Download Free Lone Star

I saw this film 5 times in General Release. It was like a ride that I
would get on. As the theater went dark, and the story began - up and
down, back and forth - moving from scene to scene. "Oh, yeah now this
part. Oh, yeah, then there was that whole part - that relationship.
Those characters have that history..."

I think my single favorite aspect of this film was the way the
flashbacks are done. The camera just pans between eras. It's so
incredibly effective.

And what great one-liners blended into the dialog!

My ears don't pick out speech well, and since some of the characters
mumble it did take me all those viewings to get all the lines in the
film. Now it's on DVD, so, If your ears are like mine you can get
English subtitles in the tricky parts, and get the whole thing the
first viewing, even the English translations of the Spanish - assuming
you don't know what phrases like "Lo siento" mean...

I was thrilled when this film was nominated by the motion picture
academy for best screen play. It lost to "Fargo", a worthy competitor..

The move Buffalo '66 was a great movie! Must see! .

Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the Ring Watched this again in preparation for The Hobbit. This is a classic..

I have never seen this movie.

John Sayles wrote the original screenplay for, and directed, "Lone
Star." If his script fails to portray the development and intersection
of ethnic relations, marital relations, migration, cultural
assimilation, politics, education, big business, and even the army in
the southern and western United States, from the Treaty of Payne's
Landing and eviction of the Seminoles from Florida in 1832 to the
cross-border migration of Mexicans to south Texas in the 1990's, it's
not for lack of trying. The sweep of his screenplay aspires to be
nothing less than multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-class,
multi-marriage -- in a word, epic. . . . Alas, the script does
ultimately fail. It fails because the screenwriter spends too much time
having characters lecture each other for the benefit of the audience
and too little time creating dramatic incidents through which the
audience might see important issues articulated, developed, and
resolved. As Laura Miller puts it in her Salon review, "The independent
filmmaker John Sayles reminds me of Gertrude Stein's description of
Ezra Pound: 'He is a village explainer. All very well if you happen to
be a village. If not, not.'" More simply, Sayles is not Chekhov, and
his movie is not "The Ox-Bow Incident" or "To Kill a Mockingbird." . .
. The acting, or perhaps it is the direction of the acting, is a
problem here too. Character actor Chris Cooper plays a rural sheriff
faced with two cold cases -- a 40-year-old homicide and a father he
never knew -- with such lack of affect that you want to kick some life
into the guy. (I saw him as Sheriff Deeds, all right, but kept hearing
the same dull voice he would later bring to FBI operative Robert
Hanssen in "Breach.") Comely Elizabeth Peña plays his romantic interest
with a ground-down-by-life monotone and an accent that sounds more
South Bronx than South Texas. Miriam Colon, as Peña's restaurateur
mother, is given almost nothing but acerbic, if not hateful, lines to
deliver. Even the wonderful Frances McDormand, who received the Academy
Award for her role in "Fargo" the same year that "Lone Star" came out,
is over-the-top in a comic turn as Sheriff Deeds' ex-wife Bunny. Only
Kris Kristofferson, as the heavy Charlie Wade, and Joe Morton, as an
Army colonel who's all spit, vinegar, and heart, are consistently fun
to watch. . . . One final cavil: the plot, such as it is, moves forward
through luck and happenstance, not through the logic of real life..