Month: October 2009

Few movies create such an eerie environment that draw you inside and create a sort of ambiguous puzzle that needs to be explored. The Shining, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut, Blue Velvet, Mullholland Drive have all lead me down rabbit holes of google searches learning what room numbers mean, what the fuck the obelisk is, the meaning of masks and “fidelio“. Last night I watched William Friedkin’s Cruising and 24 hours later I am still trying to find out all I can about this world. Doomed before it even was released for a myriad of reasons in 1980 it was buried in obscurity until it came out briefly on VHS in 1996 the surfaced again in 2007 with the DVD release.

“the film is progressive for its time on topics like police brutality against gays, and that its form is an important part of what makes it progressive. He links the film’s incoherence, which he sees as deliberate on the filmmaker’s part, to the critique it is making of patriarchy and its corollaries: homophobia, repression of gays and the warping of gay and straight relationships by relations of domination and inequality.”
– Bill Krohn

Super eerie, gritty, fragmented story telling with no heroes, this is an amazing genre-less movie (is it slasher, cop, mystery, horror?) worth several watches and some reading. Start with the trailer. Then watch the movie, if you have Netflix you can add it to you instant que here.