A friend of Gordon's loaned us his DVD boxed set of Hallmark's Lonesome Dove collection: Dead Man's Walk, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo. We started the first one today(well, technically yesterday since I'm up waaay too late), but only made it about 15 minutes in before chucking in the towel. Bad history and material culture faux pas aside, it was just bad filmmaking. When Gordon walks away from a western you know it's bad. The thing of it is, a year ago he probably would have stuck with it. Why? He said it before I could: our standards are higher because we don't watch TV anymore. More accurately, the only time we turn on the tube is to watch a movie or something else pre-recorded. We don't get cable, satellite, or even local broadcast these days...and we don't miss it.
What does watching the shlock that passes for entertainment do to people? It dulls them to the point that they think mediocre movies are worth watching. Watch enough drivel and even an Adam Sandler movie becomes bearable (by comparison, I guess). My time is too precious. I would have sat through the Larry McMurtry train wreck just to be sociable for my hubby, but luckily he lost patience pretty quickly. Lonesome Dove is pretty well-made, but neither of us were up for that depression-filled epic just now, so we went back to our books...
I watched it when it originally aired and found it good but angst-ridden and depressing. But then I found "Northern Exposure" too angst-ridden for my tastes, too.
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