Sam Fuller is a God

Though I love a director like Alfred Hitchcock, I'm in many ways drawn more towards people like Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Joseph H. Lewis. It's not that they are better directors per se or that they have better films - I think Vertigo trumps The Big Red One, Seven Men from Now, and The Big Combo - it's just their artform is purer. This though may be a white man's connection to the noble savage ideal of people who come from their own world and give us the outsiders view. God I'm drinking and blogging again. Help me Jesus.

It's just that Fuller and the others, they create their own language of cinema that isn't born of ripping off their predecessors, but people working from their own cadence, much like Bresson, or Gerard Manly Hopkins. Creating their own patois can be limiting, but like my love of Notorious B.I.G. there's something about a talent that creates a voice only their own that I find it hard not to genuflect to. There works have a raw tangible quality, something the French New wave latched onto, rightfully so, that you may be conscious of the effects of it's cinema, but that in no way dilutes what has been created.

Something I also love is what Hawks loved to do, have a third character relate who the main character is to the secondary character. What I love about this is how it not only informs us of a person, but it also does something that is so utterly human, it sums up someone in only the way an outsider can. One cannot sum up oneself, or if one can, then one has failed as a human being. We can now view the character through that perspective without thinking it is the final word. In a word: Brilliant.

Tomorrow me and a bunch of coworkers are going to bar where the management is paying for drinks. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to have two beers and call it a night, or have seventeen and catch a cab. Decisions decisions.