Never Grow Old

8/28/2019

Middling western-drama that has some okay moments but nothing really stands out, including the acting from both Hirsch an Cusack (who does seem to sleepwalk through his role, however). IDK, didn't at all hate it but kind of confused on the messaging, guess it was good for the town to be run by a tyrannical Christian priest?

10/3/2019

**_Ugly, bleak, gritty, and enjoyable_** > _The idea was to write a western that would work as a genre film, but which would also comment on the founding of America and what that really meant (and thus, hopefully, commenting on the America of today). The film opens with a burnt American flag, so it touches on subjects such as the genocide of the Native Americans, xenophobia, the oppression and exploitation of women, the law of the "wild west" and capital punishment. My main inspiration when writing were the frontier photographs from the 1850s onwards. The hardship on the people's faces was_ _startlingly apparent, and when you listen to the hynms they sang at the time, they are about hardship, the misery of life, and how life will be better on the other side, in Heaven. It is a very sobe