Dear Frank,

This movie is one that has been on my to-do list for you for over a year now — I suspect, in fact, that Deliverance is the perfect example of the type of film for which this blog was created: Classic, yet not necessarily a classic that would be considered essential viewing.

And it’s a classic for one very specific reason — I admit up front that my foreknowledge of this movie is limited to the fact that a dude gets raped in it. I mean, technically, that’s not the whole truth — I totally listened to that APM interview with the daughter of the writer once. But really all I have in my mind right now is “squeal piggy squeal!” And that isn’t helped by the fact that during the opening credits, we’re watching nature being demolished by bulldozers while this bit of voice-over plays: “We’re gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape. We’re gonna rape it.” My irony detector just went DING DING DING.

This movie moves pretty fast when it wants to — we’re quickly introduced to four bros heading out to a river in the Appalachians for a good ol’ fashioned bro trip. (Technically, these men pre-date the actual “bro” movement, but the concept remains the same.) The river they’re about to canoe down is about to disappear due to the construction of a dam (“YOU CAN’T FIGHT PROGRESS!”) and I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, JUST MAYBE, this movie is about the corruption of innocence. Read the rest of this entry →