1. The names: Chance, Dude, Stumpy, Colorado, Feathers.
2. The bit where Chance kisses Stumpy on the head, then runs out the door like a little kid who’s just stolen a piece of candy.
3. The fact that nearly every character saves Chance’s ass at least once.
4. Wayne’s bashful underplaying whenever Chance is shown to have been wrong in his assumptions (which is often).
5. When Dude, upon reclaiming his old clothes, realizes that his silver hat brim is similar to the one worn by the guy who humiliated him at the start of the film, and then tosses it away.
6. The way Wayne’s shotgun is permanently attached to his arm, like a substitute limb.
7. The blood dripping into the beer.
8. “That’s what I got.”
9. The several moments when Dude is feeling humiliated, and Chance nonchalantly diffuses the situation by asking him to join him in a walk around the town.
10. Angie Dickinson in tights. (It comes at the end, like a reward.)
11. The flower pot, and then the supercool way that Colorado tosses the shotgun to Chance. (The toss has been aped a million times in action films, sometimes in slo-mo, but it has never been bettered).
12. The tender, ceremonial way in which Chance removes Dude’s six shooters from the cabinet where he’s been keeping them safe for the last couple of years.
13. The part where the undertaker asks Chance what to do with the bodies of the three men Chance just killed, to which Chance replies, “You’re the undertaker. Bury ’em.”
14. Walter Brennan’s teeth.
15. “I speak English, sheriff. Why don’t you ask me?”
16. Dickinson and Nelson trying to hold their own with Wayne, Martin, Bond and Brennan, mostly failing, and managing to remain incredibly likable just the same.
17. “You’ve got peculiar ways of choosing what is your business.”
18. The wordless opening sequence, which is like an homage to silent films — and Hawks’ kiss goodbye to that entire era.
19. “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.”
20. Chance kidding Stumpy about not being able to throw the dynamite far enough.
21. Hawks allowing both Martin and Nelson to sing lead on a song. Back to back.
22. The way the three leads are described on the poster: “John Wayne: The big guy with the battered hat . . . Dean Martin: Dude — the wreckage piled up by a fast woman . . . Ricky Nelson: The rockin’ baby-faced gunfisted Kid . . . ”
23. “It’s about time. I was gettin’ awful tired of takin’ care of ya.”
24. The fact that it always sounds better when someone calls it “Rio fuckin’ Bravo.”
25. Walter Brennan doing the best Walter Brennan impersonation of all time.
This is one of the best speeches Peter Schiff has ever given. I’ve always been impressed with Schiff because of his ability to simplify political and bureaucratic bullshit that passes for thinking in the business media. This is the kind of straightforward logic that anyone can understand. If you don’t follow economics that much, just listen to this several times. It’s worth hearing more than once in any case…
Sometimes I’m not sure what a television ad is trying to sell me. Oh, I know what the product being advertised is, more or less. It’s the experience the ad is attempting to associate with the product that I’m sometimes unclear on. Take the ad for sportscrap that I wrote about back here. Obviously, it’s selling sportscrap. But why did the ad’s producers believe that this spot in particular would appeal to the sportscrap-buying public? Hey, I’m just a caveman, the sophisticated ways of advertising confuse and confound me, but it seems to me that any self-respecting dude who views that ad is going to be revolted. He’s going to say to himself, “I don’t want anything to do with these mustard-spooging losers.” It’s the kind of ad that makes you want to run away from a product. Even the tone is off-putting — all sallow grays and plinkety-plinkety underplaying. No thanks.
Which brings me to Citi’s latest ad for Private Pass. Have a look:
One of my favorite video forms of the YouTube era is the cutdown tennis match. Real-life tennis matches are just too damn long, you know? I played high school tennis; I’ve hung out with some excellent players; I’ve followed the sport on and off for decades … Don’t get me started or I’ll chew your ear off with my quirky tennis rants and quirky tennis passions … I think I qualify as a fan, maybe even a buff. Yet I can’t recall the last time I sat through an entire match start to finish.
So I’m hyper-grateful to the anonymous tennis fanatics who have edited a lot of matches down into ten or fifteen minute-long videos. They’re all over YouTube, dozens and dozens of great matches, distilled down to their essences. You may miss out on some of the grueling, marathon qualities of a full-length match, but it’s amazing how much of the character of a contest you can pick up in a relatively short time.
There’s lots of breathtaking tennis to enjoy in this 2009 battle between Federer and Djokovic, both of them at something close to their prime. Put it on full-screen (click on the little box-like shape in the lower-right of the frame) and enjoy.
Who are the people who make these videos? How do they record and digitize the matches? And how many hours do they spend at their editing software?
So over on Facebook a friend posts an article from the New York Times suggesting time has been kind to Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Cimino has gotten his own Final Cut, and is showing off his newly-restored four hour version in Venice. The Times suggests he may also have gotten the last laugh.
Haven’t we heard this all before? Go and Google “Heaven’s Gate” and “masterpiece” and you’ll get over 87,000 hits, with some critic or newspaper or other proclaiming the film was unjustly neglected. None of this is new. Here’s The Guardian in 2005:
Had Heaven’s Gate been directed by Bertolucci or Visconti, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece.
I may well suffer through the four hour version but I suspect I won’t change my mind. I sat through it before, at the New York opening and, along with the rest of the audience, ended up highly perplexed. To me, seeing it on opening night, with high expectations but zero preconceptions, was in interesting experience. As I wrote at 2Blowhards a number of years ago:
Some years back, I was fortunate for a time to have a film critic as a friend and was therefore able to get into some opening night, and pre-opening night, screenings in New York. These were really interesting because they let you approach the film with virtually no preconceptions.
Obviously there was “buzz” to contend with, but at least you didn’t go in with the plot memorized and with a mental crib sheet firmly in place as to what the major reviewers thought. Also, these events gave you an unvarnished look at how the attendees themselves reacted. . .
It was a fascinating experience. I came to the film expecting the best, having fallen head over heels for The Deer Hunter . . .
I recall the intermission, at which the champagne flowed freely, to be extraordinary sociology: all these semi-bigwigs walking around not knowing whether to trust the “buzz” or their own instincts (as the old saying goes “who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”). And to tell the truth, I found myself having the same ambivalent reaction myself–“hmmm, Christopher Walken wearing a ton of makeup in the old West, maybe this is somehow . . . significant????”
So do you plan to see the final final final cut when available?
There’s a big controversy brewing over circumcision.
I am not going to touch that one here.
But since a lot of the arguments back-and-forth go beyond religious tradition and get to health implications, I will ask this: why stop with circumcision?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 