All The Pretty Horses

Starring: Henry Thomas, Matt Damon Director: Billy Bob Thornton Original UK Premiere: 2001 Dvd Release: 5th November, 2001 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen, Region 2 Encoding Subtitled In: Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

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All the Pretty Horses is a novel by US author Cormac McCarthy released in 1992. Its romanticism brought the writer much public attention, spending some time on bestseller charts, earning the US National Book Award & being adapted into a blockbuster film, starring Matt Damon & Penelope Cruz & directed by Billy Bob Thornton. It is also the first of McCarthys Border Trilogy. It tells of John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old cowboy & his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, crossing the border to move South to Mexico. They encounter, among others, a young boy, Jimmy Blevins, whom they befriend & a young aristocrats daughter, Alejandra, whom John Grady Cole falls in love with. Posters Of All The Pretty Horses

DVD Extras: Filmographies for Thornton & half-a-dozen leading players; the theatrical trailer ; subtitles & a menu. In something of a missed opportunity the DVD lacks a commentary from Billy Bob could have been illuminating. But at least the crisp print, full-width ratio & the Dolby 5.1 sound do the film's technical achievements proud.

On the face of it, All the Pretty Horses should have everything going for it as a movie, taken from the novel by Cormac McCarthy acclaimed as one of the finest pieces of American writing of the past 20 years. The intuitive, up-and-coming actor-director Billy Bob Thornton, with a deep love of McCarthys novels, takes the helm directing two hot young stars & backed by some seasoned veterans along with first-rate technical support.

The plot seems tailor-made for landmark-movie status too. A downbeat, resonant tale that would have intrigued Sam Peckinpah, it tells of two young cowboys from post-WWII Texas, who cross the Rio Grande in search of the rugged adventurous life modern America can no longer offer them. And south of the border they find just what theyre looking for, but in harsher, darker & far more brutal guise than they ever dreamt of.

All the ingredients point towards the makings of a classic Western. Yet somehow they never quite jell. Powerfully photographed by Barry Markowitz, All the Pretty Horses looks unfailingly superb, & Ted Tallys screenplay draws on much of the novels spare, trenchant dialogue. Thornton handles the action sequences with assurance, especially the marathon horse-breaking episode. But it all feels distanced, & never dark or bleak enough for McCarthys savage vision. Maybe Damon is as yet too young & bland for his characters agonised trajectory. There were rumours of script problems, of scenes ruthlessly excised; Thornton claims that Miramax cut the film. Whatever the causes, the film is handsome to look at, absorbing to watch, but casts few shadows in the mind.

Henry Thomas. Henry Thomas was a major pre-war country blues singer & musician. Thomas, born in Big Sandy, Texas, began his musician career as an itinerant songster & recorded twenty-three songs from 1927 to 1929. He accompanied himself with the guitar & the quills, a folk instrument made from cane reeds that sound similar to the quena used by musicians in Peru & Bolivia. Some of his records are hard to categorize. They are sounding more like ancestors to blues than like what is now called blues. They are therefore a rare testimony of the kind of music which preceeded the establishment of the blues music in the 19th century. Maybe his nowaday best known influence is the song going down the country which was also recorded by Canned Heat in a quite psychedelic version. Posters Of Dead Birds

Editors Choice: Dead Birds, Dead In The Water, All The Pretty Horses, Fever, Niagara Niagara, Masters Of Horror, View DVDology

Matt Damon is an American film actor. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He shares an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with his friend Ben Affleck for the movie Good Will Hunting. He was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the same film. He founded Project Greenlight with Affleck to find & fund worthwhile film projects from novice filmmakers. In 2004 his uncle became the oldest person at 70 years old to swim the English Channel. Damon also produced an audiobook, reading Howard Zinn s A Peoples History of the United States. He grew up next door to Zinn. Posters Of Matt Damon

Editors Choice: Gerry, The Brothers Grimm, Stuck On You, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, Good Will Hunting, The Third Wheel, All The Pretty Horses, View DVDology

Billy Bob Thornton is an American actor. He has married five times & his most recent ex-wife is actress Angelina Jolie. He first came to semi-prominence as a cast member on the NBC sitcom Hearts Afire with John Ritter & Markie Post. His role as the villain in One False Move brought him to the attention of critics. He also had small roles in films like Indecent Proposal, On Deadly Ground & Tombstone. In 1996, he wrote, directed & starred in an independent film titled Sling Blade, an expansion of a short film titled Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade. It is the story of Karl Childers, a mentally disadvantaged man. Sling Blade garnered international acclaim, won Thornton an Academy Award for his screenplay & made him a star. Thornton is a rare celebrity in that he has A-list status, but plays both leading-man roles & character roles. His southern, small-town persona has led him to be cast in a number of down-to-earth, regular guy parts. Even his role as the legendary Davy Crockett in 2004 s The Alamo made an effort to demythologize the character & bring out his human foibles. Posters Of Billy Bob Thornton

Editors Choice: The Alamo, Bad News Bears, Friday Night Lights, Bad Santa, Monsters Ball, All The Pretty Horses, Bandits, Daddy And Them, View DVDology

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