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Sunday, April 23, 2006

"Sorry, old timer, but you're only part poison and I need meat."
- The Ballad of Cable Hogue



so in the eleventh hour, i got into grad school. friggin' relief. now i got to figure out a way to squeeze it in around my job because for the first time in like 10 years i'm working somewhere i don't hate. i thought i wasn't going to get in because it was coming up on Easter and i still hadn't heard back, so i start writing out a nice bridge-burning, sour grapes, recognize-the-skills-type post and luckily i got to delete it. thing is i got burned once before, years back when i was trying to escape Toledo, when i applied to Illinois and North Carolina. i got the packet in the mail with "welcome!" and all the housing info and registration stuff and then, when i called, they said, "uhhhh, well, we're waiting to see what these other guys do" so basically they offered the spots to some genius and whoever that was hadn't made up their mind yet. nothing like being told you're on the 2nd-string list right off the bat, eh? so that didn't work out, and this was going to be my last attempt because my GRE scores would have expired and i was dangerously close to not giving a fuck anymore. and when i called over at Pitt they said "well, we're waiting to see what this other guy does and..." so i figured fuck it. concentrate on work and writing on my own time. but then the letter showed up after all. so i guess i'm grateful, but when i get there, i sure want to know who the prodigy is that always gets first dibs on these offers. watch it be someone with a tiny book of poetry or a story called "A Dream of Fruit" but with really good grades. i'm thinking that when i send a stack of stories and chapters to these schools, there must be some people in those committees that really don't like it. clearly someone does, but someone must really have their concerns about...i don't know. something. i can't make it more obvious that i will write massive amounts of fiction. i'm not going to be one of those clowns that turns in high school shit or floats by on some book they've been screwing with for the past five years. i will write stuff that week to be read that week and that's very rare in these workshops. hopefully it'll be different in grad school, but in undergrad, people were always in love with the "idea" of being a writer and they never produced shit. they would turn in what was clearly chapter 9 of the sci-fi book they wrote in Jr. High (not a typo is sight because it's been through 3 other workshops already) and i'd drop 35 pages that i just wrote in their laps and none of them would read it. i know this for a fact because i would put these lazy bastards into my stories as characters that got their lunch money taken away or their heads held down in toilets as a way of daring them to find themselves in there, and when the day came to evalulate it...crickets chirping. so anyway, grad school should be nothing but people who are serious so we'll see.

on an unrelated subject, here's an email i just sent so a friend that i thought i'd drop on here to see if anyone likes westerns as much as me:

...you know, you're right that the "The Wild Bunch" is the probably the best Penkinpah (and maybe the best all-time western too. that and "Once Upon a Time in the West") but i'm still partial to "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" for a couple reasons. on paper Wild Bunch has the most creative animal slaugher (kids fucking with ants, then adding scorpions THEN lighting them on fire. jesus christ, kids, run out of ideas?), by far the bloddiest gunfights, the most complicated plot, a cast of like 10 main character, the most iconic dialoge ("Let's go." "Why not." "If they move, kill 'em" etc.) but there's just some things about Cable Hogue that wins me over every time. where Wild Bunch is this fevered, angry movie, Hogue is (besides maybe "Convoy") the only Sam movie i ever saw where he was either sober or just in a good mood or something and it shows through. normally, i love the cynical, nasty stuff, but with ALL his other stuff being that way, it's downright alien to come across such a loose, snappy flick by him. i mean, this things got fucking original SONGS written for it (one about butterflies!), men actually smiling, and a woman that doesn't get slapped. and even though it's "happy" it's still violently happy. the first guy to stop for a drink at Hogue's "god-given" water hole is killed by Hogue and buried next to it. doesn't sound like it here, but that was fucking funny. the next guy who stops by is a bizarre priest who's carrying naked pictures of women, and when he tries to drink from the water hole, Hogue says "give me a dime you pious bastard, or i'll bury you, too." also...funny! they become friends and you know the rest, but the movie is so simple and sure of itself i just think it's great. and the little growing graveyard he ends up with out there next to the water hole is an awesome idea. i think he did "Straw Dogs" right after Hogue so, clearly, whatever was making him happy and confident didn't last too long. in his biography he says that the indifference to Hogue's release made him angry at the audience (normally he was was just angry at the producers 'n stuff and never even though about the public) so that's what "Straw Dogs" was, a big fuck-you to the audiences who thought Hogue wasn't nasty enough. he said, "oh, not mean enough for you? how about a double rape scene and a fucking bear trap snapping on some guy's head?"

"The Ballad of Cable Hogue" seems like a glimpse of what a successful Sam Peckinpah would have been doing more of. they'd still be violent movies, but they wouldn't be so schizo and choppy and such obvious vendettas against studios and imagined enemies. Hogue is like a fable and Jason Robards is really the only actor that Sam ever got such a great fully-fleshed character out of. you know, thinking about it right now, he's the only main characer in one of Sam's movies that (except for the opening credits when he's dying of thirst) isn't sadistically punished throughout, or at the end of the movie. actually i'm going to watch all of these movies ("Ballad of Cable Hogue," "Wild Bunch," "Ride the High Country," and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") all day today as I'm working on my first western script, so i may move this email to you over to my blog to invite people to talk about westerns with me...

epilogue (with spoilers):

in spite of what seems to be Cable Hogue's death under the wheels of one of those new fangled "horseless carriages," i believe that he actually lived a long life after that day. there's three clues:

first, the fact that, after Hogue gets run over by the car, there's a quick cut in mid-sentence to them all in black at the funeral, suggesting that time has passed and the preacher is simply remembering the game Hogue played when he asked for a eulogy while he was alive.

second, the crazy preacher says something about how it took true love for Hogue to "finally leave his desert." if he died after getting run over, then he never would have left.

and third, because the sniveling warden from Cool Hand Luke says "i'm sleeping in town tonight" after the funeral, suggesting that he's been in charge of Hogue's waterhole for a long time, ever since Hogue left the desert to live with his woman in San Francisco. the fact that the men on the dvd commentary miss all of these clues, and still talk about the ending as if Hogue died from getting run over by the car, is completely inexcusable. again, i'm utterly shcked that the man who wrote "If They Move, Kill 'Em," the best biography of all time, is so fucking clueless when it comes to the climax of one of Sam's all-time best flicks.

another epilogue (even more shit spoiled):


my answer to my friend Mark's email with some specifics about the strange goings-on i noticed on this new 2-disc set of "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid":

...okay, as near as i remember from the videotape i have, the Turner version is the same as my 90s videotape. this is, by far, the superior version and, according to his biography, the exact version of the movie Sam screened for guests at his home. this is more than a "directors cut" or "preview" version of the flick, whatever that means, it is EXACTLY what he wanted to release but couldn't. so don't get me wrong, it's great that it's finally on dvd and included here, so that's all good.

the problem is that the new 2005 version that adds a couple things and rights a couple small wrongs is fucked at birth because they used the theatrical version as a starting point. that means that the extras that are added here, are added to an edited lame version that i, mercifully, had never seen until now. so they start with the half hour shorter, bloodless version of the movie and put the extras on that? that's just stupid. so i thought, "how could they justify that?" and i listen to the commentary around the scenes that i know were cut out, and they just talk about how Sam wasn't really forced to cut the movie down to shit for the theaters, that he was simply "fine cutting" the movie very quickly, and that short shit is the version he would have preferred. which is complete revisionist bullshit, because he showed the "Turner" version to people like Kristofferson for years at his own house. it seems like these egomaniacs just wanted to fuck with someone's movie and, since it's impossible to add anything 30 years later, they do the only thing they can do to it, they cut shit out to pretend it's their movie now.

so the 2005 version is a bust with, as near as i can tell, about THREE exceptions that make it worth even existing. the only things i noticed in this 2005 version that i hadn't seen before (and it was tough because you know i like this guy's movies and i spent most of the time yelling at the TV, "WHY??? WHY TAKE THAT OUT??? WHY??" but here's what's new and worth seeing in the 2005:

1.) Pat Garrett had a wife??? who knew. he goes home to his wife for about 5 seconds, looks very uncomfortable, and storms out. this scene is cool because it shows him walking through a bright white picket fence, and then at the end of the movie he goes through a shitty white picket fence and i'm a sucker for symbolism like that.

2.) the scene where Slim Pickens walks to the river to die now has the lyrics to "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" in it. i know we've heard this song a million times but this is the whole reason the song exists. the lyrics specifically talk about the death of this character. in the Turner version it just had the music and was still haunting, but this is even better because that whole scene has such a dark cloud over it. this is where Garrett deputizes Pickens to help him go "question" L.Q. Jones who used to ride with Billy and everyone is shooting of course but it's not the usual shootout. this is where Garrett seems genuinely haunted by all the killing he's been doing and when L.Q. Jones says "we shouldn't be doing this, there's not a lot of us left" and they cut to Pickens holding the hole in his stomache, i still get a chill. the Dylan lyrics makes it even stronger now. Pickens was building a boat, so he walks to the river to die and when the song says "take this badge" and they show Garrett in all black walking up to Jones, he looks weary of the killing, like it's starting to fuck him up AND he still looks like a complete badass. good good shit.

3.) there seems to be an extra song with the new opening credit sequence. instead of the Turner version where they freeze-frame in black and white for each credit, just like the Wild Bunch (and Devil's Rejects!) this one has another song and some wild west photos that are intersting. since it's extra stuff i hadn't seen, i thought it was cool. even though that makes like FOUR openings in this 2005 version before the movie even gets started: Pat getting shot (because of the editing, he's getting shot by Billy! very cool), the chicken slaughter conversations, the "he's my friend" intro in the bar, THEN the credits with the song.

so that stuff is new and good, but here's what's missing (from what i remember from my old videotape):

-less chicken slaughter
-no L.Q. Jones saying to Billy "well, he ain't your friend anymore"
-no "i'll take you for a walk across hell on a spiderweb!" line from Ollinger the crazed zealot sherrif (my favorite line in the movie!)
-no second shotgun blast into Ollinger's corpse after Billy says "keep the change!"
-less brutal cockfighting (where the one rooster gets the other's eye)
-when Garrett runs into the guy with his horse the guy no longer says "what the fuck!"
-missing a scene where Garrett's partner slaps around some locals (i think)
-less scenes of Bob Dylan's Alias character mugging and grinning and looking lost in the movie, which i guess isn't such a bad thing after all.
-shorter rape scene with the mexican dude's wife and less bullet holes when Billy rides up and kills the rapists and then decides to go back to Fort Sumner
-no line when Peckingpah himself, doing a cameo as "Will" the undertaker (!) says to Pat Garrett, who's on his way to kill Billy at the end of the movie, "go on, you gutless chickenshit son of a bitch" this is my other favorite line and a very strange moment considering the director pops up in his own movie to insult the main character. i thought it was great. that and the fact that Sam is standing there in the dark building a child's coffin. they say he was drunk mook during filming but this guy's got artsy symbolic moments coming out his ass. this is more good shit that they had NO sane reason to be leaving out of any new version.
-no follow-up to the elderly Garrett murder scenes. with is real stupid because the 2005 still keeps the opening elderly Garrett "present day" scene but drops the closing one?? why the fuck would you not put the other bookend scene on the movie? that's what i mean. just careless bullshit like that that makes me believe these assholes were just chopping scenes for the hell of it. probably more missing that i didn't notice after the one viewing but i see no reason to sit through that version any more than once. now i know what was added and that's all i care about.

anyway, don't worry. you still own the preferred version on disc II, and with the extras on the shit version, you can just think of disc I as a deleted scenes disc. so you have all possible material in this new set and for that i'm thankful. there's just no real reason on this earth to ever watch the entire 2005 version unless there are short-attention spans or children in the room.

okay i'm posting this too...

also started reading "The Authentic Life of Billy, The Kid: A Faithful and Interesting Narrative" by Pat F. Garrett. it's reads like a man trying to justify being a murderer all his life.

::: david - 3:28 PM [+] :::
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