you got westerns, congratulations! : D

we all get a time period, event, or civilization when we are entering our 30's. i got world war 2.

Western are really underestimated, to say the least. Obviously, there is a lot of crap but also a lot of great (and daring) content.

I swear modern movies just have actors narrating and renarrating what they’re doing because they know you’re on your phone not really paying attention.

/me (sadly but) approvingly nodding. Either it is because the audience is not paying attention or because the audience is (quickly) losing its ability to follow a story-line and needs things to be constantly and heavily underlined for them?

If you're looking for suggestions, I really liked "My Name is Nobody".
With obvious exceptions like "Blazing Saddles", I had figured that most of the old Westerns were the same sort of tense, action-fests. While those are great, I was surprised to find "My Name is Nobody" to be a legitimately funny comedy and also intriguing.

If you just stick with Clint Eastwood flicks for a while, you're in for a treat.
"Two Mules for Sister Sara" was another great one.

There have also been some more contemporary westerns that "get it".
I think the opening to "The Harder They Fall' is an homage of sorts to Van Cleef's introduction as Angle Eyes in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly".
"The Old Way" is a Nicholas Cage romp that's also interesting.

Also, I realized that when a cowboy does a super quick draw and shoots 3 men before they can draw it’s just like an anime when there is a flash and the hero sheathes their sword, with enemies falling over dead.

Makes sense, especially for Fistful of Dollars, Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Fistful was the Western version (as in shot for shot remake) of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a samurai movie. Anime also got it from samurai flicks and Kurosawa was the guy for that. He made more money from the Fistful of Dollars settlement than he did from Yojimbo, though.

For even more (out possibly much less because it's not great) fun, there's a movie called The Warrior and the Sorceress that's also a remake of the same film, except it's fantasy and has a topless sorceress running around. It's got David Carradine playing a character named Kain. It came out during the sword and sorcery boom of the 80s (Conan, Sword and the Sorcerer, Deathstalker, Beastmaster, and a bunch of others). Speaking of other Sword and Sorcery flicks, at last one of the scenes is recycled from Deathstalker.

One of my greatest mindfucks was high plains drifter when the protagonist

Italian westerns are so much better than American westerns. The characters are actually complex. Sometime check out the movie that’s spawned the genre: Django

you should watch the OG Cowboy Bebop! it's anime cowboy bounty hunters... in space!

pretty much a Western set in the near future/present.... many direct homages to old Western movies throughout.

Fully agree on the modern movies spoon feeding (or at least, most mainstream ones.)

I'm lucky, there's a little indie theatre about a joints' walk away from my place so I've caught a few great Westerns there. As much as I loves them, I know if I'd been at home, the distractions/phone/cat/anything else etc would've been overwhelming on hour 2 or 3 of slow panning across a desert vista...

There's a couple comedy Westerns with James Garner that I'll watch whenever they come up:

Support Your Local Sheriff

Support Your Local Gunfighter

Similar story in both, James Garner is great at his Jim Rockford persona.

Some other westerns:

Once Upon a Time in the West

Angel and the Badman (younger John Wayne, black&white)

Hellfighters is John Wayne, but not a western.

A great fuckin western is Sergio Corbucci's " the Great Silence"

1968 ; Klaus fuckin Kinski , Jean Louis Trintignant

The ending will fuck your head up. Alternate ending with the DVD version

Watch that shit !

You may enjoy older samurai movies as well. The Magnificent Seven and 7 Samurai are basically the same movie. Really any Kurosowa movie. I enjoy older movies for the pacing and how they weren't afraid to let silence be its own statement.