'80s Western Movie I Just Saw for the First Time

"All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream." (T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land, quoted at the front of Lonesome Dove, 1985)

"I've always wanted to do something like this . . . bring back the balls of the Western but also taint it with this absurdity and anything goes." (Josh Brolin in an interview with Robert K. Elder, Wizard: The Magazine of Comics, Entertainment and Pop Culture, July 2010)

I just started Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning book which was adapted into the TV miniseries, Lonesome Dove (three and a half stars total). I was surprised to learn that Larry McMurtry also wrote the books which were adapted into the movies Hud (1963), The Last Picture Show (1971), Terms of Endearment (1983), their various sequels, and most recently, the Oscar-winning screenplay for E. Annie Proux's Brokeback Mountain (2005). It's also noteworthy to me that the two main stars of Lonesome Dove (1989) went on to make the two best western movies so far in the new millennium - Robert Duvall in Open Range and Tommy Lee Jones in The Missing (both 2003). I've always liked Diane Lane but until now, I'd never seen her in anything worth sharing. Finally I have proof that she's better than the roles she's taken since Lonesome Dove. Speaking of Diane Lane's character, I never realized how much of a staple the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold is in the Western genre. When it was first announced that Megan Fox would play the romantic interest of Jonah Hex (out in theaters June 18), I was a little upset that the best way they could think to squeeze her in was by making her a prostitute. Turns out that might be the only historically accurate part of that movie (minus the Moulin Rouge meets MTV costume). Tying the second quote above into Lonesome Dove, there's a scene where cattle get struck by lightning and their horns glow blue. I'm not sure if that actually occurs in nature, or if it's just "absurdity and anything goes" like Jonah Hex. If you're not too upset by that, or by a slo-mo snake attack, or by a story where all the men solicit the same prostitute, then you'll enjoy Lonesome Dove just fine.