philosophy in film

[iambiguous]

Man, I love music. All kinds. But one kind in particular: New Wave. And, within the genre, one band in particular: Joy Division.

See [hear] why: youtu.be/m9MoyEdXKlo

But there were so many others: The Jam, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Iggy Pop, Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, the Stranglers, Cabaret Voltaire, The Clash, Bauhaus, Killing Joke and on and on. Back then the greatest fucking music in the world as far as I was concerned.

To be perfectly frank, I really didn’t give a shit about Tony Wilson or Factory records or the whole “Manchester scene” out of which the bands I loved came into existence. Let’s just say that I am not one of the “24 hour party people” sort. It’s always about what music makes me feel. Emotionally, viscerally, and, well [sometimes], aesthetically.

Not that the bits with Ian Curtis didn’t make it all worth while. That and all the funny parts, of course.

But then Curtis has his first epileptic attack. Then Curtis is depressed. Then Curtis hangs himself. After that the movie just sort of…collapses. But takes far too long.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hour_Party_People
trailer: youtu.be/A1Qz2x94q6A

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE [2002]
Directed by Michael Winterbottom

[b]Wilson: AII of that actuaIIy did happen. ObviousIy, it’s symboIic. It works on both IeveIs. I don’t want to teII you too much, don’t want to spoiI the fiIm. But I’II just say ‘‘Icarus.’’ Okay?

…

Wilson: June 4, 1976. The Sex PistoIs pIay Manchester for the very first time. There are onIy 42 peopIe in the audience…but every singIe one of them is feeding on a power, an energy and a magic. Inspired, they wiII go out and perform wondrous deeds.

…

Wilson: They’re way ahead of everyone in Manchester. They’re aIready the Buzzcocks. Behind me are Stiff Kittens. Soon to become Warsaw, Iater to become Joy Division. FinaIIy to become New Order.

…

Wilson [on the Sex Pistols performance to an audience of 42]: The smaller the attendance the bigger the history. There were 12 people at the last supper. Half a dozen at Kitty Hawk. Archimedes was on his own in the bath.

…

Wilson [on television broadcast]: But first, two minutes of the most important music since EIvis waIked into the Sun Studios in Memphis. The Sex PistoIs and Anarchy in the UK.

…

Wilson [on television broadcast]: In 1976 two or three people controlled all the music on television. And they didn’t like punk. For a year if you wanted to see the most exciting bands in the world they were on a regional show coming out of Manchester. My show.

…

Curtis [shouting across the bar]: Wilson, ya fucking cunt!
Wilson: That’s original.

…

Wilson [on The Factory poster]: It looks fucking great actually - yeah, really nice. It’s beautiful - but useless. And as William Morris once said: “Nothing useless can be truly beautiful.”

…

Curtis: Joy Division. Do you know what that is, Mr. WiIson?
Wilson: It’s when the Nazis picked out raciaIIy pure women and had sex with them.
Band member: Joy Division, that’s us, eh?
Wilson: It’s a very Nazi name. But it’s quite cheery as weII. You know, ‘‘joy.’’ Like a division of joy, or something. Joy Division.

…

Reporter: How do you answer the charge that you’re a fascist?
Wilson: What?
Reporter: Joy Division was named after a group of women heId by the SS for the purpose of breeding perfect Aryans.
Wilson: Have you never heard of Situationism or postmodernism? Do you know about the pIay of signs and signifiers? The band’s Joy Division. We’ve aIso got one caIIed Durutti CoIumn. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the irony there.

…

Wilson: If you listen to Ian’s music and you know that he killed himself then you probabIy imagine some very dark, depressive figure. A prophet of urban decay and aIienation. But I have some wonderfuI memories of him…

…

Wilson [to Lindsay]: Energy, energy? Energy is, is, it’s nothing more than a lot of new age hokum masquerading as spirituality.

…

Boethius: It’s my belief that history is a wheel. “Inconsistency is my very essence” -says the wheel- “Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don’t complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away”.

…

Wilson: I’m being postmodern, before it’s fashionable.

…

Wilson: It was like being on a fantastic fairground ride, centrifugal forces throwing us wider and wider. But it’s all right, because there’s this brilliant machine at the center that’s going to bring us back down to earth. That was Manchester. That is the Hacienda. Now imagine the machine breaks. For a while, it’s even better, because you’re really flying. but then, you fall, because nobody beats gravity.

…

Wilson: There was only one problem with the Hacienda: it never made any money. There were huge crowds and a great atmosphere.But it was all fueled by ecstasy, not alcohol. And we didn’t sell E at the bar. Although we did talk about it. We were spending money on the building,
the staff, the DJs, the sound system but most of the money went to the drug dealers. And guess what? They didn’t give the money to us.[/b]

Then came the guns. Then came the violence. Then it all comes crashing down.

[Tony Wilson has just had a vision of God - who looked exactly like Tony Wilson]
Wilson: Well, it’s written in the Bible, isn’t it? ‘God made man in His own image’.
Gretton: Yeah, but not a specific man.
Wilson: No, but if you’d have spoken to Him, He would have looked like you. But you didn’t, I did. And he looked like me.

[iambiguous]

Dysfunctional. Look it up. See if there’s not a picture of Todd Solondz next to it. After all, every single one of his characters are. And when they come together as a famiily…back off.

You can only go from family to family out in the “real world” and judge for yourself the extent to which the folks here are more caricatures than facsimiles.

But when you do you tend to discover this: That the behaviors many folks describe as not dysfunctional are even scarier still. Or are certainly more boring. And that’s assuming we can even effectively communicate things of this sort at all.

As with the characters in Welcome to the Dollhouse, you’re never entirely certain how much distance to place between them and what some might deem to be, say, “realistic” portrayals of the actual flesh and blood folks you come across in your own neighborhood. This is a film where the kids gather around to exchange horror stories about their parents. The whole point being to try and determine which are the most fucked up. And child molestation doesn’t even really count anymore [for some of them] because it’s just too common.

Also, homosexuality is intertwined into much of the narrative here. And some are not too happy with the manner in which Solondz seems to approach it. Here is an interview with him at the OUT website: out.com/entertainment/2010/0 … ?page=full

Alas, even Pee Wee Herman gets old.

IMDb

A sequel to Todd Solondz’s movie Happiness, but with entirely re-cast characters. The title is taken from the title of a song by Talking Heads.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_During_Wartime_(film
trailer: youtu.be/zzQKNQzC4Y0

LIFE DURING WARTIME [2009]
Written and directed by Todd Solondz

[b]Timmy [reading off the computer screen]: ''What Does It Mean to Become a Man? A Bar Mitzvah Speech. by Timmy Maplewood. ‘According to my brother. Billy who’s in college…becoming a man means you’re ready to take on certain responsibilities. For example. learning to stand up for yourself and what you believe in…even if it means everyone will make fun of you or say what you’re doing is wrong…or just plain hate you…and put things up on the Internet about you that are totally untrue. Even if it means getting beaten up, your face smashed in…wedgied raw and hard or just plain tortured. Even if it means being kicked out of school or arrested and put in jail.’"

…

Timmy [to mom]: Are you still wet?

…

Andy: Tell me,Joy, please…after all that’s passed, knowing all you know now…do you wish you could’ve been with me before?
Joy: No.
Andy: Eat shit, you fucking cunt. You think you’re improving other people’s lives…saving them or freeing them…from what? What the fuck do you know about other people? What? Idiot! Why did I kill myself? I should’ve killed you!

…

Timmy: Mom!
Mom: Yes, Timmy?
Timmy: Is Dad really dead?
Mom: Why are you asking me this now?
Timmy: Avi Fleischer told me he found him on the Internet…and that he was sent to jail for raping young boys. And now everyone at school is saying that my dad’s alive…and that he’s a pedophile.
Mom: Oh, Timmy. Shh, shh. It’s okay.
Timmy: Then he said he was a faggot.
Mom: Oh, Timmy.
Timmy: And then he said that I was a faggot.
Mom: Timmy, what did you do?
Timmy: I didn’t do anything. I just ran away—like a faggot.
Mom: Oh, Timmy, listen to me. You are not a faggot, and your father…
Timmy: He’s alive?
[Mom nods]

…

Chloe [daughter about 5]: Mommy.
Mom: Yes, honey. Are you ready for me to take you to karaoke class?
Chloe: I ran out of my Klonopin. Do you have any I can have first?
Mom: Of course, honey. Just go into my medicine cabinet.
Chloe: I can’t find it!
Mom: Just take half a Wellbutrin. They’re on the bottom right, next to the Percocet.
Chloe: Okay!
Mom: You know what? Just bring over the whole bottle.

…

Timmy: But what if I become one though? I don’t wanna be a faggot. There’s this kid in my language arts class, and he’s so gay.
Mom: You won’t. You won’t. I promise.

…

Jacqueline: How much do you need?
Bill: What?
Jacqueline: It’s okay. I understand. It was hard work. I’m old. There’s a stash in the Chanel. The zippered pocket. Take it all.
[he takes the money]
Jacqueline: What are you looking at? Don’t start pretending like you care…like I’m not a monster…like I still have a heart…
Bill: Forgive me.
Jacqueline: Fuck off, prick.

…

Trish: Now, Harvey, on the other hand, well, he’s not very attractive. He’s older. He’s not even that well off. He’s divorced. Poor thing had a horrible, horrible wife. But he’s Jewish. He’s pro-Israel. He did work for Bush and McCain, but only because of Israel. He knows these people are complete idiots otherwise, so don’t worry.

…

Helen [to Joy]: And I know how you didn’t come all this way and hunt me down for nothing. You really just want my advice on men and marriage and Allen…and why nothing works out…and why you feel like a total loser—the self-disgust, self-loathing. Why life has no point, it’s over, you’re basically dead…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you think maybe I have the answer. But, Joy, I’m only human.

…

Trish: So, Mark, what do you do?
Mark: Systems analysis.
Trish: That sounds interesting.
Mark: It is to me - moderately. Like intermediate-level Sudoku. But I have no illusions that what I do is of any interest to anyone else…even amongst specialists. I’m something of a functionary, but without ambition…or even hope of ambition. I plateaued in grad school, then lost interest…except in maintaining a base salary adequate to financing a low-overhead subsistence.
Trish: Are you seeing anyone?
Mark: No, I’m more focused on China. Everything else is history. It’s just a question of time.

…

Timmy: Let’s say, for example, a terrorist blows up your office building. Do you still forgive?
Trish: God forbid.
Timmy: But what if that terrorist had a good reason?
Trish: Terrorists, by definition, do not have good reasons.
Timmy: But what if your family were killed and tortured? Wouldn’t you want to do something about it, to protect others?
Harvey and Trish: Timmy, these terrorists are evil. And cowards. They’re not like you and me. They don’t believe in freedom and democracy. Your mother’s right.
Trish: Timmy, are you saying you would forgive the 9/11 terrorists?
Timmy: Well, of course you can’t forgive those terrorists. They’re dead.

…

Bill [to his father…the one Timmy thought was dead]: I’m doing a paper on homosexuality in the animal kingdom. I’ve done a lot of reading on the bonobo monkey. They share, like, 98% of the human genetic profile. But they substitute sex for aggression and regularly engage in incest—father/daughter, father/son, mother/son. It’s a very peaceable lifestyle.[/b]

[iambiguous]

War is often a slaughterhouse. Or filled with them. For some the consensus is overwhelming: This should never have happened! But for others, folks take sides. Like today in Syria. Chemical warfare? Bad. Another shock and awe to stop it? Good. Or maybe not.

Or, to put it another way, when it’s their slaughterhouse, it is bad and when it is our slaughterhouse, it is good. Go ahead, check the history books: Dresden and Hiroshima: good.

And the film came out at or around the time Nixon was carpet-bombing Cambodia and North Vietnam. Good for some, bad for others.

One thing for sure: It cost money to manufacture the implements used to create and sustain all the slaughterhouses in all the wars. And someone is going to get it. So it may as well be for the good ones. And if you want to take an in depth look into this sort of thing, the first place to start is the Erroll Morris doucumentary, The Fog of War. My own reaction is on this thread above.

And here at least we gain the perspective of folks from an entirely different planet.

Aside from all that though, I don’t really have a clue as to how all the others pieces fit together. It’s just been too many years since I last read the book.

IMDb

[b]Kurt Vonnegut Jr., author of the book this film was adapted from, was a Prisoner of War in World War 2. He was captured during the Battle of the Bulge while a battalion scout with the 106 Infantry Division on December 22, 1944, and used these experiences in his novel when Billy Pilgrim is captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp.

Although Vonnegut’s renown refrain, “So it goes”, appears over 100 times in his novel, it does not occur, even once, in the movie version.[/b]

And so it goes.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five_(film
trailer: youtu.be/DvlZtlBfCi0

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE [1972]
Directed by George Roy Hill

[b]Lazzaro: That corporal. He’ll get back home after the war. He’ll be a big hero. Dames’ll be climbin’ all over him. Couple of years go by, and one day there’s gonna be a knock on his door and there’ll be this stranger. “Paul Lazzaro sent me,” the stranger will say and then he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. Stranger will give him a couple of seconds to think about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the guts and walk away. Yes.

…

Lazzaro [to Weary close to death]: Anybody ask you the sweetest thing in the world, it’s revenge.

…

Pilgrim: Where’d you get all this?
Brit: The Red Cross. Clerical error. They’ve been sending us 500 parcels a month instead of 50.
Pilgrim: Shouldn’t you tell them? Shouldn’t you send it back?
Brit: Oh, Yank. You haven’t been in the fight very long, have you? Come along. I keep forgetting wars have always been fought by children.

…

Brit [to the Yank POWs]: You are being transferred to a camp in Dresden. Actually, I am quite envious of you. Dresden is a beautiful city. Besides being quite lovely, it’s quite safe. It’s an open city without war industries or troop concentrations. It’s by far the safest place to be until we get all of this over with.

…

Pilgrim [in his sleep]: You guys go on without me. I’ll be alright.
Prof. Rumford: All he does in his sleep is quit, surrender, and apologize. I could carve a better man out of a banana.

…

Lily: Honey, why did they keep Dresden a secret for so long?
Prof. Rumford: Oh hell. For fear a lot of bleeding hearts would say that bombing it was a chicken shit thing to do. My book is going to lay it on the line, Sweetheart. Nobody is going to weep and wail over Dresden after they read my book.

…

Prof. Rumford [to Pilgrim]: You wanna know something. We didn’t start the war; the Nazis did. And 135,000 people dying in Dresden does not seem very much when put against over five million Allies who had to die! And you just might remember that when we were bombing Dresden, the Germans were sending V-1 and V-2 rockets into London, killing men, women and children. Jesus, it gives me a pain: Weeping over Dresden and not giving a damn about our own losses! What about Coventry? What about Rotterdam? What about the extermination camps the Germans were running? Gassing millions!

…

Pilgrim: I have to stay here? I can’t leave of my own free will?
Tralfamadorian: Mr. Pilgrim, we have visited 31 inhabited planets in the universe. We have studied reports on a hundred more, and only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

…

Pilgrim: It looked like the end of the world.
Tralfamadorian: What looked like the end of the world?
Pilgrim: Dresden. After the bombing.
Tralfamadorian: Don’t be so egocentric, Mr. Pilgrim. We know how the world ends and it has nothing to do with Earth, except that it gets wiped out too.
Pilgrim: Really? How does it end?
Tralfamadorian: While we’re experimenting with new fuels, a Tralfamadorian test pilot panics, presses the wrong button, and the whole universe disappears.
Pilgrim: But you have to stop him. If you know this, can’t you keep the pilot from pressing …
Tralfamadorian: He has always pressed it, and he always will. We have always let him, and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.[/b]

That’s sure one way to minimize moral responsibility, isn’t it?

Pilgrim [giving speech]: You see in Tralfamador, where I presently dwell, life has no beginning, no middle, and no end. For example, many years ago a certain man promised to have me killed. He’s an old man now, living not far from here. He’s read all of the publicity associated with my appearance. He’s insane. And tonight he’ll keep his promise.
[murmurs throughout the crowd]
Pilgrim: If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you’ve not understood what I have said.
[Lazzaro appears in balcony]
Pilgrim: You see it’s time for you to go home - to your lives and your children. It’s time for me to be dead for a little while. And then live again. I give you the Tralfamadorian greeting: Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell. Eternally connected, eternally embracing. Hello. Farewell.
[Lazzaro shoots Billy]

Makes perfect sense to me. And you do get to live forever, right? If only in the way it was always meant to be.

[iambiguous]

It’s the rural South during the depression era. No social safety nets here. Not if you are a family of black sharecroppers. You either put food on the table or you don’t eat. And if you can’t grow enough or hunt enough you might have to resort to stealing it from others…just to survive. And then you might get caught. And if you are then your family might pretty much be on its own.

What is always fascinating [at least as much as it is apalling] is how the folks in power here can treat the folks they rule over with such a cruel and callous indifference to their plight…and yet still feel like they are the ones doling out all the favors. Like it’s the sharecroppers who owe them instead of the other way around. Partly it’s rooted in race of course…but partly it’s rooted in a philosophy of entitlement linked to one or another rendition of “we are the masters and you are the slaves.”

What is still no where in sight is the part about organizing with others to form a political struggle against these conditions. That’s still a couple of decades down the road. The only real option here is education. The son has to leave the farm, get some, and then come back with a whole lot of other options. Or more then he has now.

But I kept wondering: Where’s that part about pitching in together as a community to help each other out? There’s a black congregation in the church. And the families interact. But why was it necessary for Nathan to steal at all? Or are they all in the same leaky – barely afloat – boats. Just accepting their lot in life as a manifestation of a Lord that works in mysterious ways.

Sounder by the way is the dog. Not entirely sure though why that’s the name of the movie.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_(film
trailer: youtu.be/ToQgeO8r2T0

SOUNDER [1972]
Directed by Martin Ritt

[b]Nathan Lee: There was a day when a bull couldn’t of stopped old Sounder from getting that coon.

…

Rebecca: We’ve been through these hard times before, Nathan Lee. And we made it.
Nathan Lee: But what we make it through, Rebecca? Another season of sharecropping for old man Perkins. We work ourselves to death so that he gets richer and we can’t even eat when cropping time is done?

…

Nathan Lee: I did what I had to do, Rebecca.

…

Ike: Ya’all, one time by mistake I went into this white church down in Raleigh Parish and to this very day I don’t know how I got out of there alive. Well I went home and you know me I did me some praying to the good Lord and asked the good Lord about this white church…I said to Him “all I want to know Lord is how I got out of there alive.”
Nathan Lee: And what did the good Lord say to you, Ike?
Ike: He said, “You know, Ike, you been doing better than me…cause I been trying to get in there for 200 years andI ain’t made it in there yet.”

…

Mrs. Boatwright: Charlie, you have no legal right not to let this boy know where his father is! You hear that, you and this whole damn court house; what you are doing is wrong!
Charlie: Don’t tell me about what’s wrong. You come into my office as a friend and steal city files! I could have you arrested for that…and if you give out that information to anybody, that’s exactly what I’m going to do – and I’ll tell everybody in this town how you got the information and who you got it for! You won’t have a friend left in this county to bring you a piece of candy!
Mrs. Boatwright: You would do that, wouldn’t you?
Charlie: Now you’re getting the point, Mrs. Boatwright.[/b]

The point being there is an entrenched “system” down there. And folks to enforce it. And even if you are sympathetic to the “coloreds” plight, you don’t dare to buck it. Though she does manage to muster up the courage.

[b]David Lee [to Camille and the class]: I believe Clarence’s story…
Camille: You want to come forward and tell us why, David?
David Lee: Some people came and took my daddy away and other people said we couldn’t work the farm. But we had to,'cause we didn’t wanna lose our farm. We planted the crops and they grew. I believe his story ‘cause his story is about what he did when he had to do somethin’. He didn’t know how to swim but he had to or else his sister woulda drowned. That’s how he did it…

…

Nathan Lee: You know, son, when I got this leg hurt, I was down in a rock quarry, and all of a sudden, there was this dynamite blast comin’ at me with the kind of force to kill ten men, but I got outta the way of most of them rock, quicker’n the lightnin’ in God’s mind – ‘cause I made it up in my head, just that quick to beat the death that was comin’ at me. And that’s what I’m gonna do with this trouble in my leg. I’m gon’ beat it. That’s all that’s left for me to do. That’s what I want you to do. I want you to beat the life they got laid out for you in this valley.

…

Nathan Lee: There ain’t nothin’ here but people like them bastards that sent me away, and tried to kill me. Son, please don’t get too used to this place. I’m gonna love you wherever you is. Me, your mama, Josie Mae and Earl, we gonna love you even more. We gonna be at that school to see you every chance we get.[/b]

[iambiguous]

A Russian film based “loosely” on 12 Angry Men.

Here the one on trial is the foster son [a Chechen] of a Russian officer who brought him to Moscow to escape the war. The jurors – “a racist taxi-driver, a suspicious doctor, a vacillating TV producer, a Holocaust survivor, a flamboyant musician, a cemetery manager, and others representing the fragmented society of modern day Russia” – are pretty much reflective of our very own fragmented society. The difference being they are all of the caucasian race. So they need other scapegoats --ethnic by and large – to inflict their turmoils on.

As in other parts of Europe, the Chechen conflict has roots in religion. Chechens are Muslim by and large and many wish to separate from Russia and form their own republic. Then there is the question of immigration to other parts of Russia. The bigotry surrounding that.

Interspersed between the jury room scenes is the brutal reality of the Chechen war itself. The backstory out of which the defendent emerged.

All of the jururs here are men. Just a coincidence? After all, the trial judge was a woman. But what do I know about the criminal justice system in Russia. Other than the fact that [like ours] it is surely, “human, all too human”. And over there…just as over here…folks tend to get stuck when deciding what “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” means.

So, pitted against all of this, there must surely be a more “ideal” alternative. Good luck trying to pin that down.

IMDb

[b]Nominated for Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 80th Annual Academy Awards (2008).

Sergey Garmash dreamed to participate in any Nikita Mikhalkov’s movie for a long time. He literally begged the director to give him a role in his movie. One morning Mikhalkov called him and asked “Do you go to church”. Garmash said “Yes”. Mikhalkov then asked “Do you pray a lot?”. Garmash said “Yes”. Mikhalkov then said “Your prayers have been answered! The script is on the way”.

The movie has an epigraph (“Don’t look here for the truth of everyday life, but try to feel the truth of being”) and an epilogue (“The law comes before everything, but what’s to be done if the mercy comes before the law?”). Both are quotations from one B. Tosia. Most probably, he (or she) never lived and is the fictional alter ego of Nikita Mikhalkov.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_(2007_film
trailer: youtu.be/VcI5Zu-Znvs

12 [2007]
Written in part and directed by Nikita Mikhalkov

[b]Juror: We voted that this stinking Chechen mongrol is guilty of killing his foster father, an officer in the Russian army.

…

Juror [the only one voting not-guilty]: I have a request. May we have a secret ballot?
Juror: Why?
Juror: With a show of hands, people sometimes vote to be like everybody else…to stick with the group they belong to.

…

Juror: Yes, I worry. I worry when I see how you’re messing up this open and shut case with your Jewish tricks!

…

Juror: If he didn’t kill him what difference does it make if he doesn’t speak Russian?!

…

Juror: Coincidence? Anything can happen. Anything can happen.

…

Juror: Do you mean the old man deliberately lied under oath?
Juror: A Communist, a man of the old school, slandered the innocent Chechen boy for no good reason?!
Juror: Who but Communists lied under oath from top to bottom for the sake of privileges, power and simply out of habit?

…

Juror: So you mean this was a premeditated and well-planned murder?
Juror: Looks like one. When millions of dollars are involved, the gap between an inclination to convince and the will to kill is insignificant.

…

Juror [the one…the only one…who always felt the defendent was innocent]: She didn’t think she was lying at the trial, she had convinced herself that the boy was the murderer, that it could not have been done by anyone else. It was out of jealousy, senseless, cruel, blind, instinctive jealously.[/b]

Being a female and all.

Juror: I can guarantee you one thing for sure, he’ll live longer in prison than on the outside. Once he is released he’ll neither go to some joint to drink nor will he go to his relatives or home, he has none. That’s it. Do you see? He’ll go look for the people who killed his father. Besides, if he’s acquitted, a new criminal case on the unsolved murder will be opened. The people who killed his father will get nervous. They’ll look for the boy. He’ll be looking for them and they’ll be looking for him. He doesn’t know where they are but they know just where to go looking for him. Our decision, instead of sending the boy to prison, will be signing his death sentence.

There’s only one solution then. But I won’t spoil it for you.

[iambiguous]

Maybe the very first high plains drifter to ride into town. A really tiny town in other words. No law. No order. Just bosses. And scum.

It’s surreal. When you walk through one part of town you’re in Mexico, and, in another part, Texas.

The man with no name? Not really. His name is Joe. But, come on, how mysterious can a guy named Joe be?

What makes this hero an anti-hero is the ambiguity he carries around with him like a shroud. He just sort of stumbles into doing the right thing for three innocent folks wronged by the actual bastards. Here though his job is made all the easier because he can play one gang off on the other.

Still, the only problem with clearing the town of these thugs is this: they seem to have been the only inhabitants in the town. Save Silvanito, Piripero and the bellringer. Or maybe the local chapter of the NRA.

IMDb

[b]This has been described as the first “spaghetti western”, but when this film was made, there had already been about 25 such westerns produced in Italy. This was, however, the first to receive a major international release.

According to “Once Upon a Time in the Italian West” by Howard Hughes, Leone spotted a tree, while on location, that he thought would be perfect for the hanging tree at the beginning of the film, so the tree was dug up and relocated.

Because this was an Italian/West German/Spanish co-production, there was a significant language barrier on the set. Clint Eastwood communicated with Sergio Leone and the Italian crew mostly through stuntman Benito Stefanelli, who also acted as an unofficial interpreter for the production.

After considering Henry Fonda, director Sergio Leone offered the role of the Man With No Name to James Coburn, who proved too expensive. Charles Bronson then turned it down after describing it as the “worst script I have ever seen”. Third choice Richard Harrison also declined the role but pointed Leone in the direction of Rawhide. Leone then offered the part to “Rawhide” star Eric Fleming, who turned it down but suggested his co-star Clint Eastwood for the part. The rest, as they say, is history.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Dollars
trailer: youtu.be/gqvK80XGJkA

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS [Per un Pugno di dDllari] 1964
Directed by Sergio Leone

[b]Joe [to Silvanito]: The crazy bellringer was right. There’s money to be made in a place like this.

…

Joe [to Piripero]: Get three coffins ready.

…

Joe [to the Baxter boys]: I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’. You see, my mule don’t like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you’re laughin’ at him. Now if you apologize, like I know you’re going to, I might convince him that you really didn’t mean it.

…

Joe [to Pripero]: My mistake. Four coffins.

…

Joe: This is all very, very touching.
Ramon: You mean you don’t admire peace?
Joe: It’s not real easy to like something you know nothing about.

…

Ramon: You are well informed, eh?
Joe: A man’s life in these parts often depends on a mere scrap of information. Your brother’s own words.
Ramon: Tell me. Why are you doing this for us?
Joe [holds out his hand as a response]: Five hundred dollars.

…

Joe: When a man’s got money in his pocket he begins to appreciate peace.

…

Chico: My orders are to make sure he does not die…but also to make sure he regrets the day he was born.

…

Joe: You shoot to kill, you better hit the heart. Your own words, Ramon.

…

Joe: When a man with .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol’s a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.

…

Joe: Well, guess your government will be glad to see that gold back.
Silvanito: And you? You don’t want to be here when they get it, eh?
Joe: You mean the Mexican goverment on one side? The Americans on the other side? Me right smack in the middle? Uhn-hn. Too dangerous.[/b]

Too dangerous for them maybe.

[iambiguous]

The whole point is not in believing something like this is true but being able to acquire a frame of mind that allows you to believe that something like this is true. It could be about anything for all practical purposes. From God to a virtual infinite number of other interactions in nature. There are hundreds upon hundreds of things that one might master.

That I have myself failed to do so does not mean that you will. And perhaps if I am lucky you will change my mind. If being lucky is the right way to put it.

A frame of mind as alien to me now though as my own would surely be to them. Mine being that all ritual of this sort is rooted in the psychology of necessity. You behave only as you must. And thus give life a meaning beyond which it is warranted from my frame of mind. And no where to be seen: the power of politics and the state. It’s not for nothing that pillow books were in the domain of the aristocracy.

Lots and lots of nudity here. But given the nature of the film’s narrative, one could hardly call it gratuitous.

We see things we don’t understand. And having them explained to us is hardly sufficient. We are not of there. Plain and simple. And even those who are of there have, in the modern world, so many different options from which to choose.

The art of caligraphy being just one of them. And the body being just one possible canvas for our words.

IMDb

[b]The keeping of pillow books to record poems, secrets, and encounters with lovers was a common practice of noble women in Heian Japan. Although its content is unrelated to the film, a famous example was written by Sei Shonagon at about the same time as Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji which has the honor of being the world’s first novel. In fact, it has been said that Sei Shonogon and Lady Murasaki were rivals in the court of Heian.

Much of the film is in Japanese, and some of the English subtitles appear to be intentionally incorrect or missing, in the spirit of “language play” or “the Tower of Babel”. (Confirmed by director Peter Greenaway at a talk at the San Francisco Film Festival.)[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillow_Book_(film
trailer: youtu.be/z4I75Rvb0zo

THE PILLOW BOOK [1996]
Written in part and directed by Peter Greenaway

[b][repeated lines]
Father and Mother [and then Nagiko]: When God made the first clay model of a human being, He painted in the eyes… the lips… and the sex. And then He painted in each person’s name lest the person should ever forget it. If God approved of His creation, He brought the painted clay model into life by signing His own name.

…

The Aunt: This is a book written a long time ago. It is called The Pillow Book and written by a lady who has the same first name as you - Nagiko. When you are twenty-eight years old this book will be exactly a thousand years old. Think of that.

…

Nagiko: Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated. Why should a person be obligated to stand such sweet pain and such bitter pleasure?

…

Nagiko [to Jerome]: You’re not a writer, you’re a scribbler.

…

Nagiko: His writing - in so many languages - made me a sign-post pointing east, west, north and south. I had shoes in German, stockings in French, gloves in Hebrew, a hat with a veil in Italian. He only kept me naked where I was most accustomed to wearing clothes.

…

Nagiko: The smell of white paper is like the scent of skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well, the quill is like that instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always, always forgets.

…

Nagiko: If writings did not exist, what terrible depressions we should suffer.

…

Nagiko: Where is a book before it is born? Who are a book’s parents? Does a book need two parents - a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? Where is the parent book of books? How old does a book have to be before it can give birth?[/b]

[iambiguous]

Triangle. As in Bermuda Triangle. As in spooky ass things we can’t explain. Or spooky ass things that others insist we can’t explain. But what’s that next to the spooky ass things we can’t explain emanating from inside our own heads.

As with films like The Shining it goes to places we almost certainly can’t go but the whole point is to create this intense sense of mystery regarding where we think we are now…and how it all fits into all the things we don’t know. And may never know.

We keep wondering: has the horror sprung up from inside somebody’s head or from some “supernatural” element sprung from the imagination of the writer.

The human mind can go places some folks scarely will even begin to imagine. So others have to imagine it for them.

Think of Momento or The Machinist. Or Timecrimes. One of those films where so many scenes are repeated the entire film is really only about 30 minutes long. But unlike those this film actually gave me goosebumps at the end. No bullshit. And that hasn’t happened in a long time.

IMDb

The film makes many oblique references to The Shining. The number 237 crops up, which was the same number of the spooky hotel room Danny was forbidden to go into; there are also words written on a mirror, a ballroom and an axe.

FAQs: imdb.com/title/tt1187064/faq
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(2009_film
trailer: youtu.be/9aCdzjCftgs

TRIANGLE [2009]
Written and directed by Christopher Smith

[b]Victor: The Aeolus.
Downey [reading off s plaque]: “The Aeolus was the Greek god of winds and the father of Sysyphus, the man condemned by the gods to the task of pushing a rock up a mountain pnly to see it roll back down again.”
Victor: That’s a shitty punishment. What did he do?
Sally: He cheated Death. No, he made a promise to Death that he didn’t keep. I studied it but I can’t remember…

…

Greg: Jess, fuck! Don’t you see this is all just in your mind? Jess! Ships don’t just magically appear out of nowhere. They have skippers. I mean, in your world right now maybe they don’t.

…

Victor [shocked to see Jess]: How did you get here so fast?
Jess: [frantic]: Victor you gotta listen to me. We don’t have much time.
Victor: Whoa, whoa, what’s going on? Where’s Greg?
Jess: He’s dead.
Victor: What?
Jess: No, no I mean he was dead.
Victor: What are you saying?
Jess: Downstairs right now is a copy of myself. Me! Walking and talking with Greg!!

…

Jess: My world is waiting outside school for his mother to pick him up.

…

Jess: It returns when they’re all dead.

…

Jess [to Tommy]: Oh you’re just having a bad dream, that’s all baby. That’s all it was. Bad dreams make you think you’re seeing things that you haven’t. You know what I do when I have a bad dream? I close my eyes and I think of something nice - like being here with you. [/b]

[iambiguous]

In all honesty, I wouldn’t have a clue as to how to interact around folks like these. The only things I care much to talk about and do these days wouldn’t be of much interest to them and the stuff they tend to go on and on and on regarding don’t hold much interest for me. I’m glad there are folks out there like this able to find other folks like that to form friendships with; and I sure as shit would never suggest their lives are less important to them than my life is to me. But there are just gulfs between folks that can be bridged and gulfs that cannot. It’s entirely existential.

The fact that they would release someone like Karl from the “nervous hospital” when he has absolutely no one outside he can turn to for help speaks volumes in and of itself. But this is the rural South. And the South is a part of the United States of America.

Too bad they didn’t have Obamacare back then.

Then there’s Doyle. Not just, “a close-minded redneck, but a monster”. Some folks might see him as all that’s wrong with the world. A bully with the brains of a flea. But we never really do get to find out why he is the way he is—just that he’s had “a real hard life”. And we do get a peek or two at the times when he isn’t an asshole. But someone like him in a small town can make life a living hell for others. There’s always the threat of an explosion when he’s around. And maybe something ought to be done about it. That’s partly what this film is all about.

Of course it might just make more sense to have nothing to do with them. Move out of the small town. Get yourself an education. Interact with folks considerably more substantial and sophisticated. Let folks like this be our…entertainment? That’s not an option for Karl though. Or for Frankie.

On the other hand [and for all I know] Karl is meant to embody the second coming of Christ. But you’ll have to ask Billy Bob about that though.

IMDb

[b]In order to make his walk more awkward and consistent, Billy Bob Thornton placed crushed glass in his shoes.

Billy Bob Thornton said he wrote the role of Vaughan Cunningham specifically for his good friend John Ritter.

When Doyle tells Linda that “retards” make him sick, he adds that the same is true for antique furniture and midgets. Billy Bob Thornton has been quoted as saying that two of his phobias are antique furniture and midgets.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sling_Blade
trailer: youtu.be/Z8CF0izAyrE

SLING BLADE [1996]
Written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton

[b]Charles Bushman [to Karl]: A Mercury is a good car. That’s the car I was driving that day. I’ve had a lot of cars. Different kinds. Lot’s of different kinds of cars. She was standing - this girl - on the side of the street where there was this chicken stand, wasn’t the Colonel but it was a chicken stand nonetheless. I pulled the Mercury up right along side her and rolled down the window, see, by electric power. She had on a leather skirt and had a lot of hair on her arms. I like that a lot. That means a big bush. I like a big bush. She says, “Are you dating?” You know, so I said, “Sure”. She gets in and we pull off to a remote location that was comfortable for both she and I. She says, “How much do you wanna spend?”, I said, “Whatever it will take to see that bush of yours because I know it’s a big one”. She says, “Twenty five dollars”. That’s not chicken feed to a working man so I produce the $25, she puts it in her shoe, pulls up her skirt and there before me lay this thin, crooked, uncircumcised penis.
[Scoffs]
Bushman: You can imagine how bad I wanted my $25 back, huh?

…

Karl: I reckon what yousa wantin’ to know is why I’m in here. Reckon the reason I’m in here is cause I’ve killed somebody, mhm. But I reckon what yousa wantin’ to know is how come mea killed somebody, so I’ll start at the front and tell ye, mhm… I lived out back of my mother and father’s place mosta my life in a little old shed that my daddy had built fur me, mhm. They didn’t too much want me up there in the house with the rest of ‘em, mhm. So mustley I just sat around out there in the shed and looked at the ground, mhm. I didn’t have no floor out there, but I had me a hole dug out to lay down in. Quilt or two tu put down there, mhm. My father was a hard workin’ man most of his life. Not that I can say the same for myself. I mostly just sat around out there in the shed, tinkerin’ with a lawn mower or two. Went to school off and on from time to time, but the children out there, very cruel to me, made quite a bit a sport of me, make fun of me quite a bit. So mostly, I just sat around out there. In the shed. My daddy worked down there at the saw mill, the plainer mill, for an old man named Dixon. Old man Dixon was very cruel feller. Didn’t treat his employees very well, didn’t pay ‘em too much a wage, didn’t pay my daddy too much a wage. Just barely enough to get by on, I reckon, mhm. But I reckon he got by alright. Hmm. I used to come out, one or the other of ‘em. Usually my mother, feed me pretty regular, mhm. I know he made enough where I could have mustard and biscuits three or four times a week. Mhm. But old man Dixon, he had a boy. His name was Jesse Dixon. Jesse was really more cruel than his daddy was. He used to make quite a bit a sport with me, when i was down there at the school house. he used to take advantage of little girls there in the neighborhood an’ all. He used to say that my mother was a very pretty woman. He said that quite a bit from time to time when I’d be down there at the school house. Well… I reckon you want me tu get on with it and tell you what happened, so I reckon I’ll tell ye. I was sittin’ out there in the shed one evening, not doin’ too much of nothin’, just starrin’ at the wall, waitin’ on my mother to come out and give me my Bible lesson. Mhm. Well, I heard a commotion up there in the house. Mhm. So I run up on the screened-in porch to see what was a-goin’ on. I looked in the window there and saw my mother layin’ on the floor without any clothes on, hmm. Mhm-hmm. I seen Jesse Dixon layin’ on top of her, hmm. He was havin’ his way with her. Hmm. Well, I just seen red. I picked up a Kaiser Blade that was sittin’ there by the screen door. Some folks call it a Sling Blade, I call it a Kaiser Blade. It’s kindly a wood handle, kind of like an axe handle. With a long blade on it shaped kinda like a bananer. Mhm. Sharp on one edge, and dull on the other. Mhm. It’s what the highway boys use to cut down weeds and whatnot. Well, I went in there, in the house, and I hit Jesse Dixon upside the head with it, knocked him off my mother, mhm. I reckon that didn’t quite satisfy me. So I hit him again with it in the neck, the sharp edge, and just plumb near cut his head off, killed him. My mother she jumped up and started hollerin’ “What’d you kill Jesse fur? What’d you kill Jesse fur?” Well… come to find out I don’t think my mother minded what Jesse was a-doin’ to her. I reckon that made me madder that what Jesse’d made me. So I take the Kaiser Blade, some folks call it a Sling Blade, I call it a Kaiser Blade, and I hit my mother upside the head with it. Killed her.

…

Karl: I reckon I’m gonna have to get used to looking at pretty people.
Dr. Woolridge: Yes you will.
Karl: I Reckon I’m gonna have to get used to them looking at me.

…

Cox: Hey, Scooter, did I tell you the one about the two ol’ boys pissing off a bridge?
Scooter: I don’t believe you did.
Cox: Well, there were these two ol’ boys and they hung their peckers off a bridge to piss. One ol’ boy from California, the other from Arkansas. The ol’ boy from California says, “Boy, this water’s cold”, and the ol’ boy from Arkansas says, “Yeah, and it’s deep too.”

…

Frank [to Karl]: I won’t tell Ma about you being in the state hospital for killing.

…

Frank [to Karl]: Vaughan’s real good to Mama. Vaughan that you met? But he’s not able to do anything to Doyle. He’s funny. Not “funny,” ha-ha. “Funny,” queer. He likes to go with men. That makes him not able to fight good, but he sure is nice. He’s from St. Louis. Queer people get along better in a big town. I wish he like to go with women. I’d rather him be Mama’s boyfriend than Doyle.

…

Doyle: Hey is this the kind of retard that drools and rubs shit in his hair and all that, ‘cause I’m gonna have a hard time eatin’ 'round that kind of thing now. Just like I am with antique furniture and midgets. You know that, I can’t so much as drink a damn glass of water around a midget or a piece of antique furniture.
Linda: Doyle, you’re awful. You shouldn’t be that way.
Doyle: I ain’t saying it’s right, I’m just telling the damn truth. He’ll make me sick. I know it.

…

Vaughan: Have you knocked on the door yet?
Karl: No, Sir, not yet.
Vaughan: How long have you been standing here?
Karl: Quite a spell, I reckon.

…

Karl [eating potted meat]: I reckon it tastes alright.
Frank: You really think it’s got peckers in there?
Karl: You know better than that. You ought not say that word.
Frank: It smells funny.
Karl: Yeah, it’s a little loud. Looky there. I believe you’re right. I believe I see one right in there.
[They laugh]

…

Vaughan: I’m just going to say it. I’m gay. Does that surprise you that I’m gay? You know what gay is, don’t you?
Karl: I don’t reckon.
Vaughan [quietly]: Homosexual. I like men sexually.
Karl: Not funny ‘ha-ha’, funny queer.
Vaughan: Well that’s a very offensive way to put it. You shouldn’t say that. You were taught that, weren’t you?
Karl: I’ve heard it said that a-way.

…

Vaughan: You seem to always be deep in thought. What are you thinking right now?
Karl: I was thinking I might wanna take some of these tators home with me.
Vaughan: How about before that?
Karl: Let me think. Before that, I was thinking…I could use me six or eight cans of that potted meat… if you got any extra. Mhm.

…

Doyle [to Vaughan and Karl]: Hey! I said get out of my house! That goes for cocksuckers and retards!

…

Linda: Karl, you know what? Melinda here was voted employee of the month at the dollar store last February. Isn’t that something?
Karl: Yes ma’am, I reckon.
Melinda: Well, when you like pricing items as much as I do, it’s just bound to happen sooner or later, I guess.

…

Frank: You ever have any brothers or sisters growing up?
Karl: I had one there for a little while. But, uh, it didn’t get old enough for me to play with it.
Frank: Why not? It die?
Karl: Yes, Sir.
Frank: Why?
Karl: It got born too early. My mother and father made it come out too early some how or other.
Frank: So it died when it came out?
Karl: My daddy came out to the shed and got me. He said, “Here, take this and throw it away”, and he handed me a towel with something or another in it. Well I started for that barrel and I opened up the towel ‘cause there was a noise. Something a-moving around in there. The towel was all bloody-like all around it there. It was a lil’ ol’ baby not no bigger than a squirrel.
Frank: It was alive?
Karl: Right then it was.
Frank: A girl or a boy?
Karl: It was a little ol’ boy.
Frank: You threw it in the trash barrel?
Karl: Well that didn’t seem right to me, so I went in the shed and got me a shoe box and emptied out all the washers and nuts and screws and whatnot that were in it and I takened the little fellar and put him inside the box and buried him right there in a corner of the yard. That seemed more proper to me, I reckon.
Frank: Was it still alive when you buried it?
Karl: I heared it a-cryin’ through that box.
Frank: That don’t seem right. Seems like you would have kept him and taken care of him if he was your brother.
Karl: I wasn’t but 6 or 8. I don’t reckon I knew what to do. I didn’t know how to care for no baby. My mother and father didn’t want him and they learned me to do what they told me. These days I reckon it’s better to give him back to the Good Lord anyhow.

…

Doyle [trying to make peace with Karl and Frank]: I don’t like homosexuals and she goes out and buddies up with one so I gotta deal with that. I don’t like little wimpy-ass kids or mental retards and she got one of each livin’ with her.
[laughs]
Doyle: I’m just kidding really about that

…

Father: I told you I ain’t got no boy. Get on out of here and let me be. You ain’t no kin to me.
Karl: I learned to read some. I read the Bible quite a bit. I can’t understand all of it. But I reckon I understand a good deal of it. Them stories you and Mama told me, they ain’t in there. You ought not done that to your boy. I studied on killing you. I studied about it quite a bit. But I reckon there’s no need for it if all you’re gonna do is sit there in that chair. You’ll be dead soon enough. And the world’ll be shut of you. You ought not to have kill my little brother.

…

Doyle: What the goddamn hell you doing up in the middle of the night?
Linda: What you want, hon?
Karl: I wanna be baptized.
Doyle: Get baptized then. I don’t give a shit! Call up a fucking preacher! We can’t baptize you.
Linda: We’ll go see Brother Epersom tomorrow and get you baptized. It’s Sunday. You go on back to bed now.
Doyle: What are you doing with that damn hammer?
Karl: I don’t rightly know. I just kinda woke up holding it.

…

Karl [to Vaughan]: Bible says two men ought not lay together. But I bet you the good Lord wouldn’t send nobody like you to Hades.

…

Doyle: Didn’t I tell you to get moved out of here?
Karl: How does a feller go about getting hold of the police?
Doyle: Use the fucking phone, I guess.
Karl: Which numbers do you put in?
Doyle: Can’t you see I’m trying to relax? I thought I told you to get out of here and leave me alone. What’cha doin’ with that lawn mower blade?
Karl: I aim to kill you with it.
Doyle: Well, to call the police, you push 911…then just tell 'em to bring an ambulance, or a hearst if you’re gonna kill me.

…

Karl [on the phone]: Yes, ma’am. I’ve killed Doyle Hargraves with a lawnmower blade. Mhm. Yes, ma’am, I’m right sure of it. I hit him two good whacks in the head with it. That second one just plum near cut his head in two…It’s a lil’ ol’ white house on the corner of Vine Street and some other street. There’s a pick-up truck out front that says “Doyle Hargraves Construction” on it. Doyle said besides sending the police, you might wanna send an ambulance or a hearst. I’ll be sitting here, waiting on ye. Thank ye.[/b]

[iambiguous]

You are on the inside with all of those who are on the outside. But you want to go straight. It’s a trade off. Not nearly as much adreneline pumping but you are considerably more likely to live to see, say, your next birthday. Or your kid’s next birthday. But wanting out is not nearly the same as getting out. Others might have something to say about that. It’s not quite the same as “blood in, blood out” but it can seem that way to some folks.

This is a world where the expression “strange bedfellows” seems particularly appropriate. Gangsters, politicians, state security, businessmen and cops. The possible permutations can go on and on and on.

The Chinese government knows the triads will never go away. But some arrangments can be made more profitable than others. It wants someone on the inside…someone they can control. They want to keep the violence to a minimum. Sometimes it all seems choreographed, but other times it is anything but. There will always be rougue elements. And people are, after all, people.

Is this how it is over there? For example, is it really this barbaric? From an interview at Cineaste:
cineaste.com/articles/an-int … nie-to.htm

To: Those two films, along with Exiled, are fictional. They follow the path other Hong Kong gangster films had set, with everyone shooting guns all the time. But the Election films are meant to portray reality, the way things really are. No one shoots guns. It’s the way gangsters really behave.

Bottom line: Their elections may be even more rigged than our own. Besides, the way we go about it is so much more…civilized.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_2
trailer: youtu.be/LDp1EvDa_e8

TRIAD ELECTION [Hak Se Wui Yi Wo Wai Kwai] 2006
Directed by Johnnie To

Kwok: Looks like a lucrative project. I’m in. Jimmy, your connections are your business. Just make sure your Triad past doesn’t hurt our business. Do you understand?
Jimmy: You have my word, Mr. Kwok.

And off we go. This is the first part. Here is the second:

[b]Jimmy [to his wife atop a hill]: I want a house here. A big one. With at least three bedrooms. One for us. The other two are for our children. They’ll become doctors and lawyers.

…

Jimmy: I can’t take my business public if the law is all over me.
Uncle So: What do you mean? You’re a part of the Society!
Jimmy: I joined for protection. There’s no point in becoming the biggest gangster. I’m only in it for the money.
Uncle So: Don’t forget that we made you rich. You can’t just walk away!

…

Mr. Shi: From now on, you’re welcome in China as tourists. But you can’t do business here.
Jimmy: Even straight business?
Mr. Shi [shaking his head]: It’s our policy.
Jimmy: Mr. Hui is also a gangster. Why can he do business in China?
Mr. Shi: We made a deal, and he’s a patriot.
Jimmy: I can make you a deal. I can be a patriot.
Mr. Shi: Hui is the Chairman of Sun Gei. What’s your rank in Wo Sing? Not its Chairman?
Jimmy: If I run for Chairman, will you give me what I want? [/b]

And, just like that, everything changes.

[b]Uncle Teng: Every two years everyone has a shot. We have to maintain balance in the Society. That’s why I picked you last time. Tradition is tradition. Breaking it would cause another war. It’ll be chaos.
Lok: Understood. You should rest, Uncle teng. I’m leaving.
Uncle Teng: Learn to let go, Lok.

…

Mr. Shi: We welcome your investment in China. I wish you prosperous business.
Jimmy: Thank you.
Mr. Shi: Your arrest was all a misunderstanding. Construction has been approved. A highway will be built here. This land is yours now. Your house has also been approved.[/b]

What’s the catch?

Jimmy [after Mr. Shi hands him the dragon baton]: I’m deeply impressed…but also frightened by your power. What do you want?
Mr Shi [after a pause]: From now on the leadership will always stay in your family.
Jimmy: What do you mean?
Mr. Shi: We respect your victory. But when your term is up we don’t want more troublmakers like Lok upsetting social order.
Jimmy: So what you are trying to tell me is that my son will inherit the baton?
Mr. Shi: We can trust you. Your family will own Wo Sing. You and I will work together.
Jimmy: No! My term expires in two years! I’m just a businessman! I don’t want to be a gangster!!

But after punching Shi in the face a few times he deflates…his fate is sealed.

Janice: I’m pregnant.

And maybe his son’s fate too?

[iambiguous]

A docudrama based on actual events.

Imagine it. Your wife has just died. You call 911. The police arrive and, along with your wife’s dead body, they find these petri dishes that you use in your art. Next thing you know [in the post 9/11 world] you are arrested and charged with being a bio-terrorist!

The important thing to note is that Steve Kurtz is a member of an art ensemble that aims to expose what they construe to be instances of social injustice…and then seek to change things. So, for the reactionaries in power [during the Bush/Cheney administration], they were fair game.

Now, it’s not as though their bona fides as actual artists could ever be questioned. They published 5 books and had mounted art exhibitions around the globe. And they worked closely with any number of reputable scientists so that their art was rooted in assessment that could be defended as more than just an exercise in aesthetics.

But their ideas were, you know, radical. So, of course, they had to be hounded by the folks behind the Patriot Act. “Terrorism” being just the bogus facade here.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Culture
trailer: youtu.be/ikNO1ANHIQs

STRANGE CULTURE [2007]
Written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson

[b]Keith Obermann [from Countdown]: Like many an unfortunate drama, the story begins with a death. Steve Kurtz called 911 early on the morning of May 11th, after his wife suffered cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. When police arrived on the scene they saw not a 45-year old woman claimed well before her time, but rather petri dishes and sophisticated scientific equipment…Through his grief Steve Kurtz explained it was part of an art exhibit about genetically altered food. Unconvinced the police in Buffalo called the joint terrorism task force. Soon it was not only police searching his home but FBI agents in Haz-Mat suits…Mr Kurtz was detained, his home, his entire block sealed off for 36 hours and then along with his computers and art supplies they took his wife’s body.

…

Title card: Steve Kurtz is unable to comment on events that occured immediately prior to his arrest. Actors have interpreted his story.

…

Kurtz: What Critical Art Ensemble does is to identify things that we think are counter to the advancment of social justice and then try to do something about it. The CAE has focused on the way that the government, the military, science and industry have come together in ways that don’t do the public any good.

…

Kurtz: It’s not what most people normally think of as art. We make art that questions the relationship between art commerce and bio-technology.

…

Kurtz [teaching a class]: Maybe we’re all becoming mutant humans in order to survive in a culture that has become The Monster. At one time…we liked to think we controlled our own identity…but I think we are beginning to realize that all of that is now part of a web that is political and social and economic networks.

…

Kurtz: This prosecutor’s “great case” was putting away the “Lacawanna Six”…the ones that president Bush referred to as a “sleeper cell”.

…

Kurtz: By the time it got to the Department of Justice, then there’s not any doubt that they were trying to manufacture a crime and were trying to reconstruct me into something I completely wasn’t.[/b]

The whole point being to pummel the public once again with “proof” that the terrorists were out there and that they should be very afraid. And since the “bio-terrorist” case was so flmsy the FBI tried to show that he might also be a sex deviant or a drug dealer or out to kill the president. It was all one attempt to entrap him after another. The idea was to send a message to the art world: We can come after you too.

Peter Boyle [speaking for Dr. Robert Ferrell]: From the beginning of the whole affair I saw myself simply as collateral damage. From the start the FBI seemed to be interested in Steve’s politics. I got the impression that they were against the activities of the art ensemble and this was a way to get him. Steve has an idea that they want to frighten anyone including scientists who question what is going on in this country.

[iambiguous]

This documentary was supposedly “11 years in the making”. That comes to about 9 minutes a year. By that measure alone it can be construed as a big disappoinment. And it garnered only a 64% fresh rating at RT.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect though because, while a big fan of her [early] music, I didn’t know much about her. I rarely do with respect to musicians because it is only the music that interest me. How it makes me feel emotionally and how I react to the words as poetry. But I really did only like her “old stuff”. I listen to the new recordings when they come out but it’s just not the same.

She had always been a cypher to me then and is still a cypher to me now. There’s this “mystical” William Blakean aspect of her persona that I have never really been able to relate to. And yet paradoxically it is this very aspect of existence that has always fascinated me most. Cleansing the “doors of perception”. Is this something that can even be done?

To me the major flaw was the manner in which it seemed to be [at times] just series of home movies spliced together over the course of her life. Where’s the beef, I kept wondering. Did I really need to know she doesn’t use bleach when she’s showing us the top her son wore on his birth day? Or her talent for pissing in a bottle?

But then I’ll always be fascinated by the expressive, androgynous face. And I will always be grateful for that tirade against Bush.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_Smith:_Dream_of_Life
trailer: youtu.be/PsdxUODQUsY

PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE [2008]
Directed by Steven Sebring

[b]Patti Smith: When I was a teenager I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christie or Chris Connor or approaching songs with a kind of mystical lethargy like Billie Holliday or a champion the down-trodden…I never dreamed of singing in a rock n roll band. This idea just didn’t exist in my world then…but my world, as it’s been said, was rapidly changing.

…

Patti Smith: It’s really funny when people ask you about that - How does it feel to be a rock icon? When they say that, I always think of Mt. Rushmore.[/b]

[iambiguous]

The narratives don’t come a whole lot bleaker than this one. Consider:

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character’s last name is a reference to the Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs. IMDb

The only thing worse would be in imagining it may as well not be a delusion at all. Which is certainly [from time to time] my own “syndrome”.

Come on, we need films like this to pop up from time to time. Sure, if they all aimed to yank us down to Charlie Kaufman’s take on the world, that would be beyond even what I could endure. But, you know, just every now and again. And Charlie is reaching the age “in real life” [at 54] where the body starts to come into a fuller compliance with the crumpling mind. Suddenly you find yourself going to the doctor more and more…and death is no longer way out there on the horizon somewhere. You start in on questioning things in a way you just never did before. And, increasingly, you’re less and less pleased with the answers. And while it might not be reasonable for all folks to feel this way it’s also not unreasonable that some folks do. It’s always that part in life where your frame of mind intersects with whatever circumstances you happen to find yourself in. They feed on each other…sometimes overlapping more, sometimes less.

On the stage and then off the stage in a world that is a stage…a stage that is increasingly less likely to make that distinction known. You just make it up as you go along. Like the characters we play here, for example. But then you know how close it comes to reality by how painful it can sometimes be to watch. Yet always and again: Some so much more than others.

IMDb

Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines “synecdoche” as: “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage).”

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche,_New_York
trailer: youtu.be/XIizh6nYnTU

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK [2008]
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman

[b]Caden: Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman thinks he’s only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair. But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor will end up in this very place of desolation.

…

Doctor: You’ve had a seizure of sorts.
Caden: What does that mean?
Doctor: Seems to be some synaptic degradation. Fungal in origin. Autonomic functions going haywire.
Caden: It’s serious?
Doctor: We don’t know…but yes. We’ll get you enrolled a biofeedback program. Maybe you can learn some sort of manual override.[/b]

This after finding out he needs gum surgery for his teeth.

[b]Caden [after examning his shit in the toilet]: I think that I have blood in my stool.
Adele [his wife half asleep]: That stool in your office?

…

Adele: Can I say something really awful?
Madeleine [therapist]: Sure. Please do.
Adele: I fantacised about Caden dying. Being able to start again, guilt free.I know that’s bad…
Madeleine: Caden, does that feel terrible?
Caden: Yes.
Madeleine: Okay, good.

…

Caden: Can I ask you something? Have I disappointed you somehow?
Adele: Everyone is disappointing the more you know them. This whole romantic love thing…it’s just a projection, right?

…

Caden: I wanted to ask you, how old are kids when they start to write?
Madeleine: Listen, there’s an absolutely brilliant novel written by a four year old.
Caden: Really?
Madeleine: 'Little Winky" by Horace Azpiazu.
Caden: That’s cute.
Madeleine: Hardly. Litty Winky is a virulent anti-Semite. The story follows his initiation into the klan, his immersion in the pornographic snuff industry, and his ultimate degradation at the hands of a black ex-convict named Eric Washington Jackson Jones Johnson…
Caden: Written by a four year old?
Madeleine: …Jefferson.
Caden: Wow, written by a four year old.
Madeleine: Well Azpiazu killed himself when he was five.
Caden: Why did he kill himself?
Madeleine: I don’t know, why did you?
Caden: What?
Madeleine: I said, ‘Why would you?’

…

Caden [explaining the premise of his MacArthur Grant production]: I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.
Claire: It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s everything. It’s Karamazov!

…

Caden: You’re here, too?
Maria: I live with Adele and Olive and Gunther and Heinz and Uschi and Britt. I’m everyone’s nanny.
Caden: I want to see my daughter.
Maria: They sent me.
Caden: They? And who the fuck are “they”?
[pause]
Caden: Maria, I can’t believe Adele got her tattooed like that. I mean…
Maria: I did that. Olive’s my muse.
Caden: She’s a four year old! SHE’S FOUR FUCKING YEARS OLD!!
Maria: She’s almost over eleven now. She’s my muse. I love her.
[he leaps from his chair and punches her][/b]

It’s not exactly a linear narrative.

[b]Caden [to Claire]: My father died. They said his body was riddled with cancer and that he didn’t know, he went in because his finger hurt. They said he suffered horribly, and that he called out for me before he died. They said that he said he regretted his life. They said he said a lot of things, too many to recount, and they said it was the longest and the saddest deathbed speech any of them had ever heard.

…

Caden: I won’t settle for anything less than the brutal truth. Brutal. Brutal. Each day I’ll hand you a paper, it’ll tell you what happened to you that day. You felt a lump in your breast. You looked at your wife and saw a stranger, et cetera.
Needleman Actor: Caden?
Caden: What?
Needleman Actor: When are we gonna get an audience in here? It’s been seventeen years.
Caden: All right, I’m not excusing myself from this either. I will have someone play me, to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he’ll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god! Now, get to work!

…

Sammy: I don’t have a resume, or a picture. I’ve never worked as an actor.
Caden: Good. Tell me why you’re here.
Sammy: Well I’ve been…I’ve been following you for twenty years. So I knew about this audition because I follow you. And I’ve learned everything about you by following you. So hire me. And you’ll see who you truly are.
[he starts to act as Caden]
Sammy: Okay…Hazel, I don’t think we need to talk to anyone else, this guy has me down. I’m going to cast him right now. And then maybe you and I can get a drink and we can try and figure out this thing between us. Why I cried…Because I’ve never felt about anybody the way I feel about you. And I want to fuck you until we merge into a Chimera, a mythical beast of penis and vagina, eternally fused, two pairs of eyes that look only at each other, and lips, ever touching, and one voice that whispers to itself.
Caden: Okay. You got the part.

…

Sammy: I’ve watched you forever, Caden, but you’ve never really looked at anyone other than yourself. So watch me. Watch my heart break. Watch me jump. Watch me learn that after death there’s nothing. There’s no more watching. There’s no more following. No love. Say goodbye to Hazel for me. And say it to yourself, too. None of us has much time.

…

Caden: None of us are extras. We’re all leads in our own stories.

…

Millicent: I’d very much like to play Caden. I know it would be non-traditional casting but I think I could do it, I think I understand him.
Caden: You don’t understand him.
Millicent: Caden Cotard is a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis. Time is concentrated and chronology confused for him. Up until recently he has strived valiantly to make sense of his situation, but now he has turned to stone.
Caden: Okay. It sounds good.

…

Minister: Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

…

Millicent [voiceover as Caden directing himself]]: Now the room is waiting and nobody cares. And when you’re wait is over this room will still exist and it will continue to hold shoes and dress and boxes and maybe someday another waiting person. And maybe not. The room doesn’t care either.

…

Millicent [voiceover as Caden directing himself]: What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this.

…

Millicent [voiceover as Caden directing himself]:: As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are…gone.

…

Caden: I know what to do with this play now. I have an idea. I think…
Millicent [voiceover as Caden directing himself]: Die.[/b]

[iambiguous]

The sort of movie some will watch and think, “if only everyone could see this fim there would be no more wars”.

Or Nazis?

It breaks your heart, sure, but it’s no where near close to being that. It’s as though to suggest that kids see things straight, stripped of all the bullshit that is ideology and propaganda. Yet however much truth there is in that it doesn’t dissolve the factors rooted in political economy…or the complex manner in which human nature and nurture combine to create points of view that easily become entangled. If only by making conflicting assumptions regarding the premises used. Or the contradictory manner in which we can argue the parameters of concepts like justice, fairness, progress or human rights.

But the extent to which folks are able to grasp the ramifications of events like this, it can only aid and abet those trying to ameliorate the more egregious aspects of human interaction.

As with Life Is Beautiful, this film was criticized by some for “glossing over and trivializing” the true horrors of the Holocaust. Some argued in turn that the sympathy seemed aimed more in the direction of the few “good Germans” than toward the victims in the camp. Here is a review typical of that point of view:

movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/mo … =5083&_r=0

Germans with English accents?

Because it’s a British-made film with British actors (albeit filmed in Hungary). Had it been made in Hollywood it would have had American actors speaking English with American accents or fake German accents. To have the movie take place in German, the British film-makers would have had to either: 1) hire and be able to communicate with German actors, 2) teach German to the English actors, 3) have the actors use fake German accents, or 4) subtitle the movie in English. (1) and (2) would have been expensive, (3) would have been comical, if not offensive, to the audience, and (4) would drive off a large portion of the viewers who don’t like reading subtitles. Film critic Roger Ebert praised the film for is use of English accents which he says conveys the class of the family which could not have been shown if any of the above methods had been used. IMDb

Look for Johnny. You can scarcely believe it’s him.

IMDb

[b]Although the concentration camp where the movie is set is never actually mentioned by name throughout the movie, we know it is Auschwitz because it was the only Nazi death camp with 4 crematoria. The SS officers are discussing the building’s construction in the Commandant’s office when Bruno’s mother interrupts the meeting. In the book it is referred to as “Out-With” (coming from the P.O.V. of Bruno, who is only nine years old and can’t pronounce some words properly).

In regards to shooting the final scene, director Mark Herman remarked “it was a nightmare on many levels. We probably had more lawyers than filmmakers. We had all of the legalities of kids in amongst grown-up naked people.”[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in … ed_Pyjamas
trailer: youtu.be/9ypMp0s5Hiw

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS [2008]
Wtitten and directed by Mark Herman

[b]Title card: “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” John Betjeman

…

Grandma: I sometimes wonder if this is all down to me, making you those costumes for your little plays when you were tiny. You used to adore all that dressing up. Does it still make you feel special, Ralph dear? The uniform… and what it stands for?
Father: Mother. It’s a party. Let’s not spoil it.
Grandma: Ha! Me? Spoil things?
Father [whisper]: You should be careful. Airing your views so publicly could land you in trouble. You know that.

…

Bruno [to his mother after first seeing Pavel]: See, I told you the farmers were strange. They all wear pajamas.

…

Bruno: I’m Bruno.
Shmuel: Shmuel.
Bruno: Sorry?
Shmuel: I’m Shmuel.
Bruno: That’s your name? I’ve never heard of anyone called that before.
Shmuel: I’ve never heard of anyone called Bruno.
Bruno: Shmuel? No one’s called Shmuel.

…

Bruno [to Shumel]: It’s not fair. Me being stuck by myself out here while you’re over there, playing with friends all day.

…

Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day?
Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away.
Bruno: The soldiers? Why?
Shumel: I don’t know. I don’t like soldiers, do you?
Bruno: My dad’s a soldier, but not the sort that takes people’s clothes away for no reason.

…

Bruno: Is your dad a farmer?
Shumel: No, he’s a watchmaker. Or he was. Most of the time now, he just mends boots.
Bruno: It’s funny how grown-ups can’t make their minds up about what they want to do. It’s like Pavel. He used to be a doctor once, but gave it all up to peel potatoes.

…

Bruno: What do you burn in those chimneys? I saw them going the other day. Is it just lots of hay and stuff?
Shumel: I don’t know. We’re not allowed over there. Mama says it’s old clothes.
Bruno: Well, whatever it is, it smells horrid.

…

Bruno [after Gretel reads a lesson from their tutor of propaganda about “the Jew”]: I don’t understand. One man caused all this trouble?

…

Shmuel: I wish you’d remembered the chocolate.
Bruno: Yes, I’m sorry. I know! Perhaps you can come and have supper with us sometime.
Shmuel: I can’t, can I? Because of this.
[points the electric fence]
Bruno: But that’s to stop the animals getting out, isn’t it?
Shmuel: Animals? No, it’s to stop people getting out.
Bruno: Are you not allowed out? Why? What have you done?
Shmuel: I’m a Jew.

…

Bruno: There is such thing as a nice Jew, though, isn’t there?
Herr Liszt [the tutor]: I think, Bruno, if you ever found a nice Jew, you would be the best explorer in the world.

…

Lt. Kotler: They smell worse when they burn, don’t they?[/b]

[iambiguous]

Is this a true story? Depends on who you ask:

Author Lorenzo Carcaterra has claimed that his book on which the film is based was a true story of his childhood. When the New York legal community went on record stating that no cases resembling the events of his book could be found in any court records, Carcaterra refused to discuss the discrepancy. His claims have been neither proven nor disproven. IMDb

Here’s one account: nytimes.com/1995/07/07/books … ended.html

Even if it is not though, it’s a safe bet that somewhere out there in our “criminal justice system” stuff like this has happened. And stuff like this is still happening. All you really need is a world where lots and lots of men reside. Especially if they have dicks.

Hell’s Kitchen. As a kid I always thought how “neat” it would be to say that’s where I came from: “I was born and raised on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen…so don’t fuck with me.” Encompassing, in other words, all that is good, bad and ugly about growing up in the belly of the working class beast. Every big city has lots of neighborhoods like this.

One thing is for certain in these neighborhoods: If somebody fucks you over, you get revenge. It might take 10 years but sooner or later you fuck them over in turn. And then some. It’s only a question of how. And then getting away with it.

We’ve seen this story a million times. Boys will be boys. And then men will be men.

It’s always interesting in films like this how we can be manipulated into rooting for folks who are really little more than street thugs. Two of these guys…while truly being victims back then…were basically professional killers in a street gang. Street toughs in a crime syndicate.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepers_(film
trailer: youtu.be/1piB0xIkvUU

SLEEPERS [1996]
Written and directed by Barry Levinson

[b]Lorenzo [voiceover]: This is a true story about friendship that runs deeper than blood. This is my story and that of the only three friends in my life that truely mattered. Two of them were killers who never made it past the age of 30. The other’s a non-practicing attorney living with the pain of his past - too afraid to let it go, never confronting its horror. I’m the only one who can speak for them, and the children we were.

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: Hell’s Kitchen was populated by an uneasy blend of… Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Eastern European laborers. Hard men living hard lives. We lived in railroad apartments inside red brick tenements.

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: Hell’s Kitchen was a place of innocence ruled by corruption.

…

Young John: Hey, uh, Father. How long did it take him? You know, paintin’ the ceiling and all?
Father Bobby: Took him about nine years.
Young John: Nine years?
Father Bobby: That’s right.
Young John: For a ceiling? I had a Puerto Rican guy do my whole apartment in two days… and he had a bum leg.

…

Father Bobby: It was the Sistine Chapel he painted.
Young John: Sixteenth Chapel?
Father Bobby: Sistine Chapel.
Young John: Who painted the other fifteen?

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: We viewed with skepticism the faces on television…those protected by money and upper-middle-class standing. A growing army of feminists marched across the country demanding equality. Yet, our mothers still cooked and cared for men who abused them mentally and physically. For me and my friends, these developments carried no weight. They might as well have occurred in another country…in another century.

…

King Benny: Father Bobby would have made a good hitman. It’s a shame we lost him to the other side.

…

Young Michael: We can eat hot dogs, or we can eat air. Choose…
Young Tommy: Air is probably safer, Mike…

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: We were to hold the cart on the top edge of the stairwell. Leaning it downward, and wait for the vendor. We were to let it go the second he grabbed the handles. Then we’d leave the scene as he struggled to ease the cart back onto the sidewalk. To this day, I don’t know why we did it. But, we would all pay a price. It only took a minute…but in that minute everything changed.

…

Woman at Subway Station: Sweet Jesus! What have you boys done? What in the name of God have you boys done?
Young Michael: I think we just killed a man.

…

Father Bobby: This is one of my favorites.
Young Lorenzo: What is?
Father Bobby: “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren…you do to me.”

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: We never saw the vendor as a man…not the way we saw other men of the neighborhood. And we didn’t care enough about him to grant him any respect. We gave little notice to how hard he worked, or that he had a wife and two kids in Greece and hoped to bring them to this country. We didn’t pay attention to the long hours he worked. We didn’t see any of that. We only saw a free lunch.

…

Nokes [watching Lorenzo undress]: What the fuck is that hangin’ around your neck? Take it off.
Young Lorenzo: It’s Mary, you know, the mother of God.
Nokes [scoffs]: I don’t give a fuck whose mother it is. Take it off.

…

Nokes: It’s a tragedy, I tell ya. I don’t understand you, boys. I don’t think you know what it means to have rules. You gotta have rules and you gotta have discipline. Now I don’t know what it was like in your homes and your homelifes, but in my house with my father, there were rules. And if you didn’t follow the rules, there was hell to pay. You had rules and you had discipline. Sometimes it wasn’t nice, but boy, we learned. We sure did learn.
[the boys enter a storage room where the other three guards are waiting]
Nokes: Yeah, right around there to the right. There ya go. Come on now. I mean, it’s a simple thing really. You got rules and you got discipline. That’s the beginning of the story and that’s the end of the story. Do we understand each other?

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: There are no clear pictures of the sexual abuse we endured. I buried it as deep as it can possibly go.

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: A number of the inmates, as tough as they acted during the day, would often cry themself to sleep at night. There were other cries, too. Diffrent from those full with fear and loneliness. They were low and muffled, the sounds of pain and anguish.Those cries can change the course of a life. They are cries that once heard, can never be erased from the memory. On this one night those cries belonged to my friend John, when guard Ferguson paid him a visit.

…

Young Michael: I thought you’d never wake up.
Young Lorenzo: I thought I’d never want to.
Young Michael: John and Tommy, they’re on the other side there.
Young Lorenzo: How are they? They’re alive.
Young Michael: Who isn’t?
Young Lorenzo: Rizzo.
Young Michael: They killed him?
Young Lorenzo: They took turns beating him until there was nothing of that kid to beat.

…

Nokes: So what do you want?
John: What I’ve always wanted. To watch you die.

…

Tommy [after John shoots Nokes in the groin]: Did that hurt, Nokes?

…

Michael: It’s messy, it’s not how I had it planned but…here it is. And you and l, we can finish it.
Lorenzo: Finish what, Mikey?
Michael: You read “The Count of Monte Cristo” lately?
Lorenzo: I don’t know…ten years ago.
Michael: You see, I read a little bit of it every night. I read words like ‘revenge’. Sweet, lasting revenge.

…

Lorenzo: Mike, are you sure you wanna go this way? I mean we buried this a long time ago.
Michael: You still sleep with the light on?

…

Michael: You gotta get me one for our side.
Lorenzo: One what?
Michael: One witness. A witness who’ll put John and Tommy somewhere else on the night of the murder. A witness they can’t touch.
Lorenzo: Don’t they got a name for that?
Michael: A judge would call it perjury.
Lorenzo: I see, and what are we calling it?
Michael: A favor.

…

Fat Mancho: You know, if you get caught on this, you’re looking straight at serious. I’m talking real jail. The big house…They are not good boys any more. They’re killers now. Cold as stone.
Lorenzo: I know. I know what they were, and I know what they are, and it’s not about that.
Fat Mancho: It’s not worth it, throwing away life just to get even. You and the lawyer have a chance to get out. To get out the right way.
Lorenzo: There’s no choice…not for us.

…

Fat Mancho: You want a Rolls-Royce, you don’t come here, no no. You go to England, or wherever the fuck they make it. If you want champagne, you go see the French. If you need money, you find a Jew. But, if you want dirt, or scum buried under a rock somewhere, or some secret nobody wants anybody to know about, there’s only one place to go: right here, Hell’s Kitchen. It is the lost and found of shit.

…

Lorenzo: I didn’t know you like pigeons so much.
King Benny: I like anything that don’t talk.

…

Lorenzo: We need somebody to take the stand and say they were with John and Tommy on the night of the murder.
Father Bobby: So, you figured if you had a priest, it would be perfect?
Lorenzo: Not just any priest.
Father Bobby: You’re asking me…you’re asking me to lie. You’re asking me to swear to God and then lie.
Lorenzo: I’m asking you to save two of your boys.
Father Bobby: Did they kill that guard?
Lorenzo: Yes.
Father Bobby: So what they said is true? They walked in and they killed him?
Lorenzo: Yes. They killed him exactly like that.

…

Father Bobby: What about the life that was taken, Shakes? What’s that worth?
Lorenzo: To me? Nothing.
Father Bobby: Why not? Tell me.[/b]

And so he does.

[b]Lorenzo [voiceover]: I told him about the torture, the beating and the rapes. I told him about four frightened boys who prayed to Father Bobby’s God for help that never came. I told him everything.

…

Detective: Hey, do me a favor, would you?
Lorenzo: What’s that?
Detective: If I ever make it onto your shit list, give me a call. Give me a chance to apologize.

…

Fat Mancho [to Lorenzo and Carol]: The street is the only one that matters. Court is for uptown people with suits, money…lawyers with three names. If you got cash, you can buy court justice. But on the street, justice has no price. She’s blind where the judge sits, but she’s not blind out here. Out here, the bitch got eyes.

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: I’ve never recovered from seeing Father Bobby take the stand and lie for us…to even the score for John and Tommy. He didn’t just testify for them, he testified against Wilkinson’s and the evil that had lived there for too long. Still, I was sorry he had to do it.

…

Lorenzo [voiceover]: On March 16th, 1984 John Reilly’s bloated body was found face up in a tenement building…right next to the bottle of boiler gin that killed him. At the time of his death, he was a suspect in five unsolved homicides. He was two weeks past his 29th birthday. Thomas Marcano died on July 26th, 1985. He was shot at close range times. The body lay undiscovered for more than a week. There was a crucifix and a picture of Saint Jude in his pocket. He was 29 years old. Michael Sullivan lives in a small town in the English countryside…where he works part-time as a carpenter. He no longer practices law, and he has never married. He lives quietly and alone. Carol still works for a Social Service agency and lives in Hell’s Kitchen. She has never married but is a single mother supporting a growing -year-old son. The boy, John Thomas Michael Martinez, loves to read…and is called Shakes by his mother. It was our special night, and we held it for as long as we could. It was our happy ending. And the last time we would ever be together again.[/b]

[iambiguous]

The authoritarian personality. And it works in both directions. There are those who set themselves up as an authority figure and there are those who will comply with the orders of someone they deem to be an authority figure. Now, in the world of math and science and logic one can actually be an authority. And all the rest of us would be fools not to follow his or her lead. But in the world of value judgments there are only the more or less intelligent and sophisticated narratives of daseins.

This film is based on an incident that actually did occur in a fast food restaurant in America. In fact the post-script informs us it has happened over 70 times in 30 states.

This is the one the film is based on: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_sear … C_incident

Most of us who watch it will be appalled…and no less insistent that never in a million years would this ever happen to them. They would neither compel Becky to do as Sandra was instructed nor comply with Sandra’s commands. Instead, they would see through it all immediately and/or tell the “cop” to go fuck himself.

Roger Ebert:

Well, what would you do? You’d never go along with this, right? You’re too smart. Me, too. “Compliance” encourages us to feel superior to the employees of a fast-food chicken chain in Ohio, and so we do: Audiences are said to be outraged at what the characters do, and San Francisco-based critic Omar Moore went back to more screenings to confirm that there were walk-outs.

Walk-outs? Yeah. Lots of folks. Not because it was a shitty movie though. People were so self-righteously indignant at what the characters were doing up on the screen [and I know I was], they left the theatres in disgust. And that’s because almost from the start the film reveals that the “cop” on the phone is bogus. But he is good at pretending to be one. And how many of us really understand police procedures regarding something like this?

And there are just so many different possible combinations of circumstances. We really would have to be there, right?

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliance_(film
trailer: youtu.be/WdONydDX44I

COMPLIANCE [2012]
Written and directed by Craig Zobel

[b]Sandra: Becky, I have the police here on the phone saying you stole money from a customer.

…

Sandra: We can’t have employees stealing from a customer, you know.
Becky: But I was working. You saw me. I was up there.
Sandra: Okay. Then why do I have a police officer calling me, describing you exactly, telling me your name and saying you stole from a customer?

…

“Cop” on phone: We can either drag her downtown. We book her. We process her. We put her in a holding cell, where she’ll probably be all night long.
Sandra: That seems very extreme.
“Cop” on phone: Yeah, I mean, I think in order to keep this sort of contained, what we could do is just have you strip-search her right now.

…

Marti: So what’s happening?
Sandra: We have to strip-search Becky, and I wanted you to come in. Corporate always wants two people for a strip search, right?

…

“Cop” on phone: Have you checked her underwear?

…

“Cop” on phone: What about her rear? Did you make her turn around?

…

“Cop” on phone: Kevin, we need to find this money. I’m going to need to have her remove the apron and you search her body.

…

“Cop” on phone: Evan, you’re a grown man. You think naked girls don’t have places to hide money?

…

“Cop” on phone: You can go to jail or you can let this guy inspect you. That’s it. Two choices.

…

“Cop” on phone [to Evan]: How big are her nipples?

…

Evan [to Becky]: He says you have to turn around and bend over so I can see if there’s anything up in there.

…

“Cop” on phone: What’s that look like? Is she shaved?
Evan: It’s trimmed.
Becky: It’s shaved. It just been a couple of days.
Evan [to “cop”]: She said it’s actually shaved.

…

“Cop” on phone: Boy, it really must be stuck up there. Okay, um, we have a special procedure that we do in this case. I’m going to need you to have her do jumping jacks to try and shake it out.

…

[The “cop” has Evan searching her vagina]
“Cop” on phone: What’s it look like from there, Evan? What’s it like to have a front-row seat to the show?[/b]

Then he is ordered to lay Becky [who is completely naked] across his lap and spank her “for being disobedient”. Of course it soon reaches the point [you know the one] where Evan is less reluctant to go along.

[b]Detective [a real one]: When he told you you had to take your clothes off is there a reason you just didn’t say no?
Becky: I don’t know. I just knew it was going to happen.

…

Cop [to detective]: What the hell did they put in that chicken that made everyone lose their fucking minds?
Detective: First thing we gotta do is find the caller.

…

Detective: This happened more than once? You gotta be shitting me.

…

Interviewer: Do you feel any responsibility for what happened?
Sandra: Of course I do. But I was doing what I thought was the right thing. I think I did what anyone would do, what you would do, in that circumstance.
Interviewer: Take a girl’s clothes away because someone told you to on the phone?
Sandra: Someone who said they were the police.[/b]

[iambiguous]

She’s a monster. She murdered men. But what about the monsters that tortured her and beat her and raped her and made her life a living hell? How many of them are behind bars? There’s always pretty much been a double standard here as far as the law is concerned. There’s the johns and there’s the hookers. Boys will be boys but the only real option for a woman is to be a lady.

Remember the first one? The one who drove her deep into the woods. She murdered him, right? Wouldn’t you? Or that cop demanding a “freebie”. Not deserving of the death penalty, perhaps, but certainly deserving of a few swift kicks to the nut sack. Most of these guys are pure slimeballs. Or course there is Horton.

And then she meets Selby. She falls in love. But that’s always a two edged sword. At least in this culture. Here loving someone only goes so far if you don’t have the money to sustain the relationship. She wants to quit hooking and get a job. But can she? What else does she have to market? And how much drudgery can she bear at minimum wage?

And it’s not like she really doesn’t try to get a job. It’s just that all she’s ever done is prostitute herself.

She then simply rationalizes what she does next. And giving us an inside look into the life she lives makes us [or some of us] realize that we don’t have a fucking clue as to what does or does not make sense to someone who lives a life we can scarcely even begin to understand at all. Instead, the objectivists always insist on a one-size-fits-all “metaphysical” moral calculation that divides everything into always good or always bad. But that only works on paper. Or in places like this.

IMDb

[b]Charlize Theron won the academy award for playing Aileen Wuornos on 29 February 2004, Aileen Wuornos’s birthday.

Aileen Wuornos, a notoriously uncooperative person, gave director Patty Jenkins access to hundreds of letters she had written and received in order to gain insight into Aileen’s life.

The biker bar scenes were filmed at “the Last Resort” - a bar frequented by the real life Aileen Wuornos, and the site where she was actually arrested. The bar owner (who capitalized on Wuornos’ infamy by hanging a sign out in front of the bar advertising “cool beer and Killer Women”) makes a cameo as the bartender who threatens to cut off Wuornos for being over her tab limit.[/b]

FAQ at IMDb: imdb.com/title/tt0340855/faq?ref_=tt_faq_sm
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_(2003_film
trailer: youtu.be/vq70brIQP40

MONSTER [2003]
Written and directed by Patty Jenkins

[b]Aileen [voiceover]: I always wanted to be in the movies When I was little I thought for sure day, I could be a big big star…Or maybe just beautiful. Beautiful and rich, like the women on TV. Yeah, I had a lot of dreams. And I guess you can call me a real romaniac. Because I truly believed that one day they’d come true. So I dreamed about it for hours…I believed it whole heartily. So whenever I was down, I just escaped into my mind…I heard that Marilyn Monroe was discovered in a soda shop. And I thought for sure, it could be like that. So I started growing up real young…But I was always secretly looking for who was gonna discover me. Was it this guy? Or maybe this one? You never knew. They couldn’t take me all the way like Marilyn. They would somehow believe in me just enough. They would see me for what I could be and think I was beautiful. Like a diamond in a rough. They’d take me away to my new life. And my new world…where we think we will be different. Yeah, I lived that way for long long time. Inside my head dreaming like that. It was nice day. But one day it just stopped.

…

Bartender: The bar’s closed.
Aileen: Then do you think you could pull that stick out of your ass? Hm? Now that “the bar’s closed”.

…

Aileen [voiceover]: All I wanted was a beer. But the day I met Selby I spent most of the afternoon wanting to kill myself. So you can understand I was flexible. I mean everybody’s gotta have faith in something. For me all I’ve got left is love. And I was pretty sure that I was never gonna love a man again.

…

Aileen [voiceover]: I was gonna do it, I was going to kill myself. And the only reason I didn’t was a 5 dollar bill. I knew I’d probably given some asshole a blowjob for it, so, it really started to piss me off that if I killed myself without spending it, well, then, I basically sucked him off for free!

…

Selby: Where did you get this car?
Aileen: I borrowed it.

…

Selby: You can take care of me right…cause I’ve spent all my money.
Aileen: We don’t even need it. I quit hooking.
Selby: Why?
Aileen: Why? because it’s shit, man. I fucking hate it.
Selby: I thought you said it was okay.
Aileen: Oh…it is, you know, but, not always.
Selby: But what are you gonna do about work? What kind of job are you gonna get?
Aileen: I’ve been thinking about that. I was thinking about having a career. I was thinking maybe a veterinarian, you know. I love animals.
Selby: Yeah, but that’s a doctor…you gotta get a degree for that.

…

[Aileen goes out looking for a job…]

Aileen [at job interview]: I know how to work a rolodex.

…

Job interviewer: Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. Basically, you’ve no experience, no college degree, no resume, no work history what-so-ever in fact. And now you would like to be a lawyer.
Aileen: No, see… I’m sorry, but when I read the ad I thought it said you were looking for a secretary.
Job interviewer: Ok, well you need to learn how to type. You need computer skills. Most of our secretaries have college degrees. In fact most of them have specialised in law. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but frankly this is a little insulting. I see you’re from Daytona Beach, all of that looks great, it must be wonderful. But can I tell you something? When the beach party is over, you don’t get to say, “You know what? Now I think I’d like to have what everybody else has worked their entire life for.” It doesn’t work that way.
Aileen: Fuck you, man. Yeah, FUCK YOU! YOU DON’T FUCKIN’ KNOW ME!
Lawyer: OK, great. That’s great. See, now I’m so sorry I didn’t hire you before. Leslie, could you please escort Miss…I don’t even know her name because of course she doesn’t have a resume…out.
Aileen: I don’t need a fuckin’ escort you piece of shit! What, you think I’m a fuckin’ retard? Take your fuckin’ job and fuckin’ shove it!
[she turns to his secretary]
Aileen: And fuck you, Leslie!

…

Aileen [voiceover]: “All you need is love and to believe in yourself.”
[she scoffs]
Aileen: Nice idea. It doesn’t exactly work out that way. But I guess it was better to hear a flat-out lie than to know the truth at 13.

…

Selby: Leen, what are you gonna do?
Aileen: I got it on fucking control, man.
Selby: I’m kind of starving here.
Aileen: There’s no way, you can maybe ah… I don’t know, call your dad or…
Selby: No…
Aileen: Yeah, I know, I know. I’m just saying for you, you know? Fuck it, man, I got shit lined up, you know. This isn’t a fucking big deal.

…

Aileen [at the employment office]: The truth is, I’m…I’m a hooker. I’m trying to clean my life up here, you know…Go straight and Christian and all…so if there’s any link that you can help me with…
Clerk: Have you ever been convicted of a felony.
Aileen: Yes, but that was because I…
Clerk: That doesn’t even matter because the best you’re gonna get is factory work…Hey, Todd, do we have any factory work? Sunbeam…?
[Todd shakes his head]
Aileen: Fuck! I’m sorry, I’m just trying to talk to you…
[the clerk turns and walks away]

…

Will: You wanna call me “Daddy” while I fuck you, huh?
Aileen: I’ll try. Why? You like to fuck your kids?

…

Aileen [to john]: There’s this old guy used to rape me when I was 8 years old. Real good friend of my dad, you know. So I go to my dad, tell him what’s going on. My dad don’t fucking believe me, so his friend keeps raping me for years. And the fucking kicker to the story is that my fucking dad beats me up for it.

…

Aileen [voiceover]: People always look down their noses at hookers. Never give you a chance, because they think you took the easy way out, when no one could imagine the willpower it took to do what we do. Walking the streets, night after night, taking the hits and still getting back up.

…

Selby: We can be as different as we wanna be, but you can’t kill people!
Aileen: SAYS WHO?! I’m good with the Lord. I’m fine with him. And I know how you were raised, alright? And I know how people fuckin’ think out there, and fuck, it’s gotta be that way. They’ve gotta tell you that ‘Thou shall not kill’ shit and all of that. But that’s not the way the world works, Selby. Cuz I’m out there every fuckin’ day living it. Who the fuck knows what God wants? People kill each other every day and for what? Hm? For politics, for religion, and THEY’RE HEROES! No, no…there’s a lot of shit I can’t do anymore, but killing’s not one of them. And letting those fucking bastards go out and rape someone else isn’t either!

…

Horton: You don’t have to. You’re just having a hard time.
Aileen: No! I can’t let you live!
Horton: Oh God… my wife… my wife… my daughter’s having a baby.
Aileen: SHUT THE FUCK UP! Oh God…oh God I’m sorry…
[She shoots him]

…

Aileen [after being sentenced to death]: Thank you, judge. And may you rot in hell! Sending a raped woman to death! And you all…you’re a bunch of scum that’s what you are!

…

Aileen [voiceover]: “Love conquers all.” “Every cloud has a silver lining.” “Faith can move mountains.” “Love will always find a way.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Where there is life, there is hope.”
[scoffs]
Aileen:…They gotta tell you somethin’.[/b]

[iambiguous]

More characters I could grapple with until the day I die and still never really be any closer to figuring out. They just have a past and a way of living from day today that is too far removed from my own. So, if someone were to tap me on the shoulder and ask, “what do you thing should be done?”, I’d tell him to pass that baton on down the line. Maybe to you, perhaps.

Lots of folks from the “big city” will always view rural Americans as a bunch bumpkins and lots of folks from rural America will always view the folks from the big city as shameless infidels. But as with folks from Sling Blade above, there’s not a whole lot I would have in common with them. We may as well be from different planets.

But the murder trial itself seemed completely absurd. At worst one brother was guilty of putting another brother out of his misery. To actually arrest him and put him on trial for what he did was a travesty.

And you see this kind of “police procedure” bullshit over and over and over again in trials far, far removed from the circumstances here. In other words, if the American criminal justice system were just broken it would be a vast improvement on the way it almost certainly is instead: a fucking farce.

A crime is committed. The whole point then is not the pursuit of justice but “solving” it. And then the path of least resistence is often the one they take. Get the god damn case off the books. And when you are dealing with folks without the wherewithal to hire decent lawyers – or folks lacking in education or not really knowing what the hell is going on – that’s all the easier.

And part of the reason for that are all the components bursting at the seams with politics. If there is any possibility to use a case in order to either advance your career or make a buck that becomes the raison d’etre for pursuing it. The folks actually on trial become footballs to be kicked further down the field.

There was the rumor, for example, that developers wanted the “the Ward Boys” land. So the whole thing was just part of a plot to get them to sell it.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother’s_Keeper_(film
trailer: youtu.be/OlDSGMAyUrE

BROTHER’S KEEPER [1992]
Directed by Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky

[iambiguous]

To be smashed or not to be smashed? For some that is the only question. It just comes down to whether or not it’s deemed a viable option in their lives at any particular time. Do they have to work? Do they have kids? Is their health robust? Do they give a shit only about themselves? Can they afford to be that way? Do they have access to other options?

Like, say, getting stoned.

As regarding most things though, the moral lesson revolves around the extent to which you either do or do not identify with the drunk on the screen.

Kate’s dilemma is clear. She drinks in part because it helps her to deal with the shit we all have to endure in the course of living our lives. But when she tries to stop drinking the problems come back magnified all the more. And then when she finally does succeed her marriage falls apart. And that makes her want to start…drinking. And when she’s honest with her boss about being an alcoholic she is promptly fired. And that makes her want to start…drinking.

Then there’s the part about getting sober. The part that always seems to involve some sort of “group”. And a group always means people. And when we interact with people it can precipitate the sort of stress and anxiety that led us to drink in the first place.

Then there’s the part about Kate vomiting in the classroom. A student asks if she is pregnant. The bulb lights up and she thinks better this as an explanation than the truth: that she is hung over from a night of heavy drinking. Soon, however, everyone in the school is reacting to her as though she really was pregnant! The comic [and not so comic] consequences of that are up for grabs.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smashed_(film
trailer: youtu.be/KeKLxspQWl8

SMASHED [2012]
Written in part and directed by James Ponsoldt

[b]Kate: I gotta go to work, and you snoozed on my alarm again. I’m gonna be late.
Charlie [looking down at the wet bed sheets]: Yeah, well, you peed on me, so I guess we’re even.

…

Kate: Why is the coffee so much better when you make it?
Charlie: Because I make it with love…and it with bacon.

…

Student: Mrs Hannah, are you pregnant?

…

Kate: Is that pot?
Millie: Of course not, do I look like a hippie? It’s crack.

…

Kate: Listen, I don’t think I can do this anymore. I think I need to slow down. And I might need help.
Charlie: I’ll help you.
Kate: Yeah.

…

Dave: I just want to be honest. I think you’re beautiful. And smart and sexy and cool. And I know it’s wrong, but in meetings, I just stare at your lips and your legs. And I can’t stop thinking about fucking your moist pussy.
Kate [startled]: What?! What? What?
Dave: I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.
Kate: I don’t know why you said that either. Oh, my God…I mean, who says that? “Fuck your moist pussy”?! I’m gonna go inside with my husband. Thanks for your creepy version of honesty. Wow.

…

Kate: I stopped drinking for me. And I’m going to 12-step meetings.
Rochelle [her mother]: Oh, God, Assholes Anonymous. Kate’s father went to those meetings a few years after we got married. Dried up, left us. You can see how well that worked out for me. I raised her myself in this palace while he was off in Florida, with his shiny new wife and kids, the son of a bitch.
[she turns to Charlie]
Rochelle: Be careful. They can change, you know.

…

Kate [to her class]: I’m not going to have a baby. Okay, look. Look, I was pregnant, and then it turned turned out it just…it just wasn’t my time, I suppose, and…
Student: Mrs. Hannah, did you kill the baby?
Kate: What?! No, no. No, of course not.
Student: My mom said if you kill a baby, you go to hell. And you can’t even go to church and ask God for forgiveness.
Student #2: Mrs. Hannah, are you going to Hell?

…

Charlie [watching her text Jenny]: I like knowing that every little fuck-up I make is going to be a topic of conversation with a woman that I don’t even know.

…

Charlie: You know what?
Kate: What?
Charlie: I fucking hate AA! It’s just…it’s just turned you into a bitch. A brainwashed bitch.

…

Kate [to AA group]: You know, one of the things I’ve heard is that your best day of drinking is worse than your worst day sober. Yeah, but it’s not true. It’s not true. I mean, I had…I had some amazing times drinking and laughing and just feeling like the most adorable, charming girl in the world. When I first tried getting sober, I fugured that as long as I didn’t drink, everything else in the world would just sort of magically work itself out. But it didn’t. My marriage fell apart. I lost my job. And that shit happened while I was sober. You know, I didn’t sign up for that…And another shitty slogan I’ve heard is, uh, when you’re sober for a bit and you drink again, the disease waits for you and picks up where you left off. Well, that one was pretty damn true. My life is a lot different than it was a year ago. I live alone. I’m bored a lot more. I have a job that pays a lot less. But I’m so grateful…I’m so thankful for this boring new life of mine.[/b]

And there it is: the trade off. Is it worth it? Is there a way to know for sure? Come on, only each individual can decide that.

[iambiguous]

All of us have a childhood that, one way or another, we carry with us to the grave. But some have a childhood so traumatic [or one perceived to be] it does serious damage to their mental and emotional health. The complexities between the past and the present here can beget all manner of perverse ambiguities. Or perverse clarities.

One look at him coming off that train and you know exactly what I mean. What could have happened to him back then to create this strange creature?

There he is [early in the picture] putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Here there is a place for every piece and every piece has but one place to be. But things get far, far more convoluted when you are piecing together the parts of a man’s life. Even when that life is your own. And my argument has always been about the manner in which each of us put the fragments together. And few of us here are afflicted with schizophrenia. Or insanity.

We’re left to wonder: Was it the trauma that caused the insanity or the insanity that caused the trauma?

But how much weight should we give to this man? Why should we even care about him at all? But that can only be a piece of our own puzzle. And the answer we give is always connected to all of the other pieces. Pieces it is presumed that we know best. But not necessarily pieces we would have collected if we had any real choice in the matter.

IMDb

[b]David Cronenberg received the screenplay from Patrick McGrath out of the blue, with a note attached saying that Ralph Fiennes was interested in playing the part of Spider. After about four pages, Cronenberg had decided that he wanted to do the film.

Samuel Beckett was one of the director’s touchstones for the film. Photographs of the playwright were pinned around the sets, and Fiennes’ hairstyle is even modeled after Beckett’s.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_(2002_film
trailer: youtu.be/uTe1xiBzAws

SPIDER [2002]
Directed by David Cronenberg

[b]Spider: I will…I will not be here that long.
Terrence: Nor did I expect to be. But it is a loud world and this is an island. But an islasnd, sir, ruled by a tyrant queen who has the power to send any one of us back to where we came from. The asylum, I mean.

…

Mrs. Wilkinson [to Spider]: How many shirts are you wearing. One…two…three…four! Now really, is this abolutely necessary?
Terrence: Oh indeed it is, madam. Clothes maketh the man; and the less there is of the man, the more the need of the clothes.

…

Spider [“writing” in his notebook]: Yvonne Wilkinson. She made the first move.

…

Terrence: Nasty stuff: Gas. I knew a man once… Put his head in a gas oven… Turned on the gas…Then, he changed his mind… But his head was STUCK!

…

Spider [“writing” in his notebook]: All right, Plumber, don’t mind if I do.

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Spider [“writing” in his notebook]: He killed her. He killed her.

…

John from the asylum] [to Spider]: You ready to come back to us now, son?[/b]