Prime Cut: (1972. dir: Michael Ritchie) What a pile of prurient, woman-hating horseshit, and the damnable part is that it's so infuriatingly badly written. Who knew that Sissy Spacek could be this stupefyingly bad? She was young, yes, but she was young in Badlands and nailed that one into the ground, so I have to look to the director to place the blame. This is the guy who made the Candidate, so he's not without skills, but, wow. Look at Spacek in those early scenes: she is fully, breathtakingly dreadful, all wide-eyed, cartoonish naievete with a pragmatic overlay of fuck-me. Then again, listen to those godawful lines she has to speak, and who could carry off such bullhonky? This is malicious, misogynist fantasy, from beginning to end, possibly funded by vegans, since you also see enough of the wrong side of livestock turning into food to make you give up meat and dairy products forever.
I'm going to mull this over some more: it's the early seventies, and it's Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek. How do you even manage to make a screenful of crap out of those particular raw materials? This movie has one thing on its mind, and that's to SHOCK and TITILLATE you, just like all the millions of over-the-top serial-killer things we have to wade through today. Back then, in those more "innocent" times, white slavery (of WHITE American girls, IN America!) could be played for viripotent arousal while wrapped in the thinnest veneer of moral indignation.
The plot is absurd; the lines are bad. I have nothing good to say about this. Although there is one scene where a car gets chewed up by farm machinery, absolutely decimated, and I understand some twelve-year-old boys enjoy that sort of thing.
800 Bullets: (2002. dir: Alex de la Iglesia) An aging stuntman who once doubled for Clint Eastwood runs a ramshackle, Old West tourist attraction in Almeria, Spain, home landscape for many of the classic Spaghetti Westerns. Haunted by his drunkenness on the day his son was crushed beneath horses whilst performing the Yakima-Canutt-stagecoach trick, his ghosts are magnified when his young grandson shows up.
This movie left me with the same uncomfortable sadness I had when I finally read Cannery Row, which I'd romanticized for many years: that its gist boiled down to men only existing happily when left to tinker and gallavant alone and in packs, but unfettered by women, who always spoil the fun, unless they're prostitutes, in which case they may still try and spoil the fun, but because the relationship is bounded and defined by an exchange of money for services, the man can walk out the door at any moment without repercussion. Unlike the Steinbeck, here the implication that these men are still boys and avoiding adulthood is not entirely shunted aside, but the Peter Pan life is glorified, made shiny with quirks and humour. In this movie, the actual hard work of raising the grandson was done by women, a feat not given its due. There are two sympathetic women in the piece: one is the madam, whose job is to listen without judgment while providing booze and beautiful girls for consumption, the other a beautiful whore whose job is to smile while she makes her fake tits bounce, gleefully initiating the little boy into their joys. These are the fantasy women. Any woman who is hardened with cares or responsibilities or a job in the non-fantasy realm is reviled, as the abandoned mother and grandmother are, even as they provide the money for the careless men's lifestyle.
Misfit men who don't belong anywhere else gather in the tumbleweed ghost-town, telling stories about having done Raquel Welch and enjoying topless conga-lines of whores. When a woman intrudes with an actual request for adult behavior, she is disregarded and shouted down. Sancho Gracia is very good as the abuelito in question, but the plot makes little sense, and the manic fun these man-children have is patently ephemeral (he makes the whore promise not to tell that he cannot fuck her) and thieved from others (most of it charged to the boy's mother's credit card), and most of the glory days so obscured by lies that even the true, good parts are blurred and uncertain (he's been saying so long that Clint Eastwood is his friend, the only proof being a phone number scribbled on a bar napkin, that he even doubts it himself).
The climax depends on despicable, black-hat behaviour from the Suits and Power-Bitches, the opposite of these romanticized slackers and users, and ventures far, far into lalaland. De la Iglesia doesn't have much stake in the real world, though, and, in the end, his only interest is in giving the man-children a romp around the corral.
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