JiveTurkey
Goatlord
- Messages
- 16,890
I finished it up late last night. Brutal indeed. Those bridge scenes are tense af! It was definitely as I remembered it and watching on a valid stream vs. , um; an alternate source really didn't do much for the first 20 minutes of all non-English dialog Roy Scheider was great (and everytime I see him; I can see decades of packs of smoked cigarettes as his skin looks like a goddamn catcher's mitt) but the rest of his crew's performances were probably the worst of the film. I liked his backstory but their acting/delivery was very dated. I think the ending was a nice touch showing he had to suffer through all that only to come full circleBut I do love how he did create a backstory for the guys who were thrown together in their circumstance. That was a huge thing that I thought The Wages of Fear was missing. But I'm sure it could be argued the other way too. Friedkin, from everything I've read and seen, seems like he was just a d******d, just a terrible person. But he really did have some incredible films, (The Exorcist, To Live and Die in LA), so I always hold out hope that something made by him will at least be interesting. I know a lot of people like The French Connection too, but that one just never hit me, even though it has maybe the most famous chase scene in film history! I still think the chase scene in To Live and Die in LA is the best one I've ever seen. Again, just sheer brutality.
Criterion looks very cool. Kind of a boiled down Kanopy where they know they can only go so far into artsy territory with my "sometimes I need something grimy and/or dumb" film tastes.