LAST OF THE MOHICANS (REVISITED)

Watched this film again the other night for the maybe ninth or tenth time and it still holds up, one of those flicks I can watch anytime and still enjoy. In some ways it even gets better. Daniel Day-Lewis was never more beautiful, even when certain shots reveal that he's sort of an unusual looking dude, he still comes across as exquisitely handsome like a true classic Hollywood movie star.

And he's also one of the most consistently great film actors in movie history. Unlike Brando—or his closest (more contemporary) competitor Johnny Depp, who push the limits of a character until they're doing things you never saw an actor do before (and often come off looking like fools or even "bad" actors though always original), Day-Lewis so completely embodies the character he's playing nothing he does seems unnatural, or even unexpected, yet everything seems so extraordinarily particular each character is as individually unique as any real person is.

I said that better when explaining to someone over dinner why I loved his acting, including in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But everything about this movie works, all the acting (Madeleine Stowe was never more beautiful or grounded and Wes Studi perfectly embodies one of the greatest film villains ever) and the directing and writing, the camera work and editing (those vistas, those faces) even the score (it still moves me the way classic Hollywood scores can).

But it's Day-Lewis's film and he pulls it off so well I never doubt when I'm watching it that he really is running through forests and up mountainsides like a native to that landscape, or loading powder and "ball" into an old musket while on the run or acting and speaking like a white man raised by a Mohican father in colonial "America" would.