tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1163321594858726822.post8899056622514737989..comments2024-01-30T04:32:47.585-05:00Comments on The Cooler: Kael on Cult CinemaJason Bellamyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18150199580478147196noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1163321594858726822.post-30986949248089039452009-06-20T17:00:51.857-04:002009-06-20T17:00:51.857-04:00Christopher: I agree with your description of Kael...Christopher: I agree with your description of Kael overall. But this is one of the exceptions allowed for in your "almost always" rule. Here's more Kael from the same review:<br /><br />"...<i>It’s a facetious Western, and everybody in it talks comical. The director, George Roy Hill, doesn’t have the style for it. (He doesn’t really seem to have the style for anything, yet there is a basic decency and intelligence in his work.) The tone becomes embarrassing. Maybe we’re supposed to be charmed when this affable, loquacious outlaw Butch and his silent, “dangerous” buddy Sundance blow up trains, but how are we supposed to feel when they go off to Bolivia, sneer at the country, and start shooting up poor Bolivians? George Roy Hill is a “sincere” director, but Goldman’s script is jocose; though it reads as if it might play, it doesn’t, and probably this isn’t just Hill’s fault. What can one do with dialogue like Paul Newman’s Butch saying, “Boy, I got vision. The rest of the world wears bifocals”? It must be meant to be sportive, because it isn’t witty and it isn’t dramatic. The dialogue is all banter, all throwaways, and that’s how it’s delivered; each line comes out of nowhere, coyly, in a murmur, the dead sound of the studio.</i>..."<br /><br />Yes, it's all banter. Yes, it's meant to be sportive. But I think it plays. Of course comedy is the one thing you can't argue. She didn't laugh, so she's right to say it's not funny. I disagree.Jason Bellamyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18150199580478147196noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1163321594858726822.post-70265049606599893802009-06-20T16:23:10.761-04:002009-06-20T16:23:10.761-04:00I hardly think she didn't like Butch Cassidy b...I hardly think she didn't like <i>Butch Cassidy</i> because she <i>didn't like</i> jokes. If you really read and know her work, you would know she almost always responded well to genre movies that had a funky wit or were jokeyChrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06454215033747401460noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1163321594858726822.post-9020063868955803282009-06-19T20:41:34.894-04:002009-06-19T20:41:34.894-04:00On the specific point of Butch Cassidy, it seems s...On the specific point of <i>Butch Cassidy</i>, it seems she just didn't get it. Not from a logic perspective; from a comedy perspective. She thinks it's a bad thing that it's packed with jokes. Of course, that's what people love about it. To some degree, I take her reaction as one affected by the fact that she'd watched oodles of traditional Westerns. I think this is a case where she was alarmed by all the ways it wasn't what she expected, and she didn't embrace the new vision. We all have those moments.Jason Bellamyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18150199580478147196noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1163321594858726822.post-59287808009833296202009-06-19T20:31:58.084-04:002009-06-19T20:31:58.084-04:00I can accept some of Kael's criticisms of Butc...I can accept some of Kael's criticisms of <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i> (its smugness, the trivialization of killing Bolivians, etc.), but I've never understood why she disliked it <i>that</i> much (perhaps she didn't like the treatment of women in the film?). Kael spends much of the essay writing about other movies instead of building much of a case against <i>Butch</i>, and you can look at the western as a kind of commercial watering down of <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i>, especially at the end, but what of the chase scenes? What of the wit of Cassidy asking for rules in a knife fight, the reference to <i>White Heat</i> at the beginning, and the surprisingly easygoing way in which Newman generously gave so many close-ups to Redford, thereby cementing his stardom? Isn't the last gunfight neatly done? It may be that we've moved so far from the classic western period that <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i> looks better as a result. Didn't the youthful audience at the time associate the two gangsters on the run with evading Vietnam? If only in terms of its place in cinematic history, the film deserves more credit than the indirect insinuations she makes here.The Film Doctor https://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com