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Sam Peckinpah and Violence in Movies
Sep. 7th, 2011 01:09 amSpoilers for Straw Dogs in post and comments. Anybody who thinks the film is about lovable stuffed animals should get out now or go read the Wikipedia entry.
Someone is remaking Straw Dogs with James Marsden (Cyclops from X-Men) in the Dustin Hoffman role and set in the American south instead of rural Cornwall. They've retained the basic poster design, though.
I haven't seen the original -- one of the few Hoffman films I haven't seen -- because the director, Sam Peckinpah, was famed for the extreme and realistic violence of his movies. (I avoided the Godfather films until the late 1990s because of the violence, too. Which seems relatively mild given current standards.)
I have to figure, given the changes in popular culture over the past 40 years or so, that Peckinpah's violence is not going to strike modern audiences the way it did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So here is a question, fellow film fiends: How does Peckinpah stack up today? What kind of rating would The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs get now? Why have things changed, assuming they have? Any further thoughts on movie (TV, video game) violence?
As for the remake, how can they make the transformation of a pacifist into an extremely violent man as shocking as it was in 1971?
Someone is remaking Straw Dogs with James Marsden (Cyclops from X-Men) in the Dustin Hoffman role and set in the American south instead of rural Cornwall. They've retained the basic poster design, though.
I haven't seen the original -- one of the few Hoffman films I haven't seen -- because the director, Sam Peckinpah, was famed for the extreme and realistic violence of his movies. (I avoided the Godfather films until the late 1990s because of the violence, too. Which seems relatively mild given current standards.)
I have to figure, given the changes in popular culture over the past 40 years or so, that Peckinpah's violence is not going to strike modern audiences the way it did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So here is a question, fellow film fiends: How does Peckinpah stack up today? What kind of rating would The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs get now? Why have things changed, assuming they have? Any further thoughts on movie (TV, video game) violence?
As for the remake, how can they make the transformation of a pacifist into an extremely violent man as shocking as it was in 1971?
