I have a feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western classic is closer to the hearts of boomers and GenXers, and that under-40s are kinda “meh” if not altogether disinterested. Too sexist (all the women are depicted as disloyal and whore-ish), too violent (especially for Zoomer candy-asses), too fatalistic and end-of-the-roadish. At least it’s not racist.

“Simply the finest film ever produced between these American shores. The masterpiece of masterpieces. Film achieves its highest calling: art, incitement, revelation, challenge, elegy, physical redemption of reality that sets a bar no one else, including Peckinpah, ever reached. Yeah. I kinda like it.” — Steven Gaydos, 8.27.19.

Ditto: When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula.

Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.

“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragow wrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.

“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.

Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”

Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”

Satirizing an alleged Native American tribal tradition…no one would dare shoot a scene like this today.

“We are coming towards a great reckoning of our past. The more that these stories can be told in a truthful way, the more it can be a healing process.” — Lily Gladstone quoted in U.K Vogue.

Please name some films that you really didn’t like during your initial viewing, but which have stuck in your craw and provoked interesting reflections from time to time.

From “Just Call Me Shame,” initially posted on 12.2.11:

It was three long–ass years ago when news broke that Timothee Chalamet would play the creatively transitioning (acoustic folkie to electric poet-with-sunglasses) Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Now it’s actually, finally going before the cameras sometime in March.

This is Chalamet’s big chance to step out of the not-quite-happening place he’s been standing in for the last six years (throwing Woody under the bus, Little Women, Beautiful Boy, Bones and All, the Dune franchise, Wonka) and do something cool and provocative for a change. Maybe.

Posted last spring…

Gather round the campfire, kids, and listen to another Fast Charlie horror story, with the primary villain being (who else?) Vertical Distribution.

It appears that Fast Charlie, which opened theatrically a month ago (12.8.23) and began on-demand streaming at the same time, is being pirated to death, at a considerable scale.

The piracy is happening, it appears, because Vertical apparently failed to aggressively enable the practice of torrent poisoning, which suppresses and/or blocks the sharing of torrent files by pirates.

As of three nights ago over 3000 “feeder” sites were offering pirated copies of Fast Charlie. The entire film, I’m told, can be downloaded within five to six minutes.

Serious distributors protect their films with appropriate measures. Not long ago Poor Things was being offered at dozens of torrent sites, I’m told, but torrent poisoning corrected this situation and now it’s all but nonexistent in the pirate realm.

It appears that Vertical has demonstrated an indifference to standard streaming distribution protocols, at least as far as guarding against piracy is concerned.

I’m told that Vertical sent unencrypted cinema DCPs to U.S. theatres, thereby allowing pirates to get a head start on illegal copies.

A MUSO report states that Fast Charlie is currently being illegally viewed around 28 thousand times daily, and 1.67 million pirate downloads have happened over the last 39 days.

Distributors start the ball rolling by sending files to legit streamers prior to a given release date.

Distributors also have to aggressively enable the practice of torrent poisoning, which suppresses and/or blocks the sharing of torrent files by pirates.

I know that pirating is a two-step, feed-and-eat process. “Seeders” are thieves who have the complete file and are sharing it with others. The health and speed of a torrent largely depends on the number of “seeders“, as more seeders typically mean faster and more reliable downloads.

The feeders or “leechers” are Average Joes downloading the file. Once a leecher has the complete file and begins to share with others, they transition into seeders.

For what it’s worth, HE has only streamed pirated films twice — Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in Manhattan and Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy.