Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Directed by John Schlesinger
Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.
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What critics compared Midnight Cowboy to
They’ve known each other since kindergarten and have channeled a mutual love of film into a series of amateur parodies of various classics (i.e., “2:48pm Cowboy” instead of “Midnight Cowboy”).
I adore the moment where Greg–the main character, who makes terrible homages to classics like Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange and Breathless (and many, many more of my favorite movies)–is in his room directly above where his parents are fighting about his grades and how he won’t be admitted into college the following year.
This deep affection soon progresses to home-made films with a twist on their favorites: Breathless becomes Breath Less , Peeping Tom now Pooping Tom , Midnight Cowboy is 2:48 Cowboy , etc. It’s the sort of addition that could be insufferably quirky in a bad Michel Gondry movie (you know the one), but here it’s lovingly executed and feels impeccably in tandem with the characters’ awkward personalities.
She’s particularly fond of a takeoff on Rashomon he calls “Monorash” and an outrageous take on Midnight Cowboy titled “2:48 P.M. Cowboy.”
The film uses cinema as a cultural shorthand, flattering people for getting inside jokes about Midnight Cowboy, Apocalpyse Now, Fitzcarraldo, and the like.
It might still be called Gotham, but the reference isn't even thinly veiled: This is early '70s New York during a garbage strike, as depressing, foul and pitiless as anything from Midnight Cowboy or The French Connection.
Many of the Americanist classics, from John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy to William Friedkin’s Cruising owe some degree of fidelity to Wolfe’s brand of nihilistic lonerism.
Y si bien la película regala en esos momentos trozos de intensidad, violencia y oscuridad que nos llevan desde la frustración criminal de El rey de la comedia (EUA, 1982) hasta la expresión de las sombras de Arthur en el entorno citadino en que lo conocemos (este Nueva York atemporal, casi del futuro, casi fantasmal es muy Taxi Driver y muy Contacto en Francia, muy Midnight Cowboy y adorablemente decadente), pasando todo por personajes indispensables para recorrer la psicología americana después de la Segunda Guerra y después de la debacle militar, política, económica y moral de Vietnam: los de Psicosis (EUA, 1960) y Taxi Driver (EUA, 1976).
The Duke’s G-rated “True Grit” — which won its star an Oscar even as the X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” was crowned Best Picture — was the last shotgun blast of the old Hollywood as it expired with a defiant roar at the hippies, the druggies and the ironists.
Siegel's screenplay is reminiscent of everything from early 60's teleplays like Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight" to the urban angst of 1969's "Midnight Cowboy," and yet its symbolic paralleling of its subject to Christ, its cynical gaze at the modern marketplace and its extreme violence modernize it.
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There's more: read for me a scene where Forrest and his crippled Vietnam captain Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise) walk through a late-sixties Manhattan to the strains of Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'," the iconic theme song from fellow Best Picture-winner Midnight Cowboy (1969).
It's so stupid, often intentionally so, that it's downright brilliant, as when the stricken Chev barrels across a bridge atop a stolen LAPD motorcycle wearing nothing but some hospital johnnies and a smile while Nilsson's Midnight Cowboy theme, "Everybody's Talkin'," counterpoints the whole absurd (and absurdly entertaining) affair.
What keeps "Hercules" from becoming trite (for adults anyway) are the inspired currenty jabs co-writers and directors John Musker and Ron Clements take at everything from "Midnight Cowboy" to Disney's own overbearing marketing.
One scene elicits memories of “ Dog Day Afternoon ,” while others recall “ Midnight Cowboy ,” “ Mean Streets ” and “ Panic in Needle Park .”
Think Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection.
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An oddball friendship is born - a friendship that harks back to that of another Texan, Joe Buck, and the squirrely street bum, Ratso Rizzo, he partners with in the late-'60s classic Midnight Cowboy.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
Music
Borat leaves his ramshackle home village of Kuczek (actually a Romanian gypsy village) in a horse-drawn Yugo and soon lands in the middle of Times Square, attended by Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”, a coy Midnight Cowboy reference suggestive of the type of cultural and especially sexual moré-shattering to come.