I love Westerns. My allegiance to the genre has long been known on the Snarkmatrix. (I refer you to the comment threads on Exhibit A or Exhibit B.) So I am excited that people are excited by Joel and Ethan Coen’s new Western, True Grit.

And jeez, I hope I get a few hours by myself in the next week or so to see this movie. Parenting is a serious drag on your ability to partake of the cinema, which is one reason I’ve become such a devotée of Netflix Watch Instantly. I didn’t even get to catch the restored Metropolis when it came to town, and I had only A) waited months for it and B) written a chapter of my dissertation about its director. So I don’t know if True Grit is as good as everyone says it is. What I do know, what I know the hell out of, are Westerns, and Netflix. If you don’t know Westerns, that’s fine. So long as you’ve got a Netflix subscription and streaming internet, I’ve got your back.

You probably know that True Grit (2010) is an adaptation of the same Charles Portis novel (True Grit) that was previously adapted into a movie [True Grit (1969)] that won John Wayne a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the eyepatched marshal Rooster Cogburn. It’s not a remake, you’ve heard entoned, it’s a more-faithful adaptation of the novel.

Fine. Who cares? At a certain point, remakes and adaptations stop being remakes and adaptations. Does anyone care that His Girl Friday was a gender-swapping adaptation of The Front Page, a terrific Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur play which had already been made into a movie in 1931, and which was made into a movie again in 1974 with Billy Wilder directing and Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon playing the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell roles? 

Okay, I do. But besides me, not really. Because His Girl Friday obliterated The Front Page in our movie-watching conciousness, even though the latter is the prototype of every fast-talking newspaper comedy from, shit, His Girl Friday to the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy. It’s been over forty years since True Grit (1969). It’s a good movie, but if you haven’t seen it, don’t sweat it too much. 

You should, however, be sweating the Western. Because not least among their virtues is that Joel and Ethan Coen care and care deeply about genre. Virtually all of their movies are a loving pastiche of one genre form or another, whether playful (like Hudsucker’s newspaper comedy or The Big Lebowski’s skewed take on the hardboiled detective), not so playful (No Country For Old Men) or both somehow at once (Miller’s Crossing, Fargo). And the Western is fickle. You’ve got to contend with books, movies, radio, and TV, all with their own assumptions, all alternating giddy hats-and-badges-and-guns-and-horses entertainment and stone-serious edge-of-civilization Greek-tragedy-meets-American-origin-stories primal rites.

I’ll save you some time, though, by giving you just twelve links, briefly annotated.
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