Back in 1980, just after I had left the Trotskyist movement and thought that I would write the Great (or nearly great) American Novel, I took a writer’s workshop class at NYU’s School of Continuing Education that was almost totally worthless. The only thing that came out of it that stuck with me over the years was the teacher’s point that there are only about 10 plots in all of literature, with variants accounting for the tens of thousands of novels and screenplays. Probably the most familiar is the Road Story that can be found in both “Huckleberry Finn” and “On the Road”.
As I sat watching “Salvation”, the Strudel Western from Denmark that incorporates many of the Spaghetti Western genre elements from the 1970s, it occurred to me that Revenge plots are almost as ubiquitous as those involving the Road, maybe even more so. After discussing this film that was burdened with a number of problems but still worth seeing when it opens in NYC on February 27, I’ll say something about “Blue Ruin”, another Revenge movie that was made on a shoestring budget and was my pick for NYFCO’s best new director award for 2014. full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/02/12/salvation-blue-ruin/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
