scott cooper is the michael bay of Serious American Dramas, his stories essentially as complex as bay's boots-on-the-ground vs. liberal pussies but done in the only style he knows how: the laborious macho art weepy. this time he does the Good Colonialist story, where the white man's burden and guilt has a chance to act out extreme violence, not that it matters because the only thing cooper knows how to do is get otherwise good performers to mumble about rote emotions and Important Issues and move slowly—bale, at least, is suited to the grumbly macho cry and comes out looking fine but rosamund pike is next level awful in this. nearly every scene in this is like the third act…

Cormac McCarthy’s western epic Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is an obtuse and nearly insurmountable story to commit to screen, and I have my doubts that if it ever is produced that it will properly encapsulate the themes and poetic depth of that novel. But I can appreciate when a movie scratches the surface, and Hostiles is definitely one of those films. In it, Christian Bale is a U.S. Cavalry officer tasked with escorting a Cheyenne war chief back to his tribal home in Montana before the chief succumbs to cancer. To make things worse, the two of them had been at Wounded Knee, and there is a deep-seated hatred stemming from decades of violence that…

1892 New Mexico. Christian Bale is a United States Cavalry Captain & war hero who's been fighting Native Americans (Indians) for the last two decades. Along the way he has lost many friends/fellow soldiers in battles against the Cheyenne, Apache and the Comanche... all whom he openly despises.

Not far off retiring, he's ordered by his Colonel (Stephen Lang) to escort a Cheyenne Chief (the ever dependable Wes Studi) who, along with his family, have been granted safe passage back to his homeland in Montana by the President of the United States due to his terminal cancer.

Seething with rage but under threat of court martial & losing his pension, he has no choice but to form a detail and perform this…

Watched for Week 14 of the Letterboxd Season Challenge 2018-2019.

I don't know. My first thought was really that I don't understand how this movie still gets made in 2017, because I found it problematic af. I mean, how was Scott Cooper not thinking about the optics of a white woman ending the film by adopting an orphaned native child, in light of the long-standing government practice to kidnap native children from their parents and place them with white adoptive or foster parents? (A practice which continued into the 1960s!)

But then I see that the National Congress of American Indians heaped a ton of praise on the film for its depiction of natives. So am I just white-knighting? To…