Most movies about pop-cultural obsessives -- those individuals who live vicariously through other people’s art, films and music -- are usually about young-to-middle-aged men untethered from relationships and, in many cases, social decorum: High Fidelity, Diner, Free Enterprise, Cinemania, Watching the Detectives, Play it Again, Sam. These movies were always about men; women … [Read more...]
‘Blackthorn’ rides tired nag into Cassidy revisionism
George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that felt awfully new in its time and now feels as musty as mothballs, ended on an iconic freeze-frame of the titular bandits plunging into a hail of gunfire and their certain deaths: the outlaw criminals as tragic fatalists. This retelling of the real-life Cassidy story climaxed on the conventional wisdom of the … [Read more...]