Frank Kogan

John Cassavetes and Donald Sutherland, The Dirty Dozen



Cassavetes – sneering, cheap-jack defiance, Sutherland adding half-wit passive-resistant sniveling to the same thing; they give the Dirty Dozen crud as well as dirt and without them there's no credible underbelly, no movie.

L.Q. Jones, Buchanan Rides Alone

Don't have the adjectives for L.Q. Jones. Hired gun off the taxi squad. Alternate description: hired second-string gunman with a wandering, open heart; when he goes missing in the second-half, as sidekicks tend to do, the movie rides alone, the long-unspooling plot having let its weird little spirit drift away ("drift" not the right word; "dissipate into the haze" doesn’t get it either, nor does "evaporate"; the spirit's there but it scatters like dust).

Le Tigre "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes"

Track is excellent not just for its music but for the idea, let's talk about what we really talk about and let's be funny about it and have dogs barking oblivious to us in the end. Problem is the Tigres don't follow through: "genius" and "messiah" are no match for "misogynist," "alcoholic," and don't get at why anyone would care about the guy, e.g., how he can take a wormy little punk and make him electric.

Finally saw The Hunger Games.* Had the thought that it would not work to gender reverse the two main roles. By "not work" I mean "not work for me as a viewer of a current American or Western European movie or TV show, as opposed to in life where it may well come reversed and 'work' as such." And "not work for me" doesn't mean I wouldn't accept it even if it were done well, but rather that I don't believe it could be done well. It wouldn't click emotionally or aesthetically. I'll also say that this is a mostly untested hypothesis on my part, as I've seen very few 21st century movies and little 21st century TV. So I don't know how the roles are frequently gendered these days or what's done well or not.

Won't say more about Hunger Games in the main post so as not to spoilerate it on the small chance that someone is reading who hasn't seen it. But anyone who wants can have at it in the comments. Sixty years ago such roles likely would have been the opposite in gender and often enough would have worked very well.**

Not that the two movies are all that similar to The Hunger Games — and they're far better in a whole number of ways — but in both Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956) there's a woman who appears early and whose subsequent absence is felt extremely. Whereas now I don't think you could cast the main character as a guy, or that the gender of the absent person would be definitive. Well, you could cast the main character as a guy, but I'm hypothesizing that it wouldn't work.*** Ditto East Of Eden (1955). You'd likely have to gender reverse James Dean and Julie Harris. I don't think you could have a guy equivalent to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, though again you may well get one in life. And for all I know you're getting them in movies and on TV and I'm not seeing it; but my hypothesis is that when you get them they don't work all that well.

I realize that this post will be quite confusing for someone who can't correctly guess my reasons for not thinking the Hunger Games roles are gender-reversible.

Fwiw, I don't think it works to gender reverse Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene" or "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" or "Gunpowder And Lead," but I'll add that in fact Tyler Farr's "Redneck Crazy" (2013) is a gender-reversed "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and it went country top ten. But it doesn't work for me. And again, "doesn't work for me" doesn't mean "it couldn't conceivably work for me given my own attitudes," since all sorts of shit works for me (Rocko's "U.O.E.N.O." is on my end-of-year long list). Just that it has nothing like the depth and excitement of the Lambert tracks.

[EDIT: And Red River, The Searchers, and East Of Eden still work for me fine, better than the Hunger Games, and I don't think that's merely because I'm able to put them in the context of their times.]

Unrelated to this: is anyone else not getting email notifications from livejournal? I'm still getting notified via livejournal messages, so I don't think I'm missing anything. But lj comments aren't even showing up in my EarthLink spam filter, which I've instructed to hold messages and not to automatically delete anything.

*First installment. Haven't read the book. Btw, I have all sorts of issues with how the thing was plotted in regards to who gets to kill whom and how we're supposed to take it. It panders. But it works pretty well, 'cause the two main characters work.

**"Opposite" deserves scare quotes but I decided that sticking 'em in would be too much of a speed-bump. I can't problematize everything that's problematic.

***Unless maybe they were gay?

Saw this three days ago. What I remember most is that Sarah Michelle Gellar came through as an actress. She was required to be all flustered when the handsome brooding boy asked her out for a date, and she was required to ache convincingly when demon fighting interfered with her love life. In fact, I thought the conflict was written rather clumsily - Nikita did this much more pointedly - but I was feeling it as I was watching it.

Still don't think the show has done enough in creating either its world or its relationships. So far it relies on conventions regarding high schools rather than bringing the high school to life, and this is why it bothers me that police don't show up to investigate murders and students don't show up to screw around in or take books out of a library, except when suddenly the plot demands it. If you don't create your world then conventions are what you've got. Hewing to conventions for cheerleaders and dating but inexplicably ignoring them for libraries and murder investigations makes the latter stick out. If you do the work of creating your world, you can create your own conventions. Like in WKRP In Cincinnati it made perfect sense that receptionist was the highest paid position at the station. Anyway, we'll see how this develops, and you guys have promised me that explanations will appear, eventually.

(Double-checking the spelling of "Gellar," I typed "Sarah" into the Google box, and the sixth suggestion down was "Sarah Michelle Gellar." "Sarah Palin" was first and "Sarah Connor Chronicles" second, whatever "Sarah Connor Chronicles" is. (Well, a quick Wiki and now I know...))

Some thoughts on, or tangents from, Buffy Episode One:

(And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT PUT ANY SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS, THANK YOU.) (Of course, be warned, I'll spoil anything I want to.)(No, not really, I'll keep things vague.)

( Mark Twainishness )

( Sailor Moon )

( Hero as (non)loner )

( Who is that masked man? )

( North By Northwest )

A meme, stolen from andthatisthat:

1. Pick 10 of your favorite movies
2. Go to IMDB or some such and find a quote from each movie
3. Post them here for everyone to guess
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie
5. No googling, using IMDB search, or other search functions

1. "That'll be the day." The Searchers, frequently uttered by the John Wayne character, inspired the Buddy Holly song. Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent. ludickid got the answer.

2. "Well, there is our D____. Three children and not one marriage. Oh, I do not say that he's the first man to put the cart before the horse, but three carts and no horse? Huh?"

3. J: "Señor, the widow Gomez has delivered a son this morning - a boy."
M: "Bully for the widow Gomez!"
J: "But señor, it has been more than a year ago since Señor Antonio Gomez has been buried in the church house."
M: "Well, there are some men you just can't trust to stay where you put 'em."

4. "There is a Foreign Legion of women, too."

5. L: "The morning review compared you to a young Mozart."
S: "I was, very young. There was that much resemblance."

6. "Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about T____." T for Tuco, played by Eli Wallach. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Screenplay by Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, and Sergio Leone. ludickid got the answer.

7. "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." In A Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Screenplay by Andrew Solt. ludickid got the answer.

8. "Giulia is like Oscar Wilde; give her the superfluous and she will do without the essential."

9. "I fuck you right where you breathe." Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro) to Michael in Mean Streets. Screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin. Guessed by dubdobdee.

10. "Listen D____, I know it doesn't make much sense when you're sixteen. Don't worry. When you get to be forty, it isn't any better."