She's a male fantasy: extremely hot and into drinking and shooting and eating pot cookies. Albert soon meets Theron's Anna, who is the perfect example of the "Cool Girl" Gillian Flynn describes in Gone Girl. The plot revolves around MacFarlane's sheep-farmer character, Albert, getting dumped by Amanda Seyfried's Louise, a vapid girl who soon takes up with the mustachioed Foy (Neil Patrick Harris, whose character poops into multiple hats).
Million ways to die in the west movie#
And for the most part, the depiction of women in the movie is what I would expect from MacFarlane. His co-writers are responsible for Fox's Dads. Yes, true, it's hard to say I wasn't warned. (Death by fart, folks.)īut didn't I know what I was getting into? After all, this is a movie written, directed, and starring man responsible for the "We Saw Your Boobs" Oscar song. And while you could say that Clinch's treatment of Anna gives the movie actual stakes, a comedy like this doesn't need those kind of stakes when it's aiming for laughs as broad as the ones Macfarlane's delivering here. The argument that, yes, women were treated poorly in the Old West, does not hold measure when MacFarlane's aim is clearly not period accuracy. That conclusion is, thankfully, averted when she hits him over the head with a rock and escapes. Same when he slaps her, and then, as she's on the ground, begins undressing as if he's about to rape her. But these deaths might have just as well been animated, they're so purposefully cartoonish.īut when Liam Neeson's bandit Clinch grabs the throat of his wife Anna, played by Charlize Theron, my stomach turned. (That one's a highlight of the trailer.) There are bar brawls and fires ignited by cameras. Another is slaughtered when a gigantic block of ice falls on top of him. The whole concept of Seth MacFarlane's western is that the 19th Century frontier was a place where one could quite easily die, and the deaths are, as one might expect, over the top.
So why did the abuse perpetrated against one of its female characters have to feel so disturbingly real? Ī Million Ways to Die in the West, the latest from Family Guy purveyor Seth MacFarlane, has violence written into its title.
Million ways to die in the west archive#
I wonder if they got Sarah Silverman to play the part of the Christian prostitute who would not have sex with her fiance because they were not married yet, because they thought a Jew playing the part of a Christian prostitute would be funnier, or they couldn't find a Christian that was willing to do it? I remember reading where Shelley Long almost did not take the part in Night Shift because her character was a prostitute.This article is from the archive of our partner. And the guy that wrote the part from where she showed up to the end of the movie - he could write funny. The guy that wrote the first part of the movie couldn't write funny. It was like they had two different screenwriters. But anyhow, she's not an outstanding comedic actress. It wasn't that the girl was an outstanding comedic actor. It wasn't a bad movie so much as it wasn't a good movie.īut as I'm reaching for the remote, the girl showed up. I watched the first 10 or 15 minutes or so, and I was about to turn it off.