Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

The setting for this film, directed and cowritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is a small oil town in Texas in 1951.  As one of the characters says, the place is ‘flat and empty’, a description that equally well applies to life there.   So it’s not surprising that most of the characters spend a lot of time hankering after sex even if in virtually all cases the reality is sterile and unsatisfactory.  It's appropriate that Hank Williams’ ‘Cold Cold Heart’ is heard playing in the background at least a couple of times. The only sexual liaison we see that has some genuine warmth and affection to it is an affair between young Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and middle-aged Ruth (an Oscar-winning performance by Cloris Leachman) who is trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Indeed all of the marriages we see are unhappy.  As one of the characters observes, “80% of married life is misery.” The main object of lust among the young folk is Jacy (a perfectly cast Cybill Shepherd making her ...

THE EXORCIST I'm not into horror films, which may explain why I had never got around to watching this classic of the genre. In fact to call it a classic is to understate both its commercial success (it still has the ninth highest gross in North America, adjusted for inflation) and its cultural impact. All of which is a little surprising given that it’s not especially scary and that it’s a tough watch. However it is very shocking.  The Devil takes over the body of Regan, a young girl, and during the film her speech is extremely vulgar, she vomits green slime, she violently attacks all who come close, and she masturbates with crosses.   No wonder the film was so controversial (and there’s no such thing as bad publicity). It is also very intense, thanks to the director William Friedkin using a low-key quasi-documentary style as befits a film that treats the subject matter with the utmost seriousness, especially the involvement of the Catholic church.   Max von Sydo...