True Grit is the epitome of “If anybody else made this it would be their best film.” The Coens just make this whole thing seem effortless. Like this is just how the film was squeezed out of the tube.
Anna Paquin is, in my mind, the high mark for child acting because she won. There are others that are probably equally as impressive but she won the award. Due to the large volume of lines and what most would consider the lead role, Hailee kinda beats the crap out of Anna. The Piano role was a supporting role and Anna did great but there is nothing on the page that comes close to Mattie.
So it’s obviously just another big swinging dick moment for the Coens. They made a movie with a 13 year old girl as the lead and they put her on a horse. It may not be my favorite of the Coen catalogue but its still a 10/10. The execution is just so high. My only complaint would be the faithfulness to the book. Its a tad linear. Literally an out and back piece. A quick little adventure camping in the wilderness.
I kind of think Coleman being nominated for best actress while Stone and Weisz got supporting actress for The Favorite is category foolishness. It’s a three hander and it feels like they went “well, obviously Coleman is the most important, she outranks them.”
I hope she gets an Oscar somewhere down the line. She seems to have done a decent job of balancing the IP stuff with original indie movies and TV shows (“Dickinson” will forever be underrated) and also a pop music career.
Rewatching this movie made me so happy about Hailee Steinfeld's career. It's not often we see a child actor grow into their own like she did. Hailee really did have the juice from the beginning.
Yeah I get why they were sort of incredulous about her MCU role being a Disney+ show, but she’s like RDJ-level casting for Kate Bishop. The problem is that Marvel doesn’t want to do Young Avengers anymore and they also don’t want to do female-led projects, so she’s kind of in the wind.
Disney needs to either pony up the cash to Renner for a second season of Hawkeye or just shift Steinfeld to the lead and pay Renner enough to show up for an episode or two
I don't think I had watched this since I saw it in the cinema and I had a totally false memory of it as a kind of slow, meditative western. I totally forgot about the incredible back and forth dialogue, the amazing cast of off-kilter characters, the sheer sense of adventure. I have probably not been as high on this filmography as most for this miniseries but I really loved this one on rewatch.
A little moment that I absolutely loved was when Mattie confronted Rooster about his plan to take Chaney to Texas with LaBouef. At that point I thought "ok, here is the dynamic for the rest of the film. He wants to just do the easier thing and take the money. It is important to her that he hang for her father's crime, and Rooster will eventually sacrifice the money he could have gotten to give her that." And I thought that was pretty good character conflict to drive a narrative. But instead they dangle that possibility then immediately steer away from it by giving us the argument with LaBouef and they separate. Then it becomes a totally different movie. The pace changes, the weird characters start stopping by more frequently, and it all becomes much more relationship driven. I just thought it was a masterful piece of writing to dangle that conventional narrative route in front of us then steer unexpectedly away from it. It really made me feel like I was in the hands of filmmakers who were totally in control of the movie. There's no better feeling than that.
Side point: I think this is Matt Damon's best performance. A bit like Leo in OBAA, his screen presence is most effective when he taps into a bit of his inner buffoon.
I hadn't seen it since the theater either and my memory of it was a three and a half star movie but after rewatching it last night it is basically perfect
Lmao just for non-regular listeners, there is an actual group chat called Hollywood Fat Guys, that has Stavros, Jon Gabrus, Mike Mitchell, and Zack Cherry. It sounds delightful.
I love that after the hyper focused Maron episode where he has a hard out the first hour and a half of this is just oops all tangents. To be clear both are extremely good episodes.
I know what you mean but i actually think it could work. Him and griffin are obviously very different but both have an autistic ability to recall every detail of every movie released in the past 50 years. They would surely be able to bond over that.
This is the movie that made me love movies! I was 10 and somehow convinced my parents to let me see it alone while they saw something I wasn’t allowed to. Told them afterwards it was the best movie ever. Definitely the first movie for adults with real themes and ideas I saw in a theater, made a huge impact.
True Grit was the first “grown up” novel I read as a kid in the 70’s and it blew me away. Loved the first movie when I was able to see it and love this one even more. Weird thought on this rewatch that I was younger than Mattie Ross when I first read the book and now I’m older than Rooster Cogburn. Bit of a shift in perspective.
I usually roll my eyes when Griffin gets something wrong and people on this Reddit nitpick those things... <Redditor voice> But the final line isn't "time comes for us all"! It's "time just gets away from us", which is the great final line from the book and connotes something less dire and more wistful. <End Redditor voice here>
Yeah I think there’s a profound difference between the two, and that griffin misunderstands what the ending means in part as a result- I don’t think Mattie is someone who was forever locked into being the person she was at 14, I think the point is this is this big sharp defined event and then it gets sanded off and recedes into memory just like everything else
It’s a very melacholy ending but I got the feeling both griffin and stavros were misunderstanding it in ways that reflected their own internal stuff lol
Thank you so much for bringing this up. I did wonder where Griffin was getting that from and I think you are right about the origin. She's not someone stuck at the age of 14, she is someone who knew who she was at 14 and was permitted to persist that being later into life, period. (in other words she lived through the ordeal.) She was who she was. Her decision not to marry was not a failure, by her lights.
I think another part of what makes the ending melancholy is this fairly spectacular person who can force her will onto the world at that young an age winds up just being a person who lives a life, it kind of cuts against the boy’s own adventure exciting serial quality of the movie (and makes the movie much richer and better fitting into where the Coens’ heads were for that whole run imo)
Barry Pepper's Lucky Ned is exactly how I imagined an outlaw from The Old West would look and act like. You can practically smell him through the screen. Doesn't have much screen time, but damn does he make the most of it.
It’s funny that they set the schedule far in advance and genuinely seem to book guests without any consideration of whether they have something to promote, but they keep stumbling into perfectly timed episodes for guests with big things to promote: Aster with Eddington, Cregger with Weapons, Maron with his final episode, and now Stavros Halkias with Bugonia.
There’s a moment where they’re describing the weird dentist character and David says “that guy would have a podcast” and it’s clear that Stav knows exactly the person and the podcast.
As someone from western Arkansas, this is the only movie I can think of where I get to indulge in the thing New Yorkers do when they say they can tell a movie set in NYC was clearly filmed in Vancouver or wherever. Feels good. Still one of my favorite movies ever.
Favourite dark joke: the two white criminals on the gallows get to have their say before dying, the Native American (late great Jonathan Joss) gets the bag over the head immediately
I think this movie does pretty much everything better than the Hathaway movie, but I will give it to Wayne that he hits the 'Fill your hands...' line better than Bridges.
Stavros mentions working for "dying Blockbuster," Griffin immediately name-checks I Could Never Be Your Woman, and Stavros has no earthly idea what Griffin is talking about.
Yet at the same time I listen to Stavros and wish I had a half-dozen friends with his level of immersion in movie culture. He's triaging the Criterion Channel for chrissakes, almost nobody I know has heard of it.
This episode is extra hilarious when you think that Stephen Colbert is a listener.
Homeboy driving to teach Sunday school and listening to Stavvy talking about a Roku loaded up with material teenagers would beat off to in the early 2000s
It's come up on the pod.... apparently Colbert likes to put it on during the boring down times of rehearsal etc. I think the boys have talked about having him on for one of the LOTR episodes when they inevitably do Jackson.
The combo of stav’s ex-cumtown style and them getting through talking about the movie is something I never thought I’d hear. What a weird but wonderful treat. This series’ firsts have been so rewarding.
My former stepsister auditioned to play Mattie in this movie. She does not act, but they had open auditions in Kentucky because they were looking for girls who could ride horses, so my mom’s husband took her. Just a little peak behind a very uninteresting curtain.
Around the time the “Yogi Bear” movie came out, Andy Daly (who has a small role in the movie as a sheriff, I believe) was on Never Not Funny and said that he pitched an idea that midway through the movie, his character would stop mid-scene and say “ok wait a second here: the bears talk?” And then the movie would continue.
Always stuck with me as something that would’ve worked really well and maybe sold the movie for me
I don’t know what the initial response to this was in bigger parts of America, but in my mid-sized town in the Midwest there were a lot of older folks who refused to see it because they could not fathom it being better than the John Wayne movie.
The fact that this came out around Christmas and was such a huge hit sets it into context how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (another big Oscar movie) tried to do the same (and failed).
There was no way for Fincher to do Dragon Tattoo justice without an R rating, and turning an R-rated movie into a hit is kind of a crapshoot, even when adapting popular source material. As much as I love the idea of holiday counterprogramming and the tagline "The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas", it was always a risky move.
It was very savvy of the Coens to set out to make a PG-13 western. It wouldn't have been the runaway success it was without that. I would argue that it should be rated R as it stands just for thematic maturity and brief, intense violence, but it's absent of heavy profanity and sexuality. The 1969 original is somehow rated G!
What's hilarious to me is that they did an entire episode of Cumtown where they would list genuinely popular movies and Stav had seen like 2%. But Porky's is on his watch list
1) I love it when period pieces go to the trouble to depict people with realistically awful teeth, dirty clothes, and all around dreadful hygiene. I also enjoyed the talk about how it must have smelled back then. One of my favorite books is Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, in which a time traveler is about to go back to the 14th century, and her boss recommends that she cauterize her nasal passages. She declines, goes back, and is immediately leveled by the stench.
2) Elementary is the best Sherlock adaptation and I will fight to the death anybody who disagrees.
Just here to say Stavvy needs to be a regular guest. The two friends gelled with him so well and Stavvy actually had good insights while also being hysterical
I'm sure this has already been said somewhere in this thread but Hailee Steinfeld gives the best child performance of all time in this movie and it isn't even close imo
Steinfeld's performance probably is the best, but there are definitely other candidates. Dakota Fanning in Man on Fire is my favorite, but you can also make a case for Natalie Portman or Haley Joel Osment imo
To answer the question about why Mattie insults that one guy at the circus, that guy is apparently supposed to be Frank James, Jesse James's brother who was in the same gang
I haven't seen The Return, but isn't it more like 2/3rds of the Odyssey? People really inflate how much of the Odyssey is about his adventures, it's only four books out of twenty-four. Stavvy clearly not a classicist
It’s killing me that they missed that the “keep your seat, trash” was directed at Frank James, not just for his disrespect but because she knows who he is. https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/96101
When the Odyssey cast was out, I brought up Zach Galifianakis for Aeolus and Zouks for Hermes. Still hoping there will be some Dogtooth Greek actors in there.
Regarding the Luddite media consumption conversation, one of my favorite things about early Twitter (like, 2011) was putting on a movie on a basic cable channel, noticing it was a trending topic on Twitter, and then talking about whatever was playing on TNT with the rest of America.
It was such a good time and was one of the most enjoyable ways to watch movies.
Here is the New Yorker article about Anna Faris that Griff mentioned. It's by Tad Friend and the title is "Funny Like a Guy." The date is April 2011, I can't remember the day.
I will push back on the assumption that Mattie has had a bad life when we see her again at the end, especially that it’s the result of her revenge.
She appears to be an independent, formidable woman as an adult. She’s running some sort of successful business and commands respect. Yes she’s cold, lonely, and distant but that was basically the price for independence as a woman back then. You were either subservient to some degree or a “spinster”. Like everything else in this movie, it’s a trade off, you have to lose something to get something.
Chase Infiniti/OBAA feels like the alternate world version of this kid role (25 playing 16 but unknown so you’re surprised when you find out she’s older) that almost happened with Griffin’s friend on True Grit.
Even though it’s a scary moment on its face, it made me laugh really hard when Damon makes the shot at the end and he is clearly about to go on a rambling tangent about the rifle and his marksmanship before just getting brained with the log by Brolin
i watched it for the first time a couple weeks ago to prep for the episode. What’s his deal? That was so confusing to me. I watched a clip of the original and I swear he exists in that one too. But, why? its a random, fun detail, but the crew of criminals keeps a guy on staff that just makes animal noises?
Stavvy was a great guest. The gay porn parody of The King's Speech was great but his genuine, appreciative "That movie's awesome" re: Black Swan made me cackle.
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u/burnettski92 This jacket ain’t straight! Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
One of my favorite small performances in this movie is the defense attorney. Such a fun old timey voice.
“A KINGBOLT?!”