the filmic arts

 

I was so happy when The Sting (1973 - Robert Redford; Paul Newman) showed back up on Netflix.

        Then after I played part of it once, a bunch of other American movies from the same era came popping up whenever I went on Netflix:

The Front Page  (1974)

Chinatown  (1974)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest  (1975)

The Parallax View  (1974)

Murder On The Orient Express  (1974)

Blazing Saddles  (1974)

The Conversation  (1974)

Netflix - fairly marinating in '70s films...

(Murder On The Orient Express was just re-made in 2017, also....)

When I was a teenager I heard of The Parallax View but never saw it or read about it.  I started playing it (streaming it) this past weekend - the beginning is the President Kennedy assassination only with different, fictional characters.  A senator (instead of president) gets shot and killed, and the trigger-man dies almost immediately - OK, that's Oswald, check.  Right?  And then a whole bunch of people who were close by that day wind up dead from various improbable accidents...  It's 1963 all over again...

But then after a while I was losing track of what was supposed to be going on, and when it got to a point where there was some kind of hide-out or something, with a boisterous, shrieking monkey (he wasn't hurt, he was just noisy...) and then different still photographs started appearing on the screen and going away, to be replaced with a word, "mother," or some other word, and then another picture, etc., etc. - then I just felt like, OK, I can't, with this anymore....

I checked on You Tube to see what other people think - I typed in the name of the film, and there was a video titled, "the best scene in the movie" and I clicked on it, and it was playing that crazy picture-and-words dream-scene that had made me turn it off!  LOL.

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