Some would call Monte Hellman‘s The Shooting, from 1966, an absurdist Western but whether it is or not, it is decidedly unusual and, in its own way, entertaining. A woman, Adrien Joyce, wrote the script, in which “a mysterious woman persuades two cowboys to help her in a revenge scheme” (imdb.com). The woman in question (Millie Perkins) is pretty but waspish, and her boyfriend is a detestable gunslinger (Jack Nicholson) she has hired, as she hired the two cowboys, to do the killing she wants. Cowboy Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), however, opposes and fights against the killing.

In the film, the past is unrevealed and motivations unknown. The woman, who may be pregnant, keeps mum about everything, even her name. What we do know is that two mostly ordinary men, the cowboys, are quite stultified by peculiar evil, even if the gunslinger ends up stultified as well.

Joyce also wrote the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces. Dead in 2004, she had gifts. Hellman, who died in 2021, provides some impressive long shots.

The satirizing of men and women in modern England in the 1970 film Take a Girl Like You is hardly strong or memorable. The insights are few and the laughs are zero. There are men who are horndogs and Hayley Mills‘s Jenny refusing to lose her virginity.

A Kingsley Amis book is the source novel here. The movie was directed by the late Jonathan Miller, a British theatre director who may or may not have been an artist; I can’t say. To me, Take a Girl Like You is tame, insignificant non-art. It is worth seeing, though—I’ll make the concession—for the charm and good looks of Miss Mills.

Rowan Joffe‘s direction of Before I Go To Sleep (2014), from a novel by S.J. Watson, is pleasantly sensitive to the film’s eerie material. His screenplay is suitably penned. Mystery lies atop mystery for a woman (Nicole Kidman) so abused she is temporarily brain-damaged.

Kidman knows how to be anguished, is never false. Colin Firth is richly effective. There are too many mentions of adultery in the tale, but the small Sleep is a scary pleasure. To the critics who dislike it I have a ho-hum reaction.

Any sensible gun owners who caught ABC’s The View the other day were probably infuriated by the words of Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar about the Indiana man who shot down the mall assassin. Hostin dissed the gent, Eli Dicken, because he took a gun into a mall that prohibited them; and both she and Behar opined that Dicken was simply “lucky” that he killed the assassin. Are they not glad that Dicken tried his luck?

The usual smugness was there. The View is a nauseating, plebeian piece of shit. I use the profane word because the show deserves it.

How many Westerns present a woman doctor having sex with her nice-guy husband? Bone Tomahawk (2015) does; it’s different—as well as one of the best Westerns I’ve seen.

The kind of R-rated adult Western that The Wild Bunch is, S. Craig Zahler‘s movie is as shocking as the Peckinpah classic was in 1969. As I indicated in an earlier review, it is “grungy” and “gory” as it relates the tale of the abduction of three people by brutal, cannibalistic primitives. It conveys, I think, a message about men and women who work to maintain a society sometimes being forced to encounter the ultra-criminal, the ultra-violent, even the “anti-social” types like David Arquette‘s Purvis who deserve to die. Ah, but do they deserve to die at the hands of the primitives?—a necessary question.