-
I finally watched this movie last night. And by ‘finally’ I mean I remembered I wanted to see it 3 days ago, and got it from Netflix yesterday. In a world where 70% of my needs can be torrentially met, the 3 days I spent without COCKFIGHTER seemed like a years-long, entertainment-less abyss.
Monte Hellman and Warren Oates also made one of my favorite movies, TWO LANE BLACKTOP. COCKFIGHTER, on the other hand is not one of my favorite movies. This is what I assume was Charles Willeford’s thought process before writing the book and film: ‘You know, men and roosters, they’re pretty similar. They both make most of their decisions based on sex and pride even if it leads to their death. They’re both like living phallic symbols. I mean, roosters are even called ‘cocks’. Oh shit, metaphor, novel, and screenplay done, motherfucker.’
To which I hope someone replied, ‘Wait, what kind of decisions are roosters making?’
So the movie is that metaphor for an hour and a half. Including a lot of symbolic crotch level camera work, Harry Dean Stanton looking his youngest on film (he looks only 50 in this), and hundreds of actual chicken murders. I’m assuming in the eventual remake all the cockfighting will be CGI, and it will be considered THE MATRIX of chicken fight films.
The DVD, besides containing one of the best animated menus (a close up of a rooster’s face nervously blinking with a looped crowing sound), also had a cheaply made documentary about Warren Oates on it called something like WARREN OATES: HE WAS AWESOME THEN HE DIED. It’s interviews with people like Ned Beatty and a super-tan, but tired looking Peter Fonda saying things like ‘that dude was cool.’ The best testimonial in it though was from a writer I never heard of who said something very near this ‘Warren Oates was like a man from the 19th century. I’d try to explain what I mean by that, but I don’t think I can.’ Which at first I just thought was hilarious based on how vague and sort of stupid that statement is, but I think he was just referring to the fact that in most of his movies Oates always plays the old school guy that has no place in the modern world. Just like Bruce Willis. The difference being Oates plays him as pathetic and sad and Willis fights the internet or global corporate capitalism or whatever in all his movies and wins.
My point being, as stupid as COCKFIGHTER is, it was still 200 times better than SURROGATES.
-
-
FILM OF THE DAY: COCKFIGHTER (aka BORN TO KILL)
DIR. MONTE HELLMAN
STR. WARREN OATES, HARRY DEAN STANTON, ED BEGLEY JR., MILLIE PERKINS, LAURIE BIRD
-
The Outer Limits - The Mutant (1964)
starring Warren Oates
-
Warren Oates at home.
-
http://www.tedstrong.com/oateslinklater.shtml “…there was once a god who walked the Earth named Warren Oates.”
-
View high resolution
It still blows my mind that I have this.
It’s an alternative poster for the film, Cockfighter, which is probably:
- my favorite Warren Oates performance
- my favorite Monte Hellman film
- my second favorite film shot by Nestor Almendros
For excellent and I truly mean excellent classic and vintage film posters, check out Film/Art. I want to say in the winter of 2007, their fine collection posters including a beautiful poster for The Last Detail were featured on the walls of the ArcLight. Great collection of stuff there.
-
warren oates mumbles something about cocksuckers. From “Blue Thunder”
-
-
-
View high resolution
Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, 1974)
One of the unexpected pleasures of this film—whose milieu of fleabag hotels and dusty outdoor pits; of fighting and betting rituals surrounding mutually-assured avian destruction; of the intense loyalty of (male) hearts and eyes to said rituals and destruction—is the tender performance of Warren Oates. His character’s muteness enables the subtlest of his movements, the slightest of his facial expressions, to carry infinitely more weight than dialogue. By indicating surprise/bemusement/mystery in the raising of his eyebrows, conveying weariness/disgust/impatience in his side-arm throwing of a stone, or signifying wounded pride/resigned anger in his barely-there snarling and his kicking of an uncooperative bird, Oates creates emotions for which we don’t yet have words.
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
