This movie was long overdue — it had been lying around on my laptop for almost a year now. Finally, last friday after dinner we sat down and saw it.

My first reaction was of disappointment — I don’t know if it was something wrong with the print, but the voice-over was noticeably out of sync at several places in the movie, and it looked like a really shoddy job of dubbing. But that was a mostly cosmetic nit-pick.

Beyond that first reaction, the opening music score immediately caught my attention. It was hard to count how many desi songs had been “inspired” by bits and pieces of that one single score.

I guess everyone knows the story by now — it is, afterall, an old and highly popular movie. So I won’t blabber about the plot. The movie is everything that it claims to be — the classic western, fabulous music, amazing screenplay and direction, and beautiful cinematography — and more. I could easily see how scenes from Indian classics such as Sholay could have been inspired by some scenes of GBU.

The movie is full of attitude. Scenes of several minutes without any dialogues. Swaggering walks. Sideways glances. Unconventional camera angles. Good lighting (or lack thereof) — several things that reminded me of another great movie, The Godfather.

Clint Eastwood once and for all immortalizes the stereotype of the cowboy in this movie. But the character that really ads life for the movie is [[http://imdb.com/name/nm0908919/|Eli Wallach]] as the indomitable Tuco. Interestingly, even some of the famous Matrix lines can be traced back to this movie. Tuco in one scene says, “If you want to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” — isnt’t that familiar? :-)

A good //masala// movie that also manages to bring in some issues of the civil war in the US. A long movie (almost 3 hrs) that doesn’t bore you. This is //so// the Sholay of Hollywood :-)