"Who are those guys?!": Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

It had been a very long time since I had seen this film, and when I found out that Mrs. Meridian hadn't seen it before (her alibi is that she is young) AND I saw that my friend and incurable movie junkie Larry had it on his list of films he owns, well, I asked him to include it in the next batch he sent my way. We saw it this past weekend, Mrs. Meridian liked it, and so did I, still. But what was surprising to me was how clearly I remembered it from that last viewing and/but how differently I saw it this time.
I don't remember now just what exactly I liked about it when I last saw it. I think I remember it being more overtly comedic in its intent. But this time around, what struck me was its wistfulness, a sort of humorous melancholy. The lovely bicycle scene is a case in point: it's all gauzy light and Katherine Ross's white linen dress and Paul Newman's clowining, but the bicycle itself is a harbinger of the coming 20th century. The times they are a-changin'. Butch and Sundance's witticisms and their rather insouciant regard for Authority is all very 60's, but I understood as I watched this time that THEY, sitting on the cusp of the 20th century (and the film sits on the cusp of the 70s) don't want to change. They are criminals, but they are innocent. They want to remain like Adam before the Fall, but Etta's Eve leaves them when she realizes they really have no choice but to leave the Garden (spot that is Bolivia) (remember Ross offering Newman the apple in the bicycle scene?). So: we don't SEE them die, but we know they do. They do not lose their innocence--but, perhaps, we do as we watch.

And now for something completely different: I cannot recommend highly enough the service provided by Blogging Stats, a site that's been up since May and, so far, has only about 150 users--the Meridian being one. If you're curious, you can see my counter down at the very bottom of the page. When I moved to Blogger, I had, at first, a Bravenet counter; then, as I visited other sites, I saw that Sitemeter provided lots of information Bravenet does not but which I was curious about for my own site: where are my visitors from? How long do they stay? What page(s) do they look at? So, I added a Sitemeter, but I wished that there existed somewhere out there a counter that combined the information both sites were giving me and still remained free. Then I found Blogging Stats last week. No visuals of the sort Bravenet and Sitememter provide (though its designer says he'll be adding them in a new version), but in addition to combining the info that the two old counters were giving me, it also provides services that Sitemeter users have to pay for, things like a running ranking of visited pages, and keywords that bring visitors to the site. None of that is vital information, of course, but lovers of the trivial regardng their sites should find their hearts' desire met through Blogging Stats.

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