Synopsis
Oh my God, that's my daughter.
A conservative Midwest businessman ventures into the sordid underworld of pornography in California to look for his runaway teenage daughter who is making porno films in the porno pits of Los Angeles.
1979 Directed by Paul Schrader
A conservative Midwest businessman ventures into the sordid underworld of pornography in California to look for his runaway teenage daughter who is making porno films in the porno pits of Los Angeles.
George C. Scott Peter Boyle Season Hubley Dick Sargent Leonard Gaines Dave Nichols Gary Graham Larry Block Marc Alaimo Leslie Ackerman Charlotte McGinnis Ilah Davis Paul Marin Will Walker Hal Williams Bob Bishop Tim Dial Roy London Bibi Besch Tracey Walter Bobby Kosser Stephen P. Dunn Jean Allison Reb Brown Ed Begley Jr.
Hardcore - Ein Vater sieht rot, Spoorloos
Being that it’s 2:30am and this is my second Paul Schrader film of the night I’d much rather sleep on this and try to write something in depth in the morning. On the other hand I’m not gonna be able to sleep if I don’t get some sort of thoughts out there now. More terrifying than it is thought-provoking, oh look I’m already contradicting myself. The subtlety I’ve come to expect from Schrader’s critique(?) on religion was non-existent here. Not to say I didn’t enjoy how direct it was, from reading some other reviews I’m not alone in saying the TULIP scene was grrrreat. But all of this isn’t to say this is a bad movie, the slow descent into madness that I love so much about his work is very present here. I too was overwhelmed when I first went to LA! But for different reasons!
74
Paul Schrader's Calvinist odyssey, and total batshit self-seriousness. Look, you'd probably think George C. Scott diving into the sexual underworld is a great concept, and you'd be right, but you'd also be right in saying that it's a bad idea. This movie works because of its commitment, not necessarily because of the material. It's why many, but not all, of Paul Schrader's greatest accomplishments were given life by Scorsese's direction (Taxi Driver, Bringing out the Dead, Last Temptation of Christ). This yearned for an objective lens, a participant detached from the hellish descent. Often, Paul Schrader finds himself impassioned by the very issues that he places his characters within, and certain films benefit (Blue Collar, First Reformed) while others…
June Scavenger: 4/30
#24: A film starring George C. Scott
http://letterboxd.com/scumbalina/list/alone-out-of-my-comfort-zone-june-scavenger/.
Sure, the plot sounds great but does it live up to what it promises? HELL YES. Absolutely holds no punches. I was expecting most of footwork to be done by Peter Boyle's character. I was expecting to go no seedier than strip clubs and "regular" pornography. I wasn't expecting George C. Scott to single-handedly beat the living shit out of the snuff film industry like a one man judge, jury and executioner. There is no more satisfying proof of Scott's talent than seeing him boil over into an explosion of parental rage directed at villainous sex trade scumbags.
On a side note, it invoked a memory of when I…
An Old Wine.
A moving, powerful, honest, and disturbing film. Cassic one.
🎬 mubi
Hardcore is Paul Schrader’s lurid odyssey into the seedy underbelly of pornography and prostitution in 1970’s California. George C. Scott stars a conservative midwestern businessman who scours every street corner and dirty back alley in search of his missing teenage daughter whose been spotted appearing in underground porno films.
Coming off the success of writing Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Taxi Driver, this film is essentially a B movie companion piece. Hardcore is a well written slow burn that has become slightly dated, but still manages to retain its potent commentary on the dark side of the City of Angels.
George C. Scott gives a tour de force performance as the religious calvinist Jake Van Dorn, Scott gives an earnest performance as…
For some reason, I'd always been under the impression that the scene in the theater was the climax and not the thing that kicks the plot into action?
Released the same year that the Moral Majority formed, this almost serves as the linking point from the 70s nihilism of Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder to the 80s gutter sleazefests of Cruising and Vice Squad, reveling in the sordid melodrama and bare flesh of the porno industry without ever really condemning it. It's so weird watching this now, because everything about it feels so alien -- it's using sex shops, smutty paperbacks, porn theaters, 8mm loops, and s/m dungeons as signifiers of vice, but most of these don't really exist today. If this were to be remade, where would the George C. Scott character first see his daughter, on some porn tube site?
Lots to appreciate and unpack in this lurid, overdetermined, and obviously deeply personal film about a Calvinist of thoroughly Midwestern stock who dives headlong into the depravity of 8mm porn loops, sex shops, S&M clubs, and even a snuff film. Michael Chapman shoots the hell out of it, vividly rendering both the wintry flavor of Grand Rapids, Michigan and the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles and San Francisco. But George C. Scott is terribly miscast here. He looks the part, but it's absolutely crucial that he have a Travis Bickle-like ambivalence about the world he's entering into, and that's not in Scott's arsenal. Fine supporting performances, though, from Peter Boyle as a sleazy-yet-ingratiating private eye and Season Hubley as a sex worker who helps him out. Anyway, direction matters, and Schrader just didn't have the chops for this one.
From the opening moments of Hardcore you already have the world of Jake Van Dorn set up perfectly in front of your eyes, he is a single parent who loves his daughter very much. But in taking this seemingly ordinary image of an idealized American lifestyle, with the family’s own beliefs representing what already present themselves as so normalized by our own world, you have that world crumbling down rather quickly by the fact that another influence has entered the picture. Surely enough, you can already go ahead to point at Taxi Driver when thinking about another film that explores how the corrupted environment has slowly destroyed the world of Travis Bickle the way that we knew it, but what…
For the 3rd time, I have seen Hardcore, this time with a cousin. Paul Schrader has dared to give a sordid criticism to the conservative American ethics of those decades, to see how Scott's character is decomposing more and more deeply until reaching a point where madness makes him lose his temper, as well as to see part of his true identity, from seeing the traditional man at the beginning of the story ends up becoming a mean one as the story progresses. A tour de force drama that turns into a desperate madness in order to find his daughter who mysteriously disappears and is discovered to be practicing prostitution, with morbid scenes which serve for the spectator to try…
So I've more or less disappeared in recent months, I didn't even manage to finish Hoop-Tober properly (I just lost interest due to personal reasons). Well regardless of that, we're now into 2021, so I figured it's back to business as usual for me.
This Paul Schrader effort was kind of a blind buy for me, but the premise intrigued me, so I picked it up on Blu-ray and decided to gave it a shot. Funnily enough, this one is quite appropriate for the season, as evidenced by it's Christmas-set opening, but you quickly forget about that as things progress.
Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a Michigan businessman whose beloved daughter Kristen has left on a church-sponsored trip…
Vraiment excellent, pas un bout de gras, hyper bien rythmé. De plus le propos du film est vraiment très très bien traité de manière très fine
Although this film can certainly be called exploitative in it’s own right, it’s thoughtful and meditative compared to the successive 8MM. With Paul Schrader’s religionism, and the penultimate cries of “they didn’t make me do anything”, it’s also more humanist and life-affirming. Most striking is a didactic dreamlike quality that reminds, along with it’s Catholicism, of the later George C. Scott vehicle The Exorcist III.
Besides Scott, Peter Boyle deserves a fair amount of credit as the man who may be considered the film’s true antagonist. A cheerful Hades figure, he guides our hero through the underworld with precise care not to show him too much at a time, lest he break or suffocate— the fact that he isn’t a…
Realised towards the end of this how similar this is to Finding Nemo and kind of started freaking out about it, but this was great. Loved the use of colour, loved George C. Scott's performance and thought the score was real neat! Really dumb of me to be surprised that Paul Schrader wrote another character study, but this still bangs! Gotta check out more of his directorial work!
Un film qui a très bien vieilli, excepté la bande son trop souvent hors sujet.
Bien que la résolution soit un peu molassone le film fait preuve d'une incroyable décence quant aux thèmes abordés (sexe, religion, foi, amour paternel).
C'est aussi agréable de voir une telle cohérence dans le traitement des corps féminin : puisque notre personnage est un croyant qui se désintéresse du corps des femmes, on aura aucun gros plan lubrique gratuit et c'est cool.
"Turn it off! Turn if off! TURN IT OFF!"
A dark and sleazy melodrama. I wish there was more of the daughter – there's a huge jump (at least for me) between what we see of her at the beginning and what we see at the end. I wanted a bit more progression, or reason, or something; as it stands, I don't completely buy into her arc. But George C. Scott is incredible, completely losing himself in his performance of a man whose entire world is crashing down around him. Paul Schrader is a madman, and I love it.
Niki: Look, how important do you think sex is?
Jake: Not very.
Niki: Well then, we're just alike. I mean, you think it's so unimportant that you don't even do it. I think it's so unimportant that I don't care who I do it with.
Jake - George C. Scott -, a conservative, deeply religious Calvinist middle-aged businessman sees her teenage daughter Kristen on the runaway and hires an unorthodox private eye Peter Boyle to find her, since the police won't do anything... and little did Boyle's character as well. So, after knowing she'd been involved in making a hardcore movie and kicking Boyle's butt, he goes "undercover" into the dark porno underworld.
Paul Schrader's film is fearless on its…
schrader’s usual ruminations on faith, male ego, sex, are all here. feels like an obvious, lazy comparison, but this does for the west coast what “taxi driver” did for new york. they’re both about self righteous guys, misguidedly crusading through the seedy underbelly of america. schrader seems like a very weird dude I wouldn’t really wanna hang out with!!
watched on blu-ray.
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