Bonnie and Clyde, contra and pro

For Bill:

   

For Campaspe: 

 

Alas, embedding is not permitted for this clip, so check it out here.

What, did ya think I was gonna cite the Jay—Z number?

Incidentally, through the good graces of a correspondent who has some article credits for Commentary, I have been able to read Stephen Hunter's, um, consideration of the Arthur Penn film. It is a really remarkable piece of work, I must say. It announces its intellectual integrity right off the bat: "Route 154 seems like a road out of a Beckett landscape..." Yeah, this is the sort of thing that people who haven't actually read any Beckett like to pull out of their hack kit bags, because after all, specifics be damned, everybody knows that "Beckett" is a synonym for "bleak." And it just gets better from there, treating the film as a documentary, more or less, dribbling on about "the narcissistic culture," and ending with the implication,apropos of nothing actually based in, you know, reality, that Barack Obama hates John Wayne, would like to elevate vicious criminals, and is objectively pro-lynching. Kind of breathtaking, actually. 

I may or may not get into this at length in the near future. But right now a friend is smoking some ribs, and I need to pick up potato salad, lard bread, stuffed olives and some hot soppressata.  I've got my priorities.

Comments

[Bilge]

So I take it the diet is over?

[Glenn Kenny]

Temporarily suspended. Such are the perquisites of summer barbecue season.

[bill]

Everything summed up...through song! Nice.

Georgie Fame blinks a lot.

[Dan Coyle]

The first book I read was Stephen Hunter's Violent Screen, which, for a most part, felt like a thoughtful examination of the impact of violence in the films he reviewed. His whining that Casualties of War was "slander" was kind of stupid, since it was based on an incident that actually happened.

So I read Dirty White Boys not long after, and am treated in the opening pages to a near pornographic scene of the villains beating down a black prisoner in the shower, shoving a bar of soap in his mouth so hard it nearly shatters his jaw. The book got even MORE violent after that.

So yeah, I got all I needed to get out of Hunter with those two books.

[JF]

To be fair, Godot is set on "a country road." So we at least know he has read three words of Beckett.

Being of the Maryland/DC area*, when I started becoming passionate about movies I read a whole lot of Hunter's reviews in the Washington Post. Whenever he had an ultraviolent movie to talk about, he was pretty entertaining, and for a time that was good enough for me, the nihilistic teenager almost exclusively interested in zombies and splatter. Then I noticed that he sure liked a whole lot of shitty movies for half-assed reasons, and disliked more than a few good ones for reasons so half-assed they weren't even coherent, at which point I realized he was actually kinda terrible and stopped reading him.

*Though I'm currently in a very rainy New York on a Tarkovsky pilgrimage and as a barbecue connoisseur totally wouldn't waking up in the morning to find that the Leftover Barbecue Fairy--who I envision as a middle-aged man in an ill-fitting leotard and frilly angel wings that drip with Tabasco--had left something for me under my pillow. Hint-hint.

[JF]

Correction: part of my aside should read "totally wouldn't mind."

[Allen Belz]

"Dirty White Boys" was all it took for me, too. Made it (barely) through most of the book, to the point where the hero, a small-town lawman, is headed out to face down the three escaped cons. The woman he's been cheating on his wife with chooses this moment to cling to him and moan "But, what about us?!" To which he replies "Get offen me, woman...I've got man's work to do!" I swear, that's a barely exaggerated paraphrase of the dialogue. Like some 'Mad' parody, from back when it was a comic book. And I just stopped reading right there. I seem to recall relating this in some other blog in the distant past, perhaps even your old one on Premiere, Glenn. If so, apologies for the repetition.

[Glenn Kenny]

Wow. Anybody who adapts the name of an old Foreigner song into the title of a novel has problems that I can't even begin to fathom.

But Hunter deserves some credit for industriousness if nothing else. Having appeared to have taken all the wrong lessons from James Ellroy and Tom Clancy, he's made what appears to be a reasonably lucrative second career for himself. And for all that, he still has a message that he must impart to us from the pages of Commentary.

My favorite bit from the "Bonnie and Clyde" takedown, I've decided (aside from the fabulously double-sub-literate "It is of course ridiculous at this late date to run a comparison of the movie and the just-published books and get hung up at the manifold elisions and mendacities of the later"—guess Commentary's had to lay off their copy editors like almost everyone else), is near the end: "If they were shot to pieces, it’s because the old-time law enforcement guys knew you shot them, and then you shot them some more." Um, sure, Stephen, whatever you say. And, as a much better band than Foreigner once put it, gimme three steps toward the door...

[Tom Carson]

Tell me, how much of Hunter's piece is devoted to fascinating topics like telling us the caliber of every gun used and explaining at length how the lawmen's bullets would actually have perforated Bonnie in a somewhat different pattern if the filmmakers really knew their weaponry? That used to be his drooler trademark at the WashPost, and was one more reason nobody mourned his departure for redder -- er, greener pastures.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ tc: Nah, he leaves that stuff out, likely in deference to what he infers to be the more delicate sensibilities of the Commentary readership. Although I don't know, I bet Midge, in particular, would really eat up that sort of thing.

[Christian]

"It is of course ridiculous at this late date to run a comparison of the movie and the just-published books and get hung up at the manifold elisions and mendacities of the later" - Dean Moriarty, 1951

[JF]

Bang bang/You shot me down/Bang bang/Then you shot me some more/Bang bang/Why did they give you a Pulitzer/Bang bang, etc.

[bgn]

Sounds like a worthy successor to Richard Grenier. And this is what John Podhoretz means by an "interesting sensibility"...!

[Dave]

I know it's really off-topic in relation to this post, but your second link reminded me of Irma Vep's fine use of this song (covered by Luna)--a nice memory to counterbalance the odd comments you quoted on Penn's film.

[Campaspe]

Bardot et Gainsbourg, pour moi? Merci beaucoup!