Exorcist II: The Heretic [John Boorman, 1977]:
A few months ago, I promised a series of notes on the films of John Boorman, using quotes from the man himself. My thoughts on Catch Us If You Can (1965) went up almost immediately and were supposed to be followed, a week or two later, by a similar post on Leo the Last (1970). Although I do intend to complete this series eventually, I'm just not the mood to continue with it at the present time. When I started the project back in June, I felt as if I'd hit a wall with my own writing, which I'd never been very happy with in the first place. As an alternative, I decided to transcribe the Boorman reflections and to translate the French article on M. Night Shyamalan, just to keep the blog active. Over the last two months, I've gotten back into the habit of writing for myself. I've seen a lot of great films in the last few months, and I really want to commit my considerations on these films to the blog, while I still can. I know this intensity will soon pass (as it always does) and I'll be left with nothing to say, so I'm really pushing myself to complete these shorter capsule reviews, irrespective of how potentially interesting (or uninteresting) they might appear to anyone visiting the site.
The Boorman films that I'd planned to write about, the aforementioned Leo the Last, Zardoz (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Excalibur (1981), are easily amongst my favourite films, and are really the key works of Boorman's career alongside Catch Us If You Can, Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972), The Emerald Forest (1985), Hope and Glory (1987), The General (1998) and The Tiger's Tail (2006). It's still my intent to write about these films in the near future, but for now, the time needed to go through the chapters of Boorman's book and to retype the passages as written just takes too much effort, and is a time that I could be using to continue with my own critical studies. Unlike my aborted 'One-Hundred Favourite Films' series, which I started last year (2012), but abandoned when I realised how awful the writing had become, I still have every intention of returning to Boorman, if only to use the project as an excuse to explain why Exorcist II: The Heretic is not only a misunderstood film, but a rather brilliant one.
