Review-O-Sphere

Everybody's Talkin'~Harry Nilsson - Midnight Cowboy           While the previous Academy Awards winner, Oliver! (1968) is a very good movie, it’s a pretty fluffy and safe one. So much so that its winning the Oscar for Best Picture torpedoed the Oscars’ credibility for a few years. The Academy, now newly populated by young, fresh and arrogant faces from the New Hollywood crowd, apparently took that criticism directly to heart because you couldn’t find a movie more diametrically different from Oliver! than Midnight Cowboy if you tried.           Midnight Cowboy is a notoriously dark and unpleasant classic and is one of the darkest films to have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A small town man in Texas named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) moves to New York City seeking to follow his dreams, thinking he’ll pursue a lucrative career as a male prostitute since having sex is the one thing he thinks he’s good at (rule of thumb ...

To see part 1, click here . Once Upon a Time in the West Suite~Ennio Morricone - C'era Una Volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)           So Midnight Cowboy is indeed a great movie but the reason for its success and relevance can also be traced to a large degree of serendipity that there was no possible way for the filmmakers to plan. In 1969, the Gay Liberation/civil rights movement began when the Stonewall Riots occurred in New York City’s West Village. Also of note that year was Mart Crowley’s famous Off-Broadway play, The Boys in the Band (1968), which had been running for the past 2 years. We’ll go more into detail of this play when reviewing the film adaptation for the 1970 rundown but The Boys in the Band was the first mainstream work that analyzed gay culture and problems. Long-story short: 1969 was the year that homosexuals joined the various other civil rights movements in agitating for equal rights before both the law and culture. ...