Just the Ticket #50: Big Milestone, Bad History, Worse Blood
Attention, Ticketholders: This is awesome! Today's post marks some major milestones in the history of TimeDrop Productions (my fake, unprofitable company, which has been bringing you such publications as Just the Ticket, SW@ Ticket, Coming Distractions, and Piece Offerings since 2004). Not only is it my fiftieth issue of Just the Ticket, it is my 200th post on Blogger, and as of last night, Just the Ticket crossed the 1,000th pageview mark despite some technical difficulties with yesterday's draft of issue #49: Gerry Got A Gun.
While we're making history, let's start in the place where history is made every day: the History Channel's three-part miniseries, Hatfields & McCoys. If you've read anything about the presentation, you probably don't need to hear yet another critic go on about the dusty, sepia-toned cinematography or the long-winded, unevenly paced scripting, which I didn't find any issue with until the last hour or so of uneventful wrap-up. The feud between the West Virginia and Kentucky families, kindled by Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield's (Kevin Costner, Dances With Wolves) desertion of his company during the final days of the American Civil War and perpetuated by one damned thing after another, including a back-and-forth exchange of homicides and a real-life Romeo & Juliet romance between Johnse Hatfield (Matt Bar, Hellcats) and the devious Nancy McCoy (Jena Malone, Sucker Punch).
Exploiting the feud for personal gain is disgraced ex-Pinkerton "Bad Frank" Phillips (Andrew Howard, who played the extorting Russian drug dealer in Limitless), a character right up Howard's alley that lets the actor go just the right amount of too far.
Sure, the atmosphere was dreary, the killing was monotonous and easily avoidable on nearly every occasion, and even performances by magnum-caliber stars like Costner, Bill Paxton (who played McCoy family patriarch Randall McCoy), Powers Boothe (the rarely seen Judge "Wall" Hatfield), and an unrecognizable Tom Berenger (as Jim Vance, the Hatfield whose last straw pissed off the proverbial camel) were muffled shots in the distance when stacked up against the over-the-topness of the lesser-known cast members, but the historical significance and the information conveyed by the series were enough to hold my interest. Entertainment value and education do not necessarily require perfection, just adequacy. And Hatfields & McCoys was good enough.
Grade: C+
Curved relative to Bad Blood: A+
Direct-to-video knockoffs are the bastard children of Hollywood, and they don't come any more mulleted, snaggle-toothed, or unedjamacated than Bad Blood: Hatfields & McCoys.
Where the original's dreary brown atmosphere and frumpy Mormon compound wardrobe were effective, fairly accurate representations of post-Civil War America, Bad Blood settles for a constant brightness and costuming that is just, well, costume-y (and sometimes a little burlesque).
The plot of the original may have been long-winded, but it seems downright fleshy when compared with Bad Blood's Cliff's Notes version that takes unwelcome liberties with key points of the History Channel story and puts a new twist on the old saying "the book is better than the movie" (in this case, they're both technically movies, but you can consider the History Channel miniseries to be the more bookish of the two).
And don't get me started on the acting. I'll do a fine enough job by my own self. Every gunshot victim gasps and falls to their knees like William Shatner faking a heart attack, and goofy death scenes aside, the performances overall are just cartoonishly bad. I'll take an extreme imbalance of talent over the universally horrible any day. When the best acting comes courtesy of Christian Slater (Fox's twice-failed comedy Breaking In) and Jeff Fahey (such specimens of B-movie ridiculousness as Machete, Planet Terror, and Tornado Warning), and when the movie doesn't even have an entry on Wikipedia, you know you're in for something best gotten out of.
Good thing this movie didn't last as long as the feud.
F
Happy anniversary, y'all! Next issue I will finally get to Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. And now, a game of Clue: I killed Bad Blood in the living room with the Bic. Good night.
Exploiting the feud for personal gain is disgraced ex-Pinkerton "Bad Frank" Phillips (Andrew Howard, who played the extorting Russian drug dealer in Limitless), a character right up Howard's alley that lets the actor go just the right amount of too far.
Sure, the atmosphere was dreary, the killing was monotonous and easily avoidable on nearly every occasion, and even performances by magnum-caliber stars like Costner, Bill Paxton (who played McCoy family patriarch Randall McCoy), Powers Boothe (the rarely seen Judge "Wall" Hatfield), and an unrecognizable Tom Berenger (as Jim Vance, the Hatfield whose last straw pissed off the proverbial camel) were muffled shots in the distance when stacked up against the over-the-topness of the lesser-known cast members, but the historical significance and the information conveyed by the series were enough to hold my interest. Entertainment value and education do not necessarily require perfection, just adequacy. And Hatfields & McCoys was good enough.
Grade: C+
Curved relative to Bad Blood: A+
Direct-to-video knockoffs are the bastard children of Hollywood, and they don't come any more mulleted, snaggle-toothed, or unedjamacated than Bad Blood: Hatfields & McCoys.
Where the original's dreary brown atmosphere and frumpy Mormon compound wardrobe were effective, fairly accurate representations of post-Civil War America, Bad Blood settles for a constant brightness and costuming that is just, well, costume-y (and sometimes a little burlesque).
The plot of the original may have been long-winded, but it seems downright fleshy when compared with Bad Blood's Cliff's Notes version that takes unwelcome liberties with key points of the History Channel story and puts a new twist on the old saying "the book is better than the movie" (in this case, they're both technically movies, but you can consider the History Channel miniseries to be the more bookish of the two).
And don't get me started on the acting. I'll do a fine enough job by my own self. Every gunshot victim gasps and falls to their knees like William Shatner faking a heart attack, and goofy death scenes aside, the performances overall are just cartoonishly bad. I'll take an extreme imbalance of talent over the universally horrible any day. When the best acting comes courtesy of Christian Slater (Fox's twice-failed comedy Breaking In) and Jeff Fahey (such specimens of B-movie ridiculousness as Machete, Planet Terror, and Tornado Warning), and when the movie doesn't even have an entry on Wikipedia, you know you're in for something best gotten out of.
Good thing this movie didn't last as long as the feud.
F
Happy anniversary, y'all! Next issue I will finally get to Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. And now, a game of Clue: I killed Bad Blood in the living room with the Bic. Good night.
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