Cowboys and Aliens and Cowboy Chili

This week, we check out this summer’s Cowboys and Aliens, and have some good ol’ fashioned Cowboy Chili.

Cowboy Chili

2 T canola oil1 (3 pound) beef chuck roast, cut into 1/2-inch cubes or chili meat of your choice
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 medium onions, chopped
1 small jalapeno chopped
1 T plus 1 t chile powder, divided
1/4 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t crushed red pepper flakes
1 T chopped garlic
1 (28-ounce) can chopped tomatoes, strained, juice reserved

• Start by browning the meat and season with salt and pepper.

• Once browned, combined all the ingredients in a stew pot or a crock pot. Simmer over low for 4-6 hours.

Morgan’s Take: For a western movie, my first thought was chili. That was it. It’s simple, easy to make, and is hearty and tasty. You might notice that this chili recipe is bean free, and that’s mainly because I don’t really like beans. It was super simple to find a recipe without them, and on the flip side they are super simple to add if you decide you want them. We went with ground beef instead of the roast A because it was cheaper and B because we were only making a small batch.

The flavor profile on this is amazing. I loved it. I really loved the cinnamon especially, which kind of provides a little hint of sweet in the savory. It did come out a little spicy hot for my taste, but that’s my bad cause I screwed up on the scaling of the recipe. It wasn’t bad, just spicy. This is definitely something that I would like to play around with again.

Final Grade: A-

Andy’s Take: I like chili. So when Morgan suggested we do chili for this movie, I was really excited. I had originally thought BBQ of some sort, but chili was a super welcome option.

This was some damn fine chili, especially for a first chili attempt by us. It was pretty spicy due to the amount of jalapeno (when we cut the beef down we forgot to cut the jalapeno down) but I loved it. The cinnamon was a strange addition for me, but then once I actually tasted it, it was fantastic. I don’t know why more things don’t use cinnamon. Overall, I’d definitely make this again. It was the perfect meal for a cold night.

Final Grade: A

Cowboys and Aliens is a summer blockbuster in every sense of the word. It’s got James Bond, Indiana Jones, Sam Rockwwell, explosions, and cowboys. On the production side, it’s got Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Jon Favreau, as well as a ton of other big names, attached to it.

James Bond wakes up in the middle of the desert with some weird thing on his wrist, goes into town, beats up Indiana Jones’s son, then aliens show up, kill people, and take people. After the dust settles, a group of the survivors go after the alien scumbags and cowboy style adventure ensues.

Morgan’s Take: I’m not a big fan of westerns or space-y movies, so honestly, the main appeal of this movie for me was the total craziness of it. I was surprised by how much that I actually enjoyed the film. It was pretty much exactly what you would expect from a movie called Cowboys vs Aliens. There were cowboys and aliens and they did indeed face off.

This is a picture of horses running away from an alien ship

I will say this, the aliens were pretty freaking sweet. I thought they were original and looked pretty badass, and were just nifty and generally well done. Thinking back, I don’t really have any complaints about the movie other than sometimes the characters did really stupid things, and I wasn’t a huge fan of the female lead. I thought she was pretty freaking lame, especially with the twist they threw in.

Final Grade: B+

Andy’s Take: I don’t normally care about westerns. I’ve only seen a few that I really like, and tend to just ignore the rest. That said, I really dug the western style of this movie. I’ve seen enough alien invasion movies that I was really glad to see it in a different environment. And in fact, even if there weren’t any aliens, this team would have made a really great western. But there were aliens, so that’s even better.

James Bond has an alien hand cannon

I usually complain about people in movies doing stupid stuff, things that just are out of character and have zero intelligence attached to them, simply thrown into the movie to put the protagonists into increasingly bad situations. To my surprise, there wasn’t really anything like that in this. The characters reacted like humans would, and didn’t piss me off while watching. There’s one point where a boy is given a knife by Indiana Jones, and then a bit after he hears a noise and goes to investigate. Which is something a kid with new found power (a knife) would do. Plans sometimes backfire and in hindsight look like stupid decisions, but at the time they seem like the right thing to do.

The aliens are actually some of the coolest aliens I’ve seen in movies lately. They’re like an insect-ish amphibian with snarling eyes. Yes, even their eyes snarl. And they’re armored, so guns do little (unless shot in the head, natch). And, to my surprise, the film also shows that the aliens aren’t “stupid” and can carry grudges against individual humans.

There’s a huge spoiler warning in the next paragraph, so skip ahead if you don’t want to read it

The worst part of the movie is that the love interest turns out to be some sort of magical alien. She dies in Bond’s arms, and then indians burn her, then she magically revives in the fire as if nothing happened. She says some bullshit like “I took this form because I needed to talk to you” or something stupid like that, and then they don’t even really say much about the fact that she’s an alien that looks like a human. From that point on she acts as exposition-bot, explaining all the many things about the aliens so the many people watching it who have to have everything explained to them would be happy.

Spoiler over.

I'm sad/angry Han Solo

Aside from that whole thing, the movie was great, and I’ll definitely watch it several more times.

Final Grade: A

Next week, we don’t know what we’re watching!