philosophy in film

What did she know and when did she know it? And what happens when we can’t ask the dead fetus to confirm it?

Forget the morality. Here we have to determine if what she did is legal. And what if what she believes happened is contradicted by what can be established as in fact having happened? Or what if she can’t remember what really happened at all? Or what if she is lying about what she thinks happened? Is she a murderer?

These things get complicated. Way past words.

And yet another peek inside the vapid, pop culture world of “America youth”. Are the “girls” or the “boys” the worst offenders?

trailer:
youtu.be/yFoky5z7fkw

STEPHANIE DALEY
Written and directed by Hilary Brougher

[b]Prosecutor: Claims she didn’t know she was pregnant. Claims that the infant was stillborn. Used her teeth to cut the cord.
Lydia [forensic psychologist]: Air in the lungs?
Prosecutor: And bowels. Also toilet paper embedded in the face.

Lydia: Did they talk to you about abortion?
Stephanie: No. But I could never do that.
Lydia: Why not?
Stephanie: Because it would be killing a baby.

Teacher [quoting Hawthorne]: No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitudes before finally becoming bewildered as to which may be true.[/b]

I don’t know about that. I’ve been doing it for years and years now.

[b]Teacher: Alright, we’re talking about The Scarlet Letter here. Anyone want to tell me the point of this book? Stephanie?
Stephanie: I think the point of the book is that it is harder to live a lie than it is to tell the truth and be punished.
Teacher: That’s good Steph. Anyone think the story has any relevance today? Satin?
Satin: I think it’s bullshit. He writes about this hypocritical priest who trashes this woman’s life and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him because he’s ruined his relationship with God.
Teacher: And you don’t think a relationship with God is important?
[the teacher gets down in her face]
Teacher: You know what great literature is about, Satin? It’s about man and God. Nothing else really matters.

Satin [to Stephanie]: You’re such a fucking sheep.

Stephanie: I already knew she was going to be dead.
Lydia: How did you know that?
Stephanie: I just knew.
Lydia: Did you check for a pulse?
Stephanie: I wrapped her up in toilet paper…
Lydia: …and threw her away.
Stephanie [in a whisper]: Yes.
Lydia: But first you had to cut the umbilical cord. Did you hold her while you chewed the cord?
Stephanie: I don’t remember.
Lydia: What did you do with your hands?
Stephanie: I don’t know.
Lydia: Tell me what you believed happened.
Stephanie: What if what I believe turns out not to be true?
Lydie: Then stop believing it.

Stephanie: I’m, uh, going to take a plea bargain.
Lydia: I think that’s a good idea.
Stephanie: Criminally negligent homicide. My lawyer says I’ll get five years. But if I go to jail for 6 months I might be able to get parole.
Lydia: You’ll get parole.

Lydia [seeing the bandage on Stephanie’s hand]: What happened?
Stephanie [misunderstands and thinks she is talking about the baby]: I held her.
Lydia [confused]: What?
Stephanie: I held her. She barely moved. She was so small. She wasn’t crying. Her breathing was bad. But I knew she wanted to live. But I did not want her to. So I told her to die. And she did. I killed her with my mind.[/b]

Three historical contexts. The rich and the poor, the rich and an emerging middle class and the rich and a burgeoning middle class. That can make all the difference in the world regarding the narratives we use. Even “over there”. But some will ever resist anything other than Us and Them.

Seeing how the rich live never motivates me to want a lot of money myself. I just need enough to do the things I enjoy. But any civilized society should strive to provide all citizens with access to the middle class. And fuck that maid shit. In fact, the whole idea of having “servants” is repugnant to me.

I do however prefer that folks [rich or not] be intelligent and “cultured”. That’s just a prejudice but I suspect a pervasive one here.

In the end the servant gets her revenge. If you call self-immolation revenge.

wiki

Although the film includes some key elements of the original, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid from 1960, Im has said that he tried to never think of it during the production in order to come up with a modern and original work. One major difference between the versions is that the original film took place in the middle class, while the remake is set in an extreme upper-class environment. Im explains this with South Korea’s social structure around 1960, which was a time when the country’s middle class started to form and many poor people moved from the countryside to work in the cities: “women became housemaids who served not only for the rich but also the middle class and that issue had served as the basis to Kim Ki-young’s work. What I realized upon reworking The Housemaid in 50 years was that there are much more wealthy people now, people who are millionaires.”

One thing though that hardly changed at all: men.

Look for Shin-ae from Secret Sunshine.

As for the ending, here is what the director has to say:
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding that last scene. Even one of the producers wanted it deleted. Many people complain about it. But without that scene, I think the movie would have been just so-so. I went with my gut feeling and included it. It’s a simple set-up: they’re giving a birthday party to a little girl who just witnessed something terrible and trying to cover up her trauma with expensive gifts. I wanted audiences to wonder if she could truly heal from such an event.

Maybe. But no way in hell would I have used it.

Is this a remake?
hancinema.net/hancinema-s-fi … 27819.html

Unfortunately, it’s been years since I watched the original. And even a used DVD at Amazon now cost $115. New? $200!!

trailer:
youtu.be/CvZowWUNRh4

THE HOUSEMAID [Hanyo] 2010
Directed by Sang-soo Im

[b]Mrs. Cho: Madam’s underwear is in the bathroom, you should hand wash it. When you get that big, you pee just by sneezing.

Hae-ra: I don’t understand why your brother’s wife stopped after two kids. That’s for common people who have to struggle to raise them.

Eun-yi: I love how you’re such a nice girl. You’re not bad-tempered, you’re polite to me.
Nami: I learned that from father. He said to treat people politely. It may seem like a sign of respect, but it’s really putting myself first.

Mi-hee [Hae-ra’s mother]: She doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant yet?
Mrs. Cho: Well, she’s kind of on the slow side.
Mi-hee: Slow? Really? What do you think she’ll do when she finds out?
Mrs. Cho: Slow, or naive, she’s not completely stupid, but she won’t pull any tricks. She’s pure-hearted.
Mi-hee: Hmm. Like Dostoyevsky’s Idiot.

Woman [mother?] : Your boss came in naked and you didn’t even resist?
Eun-yi: I was naked too and waiting for him.
Woman: Are you out of your mind? So, is it different with a rich man?
Eun-yi: [handing her the check from Hoon]: He finished with that.
Woman: Wow. I guess it is different.

Mi-hee: Your husband’s fucking her, and she’s pregnant. That’s a fact. The possibility that the baby’s not your husband’s? Zero.

Mrs. Cho [handing Eun-yi yet another check]: Your consolation payment. You know this is how that family solves any problems, right? Convenient for them and not bad for us either.

Mrs Cho: R.U.N.S.! Revolting Ugly Nauseating and Shameless work!

Mi-hee: There are obstetrics tests listed on the hospital bill. Now she knows she is pregnant. Let’s see what that bimbo tries to pull.
Hae-ra: What did he see in that cheap, common slut?

Hae-ra: How could that bastard do this to me? In my house, with the bitch who washes my underwear?!

Mi-hee [to Hae-ra]: Let him sleep around all he wants. Later, you can enjoy yourself and live like a queen.

Mi-hee [to Eun-yi]: That’s a $100,000 check. That thing inside you, it’s nothing. You can just cut it off, like a cyst.

Mrs. Cho: These people are scary.

Eun-yi: I’m pregnant. But the ladies of the house found out everything. They really smacked me around. They said they’d give me $100,000 if I have an abortion. But I’m having this baby.[/b]

No, she’s not. You just don’t fuck with scary people. Especially not the rich ones. Unless, of course, you’re crazy.

Eun-yi: R.U.N.S…R.U.N.S.

Is she a cruel sadistic pig and crazy? Does that make it different?

This is a movie “inspired by actual events”. That can mean practically anything. But in this world it isn’t hard to imagine it all unfolding—even more horrifically than this. Just tune in to the Discovery ID channel from time to time.

Especially if you think this sort of stuff doesn’t go on today.

This is a really hard movie to watch. You feel helpless because you know you can’t do a goddamn thing to stop what is still going on.

And the boys? Is it all about sex to them? Or more Mother Knows Best? And then there’s David.

Oh, and don’t forget: God sees all. And the irony still being that you need Him here because, well, what else is there?

IMDb

The movie (and the novel it was based on) is based on a true story. The character of Ruth is inspired by Gertrude Baniszewski, who, in 1965, tortured two girls who were in her care (with the help of her sons, daughters, and one of her daughters’ boyfriends). Gertrude (and her daughter, Paula) was given a life sentence; in 1985, she (Gertrude) successfully made parole. She died of lung cancer in June of 1990, at the age of 60.

wiki

[b]The film had a polarizing effect on film critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently holds a 67% “Fresh” rating. In contrast, Metacritic assigns it a 29.

Stephen King said about the movie, “The first authentically shocking American film I’ve seen since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer over 20 years ago. If you are easily disturbed, you should not watch this movie. If, on the other hand, you are prepared for a long look into hell, suburban style, The Girl Next Door will not disappoint. This is the dark-side-of-the-moon version of Stand By Me.”[/b]

Here is what the film is based on:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Likens

Pay particular attention to this:

The boys would spend two years in prison. In 1971, Paula and Gertrude Baniszewski were granted another trial. Paula pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was released two years later. Gertrude, however, was again convicted of first-degree murder. She came up for parole in 1985, and despite a public outcry and petitions against her release, the parole board took her good behavior in prison into account, and she was released.

This fucking world.

trailer:
youtu.be/typY725pjZ4

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR [2007]
Directed by Gregory Wilson

[b]Adult David: You think you know about pain? Talk to my second wife. When she was nineteen she got between a couple of fighting cats, and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you can still see today. She got thirty stitches and a fever that lasted for days. My second wife says that’s pain. She doesn’t know shit, that woman.

Ruth: I’m just warning you, Honey, if I see any slutting going on around here, your ass is grass.

Ruth: You too Davey, go. Sorry, but I got some difficult thinking to do.

Ruth: Good morning David. Grab yourself a beer if you want.

Ruth: Damn it, Donnie, now we’ve got to cauterize.

Ruth: One sound down here and I promise I’ll kill the both of you. Not just punish you, kill you. Dead. You got that, David? Are we straight about that?

Ruth: You boys better string her up again. We’ve got her so no man will ever want her.

Adult David: The past catches up to you, whether you like it or not. It can be a gift or a curse if you let it. I will never forget the gift of Meg Loughlin, though I am plagued with the torment of failing again, failing somebody. But as she taught me, it’s what you do last that counts.[/b]

It’s really hard to make up your mind about David here. About what he did first, for example. And second. And third. And fourth.

A very strange relationship. It makes sense only when acknowledging these are, after all, human beings. And what is strange among them?

Well, this might be: Agreeing to marry before they know each other’s name.

But don’t bother asking, “What’s the point?” They have their own.

Of course it doesn’t hurt if you become the husband of a voluptuous and beautiful hairdresser.

So, why did she jump? She had her reasons. But certainly not ones that will ever make any sense to me.

trailer
youtu.be/O_g-zGIzvMI

THE HAIRDRESSER’S HUSBAND [Le Mari de la Coiffeuse] 1990
Written and directed by Patrice Leconte

[b]Antoine [voiceover]: My mother had knitted wool bathing trunks for my brother and me. The trunks never dried. We were always in the sea so the wool stayed wet all day and the sand stuck to our asses. I was always sore between the legs. After a week, I was walking with my legs spread to avoid screaming in pain. I’m angry at my mother for making us wear those wooly trunks. But I’m glad she unintentionally drew attention to my genitals. That summer, I realized I had to take good care of my balls.

Antoine: I’m off to the barber’s.
Mother: Again?!

Antoine: That evening, having seen her heavy but ideally rounded breasts, I was still so disturbed I couldn’t speak.

Father: And you? What do you want to be in life?
Antoine: I want to marry a hairdresser.
[His father slaps him in the face]
Father: Why did I do that? Tell me, why did I do that?

Antoine: Naturally, I wondered if Mathilde wore a bra.[/b]

Naturally, she didn’t.

[b]Antoine: Mathilde was my life. As soon as they’d gone and the door was closed, our lives would revolve around us, forever.

Mathilde: Promise me one thing. The day you don’t love me anymore, you won’t pretend to.

Antoine [voiceover]: We have no friends. We never had any. What could they add to our lives? I don’t understand couples who go out with other couples, even on holiday. It proves that love is lacking and the gulf is being bridged by outside friendships. Mathilde and I are happy together. That’s all that matters.

Antoine: While cutting my hair, Mathilde said: “Do you know Fernand Reynaud drives a Jag?” She must have read it in a magazine. And I, like a fool, answered sarcastically: “You mean he can drive, that idiot?” I never liked that actor, but Mathilde did. She shrugged her shoulders and sighed in a way I’d never heard before. Annoyed and silent, she finished the cut. That was our only fight. But it disturbed my deeply.

Ambroise: At your age, you think old folks are your friends because they’re old. It’s not true. I see plenty of relatives on Sundays, anxious to leave. I understand. This is no place for the living.

Ambroise: Everyday, I come and open the gate. Makes me feel I can leave if I want to.

Mathilde: It’s terrible. He stoops more and more every day.
Antoine: Everyday he gets older.
Mathilde: Life’s disgusting.

Mathilde: A storm’s brewing

Mathilde [leaving the shop after coitus with Antoine]: I’ll get some yogurt for tonight.

Mathilde [in letter]: My love. I’m going before you do. I’m going before your desire dies. Then we’d be left with tenderness alone. And I know that wouldn’t be enough. I’m going before I grow unhappy. I go bearing the taste of our embraces. Bearing your smell, your glances, your kisses. I go with the memory of the best years of my life. The ones you gave me. I kiss you slowly until I die. I have always loved you. I loved only you. I’m going so you’ll never forget me. Mathilde.

Antione [to customer]: The hairdresser will be back.[/b]

Maybe. But not in this lifetime.

The past catches up with you. Especially if you’ve actually had one. If you know what I mean.

Antwone Fisher sure does. And that’s before you throw in the part about race.

Here’s a guy who as a child went through a rendition of The Girl Next Door above. Nowhere near as severe but when you are a kid the psychological scars can follow you to the grave. Unless fortuitously you bump into the right people.

God’s in this one too. So is the military we can talk about.

And somewhere between Dr. Huxtable and the hood is a narrative I know little about.

This going back and confronting the past might work for some. But it’s the worst possible thing to do for others.

wiki

[b]The film is inspired by a true story, with the real Antwone Fisher credited as the screenwriter, and is based on his autobiographical book Finding Fish.

The book The Slave Community, written by American historian John W. Blassingame and referenced in the film, was one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States. The book contradicted others who suggested that African American slaves were in large-part submissive. Blassingame used psychology to determine the mentality developed by slaves during the era and possibly passed on to generations after.

Davenport suggests Antwone read the book to explain Tate’s beatings of him. Davenport does not intend to justify her actions, but he seeks to let Antwone understand where her mentality of beatings and verbal abuse to keep the foster children subservient came from. Antwone is seen briefly reading the book in the next scene.[/b]

IMDb

[b]De’aundre Bonds was initially given a role in the film. On the night that he learned he was awarded the role, he attended a family celebration and was involved in an altercation with his aunt’s boyfriend. The altercation ended with Bonds stabbing the man to death. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Derek Luke was working at the Sony Studios gift shop when he met Antwone Fisher who was working on the lot as a security guard. When Fisher’s screenplay was bought by Fox Searchlight, Luke asked Fisher for a copy of the script. He went to the casting director unannounced and asked to audition. He has since admitted “I was so terrible I started crying” but Luke was invited to audition again. Denzel Washington came to the gift shop to tell Luke that he got the part.[/b]

ANTWONE FISHER
Directed by Denzel Washington
Written by Antwone Fisher

[b]Sailor: What’s cracking Fisher?
Antwone: Your head if you don’t get away from me.

Antwone: Why does something got to be bothering me? What, because I jumped on a white boy? Something must be wrong with me?
Jerome: You looking for a discharge, Fisher?
Antwone: I ain’t looking for nothing.
Jerome: Well that’s where you’re headed.

Antwone: Cleveland.
Jerome: Parents still live there?
Antwone: I never had any parents.
Jerome: They deceased?
Antwone: I never - I never had parents.
Jerome: That would make you a medical miracle, Seaman Fisher. Where you from?
Antwone: I’m from under a rock.
[pause]
Jerome: Okay.

Jerome: You know where your father is?
Antwone: Yeah, I know where he is. He went to his ex-girlfriend’s house. They got into an argument. She killed him.
Jerome: Where was your mother when this happened?
Antwone: Behind bars. I was born in prison 2 months after my father was murdered.
Jerome: Why was she confined, your mother?
Antwone: I don’t know.
Jerome: So you were turned over to the state?
Antwone: Yeah. The state placed me in this orphanage. It was supposed to be until my mother got out to claim me. She got out but she never claimed me.

Antwone: Ms. Tate used to brag about beating me unconscious.

Antwone: Keith was half-white. She would try to compare Keith to me and Dwight. You know, he had the good hair, we had the bad hair. She used to say how Keith was better than us because his father was white. I wished I was Keith. But not even Keith could escape being called a nigger. She hardly used our names. She said the word nigger so often, called us nigger so often that we could tell who she was talking to by the way she said the word nigger.
Jerome: What happened to Dwight and Keith?
Antwone: Dwight is in Lucasvilled State Penitentary. Keith got taken back by his mother. He was raped by one of her boyfriends.

Jerome: I thought we were all done fighting, Antwone.

Jerome: Now we’re right back where we started: How come you have never been with a woman?[/b]

That’s where Nadine comes in.

Jerome: “Regard without ill-will despite an offense.” That’s Webster’s definition of forgiveness.
Antwone: Why do I have to forgive?
Jerome: So you can get on with your life.

[b]Social service worker: Place of birth?
Antwone: Ohio State Correctional Facility for Women.

Antwone: Why’d you never come for me?[/b]

There are two sides to every story. The right side and the wrong side. The good side and the bad side. The true side and the false side.

And then there’s the real world.

But this guy is a scumbag and what he did is despicable. And Robbins shows us just how despicable. Personally, I think the state did the right thing. My real qualms with execution revolve around what can happen to the innocent in a criminal justice system that can be at times nothing less then criminal itself. But that really wasn’t applicable here.

Though both Robbins and Sarandan are known political activists on the left [and opposed to the death penalty] you can’t say they didn’t bend over backwards here to show both sides of the issue. Towards the end, just when you think the whole focus is going to shift to Poncelet’s narrative [his suffering, his redemption], the actual execution itself is interspersed with a depiction of what these two men did to the victums the night of the crime—the rape and the murders.

Basically, they show us that both sides are right. We simply view the events from a conflicting set of value judgments embedded in a conflicting understanding of what is good.

Of course God and Jesus are practically Marxist revolutionaries here.

IMDb

[b]After being told that she would be played in the film by “a famous actress from Thelma & Louise”, Sister Helen Prejean was introduced to Susan Sarandon and said “Thank God, she’s Louise.”

True story?

Yes. Sister Helen Prejean (played by (Susan Sarandon) is a Catholic nun who has become a leading American advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. The character of Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), however, is a fictional composite of several prisoners counseled by Prejean, including Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie.

Why Dead Man Walking?

‘Dead man walking’ is a phrase once used in American prisons when a man on death row was being led down the hallway to the execution room. It’s believed that the term was used to warn others to get out of the way, because a person on their way to the death chamber has nothing else to lose.[/b]

DEAD MAN WALKING
Written and directed by Tim Robbins
From the book by Helen Prejean

[b]Sister Helen: What about you?
Matthew: l live here.
Sister Helen: You were brought up poor?
Matthew: Ain’t nobody with money on death row.
Sister Helen: You and l have something in common then.
Matthew: What’s that?
Sister Helen: We both live with the poor.

Matthew: l don’t trust nobody in here. But you don’t kiss my ass or preach that hellfire brimstone crap. I respect that. You got guts. You live in a neighborhood with every nigger carrying a gun.

Matthew: We have to prove l’m innocent.
Hilton: We’ll file appeals with the federal and supreme courts for that but this is a pardon board. They won’t care if you shot the gun. They’ll be thinking of the crime. And of you as a monster. lt’s easy to kill a monster but hard to kill a human being.

Matthew: l like being alone with you. You’re looking real good to me.
Sister Helen: Look at you. Death is breathing down your neck, and you’re playing your little male come-on games. l’m not here for your amusement, Matthew. Show some respect.
Matthew: Why, cause you’re a nun?
Sister Helen: Because I’m a person. Every person deserves respect.

Hilton: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s be honest. You’re not gonna find many rich people on death row. Matthew Poncelet’s here today because he’s poor. Didn’t have money so he had to take what the State gave him. He got a tax lawyer who’d never tried a capital case before. An amateur. The lawyer raised one objection the entire trial.

Hilton: The death penalty. lt’s nothing new, been with us for centuries. We’ve buried people alive, lopped off their heads, burned them alive in public, gruesome spectacles. In this century, we kept searching for more and more humane ways of killing people we didn’t like. We’ve shot them with firing squads, suffocated them in gas chambers. But now…now we have developed a device that is the most humane of all: Lethal injection. We strap the guy up. We anesthetize him with shot number one. Then we give him shot number two which implodes his lungs. And shot number three stops his heart. We put him to death just like an old horse. His face just goes to sleep while inside, his organs are going through Armageddon. His facial muscles would contort, but shot number one relaxes those muscles. So we don’t have to see any horror show. We don’t have to taste the blood of revenge while this human being’s organs writhe, twist, contort. We just sit there quietly, nod our heads and say: ‘‘Justice has been done.’’[/b]

Of course there are those who want to see all these things. Folks who think that is just what he deserves.

[b]State’s attorney: There’s been no doubt in the court’s mind about who did the murder. Matthew Poncelet is not a good boy. He is a heartless killer. These murders were calculated, disgusting and cruel. This man shot Walter Delacroix two times in the back of his head. And raped Hope Percy and stabbed her 17 times before shooting this sweet girl two times in the back of the head. These families will never see their children graduate from college. They will never attend their wedding. They will never have Christmas with them again. There will be no grandchildren. All they ask of you is simple justice for their unbearable loss. l ask you to take a breath, steel your spine and proceed with the execution of Matthew Poncelet.

Earl Delacroix: Excuse me, Sister, l’m Walter Delacroix’s father.
Sister Helen: Mr. Delacroix, l’m sorry about–
Earl Delacroix: Sister, l’m a Catholic. How can you sit by Poncelet’s side without ever having come to visit with me and my wife or the Percys to hear our side? How can you spend all your time worrying about Poncelet and not think that maybe we needed you too?
Sister Helen: Mr. Delacroix, l didn’t think that you wanted to talk to me.
Earl Delacroix: This is Mary Beth and Clyde Percy.
Sister Helen: l’m sorry about your daughter.
Clyde Percy: Yeah, so are we. Excuse us.
Earl Delacroix: Listen, Sister, l’m sure you’ve seen a side of Matt Poncelet that none of us has seen. l’m sure he’s on his best behavior, must be pretty sympathetic to you. But, Sister, this is an evil man. This is a man who abducted teenage kids and raped and killed them. That scum robbed me of my only son. My name, my family name dies with me. There will be no more Delacroixs, Sister. No more.

Sister Helen: Do you ever read the Bible?
Matthew: l ain’t much of a Bible reader, but l pick it up from time to time.
Sister Helen: Like W.C. Fields read his Bible.
Matthew: Who?
Sister Helen: W.C. Fields. He used to play this drunken character in the movies. He’s dying and a friend comes and sees him reading the Bible. The friend says, ‘‘W.C., you don’t believe in God. Why are you reading the Bible?’’ And Fields says, ‘‘l’m looking for a loophole.’’

Matthew: I like rebels. Some blacks is ok. Martin Luther King, he led his people all the way to DC and kicked the white man’s butt.
Sister Helen: You respect Martin Luther King?
Matthew: He put up a fight. He wasn’t lazy.
Sister Helen: What about lazy whites?
Matthew: Don’t like 'em.
Sister Helen: So it’s lazy people you don’t like?

Clyde Percy: l just couldn’t bear the thought of them burying that body without making absolutely and positively sure that that was Hope. l called my brother, he’s a dentist. l asked him to go to the funeral home and make an l.D. from dental records. Before he’d stuck his hand into that bag with all that lime in it and fished Hope’s jaw out he’d been against the death penalty. And after that, he was all for it.

Mary Beth Percy: So, what made you change your mind?
Sister Helen: Change my mind?
Mary Beth Percy:What made you come around to our side?
Sister Helen: l wanted to come and see if l could help y’all and pray with you. But he asked me to be his spiritual adviser, to be with him when he dies.
Mary Beth Percy:: And what did you say?
Sister Helen: That l would.
Mary Beth Percy: We thought you’d changed your mind. We thought that’s why you were here.
Sister Helen: No.
Clyde Percy: How can you come here? How can you do that? How can you sit with that scum?
Sister Helen: Mr. Percy, l’ve never done this before. l’m trying…l’m trying to follow the example of Jesus who said that every person is worth more than their worst act.
Clyde Percy: This is not a person. This is an animal. No, l take that back. Animals don’t rape and murder their own kind! Matthew Poncelet is God’s mistake. And you want to hold the poor murderer’s hand? You want to comfort him when he dies? There wasn’t anybody in the woods to comfort Hope when those two animals pushed her face into the grass!
Sister Helen: l just want to help him take responsibility for what he did.
Mary Beth Percy: Does he admit to what he did? ls he sorry?
Sister Helen: He says he didn’t kill anybody.
Clyde Percy: Sister, you’re in waters way over your head.
Mary Beth Percy: You don’t know what it’s like to carry a child in your womb and give birth and get up with a sick child in the middle of the night. You just pray and get a good night’s sleep don’t you.
Clyde Percy: My parents raised me to respect the religious. But Sister, I think you need to leave this house right now.
Sister Helen: l’m sorry.
[she turns to leave the house]
Clyde Percy: Wait a minute! lf you really are sorry and do care about this family you’ll want to see justice done for our murdered child! Now, you can’t have it both ways! You can’t befriend that murderer and expect to be our friend too.
Mary Beth Percy: You brought the enemy into our house. You gotta go.

Matthew being interviewed on TV: I had two families. Both of them I’d love and die for.
Interviewer: Your other family is… ?
Matthew: The family of man. Of men in prison. My white family, the Aryan Brotherhood.
Interviewer: You’re a white supremacist? A follower of Hitler?
Matthew: He was a leader. I admire him for getting things done. Like Castro, he got things done. Hitler might have gone overboard on the killing but he was on the right track about the Aryans being the master race.
Interviewer: The right track? The murder of 6 million Jews?
Matthew: That’s never been proven.
Sister Helen [listening at home]: What am l doing with this guy? l must be nuts.

Sister Helen: Think about it. Their kids are shot, stabbed, raped left in the woods to die alone. How’d you feel if somebody did that to your family? What would you do to them?
Matthew: l’d sure as hell want to kill them.

Earl Delacroix: My wife filed for divorce this afternoon. We just have different ways to deal with our son’s death. We’re nothing special though. Most folks that lose a kid split up. Seventy percent or something.

Sister helen: You in the room when they do it?
Sergeant Trapp: l’m on the strap-down team, left leg. That’s my job. The left leg. l take the prisoner from his cell to the execution chamber.
Sister Helen: Wow, that’s gotta be tough.
Sergeant Trapp: lt’s hard. l didn’t sleep that night.
Sister Helen: l think it’s gotta affect everybody that sees it whether they’re for it or against.
Sergeant Trapp: lt’s just part of the job. These prisoners get what’s coming to them.

Prison guard: Tell me something sister, what is nun doing in a place like this. Shouldn’t you be teaching children? Didn’t you know what this man has done? How he killed them kids?
Sister Helen: What he was involved with was evil. I don’t condone it. I just don’t see the sense of killing people to say that killing people’s wrong.
Prison guard: You know what the Bible say, ‘An eye for an eye’.
Sister Helen: You know what else the Bible ask for death as a punishment? For adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, trespass upon sacred grounds, profane in a sabbath and contempt to parents.
Prison guard: I ain’t gonna get into no Bible quoting with no nun cause I’m gonna lose.

Matthew: lf only l knew l’d die right away with the first shot. l mean, will l feel it?

Sister Helen: Let’s talk about what happened. Let’s talk about that night.
Matthew: l don’t want to talk about that.

Matthew: …and l got a thing or two to say to the Percys and the Delacroixs.
Sister Helen: You want your last words to be words of hatred?
Matthew: Clyde Percy wants to inject me hisself!
Sister Helen: Well, think of how angry he must be. He’s never gonna see his daughter again. He’s never gonna hold her, love her, laugh with her. You have robbed these parents. They have nothing in their lives but sorrow, no joy. That is what you gave them. Why were you in the woods?
Matthew: l told you, l was stoned out of my head!
Sister Helen: Don’t blame the drugs. You were harassing couples for weeks…for months before this happened.

Sister Helen: You could have walked away.
Matthew: Vitello went psycho on me.
Sister Helen: Don’t blame him! You blame him, the government, drugs, blacks, the Percys. You blame the kids for being there. What about Matthew Poncelet?!

Matthew: Walter?
Sister Helen: Yeah? What?
Matthew: l killed him.
Sister Helen: And Hope?
Matthew: No, ma’am.
Sister Helen: Did you rape her?
Matthew: Yes, ma’am.
Sister Helen: Do you take responsibility for both of their deaths?
Matthew: Yes, ma’am. When the lights dimmed last night l kneeled and prayed for them kids. I never done that before.
Sister Helen: Oh, Matt. There are spaces of sorrow only God can touch. You did a terrible thing, Matt, a terrible thing. But you have a dignity now. Nobody can take that from you.[/b]

Huh? Still: what else is there but this reliegious bullshit?
To wit:

Matthew: You know l never had no real love myself. Never loved a woman or anybody else.
Well, it figures l’d have to die to find love. Thank you for loving me.

The only thing that makes this something good is the part she insist God plays here. Take that away and Sister Helen makes the execution all that much more unbearable for him. He finds love with less than an hour to live!

[b]Prison guard: Do you have any last words, Poncelet?
Matthew: Yes, I do.
[pauses]
Matthew: Mr. Delacroix, I don’t wanna leave this world with any hate in my heart. I ask your forgiveness for what I done. It was a terrible thing I done, taking your son away from you.
Clyde: [Softly to his wife] How about us?
Matthew: Mr. and Mrs. Percy, I hope my death gives you some relief.

Sister Helen: I want the last face you see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this thing. I’ll be the face of love for you.[/b]

A really [and I mean really] funny look at a man determined to find his, uh, “real parents”. Be careful what you wish for?

But then [philosophically] this is the stuff daseins are made of:

Mel: I can’t help feeling that if I’d been raised by at least one of my real parents I wouldn’t be such a nervous person, you know? I might be living a completely different life in a totally different city. I could be married to a totally different person with a different job. I mean, how do I know? I don’t. Anything’s possible.

The implication of this either sinks in or it doesn’t.

FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
Written and directed by David O. Russell

[b]Tina: I’m in the middle of a divorce, actually.
Nancy: Sorry.
Tina: Oh, no. It was one of those dead marriages—the kind where you have to start making dates to have sex.

Mel: Hey, I didn’t go around telling my friends you didn’t want to make love for almost two months after the baby was born, did I?
Nancy: Probably.
Mel: Okay, but it didn’t get back to you, did it?

Pearl: Why does he have to do the Roots thing?

Tina [hearing a car horn]: What’s that?
Mel: Oh, my God. It’s happening. Shit!
Tina: Oh, God, no.
Nancy: What’s happening?
Tina: It’s the bump and rob thing! This is it!!

Mel: Thank you for the jacket! Sorry about the mace!

Tina [reading aloud the words on the side of the “bump and rob” van]: “The Trinity Church Ministry of Hope.”

Valerie: I’m a bad person for what I did to you.
Mel: No, don’t say that.
Valerie: It’s true.
Mel: Look, Tina says that most women who gave up their children for adoption in the 60’s were independent young women acting against a conservative world.
Valerie: You’re sayin’ I was a slut?

Tina: You know what? I can clear this up with one phone call to the office.[/b]

And clear it up she does:

[b]Tina: Listen, I, I, I don’t believe this but there’s been a terrible, terrible mistake. Valerie’s not your mother, Mel.
Mel: What? What are you talking about? Of course she’s my mother. We have the same forehead.
Jane: And he looks like Uncle Freddie.
Mel: Yeah, I look like Uncle Freddie.

Valerie: Excuse me! I expect you to pay for this damage.
Mel: Well, w-wait a minute. You said it was a gift from God. Remember?
Valerie: That’s when you were my son.

Mel: Excuse me, is one of you fellas Fritz Bourdeau?
Fritz [shoving him to the ground]: Did I invite you onto my property?!
Mel: Take it easy!
Nancy: Tina, don’t go over there!
Tina [being attacked by Mitch]: Would you let me explain?
[Mitch starts kicking her camera across the parking lot]
Tina [screaming]: FUCK! RUN!

Fritz: Why, you little shit! Look at this turd face, Mitch! This turd is my son! I’m sorry, man. Did we scare you?

Fritz: Hey, you ever been in a truck before?
Mel: No, not really.

Fritz: Are you sayin’ my son’s a bitch boy?
Mitch: I didn’t say that!
Fritz: You ain’t no bitch boy, are ya, Mel?
Mel: No, I don’t believe I’m a bitch boy.

Fritz: You know somethin’? You got a kind of Jew look, don’t you?
Mel: Well, the people who raised me are Jewish.
Mitch: They…they gave you a real “Hebe” look, kid.

Mel: Who…Who’s Old Needledick?

Paul: You do know it is a federal offense to destroy a United States Post Office?

Tony: So where did you folks come down on the big circumcision controversy? 'Cause, you know, there’s a movement afoot these days to keep the foreskin and, personally, I think a boy’s penis should look just like his father’s.

Nancy: We forgot your father’s birthday.
Mel: Oh, fuck…

Pearl: Hello?
Mel: Hi, Mom.
Pearl: So, how’s the psychic healing going?
Mel: I am really sorry we didn’t get back for Dad’s birthday.
Pearl: It’s all right. We’ll try it again when he turns 65…provided he lives that long and you’re not too busy.

Nancy: Where’d you get the pup tent?

Mel: Ever heard of hypospadias?
Tina: Is there something wrong with the plane?

Nancy: Does anybody actually own a white Taurus, or are they all rentals?

Tony: Nancy was saying you guys were having some tension about oral sex.

Tina: Did it ever occur to you to call first?
Paul: Without spontaneity, the world of B&B’s is fairly meaningless.

Tina: Look, do you wanna file an anti-defamation suit or do you want to get to the “Schwingkings” before midnight?

Richard: Is this some kind of a swapping thing you got going here?

Mel: You made LSD? Is that what you’re saying?
Richard: We made LSD.
Mary: Yes, yes. We made acid.
Richard: And we gave it out to people who needed it. You know that there are hundreds of pharmaceutical executives in this country… that are selling drugs, FDA approved drugs.
Mary: On the open market.
Richard: Over the counter with incredible side…
Mary: Horrible side effects.
Richard: Terrible side effects. And these people are not in jail.
Mary: They’re not in prison anywhere.
Richard: They’re, they’re, they’re in country clubs or playing golf. They’re having drinks.
Mary: They’re running the country, Mel.
Richard: You know, LSD shouldn’t be a felony in the first place.
Mary: It’s not addictive.
Richard: It doesn’t lead to violent crime.
Mary: It’s really the only hope for the species.

Mel: Did you take acid while you were pregnant with me?
Mary: You’re not gonna bring that thing up, are you?
Richard: You know the stuff they tell you about, you know, chromosome damage and all that stuff?
Mel: Yeah, I do!
Richard: That’s government propaganda.
Mary: Total propaganda.
Richard: They just want to get a hold of your head, that’s all.
Mary: I was relieved, though, when you came out in the hospital and you only had one head.
Mel: Very funny.
Richard: [laughing] She- She kills me! It would’ve been kinda nice if he had, like, a third eye right there, you know? You know, you know, a third eye is a symbol of enlightenment.
Mary: Mel…identity is nothing but a mental construct.
Mel: Mental construct?
Richard: Have you ever read any Tibetan Buddhism, or Chaos theory?

Paul: Is this a musical table?

Richard: How do you feel?
Paul: Vivid.

Paul: I’m seeing colors I don’t want to.

Tina [to Mel]: I guess it’s just one of those ex-felon pro-acid kind of non-smoking homes.

Mel: [to Tony] You know, you got a lot of nerve. You come in here, you lick my wife’s armpit. You know I’m going to have that image in my head for the rest of my life.

Richard: Where’s the car?
Lonnie: It’s over here.
Richard: Why did you move it?
Lonnie: I thought you moved it.
Richard: Why would I move it?

Pearl: What did I just tell you about the U-turns?
Ed: He was in my blind spot.
Pearl: You could fit the state of Wisconsin in your blind spot.

Ed [looking in the trunk]: What the hell is this?

Pearl: What kind of trouble are you in?
Mel: Us? We’re not in trouble. You’re the ones who are in jail.

Sheriff: Bobby, take these forms back to the office, these release forms and get these nice people their car keys. This is all over here. This is a Federal agent here, and he just told me the whole story about the Shlytings.
Ed: Schlitinooks.
Pearl: Shitkings.

Pearl: And by the way, w-w-why are you not wearing pants?
Paul: I had an experience, that’s why.
Pearl: What do you mean?
Paul: I resisted at first, and then it evolved and it continues to evolve for me.

Paul: How long will that take?
Tina: Usually six months to a year. But if you’re willing to wait, you know, I may be able to find a couple of lesbians who would be willing to conceive…
Tony: That’s good. Lesbians are good.
Tina: …and then you could share the baby with them.[/b]

Woody Allen once suugested this:

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.

It seems applicable here. I couldn’t even imagine it. And it is all the more horrific given the gap between before and after.

And it goes to show how contingency, chance and change – inside a circumstantial landslide – are always just around the corner. And it is captured in a particularly haunting manner here.

I don’t think I could live like this. But suicide is out of the question when the only thing you can do is blink one eye.

Locked-in syndrome at wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome

trailer:
youtu.be/G69Zh7YIg8c

IMDb

[b]Johnny Depp was originally cast to play Jean-Dominique Bauby. He dropped out because it conflicted with filming of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

Julian Schnabel learned French to make the film.

Almost the entire opening 40 minutes of the film are taken from Bauby’s point of view.[/b]

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
Directed by Julian Schnabel

[b]Dr Cocheton: You see, Jean-Dominique, you’ve had a stroke. You’ve been in a coma for almost three weeks. But now you’re waking up and you’ll be fine, I promise you.

Doctor: All right, don’t worry. It’s a slow process. Your speech will come back.
Bauby’s voice: I can’t speak?! Why can’t you hear me? Oh, Christ. I can’t speak. I can’t move. What’s happened to me?

Bauby’s voice: All right, all right, I’ve had a stroke…my speech’ll come back…my memory will come back.

Dr LaPage: Jean-Do, I know how difficult this is for you. I also know that nobody has explained to you the full extent of your condition. Well, that’s my job. Yes. My job. You’ve had what we call a cerebrovascular accident. It’s put your brain stem out of
action. The brain stem is an essential component of our internal computer, the link between the brain and the spinal cord. In the past, we would have said you’d had a massive stroke. You would very probably have died. But now we have such improved resuscitation techniques that we’re able to prolong life.
Bauby’s voice: This is life?
Dr LaPage: I’m not going to mince words. You are paralyzed from head to toe. And, as you now must have realised, you are unable to speak. You have what we call ‘locked-in syndrome’.
Bauby’s voice: “Locked-in syndrome”.
Dr Lapage: It will be of no comfort to you but your condition is extremely rare. Extremely rare. And we simply don’t know the cause. You don’t smoke and you’re not a heavy drinker. So. I’m afraid it’s just one of those things. However, apart from being totally paralysed, we believe you are normal in every other respect.

Dr. Lepage: We want you to take it easy for a few days.
Bauby’s voice: What do you think I’m doing now?

Marie: I’m the physiotherapist, and my priority is to get you to swallow. So I’ll be working on your tongue and lips.

Dr. Mercer: Do you hear what I say? Your right eye isn’t working properly. I’m going to sew it up.

Bauby’s voice: Oh my God, who’s that? It’s a monster! No, no, it’s me! I look as if I’ve emerged from a vat of formaldehyde.

Bauby’s voice: A poet once said, “Only a fool laughs when nothing’s funny”

Roussin: I can roughly guess what you’re feeling. Being taken hostage is not so different from what you’re going through. Am I right?
Henriette: Hostage?
[Awkward silence.]
Roussin: Jean-Dominique was kind enough to give me his seat on a flight to Hong Kong. Then, unfortunately for me, the plane was high-jacked and I remained a hostage in Beirut for four years, four months, two weeks, five days and seven hours. They kept me locked in a cellar. Very tiny. Dark. It was hard to breathe. I called it my tomb.

Bauby’s voice: I am ashamed I never called him after he returned from Beirut. But I felt too guilty playing editor in the frothy world of fashion magazines.

Jean-Dominique Bauby: I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed, my imagination and my memory. They’re the only two ways I can escape from my diving bell.[/b]

The only way he can communicate though is through a laborious trek through the alphabet—reciting the letters in the most frequently used order:

[b]Henriette: E - T - A - 0 - I (a blink) I. (two blinks) I is the first word? (a blink) OK. E - T - A - O - I - N - U - S - H - R - P - C - D - Y -W- (a blink) w. E - T - A - (a blink ) A. E - T - A - 0 - I - N (a blink) N. E - T - (a blink) T. (two blinks) I - want - ’ (two blinks) I want’. You’re doing brilliantly, Jean-Do. What do you want? E - T - (a blink) T. (writes it down) E - T - A - O - (a blink) 0 . (two blinks) I w a n t t o ’ - E - T - A - 0 - I - N - U - S - H - R - P - C - D - (a blink) D. (writes it down) E - T - A - O - I - (a blink) I. (writes it down) E - (a blink) E. (she writes it down; two blinks) ‘Die’. ‘I want to die’.

Bauby’s voice: Through the frayed curtain of my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible diving-bell holds my whole body prisoner.

Bauby’s voice: This Naval Hospital has in its time been a home to children with tuberculosis, a fat farm, a school, a place where, so legend has it, the great Diaghilev rehearsed his Ballet Russe.They say it was here that Nijinsky leapt twelve feet into the air. No one here now leaps into the air. These days we are all elderly, enfeebled or, like me, rigid and mute. A battalion of cripples.

Bauby’s voice: A big black fly lands on my nose. I wriggle my head to dislodge it. It clings on. Olympic wrestling has nothing on this.

Bauby’s voice: Sunday. I dread Sunday. No therapists, no shrinks, no visitors, a skeleton staff. Sunday is a long stretch of desert. But today, Marie nobly suggests she take me to Mass. I have tried to explain to her that I am not a religious man. This cuts no ice with her. ‘It will do you good,’ she says.

Bauby’s voice: All over the world people are praying for me. Top of the list is my daughter, Celeste, who prays for me every night. And Marie, of course. The most diverse deities have been enlisted to help me. In Nepal, I’m told, they chant a mantra for me. In a Breton chapel they burn candles and a Cameroon holy man has procured for me the goodwill of Africa’s gods: I have assigned him my right eye. All of them. And I can’t deny that I have attempted to organise this vast spiritual energy to support my existence. It may not be admirable, it may even be a touch hypocritical, but I’ll try anything.

Bauby’s voice: : My diving bell has dragged you down to the bottom of the sea, with me.

Bauby’s voice: My life is here in this hospital. A constant repitition.

Bauby’s voice: Like a sailor seeing the shore disappear, I watch my past recede, reduced to the ashes of memory.

Title card: Jean-Dominique Bauby died on March 9, 1997, 10 days after the publication of his book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.[/b]

No way in hell is this film for everyone:

“The film is about a family of cannibals who, after the death of the father, try to continue a ritualistic tradition of kidnapping and eating other humans.”

But then Let The Right One In wasn’t either. The film depicts more the socio-economic conditions folks living in Mexican slums endure than it does cannibilism. Amidst this sort of poverty what isn’t likely to unfold?

By and large, the film – the photography in particular – creates this brooding and grotesque atmosphere revolving around human survival on a level [and in a context] few of us can even begin to imagine.

And the film did get a 72% fresh rating at RTn 43 reviews.

trailer:
youtu.be/EBkNz3_pzsw

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE [Somos Lo Que Hay] 2010
Written and directed by Jorge Michel Grau

Cop 1: We don’t solve the old cases.
Cop 2: What’s more, we don’t solve the new ones either.

Not in the slums. Here it’s the poor going after the poorer still. And that is of little interest to the rest of “society”.

[b]Sabina: Next we have to pick a leader.
Mother: Next we start shaking, because we are going to die.

Julian: I’m not eating a fag!

Prostitute [offering up a child]: Look at this little morsel.
Cop: That’s for politicians or businessmen, no?
Prostitute: You’re getting moralistic!

Mother: Where’s the faggot?

Cop: They caught your cannibals![/b]

There’s a moment when you are first drawn into a film. In this one it’s the same for everyone:

1. Being moody
2. Being bad at maths
3. Being sad

Just how many men are there out in the world hired to kill other men out in the world who [from someone’s point of view] deserve to die? Judging by the film industry’s output there must be millions. And, given that many, a few innocent will get caught in the crossfire. Even children. And hopefully someone will pay for that.

This is a morality tale of sorts. These men kill people. Mostly pieces of shit but occassionally a brother defending a brother and a kid in church in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So justice must be done. And we fall for it over and over and over again. The scripted kind, in other words.

IMDb

The painting that occasions comment even from Ray is “The Last Judgment” by Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch-like symbolism recurs throughout the movie (the dwarf is one example), suggesting that Ray and Ken may indeed encounter their own Last Judgment - or that the waiting period in Bruges is akin to purgatory.

IN BRUGES
Written and directed by: Martin McDonagh

[b]Ray: After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off me hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter the instructions came through - “Get the fuck out of London, you dumb fucks. Get to Bruges.” I didn’t even know where Bruges fucking was.
[pause]
Ray: It’s in Belgium.

Ray: Bruges is a shithole.
Ken: Bruges is not a shithole.
Ray: Bruges is a shithole.
Ken: Ray, we only just got off the fucking train! Could we reserve judgment on Bruges until we’ve actually seen the fucking place?

Obese Man: Been to the top of the tower?
Ray: Yeah…yeah, it’s rubbish.
Obese: Man: It is? The guide book says it’s a must see.
Ray: Well you lot ain’t going up there.
Obese Man: Pardon me? Why?
Ray: I mean, it’s all narrow winding stairs. I’m not being funny.
Obese Man: What exactly are you trying to say?
Ray: What exactly am I trying to say? Youse a bunch of fuckin’ elephants!

Ray: What are they doing over there? They’re filming something. They’re filming midgets!
Ken: Ray…
[Ray runs off and watches Jimmy being instructed by the director, who Jimmy flips the bird to as soon as he leaves]
Ken: Ray, come on. Let’s go.
Ray: My arse let’s go. They’re filming midgets!

Ray: A lot of midgets tend to kill themselves. A disproportionate amount, actually. Hervé Villechaize off of Fantasy Island. I think somebody from the Time Bandits did. I suppose they must get really sad about like…being really little and that…people looking at them, laughing at them, calling them names. You know, “short arse”. There’s another famous midget. I miss him but I can’t remember. It’s not the R2D2 man; no, he’s still going. I hope your midget doesn’t kill himself. Your dream sequence will be fucked.
Chloë: He doesn’t like being called a midget. He prefers dwarf.
Ray: This is exactly my point! People going around calling you a midget when you want to be called a dwarf. Of course you’re going to blow your head off.

[Harry in message]: Number One, why aren’t you in when I fucking told you to be in? Number Two, why doesn’t this hotel have phones with fucking voicemail and not have to leave messages with the fucking receptionist? Number Three, you better fucking be in tomorrow night when I fucking call again or there’ll be fucking hell to pay. I’m fucking telling you - Harry.
Ray: Geez, he’s swears a lot, doesn’t he?

Ken: Up there, the top altar, is a vial brought back by a Flemish knight from the Crusades in the Holy Land. And that vial, do you know what it’s said to contain?
Ray: No, what’s it said to contain?
Ken: It’s said to contain some drops of Jesus Christ’s blood. Yeah, that’s how this church got its name. Basilica of the Holy Blood.
Ray: Yeah?
Ken: And this blood, right, though it’s dried blood, at different times over many years, they say it turned back into liquid. Turned back into liquid from dried blood. At various times of great stress.
Ray: Yeah?
Ken: Yeah. So, yeah, I’m gonna go up in the queue and touch it, which is what you do.
Ray: Yeah?
Ken: Yeah. You coming?
Ray: Do I have to?
Ken: Do you have to? Of course you don’t have to. It’s Jesus’ fucking blood, isn’t it? Of course you don’t fucking have to! Of course you don’t fucking have to!

Ray: Murder, father.
Priest: Why did you murder someone, Raymond?
Ray: For money, father.
Priest: For money? You murdered someone for money?
Ray: Yes, father. Not out of anger. Not out of nothing. For money.
Priest: Who did you murder for money, Raymond?
Ray: You, father.
Priest: I’m sorry?
Ray: I said you, father. What are you, deaf?
[Ray raises pistol]
Ray: Harry Waters says hello.

Priest: The little boy…

Ken: [looking at a surreal Bosch painting] It’s Judgment Day, you know?
Ray: No. What’s that then?
Ken: Well, it’s, you know, the final day on Earth, when mankind will be judged for the crimes they’ve committed and that.
Ray: Oh. And see who gets into heaven and who gets into hell and all that.
Ken: Yeah. And what’s the other place?
Ray: Purgatory.
Ken: Purgatory…what’s that?
Ray: Purgatory’s kind of like the in-betweeny one. You weren’t really shit, but you weren’t all that great either.[/b]

Purgatory. That’s where they are now. They just don’t know it yet.

[b]Ray: Jesus, Ken, I’m trying to talk about…
Ken: I know what you’re trying to talk about.
Ray: I killed a little boy. You keep bringing up the fucking lollipop man.
Ken: You didn’t mean to kill a little boy.
Ray: I know I didn’t mean to…but because of the choices I made, and the course that I put into action, that little boy isn’t here anymore, and he’ll never be here again.
[pause]
Ray: I mean here in the world, not here in Belgium. Well he’ll never be here in Belgium either, will he? I mean, he might’ve wanted to come here when he got older. Don’t know why. And that’s all because of me. He’s dead because of me. And I’m trying to…trying to get me head around it, but I can’t. I will have always have killed that little boy. That ain’t ever going away. Ever. Unless…maybe I go away.

Chloë: So what do you do, Raymond?
Ray: I…shoot people for money.
Chloë: [smiling] What kinds of people?
Ray: Priests, children…you know, the usual.
Chloë: Is there a lot of money to be made in that business?
Ray: There is for priests. There isn’t for children. So what is it you do, Chloë?
Chloë: I sell cocaine and heroin to Belgian film crews.
Ray: Do you?
Chloë: Do I look like I do?
Ray: You do, actually. Do I…look like I shoot people?
Chloë: No. Just children.

Ray: I saw your midget today. Little prick didn’t even say hello.
Chloë: Well, he’s on a lot of ketamine.
Ray: What’s that?
Ray: Um, horse tranquilizer.
Ray: Horse tranquilizer? Where’d he get that?
Chloë: I sold it to him.
Ray: You can’t sell horse tranquilizers to a midget!

Ray: [punching a tourist he presumes is American]: That’s for John Lennon, you Yankee fuckin’ cunt![/b]

Turns out he was Canadian.

[b]Harry [to Ken]: Give me a call when he’s dead.

Ken: I was not aware that there were any prostitutes in Bruges.
Jimmy: You just have to look in the right places…brothels are good.

Ray: You from America?
Jimmy: Yeah. Don’t hold it against me.
Ray: Well, that’s for me to decide, isn’t it?

Ken: [standing up to leave and picking up his coat] Two wanky hookers and a racist dwarf. I think I’m heading home.

Ray: So hang on. Would all of the white midgets in the world be fighting against all of the black midgets in the world?
Jimmy: Yeah.
Ray: That would make a good film.
Jimmy: You don’t know how much shit I’ve had to take off of black midgets, man.
Ken: See, Jimmy, my wife was black. And I loved her very much. And in 1076, she was murdered by a white man. So, where the fuck am I supposed to stand in all this blood and carnage?
Jimmy: Did they get the guy who did it?
Ken: A friend of mine got him.
Ray: Harry Waters got him?[/b]

See how many permutations there can be? Have you got a philosophy actually able to cover them all? Or does Mo’s “objectivity” do the trick? :wink:

[b]Ken: What the fuck are you doing, Ray?
Ray: What the fuck are’you doing?
[Ken sticks pistol behind his back]
Ken: Nothing.
Ray: Oh, my God…you were gonna kill me.
Ken: No, I wa - You were gonna kill yourself!
Ray: Well… I’m allowed.
Ken: No, you’re not!
Ray: What? I’m not allowed, and you are? How’s that fair?

Ken: You’re a suicide case.
Ray: And you’re trying to shoot me in the fucking head.
Ken: You’re not getting that gun back.
Ray: A great day this has turned out to be. I’m suicidal, me mate tries to kill me, me gun gets nicked and we’re still in fuckin’ Bruges!

Ken: Listen, I’m gonna give you some money and put you on a train somewhere.
Ray: Back to England?
Ken: You can’t go back to England, Ray. You’d be a dead man!
Ray [crying]: I want to be a dead man. Have you been missing something?
Ken: You don’t want to be a dead man, Ray.
Ray: I killed a little boy!
Ken: Then save the next little boy.

Natalie: [Harry gets angry at Ken and is destroying the phone] Harry. Harry! It’s a inanimate fucking object!
Harry: [to wife] You’re an inanimate fuckin’ object!

Harry: [to Yuri] An Uzi? I’m not from South Central Los fucking Angeles. I didn’t come here to shoot twenty black ten year olds in a drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person.

Harry: Well?
Ken: The boy is suicidal, Harry. He’s a wa;lking dead man. Keeps going on about Hell and Purgatory…
Harry: When I phoned you yesterday, did I ask you, “Ken, will you do me a favor and become Ray’s psychiatrist, please?” No, What I think I asked you was, “Could you blow his fucking head off for me?”

Harry: Let me get this right. Not only have you refused to kill the boy, you even stopped the boy from killing himself, which would’ve solved my problem, which would’ve solved your problem, which sounds like it would’ve solved the boy’s problem.
Ken: It wouldn’t have solved his problem.
Harry: Ken, if I had killed a little kid, accidentally or otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought twice. I’d killed myself on the fucking spot. On the fucking spot. I would’ve stuck the gun in me mouth. On the fucking spot!

Harry: I have the capacity to change.
Ken: Yeah, you do. You’ve the capacity to get worse. Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny, I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a cunt now, you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that can change is you becoming a bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: [furious] Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.
Harry: Insult my fucking kids? That’s going overboard, mate!
Ken: I retracted it, didn’t I?

Ken: I’m gonna die now, I think.

Harry: Oh, I see.
Ray: No Harry, he’s not…
Harry [putting the gun in his mouth]: You’ve got to stick to your principles.

Ray [voiceover]: There’s a Christmas tree somewhere in London with a bunch of presents underneath it that’ll never be opened. And I thought, if I survive all of this, I’d go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison… death… didn’t matter. Because at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, fuck man, maybe that’s what Hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die.[/b]

Described as a mistanthrope below he is actually more than just that. The scene in the bowling alley for example. But he is definitely aberrant when engaging the opposite sex. He creates this fantasy in his head [re The Collector] and then fortuitously [vouyeristically] bumps into a beautiful incarnation across the courtyard. Naturally she goes about the business of living her life [even the most intimate parts] with the curtains fully agape.

In any event if you were incessantly mocked and bullied in the neighborhood merely for being introverted and different you might grow to detest your fellow man too.

But who is playing whom here?

wiki

A misanthropic voyeuristic tailor, Monsieur Hire, spies on his gorgeous neighbour from across the street. This takes place in the backdrop of another plot, the unsolved murder of a local young woman. Monsieur Hire is hounded by a detective investigating the murder and is also eventually noticed by the object of his gaze, the young woman Alice. Monsieur Hire propositions Alice to ditch her boyfriend Emile, and run off with him to his little home in Switzerland, where he promises to take care of her.

trailer:
youtu.be/elNCMX8EzAM

MONSIEUR HIRE [1989]
Written and directed by Patrice Leconte

[b]Inspector: Pierrete dies on her 22nd birthday. That’s no age to die, people say, as though there were a right age. Who could have done it? No one, as usual. She probably shouted and struggled. But she shouldn’t have. The man panicked and killed her without meaning to. She died by mistake. How could someone lose their head over a few hundred franc in a handbag? They’ll find this accidental killer someday but no one will hold her in their arms again.

Inspector: I have a few questions for you but first I would like to know why people don’t like you.
Hire: They don’t. It’s true. But then, I don’t like them.
Inspector: That’s no reason. What did you do to make them hate you so much.
Hire: Nothing. That’s the point. I’m not very sociable or friendly and they don’t like that. Converstaions stop and then resume after I pass. It doesn’t bother me. I prefer silence. I don’t like to talk.
Inspector: You’re a strange guy.
Hire: I don’t agree. See? You’re just like the rest of them.

Hire: Yes. Life is horrible.

Hire: It can’t be easy to still be just an inspector at your age.

Hire: See, inspector? Some places I am not hated.

Inspector: We found a record on you. Six months for indecent assault.

Inspector: Tell me, Monsieur Hire, how long has it been since you came inside a woman?

Hire: How old would she have been? Seventy? Eighty? She’d been around forever. People loved her, this little old lady who spent all her time feeding the pigeons. Feeding the pigeons.
Prostitute [in brothel]: Come.
Hire: Shut up!
[pause]
Hire: All day, going from park to park, distributing birdseed by the handful. All the park rangers knew her and were touched. A photographer wanted to market a postcard of her surrounded by pigeons. She agreed. In her own way, she was famous. One day – I don’t know how it emerged – her will, maybe – people found out the birdseed was poisoned. For years, smiling all the time she’d been killing pigeons by the thousands. Her neighbors couldn’t believe it. She seemed so nice.
Prostiture: Come on, you’ll catch a cold.
Hire: No, I don’t want to.
Prostitute: Do you want someone else? Should I get Rosa?
Hire: No, not Rosa, not Jasmine, not anybody. I’M SICK OF SCREWING YOU SLUTS! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!

Alice: It’s nice to be watched. I enjoy it. But only because it’s you. I couldn’t with someone else. With you it’s different. I can see you’re sweet.
Hire: How ca n you say that? You don’t know me.
Alice [walking over to the bed]: Sit by me. We can talk more comfortably. Don’t you want to?
[pause]
Alice: Have you been watching me long?
Hire: Yes, every night.
Alice: When I went to bed what did you do?
Hire: Nothing. I waited.
Alice: What for?
Hire: I don’t know. I sleep very little.
Alice: So you watch all the time? You know all about me?
Hire: Not all, certainly, but some things.
Alice [reaching for his hand and rubbing it]: What’s you’re favorite part? When I undress, when I wash up?
Hire [suddenly guarded]: Go now. Don’t stay here.
Alice: I’m sorry, I thought…
Hire [out of the blue]: GET THE HELL OUT!

Inspector: She’s a cute girl. And no fool either. No fool.

Hire: Why go on playacting. We both know you’re not here for the plesasure of my company. You’re intelligent Alice. Don’t say you don’t understand. Or do you just not want to?
Alice: I’m cold. Won’t you take me in your arms. Love me a little?
Hire: Could you love two men?
Alice: Why not?
Hire: You’d go to any lengths then?
Alice: Kiss me. Please say you will.
[She kisses him tentatively]
Hire: You’re so sweet. I can’t believe how sweet you are to me. All for that charming Emile’s sake. You both want to know if I was watching that night. If I saw him come in and wake you to help him clean the blood of Pierrette Bourgeois, who he had just killed. And to hide his bloody raincoat. That’s what you want to know? Yes, I was watching. I know everything.

Hire: So, will still be still be nice to me? Still want me to take you lovingly in my arms? Still want me to kiss you? Still want me to watch you undress?
Alice: Why don’t you tell the police?
Hire: Because I can’t.

Hire: I see only one solution. Will you go away with me? Emile isn’t worthy of you. I can make you forget him. I’ll be patient. In any case time won’t matter there. You’ll love me at your own pace. I won’t rush you. I know how to protect you. You can trust me. No one will ever love you as I will – as I already do. I’ll devote every second of my life to you.

Inspector: If it wasn’t for Alice here I would never have known.

Hire: You’ll think me a fool, Alice, but I don’t feel any anger…just a deathly sadness.

Hire [voiceover]: “Dear Inspector, When you read this letter Alice and I will be far away. In the locker you’ll find the raincost Emile wore when he killed Pierrette Bourgeois…I’m taking Alice away because she is innocent and I want to protect her. Please don’t try to find us. I trust you. I think you’ll respect this happiness. We are happy…together. And nothing else matters.”[/b]

This film transports us back to the dark ages for women enduring the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy. The age of the back room [or the back alley] abortions. In England. And not as an exchange of polemics [abstractions] either. This is how such things actually did unfold. On both sides of the track.

And, if certain political forces manage to prevail here in America, may well again.

It won’t change many minds of course because there are always countervailing narratives that can be construed just as effectively from “the other side”.

More than anything, it distinguishes abortion as an exchange of abstract political arguments and abortion as your whole fucking world about to be turned upsidedown.

Even so, Vera’s approach to the whole thing [in the first half of the film] is almost surreal. She as entirely matter-of-fact about what she is doing. It throws some of the women off to say the least. This is anything but a matter-of-fact experience from their perspective.

IMDb

Filmed with no script, the film went on to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay for 2005 Oscar. Mike Leigh said that he “had to prepare the screenplay so it can be sent out to academy members. But actually the screenplay that was nominated doesn’t exist. The film is the screenplay.”

wiki

[b]In Vera Drake, Leigh incorporated elements of his own childhood. He grew up in north Salford, Lancashire, and experienced a very ordinary but socio-economically mixed life as the son of a doctor and a midwife. In the book The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real, Leigh said, “I lived in this particular kind of working-class district with some relations living in slightly leafier districts up the road. So there was always a tension, or at least a duality: those two worlds were forever colliding. So you constantly get the one world and its relationship with the other going on in my films”.

Leigh often uses improvisation in order to capture his actors’ unscripted emotions. When filming Vera Drake, only Imelda Staunton knew ahead of time that the subject of the film was abortion. None of the cast members playing the family members, including Staunton, knew that Vera was to be arrested until the moment the actors playing the police knocked on the door of the house they were using for rehearsals. Their genuine reactions of shock and confusion provided the raw material for their dialogue and actions.

Though much has been made of the controversial subject matter - back street abortion - its main theme is the buried family secret, the ticking time bomb that can lurk underneath even the most stable marriage. Much of the film’s cumulative power lies in its delineation of a rock solid family suddenly rocked to the core by a revelation that is literally beyond their comprehension: the fact that their beloved, and loving, mother is an abortionist. Why, I ask Leigh, does she keep her secret for so long?

The film has attracted some criticism from those who worked in midwifery during the 1950s. The chief concern is the method of abortion used by Vera Drake in the film. This involves using a Higginson bulb syringe filled with a solution of warm, soapy water and disinfectant, which is inserted into the woman’s uterus. This method is claimed by Jennifer Worth, a nurse and midwife in the 1950s and 1960s, to be invariably fatal. She calls the film itself “dangerous”, as it could be shown in countries where abortion is illegal and the method depicted copied by desperate women. However, a letter in response to her article claims a real-life experience of just such an abortion in Notting Hill in 1965.[/b]

trailer:
youtu.be/_5L3hGxHumY

VERA DRAKE
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

[b][repeated line]
Vera: Right dear, take your knickers off.

Susan: I have this friend who…she needs some help.

Ivy: I should be at work.
Vera: You can’t go to work in this state.
Ivy: Somebody has to earn the money. I’ll lose my job if this goes on.
Vera: It’s not your fault, dear.
Ivy: Try telling that to your boss. They don’t understand nothing, men. Bastards.

Psychiatrist: Tell me your feelings towards the father of the child. Do you love him?
Susan: No.
Psychiatrist: Does he love you?
Susan: No.
Psychiatrist: Did you love him at the point of conception?
Susan: No.
Psychiatrist: Did he force himself on you?
Susan: Yes.
Psychiatrist: Miss Wells…if you were to have the child, would you keep it or have it adopted?
Susan: I can’t have it. I’d rather kill myself.

Vera: I know why you’re here.
Inspector Webster: I beg your pardon?
Vera: I know why you’re here.
[pause]
Inspector Webster: Why are we here?
Vera: Because of what I do.
Inspector Webster: Because of what you do?
Vera: Yes.
Inspector Webster: What is it that you do, Mrs Drake?
[long pause]
Vera: I help young girls out.

Inspector Webster: Can you answer my question, please? How do you help them out?
Vera: When they can’t manage.
Inspector Webster: When they can’t manage?
Vera: That’s right.
Inspector Webster: You mean, when they’re pregnant? So, how do you help them out?
Vera: I help them start their bleeding again.
Inspector Webster: You help them to get rid of the baby? You perform an abortion. Is that right, Mrs. Drake? You perform abortions, don’t you?
Vera: That’s not what I do, dear. That’s what you call it. they need help. Who else are they gonna turn to? They’ve got no one. I help them out.

Inspector Webster: Did you help Pamela Barnes in this way?
Vera: Pamela…yes, I did. Is she all right?
Inspector Webster: She nearly died, Mrs. Drake…last night. She’s in a hospital, but she’ll live. Mrs. Drake, I’m arresting you for carrying out an illegal operation on Pamela Mary Barnes, of 37 Flixton Street, London, N1… on the 17th of November, 1950.

Inspector Webster: How much did you charge, Mrs Drake?
Vera: What?
Inspector Webster: How much did they pay you?
Vera: I don’t take money? I never take money. I wouldn’t…That’s not why…
Inspector Webster: You do it for nothing.
Vera: Of course I do. They need help.

Sid: How could you do those things, Mom? I don’t understand it.
Vera: I don’t expect you do, Sid.
Sid: Why’d you do it?
Vera: I had to.
Sid: It’s wrong though, ain’t it? Eh?
Vera: I don’t think so.
Sid: Of course it is! That’s little babies. I mean, you hear about these things, you read about it in the papers, but you don’t expect to come home to it on your own doorstep with your own mom! You ain’t got no right!

Reg: It ain’t fair. Me mum brought up six of us in two rooms. It’s all right if you’re rich. But if you can’t feed 'em, you can’t love 'em, now can you?

Vera: Poor Sid.
Stan: I know. Everything’s black and white for Sid. He’s young.[/b]

The judgment:

Judge: Vera Rose Drake, you have committeda crime, the gravity of which cannot be overestimated. The law is very clear and you have willfully broken that law. And furthermore, in so doing, you have put at risk the life of a vulnerable young woman. And but for the timely intervention of the medical profession…you might have been before me on an even more serious charge than the one that has brought you here today. Now… I have heard your plea of guilty, and I have taken that into account… and I have listened very carefully to the submissions of your council. But nothing has been advanced me today on your behalf which would persuade me to take any course other than to impose a custodial sentence. Indeed… the extreme seriousness of your crime is bound to be reflected in the sentence that I am about to pass. And that must serve as a deterrent to others. I therefore sentence you to a term of imprisonment, which will be two years and six months. Take her down.

Of course, had abortion been legal back then, “the vulnerable young woman” would have been considerably less at risk. Though, for the fetus, the results would have been the same.

The corporate lawyer will do anything and everything to bolster the bottom line of whatever particular company he or she represents. And if that means destroying the lives of others – or just reaming them inside out it – it can be rationalized easily enough: the law’s the law.

This is the part libertarians brush aside by insisting “real capitalism wouldn’t work like this.” Bullshit. This is the way real capitalism does works. It has to work that way if competition is to prevail. You do whatever it takes to keep your costs down to an absolute minimum. Because if you don’t, the competition will. And practically everybody is expendable.

CLASS ACTION
Directed by Michael Apted

[b]Maggie: If you guys wants to learn to be big time lawyers you’ve got to learn to lie better.
Brian: Maggie. Maggie. Lawyers never lie. We just tell the truth judiciously to guarantee utter confusion.

Jedediah: This firm was built on David and Goliath cases. They’re just not aound anymore. You got all these fascist Reagan judges. They hear you’re after a big corporation, they throw your ass out of court. It’s just too goddamn discouraging.

Jedediah: You’re an associate at Quinn-Califant. They pop out baby lawyers like you like a shark grows teeth row after row after row, forever.

Jedediah: Does it matter to her that these cars are blowing up? No. Does it matter to her that people – babies – are being killed? No. Does she care that she’s in bed with the vilest kind of corporate vermin?

Quinn: I’m worried about this Steven Kellum deposition.
Maggie: No, it’s completely under control. He’s wearing down.
Quinn: If he gets into court in that wheelchair with this story he’ll be far too sympathetic.
Maggie: I understand that, Mr. Quinn.
Quinn: I can’t put this in strong enough terms. I want him eliminated as an effective witness.
Maggie: Yes sir.
Quinn: Are you prepared to do that?
Maggie: Absolutely.

Jedediah: What’s a good set of 8 x 10s cost these days, 10, 15 bucks? This is important Fred. What’s the going rate for a man’s dignity, huh? You stole his wife, his kid, his body. Now I guess you spend another $10 or $15 and get the whole package. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Money. He’s after your money and you’re out to protect it. Well, you hold onto it real tight because without a heart and soul that’s all you’ll ever have.

Pavel: The depth charge!

Pavel: You want to know about the circuits…it’s just a simple reaction.
Maggie: So what you’re saying is that if the car is hit from the rear when the left turn signal is functioning it just might blow up.
Pavel: Correct. Well, if you are really interested in this why don’t you just read my report.

Maggie: People were blown up sir.
Getchell: We changed that light in the next model year.

Michael: You’re going to break rule number one, which is don’t fuck your friends. If you turn on me, every lawyer here is going to turn on you. You’ll be on the bricks faster than you can dream of. And when you try to tie into another firm, you’ll be lucky to get hired as a messenger.

Quinn: Bottom line—it is within the letter of the law.

Maggie: Why didn’t you just change the blinker circuit?
Getchell: I told Flannery about the problem. He called in his head bean counter – risk managment expert. Flannery shows him the data and asks how much it would cost to retrofit…
Maggie: You mean recall?
Getchell: Yeah. You got it. To retrofit 175,000 units. You mutiply that times $300 a car give or take. You’re looking at right around $50 million. So the risk guy, he crunches the numbers some more. He figures you have one of these fireball collisions every 3,000 cars. That 158 explosions.
Maggie: Which is almost exactly as many plaintiffs as there are.
Getchell: These guys know their numbers. So you multiply that times $200,000 per lawsuit. That’s assuming everyone sues and wins. $30 million max. See? It’s cheaper to deal with the lawsuits than it is to fix the blinker. It’s what the bean counters call a simple actuarial analysis.[/b]

And, after all, it’s not very likely to be your family and friends that get maimed and mutilated and killed. And of those that do? Well, it’s not murder, is it? No laws were broken, were they?

[b]Nick [to Maggie]: And what the hell have you done? You’re probably going to beat him, Maggie. We both know that. You got the staff and the money to grind us into the ground. But even if he loses he’ll know he went down on the right side. You’ll have your big success, your partnership…and what else?

Quinn: Come on, Jed, some of your clients weren’t even hurt that bad.

Quinn: Damn it, Jed, what’s it going to take?!
Jedediah: Bottom line, Fred? You can’t even count that high.[/b]

A few good men?

Well, you know what’s coming first:

Yet another film about the United States military in which the focus is on something that has almost nothing whatsoever to do with its actual [primary] function in the world. Code Red? That is the crime here?! That’s like focusing on the breakin at the Watergate complex and completely ignoring the Gulf of Tonkin, the illegal bombing of Cambodia, Operation Chaos, COINTELLPRO etc… The secret government that is always just below the surface here.

In this day and age, the U.S. military exist by and large to sustain a predatory foreign policy, the military industrial complex and the war economy. After World War 2 and the Cold War, “national security” has always been a distant second.

On the other hand, given all that – that Rob Reiner is yet another of Phil Ochs’s “love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal” liberals – this is a truly absorbing movie. And Code Reds [in this context] speak volumes regarding the mentalities of many lifers. These are the Dick Cheney soldiers and they have the potential to become very, very dangerous in the right political context.

IMDb

The original play was inspired by an actual Code Red at Guantanamo Bay. Lance Corporal David Cox and 9 other enlisted men tied up a fellow Marine and severely beat him, for snitching to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Cox was acquitted and later Honorably Discharged. In 1994, David Cox mysteriously vanished, and his bullet-riddled body was found three months later. His murder remains unsolved.

A FEW GOOD MEN
Directed by Rob Reiner

[b]Galloway: Lieutenant, how long have you been in the Navy?
Kaffee: Going on nine months now.
Galloway: And how long have you been out of law school?
Kaffee: A little over a year.
Galloway: I see.
Kaffee: Have I done something wrong?
Galloway: No, it’s just that when I petitioned division to have counsel assigned, I was hoping that I’d be taken seriously.
Kaffee: No offense taken, in case you were wondering.

Galloway: Tell your friend not to get cute down there, the Marines at Gitmo are fanatical.
Weinberg: Fanatical about what?
Galloway: About being Marines.

Kaffee: Lt. Kendrick…may I call you John?
Kendrick: No, you may not.
Kaffee: Have I done something to offend you?
Kendrick: No, I like all you Navy boys. Every time we’ve gotta go someplace to fight, you fellas always give us a ride.

Galloway: Do you think he was murdered?
Kendrick: I believe in God and Jesus Christ, so I’ll say this: Santiago’s death is a tragedy. But he died because he had no code, and no honour. And God was watching.

Jessep: You know, it just hit me. She outranks you, Danny.
Kaffee: Yes sir.
Jessep: I wanna tell you something. And listen up, 'cause I realy mean this. You’re the luckiest man in the world. There is nothing on this earth sexier, believe me, gentlemen, than a woman you have to salute in the morning. Promote 'em all, I say, 'cause this is true: if you haven’t gotten a blowjob from a superior officer, well, you’re just letting the best in life pass you by.

Jessep: You see Danny, I can deal with the bullets, and the bombs, and the blood. I don’t want money, and I don’t want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy. You gotta ask me nicely.

Dawson: We joined the Marines because we wanted to live our lives by a certain code, and we found it in the Corps. Now you’re asking us to sign a piece of paper that says we have no honor. You’re asking us to say we’re not Marines. If a court decides that what we did was wrong, then I’ll accept whatever punishment they give. But I believe I was right sir, I believe I did my job, and I will not dishonor myself, my unit, or the Corps so I can go home in six months… Sir.[/b]

How fucking blind is he?

[b]Kaffee: You and Dawson, you both live in the same dreamworld. It doesn’t matter what I believe. It only matters what I can prove! So please, don’t tell me what I know, or don’t know; I know the LAW.
Galloway: You know nothing about the law. You’re a used-car salesman, Daniel. You’re an ambulance chaser with a rank. You’re nothing. Live with that.

Kaffee: You’re Aunt Ginny?
Aunt Ginny: Uh-huh.
Kaffee: I’m sorry, I was expecting someone older.
Aunt Ginny: So was I.

Galloway: Why do you hate them so much?
Weinberg: They beat up on a weakling; that’s all they did. The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn’t like him. So, they killed him. And why? Because he couldn’t run very fast.

Ross: You got bullied into that courtroom, Danny, by everyone. By Dawson. By Galloway. Shit, I practically dared you. You got bullied into that courtroom by the memory of a dead lawyer.
[Ross walks away]
Kaffee: You’re a lousy fucking softball player, Jack!
Ross: Your boys are going down, Danny. I can’t stop it anymore.

Kendrick: Lance Corporal Dawson was given a below average rating because he had committed a crime.
Kaffee: A crime? What crime did he commit? Lieutenant Kendrick? Dawson brought a hungry guy some food…what crime did he commit?
Kendrick: He disobeyed an order!

Kaffee: Maybe, if we work at it, we can get Dawson charged with the Kennedy assassination.

Kaffee: Anyway, since we seem to be out of witnesses, I thought I’d drink a little.
Galloway: I still think we can win.
Kaffee: Maybe you should drink a little.

Galloway: Why did you ask Jessep for the transfer order?
Kaffee: I wanted it!
Galloway: You could have got it anywhere. You just wanted to see Jessep’s reaction. Your instinct was right. Now let’s call Jessep, and end this.
Kaffee: What possible good would that do?
Galloway: He ordered the Code Red.
Kaffee: He did? That’s great! And of course, you have proof? Oh, I forgot, you missed the day that law was taught at Law School?!

Galloway: You put him on the stand and you get it from him!
Kaffee: Oh, we get it from him! Yes! No problem! We get it from him.
[turns to Sam as if he were Jessup on the stand]
Kaffee: Colonel Jessup, isn’t it true that you ordered the Code Red on Santiago?
Weinberg: Listen, we’re all a little…
Kaffee: [interrupts with game-show buzzer sound] eeehhhhh! I’m sorry, your time’s run out! What do we have for the losers, judge? Well, for our defendants, it’s a life time at exotic Fort Leavenworth! And, for defense counsel Kaffee, that’s right, it’s a court martial! Yes, Johnny! After falsely accusing a highly decorated Marine officer of conspiracy and perjury, Lieutenant Kaffee will have a long and prosperous career teaching…typewriter maintenance at the Rocco Globbo School for Women! Thank you for playing “Should we or should we not follow the advice of the galactically stupid!”

Kaffee: Good. Jessup told Kendrick to order the code red, Kendrick did and our clients followed the order. The cover-up isn’t our case - to win Jessup needs to tell the court members that he ordered the code red.
Weinberg: And now you think you can get him to just say it?
Kaffee: I think he wants to say it. I think he’s pissed off that he’s gotta hide from this. I think he wants to say that he made a command decision and that’s the end of it.
[Starts imitating Jessup]
Kaffee: He eats breakfast 300 yards away from 4000 Cubans that are trained to kill him. And nobody’s going to tell him how to run his unit least of all the Harvard mouth in his faggoty white uniform. I need to shake him, put him on the defensive and lead him right where he’s dying to go.

Kaffee: Is the colonel’s underwear a matter of national security?

Kaffee: Colonel, a moment ago you said you told Kendrick to say that Santiago wasn’t to be touched. He was clear on what you wanted?
Jessep: Crystal.
Kaffee: Can he have ignored the order?
Jessep: Ignored the order?
Kaffee: Or forgot it?
Jessep: No.
Kaffee: Could he have thought, “The old man is wrong”?
Jessep: No.
Kaffee: When Lt. Kendrick talked to the men, any chance they ignored him?
Jessep: Ever been in the infantry, son? Ever served in a forward area? Ever put your life in another man’s hands, and his in yours? We follow orders, son. Otherwise people die. It’s that simple. Are we clear? Are we clear?!
Kaffee: Crystal. One last question, before I call Airmen O’Malley and Rodriguez. If you ordered that Santiago wasn’t to be touched, and your orders are always followed, then why was Santiago in danger? Why would it be necessary to transfer him off the base?
Jessep: He was a substandard Marine. He was being transferred…
Kaffee: That’s not what you said. You said he was transferred because he was in danger. I said, “grave danger?” and you said…we can have the court reporter read it…
Jessep: I know what I said!
Kaffee: Then why the two orders?
Jessep: Sometimes men take matters into their own hands.
Kaffee: But your men never did. Your men obey orders or people die. So Santiago shouldn’t have been in any danger, right?
Jessep: You snotty little bastard.
Ross: You honor, I request a recess.
Kaffee: I’d like an answer to my question.
Judge: The court will wait for an answer.
Kaffee: If Lt. Kendrick gave an order that Santiago wasn’t to be touched, why did he have to be transferred? Kendrick ordered a Code Red, because you told him to! And when it went bad, you signed a phoney transfer and fixed the logs! You coerced the doctor! Colonel Jessep, did you order the Code Red?
Judge: Consider yourself in Contempt!
Kaffee: Colonel Jessep, did you order the Code Red?
Judge: You don’t have to answer that question!
Jessep: I’ll answer the question!
[to Kaffee]
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to.
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can’t handle the truth!
[pauses]
Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?
Jessep: I did the job I…
Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?
Col. Jessep: You’re Goddamn right I did![/b]

Now, in the context of Hitler and the Nazis [and for some the Commies] this makes sense. There really are legitimate national security concerns. But no way in hell does it make sense in regard to the “terrorists”.

If you choose to interact with thugs be prepared for them [eventually] to seep into the parts of your life reserved for those who are not thugs. But then her husband is in prison. And he is getting out in a week.

This is one of those films where “atmosphere” is all pervasive. It’s brimming with the stuff. And here the atmosphere is ominous—you are always on the edge of your seat waiting for it to bubble up to the surface. And then explode.

You know it’s just a movie but you know these characters are art immitating the real world. Even if it’s not based on “actual events” you know the actual events are out there.

And these fuckers are always double-crossing each other into oblivion.

What do films like this have to do with Newtown? Everything? Nothing at all? The thing drips with violence. It’s drenched in it.

DRIVE
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

[b]Nino: Fuck you eating chink food in my fucking restaurant?
Bernie: What’s a Jew doing running a pizzeria?

Shannon: Kid, I want you to meet Mr. Bernie Rose!
Bernie: Nice to meet you.
[Bernie sticks out his hand to shake; Driver does not take it]
Driver: My hands are a little dirty.
Bernie: So are mine.

Nino: You paid three-hundred fucking grand for this piece of shit?
Bernie: I paid for it - out of my own pocket. This is just the shell; it’s the inside that…
Nino: Now this…that is one motherfucking, fine-ass, pussy-mobile, motha-fucka’! Damn!
Bernie: Shannon, sell him the car.
Shannon: He wouldn’t be able to find pussy in a whore house…

Irene [sitting out in the hall as music blares from her apartment]: Sorry about the noise.
Driver: I was going to call the cops.
Irene: I wish you would.

Redneck: You’re Shannon’s buddy right? We met last year. You drove me and my brother back from Palm Springs. We hired another wheelman. I spent six months in jail. My brother, he got himself killed. I got this sweet job coming up.
Driver: How ‘bout this. You shut your mouth. Or I’ll kick your teeth down your throat and I’ll shut it for you.
Redneck: Nice seein’ you again.

Driver: What is it you got there? Can I see?
[Benicio hands Driver a bullet]
Driver: One of those men gave you that?
Benicio: They told me not to lose it.
Driver: You want me to keep that for you?
Benicio: Okay.

Driver: If I drive for you, you get your money. You tell me where we start, where we’re going, where we’re going afterwards. I give you five minutes when we get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours. No matter what. Anything a minute on either side of that and you’re on your own. I don’t sit in while you’re running it down. I don’t carry a gun. I drive.
Cook: You look like you’re hard to work with.

Driver [after slapping Blanche and holding her down]: Now, you just got a little boy’s father killed. And you almost got us killed. And now you’re lying to me. So how about this? From now on, every word out of your mouth is the truth. Or I’m going to hurt you.

Driver: Whose money do I have?

Nino: What do you get out of it?
Driver: Just that. Out of it.

Nino: You’re not good at this, are you?

Shannon: How was I supposed to know everything led to Nino?!

Bernie: Let me tell you something. Anybody…anybody find out you stole from the family, we’re both dead.
Nino: What fucking family? The family who still calls me a fucking kike! To my face!

Bernie: Now it’s your turn to clean up after me.

Driver: [to Bernie] You know the story about the scorpion and the frog? Your friend Nino didn’t make it across the river.

Driver [on the phone with Irene]: Can I talk to you? I won’t keep you long. I have to go somewhere and I don’t think I can come back. But I just wanted you to know. Getting to be around you and Benicio was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Bernie: Here’s what I’m prepared to offer. You give me the money, the girl is safe. Forever. Nobody knows about her. She’s off the map. I can’t offer you the same. So, this is what I would suggest. We conclude our deal. We’ll shake hands. You start the rest of your life. Any dreams you have, or plans, or hopes for your future…I think you’re going to have to put that on hold. For the rest of your life you’re going to be looking over your shoulder. I’m just telling you this because I want you to know the truth. But the girl is safe.[/b]

Howard Stern, the janitor of God and the Holy Grail. What’s not to like? Other than Robin Williams impersonating Jim Carrey. Over the top at times? You bet. And sappy.

Still: It’s funny how paths can cross once the nut goes berzerk.

Warning: It jumps the shark now and again. Especially when they go courting Lydia. Not to mention Jack storming the castle into la la land.

It’s hard to pin this one down. It makes you almost want to be crazy, yourself. As opposed to mad. Or certainly sane.

IMDb

For the “waltzing commuter” scene in Grand Central station, the main hall of the terminal was shut down for the shoot from 8pm until the first commuter trains arrived at 5:30 am the next morning. Lighting effects outside of the large terminal windows made it seem to be 5:00 in the evening the entire night, and over 400 extras waltzed around the mirror-ball topped Information Booth again and again throughout the night. Now, on New Year’s, an orchestra plays there and people waltz for real.

Look for Tom Waits.

THE FISHER KING
Directed by Terry Gilliam

[b]Jack [on the radio]: We want to hear about the back seats of limos…about the ruined lives of people we want to be.

Jack [on the radio]: Edwin! I told you about these people. They only mate with their own kind. It’s yuppie inbreeding. That’s why they’re retarded and wear the same clothes. They don’t feel love. They only negotiate love moments. They’re evil, Edwin. They’re repulsed by imperfection, horrified by the banal…everything that America stands for! They must be stopped before it’s too late. It’s us or them.

Sondra: It’s a sitcom Jack. They’re not defining pi.
Jaxk: I’ll remember that the next time you get excited by drawing pubic hair on Raisin Bran.

Jack: It’s important to think, Anne. It’s what separates us from lentils.

Anne: Didn’t you say that what you liked about our relationship is that we didn’t have to think? We could just be there for each other.
Jack: Suicidal paranoiacs’ll say anything to get laid.

Jack: Hey, Anyone here named Jiminy?

Jack [drunk and talking to the Pinocchio doll]: You ever read any Nietzsche? Nietzsche says there’s two kinds of people in the world: people who are destined for greatness like Walt Disney and Hitler. Then there’s the rest of us, he called us “the bungled and the botched.” We get teased. We sometimes get close to greatness, but we never get there. We’re the expendable masses. We get pushed in front of trains, take poison aspirin…get gunned down in Dairy Queens.

Thug: It looks like night of the living dead!

Jack [to Parry]: Some billionaire’s got the Holy Grail in his library on Fifth Avenue?

Jack [to Anne]: I wish there was some way I could just pay the fine and go home.

Jack: Asshole. He didn’t even look at you.
Disabled Veteran: He’s payin’ so he don’t have to look. See…guy goes to work every day, eight hours a day, seven days a week. Gets his nuts so tight in a vice that he starts questioning the very fabric of his existence. Then one day, ‘bout quitting time, Boss calls him into the office and says, “Hey Bob, whyncha come on in here and kiss my ass for me, will you?” Well, he says, “Hell with it. I don’t care what happens, I just want to see the expression on his face as I jab this pair of scissors into his arm.”
[sighs]
Disabled Veteran: Then he thinks of me. He says, "Waitaminit. I got both my arms, I got both my legs. At least I’m not begging for a living. Sure enough, Bob’s gonna put those scissors down and pucker right up. See, I’m what you call kind of a “moral traffic light”, really. I’m like sayin’, “Red! Go no further!”

Jack: Where would King Arthur be without Guinevere?
Parry: Happily married, probably.
Jack: Well, that’s a bad…that’s a bad example.

Parry: [singing] Holding my penis…what a wonderful way of saying how much you love me.

Lydia: I think you’re a little attracted to me. And you’ll probably want to come upstairs for some coffee. Then we’ll probably have a drink. And talk and get to know each other a little better, get comfortable. And then you’ll…You’ll sleep over. And in the morning, you’ll awake and you’ll be distant. And you won’t be able to stay for breakfast, We’ll exchange phone numbers. And you’ll leave and never call. And I’ll go to work and I’ll feel so good for the first hour, and then…ever so slowly, I’ll turn into a piece of dirt.

Parry: I’m not coming up to your apartment. That was never my intention.
Lydia: Oh, you don’t want to.
Parry: Oh, no, I want to. I have a hard-on for you the size of Florida.

Anne: All right, let me just ask you one thing. Do you love me?
Jack: I don’t know.
Anne: You can’t even give me that, can you? Jesus, Jack! What were you planning on doing here? Pack up and drop me a note when you met somebody new?
Jack: I have no idea what I was planning to do. I just said I need time.
Anne: Bullshit! If you’re gonna hurt me, hurt me now. Not some drawn-out hurt that takes months of my life…because you don’t have the balls!

Anne: Poor Lydia. She finally finds her prince and he falls into a coma.

Jack [to Parry in a coma]: I don’t feel responsible for you or for anybody. Everybody’s got bad things that happen to them. I’m not God! I don’t decide…People survive. Say something! Everything’s been going great. Great. I’m gonna have my own cable talk show. With an incredible equity, I might add. I’ve got an incredible…incredibly fucking gorgeous girlfriend. I’m living an incredible fucking life. So don’t lay there in your comfortable coma and think I’ll risk all that because I feel responsible for you. I’m not responsible! I don’t feel guilty. You’ve got it easy. I’m out there every fucking day trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing. No matter what I have, it feels like I have nothing. I don’t feel sorry for you. It’s easy being nuts. Try being me!

Jack [Swinging on a rope]: Thank God nobody ever looks up in this town.[/b]

Bottom line: Liberal to the core. Another expose on the “best and the brightest”. In other words, with the actual nature of our political and economic system no where to be found.

Someone called this the Spinal Tap of politics. True. Only this comes much, much, much closer to reality. It’s less that they are morons than their proximity to the most dangerous buttons on earth.

Comedies don’t get blacker than this. Or funnier. Promoting war or preventing it? Really, what’s the difference?

It got a 94% fresh rating at RT. What idiots could not possibly like it? Is Tony Blair, Dick Cheney or Dubya Bush a film critic? :wink:

This really is a funny movie. And, in the context of, say, the war in Iraq, infuriating. These fucking dolts [along with our “leaders”] are running the country!

And all because there really is no way to know for sure what is “the right thing to do”. And because money doesn’t talk, it screams. Mostly from the general direction of the military industrial complex. Completely invisible here though.

wiki

Iannucci has stated: “We don’t go up to White House level, we deal mainly with state department underlings, the kind of people that actually make decisions with enormous political consequences.”

Another level they missed? Wall Street.

IMDb

[b]Prior to filming, Armando Iannucci gained access to the US Department of State by flashing a simple photo ID to a security guard and saying “BBC. I’m here for the 12:30.” He then spent a few hours walking around taking pictures for his set designers. The meeting in which General Miller is stood up by Linton Barwick was also scheduled for 12:30.

Many scenes set at 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister of the United Kingdoms’s office) were actually filmed at the real 10 Downing Street. The production gained access to the location largely because the staff were extremely excited to meet the actors who were playing their fictional counterparts.[/b]

trailer:
youtu.be/dQrqMkCuHqA

IN THE LOOP
Directed by Armando Iannucci

[b]Malcolm: Diarrhea? This is the minister of international development here, he should be talking about food parcels…not fucking, arse-spraying mayhem!

Malcolm [on phone]: He did not say “unforeseeable”. You may have heard him say that, but he did not say that.

Suzy: He sounded like a chicken with a wasp up his ass.
Toby: You give me a week, I’ll have him sounding like a chicken without a wasp up its ass.

Malcolm: We’ve already got enough fucking Pentagon goons here to stage a fucking coup d’état.

Judy: Why wasn’t I told about this?
Malcolm: Why the fuck would I tell you about it? I told you to fuck off twice.
Judy: It’s a scheduled media appearance by this department’s secretary of state so it falls well within my purview.
Malcolm: Within your purview?
Judy: Yes.
Malcolm: Where do you think you are, some fucking Regency costume drama? This is a government department, not a fucking Jane Austen novel.

Malcolm: You, hey, put the snifter out there that if the BBC ambushes a minister with another surprise question about the war, I’ll drop a bomb on them.
Judy: I can’t do that, can I? That’s political.
Malcolm: Does that not fit within your purview, Marie Antoinette? Why don’t you just scuttle off back to fucking Cranford and play around with your tea and your cakes and your fucking horse cocks. Let them eat cock!

Judy: They’re all kids in Washington. It’s like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns.

Karen: I think it’s worth noting that ministers in the UK government, such as our colleague here, Simon Foster, have made it very clear that they feel currently war is unforeseeable. Isn’t that right, Simon?
Simon: Er…well, yes. That’s…That’s what I said. And I stick to what I said. That doesn’t mean that what I said won’t change…in the future. Um…it’s not immutable or mutable. It’s…It’s…It’s… It’s developing.

Chad: You’re like the woman from The Omen. You’ve given birth to a demon, and now it’s gonna kill you.

Malcolm: “Climbing the mountain of conflict”?! You sounded like the Nazi Julie Andrews!

Simon: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Why didn’t we nail the line?
Judy: Simon, I did try to warn you…
Simon: Yes, you tried to warn me, but you didn’t actually stop me, did you…
Judy: Well I can’t tackle you to the ground…
Simon: …by shouting ‘train’ at somebody as they get hit by a train? You should go ‘train! there’s a fucking train!!’

Malcolm: Simon, I don’t like finding out about people employed by this government via the news unless they’ve just died.

Karen: Linton has set up a secret war committee. I just know it. I mean, Linton is an absolute lunatic, Liza. He is dangerous. The voices in his head are now sing barbershop together.

Simon: I’m on the verge. I’m not in any way decided.
Malcolm: Christ on a bendy-bus. Don’t be such a fucking faff arse.
Simon: No, I’m standing my ground…on the verge.

Karen [to Liza]: What you have to do is you’ve got to look for the ten dullest-named committees happening out of the executive branch. Because Linton is not going to call it the “Big Horrible War Committee”. He’s gonna hide it behind a name like “Diverse Strategy”.

Liza: “PWIP PIP”? Oh, God, it already has an acronym.

Simon: Why does Judy have control of the blinds? I’m a government minister and I don’t have control of my own blinds.

Linton: I can’t stand to see a woman bleed from the mouth. It reminds me of that Country & Western music which I cannot abide. That stuff is just choking the airwaves.

Gen. Miller: Twelve thousand troops. But that’s not enough. That’s the amount that are going to die. And at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.

Maclom [to Toby] Don’t mention this to the press, OK? Don’t mention it to anyone. If the press get a whiff that there’s a war committee even a cardboard one, every fucker in this town is gonna turn up and try and get on it.

Liza: You see this mosh pit? Well, they’re mostly house staffers, senators’ interns. Tonight they rage hard, but tomorrow they go back to the Hill and argue noise-reduction legislation.

Malcolm: You say nothing, okay? You stay detached. Otherwise that’s what I’ll do to your retinas.
Simon: Right, can I go to bed now, please?
Malcolm: No, no, no, no. We are gonna stay here, and you are gonna rehearse saying nothing.
Simon: Am I being tortured?

Simon: Tobes, I don’t want to have to read you the riot act here, but I am going to have to read you some extracts from the riot act. Like section one, paragraph one: don’t leave your boss twisting in the wind, and then burst in late smelling like a pissed seaside donkey.
Toby: All right, I was late for the meeting. I am sorry, but it’s not like I threw up in there, is it?
Simon: No, you’re right, I’m being unfair. I should be thanking you for not throwing up. Well done, you’re a star. You didn’t wet yourself, did you? You’re in the right city. You didn’t say anything overtly racist. You didn’t pull your dick out and start plucking it and shouting, “Willy banjo.” No, I’m being really unfair. You’d got so much right without actually being there for the beginning of one of the most important moments of my career. Thanks, you’re a legend.

Judy [on phone]: Malcolm?
Malcolm: What?
Judy: Do you like how I’m telling you what’s going on where you are?

Malcolm Fucking hung up, haven’t you? You fucking hoity-toity fucking…
Tourist: Hey, buddy? Enough with the curse words, all right?
Malcolm: Kiss my sweaty balls, you fat fuck.

Karen: Yes, Assistant Secretary, on point six, it feels like there’s already been an assumption that we’re invading and don’t you think that we should discuss the practical implications? I mean, this is, after all, the War Committee.
Linton: This is the Future Planning Committee.
Karen: Well, unofficially, it is called the War Committee.
Linton: Well, Karen, unofficially, we can call anything whatever we want. I mean, unofficially, this is a shoe, but it’s not, Karen, it is a glass of water. And this is the Future Planning Committee.
Gen. Miller: Well, unofficially, this appears to be bullshit.

Malcom: Linton! Linton!
Linton: Mr Tucker, isn’t it? Nice to see you again.
Malcolm: Are you fucking me about?
Linton: Is there a problem, Mr Tucker?
Malcolm: I’ve just come from a briefing with a nine-year-old child.
Linton: You’re talking about AJ. AJ is one of our top guys. He’s a Stanton College Prep, Harvard. One of the brightest and best.
Malcolm: Well, his briefing notes were written in alphabetti spaghetti. When I left, I nearly tripped up over his fucking umbilical cord.

Simon: Oh, great. Meeting my constituents. It’s like being Simon Cowell but without the ability to say, “Fuck off, you’re mental.”

Karen: I’m wondering where you were in committee, Simon. I called for back-up and you sat there like a dumb sack of shit. Only maybe worse, because, actually, on a molecular level, shit is probably fizzling with energy.
Simon: I have to say, Karen, I do have a clear strategy on this, which is I’m playing the long game.
Karen: They’ve bounced us into a short game, and you just sat there like a…what do you call it in England? A wanker.

Jamie: There’s a cartoon of you in here as a walrus.
Simon: A walrus? I’m not fat, I don’t even have a moustache. Fuck, they’ve given me tusks!

Gen. Miller [to Karen, about Linton]: He’s got his little cannons and he’s got his little guns, and…This is the problem with civilians wanting to go to war. Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go again unless you absolutely fucking have to. It’s like France.

Gen. Miller: I’m a voracious reader. I’m the Gore Vidal of the Pentagon.
Karen: Gore’s gay.
Gen. Miller: No, he’s not!
Karen: I beg to differ, but…
Gen. Miller: He’s gay? 'Cause I’ve been saying that Gore Vidal line.
Karen: He is gay.
Gen. Miller: [pause] Guess I’d better stop saying that then.

Simon: We called some builders. They didn’t turn up when they said they would.
Malcolm: What did you expect? They’re builders! Have you ever seen a film where the hero is a builder? No, no, because they never fucking turn up in the nick of time. Bat-builder? Spider-builder? Huh? That’s why you never see a superhero with a hod.

Suzy: Has she got big tits?
Toby: Oh, Christ alive. Yes, actually, she has. She’s got massive tits. Yes. Look them up on Google Earth. They’ve got their own postcode. They’re so enormous that they actually suck in other tits from the surrounding area.

Toby: Suzy, this is probably going to sound a bit odd under the circumstances, but…
Suzy: A quickie?

Malcolm: We have got the fucking intelligence.
Simon: I haven’t seen it.
Malcolm: The intelligence we’ve got is so deep, so fucking hard, it’ll fucking puncture your kidneys.
Simon: Where’s it coming from?
Malcolm: There is an informant. Ice Man.
Simon: Ice Man?
Malcolm: I don’t name them. Ice Man. Yeah. And the fact is, the stuff that he’s given us is… I’ve seen it. It would make your blood run cold and clot and turn your insides into fucking black puddings.[/b]

For those of you who might have forgotten, that’s “Curveball”.

[b]Malcolm: Right. Was it you?
Simon: No, it wasn’t. No. What?
Malcolm: You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Simon: No. And…And…whatever it was, I almost certainly didn’t do it.
Malcolm: Was it you, the baby from Eraserhead?
Toby: No, no.
Malcolm: Then it must have been you, the woman from The Crying Game.
Judy: It wasn’t me.

Gen. Miller: Got everything you need?
Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Whoa, whoa, whoa. General Flintstone. Was it you? Did you leak PWIP PIP? I mean, I know you can’t fire a gun, but can you use a fax?
Gen. Miller: No, I didn’t leak PWIP PIP. I do everything up front. OK? Not like some creepy little gay mercenary that sneaks around doing other people’s dirty work.
Malcolm: Hey, I am doing my own work. I’m doing my job.
Gen. Miller: No, you’re doing Linton’s dirty work. You’re his English bitch and you don’t even know it. I bet if I went into your hotel room tonight, I’d see you on all fours, little fishnets on, him hanging onto the back of you.
Malcolm: Oh, that’s nice, that’s nice. That’s tough talk coming from a fucking armchair general. Why don’t you put your feet up on a poof and go back to sleep?
Gen. Miller: Tucker, you might be a scary little poodle fucker, back there in London, but here you’re nothing. You know what you look like? A squeezed dick. You’ve got a little blue vein running up the side of your head. See, that’s where I’d put the bullet. But I’d have to stand back, cos you look like you’d be a squirter.

Gen. Miller: So you’re not resigning?
Karen: Are you still playing the hawk?
Simon: Well, in…in a way I’m playing a much cleverer game than that. I’m a fake hawk.
Gen. Miller: [pause] A what?
Simon Foster: …Fake hawk?
Gen. Miller: [pause] You’re an idiot. Or are you being a fake idiot?

Judy: I’ll just leave you to your thoughts, OK?
Simon: I haven’t got any thoughts. I’m just staring vacantly into space while a distant voice in the back of my head goes, “Oh, shit!” like a car alarm in the middle of the night.

Malcolm [to Toby]: I am putting you on a probationary period from today, until the end of recorded time.

Malcolm [to Linton]: Y’know, I’ve come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you. You are a real boring fuck. Sorry, sorry, I know you disapprove of swearing so I’ll sort that out. You are a boring F, star, star, CUNT!

Gen. Miller: My loyalty is to the kids. I am a soldier.
Karen: You’re not a soldier.
Gen. Miller: I’ve been a soldier my whole life! What do you mean I’m not a soldier? I’m a soldier! Look at the uniform - what, do you think I’m one of the fucking Village People?
Karen: When did you shoot a guy last?
Gen. Miller: What, just because I haven’t shot someone in fifteen years. I’m not a soldier? You know, the Army doesn’t make you drag some bullet-ridden bloody corpse into the Pentagon every five years to renew your soldier’s license!
Karen: The war is unnecessary! And if you were a good general, you’d have some balls!
Gen. Miller: Look, shut up about my balls. My balls have been around. You’ve got no idea where my balls have been.
Karen: I can talk about your balls all you want, cos I remember when…
Gen. Miller: Oh, I fucked you once 20 years ago, and I never hear the end of it! Every time we’re together, I hear this shit. I don’t even remember it!
Karen: Come on, Chad. We have to draft resignation announcements.
Chad: Actually, I think I might stay with the General, if that’s OK. If he’s staying, I might stay with him, see what assistance I can furnish.
Karen: OK…General Shrek and his faithful, talking donkey.[/b]

A bunch a fuckin losers? Sure. Nickel and dime stuff day after day after day. But you still practice not saying it to their face. If you’re in the neighborhood.

And they ain’t exactly living their lives like zombies. This being, you know, a man’s world.

Still, sometimes I think folks like Scorsese and Tarantino make films like this so they can use the N word. He said in jest.

Supposedly the film is based on actual experiences in Scorsese’s life. Well, it’s up to you to figure how true that is.

98% fresh rating at RT. One critic out of 48 didn’t like it. “Doesn’t cut it for me, I’m afraid”, said Luke Thompson of New Times. Sometimes I feel that way too. But sometimes I don’t.

IMDb

[b]While many consider this to be the quintessential New York film, very little of it was actually shot there. Many scenes, including the famous pool hall sequence, were shot in Los Angeles.

When raising money for the film, Martin Scorsese was offered a healthy sum by his mentor Roger Corman on the condition that he shoot the movie with an all-black cast. Scorsese had to turn Corman down.

The production was pretty much made on-the-run from the Teamsters, as it would have been financially impossible to make the film had it been a union shoot.[/b]

MEAN STREETS [1973]
Written and directed by Martin Scorsese

[b]Scorsese [voiceover]: You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

Charlie [voiceover]: Okay, I just come out of confession, right? Right. And the priest gives me the usual penance: Ten “Hail Marys”, ten “Our Fathers”, ten whatever. Next week, I’ll come back and he’ll give me another ten “Hail Marys” and… …another ten “Our Fathers” and… I mean, you know how I feel about that shit. Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words. Now, that may be okay for the others, but it just doesn’t work for me. I mean, if I do somethin’ wrong, I just want to pay for it my way. So, I do my own penance for my own sins. It’s all bullshit except the pain. The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, ya don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart…your soul, the spiritual side. And ya know…the worst of the two is the spiritual.

Charlie [voiceover]: You know something? She is really good-lookin’. I gotta say that again. She is really good-lookin’. But she’s black. You can see that real plain, right? Look, there isn’t much of a difference anyway, is there. Well, is there?

Charlie [repeated line]: What’s the matter with you?

Joey: We’re not payin’ because this guy…this guy’s a fuckin’ mook.
Jimmy: But I didn’t say nothin’.
Joey: And we don’t pay mooks.
Jimmy: A mook? I’m a mook?
Joey: Yeah.
Jimmy: What’s a mook?
Johnny Boy: What’s a mook?
Charlie: I don’t know.
Jimmy: What’s a mook? You can’t call me a mook.
Joey: I can’t?
Jimmy: No!
Joey [punching him in the face]: I’ll give you mook!
[All hell breaks loose][/b]

Hey, this ain’t exactly the Godfather here.

[b]Teresa: You help yourself first.
Charlie: Bullshit, Teresa. That’s where you’re all wrong! Francis of Assisi had it all down. He knew.
Terresa: What are you talkin’ about?
Charlie: He knew.
Teresa: What are you talkin’ about? Saint Francis didn’t run numbers.

Giovanni: Johnny Boy’s whole family has problems. His cousin, the girl who lives next door to you…
Charlie: Teresa.
Giovanni: The one who’s sick in the head.
Charlie: No, she’s got epilepsy.
Giovanni: That’s what I said. She’s sick in the head.

Michael [showing a picture of his new girlfriend]: You think she’s good-looking? She’s smart, too. She’s gonna be a teacher.
Tony: Let me see that. Oh, I know this girl.
Michael: Yeah?
Tony: Yeah…I saw her kissing a nigger under a bridge.
Michael: What? What do you mean?
Tony: A nigger. As in black. A nigger.
Michael: But what do you mean?
Tony: [rolls his eyes] I mean…kissing. Her lips on his lips. Kissing.
Michael: [worried] I kissed her

Charlie: I swear to God, if you open your mouth about any of this…
Johnny Boy: About what?
Charlie: You know what I’m talkin’ about.
Johnny Boy: About what? You two? Who cares? I won’t even say nothin’ to my aunt and uncle. The guys don’t give a shit. What do they care? I won’t even say nothin’ to your uncle, Giovanni. I wanted to ask you somethin’, Charlie. I always wondered about her. This is the God’s honest truth. I always wondered about what happens when she comes. She get a fit?

Johnny Boy: You too good for this ten dollars? It’s a good ten dollars. You know Michael, you make me laugh. You see, I borrow money all over this neighborhood, left and right from everybody, I never pay them back. So, I can’t borrow no money from nobody no more, right? So who would that leave me to borrow money from but you? I borrow money from you, because you’re the only jerk-off around here who I can borrow money from without payin’ back, right? You know, 'cause that’s what you are, that’s what I think of you: a jerk-off. You’re a fucking jerk-off! You’re laughing 'cause you’re a jerk-off. I’ll tell 'ya something else,
[lights ten dollar bill on fire]
Johnny Boy: I fuck you right where you breath, because I don’t give two shits about you or nobody else.
[Michael jumps at Johnny Boy and they both fight but Charlie breaks them up, Johnny Boy pulls out a gun]
Johnny Boy: Come on… Come on… fuck face! Come on… ‘ya motherfucker! Motherfucker!.. come on! I got somethin’ for 'ya asshole!
Michael: You don’t- you don’t have the guts to use that.
Johnny Boy: Oh, I don’t have the guts, huh? Come over here, I’ll shove this up yer ass! Come on!
[Michael leaves]
Johnny Boy: Hey asshole, this is for you asshole! He’s a fucking asshole!

Michael: Now’s the time.[/b]

The orgies are the least of it. The most of it revolves around some rather pithy [and witty] observations regarding human sexuality. Anything goes all the way around here.

It’s really about the holes in our head we can’t fill…by, for example, becoming preoccupied with filling all the other ones.

It’s over the top at times – like going back to the days of the hippies – but how many films like this are there from which to draw comparisons.

IMDb

[b]To make the actors more comfortable, the director and the cameramen were stripped naked while filming the orgy scene.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was going to fire Sook-Yin Lee when they learned that she was going to be participating in a film with explicit sexual content. Several prominent individuals came to her rescue, including Gus Van Sant, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Julianne Moore, in successfully urging CBC to retain Lee as a member of their staff.

Why “Shortbus”:

In the movie itself, Shortbus is the name of the club that a lot of the plot takes part in and/or relate to. ShortBus is for alternative people, let’s just say that almost every town/City in the world has something similar to Shortbus, a club/café/Joint that is not intended to “General” community. However New York’s Shortbus is where “SEX” seems to be acceptable in every possible way. According to Justin Bond’s ‘character’ in the movie, Shortbus is for folks who aren’t destined for the ‘big yellow bus’ of sexuality. The first time I saw the movie, I thought it was a putdown. But upon closer inspection, I believe it simply means that the salon isn’t for those folks who find the world of sexuality and relationships and intimacy ‘simple.’ They need support and the interaction with other folks who find it more difficult so they don’t feel so alone in their search.[/b]

Shortbus at Wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortbus

trailer:
youtu.be/H8A1dwEhSMY

Warning: Some explicit language.
[But not even close to the actual movie]

SHORTBUS
Written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell

[b]Jesse: Are you a top or a bottom?
Severin: I beg your pardon?
Jesse: I mean in real life.
Severin: This is real life.
Jesse: Let me put it this way: do you think we should get out of Iraq?

Jesse: Can you describe your last orgasm?
Severin: It was great. It was like time had stopped and I was completely alone.
Jesse: Were you sad afterwards?
Severin: Yeah.
Jesse: Why?
Severin: 'Cause time hadn’t stopped and I wasn’t alone.

Jesse: If you could have any super power what would it be?
Severin: The power to make you interesting.

Jamie [to Sofia, the “couples counselor”]: Come on, give me a breakthrough, you gave him a breakthrough!
Sofia: You don’t just dole out the breakthroughs!
Jamie: Sure you can. Really, give yourself a breakthrough.
Sofia: I don’t need a breakthrough!
Jamie: We all need breakthroughs!
Sofia: Sit down! Sit down!
[She slaps him]
Sofia: I am so sorry…I’m not going to charge you.

Sofia: I’m pre-orgasmic.
Jamie: Does that mean you’re about to have one?

Jamie: I just have to switch the film, we’re going to watch a three-hour Gertrude Stein documentary.
Justin: Sounds like a real weenie-shrinker. Come on, let’s go get laid.

Justin [to Sofia]: These bitches sucking cock and eating ass…then they show up at the buffet and say they’re vegan.

Bitch [to Sofia]: So you’re a sex therapist and you’ve never had an orgasm?

Jamie: Ah! You got a boner!
Shabbos Goy: That’s my cell phone, you fuckin’ albino butch faggot!

Jamie: Was that the first time someone sang the National Anthem into your ass?
Ceth: No.

Sofia [to Severin]: You are so far behind you think you are first.

Severin [to Sofia]: Look I know I can help you have an orgasm, and maybe you can help me to, like, have a real human interaction with someone.

Sofia: Okay, I’m going down.

Severin [to Sofia]: Alright, you gotta pull the bus over, alright? You - you’re not driving safely. Park!

Justin [looking at the clients of the Shortbus, having group sex]: It’s just like the 60’s. Only with less hope.

Justin [looking at the orgy]: Oh my God, for a minute there I thought that man didn’t have an arm.

Justin: As my dear departed friend Lotus Weinstock used to say: “I used to wanna change the world. Now I just wanna leave the room with a little dignity.”

Severin: Why are you crying?
James: I look back to things that were when I was 12 years old. I’m still looking for the same things now.[/b]

Anarchists imagine a world without government. It would look like this I suspect. The jungle. And, in some parts of the world, even with governments, it looks like this.

What do you do to fight these monsters? It comes down to what you can do. And then what you have the courage to do. You are incensed at what they do to these young girls but if you go after them they come after you. And these are vicious, cold-blooded sociopaths. Way beyond reasoning with. But hardly stupid. Thugs and gangsters who live outside the law like breathing in and out.

And maybe the authorities [here it’s London] can protect you but maybe they cannot.

So there it is: outrage and fear:

Anna: She was 14! She was 14 when he raped her. You bastards murdered her.
Nikolai: Anger is very dangerous. Makes people do stupid things. Please, forget any of this ever happened. You’re in very wrong place. You belong in there with nice people. Stay away from people like me.

I can just see the objectivists in here holding their own in a debate with them.

Of course you can be defiant as hell when it’s all scripted.

IMDb

[b]To prepare for his role, Viggo Mortensen traveled alone to Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ural Mountain region of Siberia, where he spent five days driving around without a translator. He read books on the gangs of the vory v zakone (thieves in law), Russian prison culture and the importance of prison tattoos as criminal résumés, and perfected his character’s Siberian accent and learned lines in Russian, Ukrainian and English. During filming, he used worry beads made in prison from melted-down plastic cigarette lighters and decorated his trailer with copies of Russian icons.

One day after shooting, Viggo Mortensen went to a pub without washing off his tattoos or even changing out of his costume. He claims that some of the patrons became very frightened of him, assuming he was a real member of Vory v Zakone.

None of the characters who were members of the Vory v Zakone used a gun throughout the movie. The reason for this is that when doing research on Russian organized crime, David Cronenberg discovered that members of the Vory v Zakone typically prefer to use knives instead of guns. The rationale for this is that if Vory v Zakone members were arrested by police and questioned as to why they were in possession of such weapons, the suspects could evade suspicion by claiming that the knives were simply for linoleum cutting.

Nikolai’s tattoos:

Three Cupolas (Towers) on back: Three terms in prison;
Virgin Mary with Child on abdomen: I am true to my friends / My conscience is clear (could also mean “prison is my home”);
Raven on shoulder: Death, I am not yours;
Starburst on finger: I became a criminal because of poverty and a broken home;
Cross on finger: I was in the Crosses (a prison in St. Petersburg);
Black-and-white diamond on finger: I deny official authority / I disobeyed rules while in prison;
Grim Reaper on abdomen: Death is always waiting for me;
Sun and sea with Cyrillic meaning “NORTH” on back of hand: I was in prison in the North;
Crucifix on chest: Professional Thief / I will not betray you;
Skull on shoulder: Stay away from me / Murderer;
Tattoos around ankles: “Where are you going?” and “What the fuck do you care?” written in Russian.
The stars on his knees: Mean that he has been made a lieutenant in the vory v zakone and he will never kneel (literally or figuratively) to any authority again, IE, kneeling on the stars is a grave insult to the new rank. The number of points on each star are also meant to indicate the number of years served in prison.[/b]

EASTERN PROMISES
Directed by David Cronenberg

[b]Nikolai: Sentimental value? Ah. I heard of that.

Stepan: Anna, how is it that your boyfriend wasn’t here to carve?
Anna: I don’t live with Oliver anymore, Uncle Stepan. Living back here for a bit.
Helen: For as long as you want.
Stepan: I knew he would run away from you.
Anna: He didn’t run away. Christ, you make me sound like a burning building.
Stepan: Black men always run away.
Helen: Oh Stepan!
Stepan: I’m not allowed to be honest?
Helen: He was a doctor, Stepan.
Anna: What has that got to do with anything?
Stepan: It’s not natural to mix race and race. That’s why your baby died inside you.

Kirill [on phone]: I said ‘coast’. No, not the beach is clear. It’s an English expression, you fucking baboon. It means there are no police.

Kirill [regarding Nikolai]: He is not the driver, he is the undertaker.

Ozim: Show some respect for a dead man.
Kirill [handing over an envelop filled with cash]: Respect? This is respect.

Nikolai [staring down at the frozen corpse]: Have you got a hair dryer?
[after thawing Soyka’s corpse]
Nikolai [to Azim after thawing Soyka’s corpse]: Are you finished cutting his hair?
[Nikolai takes out Soyka’s frozen wallet]
Nikolai: I thought you might want the $6.50 from his pocket. Okay. Now I’m going to do his teeth and cut off his fingers. You might want to leave room.
[Nikolai motions for Azim to go away, and then puts out his cigarette on his tongue]

Anna: Have you ever met a girl named Tatiana?
Nikolai: I meet lot of girls named Tatiana.
Anna: She was pregnant.
Nikolai: Ah, in that case - no, I’ve never heard of her.
Anna: She died on my shift.
Nikolai: I thought you did birth?
Anna: Sometimes birth and death go together. She came in with needle punches all over both arms. Probably a prostitute, at the age of fourteen. Do you think Semyon’s son knew her?
Nikolai: [growing agitated] I am driver. I go left, I go right, I go straight ahead - that’s it.

Yuri [noting tattoo on knee]: He was a member of vory v zakone. Stars on his knees means he’d never kneeled before anyone. In Russian prisons your life story is written on your body in tattoos. You don’t have tattoos you don’t exist.

Stepan [translating Tatiani’s diary]: "Kirill came down after me and he hit me until I was bleeding. Then he tried to rape me but he couldn’t do it…He just got madder and madder and kept hitting me. In the end his father came down. It was the father who raped me. He shouted at his son…’if you don’t break a horse, it will never be tame, Kirill’.

Titiani [voiceover]: I am not sure I can carry on another day. The windows won’t open so I can’t throw myself out. They inject me every day with heroin.

Anna: So you’ve read the diary. How can you keep doing what you’re doing?
Nikolai: I’m just a driver.

Nikolai: Sometimes, if things are closed, you just open them up.

Zemyon: You are being very, very honest.
Azim: I fear you more than I fear them.

Anna: Tell him what I said. He is the father.
Nikolai: Tell him what. There is nothing to tell. Slaves give birth to slaves.

Kirill [holding a bottle of brandy]: My dad swapped a little girl from Georgis for this shit.

Nikolai: He offered me stars. I accepted.

Nikolai: Yes. I have no mother and no father. There is only the code, the vory v zakone code which I have always followed.
Valery: That is why there is an empty place above your heart. Where the stars will go. And why there is an empty place on your knees.
Nikolai: I am dead already. I died when I was fifteen. Now I live in the zone all the time.

Anna: My uncle has gone missing, since I told you about him translating the diary.
Nikolai: Your uncle is fine, he is in Edinburgh, in a 5-Star Hotel. I was ordered to send him to Heaven with a bullet in his brain… instead I gave him a first class ticket to Scotland. It’s okay. He is old-school, he understands things…exile or death.

Nikolai: I need you to take Semyon out of the picture. I want you to arrest him.
Yuri: Arrest him for what?
Nikolai: Rape. The girl was 14.
Yuri: And of course she will testify?
Nikolai: She is dead, but she had Semyon’s baby. If you can prove baby was his, and girl was underage, that is statutory rape. You have baby, you need Semyon’s DNA. For poetic reasons, I suggest you take his blood.

Nikolai: Kirill, we don’t kill little babies.

Anna: I need to know who you are. Why are you doing this, why are you helping us?
Nikolai: I can’t become king if someone else sits on the throne.

Tatiana’s Voice: My name is Tatiana. My father died in the mines in my village, so he was already buried when he died. We were all buried there. Buried under the soil of Russia. That is why I left, to find a better life.[/b]

If only for her baby. The father of whom raped her. Sometimes, in this shitty world, that’s as close as some get to a happy ending.