If they move, kill ‘em.

by Nirav Soni

Howdy. Welcome to the first edition of A Taste of Cherry. This will essentially be the online version of a movie journal that I started a few months ago.

A little background on me:

I’m a recent graduate of Satellite High School, in Satellite Beach, Florida. My new-found freedom has been sort of underwhelming; true, I do get to see a lot more movies, but I still have the feeling that I’m just pissing my life away, listening to records, reading books, and (yes) watching movies. Give me some fucking FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE!!! Yeah! But, I’m trying to make the best of my last few weeks in this drab town (Melbourne, Florida). The library has been an endless source of entertainment and fulfillment, along with Patrick Paperbacks (hey you! go out and buy a book!) and my computer (which gets me into all sorts of trouble with Ink19).

Come September, I’ll be a film student at New York University. Indeed, it’s this impending New Step In Life which has really prompted me to write this column (after wasting a bunch of space at “Truth or Consequences”). Writing about movies helps me to understand them and put them in some kind of perspective.

A few of my favorite directors are: Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker (by virtue of ‘Sans Soleil’ [god, what a thing!!!] and ‘La Jetee’) and John Cassavetes. My viewing is really limited though, so if you [yes you, dear reader] have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

I try to rent/borrow movies that adhere to some kind of theme, or idea. Right now, it’s been movies that reconcile with the question “What does it mean to be a man?” Since I recently have come of the age where I’ve been alotted some degree of social responsibility, that question is something I’ve had to deal with, along with questions about sexual/gender identity. Later on in the summer I’m doing a little primer on American cinema that I’ve developed with the aid of lists by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Fred Camper and Derek Malcolm. <sigh> Ebay is a terrible thing. I just bid on a Contrastate record that I can’t really afford. Along with the themed watching, I watch tons of other stuff, most of which (I hope!) will be documented here.

I don’t intend on giving plot summaries; www.imdb.com does a good enough job of it.

“What Does It Mean to be a Man?” – the Sam Peckinpah edition

Sam Peckinpah’s name seemed to be coming up a lot when I concieved of this theme. So, I grabbed ‘The Getaway’ and ‘Straw Dogs’ from the library, and ‘The Wild Bunch’ from an anonymous movie rental place.

Straw Dogs (1971): David Thompson’s ‘Biographical Dictionary of Film’ describes this movie as “a revolting film of grinding menace, stilted and very uneasy in England.” It’s all that, and plenty more. I have a very hard time with ‘Straw Dogs’ because of the open contemept that Peckinpah shows all of his characters. Dustin Hoffman’s David Sumner is a craven academic coward and most of the Englishmen are exceptionally crass. The only person given a bit of respect is Sumner’s wife, and even that’s taken away halfway through the movie. I think that out of the three Peckinpah films I’ve seen, “Straw Dogs” is the one that emphasizes the “manhood requires rites of violence” idea (quoted from the back cover of the movie) the most. However, “manhood” in ‘Straw Dogs’ is such an arbitrary concept. Even in ‘The Wild Bunch’, there’s some method in the madness. The bunch have some sort of dignity, and a (marginally) valid reason for going on that last heist. They’re trying to get some money to see them through their old age. They’ve got a reason to be hyperviolent. Sumner in “Straw Dogs” has his epiphany in a completely irrational manner. He acts in a way completely against what he believed in before -that violence and conflict are something to be avoided, for reasons of sheer bravado, and in the name of an empty ideal, that “a man’s home is his castle” and shouldn’t be violated under any circumstances. In “Straw Dogs” Peckinpah’s masculinty seems to me to be just puffed up boorishness and unwillingness to compromise. I think this also really shows in the montage. Peckinpah is so brutal with it, especially during the rape scene (man….just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.) He cuts so ruthlessly, showing you the cowardice of Sumner, the boys hunting, some past stuff (I think…it’s been a few weeks since I’ve watched it) and the actual rape.

Jeez. I looked on IMDB, and they say that the rated-R version (the one the library has, and the one I watched) has 5 minutes cut from it. I’m not sure I could stomach the unrated version.

The Wild Bunch (1969): “You’re not going to get rid of anybody. We’ve got to stick together, just like it used to be. When you stay with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that, you’re like some kind of animal.” -Pike Bishop, in “The Wild Bunch”

I liked this one a LOT more than “Straw Dogs.” Maybe it’s because this masculinity thing is projected in the model of the Western, a format in which it belongs (except in Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man”, which is a profound critique of American society through the model of the Western, and is probably one of my favorite movies). There’s something about the idealized Cowboy which really works for me. It might be because I was born in Oklahoma, and that I’ve got some weird delusion that I’m some kind of cowboy. Or, maybe it’s that lawless ideal, that barely-together order which oversaw Western life (when the cowboys weren’t herding cattle, that is [are there any Westerns that deal directly with cattle herding? From what I understand, that’s most of what cowboys actually did.]). The “Wild Bunch” are all held together by more than bravado, it’s honor that keeps them faithful to each other, along with the knowledge that it’d be really hard to go it alone in so treacherous an atmosphere. Peckinpah seems like he’s got some genuine empathy for his characters here; the older guys seem weary, as opposed to weak, and they show some respect towards their enemies.

However, the violence is there. It’s manifested not only in the gunfighting of the characters, but in terms of the film itself. Peckinpah cuts ruthlessly, jerking the viewer around. When he slows downs the film in the action sequences, he’s literally bending the film to his will. I think that he set much of the action in the mountains to show the ugliness of the violence in contrast to the natural beauty (a la “The Searchers”). I don’t even need to go into the physical carnage. Peckinpah really set the standard for violence, but his movies are still affecting today, possibly because of the unprecedentedness of what he was doing at the time. It’s always interesting to see where the cliches come from.

<sigh> There’s a lot of stuff happening in the movie that I didn’t even touch on. Peckinpah asks questions about national identity, physical need (manifested in alchohol), and moral integrity. It’s been weeks and weeks since I’m watched this thing, so I can’t really go into them. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

The Getaway (1972): I watched this movie at my dear friend Natalie’s house, rather late at night. So, it seems that Natalie was bitten by the chatterbug and refused to not talk throughout the ENTIRE movie. Nat, sweetheart, I love you to death, but please, please don’t talk through movies. Also, giving people backrub lessons can be very distracting. Anyways, I don’t have much to say about “The Getaway” other than that Steve McQueen is tuff.

Along with this stuff, I’ve watched ‘Sans Soleil’ by Chris Marker, and ‘Nostalghia’ by Andrei Tarkovsky. I can’t even begin to talk about them. I don’t understand them, and I won’t pretend to understand them. All I’ll say is the the last 15/20 minutes or so of ‘Nostalghia’ may have been one of the most transcendent moments of cinema I’ve experienced. Really, I’ve never seen/felt like that before.