Oooh doggies, check out the latest from the ever versatile Cohen Brothers (O Brother, Where Are Thou, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading). True Grit is a remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic (the movie that won John Wayne an Oscar) that in turn was adapted from the novel by Charles Portis. This time around, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and John Brolin star, and it looks seriously good.
Book Jacket:
Charles Portis has been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost comic writers. True Grit is his most famous novel. First published in 1968, and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne (for which he won his only Academy Award), it tells the story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, who sets out in the winter of eighteen seventy-something to avenge the murder of her father.
Since not even Mattie (who is no self-doubter) would ride into Indian Territory alone, she “convinces” one-eyed “Rooster” Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshall, to tag along with her. As Mattie outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten types in her path, as her performance under fire makes them eat their words, her indestructible vitality and harsh innocence by turns amuse, horrify, and touch the reader. What happens—to Mattie, to the gang of outlaws unfortunate enough to tangle with her—rings with the dramatic rightness of legend and the marvelous overtones, the continual surprises, of personality.
True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight and unflinching, like Mattie herself, who tells the story a half-century later in a voice that sounds strong and sure enough to outlast us all.
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