A Million Ways to Die in the West (Seth MacFarlane, 2014)

[Professor Wagstaff]

A Million Ways to Die in the West

[eerik]

A Million Ways to Die in the West

Looks terrible. Did Charlize Theron really prefer this over Inherent Vice or do I remember it incorrectly?

[flyonthewall2983]

I think it was a matter of scheduling.

[FerdinandGriffon]

A Million Ways to Die in the West

I did not recognize Theron until they credited her. Is it just me or has the entire shape of her face changed?

[flyonthewall2983]

He has a good cast lined up and it looks great, but it's certainly the anachronistic writing that took me out of it. As Deadwood you could do something set in the West with foul language. Whether or not that approach could be used for a comedy would be an interesting exercise. But it feels really lazy here.

[mfunk9786]

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is now a full-time critic at The AV Club, and his review of A Million Ways to Die in the West is Ebert-level funny and terrific

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha I read that review without noticing the byline, and was wondering why it was so beautifully cutting.

[med]

Wearing a perpetual smirk and a tremendous amount of makeup, MacFarlane stars as Albert Stark,

I've lately thought there was something off about MacFarlane's face, and maybe this is it. Or part of it.

[domino harvey]

He has pretty obvious acne and resultant scarring, so no doubt he slathers himself in a bunch of foundation in order to make himself Hollywood-acceptable. He's hardly the only one, of course, but if it's noticeable maybe he should have employed the makeup people for other sufferers like Kiera Knightley or Cameron Diaz, who don't seem to have the same problem on-screen

[flyonthewall2983]

So has anyone seen this?

[who is bobby dylan]

Saw this last night with my brother. If you like MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad, Ted) I would see it, even though it's a letdown after Ted. If you don't like MacFarlane I would avoid it as the shtick he's developed through cartooning doesn't really translate to live action (it's not that funny to see an actual person take a brick to the head, Home Alone 2 aside).

[flyonthewall2983]

It would be interesting to see him do something with a much, much lower budget. He could probably pull it off, after all he did animate every frame of the Family Guy pilot himself.

[Movie-Brat]

Maybe make a Horror Comedy?

[Professor Wagstaff]

I walked out after 40 minutes, only the second time I've skipped out on a movie in my life. I'm not much for Seth MacFarlane, but at least his animated films have some momentum and exuberance in them. MacFarlene doesn't have a clue as to how you should mount a live production or work with actors, especially when it comes to establishing tone. What really irked me, though, was how palpable the actors' boredom was throughout thanks to their exasperated, lazy line deliveries. Everyone feels plucked from a different kind of western with MacFarlane the most distracting of the bunch because he looks visible uncomfortable being in front of the camera. As bad as his acting was, his direction's worse, the sort of clunky style you'd expect on a lower tier western in the 1960s,

[mfunk9786]

Just wanted to remind everyone that Charlize Theron passed on Inherent Vice because there was a scheduling conflict with this

[cdnchris]

I don't know if that's entirely fair. Though I'm sure she'll regret it, wouldn't she have already been involved with this production for a while by then? She doesn't seem the type to just drop out after signing on. Or at least I'm not aware of her doing it before, like Brad Pitt, who seems to keep signing up and dropping out of films left and right (though admittedly he usually sticks with the more interesting sounding ones, even if they turn out not to be all that successful.)

[Kirkinson]

Yeah, you can't exactly fault her for agreeing to do a job, signing on the dotted line, and actually following through with it.

[Gregory]

In this day and age, I'm not sure that starring in a comedy western is ever a good idea. She didn't just agree to do the job, though; she said that she read the script and then begged for the part.

[domino harvey]

Comedy westerns have historically never been a good idea! Maybe you have to have that infamous South African sense of humor to "get" MacFarlane and/or comedy westerns

[Gregory]

There were some great silent examples, and some of the Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam shorts were great satires of the genre's conventions and great cartoons all around. But yeah, live-action sound feature comedy westerns are almost never funny. I wonder if it's revealing that when John Ford made comedies they were almost never in a western setting.
From the looks of this film, guys getting killed in amusing ways is the new version of the guy-falling-in-horse-trough shtick from the old days.

[domino harvey]

Yes, I really should have said "Practically never," as Little Big Man is a good outlier too. But on the whole, the return rate of avoiding all comedy westerns would result in missing almost no great films and lots and lots of terrible ones!

Only just now remembered that John Swartzwelder, who is funnier on his worst day than MacFarlane could ever hope to be, crashed and burned with his own comedy western a few years back, Double Wonderful, which like the other Swartzwelder books I've read proves that joke-a-second pacing translates horribly to the novel format (And to my shock it appears he's written many many more books in the interim!)

[colinr0380]

1994 was a particularly bad year for them, with Lightning Jack failing to reignite Paul Hogan's career and Wagons East ending John Candy's.

But then I'm a fuddy-duddy who believes that Support Your Local Sheriff/Gunfighter, Cat Ballou and Carry On Cowboy perfected the comedy western until Blazing Saddles destroyed it!

[sir_luke]

So, the consensus here is that Blazing Saddles is not a good Western comedy?

[warren oates]

Apart from the Looney Tunes and a few works by Keaton and Chaplin that Gregory mentions and sure, Blazing Saddles, the problem with almost all other comedy Westerns is that they don't really hold up as Westerns. I can only think of about three authentic Westerns, films that understand the genre and have something real to say about it, which also happen to be comedies, one of which domino already mentioned: Little Big Man, The Ballad of Cable Hogue and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. All of them picaresque life histories of a protagonist who either gets to explore the whole breadth of the West or to stay in one place for a long time and have much of it come to him. From what I've seen in trailers, the West is little more than a setting for MacFarlane, who seems to do better joking with sci-fi conventions that he at least understands and cares about.

[knives]

Don't forget Destry Rides Again which is really underrated. Red Garters probably counts too.