voice
Project Runaway
What becomes a gossip columnist most?
By Michael Musto
Dear Coward Robert Ford: Please come Back and Kill Brad Pitt
By J. Hoberman
Published: October 3, 2007
Calling all pundits. It's a baffling caprice of the zeitgeist to have two studio westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold's better-than-competent 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing. Written and directed by 40-year-old New Zealand–born Andrew Dominik, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a deeply, unsentimentally nostalgic movie. Gritty but mythic, a dirty western with clean shirts, Jesse James is a bold, even wacky, reinvention — a psychological chamber drama in which the wide open spaces are geographic as well as mental. Unfolding mainly in the aftermath of the James Gang's last holdup, the movie specifically concerns the paranoid relationship between charismatic Jesse (Brad Pitt) and starstruck Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), the Judas who will murder him. The relationship between crime and celebrity clearly interests Dominik; his only other feature, 2000's Chopper, was a portrait of an Australian career criminal — the self-dramatizing author of nine autobiographical bestsellers, one titled How to Shoot Friends and Influence People. That's more or less an ironic description of Bob Ford's fate. A year after shooting Jesse, he's re-enacting the deed on a New York stage, condemned to relive his crime until, inevitably, he's dispatched by another irate nobody.
