that's what you or I might be paying to see, but I'm not so sure about the vastly greater numbers of viewers. I honestly don't think a lot of kids, for example, would know the difference or care much. but working for twelve years in a "middle school" (we used to call them Junior High, but now they tend to go from fifth through eighth gra…
that's what you or I might be paying to see, but I'm not so sure about the vastly greater numbers of viewers. I honestly don't think a lot of kids, for example, would know the difference or care much. but working for twelve years in a "middle school" (we used to call them Junior High, but now they tend to go from fifth through eighth grades, which is a terrible idea), during which I'd find myself talking to lots of kids about movies, I'm pretty convinced that most of them wouldn't know the difference. when we were growing up, we were fed a steady diet of old movies on TV. the prints sucked and most of the movies were badly cut, but a little bit of "The Bride of Frankenstein" or "Stagecoach" or "Notorious" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" or maybe a thousand others were still there to be seen. in how many years has that not been true? I used to make the mistake of asking kids what their favorite movies were, but when I kept hearing "Alien vs. Predator" or the latest dumb slasher movie or the execrable, fantastically expensive "Titanic," I realized we weren't in Kansas anymore.
which is to say that I don't think a lot of the "audience" would know what they were missing in an AI-generated entertainment world. shit, most of the new songs I've found myself trying to listen to all pretty much sound like they've been untouched by human hands.
but then, that IS what a crotchety old man would say, right? I remember a LOT of reviewers trashing "The Wild Bunch." and "Bonnie and Clyde" was a financial failure until Pauline Kael wrote her famous rave in "The New Yorker." if it had opened today, with that first weekend's grosses meaning EVERYTHING, it wouldn't have made a penny. and I'm not even an unqualified fan of "Bonnie and Clyde," but it's a perfect example of how movies used to be allowed to have "legs."
And of course "The Wild Bunch" was butchered from Peckinpah's original vision by the studio because it was "too long" - i.e., by cutting it they could include another complete showing, with a new audience paying up. It was only when Z Channel (the best movie channel EVER) here in Los Angeles worked with Peckinpah to restore the Director's Cut and then show it in 1988 that "The Wild Bunch" was able to be seen as the finest Western ever made. (Note: I just bought a copy of the Director's Cut and watched it on the Big New TV, and it's just as great as I remember. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
I saw it first in London and a week or so later, in NY, it was missing a good fifteen minutes...the whole flashback with Thornton being caught was gone. what was a lot worse was what the studio did to "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," which I also love for very different reasons.
I watch the Director's Cut at least once a year. at least. the other special stuff in that DVD set are also great, including the entire walk to the machine gun after the Great Exchange "Let's go," followed by "Why not?"
I might actually love "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" just as much, but I don't consider it to be primarily a Western.
The final walk when they know what they have to do is just great. I love the beginning the "good guys" are revealed as the bad guys, the "bad guys" are far from good. The whole preshadowing with the kids and the scorpions and the ants. It's the greatest Western ever.
as soon as those credits go on, with the freeze frames and the drums, I can feel my physiology change.
did you read that Stratton book yet? I disagree with some of his weird speculations, but the stories about the shoot are priceless. it seems to have been one of the most horrifying shoots ever. Peckinpah made a work of genius, but geniuses are often very bad boys. we can keep this exchange going for a long time...I'm like that about "The Wild Bunch...
the thing about the "good guys" who turn out to be the "bad guys" is that once you see how bad they are, they're all bad beyond any kind of redemption. except, of course, for Thornton, who's there because it beats the fuck out of being beaten in jail on a regular basis.
I also think that Peckinpah pays homage at least twice to "Thje Treasure of Sierra Madre"...the big laugh over the stolen bags of washers and the end, when Ryan and O'Brien ride off together looking for whatever fun is left to be had. I think O'Brien's great performance was crafted pretty deliberately to remind us of Walter Huston in his kid's picture. I've read in lots of places that O'Brien was almost tedious in his conversations about great performances throughout the history of acting.
Yes, I did read it and passed it on to another Peckinpah fan. I thought it was excellent, all the stuff about how they pulled it together and got it to happen. Lee Marvin's involvement (which ended when he got hired for The Professionals) was very interesting.
I just (like, twenty minutes ago) read a paragraph about Lee Marvin in Eyman's biography of John Ford. Marvin is quoted as saying that the guys in Ford's "stock company" were inclined to say bad things about Black and Jewish people, but that Ford himself was probably the most liberal guy Marvin had ever met. I hadn't realized Marvin was a Liberal Democrat. the specific anecdote mentioned is that when Ford heard the actors calling FDR a fellow traveler, he snapped at them that "you all became millionaires under Roosevelt."
the stories about Ford's treatment of everybody who worked for him are also pretty horrifying. it took David Thomson five editions of his "Biographical Dictionary" to actually say anything nice about Ford. but that new restoration of "The Informer" is gorgeous. and Thomson (I think) really does underestimate how good "The Grapes of Wrath" is.
the above was an example of that "fractal" conversational style people like to yell at me about...
Ford's famous line to DeMille was "I'm John Ford. I make good movies. Unlike you." His buddy Ward Bond was so far right it's amazing he could make a left turn in his car.
Bond was disgusting...for some reason, he ended up as one of the two guys finally responsible for who got on the blacklist. in every book about Ford I've ever seen, Bond is described as being so stupid, Ford kept him around to dump on. thing is, he has his own moments of occasional grace in some of Ford's movies, much as I hate to say anything good about him except that he's dead.
I believe the youth and future generations would respond much as we would to the loss of the human touch without necessarily having to have been trained to detect or savor it because "catching" that brief flash of emotion is a very instinctual ability with survival value. It is likely an art to be able to project it and not over-play it, but catching it may be more connected to attention (there your middle schoolers might slip up) and the survival value of insight into others' motivations. The pleasure we feel when we catch that split second of signalling might be directly connected into social functioning and reward brain systems.
that's what you or I might be paying to see, but I'm not so sure about the vastly greater numbers of viewers. I honestly don't think a lot of kids, for example, would know the difference or care much. but working for twelve years in a "middle school" (we used to call them Junior High, but now they tend to go from fifth through eighth grades, which is a terrible idea), during which I'd find myself talking to lots of kids about movies, I'm pretty convinced that most of them wouldn't know the difference. when we were growing up, we were fed a steady diet of old movies on TV. the prints sucked and most of the movies were badly cut, but a little bit of "The Bride of Frankenstein" or "Stagecoach" or "Notorious" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" or maybe a thousand others were still there to be seen. in how many years has that not been true? I used to make the mistake of asking kids what their favorite movies were, but when I kept hearing "Alien vs. Predator" or the latest dumb slasher movie or the execrable, fantastically expensive "Titanic," I realized we weren't in Kansas anymore.
which is to say that I don't think a lot of the "audience" would know what they were missing in an AI-generated entertainment world. shit, most of the new songs I've found myself trying to listen to all pretty much sound like they've been untouched by human hands.
but then, that IS what a crotchety old man would say, right? I remember a LOT of reviewers trashing "The Wild Bunch." and "Bonnie and Clyde" was a financial failure until Pauline Kael wrote her famous rave in "The New Yorker." if it had opened today, with that first weekend's grosses meaning EVERYTHING, it wouldn't have made a penny. and I'm not even an unqualified fan of "Bonnie and Clyde," but it's a perfect example of how movies used to be allowed to have "legs."
And of course "The Wild Bunch" was butchered from Peckinpah's original vision by the studio because it was "too long" - i.e., by cutting it they could include another complete showing, with a new audience paying up. It was only when Z Channel (the best movie channel EVER) here in Los Angeles worked with Peckinpah to restore the Director's Cut and then show it in 1988 that "The Wild Bunch" was able to be seen as the finest Western ever made. (Note: I just bought a copy of the Director's Cut and watched it on the Big New TV, and it's just as great as I remember. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
I saw it first in London and a week or so later, in NY, it was missing a good fifteen minutes...the whole flashback with Thornton being caught was gone. what was a lot worse was what the studio did to "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," which I also love for very different reasons.
I watch the Director's Cut at least once a year. at least. the other special stuff in that DVD set are also great, including the entire walk to the machine gun after the Great Exchange "Let's go," followed by "Why not?"
I might actually love "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" just as much, but I don't consider it to be primarily a Western.
Yeah, I like McCabe and Mrs Miller too.
The final walk when they know what they have to do is just great. I love the beginning the "good guys" are revealed as the bad guys, the "bad guys" are far from good. The whole preshadowing with the kids and the scorpions and the ants. It's the greatest Western ever.
as soon as those credits go on, with the freeze frames and the drums, I can feel my physiology change.
did you read that Stratton book yet? I disagree with some of his weird speculations, but the stories about the shoot are priceless. it seems to have been one of the most horrifying shoots ever. Peckinpah made a work of genius, but geniuses are often very bad boys. we can keep this exchange going for a long time...I'm like that about "The Wild Bunch...
the thing about the "good guys" who turn out to be the "bad guys" is that once you see how bad they are, they're all bad beyond any kind of redemption. except, of course, for Thornton, who's there because it beats the fuck out of being beaten in jail on a regular basis.
I also think that Peckinpah pays homage at least twice to "Thje Treasure of Sierra Madre"...the big laugh over the stolen bags of washers and the end, when Ryan and O'Brien ride off together looking for whatever fun is left to be had. I think O'Brien's great performance was crafted pretty deliberately to remind us of Walter Huston in his kid's picture. I've read in lots of places that O'Brien was almost tedious in his conversations about great performances throughout the history of acting.
but you probably knew the guy, knowing you.
Yes, I did read it and passed it on to another Peckinpah fan. I thought it was excellent, all the stuff about how they pulled it together and got it to happen. Lee Marvin's involvement (which ended when he got hired for The Professionals) was very interesting.
I just (like, twenty minutes ago) read a paragraph about Lee Marvin in Eyman's biography of John Ford. Marvin is quoted as saying that the guys in Ford's "stock company" were inclined to say bad things about Black and Jewish people, but that Ford himself was probably the most liberal guy Marvin had ever met. I hadn't realized Marvin was a Liberal Democrat. the specific anecdote mentioned is that when Ford heard the actors calling FDR a fellow traveler, he snapped at them that "you all became millionaires under Roosevelt."
the stories about Ford's treatment of everybody who worked for him are also pretty horrifying. it took David Thomson five editions of his "Biographical Dictionary" to actually say anything nice about Ford. but that new restoration of "The Informer" is gorgeous. and Thomson (I think) really does underestimate how good "The Grapes of Wrath" is.
the above was an example of that "fractal" conversational style people like to yell at me about...
Ford's famous line to DeMille was "I'm John Ford. I make good movies. Unlike you." His buddy Ward Bond was so far right it's amazing he could make a left turn in his car.
Bond was disgusting...for some reason, he ended up as one of the two guys finally responsible for who got on the blacklist. in every book about Ford I've ever seen, Bond is described as being so stupid, Ford kept him around to dump on. thing is, he has his own moments of occasional grace in some of Ford's movies, much as I hate to say anything good about him except that he's dead.
I believe the youth and future generations would respond much as we would to the loss of the human touch without necessarily having to have been trained to detect or savor it because "catching" that brief flash of emotion is a very instinctual ability with survival value. It is likely an art to be able to project it and not over-play it, but catching it may be more connected to attention (there your middle schoolers might slip up) and the survival value of insight into others' motivations. The pleasure we feel when we catch that split second of signalling might be directly connected into social functioning and reward brain systems.