philosophy in film

[d63]

Barfly
-directed by Barbet Shroeder

Wanda: I hate people. Don’t you hate people?

Henry: No. But I seem to feel better when they’re not around.
*
Tully: Anyone can be a drunk.

Henry: Anyone can be sober too. But being a drunk takes endurance.
*
From Factotum
-directed by Bent Hamer

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

[d63]

Solaris
-Directed by Steven Soderbergh

There are no answers, only choices.

[iambiguous]

@d63

Solaris
-Directed by Steven Soderbergh

There are no answers, only choices.

Never saw this one but the original is fantastic.

youtube.com/watch?v=seCRhjrLNy4

youtube.com/watch?v=FcglyhUre4w

[d63]

Love Tarkovsky, man!

“Great! When do we take off?”

“you are already there…”

Would like to see a modern version of Stalker.

Except, if I were going to do it, I would pay tribute to Tarkovsky.

For instance, I would start it like he did Solaris with that weird grass-like substance in a stream and a leaf floating down it. Then I would have a foot stomp into that stream that was attached to a person running from the law that was watching over the zone. Then, as the the Stalker was driving the people that hired him to the zone, I would repeat that scene in Solaris where they were driving through those tunnels, that kind of noise and then silence then noise that I’m almost certain David Lynch was influenced by. Also, I would use music from the 90’s Fathom musicians like Robert Rich, Steve Roach, and Kenneth Newby.

One thing I would take from Sodenbergh though is have the Stalker character be like his Jeremy Davies character in Solaris.

(For instance, I think Brad Pitt doing a combination of Kalifornia and 12 monkeys would work real well for it.)

And I would have that monologue at the end that his girlfriend did.

She would either have to be Juliet Lewis or Wynonna Ryder.

The only question remaining is who would be Monkey.

[d63]

The cool thing about it would be that it mainly would lie in the pre-production phase of site scouting -much as it did with Tarkovsky.

And you would have to avoid using too many special effects.

Stalker mainly lived on the archetype of a group of boys exploring a strange land and a guy that knew how to narrate it.

[iambiguous]

This is less a movie about genius than about mediocracy. In particular the mediocre arttists who are truly cursed [some crushed] by their own limitations. That’s why the focus is really on Salieri. He comes to know just how mediorce he is when he hears the music of Mozart. Worse the genius here is a vulgar clown. A man-child given over to the most vulgarian behaviors.

Salieri then becomes a man truly intent on blasphemy: fuck you God! Fuck you for allowing this unspeakable injustice.

This ironically is why God becomes so important to some: He is there as a target onto which you can vent your spleen. Without him there is nothing but enduring

I’m fortunate in that I am blessed only with the capacity to love the music that others create. And if God has anything to do with the creation of them, then He can’t be all bad.

We also get a peek at opera from the other side of the tracks: mostly farce, apparently. Mozart seemed to relish it.

And those god awful powdered wigs! What would possess men and women to wear them? What’s the story here? So I googled it:

mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/131929
Of course: syphilis.

Is this film actually based on true events? I don’t know. Here is one rendition of that. It’s just the first one I found.
jimloy.com/movie/amadeus.htm

Music from the Requiem:
youtube.com/watch?v=Zi8vJ_lMxQI

Look for Cynthia Nixon.

IMDb

[b]Mel Gibson, Mick Jagger, Sam Waterston, Mark Hamill and Tim Curry all auditioned for the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The music was pre-recorded and played in the background as scenes were filmed. Tom Hulce practiced four hours a day at the piano to appear convincing.

Several professors of music stated, after studying all of the musical keys struck on pianos throughout the film, that not one key is struck incorrectly when compared to what is heard at the exact same moment. In other words, what you see is exactly what you hear.

In preparation for some aspects of the title role, actor Tom Hulce studied footage of John McEnroe’s on-court tennis tantrums.[/b]

wiki

[b]In 1985, the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including the double nomination for Best Actor with Hulce and Abraham each being nominated for their portrayals of Mozart and Salieri, respectively. The film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Abraham) and Best Director (Forman).

Salieri’s music slowly disappeared from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868, and was rarely heard after that period until the revival of his fame in the late 20th century. This revival was due to the dramatic and highly fictionalized depiction of Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus, which was given its greatest exposure in its 1984 film version, directed by Miloš Forman. His music today has regained some modest popularity via recordings. It is also the subject of increasing academic study and a small number of his operas have returned to the stage. In addition there is now a Salieri Opera Festival[1] sponsored by the Fondazione Culturale Antonio Salieri and dedicated to rediscovering his work and those of his contemporaries. It is developing as an annual autumn event in his native town of Legnago where a theater has been renamed in his honor.[/b]

AMADEUS
Directed by Milos Forman

[b]Salieri: Leave me alone.
Father Vogler: I cannot leave alone a soul in pain.
Salieri: Do you know who I am?
Father Vogler: It makes no difference. All men are equal in God’s eyes.
Salieri: [leans in mockingly] Are they?

…

Salieri: How well are you trained in music?
Father Vogler: I know a little. I studied it in my youth.
Salieri: Where?
Father Vogler: Here in Vienna.
Salieri: Then you must know this.
[plays music]
Father Vogler: I can’t say that I do. What is it?
Salieri: It was a very popular tune in its day. I wrote it. Here, how about this? This one brought down the house when we played it. Well?
Father Vogler: I regret it is not too familiar.
Salieri: Can you remember no melody of mine? I was the most famous composer in Europe. I wrote 40 operas alone. Here! What about this one?
Father Vogler: [smiling] Yes, I know that! Oh, that’s charming! I’m sorry, I didn’t know you wrote that.
Salieri: I didn’t. That was Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

…

Salieri [to priest]: My father, he did not care for music. When I told him how I wished I could be like Mozart, he would say; “Why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? Would you like me to drag you around Europe, doing tricks like a circus freak?”
[Salieri chuckles ruefully]
Salieri: How could I tell him what music meant to me?

…

Salieri [to priest]: While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.

…

Salieri: Mozart came to Vienna to play some of his music at the residence of the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg . Eagerly, l went there to seek him out. That night changed my life. As l wandered through the salon l played a little game with myself. This man had written his fiirst concerto at the age of four. His fiirst symphony at seven. A full-scale opera at twelve! Did it show? ls talent like that written on the face? Which one of them could he be?

…

Salieri: That was Mozart. That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!

…

Salieri: On the page it looked like nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. And then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing the very voice of God. But why? Why would God choose an obscene child to be hisinstrument? It was not to be believed. This piece had to be an accident. It had to be.

…

Emperor Joseph II: Well, there it is.

…

Salieri: All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing…and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?

…

Mozart: So then, you liked it? You really liked it, sire?
Emperor Joseph II: Well, of course I did! It’s very good ! Of course, now and then, just now and then it seemed a touch. . . .
Mozart: What do you mean, sire?
Emperor Joseph II: Well, I mean, occasionally, it seems to have…How shall one say. . . ? How shall one say, Herr Direktor?
Direktor: Too many notes, Majesty?
Emperor Joseph II: Exactly. Very well put. Too many notes.
Mozart: l don’t understand. There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less.
Emperor Joseph II: My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening. I think I’m right in saying that, aren’t I, court composer?
Salieri: Yes. On the whole, yes, Majesty.
Mozart: This is absurd!
Emperor Joseph II: Young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes. Just cut a few and it’ll be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind?

…

Salieri: Are you sure you can’t leave these and, and come back again?
Constanze: It’s very tempting sir, but it’s impossible, I’m afraid. Wolfgang would be frantic if he found those were missing, you see they’re all originals.
Salieri: Originals?
Constanze: Yes, sir, he doesn’t make copies.
Salieri: These, are originals?!

…

Salieri: Astounding! It was actually–It was beyond belief. These were first and only drafts of music. But they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. lt was clear to me that sound l had heard inthe archbishop 's palace had been no accident. Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.

…

Constanze: Is it not good?
Salieri: It is miraculous.

…

Salieri [addressing a crucifix of Christ]: From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin your incarnation.
[He takes the crucifix off the wall and puts it in the fire]

…

Emanuel [After Mozart loses at musical chairs] : Herr Mozart, why don’t you name your son’s penalty?
Mozart: Yes, Papa. Name it. Name it, I’ll do anything you say. Anything.
Leopold: I want you to come back to Salzburg with me, my son.
Mozart: Papa, the rule is you can only give a penalty that can be performed in the room.
Leopold: I’m tired of this game, I don’t want to play anymore.
Mozart: But my penalty!
[jumping up and down like an angry child]
Mozart: I’ve got to have a penalty!

…

Salieri: That was not Mozart laughing, Father…that was God. That was God laughing at me. Through that obscene giggle…

…

Herr Direktor: What you think is scarcely the point. lt’s what His Majesty thinks that counts.
Emperor Joseph II: l am a tolerant man. l do not censor things lightly. When l do, l have good reason. Figaro is a bad play. lt stirs up hatred between classes. ln France it has caused nothing but bitterness. My sister Antoinette writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
Mozart: Sire, l swear to you, there’s nothing like that in the piece. l took out everything that could give offense. l hate politics!
Emperor Joseph II: l’m afraid you’re rather innocent, my friend. ln these dangerous times…l cannot afford to provoke our nobles or our people simply over a theatre piece.

…

Mozart: Elevated! What does that mean, elevated? l am fed to the teeth with these elevated things. Old dead legends. Why must we go on forever writing only about gods and legends?
Count: Because they do. They go on forever. At least what they represent: the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart. You and me, just the same as His Majesty.
Mozart: Come on now, be honest! Who wouldn’t rather listen to a hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius or Orpheus. So lofty, they sound as if they shit marble!

…

Mozart: [about the royal composer’s position he did not get] Whom did they choose?
Salieri: Herr Zummer.
Mozart: Herr Zummer? But the man’s a fool, he’s a total mediocrity!
Salieri: No, no, he has yet to achieve mediocrity.

…

Salieri: You don’t mean to tell me that you’re living in poverty?
Mozart: No. But I’m broke.

…

Salieri: The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth was…astounding. God was singing through this little man to all the world. Unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar.

…

Salieri: And then do you know what happened? A miracle! The emperor yawned! With that yawn l saw my defeat turn into a victory. Mozart was lucky The emperor yawned only once. Three yawns and the opera would fail the same night. Two yawns within a week at most. With one yawn the composer could still get…[/b]

Later:

[b]Mozart: Nine performances! Nine, that’s all it’s had and withdrawn!!

…

Salieri: I can speak for the emperor. You make too many demands on the royal ear. He can’t concentrate over an hour. You gave him four.

…

Mozart: Why didn’t they come?
Salieri: l think you overestimate our dear Viennese, my friend. You didn’t even give them a good bang at the end of songs…to tell them when to clap.
Mozart: l know. Maybe you should give me lessons in that.

…

Salieri: Mozart, it was good of you to come!
Mozart: How could I not?
Salieri: How…Did my work please you?
Mozart: [hesitantly] I never knew that music like that was possible!
Salieri: [uncertainly] You flatter me.
Mozart: No, no! One hears such sounds, and what can one say but…“Salieri.”

…

Salieri: So rose the dreadful ghost from his next and blackest opera, there on the stage stood the figure of a dead commander and I knew, only I understood that the horrifying aparition was Leopold, raised from the dead. ::the opera continues:: Wolfgang had actually summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world. It was terrifying and wonderful to watch ::the opera continues:: And now the madness began in me. The madness of the man splitting in half. Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played only five times in Vienna but in secret I went to every one of those five worshipping a sound that only I seemed to hear. ::the opera continues:: And as I stood there understanding how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son even from beyond the grave. I began to see a way, a terrible way, I could finally triumph over God.

…

Emanuel: Look, I asked you if we could start rehearsals next week and you said yes.
Mozart: Well, we can.
Emanuel: So let me see it. Where is it?
Mozart: Here. It’s all right here in my noodle.

…

Contanze: You know what’s ridiculous? Your libretto’s ridiculous! Only an idiot would ask Wolfie to work on that! 12 foot snakes, magic flutes?
Emanuel: What’s so intelligent about a requiem?!
Constanze: Money.[/b]

Ever since it was invented, there is no getting around the part that money plays in our little dramas. On or off the stage.

[b]Mozart: Your merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. 32 years of torture. years of slowly watching myself become extinct! My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all.

…

Salieri: I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.

…

Salieri [wheelchaired through the insane asylum]: Mediocrities everywhere I absolve you…I absolve you…I absolve you…I absolve you. I absolve you all.[/b]

[d63]

Yeah, Ambig, but don’t you think that movie has led to a kind Amadeus/Cassandra complex in which an individual, fancying their greatness has yet to be recognized, assumes that all resistance to them is a sign of their greatness posed against the mediocrity of the world?

It’s always haunting me not to the extent to presuming any greatness on my part, but of having committed to the life of the mind only to find my effort sabotaged by the mediocre mundane nonsense that everyone around me has surrendered their lives to. My problem is that I’ve built up the resources I have for the sake of pursuing my studies. But everyone around me seems to have different plans for those resources.

[iambiguous]

Being there. Da-sein. Coincidence?
Name: Chance. Coincidence?

Let’s face it: What we say is ofttimes not nearly as important as what others think we say. Chance is right on the surface. The “deeper” meaning is provided by everyone else making assumptions about alleged allusions that are not really there at all. What counts above all else is this: something [someone] must be around that we can deem to reflect Wisdom.

Indeed, there are lots of folks right here who just don’t seem to get that. Especially those who think they are the font. :-"

Over and again we are bombarded with snipnets from various televisions. A constant reminder of just how banal the culture can be on the boob tube. That it is actually more banal still 30 years later is all the more remarkable.

And think about it: Just as many wish their lives could be like Sailor and Lula and Lilly and Myra and Roy above, many more wish their lives could be like Chance below. You spend all your time outside tending to the garden and all your time inside tending to the TV.

And, if that means being “simple-minded”, so much the better.

After a while you begin to wonder though: Just how many metaphors [or allusions] are there pertaining to gardening?

Here is a particularly trenchant take on the film:
stuartfernie.org/beth.htm

Regarding the film’s ending:

IMDb

Originally there was a different last shot planned for the funeral sequence at the end of the film. Director Hal Ashby was chatting with another director one day about filming when he commented how well everything was going. “It’s like walking on air,” he said, then suddenly was struck with a thought. He changed the last shot to the one that appears now in the movie.

wiki

The original screenplay ended with Chance wandering down from the Rand funeral site and simply regarding the trees and leaves near the lake. Ashby thought of the “walking on water” ending and incorporated it into the production and the final cut. Lorimar hated the idea and it nearly led to Ashby being fired from the picture, but Ashby prevailed and his ending is now regarded as a brilliant mock-allegorical coda.

IMDb

[b]Peter Sellers was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor. Some said the reason Sellers lost was because of the outtakes at the very end of the movie as the credits are rolling. Sellers himself later said the outtakes “broke the spell” of the movie.

Laurence Olivier was offered the role of Benjamin Rand, but passed when he read the completed script. He said he didn’t want to be in a movie where Shirley MacLaine has to masturbate.

Shirley MacLaine’s masturbation scene was shot seventeen times.[/b]

Trust me: It makes sense given the, uh, context.

BEING THERE
Directed by Hal Ashby
From the novel by Jerzy Kosinski

[b]Chance: Good morning, Louise.
Louise: He’s dead, Chance. The old man’s dead.
Chance: I see.
[He goes back to watching TV]

…

Chance: Yes, I remember Joe. He was very fat and had short hair and showed me pictures from a funny little book.
Hayes: Some pictures?
Chance: Yes. Of men and women.

…

Chance (ordered to leave the house, he wanders into the, uh, ‘hood]: Excuse me, would you please tell em where I could find a garden to work in?
Lolo: What you growin’, man?
Chance: There is much to be done during the winter, I must start the seeds for the spring, I must work the soil…
Abbaz: Bullshit. Who sent you here, boy? Did that chickenshit asshole Raphael send you here, boy?
Chance: No. Thomas Franklin told me that I had to leave the Old Man’s house, he’s dead now, you know…
Abbaz: Dead, my ass! Now get this, honkie - you go tell Raphael that I ain’t takin’ no jive from no Western Union messenger! You tell that asshole, if he got somethin’ to tell me to get his ass down here himself! (edges closer to Chance) You got that boy? Now, move, honkie! Before I cut your white ass.

…

Chance [riding in a car for the first time]: This is just like television, only you can see much further.

…

Eve: May I ask your name?
Chance: My name is Chance the gardener.
Eve: Chauncey Gardiner. Mr. Chauncey Gardiner, I see. Are you related to Basil and Perdita Gardiner?

…

Chance [walking out of an elevator]: That was a very small room.

…

Ben: Nobody likes a dying man, Chauncey. Because nobody knows what death is. You seem to be an exception, Chauncey. That’s one of the things I admire about you, your admirable balance. You seem to be a truly peaceful man.

…

President: Mr. Gardiner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?
[Long pause]
Chance: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
President: In the garden.
Chance: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
President: Spring and summer.
Chance: Yes.
President: Then fall and winter.
Chance: Yes.
Ben: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we’re upset by the seasons of our economy.
Chance: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!
Ben: Hmm!
Chance: Hmm!
President: Hmm. Well, Mr. Gardner, I must admit that is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I’ve heard in a very, very long time.
[Benjamin Rand applauds]
President: I admire your good, solid sense. That’s precisely what we lack on Capitol Hill.

…

Rand: You know, Chauncey, there’s something about you…You don’t play games with words to protect yourself. You’re direct.
Mrs Aubrey: Mr. Gardiner, I have a telephone call for you, Sidney Courtney.
Chance: Telephone call?
Mre Aubrey: Yes, Sidney Courtney, the Financial Editor of the Washington Post.

…

Morton: Do you realize that more people will be watching you tonight, than all those who have seen theater plays in the last forty years?
Chance: Why?

…

Thomas: It’s that gardener.
Johanna: Yes, Chauncey Gardiner.
Thomas: No, he’s a real gardener.
Johanna: He does talk like one…but I think he’s brilliant.

…

Louise [with other poor black seniors, watching Chance on TV]: It’s for sure a white man’s world in America. Look here: I raised that boy since he was the size of a piss-ant. And I’ll say right now, he never learned to read and write. No, sir. Had no brains at all. Was stuffed with rice pudding between th’ ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.

…

Sally: Oh, he was very clever, keeping it at a third grade level. That’s what they understand.
Franklin: Well, I don’t understand why he was in Jennings’ house. What was up his sleeve when he pulled that stunt with us? What was he doing and why?
Sally: Who knows? Maybe the government had something to do with it.

…

Chance: I do not read any newspapers. I watch TV.
TV reporter: Do you mean, Mr. Gardiner, that you find television’s coverage of the news superior to that of the newspapers?
Chance (flatly): I like to watch TV.
TV reporter: Well, that is probably the most honest admission to come from a public figure in years. Few men in public life have the courage not to read newspapers. None, that this reporter has met, have the guts to admit it.

…

Stuart: Something rather big in the wind, I’d say. So whose files were destroyed? The CIA’s or the FBI’s?..What is it about his past they are trying to cover up? A criminal record? A membership in a subversive organization? Homosexual, perhaps?

…

Ron: Mr. Gardner, uh, my editors and I have been wondering if you would consider writing a book for us, something about your um, political philosophy, what do you say?
Chance: I can’t write.
Ron: Heh, heh, of course not, who can nowadays? Listen, I have trouble writing a postcard to my children. Look uhh, we can give you a six figure advance, I’ll provide you with the very best ghost-writer, proof-readers…
Chance: I can’t read.
Ron: Of course you can’t! No one has the time! We, we glance at things, we watch television…
Chance: I like to watch TV.
Ron: Oh, oh, oh sure you do. No one reads!

…

Senator: I heard that he speaks eight languages, and on top of everything else, holds a degree in medicine as well as law. Isn’t that true, Eve?
Eve: Well, I really don’t know, Senator, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

…

Dennis: You know, I’ve never met anyone like you in Washington before.
Chance: Yes, I’ve been here all my life.
Dennis: Really? And uh, where have you been all MY life?
[laughs]
Dennis: Ah, tell me, Mr. Gardner have you ever had sex with a man?
Chance: No…I don’t think so.
Dennis: We could go upstairs right now.
Chance: Is there a TV upstairs? I like to watch.
Dennis: You like to uh, watch?
Chance: Yes.
Dennis: You wait right here. I’ll go get Warren!

…

President: Life is a state of mind.[/b]

[iambiguous]

Again, lots of folks will look at characters like this and simply dismiss them: white trash, deadbeats, riffraff, losers.

Let’s put it this way: they don’t feature prominantly in many, uh, presidential campaigns.

And aren’t they? But surely we can go a little deeper than that. All sorts of social, political and economic variables comes into play when you are living smack dab in the middle of New York City. Here the options will expand out to encompass all manner of…lifestyles?

It’s really quite mind-boggling just how many are included here. And when they bump [or collide] into each other? All bets are off.

As I see it, some folks like to forget the part where children are brought up in a world they had absolutely no say regarding. They get “I” shoved down their throats in some of the most atrocious contexts. Yet somehow they are still totally responsible for the things they choose.

In other words, you can’t really understand what Joe Buck is now until you come to understand what Joe Buck was then. So they show us. As for “Ratso”…how hard is it to figure that out.

And then the parts played by homosexuals It’s worthwhile noting that this film was released the same year as the Stonewall riots. Times change. And that changes people.

Incredibly, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture with an X rating. The only one ever.

IMDb

[b]Dustin Hoffman kept pebbles in his shoe to ensure his limp would be consistent from shot to shot.

Robert Blake was offered the part of Ratso, but declined.

Before Dustin Hoffman auditioned for this film, he knew that his all-American image could easily cost him the job. To prove he could do it, he asked the auditioning film executive to meet him on a street corner in Manhattan, and in the meantime, dressed himself in filthy rags. The executive arrived at the appointed corner and waited, barely noticing the “beggar” less than ten feet away who was accosting people for spare change. At last, the beggar walked up to him and revealed his true identity.

One studio executive sent director John Schlesinger a memo stating, “If we could clean this up and add a few songs, it could be a great vehicle for Elvis Presley.” Presley wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, and was interested in the role of Joe Buck.

Bob Dylan wrote the song “Lay, Lady, Lady” for the film, but didn’t complete it in time to be included in the soundtrack.[/b]

wiki

Upon initial review by the Motion Picture Association of America, Midnight Cowboy received a “Restricted” (“R”) rating (Persons under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian). However, after consulting with a psychologist, executives at United Artists were told to accept an “X” rating (Persons under 17 will not be admitted) due to the “homosexual frame of reference” and its “possible influence upon youngsters”. The film was released with an X.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY
Directed by John Schlesinger

[b]From all directions: Where’s that Joe Buck?!

…

Ralph: What are you gonna do back East?
Joe Buck: There’s a lot of rich women there—begging for it. Paying for it too.

…

Joe Buck: I only get carsick on boats.

…

Annie: You’re the only one, Joe. You’re the only one…

…

Annie: You’re better than the rest of them, Joe. You’re better than any of them. You love me Joe? You’re the best, Joe! Love me Joe!

…

Joe Buck: Pardon me, Ma’am, I’m brand, spankin’ new in this here town and I was hopin’ to get a look at the Statue of Liberty.
Cass: It’s up in Central Park, taking a leak. If you hurry, you can catch the supper show.

…

Cass: You were gonna ask me for money? Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with, some old slut on 42nd Street? In case you didn’t happen to notice it, ya big Texas longhorn bull, I’m one helluva gorgeous chick![/b]

He ends up giving her twenty bucks!

[b]Ratso: You gotta get yourself some management.
Joe Buck: You put your finger on it.
Ratso: You know what you need? You need my friend O’Daniel. He operates the biggest stable in town!

…

Jackie: I just want to ask you one thing, cowboy. If you’re sitting here, and he’s sitting all the way over there, then how’s he gonna get his hand into your pocket? Oh, but I guess he has that all figured out.
[walks away]
Ratso: Faggot!
Jackie: Provolone!
Ratso: Faggot!

…

Ratso: Hey, I’m walking here! I’m walking here!

…

Joe Buck [to O’Daniel]: Uh, well, sir, I ain’t a f’real cowboy. But I am one helluva stud!

…

O’Daniel: You and me are gonna have fun together. It don’t have to be joyless!
Joe Buck: Hell no.
O’Daniel: Why don’t you and me get down on our knees right now?
Joe Buck: Where?

…

Hotel manager: We keep everything. House rules.

…

Joe Buck: You know what you gotta do, Cowboy.

…

Ratso [when Joe Buck finally catches up with him]: How do you like that O’Daniel, flippin’ out like that!

…

Ratso: I got my own private entrance here. You’re the only one that knows about it.

…

Ratso: The icebox will keep the roaches from gettin’ into the perishables.

…

Ratso: You know, in my own place, my name ain’t Ratso. I mean, it just so happens that in my own place my name is Enrico Salvatore Rizzo.
Joe Buck: Well, I can’t say all that.
Ratso: Rico, then. At least call me Rico in my own goddamn place.

…

Ratso: Miami Beach, that’s where you could score. Anybody can score there, even you. In New York, no rich lady with any class at all buys that cowboy crap anymore. They’re laughin’ at you on the street.
Joe Buck: Ain’t nobody laughin’ at me on the street.
Ratso: Behind your back, I’ve seen ‘em laughin’ at you, fella.
Joe Buck: Aw, what the hell you know about women anyway? When’s the last time you scored, boy?
Ratso: That’s a matter I only talk about at confession. We’re not talkin’ about me now.
Joe Buck: And when’s the last time you’ve been to confession?
Ratso: It’s between me and my confessor. And I’ll tell ya another thing. Frankly, you’re beginning to smell. And for a stud in New York, that’s a handicap.
Joe Buck: Well, don’t talk to me about clean. I ain’t never seen you change your underwear once the whole time I’ve been here in New York. And that’s pretty peculiar behavior.
Ratso: I don’t have to do that kind of thing in public. I ain’t got no need to expose myself.
Joe Buck: [cruelly] No, I bet you don’t. I bet you ain’t never even been laid! How about that? And you’re gonna tell me what appeals to women!
Ratso: I know enough to know that that great big, dumb cowboy crap of yours don’t appeal to nobody except every jockey on 42nd Street. That’s faggot stuff! You wanna call it by its name? That’s strictly for fags!
Joe Buck: John Wayne! You wanna tell me he’s a fag?
[after a long pause]
Joe Buck: I like the way I look. It makes me feel good. It does. And women like me, god-dammit. Hell, only one thing I’ve ever been good for is lovin’. Women go crazy for me. That’s a really true fact. Ratso, hell: Crazy Annie, they had to send her away.
Ratso: Then how come you ain’t scored once, the whole time you’ve been in New York?
Joe Buck: 'Cause, ‘cause I need management, god-dammit. ‘Cause you stole twenty dollars offa me. That’s why you’re gonna stop crappin’ around about Florida. And, and get your skinny butt movin.’ And earn twenty dollars worth of management which you owe me![/b]

Ironically enough, at the Academy Awards that year both Hoffman and Voight lost out to John Wayne in the Best Actor category. Or, rather, predictably.

[b]Ratso: Not bad. Not Bad. For a cowboy.

…

Ratso [at the gravesite of his father]: He was even dumber than you. He couldn’t even write his whole name. “X,” that’s what it ought to say on that goddamn headstone, just like our dump. One big lousy “X”…condemned by order of City Hall.
Joe Buck: My grandma, Sally Buck, she died without no one letting me know.[/b]

Then the classic “psychedelic party” scene:

youtube.com/watch?v=MQSdi-UfGrU

[b]Ratso: You want the word on that brother-and-sister act, Hansel’s a fag and Gretel’s got the hots for herself, so who cares, right? Load up on the salami.

…

Gretel: Why are you stealing food?
Ratso: I was just, uh, noticing that you’re out of salami. I think you oughtta have somebody go over to the delicatessen, you know, bring some more back.
Gretel: Gee, well, you know, it’s free. You don’t have to steal it.
Ratso: Well, if it’s free, then I ain’t stealin’ it.

…

Shirley: “Gay” ends in “Y”.

…

Ratso: Hey listen, don’t get sore or anything.
Joe Buck: I won’t get sore.
Ratso: I don’t think I can walk anymore.

…

Ratso: You ain’t gettin’ me no doctor.
Joe Buck: You’re sick, boy. You need a damn doctor.
Ratso: No doctors. No cops. Don’t be so stupid.
Joe Buck: What the hell you want me to do?
Ratso: You get me to Florida.

…

Towny: Oh, Joe it’s…it’s so difficult, I - You’re a nice person, Joe, I- I- I should never have asked you up here, you’re…You’re a lovely person, really. Oh, God, I loathe life, I loathe it! Please go, please.

…

Ratso: Here I am, goin’ to Florida, my leg hurts, my butt hurts, my chest hurts, my face hurts, and like that ain’t enough, I gotta pee all over myself.
[Joe Buck laughs]
Ratso: That’s funny? I’m fallin’ apart here!
Joe Buck: It’s just - Know what happened? You just took a little rest stop that wasn’t on the schedule![/b]

[iambiguous]

Regarding the title of the film:

IMDb

A “reprise” is a repetition or a return to an earlier event, so the best guess is that this movie is about trying to return to something that happened in the past. Erik tries to encourage Phillip, who once was a successful writer, to write again. Meanwhile, Phillip is trying to get his ruined relationship with Kari to start from the beginning again.

Some things you can reprise, some things you cannot. But you certainly have no chance of reprising anything at all if you refuse to try. On the other hand some things are better left dead.

Here or there [Norway] we are all faced with choosing between things we know only through the perspective of a point of view. And that can only be interpreted through the lens of contingency chance and change.

The passion to write. The yearning to be published.

In each rendition of this familiar story something draws you in or it doesn’t. And what draws you in is on the surface or it goes much deeper. Is it just the surface of Kari here? The references to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger? The illusions embedded in narrative?

For reasons I can’t quite explain I especially like films in which there is a narrator. A god substitute perhaps?

It either helps or it hurst to be young here.

Oh, and money just seems to be there for these folks. After all, it never comes up.

Above all, this film seems less concerned with what plays out and more with how the variables come together to favor one narrative [trajectory] over another. What’s that remind you of?

trailer
youtube.com/watch?v=J6xhnSp5Gdw

REPRISE [2006]
Written and directed by Joachim Trier

[b]Phillip [after he and Erik drop their manuscripts into the mailbox]: This is when it all begins.

…

Narrator: Erik was relieved when his suspicions were finally confirmed: He was utterly without talent. Phillip’s manusript was accepted. His book was released in the fall.

…

Narrartor: Ironic punk quickly evolved into cynical commercialism.

…

Erik: What does that mean?
Phillip: “Que le tout?” The only thing left, is everything. The whole.

…

Narrator: Phillip’s sarcastic humor made her gasp with laughter. Phillip said her gasping was repulsive. This only made her gasp even more.

…

Narrator: He enjoyed that they both admitted actually disliking The Clash.

…

Narrator: The doctors said his obsessive romance with Kari had triggered his psychosis. When Phillip was committed, Kari was advised not to visit him.

…

Lars: Guys in long-term relationships become so lame. They get sucked into this feminine sphere of TV series and nice dinners. They get less and less time to read and listen to music. Eventually they don’t even miss it. They end up as unstimulated bourgeios retards…

…

Lars: Feeling guilty is slave mentality. Sometimes you have to be Zarathustra. Be mean.

…

Publisher: Remember what Wittgenstein says, “The important things in life are expressed through music, not words.”

…

Friend: Careful Lars, too much Heidegger can make you dizzy.

…

Phillip [seeing Mathis across the roon]: Please don’t come over, you superficial imbecile.

…

S.E. Dahl [a famous author]: Do you write as well?
Erik: Yes, I have written a book. You probably haven’t read it. It hasn’t been published yet.
Sten: Then I probably haven’t read it.
Narrator: Erik knew that, in S.E. Dahl’s mind, he and Mathis were now indistinguishable.

…

Erik [being interviewed on TV]: Well, Prosopopeia, isn’t really about madness. The personal is on a different level than the biographical. But the protagonist is searching for “the absolute language.” A language which can grasp all the world’s nuances. And that is a madness of sorts.

…

Phillip [riding a bicycle down the street]: Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.[/b]

Then he opens his eyes. Oddly enough, it is like choosing to leave things to fate.

[b]Lillian [to Erik]: You’re such a damn cliche!

…

S.E. Dahl: TV is no place to discuss literature.

…

Narrator: Erik would have let nothing interfere with his creative impulses. Paradoxically, missing friends and family would have inspired him. After months of hard work, he would have his completed novel. The next fall, Erik’s second book would be published in Norway. The book would have gotten mixed reviews and sparked a literary debate. A professor from Denmark would say in an article, “Norway now has two authors of interest, S.E. Dahl and Erik Hoiass.” Erik would feel distanced from this fuss, working on his new book…[/b]

And on and on and on. Or maybe a different trajectory entirely.

[iambiguous]

Political economy. Stone walks right up to the edge of it. But he never really names it. Much less show how it works. Does he even know?

Still, what makes Gekko such a fascinating character is how he extends greed to encompass all the facets of his life. It’s not just only about making money.

As for the rest of them [the Boiler Room types] I will never in a million years understand why they choose to live this way—on purpose.

One thing for sure: There are tons and tons of people out there who still see these guys as heroes. And they are wracking their brains only in order to figure out ways not to get caught. Or to make the theft legal. Or, better still, trying to qualify as a corporation that is “too big to fail”. Oh, and forwarding their multimillion dollar campaign contributions to Washington. By way of the Supreme Court these days.

In my view, this is basically just another “morality play” that doesn’t anchor the reality of human interaction where it is actually embedded: in the world of wealth and power. If there is ever going to be a solution it has to be political. It has to evolve out of things like OWS.

IMDb

[b]Director Oliver Stone’s first two choices to play Gordon Gekko were Richard Gere and Warren Beatty.

Oliver Stone gave Charlie Sheen the choice of having either Jack Lemmon or Martin Sheen play his father (Carl Fox). Charlie chose his dad. Stone would later cast Lemmon in JFK

The first feature film to demonstrate the use of a cordless portable phone, i.e. a cellphone. The phone was nicknamed “The Brick” by users because of its large size and weight.[/b]

Wiki

Wall Street is not a wholesale criticism of the capitalist system, but of the cynical, quick-buck culture of the 1980s. The “good” characters in the film are themselves capitalists, but in a more steady, hardworking sense. In one scene, Gekko scoffs at Bud Fox’s question as to the moral value of hard work, quoting the example of his (Gekko’s) father, who worked hard his entire life and died in relative mediocrity. Lou Mannheim as an archetype old man mentor, says early in the film, that “good things sometimes take time”, referring to IBM and Hilton—in contrast, Gekko’s “Greed is Good” credo typifies the short-term view prevalent in the 1980s.

See what I mean?

For me, it’s not the extent to which capitalism is criticized but the extent to which it is shown to be rooted organically in the political superstructure. This is the part the folks in government and on Wall Street want to keep hush-hush. Why? Becasue once that is exposed, folks begin to question what our democracy actually encompasses…and what it does not. Again, it is the role played by the government in our political economy that the corporate media always tamps down.

Note: Some explicit language.

WALL STREET
Written [in part] and directed by Oliver Stone

[b]Bud: I’m tapped out Marv. American Express’ got a hit man lookin’ for me.

…

Bud: You know what my dream is? It’s to one day be on the other end of that phone.

…

Bud: Look Dad, I’m not a salesman. How many times I gotta tell you I’m an account executive, and pretty soon I’m going to the investment banking side of the firm.
Carl: You get on the phone and ask strangers for their money, right? You’re a salesman.

…

Natalie: Five minutes, Mr Fox.
Bud: Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them.

…

Gekko: This is the kid, calls me 59 days in a row, wants to be a player. There ought to be a picture of you in the dictionary under persistence kid.

…

Gekko [on phone]: Jesus, if this guy owned a funeral parlor nobody would die!

…

Gekko: Come on, Pal, tell me something I don’t know. It’s my birthday. Surprise me.
Bud: Bluestar. Bluestar airlines.

…

Gekko: Bud Fox, I look at a hundred deals a day. I pick one.

…

Bud: Fuck! Marv, I just bagged the elephant!
Marv: Gekko…

…

Marv: Goddamn, you sure went down the toilet with that ugly bitch.

…

Gekko: That’s the one thing you have to remember about WASPs: they love animals, they can’t stand people.

…

Gekko: The public is out there throwing darts at a board, Sport. I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it’s fought.

…

Gekko: Give me guys that are poor, smart and hungry. And no feelings…And if you need a friend, get a dog.

…

Bud: Uh, Mr Gekko, we took a little loss today. We got stomped out on Tarafly. About a 100 grand.
Gekko: Well, I guess your Dad’s not a union representative at that company, huh?
Bud: How do you know about my father?
Gekko: The most valuable commodity I know of is information.

…

Gekko [points at a bum and businessman]: You gonna tell me the difference between this guy and that guy is luck?

…

Gekko: You see that building? I bought that building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it’s a day’s pay.

…

Bud: All right Mr Gekko, you got me.

…

Wildman: …rarer still is your interest in Anacott Steel.
Gekko: My interest is the same as yours Larry. Money. I thought it’d be a good investment for my kid…
Wildman: No. This time I’m in for the long term. This is not a liquidation, Gordon. I’m going to turn it around. You’re getting a free ride on my tail, mate, and with the dollars you’re costing me to buy back the stock, I could modernize the plant. I’m not the only one who pays here Gordon. We’re talking about lives and jobs; three and four generations of steel workers…
Gekko: Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you took CNX Electronics, you laid off what 6,000 workers, Jessmon Fruit about 4,000. That airline you bought…
Wildman: I could break you, mate, in two pieces over my knees, you know it, I know it. I could buy you six times ever, I could dump the stock just to burn your ass. But I happen to want the company and I want your block of shares. I’m announcing a tender offer at 65 tomorrow, and I’m expecting your commitment.

…

Wildman: You’re a two bit pirate and a green-mailer, Gekko, nothing more. Not only would you sell your mother to make a deal, you’d send her COD.

…

Gekko [awed by the morning light]: Ah, Jesus. I wish you could see this, sport. Light’s coming up. I’ve never seen a painting that captures the beauty of the ocean, at a moment like this.

…

Bud: …she asked the wrong question.
Roger: What was that?
Bud: “What are you thinking?”…

…

Bud: What about you, I hear you guys are handling the Fairchild Foods merger and it may not be going through. Any surprises I haven’t read about in the Wall Street Journal?
Roger: Come on Buddy, that’s illegal. You wouldn’t want to got me disbarred now would you?
Bud: Who’s listening? It’s just one college buddy talking to another.
Roger: (sarcastic) Yeah, right…
Bud: Relax, Roger, everybody’s doing it…but if you don’t know, you don’t know.
Roger: …and if I did, what’s in it for moi?
Bud: More money than you ever dreamed of.

…

Bud [to Pop]: Who peed in your Cheerios.

…

Marv: We’re all just one trade away from humiliation.

…

Marv [after Bud’s promotion]: Oh, this is nice. Very nice. So what is it, Mr. Cocksucker now?

…

Darien: I don’t want him to ever know, you understand?
Gekko: Mum’s the word.
[after a pause]
Gekko: You and I are the same, Darien. We are smart enough not to buy in to the oldest myth running, love. A fiction created by people to keep them from jumping out of windows.
[laughs]
Darien: You know sometimes I miss you, Gordon, you’re really twisted.[/b]

THE SPEECH

Gekko: [at the Teldar Paper stockholder’s meeting] Well, I appreciate the opportunity you’re giving me Mr. Cromwell as the single largest shareholder in Teldar Paper, to speak. Well, ladies and gentlemen we’re not here to indulge in fantasy but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company! All together, these men sitting up here own less than three percent of the company. And where does Mr. Cromwell put his million-dollar salary? Not in Teldar stock; he owns less than one percent. You own the company. That’s right, you, the stockholder. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes.
Cromwell: This is an outrage! You’re out of line Gekko!
Gekko: Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

Yeah, this is sort of true and sort of false. But how does it all hinge together politically? And that is leaving aside Gekko’s motivation and intention.

[b]Carl: “There came into Egypt a Pharaoh who did not know.”
Gekko: I beg your pardon, is that a proverb?
Carl: No, a prophecy. The rich have been doing it to the poor since the beginning of time. The only difference between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians didn’t allow unions. I know what this guy is all about, greed. He don’t give a damn about Bluestar or the unions. He’s in and out for the buck and he don’t take prisoners.

…

Carl: Of course my son did work three summers as a baggage handler and freight loader. With those qualifications, why should I doubt his ability to run an airline?
Gekko: Fine, if you don’t want us, stay with the scum in present management–dedicated to running you and Bluestar into the ground.
Carl: That “scum” built this company up from one plane in thirty years, they made something out of nothing, and if that’s a scum I’ll take one over a rat any day…

…

Bud: Look, Dad, save the “workers of the world unite” speech for next time. I heard it too much growing up.
Carl: He’s using you, kid. He’s got your prick in his back pocket, but you’re too blind to see it.
Bud: No. What I see is a jealous old machinist who can’t stand the fact that his son has become more successful than he has!
Carl: What you see is a guy who never measured a man’s success by the size of his WALLET!
Bud: That’s because you never had the GUTS to go out into the world and stake your own claim!
[Long Pause]
Carl: Boy, if that’s the way you feel, I must have done a really lousy job as a father.

…

Carl [to Bud regarding Gekko] : I don’t go to bed with no whore, and I don’t wake up with no whore. That’s how I live with myself. I don’t know how you do it. I hope I’m wrong about this guy. But I’ll let the men decide for themselves. That much I promise you.

…

Roger [to Bud about Bluestar liquidation]: Well, you’re only the President of the company. What the hell do you know, anyway?

…

Commercial banker: …look, we have 30 banks ready to participate in a 4 year revolving credit line but we have to have your assurance to pay back most of the loan in the first 6 months, and the only way and the only way we can see this happening is liquidating the hangars and the planes. Can you people guarantee that?
Investment banker: Guaranteed! No sweat…we already got the Bleezburg brothers lined up to build condos where the hangars are, we can lay off the planes with Mexicana, who are dumb enough to buy 'em and Texas Air is drooling at my kneecaps to get the slots and the routes. What’s the problem? it’s done…
Roger: (passing a paper to the commercial banker) This is the pricetag on the 737s, the gates, the hangars, the routes, we got it all nailed right down to the typewriters…
Investment banker:…'course the beauty of it is the overfunded pension fund. Gekko gets the 75 million in there. Fifty million buys him the minimum annuities for 6,000 employees and he walks away with the rest. All in, he’ll net 60 to 70 million. Not bad for a month’s work. (to Bud) Your man did his homework, Fox, you’re gonna have the shortest executive career since that Pope who got poisoned…now he’ll really start believing he’s “Gekko the Great.”

…

Bud: I just found out about the garage sale down at Bluestar. Why?
Gekko: Last night I read Rudy the story of Winnie the Pooh and the Honey pot. Know what happened: he stuck his nose in that honey pot once too often and got stuck.
Bud: Maybe you ought to read him Pinocchio. You told me you were going to turn Bluestar around. Not upside down. You fucking used me.
Gekko: You’re walking around blind without a cane, sport. A fool and his money are lucky to get together in the first place.
Bud: Why do you need to wreck this company?
Gekko: Because it’s wreckable! I took another look and I changed my mind.
Bud: If these people lose their jobs, nowhere to go. My father worked at Bluestar for twenty-four years. I gave 'em my word.
Gekko (hard): It’s all about bucks, kid, the rest is conversation. [softer] Look, Bud, you’re still going to be president. And when the time comes, you’ll parachute out a rich man. With the money you’re going to make, your father won’t have to work another day in his life.[/b]

THE OTHER SPEECH

Gekko: Buddy, it’s not a question of how much is enough. It’s a zero sum game, sport. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another. Like magic. That painting cost $60,000 10 years ago. I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real. And the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it. Capitalism at its finest. The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it. You’ve got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I’ve still got a lot to teach you.

See, here is where Stone goes right up to the edge. But to call crony capitalism the “free market” is nothing short of preposterous. Is Stone actually oblivious to this?!

Darien: You may find that when you had money and lost it, it can be much worse than never having had it at all!
Bud: That is BULLSHIT!
[throws a whiskey bottle destructively; Darien starts to leave]
Bud: HEY! HEY! You step out that door, and I am changing the locks!
Darien: You may not believe this Bud but I really do care for you. We could’ve made a good team.
Bud: Get the fuck out of here.

Something tells me she’ll get over it.

[b]Lou: The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do.

…

Gekko: Fox, where the hell are you? I am losing MILLIONS! You got me into this airline and you sure as hell better get me out or the only job you’ll ever have on the Street is SWEEPING IT! You hear me, Fox?
Bud: You once told me, don’t get emotional about stock. Don’t! The bid is 16 1/2 and going down. As your broker, I advise you to take it.
Gekko: Yeah. Well you TAKE IT!
[shouts]
Gekko: RIGHT IN THE ASS YOU FUCKING SCUMBAG COCKSUCKER!!
Bud: It’s two minutes to closing, Gordon. What do you want to do? Decide.
Gekko: Dump it…

…

Bud: What’s the matter? Did somebody die?
Marv: Yeah.

…

Lou: Bud, I like you. Just remember somethingt. Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.
Bud: I think I understand, Lou.[/b]

If not, he’s just about to.

[b]Lynch [when Bud got his promotion]: The minute I laid eyes on you, I knew you had what it took.
Lynch [when Bud got arrested]: The minute I laid eyes on you, I knew you were no good.

…

Gekko: [meeting alone together in Central Park] Hiya, Buddy.
Bud: Gordon.
Gekko: Sand bagged me on Bluestar huh? I guess you think you taught the teacher a lesson that the tail can wag the dog huh? Well let me clue you in, pal. The ice is melting right underneath your feet.
[punches Bud and grabs him by the coattails]
Gekko: Did you think you could’ve gotten this far this fast with anyone else, huh? That you’d be out there dicking someone like Darien? No. You’d still be cold calling widows and dentists tryin’ to sell 'em 20 shares of some dog shit stock. I took you in.
[hits him again]
Gekko: A NOBODY!
[and again]
Gekko: I opened the doors for you! Showed you how the system works! The value of information! How to get it! Fulham oil! Brant resources! Geodynamics! And this is how you fucking pay me back you COCKROACH?
[hits him once again and Bud falls to the ground]
Gekko: I GAVE you Darien. I GAVE you your manhood. I gave you EVERYTHING![/b]

[iambiguous]

This movie barely exists at IMDb and wiki. But it is alive and well here:

rottentomatoes.com/m/poison_friends/

Includes the trailer and reviews.

On the other hand, some friends insist this is the only place to go for movies.

This is a movie about ideas and friendship. Or, perhaps, the idea of friendship. And about the words we use to traverse this rather cerebral terrain. What people do here is talk. About words. And about the best way to communicate them.

Or is this really about something else entirely. About what is deemed great and what is deemed crap. And about those who set upon themselves the task of making those distinctions for everyone else.

But to what extent are they real and to what extent are they simply narratives we manage to be talked into by others. Or talk ourselves into.Or talk others into.

All the better then to expose the gap between their words and their worlds. Some gaps being greater than others of course.

For some, there are so many different lies to live once they have given up on the truth. Or if they don’t have what it takes to live out one. Or the will to see it through. Beneath all the bluster, apparently, he is nobody. And yet obviously he could have been somebody.

But what is this world – of the Intellectual, the author, the cultured, the artiste – anyway?

POISON FRIENDS [Les Amites Malefiques] 2006
Written and directed by Emmanuel Bourdieu

[b]Andre: Everyone here writes. A diary or something else. Short stories, novels, poems. What a waste…You know what Karl Kraus wrote? “Why do some people write? Because they are too weak not to write.”
Eloi: So why did he?
Andre: To say exactly that.

…

Andre [to Alexandre]: You’re all the same. You want to write without reading.

…

Andre: Then be like Kafka. Burn it. Set her mailbox on fire.

…

Andre: I know this might seem ridiculous but I never joke about literatire. You can’t understand. Not only do you know nothing about literature, but you don’t even care about it.

…

Andre: In the “The Misanthrope”, Moliere has Alceste declare that one needs to exercise control over the desire one has to write. That is, writing must be justified. Writing must be necessary. 17th century writers such as Boileau and Moliere frequently use terms such as “itch”, or “treatment”. For these authors, the act of writing was a sickness to be cured.

…

Andre: I met him. Ellroy. Actually, he’s a bit of a jerk. Better in print than in person. I guess it was a childish idea, meeting the master, soaking up all his wise words, all that crap. You bond with the masters in their books.

…

Eloi: He lectured us for years when actually he was just a loser. I admired him so much. I was such an idiot.

…

Eloi: You lied to us.
Andre: Of course I lied to you. I lied because yo0u needed those lies. You were cowards, you needed a master. Too bad if the master embarrasses you now. And don’t tell me I’m still young. I’m not not at all. I’m the oldest of men…I’m a failure.[/b]

[iambiguous]

You gotta love a movie so funny it doesn’t give you the time to think. But, still, this one is a really, really profound reflection on…something.

And, finally: a film that takes nihilism seriously!

IMDb

[b]A lot of the Dude’s clothes in the movie were Jeff Bridges’s own clothes, including his Jellies sandals.

The reason Steve Buscemi’s character, Donny, is constantly being told to “Shut the fuck up!” by Walter (John Goodman), is because Buscemi’s character in Fargo would not shut up.

Before filming a scene, Jeff Bridges would frequently ask the Coen Brothers “Did the Dude burn one on the way over?” If they said he had, he would rub his knuckles in his eyes before doing a take.

The $0.69 check the Dude writes at Ralph’s for half and half is dated September 11, 1991, exactly ten years before the 9/11 attacks. While he is writing the check, George Bush [41] can be heard on the television railing against Saddam Hussein.[/b]

THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Written and directed by the Coen Brothers.

[b]The Stranger: [voiceover] Way out west there was this fella… fella I wanna tell ya about. Fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. Mr. Lebowski, he called himself “The Dude”. Now, “Dude” - that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then there was a lot about the Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that’s why I found the place so darned interestin’. They call Los Angeles the “City Of Angels.” I didn’t find it to be that, exactly. But I’ll allow there are some nice folks there. ‘Course I can’t say I’ve seen London, and I ain’t never been to France. And I ain’t never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the feller says. But I’ll tell you what - after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin’ every bit as stupefyin’ as you’d see in any of them other places. And in English, too. So I can die with a smile on my face, without feelin’ like the good Lord gypped me. Now this here story I’m about to unfold took place back in the early ‘90s - just about the time of our conflict with Sad’m and the I-raqis. I only mention it because sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, ‘cause, what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about the Dude here. Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that’s the Dude, in Los Angeles. And even if he’s a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide. But sometimes there’s a man, sometimes, there’s a man. Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But… aw, hell. I’ve done introduced him enough.

…

Blond Treehorn Thug [while dunking the Dude’s head in the toilet]: Where’s the money, Lebowski? Where’s the fucking money, shithead?
The Dude: It’s uh…uh…it’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.

…

The Dude: Nobody calls me Lebowski. You got the wrong guy. I’m the Dude, man.
Blond Treehorn Thug: Your name’s Lebowski, Lebowski. Your wife is Bunny.
The Dude: My… my wi-, my wife, Bunny? Do you see a wedding ring on my finger? Does this place look like I’m fucking married? The toilet seat’s up, man!

…

Blond Treehorn Thug: [holding up a bowling ball] What the fuck is this?
The Dude: Obviously you’re not a golfer.

…

The Dude: Walter, the chinaman who peed on my rug, I can’t go give him a bill, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter: What the fuck are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT… Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
The Dude: Walter, this isn’t a guy who built the railroads here. This is a guy…
Walter: What the fuck are you…?
The Dude: Walter, he peed on my rug!
Donny: He peed on the Dude’s rug.

…

Walter: That rug really tied the room together. Did it not?
The Dude: Fuckin-A.
Donny: And this guy peed on it.

…

The Dude: Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not “Mr. Lebowski”. You’re Mr. Lebowski. I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

…

The Big Lebowski: Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?
[the Dude walks out and shuts the door]
The Big Lebowski: The bums will always lose!
Brandt: How was your meeting, Mr. Lebowski?
The Dude: Okay. The old man told me to take any rug in the house.

…

Bunny Lebowski: Blow on them.
The Dude: You want me to blow on your toes?
Bunny Lebowski: I can’t blow that far.
The Dude: [looks at man lazing in the pool] Are you sure he won’t mind?
Bunny Lebowski: Uli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a Nihilist.
The Dude: Ah, that must be exhausting.

…

Walter: Smokey, my friend, you’re entering a world of pain. If you mark that frame 8 you’re entering world of pain.

…

The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?
The Dude: Dude.
The Big Lebowski: Huh?
The Dude: Uhh… I don’t know sir.
The Big Lebowski: Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?
The Dude: Hmmm…Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

…

The Dude: It’s like what Lenin said… you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh…
Donny: I am the walrus.
The Dude: You know what I’m trying to say…
Donny: I am the walrus.
Walter: That fucking bitch…
The Dude: Oh yeah!
Donny: I am the walrus.
Walter: Shut the fuck up, Donny! V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov!

…

The Dude: Walter, I love you, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the fact you’re a goddamn moron.

…

Walter: I told that Kraut a fuckin’ thousand times, I don’t roll on shabbos!

…

Donny: How come you don’t roll on Saturday, Walter?
Walter: I’m shomer shabbos.
Donny: What’s that?
The Dude: Yeah, and in the meantime, what do I tell Lebowski?
Walter: Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means that I don’t work, I don’t drive a car, I don’t fucking ride in a car, I don’t handle money, I don’t turn on the oven, and I sure as shit DON’T FUCKIN’ ROLL!!
Donny: Sheesh.
Walter Sobchak: Shomer shabbos!

…

Donny: Who’s got your undies, Walter?

…

The Dude: Also, my rug was stolen.
Cop: The rug was in the car?
The Dude: No. It was here.
Cop: Oh, separate incidents.
Maude Lebowski: [on answering machine] Jeffrey, this is Maude Lebowski. I need to see you. I’m the one who took your rug.
Cop: Well, I guess we can close the file on that one.

…

The Dude: Oh, I know that guy. He’s a nihilist.

…

Sherry: [on adult video] You must be here to fix the cable.
Maude: Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.
The Dude: He fixes the cable?

…

The Dude: Nice Marmot.

…

Nihilist: We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing. And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your johnson.
The Dude: Excuse me?
Nihilist: I said
[shouting]
Nihilist: We’ll cut off your johnson!

…

The Dude: You gonna find the guys who stole the car? You got any promising leads?
Auto Circus Cop: Leads, yeah, sure. I’ll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they’ve got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!
[laughs]
Auto Circus Cop: Leads!
[laughs as he walks away]

…

The Dude: My only hope is that the big Lebowski kills me before the Germans can cut my dick off.

…

Walter: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

…

Walter: Also, let’s not forget - let’s not forget, Dude - that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city - that aint legal either.
The Dude: What are you, a fucking park ranger now?
Walter: No, I’m…
The Dude: Who gives a shit about the fucking marmot!

…

The Dude: Fuck sympathy! I don’t need your fuckin’ sympathy, man, I need my fucking johnson!
Donny: What do you need that for, Dude?

…

The Stranger: Well, a wiser fellow than myself once said, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.”

…

The Stranger: I like your style, Dude.
The Dude: Well, I dig your style too, man. Got the whole cowboy thing goin’.

…

The Stranger: There’s just one thing, Dude.
The Dude: What’s that?
The Stranger: Do you have to use so many cuss words?
The Dude: What the fuck you talking about?
The Stranger: Okay, Dude. Have it your way.

…

Walter: Is this your homework, Larry? Is this your homework, Larry?
The Dude: Look, man…
Walter: Dude, please? Is this your homework, Larry?
The Dude: Just ask him about the car.
Walter: Is this yours, Larry? Is this your homework, Larry?
The Dude: Is that your car out front?
Walter: Is this your homework, Larry?
The Dude: We know it’s his fucking homework! Where’s the fucking money, you little brat?
Walter: Look, Larry. Have you ever heard of Vietnam?
The Dude: Oh, for Christ’s sake, Walter…
Walter: You’re entering a world of pain, son. We know that this is your homework. We know that you stole a car.
The Dude: And the fucking money.
Walter: And the fucking money. And, we know that this is your homework.
The Dude: We’re going to cut your dick off, Larry.
Walter: You’re killing your father, Larry!..All right, this is pointless. Time for plan “B”…You might want to watch out that front window, Larry. Son, this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!

…

The Dude: No, Walter, it did NOT look like Larry was about to crack! You know Walter, you’re right. There is an unspoken message here. It’s “FUCK YOU, LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!”

…

Jackie Treehorn: People forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.
The Dude: On you maybe.

…

Jackie Treehorn: Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic!
The Dude: Yeah well, I still jerk off manually.

…

Jackie Treehorn: Refill?
The Dude: Does the Pope shit in the woods?

…

The Stranger: Darkness warshed over the Dude - darker’n a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. There was no bottom.

…

The Dude: Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man.
Malibu Police Chief: Mr. Treehorn draws a lot of water in this town. You don’t draw shit, Lebowski. Now we got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain. I don’t like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Lebowski. I don’t like your jerk-off name. I don’t like your jerk-off face. I don’t like your jerk-off behavior, and I don’t like you, jerk-off. Do I make myself clear?
The Dude: [after a pause] I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.

…

The Dude: Jesus, man, can you change the station?
Cab Driver: Fuck you man! You don’t like my fucking music, get your own fucking cab!
The Dude: I’ve had a…
Cab Driver: I pull over and kick your ass out, man!
The Dude: - had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man

…

The Dude [to Walter]: You threw out a ringer for a ringer!

…

The Dude: You thought that Bunny had been kidnapped and you were fuckin’ glad, man. You could use it as an excuse to make some money disappear. All you needed was a sap to pin it on! You’d just met me! You human…paraquat! You figured ‘Oh, here’s a loser’, you know? A deadbeat, someone the square community won’t give a shit about.
The Big Lebowski: Well, aren’t you?
The Dude: Well, yeah!

…

The Dude: Well, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car.
Nihilist: Ve vant ze money, Lebowski.
Nihilist #2: Ja, uzzervize ve kill ze girl.
Nihilist #3: Ja, it seems you have forgotten our little deal, Lebowski.
The Dude: You don’t HAVE the fucking girl, dipshits! We know you never did!
[the Nihilists, stunned, confer amongst themselves in German]
Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Nihilist: Ve don’t care. Ve still vant ze money, Lebowski, or ve fuck you up.
Walter: Fuck you. Fuck the three of you.
The Dude: Hey, cool it Walter.
Walter: No, without a hostage, there is no ransom. That’s what ransom is. Those are the fucking rules.
Nihilist #2: His girlfriend gave up her toe!
Nihilist #3: She though we’d be getting million dollars!
Nihilist #2: Iss not fair!
Walter: Fair! WHO’S THE FUCKING NIHILIST HERE! WHAT ARE YOU, A BUNCH OF FUCKING CRYBABIES?
The Dude: Hey, cool it Walter. Look, pal, there never was any money. The big Lebowski gave me an empty briefcase, so take it up with him, man.
Walter: And, I would like my undies back.
[Stunned, the Germans confer amongst themselves again]
Donny: Are they gonna hurt us, Walter?
Walter: No, Donny. These men are cowards.
Nihilist: Okay. So we take ze money you haf on you, und ve calls it eefen.
Walter: Fuck you…Show me what you got nihilists!

…

Walter [at the funeral parlor]: GOD DAMN IT! Look, just because we’re bereaved, that doesn’t make us saps!

…

Walter: Is there a Ralphs around here?

…

Walter: Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. In your wisdom, Lord, you took him, as you took so many bright flowering young men at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364. These young men gave their lives. And so would Donny. Donny, who loved bowling.[/b]

He releases Donny’s ashes and the wind takes them…right into The Dude’s face.

[b]The Dude: God damn you Walter! You fuckin’ asshole! Everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the FUCK, has anything got to do with Vietnam? What the fuck are you talking about?!!!

…

The Dude: Yeah, well. The Dude abides.
The Stranger: The Dude abides. I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals.

…

The Stranger: Things worked out pretty good for The Dude and Walter. And it was a pretty good story, don’t you think? Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts anyway. I didn’t like seeing Donny go. But then I happen to know there’s a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuating itself down through the generations.[/b]

[iambiguous]

There are folks who loathe films like this because, let’s face it, it revolves basically around an amoral narrative. But these are precisely the sort of characters that take the “morality is objective” liturgies of some folks in here and show us so many different ways in which to flush them down the toilet. At best the objectivists can go up to them and insist, “I don’t care that you think it is okay to do because philosophically it is not”!

Really, what the hell can you say to people who see the world entirely from the perspective of self-gratification? Or self-preservation?

And I suspect there are folks drawn to these characters simply because the parts they play themselves up on the stage of life are entirely too scripted. The vicarious thrill of dismantling the stage plank by plank.

Still, if you don’t like these people…if the lives they live apall you, well, there it is.

Or is romance only true when we determine what that means?

Look for The King. And lots and lots and lots of low-lifes. Some really flea-bitten reservoir dogs. In fact, look for that too.

And let me ask you: Has anyone ever seen Michael Madsen and Tom Sizemore in the same place at the same time?

Note: Some explicit language.

IMDb

[b]Following the “eggplant scene”, Dennis Hopper was concerned about being “shot” by Christopher Walken with the prop gun so close against his head for fear of being burned by the barrel. Director Tony Scott assured him the gun was 100% safe, and even tested it by having the prop man fire it against his (Scott’s) own forehead. But upon firing the prop gun the barrel extended about a third of an inch and Scott ended up on the floor with blood pouring from the wound.

It was Brad Pitt’s idea for his character to be a stoner who never leaves the couch.

In the DVD commentary, Quentin Tarantino admits that this is the most autobiographical movie he has ever made.

Tarantino’s original ending had Clarence dying in the gun battle, leaving Alabama a widow. Tarantino said that he intended Alabama to turn to crime and join with Mr. White, a character from Reservoir Dogs (which he wrote and directed). In a flashback scene in Reservoir Dogs, Mr. White is asked about “Alabama”.

That’s Patricia Arquette’s four-year-old son Enzo Rossi in the final scene.

In the diner scene, when Clarence asks Alabama what her turn-offs are, she replies “Persians” in the finished film. Being turned off by her character appearing racist in that scene, Patricia Arquette, who played Alabama, name-dropped a different ethnicity for each take that was shot. She said she wanted to be equally offensive to all people.[/b]

TRUE ROMANCE
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Quenton Tarantino

[b]Clarence: In Jailhouse Rock he was everything rockabilly’s about. I mean, he is rockabilly. Mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie he couldn’t give a fuck about nothing except rockin’ and rollin’, living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.

…

Clarence: I always said, if I had to fuck a guy…I mean had to, if my life depended on it…I’d fuck Elvis.

…

Alabama: I kept asking Clarence why our world seemed to be collapsing…and everything seemed so shitty, and he’d say, “That’s the way it goes. But don’t forget: It goes the other way too.” That’s the way romance is. Usually, that’s the way it goes. But every once in a while, it goes the other way too.

…

Clarence: I can tell you… that was one of the best times I ever had. It was. But, you know, I knew something must be rotten in Denmark. There was no way you could like me that much. Man, I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you took off your dress, you…you didn’t have a dick.

…

Marty: He’s askin’ about Alabama.
Drexl: Where the fuck is that bitch?
Clarence: She’s with me.
Drexl: Who the fuck are you?
Clarence: I’m her husband.
Drexl: [laughs] Well, that makes us practically related.

…

Drexl: Now I know I’m pretty, but I ain’t as pretty as a couple of titties.

…

Clarence: I’m not eatin’ ‘cause I’m not hungry. I’m not sittin’ ‘cause I’m not stayin’. I’m not lookin’ at the movie ‘cause I saw it seven years ago. It’s “The Mack” with Max Julien, Carol Speed, and Richard Pryor. I’m not scared of you. I just don’t like you. In that envelope is some payoff money. Alabama’s moving on to some greener pastures. We’re not negotiatin’. I don’t like to barter. I don’t like to dicker. I never have fun in Tijuana. That price is non-negotiable. What’s in that envelope is for my peace of mind. My peace of mind is worth that much. Not one penny more, not one penny more.[/b]

In other words, the envelope is empty. You can do that sort of thing when it’s all scripted.

[b]Drexl: He must have thought it was white boy day. It ain’t white boy day, is it?
Marty: No man, It ain’t white boy day.

…

Alabama [opening the suitcase full of dope]: These…these aren’t my clothes.

…

Coccotti: You see that?
[Holding a clenched fist, then striking Clifford]
Coccotti: That smarts, doesn’t it? Getting slammed in the nose. Fucks you all up. You get that pain shootin’ through your brain, your eyes fill up with water. That ain’t any kind of fun, but what I have to offer you, that’s as good as it’s gonna.

…

Coccotti: …your son, the cowboy, it’s claimed, came in the room blazin’, and didn’t stop ‘till they were pretty sure everybody was dead.
Clifford: What are you talkin’ about?
Coccotti: Talkin’ about a massacre. They snatched my narcotics, hightailed it outta there. Woulda got away with it, but your son, fuckhead that he is, left his driver’s license in a dead guy’s hand.

…

Clifford: You know, I don’t believe you.
Coccotti: That’s of minor importance. What is of major fucking importance is that I believe you.

…

Coccotti: You know, Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I’m Sicilian. My father was the world heavy-weight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guys got seventeen pantomimes. A woman’s got twenty, but a guy’s got seventeen…but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell. Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don’t wanna show me nothin’, but you’re tellin me everything. I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won’t walk away from.[/b]

Here we go again: Quentin and the N word:

[b]Clifford: You’re Sicilian, huh?
Coccotti: Yeah, Sicilian.
Clifford: Ya know, I read a lot. Especially about things… about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here’s a fact I don’t know whether you know or not. Sicilians were spawned by niggers.
Coccotti: Come again?
Clifford: It’s a fact. Yeah. You see, uh, Sicilians have, uh, black blood pumpin’ through their hearts. Hey, no, if eh, if eh, if you don’t believe me, uh, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, uh, you see, uh, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors are niggers.
Coccotti: Yes…
Clifford Worley: So you see, way back then, uh, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but, uh, well, then the Moors moved in there, and uh, well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin’ with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That’s why blonde hair and blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know, it’s absolutely amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, that, uh, that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this…
[Coccotti busts out laughing]
Clifford: No, I’m, no, I’m quoting… history. It’s written. It’s a fact, it’s written.
Coccotti: [laughing] I love this guy.
Clifford: Your ancestors are niggers. Uh-huh.
[Starts laughing, too]
Clifford: Hey. Yeah. And, and your great-great-great-great grandmother fucked a nigger, ho, ho, yeah, and she had a half-nigger kid…now, if that’s a fact, tell me, am I lying? 'Cause you, you’re part eggplant.
[All laugh]

…

Clarence: You get to meet Captain Kirk?

…

Clarence: [Peeling out in reverse into oncoming traffic] We now return to Bullit already in progress.

…

Virgil: What’s the matter, baby, huh? Can’t breathe? You better get used to that.

…

Clarence: That is probably the single best piece I have ever read on Elvis Presley in my entire life. Look. It tries to pin down what the attraction is after all these years. It covers the whole spectrum. Talks to the fans, people who grew up with him, people who love his music. Then there’s the fanatics. Right? I don’t know about you, but they give me the creeps.

…

Clarence: I mean look at her. It looks like she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

…

Virgil [to Alabama after beating her up]: Now the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest. I don’t give a shit if you’re fuckin’ Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. Remember that guy in Texas? The guy up in that fuckin’ tower that killed all them people? I’ll bet you green money that first little black dot he took a bead on, that was the bitch of the bunch. First one is tough, no fuckin’ foolin’. The second one…the second one ain’t no fuckin’ Mardis Gras either, but it’s better than the first one ‘cause you still feel the same thing, y’know except it’s more diluted, y’know it’s…it’s better. I threw up on the first one, you believe that? Then the third one…the third one is easy, you level right off. It’s no problem. Now…shit… now I do it just to watch their fuckin’ expression change.

…

Floyd: Hey! Get some beer…and some cleaning products!

…

Elliot: Hi. How are you? My name’s Elliot, and I’m with the Cub Scouts of America. We’re… we’re selling uncut cocaine to get to the jamboree.

…

Clarence: If there’s one thing this last week has taught me, it’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.

…

Clarence: Like Nick Curry used to say, if I’m wrong, I swear to God I’ll fucking apologize![/b]

This is part of a truly bizarre scene. In a truly bizarre context.

Followed closely by this one:

[b]Floyd: You guys want to smoke a bowl?

…

Boris: Call me an ambulance. Somebody, call me an ambulance.
Nicky Dimes: Shut up.
Boris: Fuck you, I’m bleeding.
Nicky Dimes: I’ll call you a hearse…

…

Alabama: Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool. And sometimes Clarence asks me what I would have done if he had died, if that bullet had been two inches more to the left. To this, I always smile, as if I’m not going to satisfy him with a response. But I always do. I tell him of how I would want to die, but that the anguish and the want of death would fade like the stars at dawn, and that things would be much as they are now. Perhaps. Except maybe I wouldn’t have named our son Elvis.[/b]

[d63]

The William Hurt character in The Big Chill:

Sometimes you have to just let art flow through you.

The Jim Gaffigan character in Away We Go:

But then if life is just shit, then we’re the flies.

[iambiguous]

Hey, what can I say: I like thrillers. Annals in the philosophy of cold blooded murder.

A reconfiguration of Dial M For Murder without the need to dial at all. Press M for murder?

The rich always will have more options than the rest of us when they need to remove someone from the picture. But even they can’t possibly calculate the ramifications of every contingency, chance and change. It’s nice to know we’re all equal in that respect.

And here he gets to kill two birds with one murder.

If someone ever invents a device that allows us to know what is really going on inside the heads of others. Like, say, the ones we love? Or, perhaps, the ones who say they love us?

Thank god these things only ever happen in the movies.

Gordon Gekko, meet Steven Taylor.

IMDb

[b]Many of the artworks featured in this film are Mortensen’s own.

To calm her and create a certain atmosphere of intimacy before filming the lovemaking scenes, Viggo Mortensen sang a couple of love songs to Gwyneth Paltrow that he learned in Argentina when he was young. In an interview he said, “I don’t know if that ended up scaring her instead.” [/b]

wiki

Roger Ebert wrote “[It] works like a nasty little machine to keep us involved and disturbed; my attention never strayed”. Meanwhile, James Berardinelli wrote that the film “has inexplicably managed to eliminate almost everything that was worthwhile about Dial M for Murder, leaving behind the nearly-unwatchable wreckage of a would-be '90s thriller.”

So, which is it? Both, of course. Well, both and neither.

A PERFECT MURDER
Directed by Andrew Davis

[b]Steven: So what’s our exposure?
Business associate: Based on my preliminary trend model?
Steven: Yes. No frills.
Business associate: Think Chernobyl.

…

Steven: I feel like I’m knee-deep in bohemian cachet.

…

Steven: Well, I can certainly see what Emily was drawn to.
David: What’s that.
Steven: Your work, it’s very trashy.

…

Steven: She is in love. You…you’re in business.

…

Steven: I’m saying you didn’t study at Berkeley. I’m saying you learned to paint while doing 3 to 6 in Soledad Prison for relieving a widow of her life savings. Your real name is Winston Lagrange, which I rather like. Born to pure trailer trash in Barstow, California. Ward of the courts since the age of 10. You went from pickpocket to car thief to con man until you found out you had a way with the softer sex. No doubt looking for that mother you can barely remember. A life made up completely of depressing little scams until now.

…

Emily: Did you buy anything?
Steven: I made him an offer.
Emily: And?
Steven: And he’s chewing on it.

…

Steven: What if there were no tomorrow?

…

David: What happens if the plan goes to hell?

…

Steven: That’s not happiness to see me, is it?
Emily: Try surprise.

…

Detective Mohamed: Is there something wrong?
Steven: Aside from a dead man lying in my kitchen?

…

Bobby: You know, Mo, rich people, they’re different from you and me?
Mohamed: How’s that?
Bobby: Well, for one thing, they’ve got a fuck of lot more money.

…

Steven: By tomorrow, this will seem like a bad dream.
Emily: And what if there were no tomorrow?

…

Steven: Do you have any idea who you are fucking with?
David: Yeah. You’re the guy who hired me to kill your wife because you couldn’t do the wet work yourself. Well, neither could I.

…

David: Okay, so what’s plan “B”?

…

David: Hey Steven, do I keep fucking your wife in the meantime, or what?

…

Raquel: I mean screwing around is second oldest reason to kill someone.
Emily: Oh really, and what would be the first?
Raquel: Money, honey.

…

Emily: That’s not happiness to see me is it?
Steven: Try surprise.

…

David: Excuse me sir, can you spare 400 grand?
Steven: I don’t see why not.

…

Steven [stabbing David]: How’s that for wet work?

…

Steven: You should thank me. Artists are always appreciated more after they’re dead.

…

Emily: He must have put it back on his way in, didn’t plan on that did you?
Steven: Young David, he was…very unpredictable.[/b]

[iambiguous]

The film below was shown on 2 screens, made $5,500 and went on to gross $12,500. Yet it is really a fascinating and enormously entertaining film. Oh, and educational. It speaks volumns regarding the film INDUSTRY.

This is one of those film where, well, as soon as the “experts” start talking about “art” you know less and less about it. Especially with regard to “modern” art.

But since I know very little about that world myself I have no choice be to sit on the sidelines and listen to them all slug it out.

Until we reach the parts here open to an empirical investigation. Teri brings the scientists in. The science of art?

But slowly but surely this becomes less and less about either art or science and more and more about money. And egos.

Here is wiki’s take on it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_the_*$ … Pollock%3F

WHO THE #$&% IS JACKSON POLLOCK?
Written and directed by Harry Moses

[b]Narrator: Is this a genuine honest-to-god, no-doubt-about-it American masterpiece possibly worth as much as $50 millon? Maybe. But to Terri Horton, a 73 year old former long haul truck driver who bought the painting for $5 in a thrift shop, there’s no “maybe” about it.

…

Teri: Everybody knows that a fairy-tale starts out, “once upon a time”, but a truck driver’s tale starts out, “You ain’t gonna believe this shit”.[/b]

First off, here’s where Teri’s head was at the beginning:

Teri: I was in this thrift store and saw this big canvas with just paint all over it. No picture. It was ugly. There was nothing to it. It was just a bunch of different colors all over a canvas. I mean, to me, a painting has to have something that you can look at and say, “oh, that really looks cool”. Like Norman Rockwell or something like that.

She bought it for $5.

[b]Narrator: Aside from thinking it was ugly, the picture wouldn’t fit through the door of her friend’s trailer. So Teri put it in a garage sale where a local art teacher spotted it and told her…
Teri: “you very well could maybe – maybe – I’m no expert, but you might have a Jackson Pollock painting here.” And I said, “who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?”

…

Narrator: Who indeed? Well, for starters, he’s one of the few artists to have his own permanent room at New York’s MOMA.

…

Narrator: Ben Heller owned both of these paintings [shown on screen] before they were sold to MOMA. He bought “Echo” from Pollock for $3,000. It has since increased in value more than 10,000 times. He bought “One,” spelled O-N-E, for $8,000. It is now worth…
Heller: …Let’s just say north of $100 million and leave it at that.

…

Teri: Knowing what it was worth I thought, “Well, my God”. Something this ugly to me and my girlfriend. We were gonna throw darts at it, that’s how insignificant it was to us.

…

Narrator: Thomas Hoving [former director of MOMA] has views reflective of those in the art establishment [regarding the painting]
Hoving: It has no real interest. It contributes nothing to artistic civilization. It’s a flip.[/b]

Hoving is asked by the filmmakers to examine the painting:

[b]Hoving: Now if I had been a night watchman at MOMA for 10 years instead of a curator and director for 18 1/2, then you might say my expertise is not so good. My expertise is very good.
Filmmaker: What do you think?
Hoving: My instant impression…you know the blink, the hundredth of a second impression was “neat, dash compacted” which is not good. He wasn’t neat, he wasn’t compacted. It’s pretty. It’s, uh, superficial and frivolous and I don’t believe it’s a Jackson Pollock. It’s dead on arrival.

…

Teri: Who do they think they are? What if this thing is really real?..It was gonna have to be proven to me. Somebody was gonna have to do something to show me bottom line that this painting was not done by Paul Jackson Pollock.[/b]

And I doubt anyone will ever convince me the reaction of the Big Shots in the Art World here doesn’t revolve in part [maybe even in large part] around the fact that to them this woman is just one of the hicks from the sticks. Which, of course, she’d beam about.

Narrator: What Teri got was a collection of insults that rubbed her the wrong way.
Hoving to the filmmaker: She has no right to be bitter because what she has is no good. So, why should she care?
Filmmaker: She’s not bitter about that. I mean, she would respectfully disagree with you.
Hoving: Yeah, but she knows nothing. I’m an expert. She is not.

Next up: Provenance.

Ron Spencer: Provenance is crucial for a gallery. If you can trace the possession of the work of art from the artist to the present owner, that is strong evidence that the artist created the work.

Then Teri makes up this incredibly fantastic story to “prove” the connection between the painting and Pollock. Really it’s worth watching the film just to hear it. Especially the part about Pollock signing the painting with his dick. I shit you not.

Narrator: Although it’s hard to believe, some art dealers actually fell for it.

IFAR gets involved. Nope, not a Pollock.

Narrator: On the internet, Teri located Peter Paul Biro, a forensic scientist and art authenticator from Montreal who uses techniques straight from CSI.
Biro: I look at a painting almost like a crime scene…I’m looking for who committed the art rather than a murder…What did he use? How did he use it? How is this typical or characteristic or uncharacteristic of the painter we theorize created that work?

For example: He could verify a William Turner painting because the artist often used his fingertips to spread the paint around. Bingo: Fingerprints.

He finds a fingerprint on the back of Teri’s painting. But:

[b]Narrator: Jackson Pollock was never in the army, was never charged with a crime. Never, in fact, did anything that caused him to be fingerprinted.

…

Narrator: An art dealer Bill Page [Teri’s son] knew had found a buyer for Teri’s painting. The buyer, who did not want his identity disclosed, was offering $2 million, no questions asked.[/b]

On “principle” Teri turned it down. Biro then gets permission to visit Pollock’s studio.

[b]Biro: I approached it as an archeological site. I was looking for anything that could link Teri’s painting to the studio.

…

Biro: I was looking at a fingerprint on a blue paint can. By this time I had memorized the fingerprint on Teri’s painting. I felt this could be it. This could be the end of the search…

…

Biro: Through this kind of methodology I was able to see that there was a perfect match between the fingerprint on the back of Teri’s canvas and the blue paint can from the Pollock-Krasner house.[/b]

That settles that, right? Nope. Back to Hoving:

Hoving: Scientists are very interesting but they come after ghe true connoisseurs. So fingerprints, all this stuff is kind of that lovely “What if?”. But it’s not essential to the heart and the artistic soul of that thing…and that painting has no Pollock soul or heart."

I know: Huh?

Even if the fingerprints match?

[b]Hoving: That could be the guy who cleans out his room.

…

Narrator: The art world and the justice system were two different worlds for sure because more scientific evidence was accummulating that Teri’s painting did come from Pollock’s studio.[/b]

Acrylic in the paint: same on the floor as on the painting. Basically, what it has come down to now is this: fuck the science, we “experts” in the art world just know it is not a Pollock.

Enter Tod Volpe.

[b]Teri: It didn’t bother me that Volpe had gone to prison for fraud because by this time I know the whole art world is a bumble frappin’ fraud.

…

Narrator: Teri phoned Volpe and asked him to represent the sale of her painting. Volpe agreed. For the first time, Teri had someone on her side who understood the art world and all of its nuances.

…

Volpe: I always saw the art world as a kind of “through the looking glass” experience, kind of “Alice in Wonderland”. A lot of illusions, costumes, disguises, people who are masquerading. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the art world. Money is no object, It’s big business. It’s creating opportunities for hedge fund managers, high leveraging of art deals. It’s all about money. And power and greed.[/b]

But even Volpe hits the same catch 22: The “art world” must first “authenticate” it. The solution? Get Teri [the hick from the sticks] out of the picture. The rest is utterly fucking surreal!

The painting becomes merely another commodity to take to Wall Street…an “investment”. But how do you turn the painting itself into a piece of paper that “authenticates” what you say it is?

[b]Narrator: Art dealer Allan Stone acquired a Jackson Pollock that was in a garbage dump…Stone learned that the painting was fished out of the East Hampton dump by a car dealer who used the back of it to advertise his wares.
Stone: Everybody knew that Pollock dumped a lot of his unsuccessful things in the dump in East Hampton. In those days they weren’t worth anything.

…

Narrator: One of the reasons that Nick Carone [an expert on Pollock] may be on the fence regarding Teri’s painting is that there were Pollock imitators by the dozens.
Carone: Even in the period in East Hampton there were guys painting like him, nobodies, but they were like, talented guys, you know, never amounted to anything but they painted just like Pollock did.
Narrator: So, could Teri’s painting have been the work of one of those imitators?
Biro: Who, I ask, worked as an imitator in Jackson Pollock’s studio, had access to his painting materials and was generally allowed into the studio during the time of about 1948, '49, 1950…He had no assistants, hardly allowed his wife into the studio. It is documented that he worked alone.

…

Narrator: If, as Myatt [a famed art forger] suspects, Teri’s painting is authentic, then how did it get from Pollock’s studio to a thrift shop in California?
Volpe: Pollock was an absolute madman. I mean, he would give pictures away to anybody. If you were in his studio one night and asked if you could have one, he’s say “Yes, take it home”. He’s give it away for food. He’d give it for airplane rides to go visit his mother. I mean, who is to say what ended up where?[/b]

Is this true? I don’t know…but let’s not forget: this man is in the business of trying to sell this alleged painting by Pollock. And [of course] the “experts” don’t agree. Or are all over the map regarding the “facts”.

Narrator: Ben Heller is one of half a dozen experts in the world whose opinion can make or break a Pollock. What did he think of Teri’s painting?
Heller: I’m looking for the cracks in the paint…and the way the paint is applied, that is the layering of one color on top of another on top of another. This stuff, it doesn’t look like a Pollock, doesn’t feel like a Pollock, doesn’t sing like a Pollock, doesn’t fail like a Pollock. There’s not a question in my mind. I don’t have a doubt that this is wrong.

An “expert”?! Right.

Title card: After this film was made, Peter Biro found an identical fingerprint on an undisputed Pollock at the Tate Modern in London. A Saudi art collector offered Teri Horton $9,000,000 for her painting. She turned him down. Teri’s painting is still for sale.

[iambiguous]

Why is it called “trainspotting”?

IMDb

Irvine Welsh [who wrote the novel the film is based on] has explained that, when he was growing up in Edinburgh, there was an abandoned train station that had become a place frequented by the homeless and drug addicts. When the drug addicts were going to the station to take drugs, they would often say that they were going ‘Trainspotting’. According to director Danny Boyle, “Through the late '80s in Britain, it (trainspotting) began to mean anybody who was obsessive about something trivial, and part of that is drugs. It’s a very male thing. Women, they know better. It was a way in which men would conquer an area of life by just knowing everything about all the Sean Connery films.”

wiki

Irvine Welsh has also stated in a Q&A that the title is a reference to people thinking trainspotting makes no sense. And he says he feels the same about heroin addicts, to non-addicts the act seems pointless. However to someone taking heroin, it makes absolute sense.

The part about dasein in other words. And that perturbs many people in much the same way.

Here is a frame of mind that can be as rational or irrational as whatever you happen to think it is…or whatever you want it to be or whatever you need it to be.

I can think of any number of contexts in which it all makes perfect sense. Like, for example, the one I live in now. But I can’t have what I can’t get. And it is infuriating that the only reason I can’t have it is because others won’t let me. So, naturally: Fuck them.

Does the film “glorify” drug use? Not really. It shows the good, the bad and the ugly. But mostly it shows the frames of mind one can find oneself embodying that might shift your point of view about it. Also, a frame of mind that compares and contrasts lives said to be either “full” or “empty”…from a more tolerant, subjunctive perspective. After all, what do others really know about what is best for you and I? On the other hand, lines will be drawn. They must be. I have no illusions about that.

IMDb

[b]The writing on the wall of the Volcano Nightclub is the same as that in the Moloko bar in A Clockwork Orange. There are also paintings of Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster from Taxi Driver.

Although it looks thoroughly offputting, the faeces in the Worst Toilet in Scotland scene was actually made from chocolate and smelled quite pleasant.

Created much controversy when it was released in the USA for its content. Senator Bob Dole charged the film with glorifying drug use, but later admitted he hadn’t seen the film. See also: Priest, Natural Born Killers, and Kids.

McGregor was open to injecting himself with heroin, to better understand Renton’s character. He later decided against it.[/b]

Look for the Boardwalk Empire connection.

TRAINSPOTTING
Directed by Danny Boyle

[b]Mark [narrating]: Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

…

Mark [narrating]: People think it’s all about misery and desperation and death and all that shit which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not fucking stupid. At least, we’re not that fucking stupid.

…

Mark [narrating]: Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had… multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it.

…

Allison: It beats any meat injection. That beats any fucking cock in the world.

…

Mark [narrating]: When you’re on junk, you have only one worry: scoring. And when you’re off it, you’re suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite. Got no money, can’t get drunk. Got money, drinkin’ too much. Can’t get a girl, no chance of a ride. Got a girl, too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food… about some football team that never fucking wins. About human relationships and all the things that really don’t matter when you’ve got a sincere and truthful junk habit.

…

Mark [narrating]: Relinquishing junk. Stage one, preparation. For this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium, which I’ve already procured from my mother, who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way also a drug addict. And now I’m ready. All I need is one final hit to soothe the pain while the Valium takes effect.

…

Mark: For all the good they’ve done, I might as well have stuck them up my arse.[/b]

Trust me: It’s very funny.

[b]Mark [narrating]: The downside of coming off junk was I knew I would need to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness. It was awful. They reminded me so much of myself, I could hardly bear to look at them.

…

Mark: Begbie didn’t do drugs either. He just did people.

…

Gail, Lizzie: What are you two talking about?
Spud, Tommy: Football! What are you talking about?
Gail, Lizzie: Shopping!

…

Lizzy: What do you mean, it’s gone? Where has it gone, Tommy?
Tommy: It’ll be here somewhere! Or maybe I returned it by mistake.
Lizzy: “Returned it”? Where? The video shop, Tommy? The fucking video shop?!!

…

Tommy: Doesn’t it make you proud to be Scottish?
Mark: It’s SHITE being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We’re ruled by effete assholes. It’s a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!

…

Mark [narrating]: At or around this time, Spud, Sick Boy and l made a healthy, informed, democratic decision to get back on heroin as soon as possible. It took about 12 hours.

…

Sick Boy: Personality, I mean that’s what counts, right? That’s what keeps a relationship going through the years. Like heroin, I mean heroin’s got a great fucking personality.

…

Mark: We took morphine, diamorphine, cyclizine, codeine, temazepam, nitrazepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal, dextropropo xyphene, methadone, nalbuphine, pethidine, pentazocine, buprenorphine, dextromoramide, chlormethiazole. The streets are a wash with drugs you can have for unhappiness and pain, and we took them all. Fuck it, we would of injected vitimin C if only they’d made it illegal.

…

Mark [narrating after the baby is found dead]: She wasn’t my baby. Baby Dawn, she wasn’t mine. - Spud’s, Swanney’s, Sick Boy’s? I don’t know. Maybe Allison knew, maybe not. I wished I could think of something to say. Something sympathetic, something human.
Sick Boy: Say something, Mark. FUCKING SAY SOMETHING!!
Mark: I’m cooking up.

…

Alison: Cook us up a shot, Rent. I really need a hit.
Mark [narrating]: And so she did. I could understand that. To take the pain away. So I cooked up, and she got a hit. But only after me. That went without saying.

…

Mark: At least we knew who the father was. It wasn’t just the baby that died that day. Something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned. It seemed that he had no theory with which to explain a moment like this…nor did I. Our only response was to keep on going and ‘fuck everything’. Pile misery upon misery, heap it up on a spoon and dissolve it with a drop of bile, then squirt it into a stinking, puerile vein and do it all over again. Keep on going, getting up, going out, robbing, stealing, fucking people over. Propelling ourselves with longing towards the day that it would all go wrong, because no matter how much you stash, or how much you steal you never have enough. No matter how often you go out and rob and fuck people over, you always need to get up and do it all over again.

…

Mark: What’s on the menu this evening, Sir?
Swanney: Your favorite dish.
Mark: Excellent.
Swanney: Your usual table, Sir.
Mark: Oh, why thank you.
Swanney: Would Sir care to pay for his bill in advance?
Mark: No. Stick it on my tab.
Swanney: Ah, regret to inform, sir, credit limit was reached and breached quite some time ago.
Mark: Oh, well in that case…
[hands him some cash]
Swanney: Ah, hard currency. Thank you, Sir. Can’t be too careful these days. Would Sir care for a starter of some garlic bread perhaps?
Mark: No, thank you. I will proceed directly to the intravenous injection of hard drugs, please.

…

Mark: I don’t feel the sickness yet, but it’s in the post. That’s for sure. I’m in the junkie limbo at the moment. Too ill to sleep. Too tired to stay awake, but the sickness is on its way. Sweat, chills, nausea. Pain and craving. A need like nothing else I’ve ever known will soon take hold of me. It’s on its way.

…

Mark: It seems I really am the luckiest guy in the world. Several years of addiction right in the middle of an epidemic, surrounded by the living dead. But not me. I’m negative. It’s official. And once the pain goes away, that’s when the real battle starts. Depression, boredom…You feel so fucking low, you want to fucking top yourself.

…

Mark [gone straight]: I quite enjoyed the sound of it all. Profit, loss, margins, takeovers, lending, letting, subletting, subdividing, cheating, scamming, fragmenting, breaking away. There was no such thing as society and even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it. For the first time in my adult life I was almost content.

…

Mark: This was to be my final hit, but let’s be clear about this. There’s final hits and final hits.

…

Mark: Now I’ve justified this to myself in all sorts of ways. It wasn’t a big deal, just a minor betrayal. Or we’d outgrown each other, you know, that sort of thing. But let’s face it, I ripped them off - my so called mates. But Begbie, I couldn’t give a shit about him. And Sick Boy, well he’d done the same to me, if he’d only thought of it first. And Spud, well okay, I felt sorry for Spud - he never hurt anybody. So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers - all false. The truth is that I’m a bad person. But, that’s gonna change - I’m going to change. This is the last of that sort of thing. Now I’m cleaning up and I’m moving on, going straight and choosing life. I’m looking forward to it already. I’m gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.[/b]

[iambiguous]

I posted previously regarding my reaction to this film.

[b]Flesh and Bone always reminds me of how we see people: not the way they are but the way we are. Also the manner in which we see ourselves as adults…how this can be profoundly embedded in how others compelled us to see ourselves as children.

The movie starts out with a young boy sitting on a swing in a yard outside a house…one that is more or less isolated in some rural part of Texas. The dog starts barking and the owner of the house comes out to investigate. He sees the boy and brings him into the house. The man and his wife feed him and give him a bath. The phone doesn’t seem to be working so they decide to drive him in to see the sheriff in the morning.

Only it is all a setup. The boy gets out of bed in the middle of the night, sneaks down the stairs and opens the back door…for his father. Then they procede to rob the house. Things go terribly wrong this time, however, and the boy’s father ends up killing the man and his wife…and their own young son.

The film then takes us about 30 years into the future and the boy is now a man. He lives a solitary life [more or less] servicing local establishments with vending machines and the stuff you fill them with. The folks he bumps into in the film can’t seem to pin him down. Why does he live the way he lives? Why does he do the things he does? Of course we in the audience are privy to the kind of life he lived as a child…so we know perfectly well why he might choose to live and behave as he does. But the folks he meets in the movie don’t know anything about the boy who became a man. They don’t have that perspective and so cannot even begin to “know him” as we the audience do.

That’s often how communication works between people. Especially when you don’t meet them until you are both adults. So much of how we behave—so much of why we choose the things we do as adults—is rooted in an existential sequence of interactions and relationships and experiences as children that can have an enormous impact on our lives later on. But how in the world would we ever make another understand that? Mostly, we can’t. Mostly, in fact, we don’t really even understand it ourselves.[/b]

wiki

Janet Maslin of the New York Times described Gwyneth Paltrow as a scene-stealer “who is Blythe Danner’s daughter and has her mother’s way of making a camera fall in love with her.”

She’s really stealing them here. But then so is Meg Ryan and James Caan. Dennis Quaid? It’s just not in his character.

FLESH AND BONE
Written and directed by Steve Kloves

[b]Rosie: I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them chickens.

…

Ginnie: God bless, whoever you are.

…

Waitress: Unless that little pastry inside comes with a bicycle pump and two sisters, there ain’t gonna be a farm animal safe for three counties tonight.

…

Waitress: Feel like knocking a few sins off your ledger, Arlis?
Arlis: You want me to find out if she’s got a home.
Waitress: And take her there.
Arliss: What’s the damage?
Waitress: Put it this way, feed this girl a cucumber, it’d come out pickles.

…

Kay: I figure the bed’s one of those vibratin’ numbers, so that explains all the quarters. Nobody could possibly fancy pretzel twists that much so I reckon you won some kinda weird contest. As for the condoms, well, either you got a yen for cheerleadin’ squads or we had the night of all nights, whatever, there’s an explanation. As for the blue chicken, I need a little help with that one.

…

Arlis: “Boo-Boo”?
Kay: The story of my life.

…

Kay: You’re not taking my furniture.
Truck driver: Ma’am, I’m not emotionally involved.
Kay: Well, I am! Christ!
Truck driver [to Arlis]: “Boo-Boo”?

…

Arlis [to Reese]: Actually, I just gave her a ride…in the truck.

…

Kay: It’s scary, sometimes.
Arlis: What’s that?
Kay: Moments. Little split-seconds of time when you’re capable of unusual things. Like back there, holding that gun. For a moment, my finger twitched. Not so you could see. More like inside, under the skin. Some crazy little muscle. I could’ve done it, I could’ve shot him right in the face. My whole life would’ve changed in one tiny little second.

…

Arlis: Let me see your face…You take a hell of a punch.
Kay: Practice makes perfect.

…

Kay: Ever been married?
Arlis: No.
Kay: Ever been in love? Oh! Am I crowding you?
Arlis: No. I’ve never been in love.
Kay: Me either.
Arlis: What about your husband?
Kay: Hell, no! I mean, you saw his hair, right?[/b]

It is a sight.

[b]Kay: Besides, he ain’t no different than any of the others. I was thirteen when the first one pulled my blue jeans off. Ever since, they seem to pass me off, one to another, my whole life. Like they’re all members of the same club or something.

…

Kay: It’s not 'cause of that, is it? The tattoo? Bet that was one crazy night!
Arlis: No more than any other.

…

Kay: If we’d met under normal circumstances, you’d like me. Most people do. Or… I guess they do.
Arlis: I didn’t say I didn’t like you. Hell, I like you. It’s just there’s been a whole lot of…of…activity in the past couple of days. I go from one town to the next, you understand? I see the same faces, hear the same talk, sleep in the same beds. Then I start all over again. I like it that way. I don’t like walking into houses I don’t know. I don’t like guns coming out of nowhere. I don’t like lookin’ over my shoulders for angry husbands. I don’t like surprises, period!
Kay: You really like me?
Arlis: What’s not to like?

…

Kyle [watching Ginnie walk out the door]: I could stand a little of that in my face.
Arlis: She’d steal you blind.

…

Kay: I could do you. Couple of snips here. Couple there.
Arlis: Your hands are a couple of beers past steady.
Kay: I can do you better blind than you been getting. Your man in Blackwell doesn’t understand your hair. Besides, I’m not drunk. I know exactly what I’m doing.

…

Roy: Well, damn…you’d follow a mouse right into the mouth of a snake, eh, Junior?

…

Roy: Well, darling, I don’t believe there’s a pill-peddler alive got a better touch than my boy here, and best of all, he asks no questions.
Arlis: Practice makes perfect.

…

Ginnie: …the guy who did that to your face? Did he think you were nice?
Kay: Not at the time.
Ginnie: But you stay with him anyway, don’t you?
Kay: Who? Arlis? It wasn’t him, he’s not like that.
Ginnie: Don’t kid yourself. Eventually, they’re all like that…But, once you know that, you can turn it back against them. Use it.
Kay: Arlis doesn’t have an evil bone in his body. But…
Ginnie: What?
Kay: I get the feeling he’s been close to it, felt the heat of it.

…

Arlis: I’m his kin, you understand? I got no choice. So don’t think this is some game. Last night, it could’ve been you out there bleeding in the rain. Only difference is he’d have left you behind. Or finished the job himself.
Ginnie: Well, shit. No wonder old Black Eyes loves you. You wouldn’t have the balls to shoo a fly off a steak!

…

Roy: I had a loose end to take care of, Oklahoma way. Around Ardmore. An associate of mine…got a little greedy. Started threatening. Started to weigh on me. Stole my sleep. And you know how I feel about loose ends.
Arlis: Being one myself.

…

Roy: After Oklahoma, I drifted on down and ran into this little girl here, Ginnie. And I saw her switching tickets at this diner in Cherry Spring. She had a full rancher’s breakfast, pulled a switch with an old lady with a coffee and a piece of pie.
Arlis: A little low-rent for you, ain’t it?
Roy: It was the way she did it, see? Smooth as glass. Real nerve.
Arlis: Well, at least she won’t go hungry.
Roy: She’s a little bigger than that. The last couple of months, she’s been running this slick game. A thing of beauty. She steals from the dead.

…

Roy: She’s got grit in spades. I’ll have to watch my back with this one. Heart beats about twice a minute.
Arlis: At least it beats.

…

Roy: Don’t you kid yourself, Junior. See, you and me…we’re flesh and bone. The same blood that runs my veins…runs yours.

…

Arlis: Short don’t mean he’s stealing.
Roy: No, no, I guess not. But then again, what else would it mean?

…

Kay: I don’t know why I hang on to that photograph; it’s just…you grow up in an ugly house, the way I did, sometimes you wonder how it might have been, if things hadn’t happened the way they did. It’s funny, your father, the other day, mentioned Benson County. That’s where they lived, I’m pretty sure. The people in the picture. My family.

…

Arlis: Are you stealing from me?
Elliot: Arlis, you know I did time in Big Spring. I told you that right off, the day we met. But I did the time. I’m out now. And I want to stay that way.
Arlis: I’m not sure that answers my question.
Elliot: Arlis, you don’t know, 'cause you never been in trouble. But once you’ve been in trouble and people know it, you feel guilty for things you never done. Just because you know, they think you got it in you. That potential.
Arlis: That why your hands are shaking?
Elliot: That’s why my hands are shaking.

…

Kay: Who needs him anyway…

…

Kay: You might do something with your hair. You’ve got a nice face, you should let the boys see it.
Ginnie: It ain’t my face the boys want to see.

…

Ginnie: Well, here we are.
Kay: This is where we’re going? I don’t… Oh, my God.
Ginnie: Surprise.

…

Ginnie [holding up two bottles of Jack Daniels]: I know how grim you get if you don’t get your breakfast.
Roy: You’re smarter than I thought.
Ginnie: Not smart enough to figure out why we’re wasting our time here in cracker land.
Roy: I’ll tell you about loose ends some day. And you’ll want to listen…careful.

…

Arlis: She doesn’t know. There’s no reason for her to know. No reason for me to tell her.
Roy: I realise that. I truly do. But this woman, she’s different. I noticed that the first time I saw her. The way she looked at you, the way you looked at her. Hell, it was touching, truly.
Arlis: She’ll never know. I swear it on my life.
Roy: Damn, I wish I could believe that. But as much as we are the same, you’ve always been too emotional.
Arlis: I left her this morning. I only came back 'cause of you. This little game.
Roy: This ain’t no game, Junior. You know me better than that.

…

Roy: It’s a shame, really. She’s so sweet. Almost innocent.
Arlis: She is innocent. But I’m not. Take me. Then she can’t know.
Roy: I couldn’t do that. What kind of man would that make me? A man who shoots his own kin. No, I couldn’t sleep with that. And I do prize my sleep. There’s really only one question here, Son. Do I do it…or you?

…

Arlis: A good cigar is not what separates you from other men.
Roy: What separates you, Junior? You fuck their wives?
Arlis: I don’t shoot their children.
Roy: If you’d done what I told you, there’d have been no blood that night.
Arlis: I didn’t pull the trigger.
Roy: They were supposed to be asleep. They’re always supposed to be asleep. Besides, I didn’t shoot first. I had no choice.
Arlis: And the boy? Did he have a choice?
Roy: Fuck that little boy! He almost got your daddy killed. We had one bad night. That was 30 years ago.
Arlis: There was more than one bad night.
Roy: That was your night, wasn’t it, Junior? You’re right. You didn’t pull the trigger. But you did open the door. And now, you brung her to me. You’re stupid. You’ve always been stupid. You were stupid when you were a little kid. As a man, shit you’re being stupid now. Who’s got the gun? Me? Go ahead. Put it on me and pull the trigger. Come on. See, you can’t. You can’t, just can’t. You can’t, 'cause we’re kin. Blood. You go ahead and run along. Fill up them candy machines. It’s only right that I do it. This way we both will sleep easy, eh?
Arlis: Dad.
Roy: Son?
Arlis [shooting his father dead]: Sweet dreams.

…

Arlis [to Ginnie]: Everything he told you…it’s a lie.

…

Kay: What was I doing in that house today? Or am I crowding you?
Arlis: There are some things that are better left unsaid. It just does no good to talk about them. No good at all.

…

Arlis [to Kay]: It’s like I said, I’m a creature of habit. Each town I go, there’s a place to eat, a place to sleep…and in each town, there’s also a woman. I’m starting to miss them.[/b]

[iambiguous]

As I become less and less like the characters here I find myself less and less able to share their insights in a way relevant to the character I am now. Lots of laughs though. And a few of them no doubt will resonate all the way to the grave. But whereas before I used to say of Another Woman, "it’s no Annie Hall", now I say of Annie Hall, "it’s no Another Woman".

IMDb

[b]Alvy’s (Woody Allen’s) sneezing into the cocaine was an unscripted accident. When previewed, the audience laughed so loud that director Allen decided to leave it in, and had to add footage to compensate for people missing the next few jokes from laughing too much.

Diane Keaton’s real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie.

Marshall McLuhan was not Allen’s first choice. Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel were asked first.

The passerby Alvy refers to as “the winner of the Truman Capote look-alike contest” is in fact Truman Capote, who appears uncredited.[/b]

Look for Sigourney Weaver. They say she is in the film but I never spot her.

ANNIE HALL
Written and directed by Woody Allen

[b]Alvy Singer: [addressing the camera] There’s an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” and it goes like this - I’m paraphrasing - um, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

…

Doctor: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy’s Mom: Tell Dr. Flicker.
[Young Alvy sits, his head down - his mother answers for him]
Alvy’s Mom: It’s something he read.
Doctor: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: The universe is expanding.
Doctor: The universe is expanding?
Alvy at 9: Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy’s Mom: What is that your business?
[she turns back to the doctor]
Alvy’s Mom: He stopped doing his homework!
Alvy at 9: What’s the point?
Alvy’s Mom: What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here!

…

Alvy: I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn’t do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.

…

Alvy: They did not take me in the Army. I was, um, interestingly enough, I was, I was 4-P. Yes. In the, in the event of war, I’m a hostage.

…

Alvy: No, I can’t go into a movie that’s already started, because I’m anal.
Annie: That’s a polite word for what you are.

…

Alvy: [the man behind him in line is talking loudly] What I wouldn’t give for a large sock with horse manure in it!
Alvy: [to audience] Whaddya do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?
Man in Line: Wait a minute, why can’t I give my opinion? It’s a free country!
Alvy: You can give it but do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan!
Man in Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me…
[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]
Alvy: come over here for a second… tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Alvy: Boy, if life were only like this!

…

Annie: Sometimes I ask myself how I’d stand up under torture.
Alvy: You? You kiddin’? If the Gestapo threatened to take away your Bloomingdale’s charge card, you’d tell 'em everything.

…

Allison: I’m in the midst of doing my thesis.
Alvy: On what?
Allison: Political commitment in twentieth century literature.
Alvy: You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.

…

Jerry: It’s like when I think of dying. You know how I would like to die?
Younger Annie: No, how?
Jerry: I’d like to get torn apart by wild animals.

…

Robin: Alvy, there are people out there from The New Yorker magazine!![/b]

And Dysentary?

[b]Alvy [to Rob]: Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re-we’re left-wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual, pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here.

…

Alvy: Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

…

Annie: You’re what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew.

…

Annie: M’m, that was nice. That was so nice.
Alvy: As Balzac said, “There goes another novel.”

…

Alvy: I’m obsessed with death. I’ve a very pessimistic view of life. You should know this about me if we’re gonna go out, you know. 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.

…

Duane: Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you’ll understand. Sometimes when I’m driving… on the road at night… I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The… flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.
Alvy: Right. Well, I have to - I have to go now, Duane, because I, I’m due back on the planet Earth.[/b]

Christopher Walken as Duane:
youtube.com/watch?v=BGPcSd7DDLk

[b]Alvy: Well, I didn’t start out spying. I thought I’d surprise you. Pick you up after school.
Annie: Yeah, but you wanted to keep the relationship flexible. Remember, it’s your phrase.
Alvy: Oh stop it, you’re having an affair with your college professor, that jerk that teaches that incredible crap course, Contemporary Crisis in Western Man…
Annie: Existential Motifs in Russian Literature. You’re really close.
Alvy: What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.
Annie: Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy: Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.
Annie: We’re not having an affair. He’s married. He just happens to think I’m neat.
Alvy: “Neat.” What are you, 12 years old? That’s one of your Chippewa Falls expressions.
Annie: Who cares? Who cares?
Alvy: Next thing you know, he’ll find you keen and peachy, you know. Next thing you know, he’s got his hand on your ass.
Annie: You’ve always had hostility towards David, ever since I mentioned him.
Alvy: David - you call your teacher David?
Annie: It’s his name.
Alvy: It’s a Biblical name, right? What does he call you, Bathsheba?

…

Annie: So I told her about, about the family and about my feelings towards men and about my relationship with my brother. And then she mentioned penis envy. Do you know about that?
Alvy: Me? I’m, I’m one of the few males who suffers from that.

…

Alvy [to the camera]: Well, I don’t know what I did wrong. I mean, I can’t believe this. Somewhere she cooled off to me! Is it-is it something that I did?
Woman on the street: Never something you do. That’s how people are. Love fades.

…

Alvy [approaching young yuppie couple on the street]: You-you look like a really happy couple. Uh, uh … are you?
Young woman: Yeah.
Alvy: So…so h-h-how do you account for it?
Young woman: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Young man: And I’m exactly the same way.

…

Hippie reporter: You catch Dylan?
Alvy: Me? No, no. I-I couldn’t make it that night. My-my raccoon had hepatitis.
Reporter: You have a raccoon?
Alvy: A few.

…

Hippie reporter: The only word for this is trans-plendid. It’s trans-plendid…He’s God! I mean, this man is God! He’s got millions of followers who would crawl all the way across the world just to touch the hem of his garment…I’m a Rosicrucian myself.
Alvy: I can’t get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics. Look (The Maharisbi, a small, chunky man, walks out of the men’s room, huge bodyguards flanking him) there’s God coming outta the men’s room.

…

Hippie reporter: I hope you don’t mind that I took so long to finish.
Alvy: Oh, no, no, don’t be…don’t be silly. You know, I’m finally starting to get some feeling back in my jaw now.
Reporter: Oh, sex with you is really a kafkaesque experience…I mean that as a compliment.

…

Alvy’s father [in flashback] You fired the cleaning woman?
Alvy’s mother: She was stealing.
Father: But she’s colored.
Mother: So?
Father: So the colored have enough trouble.
Mother: She was going through my pocketbook!
Father: They’re persecuted enough!
Mother: Who’s persecuting? She stole!
Father: All right-so we can afford it.
Mother: How can we afford it? On your pay? What if she steals more?
Father: She’s a colored woman, from Harlem! She has no money! She’s got a right to steal from us! After all, who is she gonna steal from if not us?[/b]

Sometimes you really do have to wonder: What is it with Allen and black folks? A mammy and a hooker? That’s all he can fit in over 35 years?

[b]Alvy’s Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Alvy: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie’s Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Annie: [annoyed] Constantly. I’d say three times a week.

…

Annie: It’s so clean out here in California.
Alvy: That’s because they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows

…

Man at Tony Lacey party: Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept…and later turn it into an idea.

…

Alvy: A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

…

Alvy: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I…I realized what a terrific person she was, and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I…I, I thought of that old joke, y’know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y’know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and…but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.[/b]