The pain of it

True Grit

(1969)

Well, hell, yeah: of course they gave Duke an Oscar®--who were they gonna give it to?--Kim Freakin' Darby? Glen Freakin' Campbell?

Buzz has it that the Coens' version (which I'll be seeing in a couple of days) retains a lot more of the language of Charles Portis's novel (whose editor, I just learned, is an author and a friend of mine). Well, if their script is better than this one, I'm ready to put their film--which has actual actors in the cast--in the pantheon right now, along with the novel, because the script I just saw performed, often poorly, is one of my favorite non-Tarantino scripts in a long, long time.

Oh, biggest surprise: the use of the verb "to bust a cap" in exactly the 1990s gangsta sense.