Posted last night as part of a thread about the seeming lack of grizzly Wild Bunch-type actors (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez): “I know this is a common refrain where we all say how all the Gen X and Y actors are bunch of 90s blonde pretty boys or 00s weirdos or (at the moment) asexual British dweebs like Eddie Redmayne or Domnhall Gleeson…

“But The Wild Bunch was played by a bunch of awesome, stinking, grizzled character actors in their 40s and 50s, no? People leap to this argument, but it’s not like today’s ERNEST BORGNINE is somehow DANE DE HAAN or the LQ JONES of 2014 is ANDREW GARFIELD. It’s kinda not fair to say “THE WILD BUNCH TODAY WOULD BE A BUNCH OF PANSIES!” because the Wild Bunch of 1969 weren’t [that era]’s 20-somethings. It would probably be more warhorses in the Jeff Bridges-Viggo Mortensen-Woody Harrelson character wheelhouse.

“Plus this whole ‘everyone today is a pussy!’ thing always vaguely smacks of the OLDER BROTHER FROM 1977 WHO PULLS HIS SISTER’S PIGTAILS by goofing on her Leif Garrett posters.

“There are plenty of masculine actors today in their 30s and 40s — Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal” — Wells insert — Bernthal is not so much masculine as simian — “Frank Grillo, RUSSELL CROWE, Michael Pena, the cast of Sons of Anarchy, Tom Hardy, Olyphant and Goggins, Fassbender, Bana, Wahlberg, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Renner, Barry Pepper, Joel Edgerton and on and on. The idea that EVERYBODY is universally some Michael Cera-type nance is a bit of an easy riff.

“That said, there truly ARE no Hickory Farms-stinking, back-hair and bald-spot greasy-dude elder statesmen character guys anymore in that Loggia-Borgnine-Tayback, Burt Young, Peter Falk realm. Gandolfini was maybe the last one. But that’s an issue with the culture at large more than just movies. Even balding Italian greaseballs like Chris Meloni or Richard Burgi have to have a SPOT-ON GYM RAT PHYSIQUE with 0% body fat. Nobody’s ‘doughy’ anymore.”