Friday, March 18, 2011

Where they roam





I don't know how or what to write about Jackass 3(D). Believe it or not, it was my first exposure to Jackass in any of its incarnations. I laughed a few times. I shook my head a few times. I just don't know. These guys may have been fierce and reckless warriors in any other period of history. Or at least the village drunks. In our time, they're first-class entertainers. If nothing else, they validate the veracity of the chair wrestling scene in Korine's Gummo.

Stalag 17 is one of those movies that surprised me by how familiar it felt. I either watched this a long time ago or I just merely recognized it by the bits and pieces of it that appear in all sorts of other war and escape films.

I watched Buffalo Bill because of our brief McCrea conversation. It's a dud and mostly fails because of an uninspired script, but all of the players do fine work to keep the thing afloat. To give the script some credit, there are lots of nice touches of humor. It's more the structure of it and the overbearing statement of themes ("It's a disease of Civilization." "God bless you, Buffalo Bill."). Buffalo Bill also features one of the best battle scenes that I've seen in any film ever. It's worth watching for that alone. I guess that Wellman only directed this as part of a deal to get The Ox-Bow Incident made. He did well here in salvaging a bad script.

NWI has a decent selection of McCrea Westerns. I'm going to try to check them all out.

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