themariablog (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} themariablog) wrote,@ 2006-08-18 11:58:00 |
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The Last Picture Show I saw -
I watched a good movie a couple of nights ago. I say it casually, like one of those people that once or twice a week will watch a video they later recommend and call good, or pretty good. Actually I hardly ever watch movies and think they’re good. Sometimes I won’t see a good movie all year.
I think I’ve said before I seldom watch movies and am not offended by them. I was analysing Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with a friend once, and she said sometimes you just have to turn off that political analysis, and enjoy. I just looked at her. It’s got to the point where I’m grateful when I’m not offended. I’m often quite offended by movies I haven’t even seen, and am thinking of starting to provide in-depth and revealing reviews of these.
Anyway, we watched The Last Picture Show a couple of nights ago on DVD and I think it’s good. Directed, edited and co-written by Peter Bogdanovich it was released in 1971. It unravels the perverse social, sexual and class relations in a small Texas town of the 1950s. High school kids get it on with adults. The male lead has an ongoing relationship with the coach’s miserable lonely wife, the female lead gets it on, or more accurately is got on by a friend of her father’s who is also shagging her mother. The young men band together to pay for the local simpleton of their age to get laid by a prostitute, raising the shackles of their mentor and friend, the local pool hall owner. And so on.
I liked it. The depiction of adolescent-adult sex was not shown licentiously. There was no underlying sense of tantalising forbidden fruit. The lives of the adults and the kids were desperately achingly sad. You got glimpses that their behaviour was just a last ditch attempt to feel more connected, or more alive or just to feel more. The town is desolate. Momentous things happen and the town remains desolate. It’s beautifully shot in black and white, with enormous depth. The major characters are complex, each capable of nastiness and beauty.
We watched an overly long retrospective interview with Peter Bogdanovich about it. I didn’t like him much, and resented he’d made such a good movie but by the end of the interview he basically revealed that he realised it was his one and only brilliant movie, so I felt sorry for him as well. He said they drove all round Texas looking for a town to film it in, and finally chose the one that the author of the book the movie was based on grew up in, and was writing about. Peter Bogdanovich drove to the town after many days and said this place is perfect and the author, Larry McMurtry, said well it should be.
Apparently people were quite grumpy about the movie when it came out. It got lots of Oscars. I’m amazed that once good movies got awards. What the hell happened to that?
I watched a good movie a couple of nights ago. I say it casually, like one of those people that once or twice a week will watch a video they later recommend and call good, or pretty good. Actually I hardly ever watch movies and think they’re good. Sometimes I won’t see a good movie all year.
I think I’ve said before I seldom watch movies and am not offended by them. I was analysing Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with a friend once, and she said sometimes you just have to turn off that political analysis, and enjoy. I just looked at her. It’s got to the point where I’m grateful when I’m not offended. I’m often quite offended by movies I haven’t even seen, and am thinking of starting to provide in-depth and revealing reviews of these.
Anyway, we watched The Last Picture Show a couple of nights ago on DVD and I think it’s good. Directed, edited and co-written by Peter Bogdanovich it was released in 1971. It unravels the perverse social, sexual and class relations in a small Texas town of the 1950s. High school kids get it on with adults. The male lead has an ongoing relationship with the coach’s miserable lonely wife, the female lead gets it on, or more accurately is got on by a friend of her father’s who is also shagging her mother. The young men band together to pay for the local simpleton of their age to get laid by a prostitute, raising the shackles of their mentor and friend, the local pool hall owner. And so on.
I liked it. The depiction of adolescent-adult sex was not shown licentiously. There was no underlying sense of tantalising forbidden fruit. The lives of the adults and the kids were desperately achingly sad. You got glimpses that their behaviour was just a last ditch attempt to feel more connected, or more alive or just to feel more. The town is desolate. Momentous things happen and the town remains desolate. It’s beautifully shot in black and white, with enormous depth. The major characters are complex, each capable of nastiness and beauty.
We watched an overly long retrospective interview with Peter Bogdanovich about it. I didn’t like him much, and resented he’d made such a good movie but by the end of the interview he basically revealed that he realised it was his one and only brilliant movie, so I felt sorry for him as well. He said they drove all round Texas looking for a town to film it in, and finally chose the one that the author of the book the movie was based on grew up in, and was writing about. Peter Bogdanovich drove to the town after many days and said this place is perfect and the author, Larry McMurtry, said well it should be.
Apparently people were quite grumpy about the movie when it came out. It got lots of Oscars. I’m amazed that once good movies got awards. What the hell happened to that?
