Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★

  58th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch

  I believe I've seen the monument in the end, but I had no idea about the story or the man until now. And, before I go any further, I must state that nothing about this "sport" or form of entertainment has ever piqued my interest. I used to be intrigued and wondering why the bull reacted in such a way to the color red, but I've since learnt that it extends beyond just a sheet with a solid color. To be honest, I wouldn't be shocked if the bull was irritated by the sound emitted before and after the charge. I knew I wanted to beat some of those folks up as…

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★½ 12

  1st Budd Boetticher

  There’s that oft-misquoted line from Ford’s ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’- “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. The story of how Boetticher made Arruza is so wild that you might think it follows that diktat, but apparently it’s all true; Boetticher’s colossal folly after a decade of success in Hollywood was to go out and make a documentary about his friend, the legendary matador Carlos Arruza, off his own back with his own cash. The resulting decade of production was disaster after disaster, costing the rugged director his marriage, his financial solvency and even his sanity for a brief period of time. When the final film was released in the early 70s, it was…

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★ 4

  Viewed with the Amazing Edith's *Collab Film Group*.

  Bud Boetticher, director of westerns, once became mesmerized by the sport of bullfighting and began to learn the sport himself. Carlos Arruza (for who this docu-narrative is named after) was one of his biggest mentors, and so, Boetticher enamored by the matadors decided that in return he would film their lives and their passions. At this point in time however, Boetticher had become a financial recluse in the deserts of Mexico, refusing projects tossed his way from Hollywood and ending up in prison for all his accumulated debt. This struggle session started way back in the 50s and culminated in the release of Arruza in 1972. Oddly enough, his friend for whom this was…

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★ 5

  You are the bull. You’re a great and flexing pastoral beast. For hours before the fight, you are placed in a tiny, dark isolated cell. You are not given food or water. Your anxiety is through the roof. Just before entering the bull ring, you are harpooned, you’re released into the bright arena of battle already bleeding. And then you are foppishly taunted. You are run and run and run in circles. Then you’re lanced again. And then again and again. You have lost huge amounts of blood now. For much of the back half of this encounter your mind is fogged from rage, fear, pain, and blood loss. Eventually, you become lethargic. You leak away, until you are barely…

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  Review by Stephen M ★★ 13

  COLLAB FILM CLUB

  A 1972 documentary by famed Western director Budd Boetticher and a passion project of his dating back to 1954: the life of his friend, the renowned bullfighter Carlos Arruza. Boetticher had actually done two Hollywood bullfighting films - The Bullfighter and the Lady with John Wayne and The Magnificent Matador. Narrated by actor Anthony Quinn - who’d starred in the second film - it’s both a portrait of a celebrity sports star in retirement and a tribute to bullfighting. It was hard however to watch this without also being reminded (for me, at least) of the darker ethical underside of bullfighting, which are not presented in the film.

  It starts off as Arruza retires to his Mexican…

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  Review by 𝔸ℕℕ𝔸 ★½ 15

  Watched with the Collab (#21)

  "The result is an astonishing work of poetry, immediacy, and violence that fearlessly wrestles with the filmmaker’s own ambivalence about the titular matador’s triumphs"

  I was expecting a nuanced film on bullfighting and got none of that. I'm glad narrator Anthony Quinn sounded excited, but I wasn't. It hurts to give such a low star rating to something that took director Boetticher many tribulations to make. There's just little here narratively or visually to latch onto.

  Let's just say, that whenever I watch a bullfight, I actively root for the bull.

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  Review by Constance_Prue ★★ 9

  Even if you used the Webb Space Telescope, you still couldn't locate my interest in this movie. Really only for Budd Boetticher completists, and since I was today years old when I found out who that is, that's not me.

  collab film club

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  Review by louferrigno ★½ 1

  The league of great Western directors has a lot of notable names and faces that would forever imprint our impression of the Old-Time West, you have of course John Ford and the few contributions that Howard Hawks and Delmer Davis offered to the table, but one could make the argument that Budd Boetticher captured the era as close as possible, distilling the genre's most fundamental traits (honor, pride, machismo) into a riveting simplicity in part due to his usual practice of working in the B-movie circuit, and the laconic mythic nature of such films like Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, and Seven Men From Now stand as some of the greatest traditional Westerns one will ever see. Boetticher jumped ship…

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  Review by boa_noite ★★★★★

  First half is a great documentary! Second half is a great movie!

  I don't think it's by chance - not at all - if some of the shots here resemble Rivette (the statues in Le pont du nord) or Straub-Huillet (the driving in History Lessons). It's just that they found similar solutions to similar questions. (Must I add that all of these movies are history lessons?)

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  Review by Clark Abraham ★

  Watched in Collab Film Club this week for a "Troubled Productions" theme. I don't have a lot to say about this one. If you are into the Hemingway matador stuff, then maybe you will find Boetticher's "lyrical" depictions of bull fighting interesting. For a layman, the footage is straight up boring. The narration doesn't add much to it. A passion project between Boetticher and Arruza, the film is a troubled production because it took around 10 years to be completed. Arruza is a passion project that veers into the masturbatory. I wanted to get into this more, but had a hard time caring about anything depicted on screen.

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  Review by MushiMinion ★

  His name was Carlos Arruza.

  He raised bulls,

  To fight them.

  This is one of those cases where the story behind the long production is more interesting than the resulting doc, which ends up like any of the many slow, dry educational shorts that feel empty without Joel/Mike and the bots riffing over them. It did, however, provide Babs ample time to practice embroidery and crochet.

  ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏʟʟᴀʙ

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  Review by Rafi Krespin ★½ 2

  The combination of the valorization (and grisly depictions) of the torture of bulls combined with a general remove from the doc’s subject means this one never stood a chance. Neither Arruza nor anyone else in his circle is interviewed (or at least none of this footage shows up in the finished film), so we never get any real sense of who this iconic individual was or even what he sounded like. Even Anthony Quinn sounds bored.

  collab film club