Film Review: Midnight Cowboy

[yesthattom]

Last night quietchris and I watched Midnight Cowboy (IMDB, Wikpedia) staring stars Dustin Hoffman, and newcomer Jon Voight!

Young Jon Voight is so different than Older Jon Voight! I hardly recognized him.

So, a quick plot summary: in the 60's, Texan thinks New York City rich women want cowboy meat. He moves to NYC to try to be a hustler. Nobody told him the real money to be made is with NYC men. Hot man-on-man action, w00t!

The film is the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award. It was released in 1969, re-released in 1971 (this time it got an R-rating), and then again for its 25th anniversary.

Trivia:

• This is the movie where "Hey! I'm walkin' here!" comes from
• The Muppet Rizzo the Rat is named after Dustin Hoffman's charactor "Rizzo"

Highly recommended.

Comments

[tn-grrl.livejournal.com]

It is amazing how many cultural references to this film are made in popular media. After dariens_haircut and I watched it, we saw at least 3 references in the next week alone!

[la-directora.livejournal.com]

This is the movie where "Hey! I'm walkin' here!" comes from

Dustin Hoffman told a great story about this moment when he was on "Inside the Actors Studio" recently. Apparently that wasn't scripted at all. They just wanted to capture some kind of "New Yorker on a busy street" moment, and they were capturing that shot with a hidden camera, not on a cleared, controlled street. So they kept doing that shot over and over again until they hit the timing right, and a cab came along in the middle of the shot. Hoffman talked about how he, the actor, immediately wanted to scream at the cab, "Hey, we're making a film here!" But he then filtered it through his character, and what came out was, "Hey, I'm walking here!"

I still haven't seen that movie. But it's near the top of my Netflix list. As is "All the President's Men". Hey, have you been stalking my Netflix list lately? ;)

[logisticslad.livejournal.com]

I both liked it and found it to be quite disturbing at the same time. It's a ground breaking film, and the fact that it received such critical acclaim even though it mentioned homosexuality was a huge cultural advance. I believe that it was rerated from X to R, specifically because it had won the Oscar and the studio argued that it should be more accessible to the public and that the actual graphic content was quite low relative to other X films of the time.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

I should see that sometime, I've just seen the edited-for-TV version many years ago and the Mad Magazine parody.