Peckinpah

[private witt]

The thing that makes Straw Dogs so good is how it plays against convention.  It doesn't star Clint Eastwood or Jack Pallance.  The protagonist is a product of late sixties campus culture.  A man so unconfortable with violence that he'll lie to avoid even the most basic confrontation.  And he isn't up against a bunch of badasses.  He's fighting a bunch of drunk handy men who couldln't be more boring.  Peckinpah's whole point is that violence is something inside all of us, not just the super-macho.  The moment where Dustin Hoffman's character beats a man to death with a metal rod is my favorite, because here you see him actually putting style and grace into his swing; he is enjoying the killing.  It makes me think the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Lector beats a cop to death with his own baton may have been a nod to Peckinpah. 

And I hear a lot of people complain about how Hoffman't character never learns that his wife is raped, as though she would ever tell him.  The couple have an antagonistic relationship throughout the whole film and her telling him this would have been completely out of character for her (she makes pitch black jokes hinting at what only the audience knows) and would have united them at the end of the movie.  In this story it was paramount that not happen for two reasons. 1. The couple had to have complete oposite reactions to bringing a suspected rapist into their home after hitting him with the car, which sets up number 2: the wife has to betray her husband.  It is not enough that Hoffman's character is fighting the men outside the house.  To truely make him desperate, Peckinpah had to have him fighting to survive against everyone.  And this ivy league mathematician finally feels his home is not a thing worth protecting after his intellectual self has merged with his animal self that he had always repressed when we hear the suspected rapist say, "I don't know my way home," to which Hoffman's character smile and reply, "Neither do I."  He no longer needs a house to protect him and he is fine with that.

[Gold Trumpet]

To the young viewer, this happens all the time, but I'm afraid to look at whatever I said earlier in this thread. Where once I was blind to Peckinpah, now I see. The box set is much anticipated.

[SiliasRuby]

Watched Straw dogs again, it's been a while and I just throughly enjoy it, pretty intense.

[SiliasRuby]

'The Wild Bunch' is quite a western and I hate MOST westerns. Most westerns are dull to me, with the exceptions of westerns done by John Ford and Anthony Mann. This had balls, but I knew and heard that going in, I was surprised it took me this long to watch the blu-ray since I'e had it for such a long time. The performances are pitch perfect and the violence exquisite but I wasn't expecting anything less. Portions of the film was so intense and fun I couldn't stop smiling.

[Convael]

I was pretty bored with Straw Dogs for the first half or so and then the end just completely blew me away since it was my first Peckinpah.  I mean, a fucking BEAR TRAP.  I'll rewatch it again to pay more attention to the first half since I didn't even know what was waiting for me on my first viewing.  The Wild Bunch is just insane action through and through from the very beginning...  It's wonderful that what seems like an insane old man who's drunk all the time was able to form some pretty great movies which seemingly had a lot of his personality in them.  It's nice that he was a crazy old drunk who could turn that into something productive and wonderful.

[SiliasRuby]

Crazy old drunks always know how to put out creative output.

[SiliasRuby]

I saw 'The Getaway' tonight. AMAZING. Just, if I could be a 15 year old for one moment. "Ali MacGraw, I LOVE YOU, I NEED YOU, I WANNA BE YOUR SPECIAL MAN." Okay, done. This was one of the best 70's films I'e seen in a long time, perhaps ever. There are certain scenes in this film that make glad studios had no idea what to do with audiences in 1966. The violence is skilled and slightly opera-etic, quietly disturbing, and always well done. The story is solid but the editing and music especially works wonders on the senses.