lunedì, marzo 03, 2008

Hard, you say knowingly

The F-word found Good to Me by Otis Redding, who I love. And now I love him more. I ladore the Beatles, really I do, they're the whatevers of the universe, but Otis Redding's version of 'A Hard Day's Night' onto the original is like a big gorgeous black man offering to fuck your legs off onto two pallid lower-middle-class English boys whining for a blowjob. I can't find a video of it so I'll just post one of Otis Redding making Mick Jagger look like a twelve year old girl:



And just because it's awesome:



Ugh, it makes me want to cry that he's dead.

Anyhoo. The F-word also found The Big Sleep, which I hadn't seen yet, the one with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She looks like Uma Thurman but hot. It was good, and I was interested to see how they'd departed from the book to avoid getting censored. Or not departed from the book.

For example, there's a bit in the movie where a handsome young guy shows up at Joe Brady's apartment, kills him, and then gets taken to Geiger's house by Marlowe, where Geiger's body is lying 'in state' on the bed. In the movie there's no explanation for all that, whereas in the book, where the same thing happens, Chandler was able to show that Geiger was gay and had had a sort of gigolo living with him who ended up shooting Brady, et cetera.

I was curious about what audiences must have thought about the sequence without knowing who the hell this handsome angry young guy was - if it made any sense, or if there were cues I missed in the movie suggesting what the relationship between Geiger and the gigolo was. Maybe people were more sensitive about suggestions of gayness back then because homophobia was common even though gay people usually kept it in the closet - you had to look out for things to get paranoid about . . . . Don't know.

Nessun commento: