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.
