(NOTE LANGUAGE) The Western film The Power of the Dog is on the march to the Oscars, but don't count Sam Elliott as a fan -- in the least.
Elliot went off on Jane Campion's multiply-nominated film, during a chat in a new installment of Marc Maron's WTF Podcast, and he didn't hold back. "F*** no," he replied when Maron asked him if he liked it.
The 1883 star said, "There was a f***ing full-page ad out in the LA Times and there was a review, not a review, but a clip, and it talked about the 'evisceration of the American myth.' And I thought, 'What the f***?' This is [coming from] the guy that’s done Westerns forever," Elliott says.
"The evisceration of the American West? They made it look like -- what are all those dancers that those guys in New York who wear bow ties and not much else," he asked, meaning of Chippendales dancers.
"That's what all these f***ing cowboys in that movie look like," Elliott says of The Power of the Dog. "They're all running around in chaps and no shirts. There's all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f***ing movie," to which Maron correctly noted, "that's what the movie's about."
In the film, Benedict Cumberbatch's Phil Burbank is an apparently a closeted gay man who lashes out against his brother and his new wife.
Elliott calls Campion a "brilliant director," but added, "What the f*** does...this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West? And why in the f*** does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, 'This is the way it was.' That f***ing rubbed me the wrong way, pal."
"I took it personal," the Lonesome Dove veteran noted.