Yum Yum….there is somethng about a man in a saddle, wearing a cowboy hat.? Everywhere you look this fall, gunslinging cowboys and lawless border towns are rising out of the dust.?? And just like that, the Old West is the new black.??
The trend begins Friday, with “3:10 to Yuma,” from “Walk the Line” director James Mangold. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale saddle up as an outlaw and a rancher, respectively, facing off in the barely settled southwest. Squint and you’ll think you’re watching Alan Ladd and Jack Palance in “Shane.”?? Following this is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” out Sept. 21, starring Brad Pitt as the celebrated bandit and Casey Affleck as the former pal who did him in.?? Then on Nov. 9 there’s the new Coen brothers movie, “No Country For Old Men,” based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a modern-day Western about a series of murders near the Rio Grande, starring Javier Bardem as a menacing drifter with a penchant for coin tossing and guns. And in December comes Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century Texas epic, “There Will Be Blood,” about an oil rancher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his family, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!”
