[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Yeah. Brilliant film. The last Western, and all that. I often wonder who made the better Westerns: Ford or Peckinpah. Ford probably made the better films but purely in terms of Westerns I increasingly think it has to be Peckinpah.

Meanwhile, finally watched Woman in Black last night. Excellent movie, and unusually scary for a Hammer film. I've always loved Hammer but they never actually scared me. This one really got to me. Let's hope Hammer v2.0 can keep this up.

ideologically i like ford very little. visually/technically he made incredible stuff. but he's more of a different century-- he's naive, he seems to believe in rah rah america and manifest destiny. he's great but i see his movies as a dated cultural artifact. even searchers where he supposedly criticizes western stereotypes... i kind of don't think so. i read it as "these are the ugly men we have in the frontier SO THAT we can have our nice homes." bit like jack nicholson's dialogue in "a few good men."

wild bunch is more of a.... am i going to say this?... an existentialist movie. he deals in death and absurdity-- not just absurd situations but in the absurdity of human cruelty... those children, damn. (and i've seen the same children outside of a movie).

this comes through much more clearly in the director's cut than in the versions i saw before. the ones before look like a bit of squib porn-- i mean, magnificent vilence, but mostly violence. this one is... wow... philosophical. i have no other word for that. i don't know if i just saw it in the right moment or it's after seeing it so many times but yesterday it was like every line of dialogue, every shot, every character, every plot point opened up completely.

when i see a ford movie i'm amazed in part but i also say "oh, corny old times." THIS cut of wild bunch is... doesn't need translation/interpretation/transposition/hermeneutics. it's just. wow.

the other cuts of this movie should be burned out of existence so that nobody is ever misled again into thinking that it was a glorification of violence. it isn't. this is not "pulp fiction." damn damn damn. this movie is something else. after a few days maybe my mind will settle and i'll see it more clinically, but today... wow.

...

i think i haven't seen woman in black... will have to look that up