The Thicket review – Peter Dinklage is a bounty hunter in harsh western with unusual chill

Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis star in a horse opera set in a snowbound world of bars, brothels and wide open spaces Here is a western starring Peter Dinklage, but forget hot sun-baked gullies and leather-skinned cowboys riding sweatily through rattlesnake country. The Thicket takes place in a hard, snowbound wilderness interspersed with equally hard, snowbound little townships consisting mainly of bars and brothels. You can see the breath in the air and the blood on the snow. The plot is staple horse opera: a kidnapped maiden must be rescued by a motley group of good-ish guys with mixed motives, headed up by Dinklage playing a bounty hunter character offering a similar vein of dry, world-weary cynicism as his breakthrough role as Tyrion in Game of Thrones, only much less aristocratic. He is joined by Gbenga Akinnagbe as his right hand man, with whom Dinklage has nice chemistry, and Levon Hawke, as a naive young Christian whose sister has been kidnapped by ruffians. The ruffians a...

The secret to living longer: join a club

The documentary Join or Die examines the decline of organizations in America – and how it’s fueled a national crisis

Between the 1970s and 1990s, the number of Americans who attended a single local civic meeting in a year plummeted by 40%. The number who went to a single meeting of a club – say, the Rotary or a local tennis team – dropped by 50%. Even the number of picnics Americans joined dropped by 60%. And as the social scientist Robert Putnam has been telling us for decades, this matters – in fact, it may be a question of life or death.

That’s because, as Putnam has told audiences, “your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.” And it’s not just a matter of our own health – it’s about the health of democracy itself.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CxGU0P3
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

The Portable Door review – Harry Potter-ish YA fantasy carried by hardworking cast