2022-018 / MAP: 96.18/100
IMDb / Wikipedia / Official Trailer / Our Collection
Fascinating biopic on two American outlaws and folk heroes. Their daring bank robberies and explosive train heists soon brought more heat than they could handle - their solution… Bolivia! They never made it home.
Did I say fascinating? Because the film is absolutely fascinating. Director George Roy Hill (who received an Oscar nod) pulls together enough of the historical account and then goes on to exceed our cinematic expectations of what a western can be. If I was a betting man, I’d say 1968’s Sergio Leone epic spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West influenced this film’s raw and gritty realism but also freed other creative decisions. The music is decidedly anachronistic, which stands out sharply. The camera work is aggressive and puts you right in the thick of the action or winds you out until you feel no bigger than an ant against the dusty vistas. You feel every tense moment as Butch and Sundance work hard to evade capture and the dread as they launch their bodies off a high cliff into a raging river.
The writing, damn - sharp, witty, smart. There’s way more story to tell but there’s not enough time. You truly get the feeling every day was an adventure all its own for both men, maybe that’s what captured people’s imaginations. Script Writer William Goldman had the impossible task of trimming this biopic down but he did what he does best - he gives us the “Good Parts” version and finds the balance between relaying history and making it entertaining. If the “Good Parts” version sounds vaguely familiar, you might have seen Goldman’s The Princess Bride, it was just the good parts too. In the book, he discusses how The Cliffs of Insanity were influenced by the famous desperate jump scene in this film.
A movie is only as good as its actors can act and they’ve saddled the film with the era’s most charismatic - Paul Newman and Robert Redford. I’ve seen the film before, many long years ago, but I forgot how much humor was built into the scenes - witty comments, unexpected actions, just humor used to help ease the strain of being on the run. I’ve got very little to complain about here.
Mrs. Lady Zedd said she was straight up pissed she missed it and warned me
... keep reading on reddit ➡
What are the chances that the Meowth that is going to be with butch and Cassidy is going to be Meowzie. Like they haven't shown up in the anime in 14 years and they show up randomly now with a random female Meowth in a series that has been about call backs and to give them a completely new female Meowth seems out of place. That's just me.
I was browsing wikipedia pages of random people who lived in the late 1800s in the US and skirted the edges of the law, and I realized that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday have far longer wikipedia pages than Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid, which I recognize isn't a perfect proxy for how famous people are, but it tends to be somewhat correlated. The order by length of wikipedia article goes
Wyatt Earp ≈ Doc Holliday > Billy the Kid >> Butch Cassidy >> the Sundance Kid,
But I hadn't even heard of them until like yesterday, and I had only barely heard of Billy the Kid either, and I don't really know anything about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid either, except having definitely heard those names before, so I was wondering if I'm the outlier? Are Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday people most Americans would have heard of?
Do you think most Americans would know who Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were?
I realized that when Butch and Sundance go to Bolivia and get jobs as security detail for Strother Martin and they're paranoid about getting ambushed when they're going down the mountain, and they get called "morons" because no one is going to rob them when they don't have any money, that that was the plan for robbing the Flyer that Harvey came up with and got them set off on the whole chase in the first place. Harvey said they'd rob the Flyer going to and coming from it's destination, and Butch took his idea after besting him in the "knife fight."
Just thought that was a neat bit of cyclical screenwriting. Thanks
How was the famous "they die in a hail of Bolivian bullets" end optical done? The stills show the progress of the scene - they run out of their bunker in a color mid shot which zooms in tighter, freezes, then fades to sepia. This pulls back to reveal a giant wide shot.
The dissolve from color to sepia isn't perfect, but A) it very much looks to be the same camera angle and shot and framing and motion, and B) it's an optical so would be a pos struck from an inter neg, and there would definitely be some reregistering of the frame because of that. But they didn't shoot it in the wide then push way in on the neg, because even with a fine-grained stock it would have been terribly grainy?
How was it done?
https://preview.redd.it/jk9lzo6ysdq71.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=37183cb68fb7a2dcc0835155044f9312f1350fed
https://preview.redd.it/ttkr8s7ysdq71.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5ece0e976d99f296c0a343a3babc77b42af2763
https://preview.redd.it/qwbges7ysdq71.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a73c2719b2ba4b4332bb157c0ba47badab30e77f
https://preview.redd.it/9hbvnu7ysdq71.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61cfd5d81e3bd831da8524b1c887a1441f2008b7
https://preview.redd.it/0vmi1s6ysdq71.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4ceaacfbbcd754a03fd8c20c7e6b9da3b7e54f02
MAP: 96.18/100
IMDb / Wikipedia / Official Trailer / r/500moviesorbust
Fascinating biopic on two American outlaws and folk heroes. Their daring bank robberies and explosive train heists soon brought more heat than they could handle - their solution… Bolivia! They never made it home.
Did I say fascinating? Because the film is absolutely fascinating. Director George Roy Hill (who received an Oscar nod) pulls together enough of the historical account and then goes on to exceed our cinematic expectations of what a western can be. If I was a betting man, I’d say 1968’s Sergio Leone epic spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West influenced this film’s raw and gritty realism but also freed other creative decisions. The music is decidedly anachronistic, which stands out sharply. The camera work is aggressive and puts you right in the thick of the action or winds you out until you feel no bigger than an ant against the dusty vistas. You feel every tense moment as Butch and Sundance work hard to evade capture and the dread as they launch their bodies off a high cliff into a raging river.
The writing, damn - sharp, witty, smart. There’s way more story to tell but there’s not enough time. You truly get the feeling every day was an adventure all its own for both men, maybe that’s what captured people’s imaginations. Script Writer William Goldman had the impossible task of trimming this biopic down but he did what he does best - he gives us the “Good Parts” version and finds the balance between relaying history and making it entertaining. If the “Good Parts” version sounds vaguely familiar, you might have seen Goldman’s The Princess Bride, it was just the good parts too. In the book, he discusses how The Cliffs of Insanity were influenced by the famous desperate jump scene in this film.
A movie is only as good as its actors can act and they’ve saddled the film with the era’s most charismatic - Paul Newman and Robert Redford. I’ve seen the film before, many long years ago, but I forgot how much humor was built into the scenes - witty comments, unexpected actions, just humor used to help ease the strain of being on the run. I’ve got very little to complain about here.
Mrs. Lady Zedd said she was straight up pissed she missed it and warned me it might
... keep reading on reddit ➡