Film discussion: Hell or High Water
As usual, it’s The Music Hall to the rescue.
Hell or High Water, is a modern Western, and it’s a movie I have high hopes for. All the ingredients are there, including the bleak Texas landscape, a couple of desperadoes on a bank robbing spree, a Texas Ranger with a far-away look in his eye and a script that’s keeping the scales of justice hanging in the air as we sort out the real villains.
The plot of the movie is simple: a couple of brothers who need money start robbing banks and the Law moves in to stop them. And frankly—and I’m serious about this—I have no earthly idea how it ends. Because the scriptwriter and the director and the stars give this story a spin that we’ve not seen for a while. (At least that’s what my reading of the critics and the comments of the director lead me to believe.)
Stars? Oh, yeah. The brothers holding up the banks are played by Chris Pine (Captain Kirk in the most recent Star Trek movies) and Ben Foster (X-Men and The Messenger), two actors who are both very hot (I’m told) and very good actors. The Texas Ranger is played by (drum roll) Jeff Bridges, a man who exudes experience and raises characters into a higher plane of reality.
The scriptwriter (Taylor Sheridan) has done an interesting stacking of the narrative deck by having the brothers robbing the very bank that is trying to foreclose on their land, which gives the movie a pinch of social justice in the mix.
Fortunately, I couldn’t tell you how the movie turns out if I wanted to. I just don’t know. And I’m dying to find out. Like I said, all the ingredients are there. I can’t wait to taste it!
We will gather in The Historic Theater at 7:00 on Tuesday night and conduct a thorough post mortem on Hell or High Water, while fortified by free coffee and popcorn. It should be great.
I hope to see you there.
And if you’re dying to let your iPhone know what you’ll be doing on Tuesdays evenings in November, you can tell it that you’ll be attending film discussions on November 1 (Don’t Think Twice), November 8 (Howard’s End), November 15, (Sully) and November 29 (Cameraperson). And if that lineup doesn’t forestall seasonal affective disorder, I don’t know what will.