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Reviews
A Murder at the End of the World (2023)
Practical Warning on AI
It's easy to nit-pick this as if it's a big budget production but it's not. What's nice is it's originality. At times the genius protagonist is really dumb but most young are when it comes to personal tact or selfish drives' effects on others. These are bad habits of normal people so I'm okay with the script when it goes that way despite annoying. Reminiscent of a less controlling to or less universal "Hal" from Space Odyssey 2001" from 50 years ago, this is more prescient, almost omni-prescient in its warning as this absurd world treads blindly forward mesmerized by advertisers and fake news because it flatters begetting AI for profit, ego, and power.
Butcher's Crossing (2022)
Grant's Policy Missed
Especially through the credits at the end, President Grant's Policy to starve the Indian Problem by ordering the slaughter of the Buffalo was missed, not even a mention which makes the movie pointless in my opinion.
Otherwise the cinematography is wonderful and the main characters are believable.
There is no reference to why Buffalo hides are in demand though and that's because demand was a government imagined one to starve Native Americans and pay for so doing. It was a regretful policy that even before his death, Grant regretted it's success.
It's too bad that isn't explained.
Never be the same.
The Power of the Dog (2021)
Now I must read the book.
It's interesting; for those familiar with Montana, the scenery is more like Alberta or New Zealand of course, and the effort to depict cowboys might be more realistic than Hollywood's norm but still borderline ludicrous. I wish to read the book after watching this. On the surface the social message is odd, to me having known many real cowboys, that one could survive adolescence as a bully without having been taken down a peg or several pegs routinely, with fisticuffs and repeated firings. But then we learn this cowboy's not a hired hand, or simply another toxic male. Then we learn that he's also highly educated, a Yale grad, so no wonder his accents vary with his dramatic overtures, and find he has a softer side, a perceptive side, and a giving side, with the film never letting out what hurt pulled him back to ranch life. The real bully is not there. It's in another character, a burgeoning serial killer it seems, starting out, working his second quite quickly here, for what hopes to be a long career.