Thanks to people like Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and Lawrence Kasdan, I'm a huge fan of the Western genre. (Yes, Lawrence Kasdan. What of it? Silverado rocks!) So when I read that Warner Bros. was bankrolling a Western with Brad Pitt as Jesse James and Casey Affleck as the man who (finally) put Jesse in a pine box, I was more than a little intrigued. Then I learned that Andrew Dominik (Chopper) would be directing, that Ridley Scott (one of my favorites) was producing, and that the supporting cast would include Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel and Ted Levine. I was officially psyched for this movie.

Unfortunately that was about two years ago. So where the heck is the movie already? Its release date has been pushed around more violently than a Big Mac at a vegan rally, but what gives? It's got BRAD PITT in it, right? How tough is it to release a Brad Pitt movie these days? Well, according to The L.A. Times, the flick's been met with some pretty unfriendly test screening audiences. Reports also indicate that director Dominik has his preferred cut, but Pitt and Scott also have a version that they like. One of the cuts apparently runs over three hours long; WB wants something more Clint Eastwood-y, whereas Mr. Dominik seems to be shooting for something a bit more Terrence Malick-ish. Good thing they have three-time Oscar winner Michael Kahn helping out in the editing room.

Seems to be a prickly issue all around, but the thing only cost about $30 million, which is probably about as low-budget a studio Western as you'll ever find these days. Based on the book by Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is presently scheduled for release on September 21. And I bet they shorten the title too.

You might remember my news in November that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was gearing up to come out next month. Now that we're just days away from February, there is still no release date for the film. IMDb does have a bunch of European release dates for the end of the year, but it's easy to change or bump those even further, so I doubt that's any indication of a North American release date. Personally, I think they got held up by the exorbitantly long title.

Sam Rockwell, who plays Robert's brother, Charley Ford, recently talked to the Calgary Sun, and gave a few more details on the film while out promoting Joshua at Sundance. From the mouth of Rockwell: "I haven't even looped it. They're still editing it." He continues to say that the film was long, so they're making some cuts and "fine-tuning" it. I would assume the film will play like a pitch-perfect masterpiece after over a year of cuts and tuning! The meandering completion of the film doesn't seem to have dashed Rockwell's hopes, and he describes it as a movie with "a lot of indie sensibility."

I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that they're also all smacking themselves for casting Brad Pitt over Christopher Eigeman, like I suggested in November. Look at that picture of Jesse James above. Robert Ford didn't shoot James, the famous outlaw just jumped in a time machine to become a delightfully verbose indie actor!