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Love hearing all these positive reactions! I have a friend out here from Texas who hated it
What?!
First of all, glad to hear that you loved it. Nearly nine months into the year, and it's definitely my favorite of the year so far as well.
As for my Texas friend who hated it - full disclosure, he's one of my business partners (and yeah, yeah, "You need a new business parter," etc.). He's smart as hell, and usually has fantastic taste, but for some reason he's an outlier on this one. And trust me, I've been giving him relentless sh*t for it. He saw it two weeks early at a private screening, also with a Q&A with the director, and he immediately got on our Slack channel to tell us about it. Critic reviews at that point we're still at 99%, and when he started tearing it down, I was thinkingmaybe this is just one of those pretentious movies that critics love that the rest of us will hate. I also figured it was probably inauthentically Texas, and that had something to do with his hatred. Here are some of his complaints, word for word...
- "1/3 of the way in I was like, 'What is this movie even about?'"
- "The biggest issue was that it was completely unmotivated. They tried to subvert the motivation and be cute and it was terrible."
- "I was having a hard time buying Chris Pine and also the whole 'Mexican Injun' talk felt like leftover pages from Young Guns 2."
- "The director was literally there to introduce the movie and had nothing positive to say about it. He was like, 'I felt like we got to some good themes, but who knows. Come see me at the bar afterwards.' I really wanted to have things to talk to him about, but was just at a loss."
My retort, the second I got out of the theater, two weeks later (apologies if this offends any of the ladies)...
"Guys, I'm afraid XXXXX may have been on his period the other night, because Hell or High Water is fantastic. At times, sure, it's a little too twangy, a little too earnest, and Jeff Bridges is a little too Jeff Bridgesy, but man, overall, I loved it. Packed audience in The Dome gave it a big round of applause at the end, too."
Since then, I almost feel bad, because my friend clearly sees the overwhelming love for this movie, and has definitely backed off a bit. He almost feels left out. He even swears they had to have shown a rough cut at his screening, to which I laughed at him for even trying that excuse.
Anyway, in the above quotes, I'm sure that's how I sound to many of you on here at times, but oh well. I swear he's a great guy, not a pretentious ******, and a loyal Texan. Ha, that was definitely a line-in-the-sand moment for us, but we're all good now.