the William Friedkin poll

Thinking about Killer Joe still makes me smile.

I hope that in the future, when someone is talking about "The Church", a bystander's first assumption will be that you're talking about the rock band, but their second guess will be Thomas Hayden Church.

i finally saw sorcerer last week. for a minute i'm like, why on earth do they launch this hare-brained scheme to retrieve this ancient nitro. they're an evil oil company, it can't be too hard for them to scare up something else to blow up the well with! and then i'm like, actually, that's exactly the kind of bone-stupid short-sighted greedy corner-cutting decision that an evil oil company would make - fair dos friedkin, fair dos

have you seen The Wages of Fear?

i don't remember if Clouzot was more 'plausible'

i have! on a terrible .avi file downloaded from somewhere nefarious. i need to see it for real.

i don't remember if Clouzot was more 'plausible'

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat is going on in Sorcerer???

truckdriving iirc

the second hour was p cool, but
WHO are these guys and WHY are they doing this and for WHAT???
I haven't seen Wages of Fear

you better flap to it

they are desperate no-hopers

it's an insane, suicidal mission that makes no sense - exactly the sort of thing a rapacious oil company would extort its criminally underpaid workers to sign up for

read a little about Friedkin's plan to get an all star cast... I love Roy Scheider but this would've worked much better with McQueen/Mitchum and Mastroianni... the almost complete excision of exposition here would work with stars. but even the mission and who it's for and why is unclear

the first part of the movie lays out the backstories of each of the four to show how their unhealthy risk tolerance has landed them in Porvenir; driving nitro-laden trucks over impossible roads seems like the logical next step

Wages of Fear is the better film, but I prefer Sorcerer for the Tangerine Dream score

which is really under-used - what little is left is awesome!

watched Sorcerer for the first time (thanks Criterion), pretty amazing movie. i like the whole cast but especially Scheider (obv) and Cremer (great face). looks great, score is incredible, all the location shooting is fantastic. my one quibble with it is the pacing/structure. him adding backstory intros for three of the characters means they don't get into the trucks until the second hour of the movie, it feels like it needs a little more in the trucks. i'd leave what he has but add another 20ish minutes of truck action. iirc more of Wages of Fear proportionally is devoted to the truck stuff