Friedkin 07.

"In a way, 2007 is shaping up as the year of director William Friedkin," writes ST VanAirsdale, introducing a tight and terrific interview at the Reeler. "In addition to May's unsettling paranoiac melodrama Bug, the coming weeks promise theatrical revivals of his Oscar-winning 1971 cop thriller The French Connection (opening this Friday at Film Forum) and his controversial 1980 leather-bar detective epic Cruising (opening Sept 7 before finally arriving on DVD Sept 18)." And let's not forget that he's recently been made an Officer of the French Order of the Arts and Letters.

In the Voice, J Hoberman looks back on that "newfangled genre flick, fraught with urban decay and racial tension," The French Connection, which, in 1971, "seemed like glorified Don Siegel... While Dirty Harry provided audiences an anti-establishment legal vigilante, The French Connection introduced the notion of the heroic working-class narc."

Updated through 9/3.

"When Cruising came out in 1980, pretty much everyone hated the movie," the San Francisco Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub, noting that it'll also be screening at the Castro. "The film has since developed a cult status, with some giving the movie historical significance for its detailed (albeit skewed) look at gay culture in the early 1980s." Greg Marzullo recalls the brouhaha for the Houston Voice.

Update, 8/29: Paul Wilner talks with Friedkin about the return of Cruising for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 8/30: "Because the stunning centerpiece [i.e., that landmark chase sequence] looks like an extravagant feat of guerilla filmmaking, The French Connection feels new again," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "In the wake of its acclaim, Pauline Kael deemed The French Connection 'what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks.' True, but as the rest of equation comes into view, the message behind those jolts has grown retroactively enlightening. The movie's original tagline heralded 'an out and out thriller,' but now it's the sort of thriller that rarely gets in: a smart one."

"Both on a conceptual level and in practice, Cruising buys into and advances some of the most dangerous myths about homosexuality and the homosexual lifestyle - and you don't need Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet to tell you that," blogs Slant's Ed Gonzalez. " Walking out at the end of yesterday's screening, still suffering from a rather nasty cold, I felt as if I had been fisted - without the Crisco!... Cruising is completely ridiculous, but Friedkin's homophobia gives the film a strange chill. The director is fascinated with the subliminal, but the way he imbeds sounds and images into the film is frightening only in the sense that it exposes his own warped views of gay sexual behavior."

"In a strange way, Cruising has come full circle and become a part of gay history, a creepily affecting time capsule of a subculture the mainstream otherwise ignored completely," blogs Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Today, it's compelling primarily as a sociological document of a dirty, dangerous New York where sex and death seem inextricably interlinked even before AIDS. In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype - the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others - the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same."

Update, 9/1: "How could such a pandering film be described as uncompromising?" asks Matt Zoller Seitz of The French Connection. The film "was widely hailed as an aesthetically fresh, socially relevant new entry in the cops-and-robbers genre. It was lumped together with two other 1971 touchstones, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs, as an example of the new fascist populism - a subgenre that combined studio production values and exploitation tactics. Friedkin's film is the least of the three because it's got almost nothing on its mind but rattling the audience."

Update, 9/3: "The gay blogosphere has largely treated the re-release of William Friedkin's 1980 ode to fisting, faggotry, and flash cuts with a level of indifference nearly equal to the fury of the disco era's gay community," notes Eric Henderson at Slant. "Our culture has now scaled Brokeback Mountain and breathed in the thin, undernourished, Oscar-hungry air thereabout. For all its bad judgment, questionable portrayals, and arrogant artsploitation aims, Cruising is precisely what Brokeback and all excepting a small handful of eternally rewarding fringe gay movies (Tropical Malady, Bad Education, Mulholland Drive) are not: an interesting film."

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2007 1:03 PM