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| marantzo |
 Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 7:51 pm |
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| Cruising is a good example of why I won't have as much ammunition as others on here. I never for a second thought of seeing Cruising because I was sure I'd hate it. This goes for many movies. My list of movies that I hated consists of movies I thought would be good enough for a nice 90 minutes or so, or they were movies got good reviews. One was because SA and I had free tickets because she was an English teacher. Tess. We left at intermission. What a dreary bore that was. Polanski could really make vapid crap that was tied up in a pretty bow. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 7:58 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Marc wrote: Quote: Everything the rest of you like.
once an asshole, always an asshole.
Once a humourless blowhard, always a humourless blowhard. |
_________________
A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:08 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
Posts: 8424
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the return of the Pillsbury Doughboy.
You here to talk film or just trollin'? |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:09 pm |
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| I knew you were joking. I was even going to mention that to Marc, but I had to go see a movie that I foolishly thought I would like. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:11 pm |
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Why are guys well over six feet tall always pugnacious?  |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:13 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| Yeah the Aussie's a laff riot. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:17 pm |
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| Gary, you may have to rent a film you know you'll hate just so you can post a review in here. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:19 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| I'm 5'11. Rod is six feet in his fuck me pumps. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 9:47 pm |
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| Cruising is gonna get a bruising. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 10:55 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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Befade wrote: This forum is taking off!! I guess I'm not much of a movie hater. But ask me what Broadway musical I hated the most.......easy.......A Chorus Line.
I'd love to hear what you hated about that great show. The movie version--now that was a truly hateful film, because of what Richard Attenborough, who seems to know precisely nothing about musicals, did to the fantastic source material. One of the most empty-headed adaptations I've ever seen. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 11:17 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| I hate Hollywood movies that want it both ways when it comes to exploitative material, particularly when it involves sex and violence. These films condemn their subject matter while shoving it in our face. They are dishonest. They use sordidness to titillate while slapping you upside the head with a "message" so as to let everybody, the film makers and audience, off the hook. These movies don't have the integrity of porn. With porn, what you see is what you get. Porn doesn't hide behind a facade of social significance, gritty realism or shocking expose (unless it's done ironically). Hollywood films like The General's Daughter, 8mm, and Cruising are as odious in their moral bankruptcy as low-budget sleaze like I Spit On Your Grave and Death Wish 2. The General's Daughter uses a feminist message (tacked on at the end of the film) to justify several prolonged ultra-violent rape scenes. 8 mm, under the guise of being a serious expose of snuff films, subjects the viewer to repeated scenes of pornographic violence against women. Cruising is gussied up in hard hitting police procedural drag while all it really wants to do is shock the living shit out of straights by staging scenes depicting the roughest and darkest areas of gay sex (including murder). None of these films has an ounce of genuine moral conscience, though they would like you believe they are serious in their intent to reveal something true and valuable. The only thing that is actually revealed is that Hollywood will stoop as low as the worst grindhouse sleaze merchant in order to sell tickets. At least the grindhouse business was upfront about what it was doing. In that there is some integrity. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 1:49 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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SCORPIO RISIBLE.
Cruising (1980). Directed by William Friedkin.
Starring Al Pacino.
Stuart Richards: How big are ya?
Steve Burns: Party size.
I’m not interested in discussing the plot of Cruising. It’s a serial killer/slasher flick that plot wise is no different than hundreds of others like it. What makes Cruising of interest is in how it is completely unlike any other Hollywood film I’ve ever seen - and that is in its depiction of gay life in Manhattan during the late 70s. This ode to sexual loathing – gay, straight and in between – is a big budget fetish flick that plays like a cross between Waiting For Mr. Goodbar and Scorpio Rising as directed by Piero Pasolini and Bob Fosse.
From its ridiculous over-the-top rough trade encounters to drag queens that make Tootsie look demur, Cruising would be a pitiable piece of shit if it wasn’t so genuinely disturbing. The idea that gay men behave in the ways they do in this film is not merely homophobic it is homohysteric. Scenes inside of The Ramrod and The Anvil are cluttered with undulating leather clad queers in a titty twisting, bootlicking, ass fisting frenzy. Bodies glisten with cum and KY Jelly. Locker Room permeates the air like the sweat off God’s balls. The scenes are shot in nauseatingly garish colors and the soundtrack drones blues rock with sinister lyrics - the Devil’s music (John Hiatt, Mink Deville, The Germs!). This Dionysian nightmare was drawn from the feverish brain pan of the seriously demented mind of director William Friedkin. Cruising does to gay nightlife what Friedkin’s The Exorcist did to pea soup. It makes you want to avoid it like a bad case of the swine flu. I have the feeling that Friedkin was working out his own repressed bondage fantasies in Cruising. He probably tossed off at night looking at the rushes while wearing a bondage mask and a studded dog collar.
The street scenes of butch guys cruising in black leather look like outtakes from some post-apocalyptic porn film, The Rod Warrior. We also get a club scene where 100s of gay men dressed in police uniforms slow grind, hump and beat other with police clubs. Brokeback Mountie.
Several scenes play like a big-budget version of Kenneth Angers Scorpio Rising. The camera slowly panning across and zooming into close-ups of biker boots, leather jackets, taut flesh, erect nipples and lubricated fists. All of this is shot in grainy, cinema-verite style, but with Hollywood artifice that is phony and contrived. I wonder what Anger would have done with Cruising's budget? Now, that might be a film worth seeing.
But, the truly disturbing scenes in Cruising are the murder scenes, which of course involve a big knife. Friedkin shoots these scenes in agonizingly long takes that fetishize the stabbings in ways that are truly disgusting. The Freudian shit gets laid on thick Yes, we get it. Blood = cum. Knives = penises. Stabbing = fucking. Meat hooks, slabs of rare steak, steak knives abound. We’re in the meat district. These faggots are nothing but slabs of flesh animated by ravenous desire. Subliminal images (solarized spurts of blood) flash by with an agitated stutter. Strobe lights mimic amyl nitrate rushes. Fuckers grunt and groan. It would be sad if it wasn’t so damn sick. Friedkin lingers on every detail as if he were documenting the mating habits of preying mantises for a National Geographic special. Vial.
An interrogation scene inside of a police station in which a big black cop, naked except for a jockstrap and cowboy hat, beats the shit out of an innocent queer is a revenge fantasy only Jerry Falwell could love.
Poor Al Pacino. What was he thinking when he took this role? Was he broke? Did he need coke money? His character, a cop gone undercover in the gay community, struggles with his own "manhood". The tug of homo love wears him down. His relationship with his girlfriend starts to suffer. He can't get it up. Pacino strains mightily against the lure of the cock. He sweats, licks his lips and looks as confused as a drag queen in a bowling alley. Homosexuality is treated like a virus, like something you can catch. No one is safe. Not even the manliest of men. The scourge of homosexuality can strike at any time taking even the mightiest of heteros down with it. Be warned, This could happen to you! All men are latent homosexuals! The lure of the glory hole is stronger than the siren song of a 1000 harpies.
Karen Allen is the only woman in the entire film. She plays Pacino's bewildered and frustrated girlfriend. Not much to say about her performance other than she has perfected her "deer in the headlights" look.
I could go on. Cruising is a brutal and ugly film. It should have been re-titled “I Spit On Your Groin”.
It might have made a few bucks.
I'm straight, but I was there. As anyone who lived in New York City in the 70s and participated in NY nightlife knows, the Anvil and Ramrod were user friendly hangs for straights. They weren't the gay nazi nightclubs depicted in Cruising. And blues rock was not part of the soundtrack. Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were blasting the dance floor. |
Last edited by Marc on Sun Dec 06, 2009 1:29 pm; edited 6 times in total |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 5:49 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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| Why do you think Pacino agreed to do it? This is also an interesting story, potentially. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:49 am |
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Great synopsis Marc. Why did I avoid this movie? I wondered the same thing as Billy, about why Pacino did this movie.
Not having seen this movie, this might be wrong, but I think the bar that a lot of the things Marc described taking place is modelled after, if not actually shot at a bar in the Village that I'm familiar with. I'm sure Marc knows it too. My first wife and I were bar hopping in the village and after about two bars where there wasn't much going on we saw one near the West Side highway where there were a lot of people partying it up. The Bally Bay. We went in and noticed that it was an all male crowd. This was when some bars still were men only. I asked one of the guys if women were allowed. He said something like, "Sure. Have a good time." We did. The place was packed and we were the only male/female couple there. We danced and a couple of gay guys even danced with my wife. Had a great time. No serial killers either. A couple of years later when I walked by the Bally Bay I noticed that the crowd had changed to the black leather jacket gay crowd. That's what made me think that it was place they were portraying in Cruising.
Review of movies I hate pending. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:31 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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About as far removed from Cruising as it's possible to get, but conceivably an even worse movie, is the egregious filmization of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. It's the worst of several terrible R&H movie versions including South Pacific and Flower Drum Song and (though some seem to like it) Oklahoma! By comparison, the good-but-not-great movies based on The King and I and The Sound of Music are deathless classics.
Anyway, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, the screenwriter-parents of Nora and Delia, have taken the story of Billy Bigelow, the wife-beating carnival barker who finds redemption after death, and turned it into the most vanilla and plastic movie imaginable. The fake sets and lousy cinematography are bad enough, but the flavorless acting is the capper.
The whole cast rings false, but the leads--Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones--are the nails in the coffin. Carousel was originally supposed to star Sinatra and Garland. Now, I'm not prepared to say Sinatra would have been any better than MacRae. Though FS had a much more distinctive singing voice than GM, his urban persona might have been just as disastrous in the role of New Englander Bigelow as was Macrae's personality-free performance. Garland had arguably too much personality for the codependent Julie Jordan, but Jones's cliched ingenue was definitely a nowhere choice.
In any case, MacRae and Jones were wrong. They did quite nicely with Oklahoma!'s Curly and Laurey, but Billy and Julie were Shakespearean characters by comparison.
In addition, Carousel director Henry King (???) imposed no style on the material. As a result of all this mismanagement, even such marvelous songs as "If I Loved You," "June is Busting Out All Over," "You'll Never Walk Alone," and "When the Children Are Asleep" sound thuddingly mediocre. It's a classic--I would say the classic--case of a great stage musical being desecrated on screen. |
Last edited by billyweeds on Sun Dec 06, 2009 12:49 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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