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Reviews
My Hustler (1965)
Ed Hood holds forth; Paul America hesitates to become a hustler
This film is a timeless piece of Americana that cuts across social classes. There are few clues about its date - the dial-a-hustler plot device could easily be eliminated without detriment to the film - it could be last summer, or fifty years ago.
Ed Hood is arch, infuriating and very funny. Although, as he says, he is very well educated, he quotes Dante in a disjointed way, combining the initial lines of the Inferno with lines 47-48 of Canto XX of the Paradiso, and appears to believe Kali is a Syrian goddess, Blame it on the alcohol. He is a compelling old dominator at 29, the same age as Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell). The screen lost a great character actor when Ed retreated to Cambridge to pursue his PhD, boys and Gallo burgundy.
Ed dismissively assigns Genevieve to the bottom of the homosexual caste system: a "fag-hag", but nothing can disguise her beauty and joi de vivre. She did not, to my knowledge, and sadly, appear in another film. Why, one asks, do the most talented and beautiful make a meteoric appearance and then disappear? Viz. Natalie Pascaud in Les Vacances de M. Hulot.
Paul America is pretty convincing as a football player about to go wrong. He comes across as very young, and Ed as old, although the age difference is only 8 years. America is not innocent, exactly - more cautious and impassive. "I just want to get high." The hard, slick, defeated Campbell tries the usual queer come-ons in the bathroom scene, and then realizes that he needn't bother - America will let anybody do anything to him.
Poignant and eerily convincing is the final procession of supplicants before America - each with essentially the same pitch - the girl, the queer and the androgyne try to convince America to go run away together. Poignant because we know that America will not accept any of them. Ed Hood's dark glasses, beer-sucking, display of money and willingness to address the camera directly are the scariest and most fascinating.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
perfectly horrifying until 80% of the way through
Don't miss it.
The depiction of brutal injustice and hopelessness in this movie is utterly convincing. I was totally taken in, and by 80% of the way through was dreading the end: on the one hand, I knew that stagnation, institutionalization and hopelessness are the fates to be expected in the U. S. prison system, and would not be disappointed or surprised to see an end similar to the beginning in those regards; on the other hand, I hoped for some kind of positive uplift at the end. Unfortunately I was disappointed in both expectations. The Hollywood ending was too contrived and unbelievable to maintain the high level of realism of the first part of the movie.
1. You cannot tunnel through 15 feet of concrete with a rock hammer, even in 20 years. 2. A Portland newspaper cannot banner-headline a prison corruption story, ever. 3. The Warden could have notified all the banks to expect an escapee masquerading as a customer before Dufresne could have withdrawn funds from 10 banks. Have you tried to close a bank account recently? 4. Dufresne could not have kept his suit and papers intact crawling through 500 yards of sewer pipe.
Etc., etc. No ending is better than a contrived feel-good ending. Were the producers concerned that we might be too inspired to advocate prison reform unless they gave us a shot of feel-good at the end? Fortunately the power and artistic perfection of the first part of the movie dominates.
Very disturbing and powerful. I am grateful for the conversation it inspired between my stepdaughter, my girlfriend and myself this morning. We ranged over the Massachusetts Geoghan case, the death penalty, criminal justice in the U. s. vs. China, and the thousands of movies that do NOT have Hollywood endings.