By Joe Bendel. “Dueling Banjos” must be expensive music to license. It’s about the only thing missing from the formerly indie Rod Lurie’s Red State-phobic remake of Sam Peckinpah’s career-defining film, Straw Dogs. Transferred from the English countryside to the Deep South, the once edgy examination of violent human nature is now a standard issue killer hillbilly movie, which opens today nationwide.
The prodigal television ingénue Amy Sumner tells her screenwriter husband David her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi is properly pronounced “Backwater.” There you have the film’s flash of wit. It also tells viewers what to expect of the locals. Everyone watched her cancelled show, including her former high school beau Charlie Venner, whom her husband hires to fix their hurricane damaged barn. In retrospect, this is a bad idea.
Venner, his brother Darryl, his other brother Darryl, and their wacky next door neighbor, the unmistakably psychotic Norm, do not exactly hustle on the job, taking plenty of breaks to leer at her and deride his manhood, such as it is. Things quickly escalate when one of the good old boys strings up the family cat in their closet. Yet Sumner will not confront them directly, preferring to confuse them with his cryptic beating around the bush. Eventually though, things get way out of hand, forcing Sumner to defend home, hearth, and Jeremy Niles, a developmentally disabled grown man with an implied history of inappropriate behavior – whom the gruesome foursome and their former football coach, Tom Heddon, are out to lynch.
Strangely, Lurie’s adaptation hardly ever deviates from the basic structure of Peckinpah’s original, yet he clearly has no clue what made the original so effective. For one thing, the 1971 film pulled a cultural reverse, unleashing a violent maelstrom against the picturesque backdrop of Cornwall, while casting a Yank as the pacifist victim. However, a city slicker terrorized by a pack of southern hicks is a real dog-bites-man story in Hollywood.
As a nebbish mathematician, the responses of Dustin Hoffman’s Sumner also made more sense in the context of Peckinpah’s film. It is not hard to imagine that he might have been bullied before, and was reverting to old survival strategies in his attempts to befriend his antagonists. In contrast, James Marsden’s snobby, Jag-driving, outspokenly atheistic screenwriter never seemed to have a bad day in his life before he got to Blackwater. Frankly, Venner might be a knuckle-dragging neanderthal, but he has a point when he tells Sumner it was rude to walk out during the pastor’s sermon. Of course, in real life he should not be brutalized for such boorishness, but in a sleazy exploitation film (which is really what the new Straw is) it is a close call.
There is no question Lurie is demonizing the gun-and-religion clinging Red-Staters, but at least he refrains from playing the race card in his Straw. Though savage, Venner and his crew are really not portrayed as racists, per se. In fact, they more or less respect the town’s African American lawman, Iraq War hero John Burke. Of course, as an authority figure, they still have problems with him.
At least Lurie gets down to business during the climatic siege, delivering the old school payback with efficient directness, though again he more or less replicates the methods of execution employed in the original film. He also includes the notorious rape scene as well, but the reactions of Kate Bosworth’s Amy Sumner are never ambiguous (indeed, it is hard to blame him for “wimping out” in this respect).
Marsden and Bosworth make a pretty dull, unlikable couple. Alexander Skarsgård is not a particularly flamboyant villain either, but at least he adds an intriguing dimension – hinting at Venner’s possible sense of remorse. Naturally, it is up to James Woods to ham it up something fierce as Coach Heddon, a mean drunk if ever there was one.
It is hard to understand why this film was produced. If Lurie wanted to make a southern fried grindhouse movie, he should have done so without invoking comparison to such a controversial (and superior) film. Faithfully violent but often outright silly, Lurie’s Straw is just about what you think it is. Not recommended (except perhaps as an ironic trip to the drive-in for fly-over country), it opens today (9/16) in several New York theaters, including the Regal Battery Park.
Posted on September 16th, 2011 at 4:10pm.
Every contemporary remake exploits the original movie. Also the audience – who are suckered into paying their bucks for what usually turns out to be a mediocre movie going experience. The only good thing I can see about remakes is that it gives the production companies an excuse to update the politics and cultural errors in classic movies made during culturally backward and primitive times. Like the 1980s. As an additional bonus, it sets up the potential for politically connected media companies to stop issuing the old incorrect films while leaving their pod people remakes behind so we don’t get confused about how things should be.
Don’t waste your hard earned money on this piece of Leftist Hollywood silver screen filth!
Yes, the South, the Christian religion and patriotism are trashed just like this was a Communist Party rally in Chicago during outside Democrat Convention in 1968! The producers pulled out every Leftist loony tune idea about white Southerners, who are portrayed as alcoholic trash that specialize in ripping off their clearly morally and intellectually superior atheist pinko writer from none other than Hollywood, who is busy working on a script about the Battle of Stalingrad and the heroic Red Army during WW II.
Of course, the only positive Southern characters portrayed are the liberal sex kitten blond wife of the wimp pinko Hollywood script writer protagonist and the black Iraq War hero sheriff. Thus the Leftist PC gods of diversity are appeased. Somehow another movie PC icon, “The Noble Liberal Teacher” of the poor dumb Southern white Christian kids on the Greater Glory of Karl Marx and Safe Sex is missing.
I hope I don’t give Hollywood any ideas for their next flick.
This movie that takes place in the red neck Mississippi of today (where most the 50% Mississippi population blacks are missing) has to have a retarded man: the Leftist Hollywood’s way of saying all white Southerners are morons because they marry their first cousins and have crazy kids who join The Tea Party Movement. The producers get this clever plot idea from the classic movie “Deliverance” where retarded, inbred, dirty and very dentally challenged Georgia hillbillies attack the outsiders. In this manner they hope to ignite movie viewer ignorant prejudice against white Southerners.
I have a challenge for a Hollywood producer interested in breaking new ground in action movies about Southerners who practice the crimes of rape, murder, lust and destruction. I would call the movie “Hush Crimes” and it would be about this gang of racist black Southerners whose minds have been washed and dry cleaned by a black Muslim minister into hatred against all whites. One hot southern night in Tennessee this black gang high on drugs and rage kidnaps a very much in love white Christian couple and take them to the nearest Hood. After several days of graphic bloody torture and many gallons fake blood, the couple die. The much abused bodies are taken to the nearest trash dump, where they are discovered by workers that alert the police, who soon arrest the bad guys. At the trial the black criminals plea not guilty; furthermore, that they are the innocent victims of a white racist KKK lynching in progress!
Do I really think such a movie will made in PC Hollywood? No way, Jose! The very idea is something that would give The Vapors to a typical wimp Leftist Hollywood writer like the one portrayed in Straw Dogs! It has been well established by a Roman Legion of socialist experts who rule Academia with the iron sandal that only whites are racists who commit crimes against blacks.
“Why racism is in the very DNA of all whites!” shout the very pale liberal Philosopher Kings of Harvard.
And did anyone catch Lurie’s interview a few days ago? The one where he swore he had no political intent, and then immediately afterwards went on an ideological tirade about how he just wanted to show a “culture of violence” bumping heads with a guy who…ehem… “fights like the Russians at Stalingrad.”
I kid you not.
The guy foreswears political intent, and then compares the protagonist’s crescendo of violence to the Russians’ last stand against the Nazis. He caricatures everything about Southern culture, reducing it to “violence” (including their Christianity, which apparently is all about blood-feud, vendetta and wrath).
Can lefties in Hollywood really have their heads THAT far up their a**es? I mean, so far up there that it pops out again right between their shoulder blades? It seems so – and it’s shocking. Even I hadn’t supposed that their bigotry was so crude. Lurie evidently takes his narrow little world of shibboleths for a cosmic truism, and thus, apparently, views his tendentious and invidious cliches as brute facts.
What a sad, small man he is.
Oh, and P.S. – his passive-aggressive condescension toward Peckinpah, an infinitely superior artist in every sense of the word, is unbearable. If you didn’t want to step into the ring with Peckinpah then you shouldn’t have ganked his aura you weasel. Better title for your film, courtesy of me: “Straw Men.”
@SeeSaw: +1
There was a review on “The Nation” blog before it came out. Lurie is quoted as saying he was “making a feminist movie”.
No, no politics at all.
I understand Clooney has a “no politics” movie coming out on Howard Dean. This “no politics” claim has been going on since the anti-Iraq war films were bombing horribly – at first I thought it was just leftists fibbing for more opening week grosses, but in retrospect it could be the all too common left mindset – left politics aren’t “politics”, it’s just the truth.