Movie Details
| Title: | Busting | |
| Director: | Peter Hyams | |
| Year: | 1974 | |
| Genre: | Cop | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 01.05.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 01.05.23 | Internet | Tonight's double feature is from this week's Video Archives podcast. QT's podcast seems to be doing well because the "related" movies on the imdb page for this are all mentioned on the pod. In any case, I'd never heard of this before but, like QT, I am a fan of 70s cop movies. Really, a movie called Super Cops is one of the first times I realized that just because a movie is good doesn't mean it will be held up as a classic and always available. I think I watched it on 16mm at a friend's house and thought, like, what the fuck. This movie is better than half the crap coming out today, it's Gordon Parks' follow up to his Shaft movies, why do we have to buy a 16mm print of it in order to see it? Of course, now it's probably on Amazon or otherwise available, but the point I was getting around to making is that 70s cops movies aren't just limited to French Connection and Serpico. The Super Cops. Freebie and the Bean, this one, Electra Glide in Blue, Mitchell... not even counting the Dirty Harrys, blaxploitation, and Italian stuff. There's a lot of good 70s cop movies out there. And this is one of them! My thoughts largely mirror Roger and Quentin's from their podcast. I definitely see the love of this dolly which gives the action scenes a really dynamic and kinetic feel that can't help but engage the viewer. There's lots of attention paid to composition there where each shot moves from beat to beat and conveys a lot of action and information with each setup. And both Elliot Gould and Robert Blake are great together. Another reason why I wanted to watch this was because everyone on the Video Archives podcast is a pretty big Peter Hyams fan and I only know him from pretty crappy 90s stuff like Timecop and Schwarzenegger's End of Days. They talked about The Relic on a previous episode which I remember enjoying the book way more than the movie, and now with this they're saying he's like this action maestro so I wanted to see if my previous opinion was wrong. Well, I stand by his 90s work being mediocre but I didn't realize that he made Stay Tuned which I was a fan of (and had a long-standing idea to remake except with old film noirs instead of tv) and 2010 (which I remember being good albeit a "normal" sci-fi film rather than the experience that is 2001). I guess Capricorn One is the movie of his to see but his work here is pretty impressive. I don't know how it compares to the car chase in Freebie or the building demolition in Super Cops but this was a solid fun movie that fits into the 70s cop genre really well. |
