kes – Smug Film (1/7/13

elvishybrid

I’ve done it, guys—I did Elvis! To be specific, I did all 31 Elvis films, two a week, in about four months time. This has been a wild ride, and I thank all of you that have followed me through it.

If you remember, I set out on this journey with merely a passing fascination for Elvis, and a huge ambivalence toward his films. I finish this journey with now a plethora of Elvis film knowledge, an Elvis t-shirt, a vintage Elvis belt buckle (gifted to me randomly!), copies of both Peter Guralnick Elvis biographies (Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley) and a small collection of very attractive Elvis JPEGs saved on my desktop.

I like to think that this project has changed me for the better—I now know what it’s like to soar with Elvis at his highest highs, and cringe for him at his lowest lows. I did genuinely have a lot of fun with these; there’s something very watchable about these movies, which I can’t say for most crappy ‘60s films. I’m sure it would have been a different experience had I been there when they were coming out, but to view them as a retrospective has been a real trip.

Elvis was just fun—he embodied that pure, unfettered, visceral feeling of singing and dancing your heart out. It was that force that made sequin jumpsuits look cool and shaking your ass look manly. Heck, he even made womanizing look like fun for everyone. And his movies, like himself, were equally as unpretentious and easy to digest. While the plots were often inane and the music quality dropped severely throughout, you always came wanted to come back and see what Elvis was up to this time. Some of these are worth sitting through just for that one song, or that one performance, or one scene of Elvis kissing three brides on the mouth before he gives them away to their husbands on their wedding day. I now truly understand how Elvis became such a larger-than-life presence– that unachievable ideal that eventually brought Elvis himself to his knees.

But I digress. Lets take one last trip though Elvis film-review-land with his 31st and final film:

Continue reading Jenna Does Elvis #16 – Change of Habit (1969) / Complete Elvis Ranking

meeks The second most interesting thing that happens in Meek’s Cutoff.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond
104 min.

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead.

One review I read of Meek’s Cutoff called it an “anti-Western”, and that title is apt. Director Kelly Reichardt does approach the genre from a unique perspective. She shows the earliest journeys made by settlers to the American far West as they really were: really fucking tedious most of the time.

There’s a wagon train of eight people lost and thirsty in the Oregon desert. They think their guide—the asshole racist Stephen Meek—is responsible, either from negligence or malice. A lone Native American shows up and Meek captures him. They think the Native American might know how to find water, so they take him along. They get into an argument when one of their wagons crashes. Then they see a living tree. I guess that means they find water, but I don’t know because the movie ends before anything else happens. That’s not a synopsis, that’s literally every significant plot point in the whole thing.
Continue reading Meek’s Cutoff is a Tedious Nightmare