I have not yet watched the movie as I'm waiting for Mrs. Derelict to return from Alaska so we can watch it together. We loved the original series, and I have little doubt the movie does the entire enterprise justice.
Roy, your spoilers are pretty mild, so I don't mind them in the slightest.
"at one point he orders the murder of a little girl to prevent her from identifying him." Gotta admit, if I'd been watching Deadwood, that's the point where I probably would have bailed out, no matter how well the show was made. It even affected the review for me to an extent--to me, much of the rest of it sounded like "Sure, Al Swearingen is a child murderer, but other than that he's a pretty decent guy." Hope the kid survived.
Like reader Mark Lungo, I limit my intake of sadism and violence, even when it's presented artistically. To that end, I haven't owned a TV for nearly 20 years and the glimpses of the current 'hot' shows always confirms my decision. I saw some high/low lights of GoT on the web and, that scenes like the 'Red Wedding' are cult pop memes seems exactly what the U.S doesn't need and are certainly what I don't. Of course this could all be a neurotic reaction caused by my very strict Catholic upbringing but I like to think that it's humanism that leads me away from violence and cruelty, whether depicted or actual.
I'm contrarily glad others can watch these shows and films with pleasure and attentiveness. Years ago I had a conversation with a friend about the language used in Deadwood, particularly the cussing. I had to explain that there has always been swearing and naughty language but it was not in the past the same words we use today. People laugh at yesteryear's tough talk and insults, so the creators of these shows and movies devise a new mashup of high-toned florid speech and recognizable camping-mouth diction to the delight of modern ears in the wake of George Carlin's dirty words and the now common practice a la Howard Stern, Mamet, et al.
Last night I opted to watch bits of Audie Murphy Westerns while this movie was airing, which was in itself a perverse review of what I used to watch on TV. So many hours, a lifetime spent, accumulating a vocabulary of dialogue, costumes, sets, and scenery, names of actors, writers, directors, camera chiefs, and composers, all the little people and little details, and that internalized experience makes watching anything now quite different from before I understood how the stuff of dreams gets made. I feel like the greyhound that caught the mechanical hare.
I have a small library of slang and swear word dictionaries going back to the two volumes of Eric Partridge's Historical Dictionary of Slang, and I can attest that the Deadwood cussin' is not reflected in those collections. All of Mark Twain's friends and family commented on his prolific cursing but never gave examples except the most bowdlerized, more the pity. Elaborate and original cursing is a lost art, having been swamped in an ocean of fuck, fuck derivatives, and shit.
Cursing is, to state the obvious, a derivative of culture. Culture doesn’t have to be national. To a large extent, of course, America’s immigrant history means we have many cultures and many vocabularies of cursing. Everyone knows the elaborate and florid nature of Italian cursing at least from mob movies. Also, the nature and vocabulary of cursing, like the rest of the language was very different 150 years ago in-the undeveloped Dakota territories. So we would expect the nature of cursing in Deadwood to reelect a culturally rather narrow, even stilted sound.
But, I have been exposed to Russian cursing in Russia (not directed at me) and it was simultaneouly frightening and amusing (I had a translator). Some of the worst curses in another country can seem odd and not particularly threatening to a Wester ear. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia, the absolute worst thing you could call somebody was “You dirty dog.”, which seemed pretty mild to me.
I have not yet watched the movie as I'm waiting for Mrs. Derelict to return from Alaska so we can watch it together. We loved the original series, and I have little doubt the movie does the entire enterprise justice.
Roy, your spoilers are pretty mild, so I don't mind them in the slightest.
"at one point he orders the murder of a little girl to prevent her from identifying him." Gotta admit, if I'd been watching Deadwood, that's the point where I probably would have bailed out, no matter how well the show was made. It even affected the review for me to an extent--to me, much of the rest of it sounded like "Sure, Al Swearingen is a child murderer, but other than that he's a pretty decent guy." Hope the kid survived.
Damn fine review. In a just world, you could go ahead and quit your day job.
Like reader Mark Lungo, I limit my intake of sadism and violence, even when it's presented artistically. To that end, I haven't owned a TV for nearly 20 years and the glimpses of the current 'hot' shows always confirms my decision. I saw some high/low lights of GoT on the web and, that scenes like the 'Red Wedding' are cult pop memes seems exactly what the U.S doesn't need and are certainly what I don't. Of course this could all be a neurotic reaction caused by my very strict Catholic upbringing but I like to think that it's humanism that leads me away from violence and cruelty, whether depicted or actual.
I'm contrarily glad others can watch these shows and films with pleasure and attentiveness. Years ago I had a conversation with a friend about the language used in Deadwood, particularly the cussing. I had to explain that there has always been swearing and naughty language but it was not in the past the same words we use today. People laugh at yesteryear's tough talk and insults, so the creators of these shows and movies devise a new mashup of high-toned florid speech and recognizable camping-mouth diction to the delight of modern ears in the wake of George Carlin's dirty words and the now common practice a la Howard Stern, Mamet, et al.
Last night I opted to watch bits of Audie Murphy Westerns while this movie was airing, which was in itself a perverse review of what I used to watch on TV. So many hours, a lifetime spent, accumulating a vocabulary of dialogue, costumes, sets, and scenery, names of actors, writers, directors, camera chiefs, and composers, all the little people and little details, and that internalized experience makes watching anything now quite different from before I understood how the stuff of dreams gets made. I feel like the greyhound that caught the mechanical hare.
I have a small library of slang and swear word dictionaries going back to the two volumes of Eric Partridge's Historical Dictionary of Slang, and I can attest that the Deadwood cussin' is not reflected in those collections. All of Mark Twain's friends and family commented on his prolific cursing but never gave examples except the most bowdlerized, more the pity. Elaborate and original cursing is a lost art, having been swamped in an ocean of fuck, fuck derivatives, and shit.
Cursing is, to state the obvious, a derivative of culture. Culture doesn’t have to be national. To a large extent, of course, America’s immigrant history means we have many cultures and many vocabularies of cursing. Everyone knows the elaborate and florid nature of Italian cursing at least from mob movies. Also, the nature and vocabulary of cursing, like the rest of the language was very different 150 years ago in-the undeveloped Dakota territories. So we would expect the nature of cursing in Deadwood to reelect a culturally rather narrow, even stilted sound.
But, I have been exposed to Russian cursing in Russia (not directed at me) and it was simultaneouly frightening and amusing (I had a translator). Some of the worst curses in another country can seem odd and not particularly threatening to a Wester ear. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia, the absolute worst thing you could call somebody was “You dirty dog.”, which seemed pretty mild to me.