CS Film Club II

Fat City 

The timing of watching Fat City a 1972 boxing drama from legend John Huston worked out perfectly, as I (inadvertently) paired it with another film of his, from the same year, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (currently playing on Criterion through the end of the month). Funny enough, Roy Bean also features Stacy Keach, one of the leads of Fat City. Small world, eh. Nonetheless, City tells the story of the aforementioned Keach, a down and out boxer, past his prime, living in Stockton, California. Shortly after a quick montage (and a banger of opening song from Kris Kristofferson) of this slice of life, working class, run down town, we meet Keach's character, Billy Tully goes to local boxing gym for a workout. It is there he meets our second main character, Ernie Munger, played by a fresh faced Jeff Bridges. The two begin to spar, and Tully, having had past success in the ring, recommends Munger get serious about this boxing thing.  

By all accounts, Fat City was something of a rebound for Huston, as I guess he had some box office failure leading up to this. After watching it, I can see why. The end result is a quietly told character study made with some great technical skill. So much of what makes this an effective film are the lead performances, particularly from Keach, who rarely oversells anything he does. He is perfectly understated throughout, and a lot of what makes him great in this, isn't what he says, but his appearance. From his face alone, he looks much older than he is and he has had his fair share of beatings/benders. For telling a story about a washed up boxer, those kind of things can go a long way. There are a couple of scenes that elaborate on Tully's past, and why he is where he is, but Huston never lets on too much, or gives us a lot. We never see his wife, but we see all the drinking, we see all the failed attempts at trying to restart his career. It's all there for the viewer to take in.

It's interesting watching a boxing movie from the '70s that isn't Rocky, which is probably more than anything else, a personal thing. Boxing movies and Rocky go hand in hand, and my mind always goes in that direction when thinking of this particular genre, so ultimately it was nice to see something else from this period, and not to mention one that came before it. I bring this up really because I feel this is a genre that is pretty easy to fall victim to clichés, but I think Fat City ultimately does a good job of avoiding this. While the film never feels too heavy (credit to Huston and the writing), it's also not too sentimental, and it gives you a pretty stripped down look at the world he is creating. You get a nice picture of a county in transition, and the problems that these people are facing. It feels real from start to finish. 

Bridges and Keach make for a great pairing when they do share scenes. The actors are about 10 years apart in real life and in the film, and that mentor/mentee relationship plays out really well. You get a sense here and there that the two characters are ultimately going on wildly divergent paths, but that never really comes to fruition, which really gives this movie a bittersweet kind of feeling. I also have to talk about the boxing scenes, which for being made in the 1970's, is pretty damn impressive. The shots throughout in the ring when we did see the fights felt very raw and gritty, something I imagine a fight on the boxing circuit would look like. 


All in all, solid flick. In for next round.


8/10

I recently watched The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean for the first time as well.  Pretty good movie but I prefer Fat City which is a raw, powerful movie.  The very last shot of them sitting in the coffee shop saying nothing, it says a lot without saying anything.  Glad you enjoyed.

Out. Sorry man

Thanks, I'll launch the next round then.

Round 220
PG Cooper - PhantomKnight
Dracula - Doomsday
donny - IanTheCool

Can we aim for July 18th as a due date? 3 full weeks and a little change.  Let's ride.

Doomsday

The Bedford Incident
Chico and Rita
A Fish Called Wanda
Night of the Kings
Paper Moon
Von Ryan's Express
The Wicker Man (1973)

A Fish Called Wanda has been on my list for years, I think it's high time I finally knock it out.

For you:

The Big Heat
Black Dynamite
Fiddler on the Roof
Popatopolis
Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Thief

Apologies if you've seen any of these, I just searched through a bunch of movies Letterboxd and selected some that you hadn't rated.

It's almost like another Blaxploitation spoof some asshole recommended to you might have left a bad taste...

It honestly surprises me that you've yet to see Back to the Future Part III, so I just had to put it on there.  But if you ask me, you'd be making really good choices with any of these.

Sorry this took so long...

Black Dynamite (2009)
In 2007 Quentin Tarantino and his friend Robert Rodriguez tried to bring audiences back to the heyday of 70s exploitation filmmaking with their double feature Grindhouse, which combined two films made to look like relics of that decade onto a single bill and unleashed it onto an audience who’d been taught what cinema was by Pirates of the Carribean and Spider-Man… it didn’t go well. Tarnantino and Rodriguez had planned to make Grindhouse a running franchise that would invite other directors to explore other forms of exploitation cinema in similar ways. I like to think that in an alternate universe where Grindhouse wasn’t one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history, this 2009 film Black Dynamite might have worked well in one of the franchise’s future double bills because it’s trying to do something very similar. The film is a pastiche of the Blaxploitation genre that was shot on 16mm to look like an authentic product of the 70s, albeit one that is intentionally trying to be over the top and outrageous and is made more with the pacing that modern audiences would expect. The people making the film clearly love these old movies but they also aren’t blind to their shortcomings and are very self-aware about the fact that they were essentially male fantasies and also that they were known to demonize drugs in ways that would have made Nancy Reagan blush. As the film goes on it gets even crazier, bringing ninjas into the film and then ending in ways that were more outrageous than even a Dolemite film would have thought over the top, but the movie never outstays its welcome and manages to end right when its outrageousness might have started to get old. I’m not sure the movie ever quite digs deep enough into this genre to really stand out as a major statement on film, but it certainly understands what made them fun and also how to make them interesting to modern audiences.
***1/2 out of Five