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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

Society is indeed a contract... [the state] is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

—Edmund Burke