T.W. Day

First, David Gyasi was a good choice for Reeves. He is a fine actor and totally credible, even delivering awful dialog and working with terrible direction. Ron Perlman was just wasted in his part. Clearly, Perlman was brain damaged from his time on Sons of Anarchy. That sort of experience can produce permanent wounds. I can't think of any other reason why an actor of his ability and reputation would have become involved in this mess. Frank Grillo. surprisingly, pulls a decent performance out of a terrible script, which was a major accomplishment. The direction (loosely defined) on "Hell on the Border" was awful, maybe even mailed in from another country. Wes Miller should change his name and occupation. If there was post-production work done on this movie, it is likely a compelling argument for re-criminalizing marijuana. Everything about the production smells of too much ganga in the room. The editing, if there was any, was even worse. The many long, meaningful stares could have been cut to seconds, which might have made the finished movie less than 45 minutes. There is no continuity, no flow, and even not that much of an attempt to tell a story. Couple that with awful audio work and this is a good movie to play in the background while you are reading a book or even writing one. The dialog is totally lost in the background noise and music. The music was totally inappropriate for the genre. This won't even be satisfying if you are a Clint Eastwood fan. It is just a mess.

"Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band" is an amazing whitewash of how greed and trust should never be in the same room. The wrap-up is pretty typical of the whole film. Robertson ignores the death of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and leaps ahead in time to his imagined last moments with Levon Helm on Helm's deathbed. (Helm's wife, Sandy, says that never happened.) There was a blazingly obvious way Robertson could have provided some credibility to his claims, since The Band's real musician and all-around-fill-in-the-spaces member, Garth Hudson, is still live and well. No mention of him in this self-promoting hack piece, either, other than a text blip at the credits acknowledging that Hudson is living with his wife in Woodstock, NY. Robertson is desperate to be taken seriously. His book, "Testimony: A Memoir," he claims pretty much to have taught every great guitar player from the 60s on how to play, to have written music that in no way has he ever approximated since the friends he back-stabbed stopped doing the work, and to be all around brilliant and underappreciated. He doesn't mention the fact that his mic was always off because he can't sing and doesn't seem to notice that pretty much everyone who picks up a guitar can play him under the table. If there was a lick of truth to this farce, Garth Hudson would have had more than a few words to add to the story. It is a sad story that has been repeated ad nauseum in pop music: a band forms and creates music far greater than the sum of the parts, some greedy fool imagines he's the core of the group, the group falls apart, and no one from the group ever produces a lick of creativity again.