Movie Details
| Title: | Wake in Fright | |
| Director: | Ted Kotcheff | |
| Year: | 1971 | |
| Genre: | Trapped in Crazytown | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.26.12 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- First Blood
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.26.12 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2012 I guess this movie was almost were it not for the efforts of some awesome print archivists and now Drafthouse Films is re-releasing it. I really love stories like this... how the negatives were thought lost and then found in some unmarked box posted for destruction 48 hours after being discovered, then painstakingly renovated to be brought back to life. Or some random pristine print found in a closed hospital in Sweden or something because they used to screen it for child patients. These are stories that will soon be gone forever now that all films are digital, but something about the tactile vulnerability of the film itself really satisfies the film nerd neurons in my brain. Anyway, the film is kind of a typical existential 70s freak-out where a guy, kind of stuck in mundane life, gets roped into this absolutely hellish lost weekend adventure like he literally took a vacation in hell like the brimstone biblical hell with fires and devils and torture and shit... then at the end of the movie he for some reason loves it. I don't... well.. I guess maybe I sort of understand it but in the sissy white intellectual college student way like I appreciate the cinematography in SPike Lee films but I don't think I'll ever understand these types of movies in the grizzly 90-year old blues guitarist with a roadmap of cracks in his hands way like realy FEEEEEEL it man. I'll never be there, so parts of this movie left me cold. It's great though. Everything that movies have taught me about how dirty, fly-ridden, sweaty, orange, crazy, beer-soaked, rough and tumble, and batshit crazy rural Australia was and is and will always be. The amount of beer ingested in this movie, particularly in long chugging swallows, is really impressive. Donald Pleasance is also great. Boy that rape came out of nowhere, didn't it!? |
