Leftpedal

our quest to watch all the Tommy Lee Jones movies

This is honorable, right?

My girlfriend and I are watching lots and lots of Tommy Lee Jones movies, whatever’s available on Netflix. We might not watch all of them, but we’re watching a lot of them. We might have to throw some different stuff in between in the queue, but here’s where we’ve been so far.

Why, you ask? I have no idea. Reviews may come later, but of the ones we’ve already watched, there were 2 I’d previously never heard of: The Eyes of Laura Mars and Blue Sky. We watched Laura Mars a while back, and not part of the current marathon, but it was pretty good. TLJ pretty artsy. Blue Sky we watched last night. Neither of us felt that Jessica Lange deserved her Academy Award, but this was a pretty good, yet disturbing movie. Definitely a TLJ classic that would not be on most people’s radar (I had never heard of it, actually, either).

Best so far? Overall movie: Coal Miner’s Daughter. (Yeah, I know, NCfOM was good, but it was a Coen movie. It was their movie, not TLJ’s movie. They used him for their own purposes. It was Lebowski, just not funny.)

Best TLJ performance? Well, Tommy Lee is Tommy Lee in almost every movie, however nuanced the TLJ performance. But why would you want to see a TLJ movie where he didn’t give you what you wanted? He was totally different in Laura Mars and JFK, though. But he was the vulnerable TLJ in Elah. The hard ass, but soft sided TLJ in Double Jeopardy. Sad TLJ in Blue Sky. Hard assed in The Fugitive; hard assed with humor in Marshalls. Director and dreamer TLJ in Melquiades. Dolittle TLJ in Coal Miner.

Anyway:

Tommy Lee Jones movies we’ve watched, to date, in our TLJ marathon:

No Country for Old Men

The Eyes of Laura Mars

In the Valley of Elah

The Fugitive

Coal Miner’s Daughter

U.S. Marshalls

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

JFK

Double Jeopardy

Blue Sky

Upcoming (the first 10 are the top 10 of the queue, others are down a bit):

The Package (*currently at home)

Blown Away

Broken Vows

Rules of Engagement

The Client

Heaven & Earth

Black Moon Rising

Stormy Monday

Nate & Hayes

Barn Burning

Natural Born Killers

Fire Birds

The Big Town

Yuri Nosenko

Back Roads