journal features
movie reviews
photo of the day

movie review - Straw Dogs

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Vancouver, 2002.07.02

I'm writing this review a full two weeks after I watched the flick, because I've been trying to decide what the point of the thing really was. It's a Sam Peckinpah movie, so I haven't been trying too hard, but it's been nagging at me. It's about a young American mathematician and his English wife who return to the small town where she grew up so that he can work on a book on mathematics. The couple are terrorized by thugs from the local village, the whole thing explodes. The last scene makes it seem like the point is 'killing will make you a man'. I dunno. I can't recommend this one; the unnecessary rape scene alone is enough to stay away from this.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

For a long time I was very bitter that the people who controlled the means of anybody ever hearing my songs were never gonna play them. They only favored music that I specifically and particularly hated, and I wanted them dead. Suddenly, there was another avenue. I started hearing my stuff coming out of bars and then it started to happen little by little — a movie song here or a TV ad there.

—Iggy Pop