The Assassination of My Evening by the Director Andrew Dominik

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I just finished The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

My god. This was a ninety minute movie stretched out to two hours thirty eight minutes. (This is down from it's original screen time of nearly four hours! )

Visually beautiful but ponderously and unnecessarily slow, I'm rarely relieved when a movie is over and tonight I'm not only relieved but I'm grateful we have no straight razors in the house. This movie is cinematic Prozac, including all of the nasty depressive and suicidal side-effects.

Remember what a cool movie Tombstone was? Its evil twin, born a year later, was Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp: where Tombstone was polished and kept the story moving with action and compelling relationships, Wyatt Earp bludgeoned you for just about twice the running time with just what a bunch of assholes the Earps were. (It didn't help having Dennis Quaid in the cast.)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was like that, but there isn't a cooler movie I can fall back on. I'm sure that looking at forty-five seconds of Brad Pitt's right eye twitching looks like character development on paper, but it doesn't make for good entertainment.

If you must rent this film, fast forward to about two hours in. Everything you need to know - including all the character and relationship development the movie has to offer - happens from that moment on. The rest is just directorial and cinematographic masturbation.

Comments

[tapestry01.livejournal.com]

I agree about The Assassination of Jesse James... it was way too long for a feature. If you think of it as a documentary, it's not so bad. I enjoyed Wyatt Earp,, mostly because of all the supporting characters. I did not like Kurt Russell's Wyatt in Tombstone, because he played Wyatt Earp as mostly reactive, whereas I think of him as a proactive kind of guy.

[glesyn.livejournal.com]

Made the mistake of watching it on HBO. Now I know where the plot went: straight to the end of the movie.

[iarraidh.livejournal.com]

I caught it on cable on a slow day. I also liked the look of it, and am a sucker for period pieces.
The sin in this movie was the editing - which no doubt was at the director's hand.
If you cut out a lot of the things you mention (e.g., eyebrow twitching) it had a chance.

One has to wonder if this was yet another case of a book beeing massacred when made into a film. Haven't read it, and probably won't.

I particularly enjoyed Casey Affleck's portrayal of Ford; although again there was too much time spent on 'angst'
shots.

If you can stand to waste another evening, try 'Ride with the Devil' from Ang Lee.
It also is horribly paced and hard to wade through.
However, the way the lifestyles and language of the time are captured is worth the effort - or at least was for Me.