philosophy in film

[iambiguous]

As with a film like The Color Purple, Precious stirred up conflicting reactions from within the black community.

There were folks who applauded it for portraying an experience they see as [for some] true to life. There were folks who condemned it for perpetuating what they see to be flagrant racial sterotypes.

nytimes.com/2009/11/21/movie … .html?_r=0
revcom.us/a/189/precious-en.html
blog.sfgate.com/abraham/2009/10/ … scar-buzz/

It would seem that a case could be made for either point of view.

Not many characters like Precious around. And certainly not many of them around who play the leading role. But it is hard to say with any degree of certainty what it means to be “good” or “bad” when you are born and raised in an environment like this. The mother and the father—what is their own backstory? What sort of childhood did they have? Some conservatives like to insist that none of it matters…just as some liberals will insist it is the only thing that does matter. Has that been resolved yet?

How bad is it? Well, for one thing, her father rapes her. She had a baby [his] born with Downs syndrome. Claireece calls her “Mongo”. That’s short for Mongoloid, she says. Her mother is nothing less than an abomination at times. And her whole world revolves around eating, watching televison, conning social services and viciously abusing Claireece. Claireece is morbidly obese. She’s pregnant again with her daddy’s child. Her daddy has AIDS.

For all practical purposes, it is way, way beyond my capacity to grasp.

IMDb

[b]Over 400 girls were interviewed from across the country for the part of Precious. Gabourey Sidibe was cast a mere six weeks before the start of shooting after being forced to the audition by friends.

In the final confrontation scene, Mariah Carey was not directed to cry; rather, she was supposed to react with stone faced horror, just as Ms. Weiss does in the novel. However, Carey was so overpowered by the performances of Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe, she broke down in tears and ducked her head away from the camera as not to ruin the scene. Director Lee Daniels loved Carey’s natural reaction and kept the shot of her wiping her tears in the final cut.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_(film
trailer: youtu.be/LpU8rJ_ZwOs

PRECIOUS [2009]
Directed by Lee Daniels

[b]Claireece: [voiceover] My name is Claireece “Precious” Jones. I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend with real nice hair. And I wanna be on the cover of a magazine. But first I wanna be in one of them BET videos. Momma said I can’t dance. Plus, she said who wants to see my big ass dancing, anyhow?

…

Mrs. Lichtenstein [principal] Hello, Claireece. Are you pregnant?
[Claireece looks away]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: You’re 16; you’re still in Junior High School; and you’re pregnant with your second child. Is that correct?
[No reply]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: Are you pregnant, again?
[Mrs. Lichtenstein huffs, exacerbated]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: What happened Claireece?
Claireece: I had sex, Mrs. Lichtenstein.
Mrs. Lichtenstein: Do you have any other thoughts about your situation, Claireece?
[Claireece shrugs]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: Claireece?
Claireece: Am I in trouble?
[No reply]
Claireece: Thank you, but I have to get back to math.
[She gathers her things to leave]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: Sit down, Claireece. Sit down right now!
[Claireece sits back down]
Mrs. Lichtenstein: We should have a parent-teacher conference with you, me and your mother.
Clarieece: My mother’s busy.
Mrs. Lichtenstein: Alright. How about if I come to your house?
Claireece: If I were you, I wouldn’t.

…

Claireece: I hate crackheads. Nobody ever rings the bell but crackheads.
[Claireece walks over to the intercom]
Claireece: Stop ringing the godamn buzzer you motherfuckers![/b]

Nope. Not this time.

[b]Mother: Who is that, Claireece.
Claireece: The white bitch from school.

…

Mary: Precious! PRECIOUS! PRECIOUS! Get down here, bitch! You brought that white bitch up in my house? You wrong to bring that bitch up in here!
Claireece: I ain’t bring her in here.
Mary: Well, why the fuck did she ring my buzzer? I can’t hear you, Precious. Since you got so much mothafuckin’ mouth and you gon’ bring a bitch up in my house… why did that bitch ring my goddamn buzzer?
Clarieece: I ain’t tell her to come here!
Mary: See, I think right now you think you becomin’ a grown woman. ‘Cause that shit you pulled in the kitchen… I shoulda fucked you up. But I let you walk away. And I let you get yourself together. But, bitch, I’mma let you know, don’t you ever pull that shit again. That’ll be your last mothafuckin’ day stayin here. I promise you that. You gon’ send a white bitch to my mothafuckin’ buzzer? Talkin’ ‘bout some higher education? You’re a dummy, bitch! You will never know shit! Don’t nobody want you, don’t nobody need you! You done fucked around and fucked my mothafuckin’ man? And had two mothafuckin’ children? And one of ‘ems a goddamn animal, runnin’ ‘round lookin’ crazy as a mothafucka? Bitch, you know what? See, I think you… I think you tryin’ me. I think you tryin’ to fuck with me. You fuckin’ with my money… and you gon’ stand up there and look at me like you a mothafuckin’ woman? I’mma show you what real women do, bitch. See, you don’t know what real mothafuckin’ women do. Real mothafuckin’ women sacrafice! I shoulda aborter your mothafuckin’ ass! 'Cause you ain’t shit! I knew it when the doctor put you in my goddamn hand you wasn’t a goddamn thing! You wear that smirk on your face, bitch? Get outta…!
[throws object at Claireece]
Mary: Now smile about that! Smile about that, you fat bi -
[Claireece kicks a shoe at Mary]
Mary: I’mma kill you, bitch!
[Mary chases Claireece up the stairs]

…

Claireece: [Taking an assessment test] There’s always something wrong with these tests. These tests paint a picture of me with no brain. These tests paint a picture of me and my mother, my whole family as less than dumb. Just ugly black grease, need to be wiped away, find a job for. Sometimes I wish I was dead. I’ll be okay, I guess, ‘cause I’m lookin’ up. Lookin’ for something to fall on me…a desk, a couch, tv… my mom, maybe.

…

Claireece: The other day, I cried. But you know what? Fuck that day. That’s why God, or whoever, makes new days.

…

Ms. Rain: You guys know that you are in the ABE class. This is not GED. This is to get you ready for your GED.

…

Ms.Weiss [a socialworker]: I need to know about your homelife and your mother. I need to know what it’s like where you live.
Claireece: My mother’s like a whale on the couch. She say I eat all the time, but she always making me eat. Then she call me a fat mess. The only time she ever leaves is to play her numbers…watch TV, eat, watch TV, eat again. Can you help out with that?

…

Claireece: Social worker here.
Mother: Why din’t you tell me that bitch was comin’ so fuckin’ early? Come get my wig!

…

Mrs. Weiss: You know, let’s talk about your father. Tell me about your relationship with him.
Claireece: I don’t know much more than you do, Mrs. White.
Mrs. Weiss: That’s Mrs. “Weiss.” Talk to me about the little you do know about your father. It is important, whether you know it or not.
Claireece: He give me his baby and my one before it, but I don’t never see him…
Mrs. Weiss: Wait, what did you say he gave you?
Claireece: Nothing.
Mrs. Weiss: Wait, Clareece, you just said your father gave you something…
Claireece: Nothing.
Mrs. Weiss: No, I HEARD you just say…
Claireece: You didn’t hear shit.
Mrs. Weiss: I heard you just say your father…
Claireece: You didn’t hear shit like it!
Mrs. Weiss: I don’t care, honey! I need to know this!
Claireece: I didn’t say nothing like it! Let’s move ON!
Mrs. Weiss: I need this to HELP you…
Claireece [Angrily]: Bitch, can we change the subject?
Mrs. Weiss [tossing her file aside]: Okay. Well, I’ll see you next time then. Or maybe you’ll see someone else. But you’re going to have to talk to someone if you want your check, sweetie.
[Long pause, whilst Claireece considers this]
Clarieece: I see vampires too…

…

Claireece [to Mrs. Weiss]: I been going to the doctor, too. It’s nice. Msw. Rain fall out when she found out I ain’t never been to no doctor before. Don’t know how I had my first baby on the kitchen floor with my momma kicking me upside the head. Them the kind of things you talking about when you say, say whatever come to my mind?

…

Claireece [voiceover]: That’s the end of them welfare checks. I just couldn’t lie no more. I shouldn’t have said none of that. Momma gonna kill me.

…

Mother: Your daddy dead. He had the AIDS.

…

Mrs. Weiss [angrily]: You just sat there, shut up, and let him abuse your daughter.
Mary [hysterically in tears]: I did not want him to abuse my daughter! I did not want him to hurt her! I didn’t want him to do nothing to her!
Mrs. Weiss: But you ALLOWED him to hurt her! You did!
Mary: But, those… those things she told you I did to her? Who… who… who else was going to love me? WHO else was going to touch me? WHO else was going to make me feel good about myself? You sit there and you judge me, and you write them notes on your notepad, because you think you know who I am!

…

Claireece [to her mother]: You know to this day, I never even knew who you was, not even after all them things you did. Maybe I was too stupid. Maybe I just didn’t want to. You ain’t gonna see me no more.[/b]

[iambiguous]

This is a fictionalized account of a true story. How fictional?

From IMDb:
Although the movie is based on a true story, it has been indicated by Billy Hayes himself 20 years after its release, that what is presented in the movie is a very exaggerated version of what happened to him in the prison in Istanbul, Turkey. Turkish government officials greatly resented the portrayal of their country in the movie, and made this known to the media in general after the film’s release. Reportedly, Billy Hayes told ‘The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’ that this film “depicts all Turks as monsters”. In 2004, screen-writer Oliver Stone apologized for the portrayal of Turkey, Turkish prisons and the Turkish people in the movie.

It seems Oliver Stone was more intent on bashing Turks than anything else.
One account: m.ibtimes.com/midnight-express-a … 95074.html

In some respects, we have this sort of thing going on right here. What really seems to count [for a few] is not all the bads things that folks can do but how it always seems to be certain kind of people that do it. The Muslims, for example. Or folks from an “inferior” race.

Ironically, Billy Hayes goes to prison for drugs and then once inside the prison he finds that drugs abound. Along with the brutality. But at least he was imprisoned with others from a “Western” background.

But then there’s the place they send you if you are deemed to be “criminally insane”. Grim and ghastly barely describes it. How far then is the gap between the way it is portrayed here and the way it “really is”?

IMDb

[b]In an attempt to really get into character, John Hurt stopped bathing for most of the 53-day schedule and reeked so badly in time, most of his colleagues avoided being close to him.

Producer David Puttnam has mixed feelings about this project. He was happy with the finished cut but when he saw the film with a paying audience at a late night showing in New York, he was deeply disturbed by the audience’s reaction to some scenes. They were cheering and clapping instead of the desired effect of being repulsed by the characters actions.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Express_(film
trailer youtu.be/lhuutAnXBzQ

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS [1978]
Directed by Alan Parker

[b]Tex: Boy oh boy, you picked a bad time to fly, Billy. There are guerrillas all over the place blowing up planes and all. They hit four planes in four days. But I guess you young people don’t read the news anymore. That, and with our people back home kicking up a shitstorm about the flow of heroin from Turkey…
Billy: I didn’t have heroin. It was just a little hashish.
Tex: That doesn’t matter. A drug’s a drug.
Billy: It was my first time. It was only two kilos.
Tex: It doesn’t matter if it was two kilos or 200 kilos. The Turks love catching foreigners. They want to show the rest of the world that they’re fighting the drug trade.
Billy Hayes: Who are you? What’s your name?
Tex: That’s not important.
Billy Hayes: Are you with the American consulate here in Istanbul?
Tex: Something like that.

…

Tex [with a revolver pointed at Billy’s head]: You seem like a nice guy, Billy. I really do feel sorry for you. But if you try anything or try to run away again, I’ll blow your fucking brains out!

…

Billy: Who are the kids?
Jimmy: Kids? They’re not kids. They’re local street urchins the Turks lock up here in a seperate wing for the juveniles. Boys as young as nine or ten years old. They’re thieves, drug dealers, muggers, con artists, pickpockets, rapists, murderers… you name it, they do it. Don’t trust any of them!

…

Max: The best thing to do is to get your ass out of here. Best way that you can.
Billy: Yeah, but how?
Max: Catch the midnight express.
Billy: What’s that?
Max [laughs]: Well it’s not a train. It’s a prison word for…escape. But it doesn’t stop around here.

…

Billy [voiceover in a letter to Susan]: To the Turks, everything is “shurla burla”, which means “like this, like that”. You never know what will happen. All foreigners are “ayip”, they’re considered dirty. So is homosexuality, it’s a big crime here, but most of them do it every chance they get. There are about thousand things that are “ayip”, for instance, you can stab or shoot somebody below the waist but not above because that’s intent to kill. So everyone runs around stabbing everyone else in the ass. That’s what they call “Turkish revenge”. I know it must all sound crazy to you, but this place is crazy.

…

Jimmy: The second way out, I need your guy’s help, and that’s under.
Billy: You mean tunnel? Are you serious?
Max: This is Shagmahr prison, not Stalag 17.
Jimmy: Well that’s where you’re wrong fuckface, 'cause it’s already built!

…

Billy and Erich: Prison…monastery…cloister…cave. Prison…monastery…cloister…cave. Prison…monaster…cloister…cave.
Billy: Prison…

…

Billy [to the Turkish court]: What is a crime? What is punishment? It seems to vary from time to time and place to place. What’s legal today is suddenly illegal tomorrow because society says it’s so, and what’s illegal yesterday is suddenly legal because everybody’s doin’ it, and you can’t put everybody in jail. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. But I’ve spent 3 1/2 years of my life in your prison, and I think I’ve paid for my error, and if it’s your decision today to sentence me to more years, then I…

…

Billy [to the prosecutor]: I just wish for once that you could be in my shoes, Mr. Prosecutor, and then you would know something that you don’t know: mercy! That the concept of a society is based on the quality of that mercy; its sense of fair play; its sense of justice! But I guess that’s like asking a bear to shit in the toilet.

…

Billy [to the judges]: For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny you don’t eat’em! Jesus Christ forgave the bastards, but I can’t! I hate! I hate you! I hate your nation! And I hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re a pig! You’re all pigs…

…

Ahmet [at the wheel]: Billy, you’ll get in trouble if you walk this way. A good Turk always walks to the right. Left is Communist, right is good.

…

Ahmet [who claims to have studied philosophy at Harvard for “many, many years”]: Where are you going? Why don’t you walk the wheel with us? What is the matter my American friend? What has upset you? Oh! I know. The bad machine doesn’t know that he’s a bad machine. You still don’t believe it. You still don’t believe you’re a bad machine? To know yourself is to know God, my friend. The factory knows, that’s why they put you here. You’ll see… You’ll find out… In time, you’ll know.[/b]

Unless he escapes first.

[iambiguous]

All the usual themes: love, sex, commitment…family, friends…God, religion. I’m thinking a new Woody Allen. Never panned out that way though. After this rather wonderfully witty inaugral performance the stuff that came later was, well, more forgettable. I can’t even recall a title from all others. And I did watch a few.

But within the context of this particular demographic this one is still a gem. What’s a man to do when he wants both lasting love and every attractive woman he bumps into? In this culture?!

There are just people who need to have a [more or less] liturgical moral structure in their lives. They need this in order to talk themselves into believing that there are in fact right behaviors and wrong behaviors. Others let this revolve entirely around whatever brings them pleasure or pain. But most of us fall somewhere inbetween. We make those important distinctions between harming and not harming others but we recognize that sometimes the sheer complexity of life envelops us in all manner of more… ambiguous contexts. We do the best we can to abide by one or another “code” of behavior.

In the end, it’s all Hollywood. But only a fool would imagine it’s really the end.

IMDb

[b]Edward Burns gave Robert Redford a tape of this film in a NYC elevator and begged him to watch it. Redford said that Burns looked like a panhandler. “I get that all the time, but I thought, what the hell, that’s what it’s all about.” He watched it, liked it, and the film went on to win at Sundance.

The most profitable film on a percentage basis in 1995. It cost only $200,000 to make and grossed $13.4 million, 67 times its budget.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_McMullen
trailer: youtu.be/XJwLBdjEerE

THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN [1995]
Written and directed by Edward Burns

[b]Barry [after someone mentions their father]: Speaking of our favorite wife beating, child abusing alcoholic, I went to the cemetery today.
Patrick: And?
Barry: And I’m happy to report that he’s still dead.

…

Jack: I’m pretty much a one-woman kind of guy.
Ann: That’s what my ex-husband first said when I met him.
Jack: And he wasn’t?
Ann: No, he was. I just wasn’t a one-man kind of girl.

…

Patrick: No, I can’t do it. I can’t live with a woman I’m not married to.
Susan: We’ll be married eventually, so what’s the difference?
Patrick: The difference is we’re not married now. Therefore, I would living in sin.
Susan: We’re not living in sin! We love each other!
Patrick: What does that mean? Listen, there’s no amendment to the rule—“living in sin lest tou love”, okay? I can’t do it. That’s the bottom line.
Susan: Look, I know what you’re doing. You just don’t want to make a commitment, do you?
Patrick: No, it’s not that, I swear.
Susan: So what is it?
Patrick: It’s I’m a Catholic, that’s what it is. And there are certain rules and regulations you have to live by. I’m living by them! Hey, for the same reason you won’t eat a bacon cheeseburger, huh? This is a part of my baggage.[/b]

She’s Jewish. But he doesn’t seem to have any problems rationalizing fornication.

[b]Jack: Patrick…are you ready to spend the rest of your life having sex with this one woman? I mean, she’ll be the last woman that you get to see completely naked and be allowed to touch. That’s something to think about.

…

Patrick: What I’m talking about is real love. I mean two people mapping out an eternity in a moment. And we’d sit and have intimate conversation in some dimly lit room, and we’d both feel there was nowhere else in the world we’d want to be.
Jack: Jesus Christ, Patrick. I mean that’s very romantic, but there is no fucking chance in hell that’s going to happen.
Patrick: You don’t believe in true love? You don’t believe God has someone out there just for you and He allows the lucky few to be fortunate enough to find one another?
Jack [incredulous]: How the hell did a fruitcake like you end up as my brother? No, I don’t believe in true love, but if there is true love, I’m sure God has nothing to do with it.

…

Patrick [to Susan]: Hey, hey, I don’t need any new ideas, okay? I’m confused enough already.

…

Marty: Well listen, Barry, you better find some inspiration soon. For one thing, you need the money. And you know what? It’s embarrassing - I’ve gotta tell the people in my business that my best young writer lives on Long Island. Writers live in Manhattan, Barry. Joey Butafuccos live on Long Island.

…

Patrick: I miss her.
Jack: No, you don’t. You only think you do. You’re suffering from the “will I ever get laid again blues”.
Patrick: No, my friend. I think it’s the case of, “you don’t know how good you had it till it’s gone” syndrome.

…

Barry [holding up a banana]: Listen, Patrick, I have a theory. Man is like a banana. Strong and firm, bright and phallic, and he’s protected by his all-important shield. But, when a woman comes along, you know, she sees this bright phallic beast and she wants it. But she’s not happy with it the way it is. She wants to see inside. So, she starts peeling away your all-important shield.
[he peels the banana]
Barry: First, she wants to see your romantic side, then she wants to see your passionate side, finally she wants to see your soft, caring, feminine side. She keeps peeling and peeling until you’re left there buck naked, totally exposed with your balls blowing in the wind. And that’s when she gets her knife, and she cuts away your manhood piece by piece…until she’s having your cock in her corn flakes.

…

Barry [to Audrey]: I like being a pessimist. It helps me deal with my inevitable failure.

…

Jack: Patrick, you’re Mr. Ten Commandments. Let me ask you, how bad a sin is adultry?

…

Patrick: I’m stunned. I can’t believe this, Jack. You’re actually considering sticking your penis into another woman.

…

Patrick: But why would you abandon Catholicism?
Leslie: Because I tried to figure out why I said yes to James, and that’s when it hit me. I had to get married. What’s a single Catholic girl going to do if she doesn’t get married? I can’t have premarital sex. But if I do, I can’t use birth control. But if I don’t use birth control and I get pregnant, I can’t have an abortion. What’s a girl to do while she is waiting around for Prince Charming to show up? I mean, Christ, I can’t even masturbate!

…

Patrick: You can’t have an abortion! That’s against everything I believe in!
Susan: Well the last time I checked the baby was inside me and not you…so I’ll make that decision.

…

Patrick: I’m going to Hell…

…

Patrick: I thought you didn’t eat meat.
Leslie: Only on Fridays.

…

Jack: Look, I fucked up, okay? I know I didn’t do the right thing but I felt I had to do it anyway. Look, I love Molly…you know I really do. But who says you have to be 100% faithful to your wife, anyway? It just isn’t natural?
Patrick: God said.
Jack [angrily]: Well, fuck God! Why should I spend all my life having faith in something I have no proof ever existed? Patrick, I’m a man. I had a certain urge and I acted on it. And I don’t see it as being such a big deal.
Patrick [stupefied]: “Fuck God?!”

…

Patrick: Susan wants me back
Jack: What about the baby?
Patrick: She had a miscarriage.
Molly: Oh, my God!
Jack: Jesus, talk about the luck of the Irish.

…

Patrick: So what’d ya’ give up for Lent?
Barry: I gave up resolutions.
Patrick: That’s convenient.

…

Molly [to Jack]: When did you become such a fucking coward?

…

Audrey: I love you, Barry. And I won’t love anyone like I love you. But I’m not going to be like your Mom and wait 35 years for you.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Nobody knows. Nothing? Well, some things surely. Just not what they would need to know in order to answer the most important question of all: How ought I to live my life? The doors of perception here come in all manner of shifting shapes. And one man’s key is another man’s dead bolt.

William Blake, God and religion. Colin Wilson devotes a chapter or two to them in his book The Outsider: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Colin_Wilson

In whatever manner, alienation and despair morphs into something analogous to “spirituality”. I never bought into it though.

Fact is, I never really understood it then and I don’t pretend to really understand it now. It’s only to state the obvious: that human existence – that existence itself – can seem very mysterious at times. And then there’s the part about Native American culture and how it fits into all of this. But what do I really know about that either. Same with “revisionist Westerns”. Most of that stuff is over my head. I just do the best I can with what I think I know about it. It’s a really strange film and that’s good enough for me.

What’s it all mean? Well, you may as well start in on deconstructing semiology. Everything seems to be a sign pointing you in the direction of yet another referential metaphor.

My guess though is it really doesn’t work this way when you die.

IMDb

[b]The lines “The vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my vision’s greatest enemy” that Nobody says to the trading post missionary are from William Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel”.

The lines “Every night and every morn / Some to misery are born / Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight” are from William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man
trailer: youtu.be/_64Qv0jV_PY

DEAD MAN [1995]
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

[b]Train Fireman: Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later than night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

…

Mr. Dickinson: Who the hell are you? And where did you get that goddamn clown suit? Cleveland?

…

[William has just discovered a colt .45 under Thel’s pillow]
Thel: Watch it. It’s loaded.
William Blake: Why do you have this?
Thel: Because this is America.

…

Nobody: What name were you given at birth, stupid white man?

…

Conway Twill: ‘Course you can’t put much stock in a man who spends the most part of a conversation talkin’ to a bear…talkin’ to a goddamn bear.

…

Nobody: Every night and every morn, some to misery are born. Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight; some are born to endless night.
William Blake: I really don’t understand.
Nobody: You were a poet and a painter, William Blake. But now, you’re a killer of white men.

…

William Blake: What should we do?
Nobody: The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow.

…

William Blake: What is your name?
Nobody: My name is Nobody.
William Blake: Excuse me?

…

Nobody: I was then taken east, in a cage. I was taken to Toronto. Then Philadelphia. And then to New York. And each time I arrived at another city, somehow the white men had moved all their people there ahead of me. Each new city contained the same white people as the last, and I could not understand how a whole city of people could be moved so quickly.

…

Big George: What’s a Philistine?
Sally: Well, it’s just a real dirty person.

…

Benmont Tench: Who are you travelin’ with?
William Blake: Well, uh…Nobody.

…

Nobody: You cannot stop the clouds by the building of a ship.
William Blake: What? What did you say? You know, I’ve had it up to here with this Indian malarkey. I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said since I met you, not one single word.

…

Nobody: Are you sure you have no tobacco?
William Blake: I’ve already told you I don’t smoke. And if I don’t smoke, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t have any tobacco.

…

Nobody: I have just ingested the food of the Great Spirit…Father Peyote.
William Blake: Do you think I could have a little bite of it?

…

William Blake: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

…

Conway Twill: I’ll tell you one thing: if that there Blake fella keeps on shootin’ marshals, I might end up liking the bastard!

…

Conway Twill: How 'bout your family history there, Cole? Let me guess. Kind of figured you for a German, huh? I mean, am I right? Am I close?[/b]

His last words, as it were. Before he is eaten.

[b]William Blake: Do you still have my eyeglasses?
Nobody: No, I traded them. Do you have any tobacco?
William Blake: No, I traded it.
Nobody: For what?
William Blake: I’m not telling.
Nobody: Liar.
William Blake: Thief.

…

Trading Post missionary: God damn your soul to the fires of Hell!
William Blake: He already has.

…

Nobody: I prepared your canoe with cedarboughs. It’s time for you to leave now, William Blake. Time for you to go back where you came from.
William Blake: You mean Cleveland?[/b]

Actually, quite a bit further.

[iambiguous]

Imagine Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee and Bill Cosby sitting in the theatre side by side while this film played. Ouch.

And it’s not just about the N-word either.

That it depicts an actual criminal element that flourishes in an actual crimial environment is less important to some than the manner in which it sometimes seems to glorify it. And then becomes [for all intents and purposes] a how-to manual for the proper gangster. It’s not the way it is because this is how they really are but more like this is how you better be if you want the respect of all the others.

Here things are a bit murkier though. Forget Pulp Fiction. This ain’t exactly folks blowing each other away and the bodies piling up. But we know that the transactions unfolding here are not really all that far removed from it. So it still reflects the mentality of being outside the law. Only here, it revolves around the distribution of guns. The guns being used to blow people away in, say, the drug trade.

In this one, everything is considerably more…intimate: who is playing whom? Follow the money. If you can.

But then it’s still all wrapped up in the same social, political and economic narratives that have been ravaging actual neighborhoods from coast to coast. That’s not murky at all though. It’s completely invisible.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Brown_(film
trailer: youtu.be/HsIHx_4Nr7E

[b]Note: some explicit language[/b]

IMDb

[b]Probably the least violent of all Quentin Tarantino’s movies, as only 9 shots are fired, and 4 squibs of blood are seen used.

Spike Lee publicly criticized Tarantino for the frequent use of the word “nigger” in the film. Samuel L. Jackson, previously a frequent Lee collaborator, defended Tarantino in the press. Miramax chairman called Lee in an attempt to mediate between him and Tarantino but Lee refused to speak with Tarantino.[/b]

JACKIE BROWN [1997]
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

[b]Ordell: Now that there is the Tec-9, a crappy spray gun from South Miami. This gun is advertised as the most popular gun in American crime. Do you believe that shit? It actually says that in the little book that comes with it: the most popular gun in American crime. Like they’re actually proud of that shit.

…

Ordell: Oh, uh-uh-uh, here we go… AK-47 the very best there is…When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room…accept no substitutes…
Bikini clad model on TV: Nothing gets between me and my AK.

…

Ordell [to Melanie]: Girl, don’t make me put my foot in your ass.

…

Beaumont: I’m still scared as a motherfucker, O.D. They talking like they serious as hell giving me time for that machine gun shit.
Ordell: Aw, come on, man, they just trying to put a fright in your ass.
Beaumont: Well, if that’s what they doin’, they done did it.

…

Ordell: Look, I hate to be the kinda nigga does a nigga a favor, then, BAM!, hits a nigga up for a favor in return. But I’m afraid I gots to be that kinda nigga.
Beaumont: Whatchu mean?
Ordell: I need a favor, nigga!

…

Louis [looking down at Beaumont in the trunk]: Who is that?
Ordell: Thats Beaumont…
Louis: Who’s Beaumont?
Ordell: An employee I had to let go…
Louis: What’d he do?
Ordell: He put hisself in a position where he was gonna have to do ten years in prison… Thats what he did. And if you know Beaumont you know there ain’t no goddamn way he can do ten years. And if you know that, then you know Beaumonts gonna do anything Beaumont can to keep from doin’ them ten years…includin’ tellin’ the federal government any and every motherfucking thing about my black ass. Now, that, my friend, is a clear-cut case of him or me…and you best believe it ain’t gonna be me.

…

Ordell: Now, I got me, so far, a half million dollars in lock boxes in a bank down in Cabo San Lucas…I make this delivery I’m gonna have me over a million. Hey, you think I’m gonna let a little cheese-eatin’ nigger like this fuck that up? You best think again. Before I let that happen, I’ll shoot this nigger in the head and ten niggers look just like him. You understand what I’m saying?
Louis: Yeah…

…

Max [to Ordell]: I’d say you’re in the drug business, except the money’s moving in the wrong direction.

…

Ordell: Look, you got to look at this with a little compassion, all right? Jackie ain’t no criminal. She ain’t used to this kind of treatment…Gangsters don’t give a fuck, but your average citizen… a couple of nights in County get to fuckin’ with their mind.
Max: Ordell, this isn’t a bar. You don’t have a tab…

…

Max [to Ordell]: Is white guilt supposed to make me forget that I run a business?

…

Ordell: You gonna thank me?
Jackie: For what?
Odell: Who the hell do you think got your ass out of jail?
Jackie: The same guy that put my ass in jail.

…

Ordell: Is that what I think it is?
Jackie: What do you think it is?
Ordell: I think it’s a gun pressed up against my dick.
Jackie: Well, you thought right. Now take your hands off from around my throat, nigga.

…

Ordell: Goddamn girl, you gettin’ high already? It’s just 2 o’clock!
Melanie [chuckling]: It’s that late?
Ordell: You know you smoke too much of that shit, that shit gonna rob you of your own ambition.
Melanie: Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV…

…

Winston: Look man, there’s only three reasons why you can’t make your court date. One, you’re in a hospital. Two, you’re in jail. Three, your ass is dead.

…

Ordell [to Jackie]: Goddamn, girl, you come in here on a Saturday night, I bet you need nigga repellent to keep them motherfuckers off your ass.

…

Ordell: She trying to play your ass against me, ain’t she?
Louis: Yeah. Uh-huh.
Ordell: See, I knew it…I knew it. I knew it! See, you didn’t have to say nothing. I know that bitch…
Louis: I don’t understand why you keep someone around your business and you can’t even trust ‘em…
Ordell: I ain’t gotta trust her. I know her…
Louis: I don’t know what that means, man…
Ordell: Well, you can’t trust Melanie…but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.

…

[Louis has forgotten where he parked]
Melanie: Jesus, but if you two are not the biggest pair of fuck-ups I’ve ever met in my entire life. How did you ever rob a bank? When you robbed banks, did you forget where your car was then too? No wonder you went to jail.

…

Ordell: Is she dead, yes or no?
Louis: Pretty much.

…

Ordell [to Max]: Jackie can tell me any story that comes into her pretty little head, just so long as at the end of that story she hands me my motherfucking money.

…

Ordell [to Max]: My ass may be dumb, but I ain’t no dumbass.

…

Ordell: There ain’t nothin’ you wanna tell me before we get out of this car, is there?
Max: No.
Ordell: Last chance, motherfucker. Are you sure? You better be, motherfucker…

…

Jackie: What’s the matter, haven’t ever borrowed someone’s car before?
Max: Not after they’re dead.

…

Jackie: I’ll send you a postcard.
Max: Will you?
Jackie: I sure will partner.
[They kiss. Both are silent for a moment after, then the phone begins to ring. Max hesitates to answer it]
Jackie: You’re running a business Max.[/b]

[iambiguous]

If it’s set in a small town chances are I’ve seen it. And boy is this ever set in one. And boy oh boy does it ever star Jennifer Connelly.

I guess you might call Harry an opportunist. And he is always just passing through. So if he comes through your town nail everything down. And who plays this character better than Don Johnson? You can’t help but recall Ben Quick—the character he played in the 1985 TV rendition of A Long Hot Summer. Fire figured into that one too.

Only Harry might have met his match this time in Holly. And she’s no Noel Varner. More like Eula.

The town is a regular Payton Place. But then aren’t they all. Not many likeable people here. But all the better to cheer Harry on as he schemes his way to the lady and the loot. But which lady and which loot?

Sometimes the really smart people can be just as stupid as the rest of us.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Spot
trailer: youtu.be/vmWLUAsas60

THE HOT SPOT [1990]
Directed by Dennis Hopper

[b]Harry: Wave your hands around and talk like you own the place.
George: I do own the place. What the hell do you think you’re doing?
Harry: Sellin’ a car.
George: Like hell you are.
Harry: I just did.

…

Harry [lighting a cigarette]: Shouldn’t chew that stuff. lt’s bad for you.

…

Gloria: Think we ought to come into his house like this when he’s not here?
Harry: Probably not.

…

Harry: I’m a car salesman. When I want a job cleanin’ cars, I’ll get one.
George: That may be a lot sooner than you think, the rate you’re going. What are you, anyway? 35? 36?
Harry: Around there.
George: Well, you sure as hell haven’t set the world on fire so far, or you wouldn’t be hangin’ around a place like this.
Harry: Yeah, but I got ambition. I figure if I stick around selling jalopies for another 40 years, somebody’ll give me a testimonial and a $40 watch.

…

Dolly: So whatcha gonna do in our town?
Harry: Whatever there is to do.
Dolly: There’s only two things to do in this town. You got a TV?
Harry: Nope.
Dolly: Well, now you’re down to just one.

…

Harry [reading from the back of a romance novel Gloria had been looking at]: “He was a stranger in town. A rough man, mocking, sometimes cruel. But Miriam saw past the tough facade to the bitter wounds that made him - hide his true self from the world.”
Gloria: l told you it was silly.

…

Dolly [after having sex with Harry in her husband’s car lot]: That was more fun than eating cotton-candy barefoot.

…

Harry: What do you have to see me about?
Dolly: Well, now l’ve heard everything.

…

Frank: So you’re a tough guy, huh?
Harry: No, you’re the tough guy. I’m worse.

…

Holly: George says you’re gettin’ serious about Gloria Harper. If you think you’re gonna ditch me for that saccharin little candy-ass, you’ve got another think comin’.
Harry: I don’t see as you got much to say about it.
Holly: So that’s the way it is, hey?
Harry: That’s it.
Holly: You’re gonna wish to Christ you never laid eyes on me.
Harry: I already do.
Holly: Not yet. Not really. But you will.

…

Holly: Harry, darling. I don’t think you’ll ever have much luck explainin’ it to her.
Harry: Sutton didn’t know. He wasn’t even at the fire. You told him. lt was you.
Holly: You’ll have to beg now. You had your chance. Now l’m gonna enjoy hearin’ you beg me to marry you. See…you have to look after me, Harry. Something might happen to me.
Harry: Yes. Something might.

…

Harry: In this life, you gotta take what you want.
Dolly: I always get what I want, Harry.
Harry: Yes, indeed. I’ve found my level. And I’m livin’ it.[/b]

And it’s not like Gloria will be leaving town anytime soon.

[iambiguous]

Even with the “happy” ending there are few more cynical peeks inside the medical industial complex. It’s not only all about the money here but [for some] literally a matter of life and death. At best Obamacare is just another liberal bandaid from the crony capitalists that perpetrate and then perpetuate this travesty in the so-called “richest nation on Earth”. Some having the gall even to call it the most civilized!

This is the super hightech world of keeping folks alive so that the insurance companies will keep forking over the dough. How close is it to the way things really are…or to the way things ought to be instead? I’ll take a stab at it: Depends on who you ask?

But it’s all about the money outside the hospital too. One sister stands to make a ton of money if Dad lives and the other one if he dies. Who is he? What difference does that make when it is all about the money. Just get yourself a good lawyer. And what would you be willing to do for 10 million bucks? And it’s not like the patient’s condition really isn’t terminal.

And then all the moral and metaphysical ruminations from the Furnaceman and the Nun. The part about how we ought to live in preparation for how we ought to die. And the part about what comes after. The part, in other words, they should have left out.

And, oh, if only the world could be as it is reflected in Dr. Solomon Ernst’s sermon at the hearing. Oh what a wonderful world it would be.

movie clip: youtu.be/zQ_fbAkxI-M
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Care_(film

CRITICAL CARE [1997]
Directed by Sidney Lumet

[b]Dr. Ernst: It’s important to say we did as much as we could.
Stella: Which is doctor-speak for we put this patient through hell before he died.

…

Raphael: Water. Please give me water.
Stella: You can’t have any fluids, remember? You can’t have any fluids because you don’t have any kidneys so you can’t pee. I can give you some ice chips every so often.
Raphael: I don’t believe in God, anymore. God would answer my prayers with suffering like this.

…

Furnaceman: Your problem is that you are now absolutely useless to other people. From now on you’re nothing but a burdon to others. People have nothing to gain from being nice to you. Let me put it this way, when you were healthy and you were out there chasing money and women, how much time did you put in comforting the dying? Not much. And I’ll tell you why. Because it’s depressing and disturbing and thankless work. You just have nothing to offer anyone anymore. Well, except for one thing.
Raphael: What’s that?
Furnaceman: Health insurance.

…

Dr. Hofstader [in a room filled with computers and lab workers]: Dr Ernst, come see the future of medicine. Seeing patients is a waste of the doctor’s time. We try to correct that problem. We like to think of patients as information that can be digitized. Then we can build computer models for surgeons to practice on that are identical with any patient.

…

Dr. Butz: What’s wrong with bed five. He’s all paid up. He’s got three insurance companies paying off his bills monthly.
Dr. Ernst: If he’s going to die, why should we proceed?
Dr. Butz: Where have you been all your life? It’s called revenue! He’s got catasthropic health insurance…long term health care…the works!
Dr. Ernst: What difference does insurance make?
Dr. Butz: What difference does insurance make? This must be the generation gap. It’s these HMOs that have confused the issue. If the patient were part of an HMO then I could understand your dilemma. With those babies we get paid not to perform medical procedures. It’s a little like when the government pays the farmers not to grow crops. But with insurance we get paid to perform medical procedures. Do you understand the difference.

…

Dr. Ernst: My question is, if you were comatose would you want to be kept a live for months by machines.
Dr. Butz: Hell no! When I go, I don’t want to be tortured in some bed. I have this planned out, Warner. I’m gonna be sitting on my back porch, I’m gonna have a Cuban cigar in one hand, and a big glass 'o scotch in the other, and a belly full of barbecued ribs with a ton of sauce. That’s why I don’t have insurance.

…

Dr Butz: This poor schmuck in bed 5 didn’t load up on insurance so that he could go gently into the night. He wanted us to put up a fight…and he wanted us to be paid in cash. That’s why he bought the insurance in the first place![/b]

There is that point.

[b]Dr. Ernst [to Stella]: People are afraid to die so they pay us to keep them in suspended animation.

…

Payne: Dr. Ernst, before we prepare a case it is absolutely essential that we know the truth, so that we can teach our witnesses to articulate truth to our best advantage.

…

Dr. Butz: Dr. Ernst, when those lawyers start crawling all over you, that’s when you know you’re a doctor.

…

Dr. Ernst [to Felicia and Constance]: Don’t forget, I can keep your father legally alive almost indefinitely. And I can end his life any time I want just by turning a knob.

…

Dr. Ernst: Connie, you forgot your Bible
Constance: If it were any good, I would have gotten all the money.

…

Dr. Butz [shouting from his car after Dr. Ernst rushes to look after a boy who fell down skateboarding outside vthe hospital]: Ernst! Stay away from him! You wanna get sued again? Damn it, make sure he’s got insurance! Better ask him for proof of insurance! Haven’t you learned anything from me?
Mike: Are you a doctor?
Dr. Ernst: Yeah, I’m a doctor.[/b]

That’s better than no change at all, I suppose.

[iambiguous]

‎"You humans…"

Whether coming from an actual alien or from a mere mortal who thinks he is one, that’s what films like this are usually all about. It allows someone to lump all of us together and then to tell us the things we do right and the things we do wrong. Usually it revolves around how dangerous and destructive we are. As a “species”. Then the “but” part. But it is in embracing the marvel and the majesty of human freedom that this is just something we have to put up with. It’s the price we pay. And well worth it. Instead we have to strive always to keep the bad parts in check by practicing the good parts more. The good parts bearing a striking resemblance to the moral and political philosophy of the one who wrote and/or directed the film.

To wit:
Prot: Let me tell you something, Mark. You humans, most of you, subscribe to this policy of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, which is known throughout the universe for its…stupidity. Even your Buddha and your Christ had quite a different vision, but nobody’s paid much attention to them, not even the Buddhists or the Christians. You humans. Sometimes its hard to imagine how you’ve made it this far.

Sound familiar?

Is he an “alien”? These folks seem to want it both ways. There are the facts about him – things he knows, things he can do – that indicate he may well be from another world, and the facts about him – uncovered through hypnosis and detective work – that indicate he is not.

Look for “eternal return”. And Jesse Pinkman

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-PAX_(film
trailer: youtu.be/UfcbshzkvUs

K-PAX [2001]
Directed by Iain Softley

[b]Mark: Well, let’s hope that extraterrestrials qualify for Medicaid.

…

Mark: Have a seat.
Prot: “Have a seat.” What a curious expression.

…

Mark: Where is home?
Prot: K-PAX.
Mark: K-PAX?
Prot: Capital “K,” hyphen, capitals “P-A-X.” K-PAX is a planet. But don’t worry. I’m not going to leap out of your chest.

…

Mark: What if I were to tell you that according to a man who lived on our planet, named Einstein, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light?
Prot: I would say that you misread Einstein, Dr. Powell. May I call you Mark? You see Mark, what Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster.

…

Mark: Prot, why did you want to come to our planet?
Prot: Well, I’ve been here many times before. But what brought me here first? I don’t know. Pure curiosity, I guess. I’d never been to a Class BA-3 planet before.
Mark: Class BA-3?
Prot: Early stage of evolution. Future uncertain.

…

Prot [eating a banana—peel and all]: Your produce alone has been worth the trip.

…

Mark: Whoa, w-wait, wait a minute. Uh, Chuck, I didn’t think human beings could see ultraviolet light.
Dr. Chakraborty: We can’t.

…

Prot [to team of astrophysicists]: I take it my calculations help explain the “protabations” you’ve been seeing in the rotation pattern of your binary star, but have been unable to explain until…this moment.

…

Prot: You know what I’ve learned about your planet? There’s enough life on Earth to fill 50 planets. Plants, animals, people, fungi, viruses, all jostling to find their place, bouncing off each other, feeding off each other. Connected.
Mark: You don’t have that kind of connection on K-PAX?
Prot: Nobody wants, nobody needs. On K-PAX, when I’m gone, nobody misses me. There would be no reason to. And yet I sense that when I leave here…I will be missed. Yes. Strange feeling.

…

Prot: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don’t you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Based on a true story. But given the topical nature of the subject matter that can only be encompassed in a political narrative. There are the facts of the matter and the manner in which the facts are intertwined into a particular point of view.

IMDb: Three days after this movie’s UK television broadcast, Sunday aired on TV, which chronicled the same event from an alternate perspective.

It is filmed in such a way that you imagine it is actually a documentary you are watching. Or as though it were unfolding in real time here and now.

On the surface, “The Troubles” seem to revolve around a religious conflict. But others insist it is far more a political and economic contest. Still others point to the role that England plays and call it a struggle for national sovereignty. Under their own leadership of course.

Only one thing seems certain. All sides are right if you completely disregard the arguments of the other sides.

It was made clear from the start though that the “paras” were hell bent on taking full advantage of the peaceful march to round up [and shoot to kill] as many of the “hooligans” as they could. Even when it was obvious that many were not hooligans at all. It was nothing less than cold blooded murder. The only real question is how far up the chain of command did this go? And, from the other side, there were radicals interested in anything but a peaceful march. The bloodier the better. Maybe that will finally spur “the people” to rise up and join the revolution.

In the end though it is always about the same thing: who ultimately has the power to impose their own solution to their own narrative. And then to “investigate” it and find there was no one really to blame for the slaughter. A complete whitewash with the military planting “bombs” on the corpses to make it appear they were justified in doing what they did.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(TV_film
bloody sunday at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972
trailer: youtu.be/6sssXPYcXZc

In song:
U2: youtu.be/EM4vblG6BVQ
John Lennon: youtu.be/cLZhNs7M1oE

BLOODY SUNDAY [2002]
Written and directed by Paul Greengrass

[b]Ivan Cooper: I just want to say this to the British Government… You know what you’ve just done, don’t you? You’ve destroyed the civil rights movement, and you’ve given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young men… boys will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind.

…

Title card: Two days after Bloody Sunday the British Government set up an inquiry under Lord Chief Justice Widgery. Lord Widgery accepted the British Army’s claim that soldiers came under fire from IRA gunmen as they entered the Bogside. He concluded there was a “strong suspicion” some victums had been handling weapons and the army’s actions were justified. None of the soldiers who opened fire on Bloody Sunday were ever disciplined. The officers who planned and led the operation were later decorated by the Queen.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Based on a true story. What more can you say? Ray Manzarek insisted it was a terrible account of the band’s history. And he knows a thing or two about it, having actually been a member of the band.

In his own way, Jim Morrison was an ironist. Or so it seems to me. He would take your reaction to The Doors seriously only up to a point. He would then take his own reaction to your reaction seriously only up to a point. Beyond that is the narrative. The subjective prejudice. And then the politics.

Same with “the times” out of which The Doors came into existence. Nothing necessarily sacred about that either. It’s all just a matter of opinion. Some stay the same over time and some don’t. And it stays like this all the way down to The End.

I still recall columnist George Will’s hysterical reaction to the movie:
thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1 … doors.html

Is this closer to the “truth”? It’s a futile argument. Start there and you’ll come closer to whatever the truth might possibly be. Or at least until you start to think it is something else.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_(film
trailer: youtu.be/xk8T3UCKTew

THE DOORS [1991]
Written in part and directed by Oliver Stone

[b]Jim [from his film class project]: Nietzsche said, “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

…

Jim: I feel most alive confronting death, experiencing pain.
Pam: I think you’re most alive recognizing beauty, seeing truth. Does death turn you on? You love death?
Jim: Life hurts a lot more. When you die, the pain’s over.

…

Music manager: Leave it to me, I can take you all the way.
Ray: You liked our music?
Manager: I loved it. That’s why I’m here. It’s dark though. Get some tunes like Herman’s Hermits. That shit goes right to the radio.

…

Jim: Come on! How many of you people know you’re alive? How many of you people really know you’re alive?!

…

Holzmann: Hi, I’m Jack Holzmann, I own Elektra Records. Listen, if you could record what you did in there, we’d have something and make a lot of money. And Rothschild here was born to be a producer.
Rothschild: You guys were… it’s Bertold Brecht, it’s cabaret, it’s rock’n’roll. I’m really blown away, I’d like to get you guys into a studio…like immediately. Mr. Morrison, how’d you like to come down from there and go make a record?
Jim: Sure, why not?

…

Interviewer: Name, occupation?
Pamela: Pamela Morrison, ornament.
Interviewer: Name, occupation?
Robby: Robby Krieger, guitar player.
Interviewer: Name, occupation?
John: John Densmore, percussionist, 23 years old. Far out, man!
Interviewer: Name, occupation?
Ray: Raymond Daniel Manzarek, born February 12th 1939, musician, organist.
Interviewer: Name, occupation?
Jim: Uh, Jim.

…

Ed Sullivan: And fellows, have a nice big smile when you get out there. There’s no point in being sullen.
Jim: We’re kind of a sullen group, Ed.

…

Photographer: Do you have any idea what these pictures can do? One image controls millions of people.
Jim: Where are the Doors?
Photographer: Right here! Forget the Doors. You’re the one they want. You are the Doors. Come on! Yeah that’s good. Be ugly! I love that. Anything you want. There are no restrictions here. Look at yourself. Fall in love with yourself. You’re your own audience now. The want you, worship, love you, adore you. Jim Morrison. The God of Rock and Cock.

…

Andy Warhol: Somebody gave me this telephone…I think it was Edie…and she said I could talk to God with it, but uh… I don’t have anything to say…so here…
[giving Jim the phone]
Andy Warhol: …this is for you…now you can talk to God.

…

Reporter: How do you feel about being called the ultimate Barbie Doll?
Jim: Well, when you say something like that I guess it’s a shortcut to thinking.
Reporter: What about the dreadful reviews your new poetry book has gotten?
Jim: I guess they didn’t understand.

…

Reporter: Do you believe in drugs, Mr. Morrison?
Jim: I believe in excess…I believe in a long prolonged derangement of the senses to attain the unknown…Although I live in the subconscious, our pale reason hides the infinite from us.

…

Jim: Hatred is a very underestimated emotion.

…

Jim [in a monologue]: Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. That’s all. I was curious. I kind of always preferred to be hated. Like Erich von Stroheim in the movies: The man you loved to hate. That’s meant to be ironic. Like courage wants to laugh. Essentially stupid situations. I go out on stage and howl for people. In me, they see exactly what they want to see. Some say Lizard King, whatever that means. Or some black-clad leather demon, whatever that means. But really, I think of myself as a sensitive, intelligent human being, but with the soul of a clown that always forces me to blow it at the most crucial moment. I’m a fake hero. A joke that God’s played on me.

…

Pamela [of Patricia]: You actually put your dick in this woman?
Jim: Well… sometimes, yeah.

…

Jim [to Miami audience]: You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!

…

Rothschild: I’m sitting in that fuckin’ booth for months. I look out of that glass: I see Jim, I hear Jim, But do you know what? I miss him. And the whole time he’s standing right there in front of me. How can that be? Don’t make me go through it again. I went through this watching Janis dive to the bottom of a bottle of “Southern Comfort.” I won’t go through it again!

…

Jim: Hey listen, Paul, can you get us some heroin?
Rothschild: No!
Jim: Why not?
Rothschild: No!
Jim: Why not? What’s some heroin?
Rothschild: I’m not going to participate in anything that’s going to help you accomplish your goal, Jim.
Jim: What’s my goal, Paul?
Rothschild: “Your only friend, the end.”

…

Robbie [to Jim]: You said you love pain. You run from it every chance you get.

…

Jim: Are you going to get rid of it? Look…wouldn’t it be better to have it with someone who wanted to be its father?
Patricia: A fucking genius, that’s what it’d be. From you and me? The child would be a goddess or a god.
Jim: It would be a monster.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Again, “The Troubles”. Again, based on a true story. Again, different sides. Only this time the magnification goes all the way down to just two men: the man who shot the other man’s brother.

In other words, there is no political, social or economic context to explore. It is essentially idealistic. Conflicts of this sort involve violence and the violence rips individuals, families, communities, nations, worlds apart. If only we could all just recognize the senselessness of it. But the conflicts are not senseless at all. They revolve around those in power able to forge a government [armed to the teeth] able to sustain an infrastructure that preserves their own interests.

Yes, Alistair was just a teenager playing soldier. The point being not to be thought of as chicken by Sammy. He gets caught and goes to jail. For 12 years.

Now he’s out and it has been set up: He’s going to confront the boy [now a man] whose brother he shot and killed all those years ago.

The producers of the show are looking for “real emotion”. And then they are looking for “truth and reconciliation”. But that might not be what Joe is looking for at all.

Alistair Little and The Forgiveness Project: theforgivenessproject.com/storie … n-ireland/
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Minutes_of_Heaven
trailer: youtu.be/uZOE7HgvI3c

FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN [2009]
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

[b]Alistair [talking to tv camera 2008]: For me to talk about the man I have become, you need to know about the man I was. I was fourteen when I joined the tartan gangs and I was fifteen when I joined the UVF. At that time, don’t forget, there were riots on the streets every week; petrol bombs everyday, and that was just in our town. When you got home and switched on the TV, you could see what was happening in every other town as well, and it was like we were under siege. Fathers and brothers and friends were being killed in the streets, and the feeling was we had to do something. We’re all in this together and we all have to do something.

…

Alistair [to the tv camera]: The thing you have to remember; what you have to understand, is the mindset. Once you have signed up to terror, and joined the organization; the group, your mind closes right down. It becomes only our story that matters, not their story - the Catholics. It’s only my people that are being killed, and here suffering and that need looking after. Catholics being killed? Doesn’t enter your head. And so when I went up to Sammy, our local commander, and told him I wanted to kill a Catholic man, it wasn’t a wrong thing for me to do. In my head, it was the proper; the just; the fair; the good thing to do, and so, it was easy.

…

Alistair [to the TV camera]When I got to the house, there was a boy in the street. I didn’t expect him to be there, but, there he was. I only looked at him for a moment because I had a job to do, but if I had known that he was Jim’s brother, I would have shot him as well. It was in the mindset. It was tit-for-tat, and perhaps one more - why not? That’s what it was like. I was only seventeen. I’d seen my people fighting ever since I was a wee boy. You’d take sides with your friends as a boy, but we weren’t just throwing stones over the fence - we were shooting guns. What I want to tell people; what society must do is to stop people getting to the point where they join the group. Because when you get to that point it’s too late. No-one’s gonna stop you. No-one’s gonna change your mind. And once you’re in, you will do anything. You will kill anyone on the other side, because it’s right to do it. Once your man has joined the group, society has lost him. And what he needs to hear are voices on his own side, stopping him before he goes in. There were no voices on my side, not on my side of the town, not in my state. No-one was telling me anything other than that killing is right. It was only in prison when I heard that other voice.

…

Alistair [to TV camera]: And the Muslims now - you know the kids now are like I was then. They need to hear those voices now, stopping them from thinking that killing is good. They need their own people to say “no”. That’s where they need to hear it, and that’s where I would put my money - on making those voices heard in every mosque in the country.

…

Alistair [to TV camera] When I got home, my mother and father were watching the TV, and it came on the news that the man I had shot was dead. I was so excited, I couldn’t wait for when I would get my congratulations. Sammy was going to come knocking at my door, he was going to lead me out into the street and proudly walk me into the bar, and everybody was gonna stand up and applaud. Me? I would’ve shot anyone for that. And that is why I talk to anybody who would listen now, to tell them to stop boys like me thinking that to shoot an innocent, and a decent man in the head, is a good thing.

Alistair [1975 to his mates]: So this is our first kill, boys. I told Sammy that I wanted to do it. He said he’d check and see if there was anything else going down tonight. He came back to me and said it was good to go…He just looked us in the eyes like he was, you know, he was proud of us. I’m telling you, it was a good feeling. We’ll be walking into that bar ten foot tall now, eh?

…

Alistair [1975]: I’ve scored. Go! Go!

…

Alistair [2008]: It’s a programme about reconciliation. My own, in fact. It’s my own. I’m to meet the brother of the man I killed.
Ray [driver]: Have you not met him yet?
Alistair: No. No, not since the day.
Ray: Well, did you ask for this?
Alistair: That was never going to be my call, Ray. I don’t have the right to ask anything from him.
Ray: So did he call you or…?
Alistair: No, the programme people, they approached him. Then me. I said I’d be I’d be willing t-to, you know. If it’s a meeting he wants I’d be willing t-t-to do it, to see him. I’d do anything to…You know, to…

…

Joe [of Alistair]: She’s been staring at me for 33 years, do you know that? What it’s like? Your mother blaming you for 33 years? Three bullets went into his head. You’d know that, though. Did you know another one hit a picture of a cat on the wall? It wasn’t me who broke that picture, I never got the blame for that one, and if it wasn’t me who broke the picture on the wall, it wasn’t me who killed my brother. I didn’t kill him like she said I did. It was you. It was you in the car arriving at her house and shooting three bullets into her son’s head, making her grieve the way she did, blaming me the way she did.

…

Joe [to himself]: Well, here you are, pal. A fully signed up member of the celebrity circuit of Life’s Victims. Men in love with donkeys, twins stuck together by their bollocks, elephant women who can’t get out of their chairs, and now you.

…

Joe [to himself]: I can do handshakes, Michael! And I can do victim. I can do handshake and victim both at the same time. But I’ve made a decision on this one. Reconciliation? You have no idea.
[he pulls out a dagger]
Jpe [to himself]: A handshake? For killing my brother? For me taking the blame? 33 years of that? What do you think I am, a joke? If ever a man deserved a knife run through him, that scum of the earth. Truth and reconciliation? I’m going for revenge.

…

Joe [to Vika]: But I don’t do kindness. I fucking hate kindness. I don’t let that in. I let it in then, but never again. The trouble with me is, I’ve got all the wrong feelings. Oh, his feelings! They are just right, just perfect! He did it in cold blood, but now look at the man he has become! “What is it like to kill a man,” they all ask him? “Well, you have to understand…” And off he goes again, telling them all about this and that. But hats off to him, he’s cracked it! He knows they all love to shake hands with a killer.

…

Joe [to Vika]: Listen to him, they will say, and there is hope in the world! And you know what he’s thinking? Do this gig well here and I’ve got another 20 years of pay cheques in front of me. I can talk about that day then and this day now for the next 20 years, how I came face to face with the brother of my victim, and how it was the final act in my journey towards a magnificent redemption, and how listening to me is the way forward in life, plus VAT. And with their cheques in my pocket, I will talk unto the wretched of the world and I will heal them with my words, I won’t have to work in a fucking egg carton factory ever again!"

…

Joe: So! The man shot my brother three times in the head. The man is having the life of Riley. What should I do? Do I shake his hand or do I kill him?
Vika: Well, killing him wouldn’t be good for him.
Joe: For sure of that!
Vika: But it wouldn’t be good for you either.
Joe: Oh, not good for me? My five minutes of heaven! How would that be not good for me?

…

Joe: What about him? What did he say about himself?
Vika: He didn’t talk about himself. But he seems very sad.
Joe: Sad?
Vika: I don’t know, but…I don’t know him really, but that’s how he seemed. Like he couldn’t forgive himself for what he’s done to you. There’s an expression you say, um…a broken man.

…

Alistair: 33 years that boy has been living in this head, standing there, staring at me, looking up at me, never leaving me. Never leaving. Every morning waiting for me, and I know he’ll be there for always. I don’t know what to do any more. How to deal with this. I feel I’ve come to the end of what I can take. Time will heal they say… what everybody says about everything. The years just get heavier. Why don’t they tell you that? Nobody tells you that!

…

Joe [on phone]: Alistair Little?
Alistair: Yeah?
Joe: It’s Joe Griffin. We’re finished.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Another buddy flick. Sort of.

It’s a post apocalyptic world so naturally a boy can communicate telepathicaly with his dog. Another thing for sure: They don’t make daseins then and there the way we make them here and now. There and then it’s more along the lines of might makes right. Dog eat dog? In any event, this is how most folks would imagine a world that has crumbled down into a nihilistic hellhole.

But it’s all done tongue in cheek. Isn’t it?

Still, it’s certainly not out of the question that, given the world we live in, the narrative might eventually become post-apocalypic. A Mad Max contraption where the only thing that really does matter is your capacity to survive from day to day. All the things that make us “civilized” would still be around…only fewer and farther between. And moral compromises would surely be more advisable.

Not many philosophers around…not in a political economy that has reverted back to one more likely to be described as “nomadic hunter-gatherer”. Not counting the mutants.

This is a future in which everyone – literally everyone – is white; and the best a woman can hope to become is “the cheese”. Or cooked and eaten.

Then there’s the part “underground”. What’s it like down there? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Dog
trailer: youtu.be/cAPLJRKyJLk

A BOY AND HIS DOG [1975]
Written and directed by L.Q. Jones

[b]TITLE CARD: World War IV lasted five days. Politicians had finally solved the problem of urban blight.

…

Vic: Hell! They didn’t have to cut her! She could have been used two or three more times!
Blood: Ah, war is hell.

…

Blood: I detect no living female within my range sir. I have sniffed and I have smiffed and I have a negative reading. But if you like I could tell you a suggestive story: “A cautious young fellow named Lodge / Had seatbelts installed in his Dodge / When his date was strapped in / He committed a sin / Without even leaving the garage.” That’s clever, isn’t it?

…

Vic: I wonder why they hang around him?
Blood: Probably just charisma.

…

Lou: That’s our boy. Put out the cheese.

…

Vic [to sentry]: If my gun picks up one rust spot you’re gonna wake up with a crowd around 'ya.

…

Rovers: Screamers!

…

Blood: Once more unto the breach dear friend…

…

Vic: You mean you want me to knock up your broads?!

…

Vic: I gotta get back in the dirt to feel clean!

…

Lou: Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. To the farm immediately.[/b]

[iambiguous]

From wiki:

This film is inspired by the real-life killing in Texas of an American teenager, Esequiel Hernandez Jr, by United States Marines during a military operation near the United States–Mexico border as well as the novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner which displays the same plot, promise, and challenges encountered in the movie.

As with most political issues that flare up from time to time on the news, immigration stirs up a lot of emotions. The arguments come and go. Some try to be reasonable, others are just out to parade their own blind [and often rabid] prejudices about “those people”. They are the ethnocentric racists and that will always more or less be the bottom line. Still, even among them there are folks who are particularly despicible. They practice what they preach. And sometimes they work for the government. And then over time it can all become institutionalized.

But this isn’t really about that. This is less political than personal. A man becomes your close friend. And being an illegal “wetback” north of the border, he knows the risk he runs. So should the worst come to pass he asks you to bury him in the town of his birth. The town where his family and his wife reside. A town in Mexico. Or so he says. But then he has already been buried twice already.

For me dead is dead. Where you bury me is meaningless. Or even if you bury me at all. But others think about it differently. Still, what are our obligations to the dead? Folks think differently about this too.

The end here is infused with all manner of ambiguity. So don’t even try to pin it down. And it’s not so much a matter of redemption as it is the manner in which a new experience can leave you changed forever.

IMDb

[b]Director/Actor Jones gave each cast member a copy of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” to read so that they would understand alienation, a big theme in both the novel and the film.

Much of the movie was shot on Tommy Lee Jones’s own ranch.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_ … es_Estrada
trailer: youtu.be/H3P7wiVIhWk

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA [2005]
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones

[b]Border Patrolman: How many got away?
Norton: Three.
Border Patrolman: Well, someone’s got to pick strawberries.

…

Border Patrolman: You were way overboard there, boy.
Norton: No sir. Fuck it. They were trying to get away.
Border Patrolman: I want you to think about how much trouble I’ll get into if you keep beating these people up. I don’t like trouble, boy. I don’t like it at all.

…

Rachel: Viagra works for Bob.
Belmont: I’ll turn truck-stop queer and blowjob-giver before I use that shit.
Rachel: That’s what Bob said.

…

Pete: You need to investigate them border patrols that use a 223.
Belmont: You want me to investigate the Kennedy assassination while I’m at it?

…

Pete: I told you you notify me.
Belmont: You’re not his family. I don’t have to notify you about a goddamn thing. He was a wetback.

…

Melquiades: Take him, he’s yours. Really, take him.
Pete: But it’s your horse.
Melquiades: Mine, yours…what’s the difference?

…

Pete: Dig him up.
Norton: Who?
Pete: Melquiades Estrada, you stupid gringo son of a bitch. You killed him, now dig him up.

…

Melquiades: Promise me one thing, Pete. If I die over here, carry me back to my family and bury me in my home town. I don’t want to be buried on this side among all the fucking billboards.

…

Belmont: There’s a thousand ways he can go to Mexico, and that sonofabitch is so fuckin’ nuts he might be headin’ north to Canada.

…

Norton: Hey! Hey, you!
Pete: My name is Pete.
Norton: Well, Pete, the ants are eating your friend.

…

Pete: Thank you!
Old Man with Radio: I need to ask you a favor.
Pete: Anything you want.
Old Man with Radio: I need you to go ahead and shoot me. My son, he ain’t coming back.
Pete: Oh, he’ll come back.
Old Man with Radio: He said he had cancer. Told me to go into town with him. But I don’t want to go. I’ve lived here all my life. I don’t want to offend God by shooting myself. It’s a problem, you see.
Pete: We don’t want to offend God either.
[Pete and Mike start to leave]
Old Man with Radio: You’re good people. You need to go ahead and shoot me.

…

Mariana: Is there hot coffee?
Juan: Yes, fresh made.
Mariana: Bring me the pot.
[Mariana pours the coffee in Mike’s lap, then hits him with the pot]
Mariana: Now we’re even, asshole.

…

Norton [to Pete riding away]: You gonna be alright?[/b]

[iambiguous]

You can’t really blame them for trying. And, as this is based on an actual event, they really did try. To do what? To get their son back…to reclaim their family. But in order to do that they end up kidnapping a Texas State Trooper. That’s right: Texas. So you know this is not likely to have a happy ending.

You also can’t help but wonder just how far from the truth this is. At times it’s like watching the Keystone cops. Every imaginable fuck up possible. At one point there are over 150 cars following them down the highway! And that’s not counting the hairbrained locals. Or the media.

Needless to say they become folk heroes.

Anyway, here’s what really happened: haysfreepress.com/2012/05/09/the … z2aBgXXIA7

Or one version of it.

IMDb

Although the events of the film occur over a couple of days, in reality the events were over with in just a few short hours.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sugarland_Express
trailer: youtu.be/DRsMXxfw0SI

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS [1974]
Directed by Steven Spielberg

[b]Prison guard: You are permitted to display familial affection, including bodily contact, as long as it doesn’t outrage the public decency.
Lou Jean: Does that mean we can kiss?
Prison guard: If you so desire.

…

Lou Jean [to Clovis]: If you don’t help me our last time!

…

Hubie: Clovis…nobody breaks out of pre-release!

…

Mrs. Nocker: Pa, you’ve bought it.

…

Mrs. Nocker [to Pa]: Oh shit! Our car’s stole.

…

Mrs. Nocker: You got me out here with no where to sit.
Mr. Nocker: Why don’t you sit on your fist and lean back on your thumb.

…

Slide [on radio]: We got a 10-32 here. Says drop off or he’ll shoot.
Captain: They hurt you any, Maxwell?
Slide: I’m sorry about this, Captain. I had no idea they were 96s
Clovis: What you talkin? 32? 96? You tryin’ to code me out?
Slide: No sir, it’s merely a verbal shorthand. 10-32 is a man with a gun. 10-96 is your mental subject.
Clovis [grabs the radio]: We ain’t no mental subjects! I’ve done some dumb things but I ain’t no mental subject!

…

Lou Jean [at the gas station]: Hey, look, they got Gold Stamps! I want Gold Stamps!

…

Cop [looking out at all the cop cars]: Where in the hell are they all coming from?!

…

Slide [on the loudspeaker]: Captain, this is patrolman Maxwell Slide. I suppose y’all might want to end it right here now. If that’s your thinkin’, sir, it’s fine by me. Y’all come on in. Tell everyone I told you that.

…

Slide [to the captain]: He took my gun but he was never going to use it.[/b]

[iambiguous]

She is in the wrong office. She thinks it’s a shrink but it’s really a…tax accountant? But he is so intrigued by her tale he lets her go on. And on and on. She is pouring out the most intimate details of her emotional and sexual life. But sooner or later…

Until then though he serves her better than the shrink would. Why? Because he genuinely becomes entranced by her predicament. He comes to care about her and does not react to her as a “professional” might. They are stangers who do become intimate. And then oddly enough he himself makes appointments with the shrink in order to gain those “professional” insights into the human psyche.

And, naturally, in his own way, his personal life is as problematic [desolate] as hers.

As much as anything it conjures up a tale of…hope? Or, more precisely, an intrigung existential glimpse into the nature of contingency, chance and change. But hope is just one direction in which things can go. And what can we ever truly believe of the things people – strangers, in particular – tell us?

And then there is always the part about beauty. As though her own was hardly worth mentioning? As though it really wasn’t a factor at all? And what of Jeanne. Pretty…but not beautiful. And older. And already thoroughly explored.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimate_Strangers
trailer: youtu.be/34YVqhsyDzA

[u]Note: some explicit language[/u]

INTIMATE STRANGERS [Confidences Trop Intimes] 2004
Directed by Patrice Leconte

[b]William: Who referred you to me?
Anna: Nobody. I looked in the yellow pages.

…

Anna [thinking she is talking to a psychiatrist]: My husband has stopped touching me. We don’t have sex anymore. It’s been six months. It just stopped dead. I miss the pleasure he gave me. But also the kissing and the cuddling.

…

Jeanne: Doctor? You posed as a shrink?
William: I didn’t pose. She mistook me for Dr. Monnier. The psychiatrist down the hall. She’d come to see him.
Jeanne: And you didn’t enlighten her?
William: I realized too late. My tax clients often unload their love lives. I thought she wanted advice on divorce.
Jeanne: Is she pretty?[/b]

Oh yeah.

[b]Anna: My husband wants me to make love to another man.
William: Another man? Someone you know?
Anna: No, any man. He’s obsessed with it. “You’re free to fuck whoever you like.” His word, not mine “Fuck.”

…

Dr. Monnier [to William]: “Couches deep as tombs”. You know the line from Baudelaire?

…

William: I’ve got to tell her the truth. I need her number. I know nothing about her.
Dr. Monnier: You know too much already.
William: No, I need to contact her.
Dr. Monnier: “Cunt-act”. That’s what everyone wants.[/b]

This guy is good.

[b]Anna: You cheated me.
William: The evidence is against me. Forgive me, please.
Anna: No. I could have killed you. Really!
William: It was a stupid misunderstanding. I’m sorry.
Anna: And me? Telling all my secrets to a nobody! I felt dirty. Like I’d been raped!

…

Dr. Monnier: People have lost the art of listening. Even barbers and waiters can’t be bothered now. In you, she has found an open ear.
William: Is that bad?
Dr. Monnier: As long as her health doesn’t suffer, I can’t bar you from seeing her. Your business isn’t unlike mine. We both treat the same neuroses, what to declare and what to hide.
William: My “open ear” won’t solve her problems.
Dr. Monnier: Her problems or yours?[/b]

Really good.

[b]William: Why don’t you claim your freedom?
Anna: My freedom isn’t to leave him. It’s to get him back.

…

Dr. Monnier [to William]: Listen. Your tie is always perfectly tied, your tax affairs are rock solid, but let your brush with psychoanalysis teach you this, at least – you do not master everything. Some things escape you.

…

Dr. Monnier [to William]: Once ajar, the door to female mystery is hard to shut again.

…

Jeanne: You never could make the first move. She must wonder why you are waiting.
William: It’s not why she comes.
Jeanne: Why else? To recite her orgasms to a tax lawyer? Does it get you hard?

…

Jeanne: You asked my advice. Decide what you want.
William: I wish I knew.
Jeanne: It’s easy! Dump her or hump her.

…

Anna: He laid me on the bed, leaving the light on. He moved my hand to stroke him. We clung to each other all night. Together again. I won’t go into details.
William: No, do! Spare me no details. The mouth, the tongue, the fingers. Sado? Maso? Scato? Penetration? Vaginal? Anal?
Anna: What’s got into you?
William: You can say it all, but I can’t take it all. I saw you two last night. The room was opposite my window. Perhaps you didn’t notice.
Anna: No…
William: Your husband came to see me. “Fuck my wife in my home”, he said. But fucking her in view of me was even better.

…

Anna [to William]: So, where were we…[/b]

[iambiguous]

When you first see him you’re wondering: how disturbed is he? Ten minutes later you still don’t know for sure but you’re thinking: it’s probably worse than you imagine.

Think about this: suppose you were a musician and you composed something that motivated two fans to commit suicide? How do you measure your responsibility here?

Anyway, after 20 years out of the limelight, what could possibly bring this retired rock star back out into the world? Nazis, maybe? But first his estranged father has to die.

His father was a prsioner at Auschwitz. He spent his life looking for his “persecutor”, former SS Officer Alois Lange. Cheyene takes up the quest. But is he just a “small fry” or a “shark”? Mostly what he did was humiliate him. And what is that compared to all the atrocities embodied at Auschwitz?

Weird doesn’t even come close to describing it. The visual images alone though are worth whatever you paid to watch it.

Look for the biggest pistachio in the world. But not the samllest.

IMDb

When Cheyenne is talking with David Byrne, he reveals he lives tortured by the suicide of two teens who were fans of him. This is a recreation of a real-life incident that happened in 1985 in Reno, where two young ones called Raymond Belknap and James Vance made a suicide pact after listening to Judas Priest’s songs.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Must_ … lace_(film
trailer: youtu.be/q0ryRwKkKI4

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE [2011]
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino

[b]Cheyenne: What do you call yourselves?
Steven: The Pieces of Shit.
Cheyenne: That’s a really good choice.
Steven: You’re fuckin’ right it is, yeah! It took us 6 months to come up with it, besides it’s exactly the right name for this moment in history.

…

Mr. Keogh: How many times must we tell you you’re not welcome at our sons’ graves?

…

Desmond: Why isn’t there any water in your pool?
Cheyenne: I don’t know… No one ever filled it.

…

Jane: You come back to me soon. You know, I can’t live without you.
Cheyenne: That’s not true, but it’s kind of you to say.

…

Mordecai: What are you insinuating?
Cheyenne: That even Nazi hunters follow the rules of show business and go where the biggest publicity will be.

…

David Byrne: You were an artist. You did that when you were performing.
Cheyene: Fuck I was, David, the fuck I was. I was a fucking pop star. And I just wrote dreary songs because they were all the rage and made tons of money. Just depressed songs for depressed kids, and two of them, m ore fragile than the rest, ended up doing themselves in as a result of it. And now I go to a cemetary once a week to appease my guilt and it doesn’t make it better, it makes it fucking worse!

…

Cheyenne: At this particular moment I’m trying to fix up a sad boy and a sad girl, but it’s not easy. I suspect that sadness is not compatible with sadness.

…

Cheyenne: You know what the problem is… Rachel?
Rachel: What?
Cheyenne: Without realizing it, we go from an age where we say: “My life will be that” to an age where we say: “That’s life.”

…

Gun dealer: Hi. What sort of weapon are you interested in?
Cheyene: One that hurts.
Gun dealer: Well, you’ve come to the right place.

…

Alois Lange: I hated your father because his obsession with me made my life impossible. But I have to say that he completely won me over. The unrelenting beauty of revenge. An entire life dedicated to avenging a humiliation.

…

Mordecai: Holy shit…

…

Mordecai: Your father loved you.
Cheyenne: How do you know?
Mordecai: He told me.
Cheyenne: That’s not true, but it’s nice of you to say.[/b]

[iambiguous]

The last time we left them [cinematically], Diane Ladd and Laura Dern could not have been more different as Mother and Daughter. That would be in Wild At Heart. It had come out just the year before.

A whole different world you might say. And, as I always say, when you live in a whole different world chances are your sense of self will be reflected in that. So then I ask myself: what parts transcend this? What are the aspects of human interaction that cross all space and time?

Well, human sexuality for one. We all come equipped biologically – or most of us do – to have sex, to enjoy sex. But there are any number of historical and cultural contexts in which any particular individual might experience it…or not experience it. With or without pleasure. Here a young woman comes into full blossom. She wants sex, she wants love. She has had a tumultuous [and promiscuous] past. But it is 1931 in the deep South. And this is a respectable family she has come to live with. And there are both the father and the son to contend with. And then, later, practically every man in town.

So, she is “sick” the doctor decides. Neurotic. Hysterical. There’s only one thing to do. But only over Mother’s dead body.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambling_Rose_(film
trailer: youtu.be/zdrYIRk3Hi0

RAMBLING ROSE [1991]
Directed by Martha Coolidge

Willcox/Buddy [voiceover 1971]: In deep Dixieland, the month of October is almost summery. I had come south to visit my father. Mother had died a few years before, and Daddy was living all alone. He wouldn’t have it otherwise. Looking at that old house, a painful nostalgia gripped me for the south itself, the old south I had known, and the people in it. When I was thirteen years old, a girl came to this house. I overheard my father decide in a conference with my mother to hire this girl, a good natured and highly unfortunate girl who was working for a farm family down near Gadsden, Alabama. Thus she was hired, sight unseen, by a long distance call. She was the first person I ever loved outside members of my own family. But as my father said, she caused one hell of a damnable commotion.

In a word: Sex.

[b]Buddy: Rose, who were those scoundrels in Birmingham?
Rose: Nobody.
Buddy: But who were they?
Rose: They were just bad men, that’s all.
Buddy: In what sense were they bad?
Rose: Bad is bad, Buddy. There ain’t no sense to it.
Buddy: Did they try to induce you to become a prostitute?
Rose: I don’t answer talk like that, Buddy. I just don’t hear it, I turn my back and look away!

…

Doll: What are they doing now?
Buddy: Her titty is out! Daddy has his hand on it!

…

Daddy [to Rose]: Put your damn tit back in your dress. Replace that tit!

…

Buddy: Can’t I just see what the nipple looks like?

…

Buddy: Rose, since your here in bed with me and I’ve already touched your titty…
[he whisperes in her ear]
Rose: Buddy, What an awful thing to say! Where are you getting such ideas at?!
Buddy: I’m curious, Rose. I’m real curious.
Rose: Curiosity killed the cat.
Buddy: Yeah, but satisfaction brought him back.
Rose: You ought to be ashamed, a child your age asking such a nasty thing.
Buddy: But I’m curious. It’s nature. Now what’s wrong with nature? I’m 13 and a half. Can’t I touch it just a little? To see what it’s like? Can’t I touch it just for a second? Don’t you like me?
Rose: Sure I like you, Buddy, but you’re just a child.
[she let’s him touch it…you know, it]
Rose: Buddy, quit it.
Buddy: I’m not hurting you, am I?
Rose: No, you’re not hurting me. You just better quit it, Buddy.
Buddy: Why if I’m not hurting you?
Rose [breathing heavy]: You…you wouldn’t understand. I must be out of my mind.
Buddy: Without a doubt this is the most pleasant experience in my life.
[Rose has an orgasm]
Buddy: What’s the matter, Rose, are you sick or something.
Rose: I must be crazy or something. I gotta get out of here! I gotta get out of here![/b]

How the hell did this one get by MPAA?

[b]Buddy: …on the other hand, 12 men in one day…in two days you could earn as much as you earn here in a whole month.
Rose: Buddy, I don’t want to be no whore! It’d kill me.

…

Rose: Buddy, Mr. Right is out there somewhere and I’m going to find him.

…

Daddy [to Buddy]: That girl strikes like a cobra.

…

Mother: What you don’t understand is, it’s positive energy on this planet. It’s what we do with it that makes it negative.
Daddy: Darlin’, don’t go off into the fourth dimension, alright?

…

Rose: I know it was wrong and I oughtn’t to have done it. But I am only a human girl person!
Daddy: Rosebud, you break my heart. But I am only a human man person myself…of the father variety. Pack your bag baby. As of this moment you are fired.

…

Doctor: This girl is sick in more ways than one. She is an extreme psycho-neurotic with uncontrollable sexual impulses. It would be a mercy to spare her the suffering she causes herself…and others. Therefore I am recommending as a therapeutic measure the removal of her second ovary.
Daddy: Reluctantly I agree. It would be a kindness and a blessing to her…and to everyone else. The girl is over-sexed. I say spare her.
Mother: Over my dead body! Are you human beings…or some kind of male monsters? Is there no limit to which you will not go to keep your illusions about yourself? You’d go so far as to mutilate a helpless girl who has no means of defending herself?

…

Daddy: Rose isn’t dead, son, not really. Some of us die, some of us don’t. Rose lives!
[pause]
Daddy: Don’t worry about it, boy. She’s at rest with Mother and the creator of the universe. She’s at rest with Mother.[/b]

What is there really left to say?

[iambiguous]

True crime. Lots of folks are fascinated by this stuff. On television they have entire programs – entire channels – dedicated to it. The killers in particular. And no killers are more in demand than serial killers. Just google it.

And right up there at the top [or damn close to it] is this one: Zodiac.

Why? Lots of reasons. Many I’m probably not thinking of. But there are a few almost everyone does:

1] it has never been [definitively] solved
2] the enigmatic ciphers
3] the way he taunted the authorities
4] that strange dude considered most likely to be the killer

What makes events like these most frightening is the randomness of the killings. Someone just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not that he is hunting you down…but that you are there when he decides to hunt someone down. In other words, if it could be anyone then that includes everyone. At least if they venture out into the public.

It’s puzzling though how some folks become utterly fixated on certain cases. They read everything they possibly can about them and invest hours and hours putting pieces together into something they feel satisfied is the whole truth. Or closer than anyone else has ever come to it. Meet Robert Graysmith. He wrote the book on it

IMDb

[b]Zodiac’s confirmed [as of yet] first murder on Lake Herman Rd. was excluded from the film on the basis that there was no surviving victim to corroborate details. In the spirit of accuracy, the crew decided to not include the Lake Herman killings and to instead begin with the July 4th crime, considered to be his second action of murder.

The producers hired a private investigator to track down the real-life Zodiac survivor, Mike Mageau.

Dave Toschi in real life was the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s performance in Bullitt. In the film, Graysmith mentions that Toschi wears his gun like Bullitt. Avery replies that Bullitt got it from Toschi.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(film
trailer: youtu.be/ZVipbvDWbJI
zodiac website: zodiackiller.com/

ZODIAC [2007]
Directed by David Fincher

[b]FBI agent: All right, people, listen up. The cipher’s broken into three sections…each with 8 lines and 17 symbols. No breaks denoting different words. No numbers or clues to substitution keys. And you got symbols from at least seven different sources. Greek, Morse code, Navy semaphore, weather symbols, astrological signs.

…

Mr Harden [to Mrs Harden]: Hey, take a gander at this code thing. You wanna give it a go?

…

Graysmith [reading the cracked cipher from Zodiac]: “I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To kill something is the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.”

…

Toschi [into phone]: Whoever this is, you owe me another lamp.

…

Toschi: Suspect’s negro male adult, who also happens to be a stocky, crew cut caucasian.

…

Graysmith: Whoa. Dude, he wears his gun like Bullitt.
Avery: No, McQueen got that from Toschi.[/b]

That’s actually true.

[b]Captain Lee: You got any hard suspects?
Toschi: Uh, about 90 an hour. I’m up to about 500.

…

Zodiac letter: “This is the Zodiac speaking. I’d like to see some nice Zodiac buttons wandering around town. Everyone else has these buttons…like peace, black power, 'Melvin eats blubber,'et cetera. It would cheer me up if I saw a lot of people wearing my button. Please no nasty ones.”

…

Graysmith: Doesn’t it bother you that people call you Shorty?
Shorty: Doesn’t it bother you that people call you retard?
Graysmith: Nobody calls me that.
Shorty: Right.

…

Graysmith: Does anybody ever call me names?
Avery: What, you mean like retard?
Graysmith: Yeah.
Avery: No.

…

Graysmith [reading from the newspaper]: “Paul Avery’s investigation has won him a message from the Zodiac warning: ‘You are doomed.’ As a result, several crime newsmen are wearing Iapel buttons reading: ‘I am not Paul Avery.’”

…

Melanie: Glynnis said you were a cartoonist.
Graysmith: Oh, yeah.
Melanie: What were you doing at the gun range?
Graysmith: Reading.

…

Armstrong: Did you see this?
Toschi: Unfortunately, yes…
Armstrong: Here comes every lunatic in California.

…

“Suspect”: I’m the Zodiac.
Armstrong: And how did you kill your victims?
“Suspect”: With a gun. No… with a hammer.

…

Informant: Have you ever thought Paul Avery might be the Zodiac?
Toschi: Frequently.

…

Arthur Leigh Allen: I am not the Zodiac. And if I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.

…

Arthur Leigh Allen: Oh. “The Most Dangerous Game.”
Armstrong: What?
Arthur Leigh Allen: “The Most Dangerous Game.” That’s why you’re here isn’t it? It was my favorite book in high school. It’s about this man who waits for these people to get shipwrecked on this island. Because he was tired of hunting animals, he hunted the people for the challenge.
Toschi: And man is the most dangerous animal of all?
Arthur Leigh Allen: That’s the whole point of the story

…

Toschi [to Lee and Armstrong]: So does anyone think this suspect warrants further investigation?

…

Melanie [to Graysmith…now her husband]: Nobody has more Zodiac crap than you do.

…

Avery [to Graysmith]: Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into a footnote…Not that I haven’t been sitting here idly, waiting for you to drop by and reinvigorate my sense of purpose.

…

Toschi: Mr. Graysmith… Zodiac hasn’t written in three years. You know how many murders we’ve had in San Francisco since?
Graysmith: No.
Toschi: Over 200. That’s a lot of dead people and grieving families that need help.

…

Avery: The fucking library…

…

Melanie: When is it gonna be finished? When you catch him, when you arrest him?
Graysmith: Be serious.
Melanie: I am serious.
Graysmith: I need to know who he is. I need to stand there. I need to look him in the eye…and I need to know that it’s him.
Melanie: Is that more important than your family’s safety?
Graysmith: Of course not.
Melanie: Why? Why do you need to do this?
Graysmith: Why? Because nobody else will.
Melanie: That’s not good enough.
Graysmith: Are you done? Can I go?

…

Graysmith: Do you remember his name?
Linda: It was short, like a nickname. Like Stan.
Graysmith: Rick?
Linda: No, I don’t think so.
Graysmith: Are you sure?
Linda: Yeah.
Graysmith: How can you be sure? It was long ago. Think hard. It was Rick.
Linda: No, it wasn’t.
Graysmith: It was Rick. It was Rick Marshall.
Linda: No.
Graysmith: Just say it.
Linda: It wasn’t Rick.
[pause]
Linda: It was Leigh.

…

Graysmith: Dave, he made a mistake! The birthday was the one time that he was weak, the one time he gave something away!
Toschi: Robert…
Graysmith: It’s Arthur Leigh Allen!
Toschi: Where did you get that name?
Graysmith: December 18th. He called the Belli’s house. “I have to kill. Today is my birthday.” It was his birthday. Arthur Leigh Allen was born on December 18th.
Toschi: Get in here.

…

Graysmith: This is a case that’s covered both northern and southern California with victims and suspects spread over hundreds of miles, would you agree?
Toschi: Yeah.
Graysmith: Darlene Ferrin worked at the Vallejo House of Pancakes on Tenneessee St. Arthur Leigh Allen lived in his mother’s basement on Fresno St. Door to door, that is less than 50 yards.
Toschi: Is that true?
Graysmith: I’ve walked it.
Toschi: Jesus Christ.

…

Graysmith: Just because you can’t prove it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Toschi: Easy, Dirty Harry.

…

Mike Mageau [after identifying Arthur Leigh Allen as his shooter]: The last time I saw this face was July 4th, 1969. I am very sure that’s the man who shot me.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Duplicate post

[iambiguous]

How true to life is this? Well, since most of the main characters are based on folks writer and director John Singleton knew, I’d say it’s true enough. More to the point though is this: 22 years later how much different are things in South Central L.A.? In this economy?

Some folks will watch films like this in order to be educated about a world they know nothing about. Others will watch it in order to be enterained by a world that merely reinforces their own personal prejudices.

What always strikes you about “the hood” in L.A. though is how different it seems to be from “the hood” depicted in, say, The Wire. Right here in Baltimore, my own hometown. It looks more like suburbia than “the projects” often depicted in the urban environments that proliferate on the East Coast. But the seeming endless sound of guns being fired, choppers overhead and/or sirens wailing links them both in ways many folks know little or nothing about. Except when we are watching stuff like this.

One thing seems certain: Here or there even the best Moms and Pops are up against peer pressures – and gang culture – that are hard to really subdue. Especially if they are raising sons. But some do manage to prevail. Otherwise this movie wouldn’t even exist.

IMDb

[b]The self-hating black police officer was based on a cop whom John Singleton witnessed as a kid. Singleton felt it was critical to show this officer to show how racist black police could be towards black people.

In order to maintain a sense of realism (i.e., shots firing unexpectedly), John Singleton never gave the actors cues as to when the shots would be fired. As such, their reactions are real.

After this film premiered nationally, there were instances where rival gang members ran into each other in theaters showing this film and engaged in shootouts.

John Singleton based Tre’s childhood on his own. Singleton’s father was a mortgage broker like Laurence Fishburne’s character. When he was 12, Singleton moved in with his father in South Los Angeles. Like Tre, Singleton stayed out of trouble with his father’s guidance and went to college.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyz_n_the_Hood
trailer: youtu.be/LPuz3S-G5RA

[u]Note: Some explicit language[/u]

BOYS N THE HOOD [1991]
Written and directed by John Singleton

[b]Doughboy [aged 10]: Damn, Tre, your daddy mean. He’s worse than the bogeyman himself N The Hood. Gotta do all these leaves. Who he think you is, Kunta Kinte?

…

Furious: You may think I’m being hard on you right now, Tre, but I’m not. I’m trying to teach you how to be responsible. Your friends across the street, they don’t have anybody to show them. You gonna see how they end up too.

…

Tre [Age 10]: Don’t y’all know that this is a dead body?
Ric Rock: Yeah, motherfucker, we know that shit. He ain’t bothering you, so don’t fuck with him.

…

Mrs. Baker [to Doughboy]: You ain’t shit. You just like your daddy. You don’t do shit, and you never gonna amount to shit. All you do is eat, sleep, and shit.

…

Furious: Okay, then. What’s the three rules? Break it down for me. And think before you answer.
Tre [aged 10]: First, always look a person in the eye. Do that, they respect you better. Two was to never be afraid to ask you for anything. Stealing isn’t necessary. And the last one, I think, was to never respect anybody who doesn’t respect you back. That right?
Furious: Yeah. Yeah, you got it.

…

Furious: What do you know about sex?
Tre [aged 10]: I know a little bit. I know, I take a girl and stick my thing in her and nine months later a baby comes out.
Furious: You think that’s it?
Tre: Basically, yeah.
Furious: Well, remember this: Any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his chldren.

…

Doughboy: Ho’s gotta eat too.
Shalika: Who you callin’ a ho’, I ain’t no ho’.
Doughboy: Oops, I’m sorry, bitch.

…

Tre [on the phone] Who dis?
Reva [mother]: Who dis? What kind of way is that to answer the phone? Have you given anymore thought to what we talked about?
Tre: Yeah…I don’t know yet.
Reva: Let me speak to your daddy.
Tre: POP! Telephone.
Furious [to Reva]: Who dis?

…

Old Man: Ain’t nobody from outside bringing down the property value. It’s these folk, shootin’ each other and sellin’ that crack rock and shit.
Furious: Well, how you think the crack rock gets into the country? We don’t own any planes. We don’t own no ships. We are not the people who are flyin’ and floatin’ that shit in here. I know every time you turn on the TV thats what you see, Black People, sellin the rock, pushin the rock, pushin the rock, yeah I know. But that wasn’t a problem as long as it was here.
[referring to Compton, Watts and other Black ghettos]
Furious: It wasn’t a problem until it was in Iowa…and it showed up on Wall Street where there are hardly any black people. You wanna talk about guns, why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community?
Old Man: Why?
Furious: I’ll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves. You go out to Beverley Hills, you don’t see that shit.

…

Shalika: Well you tell me this nigger, how you know God’s a he? He can be a she. You don’t know that.For one thing, you don’t know what the fuck I be motherfucking knowing.
Doughboy: I read about this shit when I was in the pen. It was this book, right, and it was telling life in the perspective if God was a bitch. Said if God was a bitch, there wouldn’t be no nuclear bombs, no wars because that ain’t in a bitch’s nature. Life would be different if God was a bitch.
Shalika: Why every time you talk about a female you say bitch or whore or hootchie?
Doughboy: Because that’s what you are.
Shalika: Nigger, fuck you.

…

Doughboy: Man, Tre, your pops is like motherfucking Malcolm Farrakhan.

…

Ricky: I’m going into the fucking Army. That’s all there is to say.
Tre: You’re doing what?! Man, what are you, a damn fool?
Ricky: They say I can learn to work on computers. Plus, they’ll give me money for college.
Tre: Listen to you. You sound like the commercial. They don’t tell you that you don’t belong to you no more. You belong to them, the government. Like a slave or something. My daddy told me a black man has got no business, no place in the white man’s Army.
Ricky: I heard all that. I got a little boy to think about, okay? I don’t want to be like my brother. Hanging out and not doing shit. End up dealing 'caine, just like him. I want to do something with my life. I want to be somebody.
Tre: Listen, let me tell you something. When you join that Army, you ain’t gonna be nobody.

…

Tre: I didn’t do nothing.
Officer Coffey: You think you tough?
[pulls gun on Tre]
Officer Coffey: Scared now, ain’t you? I like that. That’s why I took this job. I hate little motherfuckers like you. Little niggers, you ain’t shit! I could blow your head off with this Smith & Wesson and you couldn’t do shit. Think you tough? What set you from? Look like one of them Crenshaw mafia motherfuckers.

…

Furious: Now I want you to give me the gun.
[Tre does not hand the gun to his father]
Furious: Oh, I get it, you gonna end like Doughboy… like little Chris in a wheelchair.
[Tre still doesn’t respond]
Furious: GIVE ME THE MOTHERFUCKING GUN, TRE.

…

Doughboy: Turned on the TV this morning. Had this shit on about how we’re living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places. How foreigners live and all. I started thinking, man. Either they don’t know…don’t show…or don’t care about what’s going on in the 'hood. They had all this foreign shit. They didn’t have shit on my brother, man.

…

Tre: Hey, Dough. You still got one brother left, man.[/b]