Killer of Sheep

(backlogged to 9/10/07, 1:21am)

I'm glad I found out about this movie being shown at the Red Vic, since it's apparently kind of hard to find.

After about two and a half weeks, the strongest image in my mind of this movie is the scene when Stan dances with his wife, the way she starts to so hungrily kiss and grope him and how distractedly he just kind of walks away; it could've come off as too disaffected like the worst Antonioni or something, but it doesn't, it felt really potent. And then Stan's wife standing there, and does she leave the frame or not? and the window, empty, divided into nine smaller squares of white against the dark gray and black everything else, burning away in the middle of the frame. The way Burnett held the shot, too, on just that empty window. It's just so amazing when the reality of a specific object in actual time pokes through the narrative of a movie. (is that maybe part of the secret of how this thing works?)

The whole part where Stan goes with his friend to get the motor, the quirky behavior of the people in the house who sell him the motor, his friend hurting his fingers and then carelessly leaving the motor on the back of the truck, that whole scene was probably the most narratively fulfilling: it was funny and heartbreaking, very much in the way of an old Italian movie, like Umberto D or The Bicycle Thief.

The scene toward the beginning with the kid peeking out from behind the wooden board and the other kids throwing rocks at him, that scene was kind of ruined by my reading of Ebert's review before watching it. I tried to hard to make what I was seeing seem as perfect as how it had sounded as described by Ebert: there's a true instance of a spoiler!

Many of the reviews had said the scenes in the slaughterhouse were so disturbing, but I wasn't really all that disturbed by them. I mean, slaughterhouses suck, but I already knew that. Why was that such a sticking point for so many of the reviewers?