Movie Watch: The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

We actually ending up renting this from iTunes as a kind of half experiment, half need for western. The movie is simply excellent, a kind of slow and thoughtful exercise on Jesse James and the genre in general. The movie relies on very little in terms of generic motifs or plot devices and instead has a hard focus on storytelling and character development. It's rather haunting in it's beauty and Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck pull off simply brilliant performances, though the latter feels more like a standout role.

iTunes worked pretty well. I don't think there's any way to view the movie while it is download, which is a bit of a downer, but the movie itself downloaded in about an hour or so and we were ready to roll. Image quality was good, but of course we are still in the SDTV world...