Went to check out the WI album and it’s just an early Justin Vernon playlist. Huh.

If I were Sufjan Stevens, I wouldn’t be annoyed, I would immediately announce plans to cover these 26 albums, though.

I’m glad some of the people took this seriously. The song title “I’ve never been to Georgia” on the Georgia album makes me laugh but if it was even one full album of that scruffy troll stuff it’d make me want to jump off a cliff.  I’m also not sure why this would annoy Sufjan Stevens, even if it was a single album…

“There’s nothing happening in Guam, sir!”
-Good Morning, Vietnam-

GUAM OR GTFO!

First this I listened to this morning.  It’s fucking intense and just surprises.  It’s really remarkable.

I have to stop reading reviews of this, getting my expectations too high, Pitchfork gave it a straight 10.

No matter what character he played, he was always still some of the sheriff from First Blood to me.

Dude’s a fool

I agree, but the TW comparison fails more because TW always had that special (if often lovable) horseshit bourgeois-American moral hypocrisy behind its twists. That sort of “just deserts” twist isn’t in this film at all, much less the original story.

Isn't he on record as saying music died February 3, 1959?

I saw it at random on an afternoon movie slot on a local TV station when I was 13 or 14, and was haunted by it.  I loved it. I remember feeling the sense of superiority you describe because I felt like I must be really special and different because I could appreciate a left-of-center drama film like that.  Now I…

To be honest, the Twilight Zone comparison here and the review overall feel like they’re focusing on the ‘reversal’ of the whole story. In my experience, that development creeps in a lot more subtly and later than implied here. There is a surreal sheen over the entire thing, but I’d compare the thing to Mad Men (which,…

I know what you mean. I saw it as a teenager as well and didn’t see the point of it until I was about halfway through the film. It made total sense, especially with his deterioration toward the end of the film. Lancaster’s body language is pretty epic in this—he looks like he’s physically getting smaller as he gets…

I was 17 when I saw it. I can pinpoint the year because I had dropped out of high school and there was this girl... Anyway, I did not get it, though I bluffed my way through a conversation about it with her on the way home. That was 40 years ago. I don’t have any big plans for this weekend, so maybe I’ll try again.

The remarkable part of the role Lancaster chose to play was the gradual physical and emotional deterioration of the character....turning the final 10 minutes of the film into one of the most haunting portraits of emotional/physical desolation ever portrayed on film.

On one hand, you got to admire Burt Lancaster for being willing at age 55 to take a role which required him to spend the entire shoot wearing nothing but a pair of speedos.

Thanks for the great review, Mike. This one has been on my list for years. I’ll try to catch it this week. I read the story a few years back and confess that it struck me as a second rate “Twilight Zone” although I suspect it probably resonated more with the Rob and Laura Petrie generation. I didn’t realize the story h…

Holy cow I saw this movie when I was a teenager and I thought I was really smart because I “got” it.

Apparently there is / was a legendary reel of Disney bloopers which used to get shown to very honoured guests, of which one of the most famous was Julie Andrews turning the air deep navy blue when the wires broke holding her during a scene in Mary Poppins and she hit the floor from about six feet above the stage.