All movies are on Thursdays, 3:45 pm, AV room, JUDE.
March the FIRST: Pale Rider, dir. Clint Eastwood
March the EIGHTH: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, dir. George Roy Hill
Next Up: March the FIFTEENTH: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch
March the TWENTY-SECOND: McCabe and Mrs Miller, dir. Robert Altman
March the TWENTY-NINTH: Blazing Saddles, dir. Mel Brooks.
A movie preview of this additional screening shall be posted shortly.
The above program's still provisional. Date, timing and venue have not yet been finalised. Core members (those who've taken on the responsibility of regular attendance, and you know who you are...) are requested to take part in taking further decisions.
Clint EASTWOOD – PALE RIDER
Post-Sergio Leone, Eastwood made four great revisionist-westerns, starting with The Outlaw Josey Wales and peaking off with Unforgiven, with High Plains Drifter and this film here tucked in between. Pale Rider is morally and stylistically far more traditional than the rest, perhaps because it’s a remake of the sentimental 1953 hit Shane. But to that, Eastwood adds the baggage of his mythological status, back from his Leone-days, as “The Man with No Name” (this time as The Preacher, bringing an additional layer of biblical allegories not there in the original).
NOTE: Unforgiven is on HBO this month, as a part of their OSCAR SPEACIALS package.
Wikipedia
IMDB
Review Selections:
1. Roger Ebert
2. Peter Reiher
3. Heumann and Murray
George Roy HILL – BUTCH CASSIDY and THE SUNDANCE KID
If Robert Redford starts off as Sundance in the traditional guise of a lightning-quick sharp-shooter, his pal Paul Newman has this almost hippy feel to his Butch. In the company of the young schoolteacher whose bed the two friends share, their exploits start with the 60s free-love-it’s-a-free-world feel, but end up with a miraculously nagging posse of lawmen at their tail, which turns the climax into an existential nightmare. With a decidedly 60s folk-pop soundtrack, and brilliant cinematography to boot, it’s an entertaining joyride that ends up with a premonition of the lost-70s. Trivia: The final shot of this film was last copied in recent memory, and quite effectively, in Rang De Basanti.
Wikipedia
IMDB
The Real Butch
Review Selections:
1. Christopher Null
2. James Berardinelli
3. Eric Enders
Jim JARMUSCH – DEAD MAN
Johnny Depp plays William Blake, an unheroic northerner who ends up in a Southern hicktown having been promised a job by a mining company that runs the town under the quasi-feudal leadership of its owner. Not only is he refused the job, Depp also ends up by mistake with a bullet in his chest and two dead bodies to his count. He’s saved by a lonely Indian with a history of being a circus exhibit and a school-student in England, who revives him and sees in him a reincarnation of Blake the poet. Depp is forced to live up to his mythological status, speaking with bullets what Blake Sr. did through words, as he’s chased by three mercenaries on the payroll of the company. The tagline runs: “It’s dangerous to travel with a dead man.” Who’s dead?
Wikipedia
IMDB
About Neil Young's Score
Review Selections:
1. Gino Moliterno at Senses of Cinema
2. Greil Marcus at Salon
3. Leo Goldsmith
5. Emanuel Levy
Robert ALTMAN – McCABE & MRS. MILLER
With typically Altmanesque multiple speech tracks and overlapping dialogues, the hypnotic dirges of Leonard Cohen in the background, the washed-out and painting-like palette of overexposed pastels by Vilmos Zsigmond, and the rugged rocks and vast vistas of the mythical West replaced by a shabbily growing mining town on the bleak, soggy slopes of the northwestern frontier -- this film looks, talks or sounds nothing like a Western. Yet, with all the type figures of the mythical west – the small-time hustler-cum-saloon-owner, the whore-with-the-correct-intentions, the big-bad-mining-company eating up the small entrepreneurs, and three mercenaries, a giant, a half-breed and a kid - the formulaic plot was what Altman wanted, so it left his audience time enough to notice the games he plays with this traditional material. Shot in sequence in a town actually built by the crew in Vancouver with the help of young Americans fleeing the Vietnam conscriptions, this is possibly the greatest iconoclastic Western of all time.
Wikipedia
IMDB
Original Script
Review Selections:
1. Roger Ebert - original review
2. Roger Ebert - great movies
3. Ed Gonzalez at Slant
4. Charles Taylor at Salon
5. Adrian Danks at Senses of Cinema
6. Weepingsam at The Listening Ear
7. John Puccio
8. Mike Ruderman
9. Christopher Moyer
10.Jared Sapolin
11. Sapolin Post-script
12.Robert Hayward at Kinocite
13.J.T.Ramsay at Stylus
14.Mark Asch
15.M.I.Kim at TheJujube
Next month’s genre: FILM-NOIR
