I think my family is glued together with movies. Last night, Jeff and I watched Support Your Local Sheriff for about the nth time, but it was Keith’s first time watching, and I don’t watch movies the same way I used to, so I was impressed.
James Garner makes being effortlessly masculine and a bit of a selfish bastard poetry in motion; Joan Hackett does the smart but ditzy daughter with a verve and authority which is delightful; Jack Elam is flat out brilliant; Bruce Dern as a yob = lucky guy, he got some of the best lines; Walter Brennan as his long-suffering crusty cuss of a father is like a multi-layered parody of himself; all the casting is marvellous. The script is where it starts though, and William Bowers, also responsible for Advance to the Rear, the remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, and the Sheepman, wrote one for the comedy ages. Highly recommended.
Another movie I watched recently, which I am not going to recommend because it’s a damned strange, disturbing, and not very kind to animals movie, was The Holy Mountain. I was whipping around somebody’s personal best 100 movie list on the internet and this one got mentioned with such inarticulate adoration (“Just see it. It’s too hard to describe”) that I had to make Jeff get it from Zip.
I LOVED IT. I can hardly wait to show it to all my coolest film fan friends, because it is strange and marvellous and disgusting and eye-popping and very memorable. About an hour in, I thought, “Man, this movie simply cannot get ANY better (this was at the point a six foot ball python showed up… there are A LOT of animals in this movie.) In another scene a guy gets to take a symbolic (rebirth) bath with a baby hippo; women get their heads shaved; a guy who’s like Jesus shares a joint with a quadruple amputee; one hundred lamb carcasses are paraded around on crucifixes; a man gets hauled up the side of a building in an incredible, bizarre shot; tarot cards are invoked; and the end … well, it predates the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by quite a bit, and there’s NO WAY on earth you can convince me that Terry Gilliam didn’t see it before they made Grail. Anyway, the movie is about spiritual quest(s) and it pauses occasionally to kick militarism, consumerism and religion with glee and hobnailed boots, while mocking itself and occasionally giving hints about how to deconstruct the movie.
Even if you don’t follow the ‘plot’ it is an amazing and very big budget piece of awesome weird, and the visuals completely saturated my ability to take them in. And I liked the hippy dippy music, so there. The director says, “I ask from film what most people ask of psychedelic drugs” and the only response to that was/is, “Yes.”
