The Blood Sister viewing — "Hal’s critical take on the film…"
Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres,’ cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert […] Himself’s best in this vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque metaWestern but also a really good Western, with chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ
Context
The plan's "filial film criticism" delivered whole: Hal has a worked-out position on the metacinematic-parody period — theory as escape from feeling, the parodist seduced by his own target genre (the trimmed middle names the "cathartic bloodbath" formula specifically) — plus a canon-ranking: Sombrero best-in-vein because it's also really a Western. It converges nearly beat for beat with Joelle's independent verdict in 150 (parodists as "camp-followers in ironic masks"): the two people who studied him closest wrote the same review without comparing notes.