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I hired some movies out last night! Good ones! That I've never seen before! But have wanted to for ages! The Godfather (Coppola), The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich), Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger), From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann) and On Golden Pond (Rydell).

The first one I got down to watching was Midnight Cowboy (1969,dir. Schlesinger). This was pretty decent, but (to me) acted more as a curious piece about Hollywood's dealing of homosexual issues, as well as the Academy on similar issues. While the queer content is obviously not as all over the place as certain movies of recent times (and even not-so-recent times) I can only presume at the time that seeing a man give another man head was sort of shocking. Still, the film itself wasn't as good as I had been lead to believe. That scene with the Andy Warhol crowd was sort of cool though! Of the performances, Jon Voight proved to be a nice leading man in his early years (and he had a good body from what I can see, too!) but I don't get all the hoopla around Dustin Hoffman's performance. Yes, it was good in the sense of "that's a good performance!" but it's not "unforgettable" or whatever other adjectives I've heard people use. Funny then that he should win the Oscar year 20 years later for playing a completely different role yet with many similarities. The supporting performances are a mixed lot. Brenda Vaccaro gave my favourite performance of the movie and she's only in it for a little over 10 minutes maybe. I did enjoy Sylvia Miles' miniscule performance - how it got nominated for an Oscar though is a head-scratcher.

Anyway, the film is good as a curiousity project, but I don't think it's as stunning today as it would have been back in it's X-rated days. B-