Frontier Partisan Cinema — Rez Police, A Man And His Dog & Lioness

If you enjoy the Continuity & Persistence of frontier tales set in a contemporary setting, this summer has a lot of cinematic juice for you.

Lady Marilyn is going to be riveted to the screen for Heart of the Beast.

No, not because of Brad Pitt. The dog, people. It’s always about the dog. I can hear her now…

“If anything happens to that dog…”

Trailer has dropped. This looks badass…

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We are enjoying My Cowboy Soap Opera 2.0 Dutton Ranch quite a lot. I am quite smitten with the landscape shots. The Texas range is not Montana; you can’t beat the Big Sky State for grandeur. But it sure has its appeal. Not least because, for me, it calls up the ghosts of Comancheria, so stunningly evoked in a passage from All The Pretty Horses that I love and return to over and over again:

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

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Taylor Sheridan’s covert ops drama Lioness will roll into its third season in September. We like that one, too.

In Lioness Season 3, hidden networks, foreign operatives, and personal betrayals collide. Joe (Zoe Saldaña) walks the line between duty and home as unseen forces circle her world. Guided by Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) and Westfield (Michael Kelly), Joe confronts enemies operating in the shadows, leaving her to reckon with a war that now reaches into every part of her life.

Teaser is out…

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Gangland has a bit of buzz around it…

Originally known as Keep Quiet — the title still attached to the film when it recently had its North American premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival — Gangland showcases a career-highlight performance by C&I reader favorite Lou Diamond Phillips (pictured above) Teddy Sharp, a Thunderstone Tribal Police Department cop dealing with a by-the-book new partner (Dana Namerode) and a vengeful ex-con. Elisha Pratt plays the prodigal bad boy, Richie, who’s newly released from prison and eager to reunite with fellow gang members while settling old scores. Meanwhile, Teddy wrestles with other demons from his past — and can never forgive himself for unwittingly inviting one into his community. (Opens in theaters July 10.)

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Ran across this old Nike ad in a discussion about the immortal magnificence of the Last of the Mohicans score.

I had never seen this… and it’s awesome.