Change Your Image
djdaedalus
Reviews
Bullitt (1968)
Not just a movie...
...it's a historical document. Society ladies showing off their trophy furs. Defunct airlines (Pan Am) and collapsed freeways (the Embarcadero). Cops without cell phones, or two way radios. Billboards showing how little has changed ("Need Money for Taxes ?", "Mothers Day Brunch May 11, make your reservations now") and how much ("ENCO" gasoline). Backstreet USA in all its slovenly glory. Moribund corner stores with fading signs. And of course an airport where you walk in and out, neat as you please, past the luggage left standing unattended at the curb.
Before Bullitt only the Europeans produced cinema that actually photographed society instead of re-creating it in a studio. With a few exceptions (The Conversation, The French Connection) Hollywood didn't exactly pick up the ball and run with it. Hollywood makes money, not historical documents. No matter. Watch this movie for its action and its background - and ask yourself if your time is better than Bullitt's.
Theatre 625: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)
Prescient doesn't begin to describe it
Time : the near future. Or far. Or now.
A small minority of "high drive" people manufacture the entertainment and drugs that keep the majority of "low drive" people happy. TV is two way - they can see the audience reacting. And the news is bad - the Low Drives are getting bored, even with the "S=x Olympics" on the horizon.
Not all the High Drives are happy either. Some want "real art" on TV, others just have consciences. One "real art" advocate cracks, puts on an unscheduled demonstration during a TV show and is killed in a fall.
The audience laps it up, even as it laughs it up. The High Drives realize that the Low Drives want surprise, tragedy, even horror. They devise the "Live Life Show", with a High Drive family stranded on a windswept Scottish island, and lots of cameras around to follow their movements....and there's a surprise...your friendly neighborhood psychopath.
Britain's top actors, including the incomparable Leonard Rossiter, showed the way to where we are now, with Reality TV and Fear Factor lining the sewer of the public mind. At least they haven't killed anybody...yet.