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.