True Grit – 7

Great style, but not much substance, this makes one wonder if the Western genre is “all played out.” The one novelty was the flowery and erudite diction, spoken principally by the precocious 14-year-old. Beyond that, every move was one we’d seen before, and Jeff Bridges gave us a little too much Jeff Bridges, coming so soon after his similar role in Crazy Heart. The final rescue scene was both unbelievable and unemotional, a major anticlimax. I think the Coens could learn a reverse lesson from Zatoichi, a latter-day Japanese samurai film