My least favorite genre is the romantic comedy.  Or even worse, the teen love romantic comedy.  Actually, teen love is even worse when it’s not funny.

On the other hand, I love vampire movies.  The blog, Snarkerati, listed the 70 top vampire movies of all time.  The list is great because it takes a combination of IMDB user scores and Rotten Tomatoes.  IMDB represents the popular vote, while Rotten Tomatoes represents the reviewing elite.  It’s sort of like the House and Senate.  I have seen 41 of those 70 movies.  Included in the movies I’ve seen:

The Canadian Royal Ballet’s version, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002)

The Eddie Murphy Movie: Vampire in Brooklyn

And the straight to video, Subspecies

But Twilight seems to bring too much teen angst and romance.  Maybe I’ll see it, but probably not with all those teen-aged swooning girls.  Vampires are supposed to be evil, predatory, and ancient.  There are many variations, including hot Kate Beckinsdale vampires, but teen idol is one step too far down the road Anne Rice was treading when I stopped reading her books.

I have a friend who loves westerns.  I love westerns.  Unforgiven is one of my all time favorite movies from any genre.  And 3:10 to Yuma was great as well.  The one thing I really don’t like is romantic comedy.  I will, at some point, write an essay on why I don’t.  I also really don’t like when they shoe-horn romance into places it just doesn’t belong.  Top Gun, which is over-rated as an action flick, and very over-rated as some kind of guy cult movie, suffers badly from this.  If it does belong in the story, I’m okay with it.  Officer and a Gentleman?  Yes, the love story was very much part of the overall story.

Anyway, my friend had the same reaction I did when reading the reviews about Appaloosa.  “What the F(*&ck” is Renee Zellweger doing in this movie?”  She not only just seems wrong, she’s also almost as iconic of romantic comedy as Hugh Grant.  He decided not to see the movie.  I swallowed my fears and, partly due to peer pressure, went anyway.

I won.  Ed Harris, who co-wrote, directs, and turns in a starring role, must really understand the western.  He gets down into the roots of the genre, capturing the violence, the shifting sense of right and wrong, the slow pace at which everything happens in the wide open desert.  Having read over 50 Louis L’ Amour novels and a scattering of other westerns, as well as growing up in a small desert town where you can shoot guns in your back yard, I consider myself knowledgable enough.  This is another great entry in a genre that is marked with some masterpieces, and which somehow always captures more about America than other genres.

He gets that the West was a microcosm of civilization, going from lawless to quasi-civilized in just a few short years, and that the people who became the pillars of the community came from both sides of the law.  And honor.

Harris also understands just where love fits in all this.  Renee Zellweger showed up and my hackles rose.  But her character was exactly right for the time and for the story.  As the town whore explained, women have it hard out here.  Love is mostly for men.

I hope my friend gets over his little RZ wall and sees this movie.  He’ll love it.