In the midst of life I find my hands full with work. So, here's only a quick update:
Michael Tolkin: Rapture: challenging film about religious hystery, seems quite underrated and somewhat ahead of its time ****
Edward Dmytryk: The Sniper: also ahead of its time in its depiction of a sexually frustrated serial killer, who kills young women with his rifle, but slightly muddled by some naïvety and too many policemen on screen! ***½
Robert Altman: McCabe and Mrs. Miller: has yet to be seen properly on big screen, but still convincing in its depiction of a frontier town, probably one of the very few really realistic westerns there are ****
I've also been reading - amidst the Finnish war stuff and some Tolkien (work-related both) - police and other crime novels by British John Wainwright, whose books are quite good, despite Wainwright's tendency to overwrite his rants about the slums and the people therein. Will get back to them later on.
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3 comments:
THE RAPTURE certainly isn't underrated by me...it came at the end of a run of eschatological horror films from the major US studios, and the only one which seems to me to be an artistic success (following GHOST, FLATLINERS, JACOB'S LADDER and DEF BY TEMPTATION, and probably a few others I'm forgetting)...so, very much of its time. I've managed to miss THE SNIPER so far, wonder how much it influenced TARGETS. I've enjoyed MCCABE... even in heavily censored broadcast form back in the '70s...when it seemed only a Little grittier than the spaghet' westerns and others coming into my ken at that time. Sympathies...I should be working rather than writing this.
You're probably right about the eschatological films of the period, didn't come to think about them. The other films you mention... when JACOB'S LADDER seems to the best of the bunch, there's not much one can say.
You're not wrong. THE RAPTURE was vastly better than those which preceded.
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