only like 90 minutes left.
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Apologies for the spam, I have never gotten involved in American electoral politics but feels like the time to:
Since I don’t want to just leave it at my demands on readers, here are some movie reviews by me:
King of New York (USA 1990) (watched many times):
Now this is a movie. Incredible film where Christopher Walken's character gets out of jail, moves into The Plaza, raises money for a Bronx hospital, kills several Italians and goes tieless throughout. This has to be his defining role. It is better than the movie where he plays Diane Keaton's brother. Walken is scary in this film, which is hard to imagine now. There is a scene where Walken dances for Larry Fishburne. It is very good, and you can see why the dancing stuff followed Walken around for 20 years. In the 1990s he had an outsized and perhaps altogether not deserving reputation as an interesting person. Or so I thought. It is all here.
This is rightly a precursor to Bad Lieutenant. It is about an unlikeable man forcing his will on people around him. Keitel's lieutenant doesn't take the train but Walken's character does. Like other Ferrara movies, King of New York paints the city without nostalgia or stuffy emotion. It is not so much a movie about the city as it is an astonishingly stylish and delicate representation of a town so big that there are a million ways to live in it. This has to be one of the smartest movies where a lot of people die in it to have ever been made.
I went to see this again a few weeks ago at The Roxy, for free, and Ferrara came out spitting 16 bars of Schooly D and telling stories. Every time one of the movie fans in the audience asked him something about his process, he produced an impenetrably worthless and entertaining answer. There is no way anyone in that room could get a drop of insight from him. And yet. This, like many of Ferrara's films, is both classically beautiful and plain without looking backwards. It is a fully current New York film. I am not sure what artists do that now. I think the world would be a better place if more people did that. It makes you think you're living in an important age. Clearly we're in one now, but it only feels that way -- it doesn't look it.
Rio Grande (1950 USA) (watched June 5):
What a great movie this is. I went to watch Rio Bravo, but my copy had a Serbian overdub -- or maybe it was just the original Serbian version of the film. So I watched this instead. John Wayne is less hungover here and not as fat as he is in his 20 other movies. He has a mustache that looks real good. He's in Texas and has an Irish sidekick who is balder than him. His son shows up after flunking out of school and then his kid's mom shows up. They weren't divorced but it appears he has not seen her in a long time. He tries to win back her affection by getting a bunch of soldiers to serenade her after he helps her with the luggage. They sing throughout the rest of the movie, and are very good. The Indians in this movie are the bad guys but I think they have gotten an unfair shake.
The horseback riding in this movie is the best I have seen in any film. During one scene, Ben Johnson, who played Sam in The Last Picture Show, rides two horses like a Razor Hoverboard, one under each leg. He races against his friend and jumps over a fence. Wayne's horse is also fast as hell in this thing. It is the first movie I have seen where I stopped to marvel at what the horses were doing. I guess that is the genius of John Ford. Recommended.
Thanks for reading, and contributing (if you did). I promise I will barely ever do this again.
Snake