Every once in a while you come across a startlingly fine sentence, one that brings you up short and makes you pay new attention.
I'm not saying anything about dogs, but guess which sentence appealed so much in this excerpt from a review of Funny Games, found in the New Yorker:
And so, like shackled prisoners trudging back to the rack and the thumbscrews, we start once more, with an overhead view of a family car pulling a boat on a trailer along rural roads. The family comprises George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), their ten-year-old son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog—a lolloping golden retriever named Lucky. If there is one lesson we learn from “Funny Games,” it is not that malice is rooted deep in our soiled nature, or that capitalist society has made an unhealthy fetish of violence, but simply that, if you want to avoid such unpleasantness, ditch the retriever. Everything that happens to George and Ann could have been avoided with a pair of Dobermans, or an underfed Scottish terrier with a working knowledge of Nietzsche.
Read the whole good thing:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/03/17/080317crci_cinema_lane
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
In the cinema as in life dogs signify class. The bigger the dog the higher the social status. French monarchs had gigantic Irish wolfhounds, the middle class have their Red setters and Labradors, the working class have their small but deadly pit bulls while the petit bourgeois have silly dogs like poodles. A woman in a silk dressing gown and a pampered pooch is bound to end up dead - certainly in the Hitchcock lexicon. The critic is correct... the dog defines the character - and their cinematic denouement.
Oh dear. Anonymous makes an excellent point and I must face that my own dog and star of my own narrative puts the petit into petit bourgeois, as you can see by her various portraits here.
Know what you are and be that thing.
Great insight though.
Post a Comment