Last Night At The Alamo

The events on the last night in the existence of a little suburban Houston pub. It has to be closed down for development reasons but one of the regular customers, Cowboy, seems to have friends in high places.

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  • ★★★½ review by nrh on Letterboxd

    dead end sad sacks drink to commemorate the last night before their beloved bar gets torn down. with each drink a layer of delusion is torn away, the kind of delusion that's almost an article of faith, the kind that gets you through the day.

    as a long night of the soul narrative inside a barroom the closest comparison is iceman, but where o'neill's space is a notional one this is physical; you can smell the stale lone stars and the sweat, the years on the walls.

    this isn't as strong as pennell's great the whole shootin' match, which is one of the great american films, but it is hard to shake the feeling that he wasn't getting at something with these, a kind of true american vernacular art filmmaking. this has the rhythm of a rambling conversation that turns into a confession and then maybe something worse. strange strange work of the highest order.

  • ★★★½ review by Evan on Letterboxd

    “Meet the Houston Barflies who Voted for Reagan”

    Is it possible to like what a director is trying to get at while also finding all of his good ol’ boy characters really gross (and not in an endearing way)?

  • ★★★★ review by Patrick Pryor on Letterboxd

    The first half of this movie had me reaaaaal worried about its admiration for these good ol' boy rednecks who I would actively avoid running into in real life. These chuckleheads are racist, homophobic conservatives who are NOT cute or quaint or folksy or funny or however some Republican wants to paint his constituents. Luckily, Pennell snatches the ten gallon hats off these barflies and debunks some Western myths. Love to see that swaggering machismo snipped'n'clipped! More Cowboy humiliation, less sweaty idjits ripping pages from a cursing thesaurus and shouting at their wimmin', please!

  • ★★★★★ review by Graham L. Carter on Letterboxd

    Why don't you go throw a cat off a bridge or something.

  • ★★★★ review by Sidney Shear on Letterboxd

    "Why do you curse so much?"

    An inmersive, seedy look at the last night of a regional Texan dive bar, this small and touching tribute if full of colorful and eccentric characters that will remind anyone of someone they know. It has so much more depth than I was expecting in how Cowboy's image digresses and the on screen relationships sway.

    Gotta love the speech against Redford & Travolta, so real!

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