Year Of The Western! #21 El Topo (1971)

Challenging your expectations and your boundaries can be a good thing. I will never regret taking the time to try and experience something I am not familiar with. I would rather know I took the time with a piece of art that I ended up not understanding or liking rather than the possibility that there are works out that would set my brain and my spirit on fire and I just chose not to bother with...

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Year Of The Western! #20 Sabata (1969)

I am sure it was not planned like this when I asked my friend and resident genre movie database, Kevin to give me a wide swath of westerns to watch for this list, that it would seem like one film's extremes would stand out in contrast to the previous one's. More than likely it is that my mind is just taking it that way because there is no true order to these films other than release date. Either...

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Year Of The Western! #19 The Wild Bunch (1969)

So after watching a film, I like to go and dive into the trivia and productions notes about it. I normally post the links to imdb.com and wikipedia at the top of my posts (and I will do the same here) but I want to point out one bit of trivia that I feel speaks a lot about The Wild Bunch. John Wayne complained that the film destroyed the myth of the Old West. I wonder how accurate...

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Year Of The Western! #18 True Grit (1969)

I believe this will be the last John Wayne film on the list. I have seen him three other times (The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and each time he has grown a little more on me. I can see why he belongs among the greats to define a genre. This was a really fine way to say goodbye to the Duke for The Year Of The Western!  Film #18 True Grit (1969) Here...

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Year Of The Western! #17 Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

After the absolute knockout punch that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gave me, I was really looking forward to this film. I was not disappointed, but what I thought I was expecting, I did not get. That's a very good thing. Just like how I have come away with different thoughts and feelings on the three Corbucci films I have seen, Once Upon a Time in the West leaves me in a different headspace...

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Year Of The Western! #16 The Mercenary (1968)

And here is the palate cleanser after The Great Silence. Phew, I was worried I was going to be stuck down that sad dark wintery hole for a while. I made another slight error in trying to review these films in their release order. This one came out a month or so before The Great Silence (in Italy anyways... it is hard to pin down exact release dates for some of these as they opened in different...

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