Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt
Year: 1969
Runtime: 1h 53min
Joe Buck (Voight) is coming east to be a prostitute! The naive (and a bit simple) cowboy tries to establish a career as a “hustler” but is ridiculously bad at the business side of things. Then he meets Ratso/Rizzo (Hoffman) who offers to set him up with a pimp for a cut of the proceeds. What could possibly go wrong?
“Oh my God! I’m GORGEOUS!” (IYKYK)
This could be the setup for either a comedy or a tragedy. Fortunately for the movie, but unfortunately for our mental states, it definitely lands in the latter category. Finding rich women willing to pay for sex is a harder job than Joe imagined. but at least he develops an unlikely but kind of beautiful relationship with the equally weird and lonely outsider Rizzo, who dreams of going to sunny Florida.
But for now, he’s busy walkin’ here
Joe’s past seems a Cimmerian cocktail of childhood abuse, religious trauma, sexual trauma and isolation. Homeless Rizzo is a tragic character as well, squatting in squalor (that’s fun to say ten times fast!) and trying to survive by any means necessary in an inhospitable city.
“So, I see a suave cowboy hustler.” “No, no, this is definitely a bachelor. Confirmed.”
We loved their relationship, the flashbacks and mysteries of Joe’s past, the dream sequences and the fantasies. Hansel and Gretel’s party seemed to us the quintessential ’60s New York party, and that whole sequence was exciting. Also, there’s a not-so-secret homosexual subtext here that’s really great. But we loved a lot of that in the worst way possible – this movie is just incredibly sad. That being said – it’s a classic for very good reasons and we would recommend it to everyone.
“Well Deborah, I’m not gonna pay him to lick my FACE!”
Again though Edgar, why do you make us watch these emotionally devastating movies? There have been three in a row that have gradually chipped away at our will to live. Reality is bad enough right now – we don’t need our entertainment to make things even worse…
Oh, all right, we forgive you. Mostly because these heartbreaking and depressing movies have all been very good. But also partly because you’re not actually forcing us to do this and we kind of brought it on ourselves…
What we learned: We need Jesus! More specifically, we each need a flashing Jesus statue in our bathroom.
Watched: February 16 2023 (We know, we know… It’s been an intense few years, ok?)
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Russell Streiner
Year: 1968
Runtime: 1h 36min
Heeeeey guys… So it’s been (another) minute, but we’re finally back in a place in our lives where we want to try to revive the blog. How fitting then, to talk about a movie where things refuse to stay dead and buried! It’s almost as if we planned this (we didn’t. Planning is not really part of our skill set..).
In Night of the Living Dead, siblings Barbra and Johnny expect nothing but a peaceful afternoon on their yearly road trip to place flowers on their father’s grave. Which just goes to show that expectations are meant to be crushed. Instead of a routine 6 hour trip of bickering about the inconvenience of their father being buried so far away (rude! Of him, we mean. Bury yourselves close to your relatives), they find themselves caught in a new and exciting situation: the dead walking the earth and armageddon being nigh! Well, Barbra does at least. Johnny is a lost cause from the beginning and the first one to die. But his sister makes a valiant, if somewhat hysterical, effort to escape the slooooowly creeping dread that surrounds her.
POV: the most unsettling game of Grandma’s Footsteps ever (possibly apart from the one played in Royston Vasey)
We probably don’t need to say much more about the plot – a bunch of strangers end up together in a house trying to survive, and make sense of, an inconceivable and dangerous situation. Some with more luck than others.
50+ years later, the zombies themselves might not pack the same punch (bite?) they once did, but Night of the Living Dead is still incredibly entertaining, creepy and stressful. This is the movie that cemented the modern zombie; not the Haitian undead slaves, but flesh-eating monsters with brains on their… well, brains. Interestingly enough, the word “zombie” is not used in the film – the undead are referred to as “ghouls” throughout. But you don’t fool us – we know what you really are!
A zombie, by any other name, would bite as hard
Shockingly to a lot of white audiences back at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement (and even now because the world sucks and people suck even more), the most constructive and reasonable person in the film is an African American man. Ben deals with what must be dealt with and gets shit done. Of course, once the Middle Aged White Man™ emerges from the deep dark basement, he tries to take over the leadership position. Fortunately, there are some Radical ’60s Teens™ around to help the cultural progress in the US (a.k.a. the house) and support Ben.
You don”t mess with Ben. He came there to chew bubble gum and kick undead ass. And he’s all out of bubble gum.
Progressive as that may be, the main female character is still mostly useless, prone to hysteria and easily distracted by shiny things. We can’t blame her too much, we suppose. Her reaction is pretty natural considering what she’s just gone through, which includes, but is not limited to, watching her brother be eaten by some guy in the cemetery. And as entertaining as it can be to watch characters quipping their way through mortal danger and trauma; apathy, irrationality and terror are probably more common responses to zombie apocalypses.
Flam – flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathl- heaving breaths. Heaving breaths… Heathing…
We love this movie – it’s a regular rewatch for us, especially during spooky season (happy Halloween-month to all who observe!). From the first notes of the creepy score it is clear that this is going to be a scary ride, which it is. Not so much because of the zombies as the people and the racism, but isn’t that always the case… Night of the Living Dead is entertaining yet very dark with shocks, twists and turns. Its legacy is also undeniably significant; where would we, as a society, be without zombie movies in our horror canon? Definitely less entertained, that’s for darn tootin’.
Personally, we would hate to live in a world where every minor or major inconvenience was not met with the line “Let’s go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all this to blow over.”
What we learned: Blades don’t need reloading, and stagnation means death.
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