Word: friedkins
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...William Friedkin doesn’t know how he survived the making of “The French Connection,” his 1971 police-procedural classic.As the Oscar-winning director tells it, his appearance some 35 years later at the Harvard Film Archive’s two-week retrospective of his work can only be explained by miracle. “It was the Movie God again,” he said. Only some sort of cinematic deity could’ve saved him, he says, from the perils of one of the movie’s most famous...
...World War II and attended Fordham University before entering the TV industry in its New York infancy. He was a prominent member of that first generation, the so-called Golden Age of Television, that birthed directors who would win Oscars (Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill, Franklin J. Schaffner, William Friedkin) or be nominated for them (John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison, Arthur Penn, Arthur Hiller, Robert Altman). Directing scripts by such comers as Gore Vidal, Reginald Rose and Horton Foote, he learned a reverence for the word and for the midcentury liberalism it embodied and ratified. Solid, non-Communist, arguably paternalistic, this...
...much harder to explain my regard for Bug. I mean, eclectic as I pretend to be, I don't much care for horror movies, especially the currently endemic teen-slasher variety. But I saw William Friedkin's movie many months ago and it has haunted me ever since. For reasons best known to the addled-geniuses of movie marketing, it's being thrown against the Pirates of the Caribbean juggernaut next weekend, which probably is a result of a lot of people going "yetch" when they saw it. I understand that response. Who wants to see a movie shot almost...
...Make that a lot more loony. He begins to perceive an insect infestation in the motel. His lover at first doubts him, then with growing intensity succumbs to his madness with results you can perhaps imagine, though not, I think, with the creepiness that Friedkin, working from a script Tracy Letts adapted from his own play, enthusiastically realizes. He's a director used to working on a larger scale (The Exorcist, The French Connection) who has not had much luck in the movies lately. But, boy, he's good working on this miniscule scale. Those imaginary bugs quickly become more...
...challenges the lax, we're-just-kidding-around spirit of most American movies (see, or rather don't see Grindhouse, for example). Like it or not, Bug takes you deep into the realm of abnormal psychology. Like it or not, it is a serious movie, very possibly Friedkin's best. In any case, it almost literally itched this reviewer back to consciousness of the movies' divine and utterly essential scuzziness. Mozart is great, and can survive the indifference of inept filmmakers. Bug probably won't survive the indifference of its distributor (and, since its not teen-friendly) its lack...