Movie Club for February: The Longest Yard
My pick for this month's movie club: The Longest Yard, starring Burt Reynolds as a former pro football player who is sent to prison, and there organizes an inmates-against-the guards football game. A remake of this movie is soon to be released, starring Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, with Reynolds as a coach this time.
So why this movie? Mostly, I guess, because I saw an ad for the new version during the so-called 'Super Bowl' (boooo! Patriots are the new Cowboys! Let's all hate them together). But also because I've never seen the whole thing, and I think it's part of an interesting genre of prison movies that came out in the late 1960s and 1970s. Politically and economically, the 1970s seem to be a crucial decade in the turn toward our current phase of conservative politics, corporate globalism, and fear-mongering. Lest any think that sentence is just another bit of Bush-bashing, let me clarify that I'm talking about the last 25-30 years of US history, not just the current Bush administration, during which these long-term developments seem to be coming to some sort of crisis point.
One of the key issues for conservative politics in the 1970s-1990s was crime, and the need to clamp down hard on all types of criminality (except white collar and corporate crime). As a result of mandatory sentencing laws and the war on drugs, the US now has the highest incarceration rate in the world (we surpassed Russia in 2002 when we had 714 people behind bars for ever 100,000 people in the country; Russia's rate was 548; Canada's 116; England's 141). Rising levels of crime were the primary basis for 'get tough' policies in the 1980s. But since the 1990s, while crime rates have been dropping, the prison population has maintained steady growth, topping 2 million for the first time in history in 2002.
So before there were terrorists silently stalking us day and night, there were criminals--drug gangs, kids out 'wilding', serial killers and pedophiles--who would stop at nothing to do us and our families harm. But the 1970s prison movies (and don't forget those Johnny Cash records!) showed a very different face of crime than, say, the Dirty Harry movies. Prisoners were sometimes victims of circumstance, or rebels against authority, or at least in some way presented sympathetically. In recent years, there seems to have been a new stream of prison movies making their way to movie screens. Some, like the Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999), have stressed the redemptive possibilities of prisons--a far cry from the prison inhabited by Cool Hand Luke. While they might be portrayed as fanciful propaganda in a society happily ignorant of its increasing population of actual prisoners, these movies still showed (some) prisoners as human and at least capable of redemption.
Do these new prison movies foretell a change in our national culture and politics, back toward the more anti-authority movies of the 1970s? Were those earlier prison movies really anti-authority? How will the presentation of prison life have changed in the 2005 version from 1974's The Longest Yard? Will there be any echoes from the Abu Ghraib scandal, or lack of scandal, in our popular entertainment (how long before the first joke about being piled naked into a pyramid--other than from Rush Limbaugh, that is)?
These are questions that I invite you to ask as you watch The Longest Yard. Aside from all this frothsome popular culture stuff, though, I expect the movie to be pretty funny. For reasons that I cannot quite identify, I have grown rather fond of early Bert Reynolds movies, even though I remember in my snobby adolescence really hating the Smokey and the Bandit flicks when they came out (without ever seeing them, of course). It was nice to see Bert in his own Super Bowl commercial, too. I'm sorry that his most recent comeback, begun with Boogie Nights (1997), I believe, seems to have stalled; hopefully, some smart screenwriter somewhere is at work on a new Sharky's Machine movie--sort of Sharky meets the Rockford files. So enjoy the movie, then write up your thoughts for the rest of us.
So why this movie? Mostly, I guess, because I saw an ad for the new version during the so-called 'Super Bowl' (boooo! Patriots are the new Cowboys! Let's all hate them together). But also because I've never seen the whole thing, and I think it's part of an interesting genre of prison movies that came out in the late 1960s and 1970s. Politically and economically, the 1970s seem to be a crucial decade in the turn toward our current phase of conservative politics, corporate globalism, and fear-mongering. Lest any think that sentence is just another bit of Bush-bashing, let me clarify that I'm talking about the last 25-30 years of US history, not just the current Bush administration, during which these long-term developments seem to be coming to some sort of crisis point.
One of the key issues for conservative politics in the 1970s-1990s was crime, and the need to clamp down hard on all types of criminality (except white collar and corporate crime). As a result of mandatory sentencing laws and the war on drugs, the US now has the highest incarceration rate in the world (we surpassed Russia in 2002 when we had 714 people behind bars for ever 100,000 people in the country; Russia's rate was 548; Canada's 116; England's 141). Rising levels of crime were the primary basis for 'get tough' policies in the 1980s. But since the 1990s, while crime rates have been dropping, the prison population has maintained steady growth, topping 2 million for the first time in history in 2002.
So before there were terrorists silently stalking us day and night, there were criminals--drug gangs, kids out 'wilding', serial killers and pedophiles--who would stop at nothing to do us and our families harm. But the 1970s prison movies (and don't forget those Johnny Cash records!) showed a very different face of crime than, say, the Dirty Harry movies. Prisoners were sometimes victims of circumstance, or rebels against authority, or at least in some way presented sympathetically. In recent years, there seems to have been a new stream of prison movies making their way to movie screens. Some, like the Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999), have stressed the redemptive possibilities of prisons--a far cry from the prison inhabited by Cool Hand Luke. While they might be portrayed as fanciful propaganda in a society happily ignorant of its increasing population of actual prisoners, these movies still showed (some) prisoners as human and at least capable of redemption.
Do these new prison movies foretell a change in our national culture and politics, back toward the more anti-authority movies of the 1970s? Were those earlier prison movies really anti-authority? How will the presentation of prison life have changed in the 2005 version from 1974's The Longest Yard? Will there be any echoes from the Abu Ghraib scandal, or lack of scandal, in our popular entertainment (how long before the first joke about being piled naked into a pyramid--other than from Rush Limbaugh, that is)?
These are questions that I invite you to ask as you watch The Longest Yard. Aside from all this frothsome popular culture stuff, though, I expect the movie to be pretty funny. For reasons that I cannot quite identify, I have grown rather fond of early Bert Reynolds movies, even though I remember in my snobby adolescence really hating the Smokey and the Bandit flicks when they came out (without ever seeing them, of course). It was nice to see Bert in his own Super Bowl commercial, too. I'm sorry that his most recent comeback, begun with Boogie Nights (1997), I believe, seems to have stalled; hopefully, some smart screenwriter somewhere is at work on a new Sharky's Machine movie--sort of Sharky meets the Rockford files. So enjoy the movie, then write up your thoughts for the rest of us.
posted by Ambivalent_Maybe at 5:43 AM
1 Comments:
NetFlix has a VERY long wait for this movie....but I just saw it for sale at one of the box stores, $5.99 if I remember correctly.
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