Just when I thought I might be out of the blogging thing, I get the inspiration to come back. Well it is Juneteenth and I felt like celebrating in my own way so I finally decided to re-watch this one and well...Happy Holiday.
No better time than Juneteenth to re-watch this masterpiece. Think Los Angeles Story rather than Tokyo Story and it is a quiet storm! We see a slaughterhouse worker (the titular "killer of sheep") go about his job while slowly going insane in despair of how close to edge of poverty his family is living. This is the last generation that came to Los Angeles from the Deep South (likely Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, or Mississippi) and found ghettoization and alienation waiting for them. The vignettes of everyone living their and existing halfway between humanity and inhumanity is what the movie digs into. It's neorealism and surrealism combined and you hold your breath the whole time hoping Stan does not finally snap at the despair.
This movie is of course Charles Burnett's masterpiece. It is the magnum opus of the LA Rebellion Film Collective in totality (yes even more so than Daughters of the Dust) and it was criminally withheld from release for decades because the licensing for the soundtrack (one of two Burnett features to suffer such a fate along with My Brother's Wedding). Like much of the LA Rebellion of this time, it is done in the neorealist style of on-location and no professional actors and it works like magic. It feels like a dark fairytale world when it is just South Los Angeles in the late-70s. The area was yet to be completely consumed in gang warfare and crack-cocaine and we get to see it as it was before those two forces change it forever.
I don't know what else to say, this is the best in American Independent cinema of this era and if you can watch it, watch it!
