the William Friedkin poll

To Live and Die in L.A. is a must-see. Totally morally fucked, really well shot (in a super '80s style that's even better than Michael Mann's) and Willem Dafoe does great early arch-villain work. I also love Cruising and Sorcerer, and The Hunted and Bug were both surprisingly strong. Wish Sorcerer would get a decent DVD release.

I liked Bug a lot; not entirely sure what to make of Killer Joe, but I laughed a lot, so that's something.

I voted for The Exorcist, which I suspect is too obvious to win this. I like The French Connection, but I never felt compelled to see it a second time. Ditto To Live and Die in L.A. Haven't more than half of what's listed.

seen Connection, Exorcist, Cruising, LA, The Guardian, Blue Chips and Jade - prolly voting LA

I've seen 4 of his first 5 films, then nothing but TL&DiLA and Bug.

Would probably vote for The French Connection (despite the queasy bigot appeal) or the Pinter or Crowley adaps.

ISTR Rampage being some real bullshit but have only seen it the once, so whatever. Still haven't seen Sorcerer.

there's several movies I like a bit here but the Exorcist is the best of them by a very long distance.

xxxp Crowley, John or Crowley, Aleister? If the former, it sounds like theres a Friedkin film I need to track down.

Mart

to live and die in l.a. is incoherent nonsense and i am literally amazed it was taken seriously.

no way 'bug' came out in 2010

& 'killer joe' is out in 2 wks it looks like

whoops yeah Bug was '06.

and yeah I timed the poll so that interested parties might have time to check that one out.

was tempted by a few lol votes but gotta go with French Connection, its almost unfair how good it is

really wanna see Killer Joe, even tho I wasn't too high on Bug

Just finished re-watching The Hunted. If your collection of Manly Man Movies doesn't include this DVD, your collection is incomplete. Tommy Lee Jones makes a stone knife like a caveman! Benicio del Toro makes a knife out of an iron bar! Then they fight!

https://twitter.com/WilliamFriedkin/status/214143633874616320

to live and die in la is a masterpiece (r wood offers a gd critique of it, somewhere or other, and of course wood locks onto the many scenes/images throughout the film of money being forged/duplicated/circulated.)

iirc, friedkin issued Rampage in two different versions - the first, anti-death penalty, later revised to be pro-death pen?

Deal of the Century is a 1983 American comedy film directed by William Friedkin and starring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines, and Sigourney Weaver.

The film follows the adventures of several arms dealers that compete to sell weapons to a South American dictator

after years of asking I've literally met no one who's seen this.

so theyre releasing killer joe nc-17 huh? only open in ny this wk & a handful of other cities next wkend

missed a chance to see Killer Joe, plus Friedkin, Big Mac and Gershon @ LincCtr the other night!

after years of asking I've literally met no one who's seen this.

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, July 27, 2012 4:52 PM (2 hours ago)

really? for a time it was one of those on-HBO-every-15-minutes movies

morbs you've never seen cruising?

as much as I love TLADILA I've gotta go with the exorcist, it's his batshit piece de resistance

I have not seen Cruising. No one said it was any good til about ten years ago, and I'm v suspicious of stuff like that.

cruising's worth a watch imo. i dont know if i'd call it good but its pretty wild

the clips I've seen from it make it look REALLY ridiculous ... otoh Germs on the sdtk

yeah, I don't like bad n' wild

cruising had got that particular brand of sleazy friedkin atmosphere and good momentum and it's hilarious as fukk, mostly unintentional.

Cruising is classic heteroporn.

no wonder Eric likes it!

I saw that Cruising will be on streaming Netflix as of next week.

let's shsre a couple poppers and watch it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLHdW2Znj9s

cruising had got that particular brand of sleazy friedkin atmosphere and good momentum and it's hilarious as fukk, mostly unintentional.

― omar little, Friday, 27 July 2012 23:22 (Yesterday) Permalink

i saw cruising when it came out, pretty much remember it this way^^ emphasis on the unintended lols

voting French Connection

I have amazingly seen but two of these, so I voted for the Exorcist.

Rewatching L.A. now. For being released at the height of Mann-dom it uses its splashes of orange and the Wang Chung soundtrack with real flair (Year of the Dragon it's not). And I'm a sucker for showing characters at work, doing things they love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XDH3o5Wgs

david caruso does the best acting of his career in that car

boy did Jade offend Roger and Gene.

from imdb:

According to Joe Eszterhas's autobiography he hated the final film. Director William Friedkin changed Eszterhas's script so much, he threatened to remove his name from the credits. Paramount settled with him by giving him a "blind script deal" worth two to four Million Dollars. Later, Friedkin admitted that he did virtually rewrote the script, but Friedkin also said that this film was his most favorite film he had ever made.

that are interesting grammar

Lew Edwards: I do the fucking, I never get fucked!

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David Corelli: Cristal, Baluga, Wolfgang Puck... it's a fuckhouse.

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I've told you guys this before, but you all really need to read the original shooting script for Jade. The final 10 pages are among the funniest things I've ever read.

David (to Edwards): If anything happens to her, I have a roll of film of you and a dead hooker.

Governor Edwards: What if something happens to you?

David: Something is going to happen to me. (he smiles) I'm going to run for mayor next year.

Governor Edwards: Well sir-- you've got my endorsement

David looks at him-- it's his turn to smirk.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

looks like 'killer joe' is going much wider 2morrow. the bow tie cinema near me is getting it

Shoulda made the poll close about a week later. Oh, well. Can't imagine it garnering many votes, but it's def one of the more distinctive and entertaining flicks I've seen this year.

Good 30-min interview with Alec Baldwin:

http://www.wnyc.org/story/htt-william-friedkin/

this is brilliant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmihQf9WmDk

Finally watched The Boys in the Band today, which I'd always assumed was one of those things that I should see more for historical reasons than anything else, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. A time capsule, obviously, but one whose portrayal of queerness as a social, emotional and political state feels far more vital, to me, than something like the watchable but ultimately frivolous Looking (the first season, anyway; haven't seen the second). Only Kenneth Nelson's showy final act breakdown grates a bit.

on an emotional level. I think it's somewhat less of a time capsule than it appears on the surface; people still are trapped in forms of self-loathing... shameless archiving:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-boys-in-the-band

The Brink's Job is wildly uneven, but damn is Warren Oates great in his two big scenes.

Second watch of TLADILA is great value

So many....moments

Sorcerer on limited reissue in the Uk this weekend and out in a fancy pants 4K Blu in a week or 2. Some people go MENTAL for this film.
Not ilx clearly tho..

I love it. Bought the US Blu-Ray when it came out either last year or earlier this year.

sorceror is fucking amazing

I finally watched Cruising; it is a mess o' shit

I suppose I'd find out in Friedkin's commentary track why he had multiple actors play the killer(s)?

I do approve of using Willy DeVille and The Germs in the bar sequences instead of disco

perceptive essay imho

https://www.cineaste.com/fall2013/from-the-archives-cruising/

Sorcerer rules.

I suppose I'd find out in Friedkin's commentary track why he had multiple actors play the killer(s)?

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius)

Because he was cheating?

I saw this for the second time - and first time on a big screen - last summer and it struck me as far more superficial than it seemed on first viewing. The ambiguity that pops up suddenly in the final scene is entirely unearned.

I never think dance club scenes in movies look authentic, and this film is no exception, even though the leather bar scenes were supposedly filled out with their real-life patrons. There was just too much going on at the same time, when in reality (I'm educatedly guessing) those places would be boring most of the time.

well, drama is life w/ the dull bits excised etc

tbf they go 'ambiguous' in Cruising way b4 final scene.

Friedkin also said Pacino wanted to get the 'fashionable gay haircut' of '79, and it turned out so badly they delayed production for a month. I'd like to see a still!

see, James Franco wouldn't make that mistake

he'd make others, tho possibly not as many as Friedkin did.

re ambiguity, supposedly the specific ambiguity you get full-on in the final shot is something that was better supported in the 40 minutes that had to be cut out of the film to avoid an X rating. Yeah, it's not hard to see where Friedkin was going wrt that idea much earlier on, but there's kind of a lack of hard evidence I'd say.

Wikipedia quotes Friedkin as saying the excised 40 minutes would have made the film both more and less ambiguous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqdlmJXZGsU

!!!

what the hell

I caught Bug a few weeks ago and thought it was terrific. Shannon & Judd were an unholy mess.

Thinking about Killer Joe still makes me smile.

I hope that in the future, when someone is talking about "The Church", a bystander's first assumption will be that you're talking about the rock band, but their second guess will be Thomas Hayden Church.

i finally saw sorcerer last week. for a minute i'm like, why on earth do they launch this hare-brained scheme to retrieve this ancient nitro. they're an evil oil company, it can't be too hard for them to scare up something else to blow up the well with! and then i'm like, actually, that's exactly the kind of bone-stupid short-sighted greedy corner-cutting decision that an evil oil company would make - fair dos friedkin, fair dos

have you seen The Wages of Fear?

i don't remember if Clouzot was more 'plausible'

i have! on a terrible .avi file downloaded from somewhere nefarious. i need to see it for real.

i don't remember if Clouzot was more 'plausible'

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat is going on in Sorcerer???

truckdriving iirc

the second hour was p cool, but
WHO are these guys and WHY are they doing this and for WHAT???
I haven't seen Wages of Fear

you better flap to it

they are desperate no-hopers

it's an insane, suicidal mission that makes no sense - exactly the sort of thing a rapacious oil company would extort its criminally underpaid workers to sign up for

read a little about Friedkin's plan to get an all star cast... I love Roy Scheider but this would've worked much better with McQueen/Mitchum and Mastroianni... the almost complete excision of exposition here would work with stars. but even the mission and who it's for and why is unclear

the first part of the movie lays out the backstories of each of the four to show how their unhealthy risk tolerance has landed them in Porvenir; driving nitro-laden trucks over impossible roads seems like the logical next step

Wages of Fear is the better film, but I prefer Sorcerer for the Tangerine Dream score

which is really under-used - what little is left is awesome!

watched Sorcerer for the first time (thanks Criterion), pretty amazing movie. i like the whole cast but especially Scheider (obv) and Cremer (great face). looks great, score is incredible, all the location shooting is fantastic. my one quibble with it is the pacing/structure. him adding backstory intros for three of the characters means they don't get into the trucks until the second hour of the movie, it feels like it needs a little more in the trucks. i'd leave what he has but add another 20ish minutes of truck action. iirc more of Wages of Fear proportionally is devoted to the truck stuff

Finally watched Cruising. Did anyone else think the screenplay (and actors’ delivery of same) were kinda crap?

No, not at all. I get tingles every time I hear Paul Sorvino ask “Have you ever smoked another man’s pole?”

Killer Joe seriously got screwed over in the original poll. What a brilliant comedy

It is a film made by a straight man gawping at the gay leather community in West Chelsea in late 1970s-early 1980s NY. There were protests against it at the time as not being representative of the larger gay community, and it wasn't

but it's an interesting artifact in retrospect, and as a film it is worth watching I think and has a chilling ending

just watched the hunted

what a bizarre mess of a few nice elements

did they have to give up at some stage and botch together a movie using what they had?

The last time I re-watched it I was shocked how much time was devoted to Del Toro's character's wartime experiences. That shit could have been chopped down to about two minutes and it would have made the movie much scarier and weirder. But overall I still like it.

it loses any and all idea of what it is by the end of the long foot chase through park/tram and never comes back

i like plenty of the rest of it

the editing in particular is absolutely horrible- continuity, flow, coherency and any sense of timing or momentum go completely out the window

I watched Sorcerer this afternoon. I had a great ride. I didn't want that end but it made thematic sense, I suppose. I've read a fair bit about the characters being poorly drawn, or cold, but eh, I liked that Friedkin left gesture and landscape do most of the work. It was allegorical, psychomachia even; let the journey tell the story.

Some decent stuff here: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/sorcerer/

Interview with Friedkin by Nicolas Winding Refn from, I think, the Sorcerer blu-ray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZAvDlqGSEc

Watched Cruising off Hollywood Suite a couple of weeks ago. Sordid and not very good, although Pacino's performance is still much more restrained than what's around the corner (maybe Scarface is where it all started to go south).

https://www.criterion.com/films/34370-sorcerer

I probably would've voted for The French Connection which plays up to his strengths. I actually think his best film is The People vs. Paul Crump, an hour-long television documentary he made while he was still directing local television news for WBKB in Chicago. When Friedkin made an appearance at the Harvard Film Archive, they screened it with The French Connection, and if you see both, it's easy to understand why.