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Title: "The Missing" (2003). Post by: Neville on July 28, 2004, 09:09:40 AM For some reason there are movies and genres I feel confortable with. I love low budget thrillers and modern westerns. While I like many other things, I will always choose one of these two whenever I can. That's the reason why last night I rented this western by Ron Howard.
The funny thing is that I hate Howard's movies. For some reason they always look uninspired and restrained to me, even when the subject could create some controversy. Here's a person, I would say, that feels confortable with mediocrity. And then, I would have to swallow my comments. "The missing" is a sober, adult and often violent film that sits just in the edge between the classic westerns and the revisionist ones. The plot seems inspired by John Ford's "The Searchers", but the main characters are not hardened cowboys, but a strong frontier woman (Cate Blanchett) who forms an uneven couple with his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who helps her to track her daughter's captors. And Ron Howard is surprisingly up to what the task the film requires of him. He manages the intimistic scenes with the sensibility they require, doesn't overlook the violence without unnecesaryly underlining it, and works so well the abundant cliches that at any moment every possible ending seems possible. Even detractors of revisionist westerns will like this one. When Howard focuses on the unusual characters and their personal circumstances (TLJ character is white but abandoned civilisation to live with the indians) he manages to add layers to the story without becoming too preachy. I wasn't going to watch "The Alamo" precisely because Howard had made it, but now I think I will give it a chance. If I have to judge from all his films that I have seen (I haven't seen them all and I don't plan to), this is without doubt his best film ever. Title: Re: "The Missing" (2003). Post by: trekgeezer on July 28, 2004, 12:08:49 PM Ron Howard did not direct the Alamo, he backed out before they even started filming. I think he was a producer on it .
Title: Re: "The Missing" (2003). Post by: Neville on July 29, 2004, 09:37:30 AM You're damn right, trek_geezer, I just checked the IMDB and the only accredited director is John Lee Hancock. I might give it a chance anyway.
Title: Re: "The Missing" (2003). Post by: Scott on July 30, 2004, 04:49:55 PM I liked THE MISSING even though OPEN RANGE was a bit better. Tommy Lee Jones was the only part that I didn't appreciate. Not the character, but the actor Jones was a bit distracting for me. Over all a good Western.
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