Straw Dogs

“All right, now for the great Sam Peckinpah. And you have Straw Dogs, which is unrelenting and a great lesson in tension, ratcheting up tension, and credibility. It is so realistic and terrifying. This is a must-watch for sure.”

“Peckinpah is a filmmaker that’s always on my mind, but especially with Eddington, and Straw Dogs is a perfect film, one of the great films about, you know, just how awful it is to be a person living with other people. And it’s also one of the tightest films ever made. It begins in a fraught place and just… it’s a snare that just tightens and tightens and tightens until the climax, which is just one of the greatest in all of movies.”

“And this is Straw Dogs on top of Under the Volcano... The takeaways I take from watching this are silly but one that Dustin Hoffman you see him shaving with an electric razor in his trailer... Sam Peckinpah doesn't read the newspaper he has a knife that he is a pretty big knife and he throws it at this door that's like a broken door piece of wood leaning against his House until they're ready to shoot I've never been around a knife throwing director.”

“Straw Dogs. Pauline Kael called it a fascist work of art. I don't know what she was talking about, but it is a powerful one and a disturbing one, and I need to see the Criterion Blu-ray special edition because I haven't seen it in a while, because I need to be disturbed a little this week.”