Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

This film is possibly the most entertainment ever captured on and assembled with film. To me, anyway, it is the perfect movie. I know I’m not alone when I say that it could be the best Western, or the best Drama, or the best Comedy of its time. This film quite simply has it all.

Beyond all of its very obvious virtues, however, is its real magic. This film has an aura of charm about it. Maybe it’s due to the legendary subject matter and the romanticization of the Old West. Or, perhaps it’s actually the filmmaking. The still montage, of course, is wonderful. It expresses something that ‘motion picture’ cannot. It summons a sense of sentimental empowerment in me, and makes me happy. It really does, in fact this whole film does that: makes me happily sad or sadly happy.

The score is wonderful, especially during the photomontage, and I’m not typically a fan of score at all. Most films are over-scored, especially nowadays, as they insist upon depriving the imagination of the movie and making it a commercial for something entirely intangible but extremely profitable. This score, songs and all, is so evocative of primal joy and carefree romance that it cheers me up just sitting here writing and thinking about it.

The characters are well rounded, too. Newman and Redford have their famous chemistry in Spades in this film. Working with the tightest script outside of Casablanca, they create heroes out of dust. They pull off playing true legends, something pretty rare. They do so largely because they play Butch and Sundance as two guys who have spent a lot of time together. Our mannerisms rub off on people we’re with and vice-versa, but that is nowhere in filmdom better realized than in this movie. The characters have enormous differences, but it’s obvious to me that they are best friends, at least in the movie. They are two very different people who interact so casually and naturally that there seems to be very little interaction at all. They become one legend; two people who subconsciously borrow each other’s characteristics.

I’ve never met anyone who’s seen this film and not loved it. Most people rave about it, in fact, and I am most definitely one of them. I consider the first time I watched this film as a ritual right of passage for me. Along with 2001, it is one of a small handful of films that so deeply impacted my life immediately. I saw films differently after I saw this for the first time, and it’s maybe the only film I know of that I could watch five times consecutively and not be bored once.

2001: A Space Odyssey

John Lennon said that this movie should be shown in a temple 24 hrs/day, or something along those lines. Lennon may have been prone to exaggeration, and atheism, but he has a point. Some people say this film is boring or pointless. That amazes me, well actually it doesn’t, since most movies don’t ask anything of their audience, especially patience or imagination. The film itself is simple and slow, but it is beautiful. This might largely be the point. Who knows what Kubrick’s actually thinking? He doesn’t usually seem to have a solid point to get across, but he’s not off the wall for the sake of itself, either, like Godard or Tarantino. He is a storyteller first and foremost, and he tells stories with pictures, which is what "cinema" originally meant. Watching this film is pure cinematic joy to me. It’s a ballet, a tango between man and his time alive, a serene fear of death accompanied by an over-compensation of progress in the face of mortality. Curious as ever, ignorant as ever, obstinate as ever, bloodthirsty as ever, self-doubtful as ever, self-important as ever, self-possessed and unaware as ever. This movie shows mankind as fickle untrusting beasts who hide behind civil hatred and a clean sterile environment. It also shows humankind, and the universe as a whole for that matter, as an outrageously beautiful existence; man and the universe living in a copulatory splendor of partnership. There is a romance between man our world, a torrid affair, really, that lives behind the obvious, beneath history, an underlying beauty, an on-going millennia-old tryst. This is captured by the third person omniscient camera. Such objectivity is how this film relays so much splendor, wonder, beauty, and grace. Few films try to tell a story from outside the boundaries of human life itself, where we breathe, eat, sleep, smoke, screw, drink, travel, taste, smell, hear, see, and feel. This film may show the insides, the inner-makings of fear, stupidity, adventure, and bravery, but it does so from the outside, almost from HAL’s perspective. I agree with Lennon that it should be shown 24 hours a day, but not in a temple, it’s not a holy or divine experience. It is merely beautiful just as mankind is merely beautiful. This is perhaps the best, most profound, most groundbreaking film ever made, of man by man for man. It’s not sacred, but the imagination it ignites within the open-eyed viewer may well be sublime.