I have always loved Westerns. When I was a kid, I'd watch them with my dad. Saturday afternoons on the couch in the living room. In the weird formlessness of Sunday nights. He had a kind of magic, my dad. This ability to squirm around in the upper reaches of the cable channels and, like he had some kind of personal pinky-swear deal with the gods of static and strangeness, pull down all kinds of oddities.
I watched Jeremiah Johnson with him a dozen times, and A Man Called Horse. I saw Duck, You Sucker! when I was too young to understand anything more than the motorcycles and the dynamite and The Missouri Breaks when I was too young to understand anything at all. I still consider The Outlaw Josey Wales one of the most perfect American stories ever told.
But it isn't my favorite. No, my favorite Western of all time? The grand horse opera that eclipses them all? That would be Red Dead Redemption.
No, really. I'm at least 95 percent serious here, and I will fight you. Among all video games, it remains (at six years old now, with a sequel in the works) one of the most physically gorgeous and emotionally layered.