cowboy love story

Did you like Amores Perros? Do you care about Texas? Do you care about the border? Were you a little let down that, after all the cowboy hype, the guys in Brokeback were technically more like sheep hands?

I saw The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada last weekend and I really loved it. As it started I thought, ohh, it's a cowboy love story! Not gay, but definitely love. It's about two cowboys who are friends, and one of them is shot dead. One of them is Texan and the other is Mexican, but those are very fluid categories, huh. So the one who's left alive has to carry his friend's body back to Coahuila, Mexico, to be buried. And he kidnaps the murderer and brings him along.

I care about all of the things in the first paragraph [except the last one, because, ehh, semantics, right? When people say Brokeback is about gay cowboys, what they're really saying is it's about gay men] and also I've been thinking alot about grieving lately, and this is a pretty powerful portrait of grief. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it's cathartic as hell.

Maintaining borders is hard effing work, that's what it made me think.