The Last Real Cowboys (Short)
In Jeff Lester’s short, “The Last Real Cowboys,” we see Tar (Billy Bob Thornton) and Slope (Mickey Jones) sitting around the campfire, eating beans and talking. Though they seem to have a good life punching cows (was that really a thing in the 1800s?), Slope has found himself longing for a simpler life, back when Tar and he were kids…and skipped. Wait, what? Lester and screenwriter Rudy Gaines (who came up with the story together) take the iconography of the Western, embody it in tone and filmmaking style, and then ask Jones and Thornton to turn it on it’s head while continuing to embody the type of cowboy we saw in the westerns of old. That Jones and Thornton do so well at playing the disparity that comes out by the end is not surprising at all, and how they sell it makes this a genuinely enjoyable play on an old formula.
