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About halfway through 8 Million Ways to Die, I realized--thanks to a boom mike--my twenty year-old laserdisc was open matte, not pan and scan. The widescreen zoomed suddenly made the shots tighter and crisper, regaining Ashby's usually calmness. I suppose I should have stopped and went back to the beginning to see if it made any difference, but I doubt it. The first forty minutes of 8 Million Ways to Die suffer multiple plagues--summary storytelling, sometimes good but Jeff Bridges's wife in the movie doesn't even have a line when she's on screen it's all so fast; Alexandra Paul, who's supposed to be playing a “wuss,” so maybe her crappy performance is intentional; and Rosanna Arquette. At the halfway point, moments after I saw that boom mike (it actually was a mike for Arquette), she changes. Goes from being bad to being good (sometimes great) in the rest of the film.
8 Million Ways to Die is a Chandler-esq “mystery” where the detective forces his way through the case i |
