In Would You Survive a Movie Gunfight?, Shea Serrano offers a thorough look at the form and function of movie gunfights and what it takes to get through one alive.
The Best Times to Movie-Shoot Someone
• When it’s a revenge thing.
• When you’re a law-enforcement officer and they’re a bad guy.
• When you’re a bad guy and they’re a law-enforcement officer.
• When it’s the Wild West and someone is riding toward you on horseback. (This one is great because they always roll off the back of the horse, or, if you’re lucky, they get their foot trapped in one of the stirrups and then the horse drags ’em a good ways.)
• When they’re standing on top of a building and you shoot them and they fall off very dramatically. (They have to crash through an awning.)
I have so many problems with Serrano's top list of movie gunfights, but I'm busy finishing up a nice piece about the shortcomings of Smurfs 3: The Lost Village as revolutionary praxis.
