philosophy in film

Woody Allen once suugested this:

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

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

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

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

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

trailer:
youtu.be/G69Zh7YIg8c

IMDb

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

Julian Schnabel learned French to make the film.

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

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
Directed by Julian Schnabel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No way in hell is this film for everyone:

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

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

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

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

trailer:
youtu.be/EBkNz3_pzsw

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

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

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

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

Julian: I’m not eating a fag!

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

Mother: Where’s the faggot?

Cop: They caught your cannibals![/b]

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

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

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

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

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

IMDb

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

IN BRUGES
Written and directed by: Martin McDonagh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priest: The little boy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turns out he was Canadian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken: I’m gonna die now, I think.

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

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

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

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

But who is playing whom here?

wiki

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

trailer:
youtu.be/elNCMX8EzAM

MONSIEUR HIRE [1989]
Written and directed by Patrice Leconte

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

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

Hire: Yes. Life is horrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDb

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

wiki

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

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

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

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

trailer:
youtu.be/_5L3hGxHumY

VERA DRAKE
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The judgment:

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

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

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

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

CLASS ACTION
Directed by Michael Apted

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pavel: The depth charge!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few good men?

Well, you know what’s coming first:

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

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

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

IMDb

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

A FEW GOOD MEN
Directed by Rob Reiner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How fucking blind is he?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRIVE
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driver: Whose money do I have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDb

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

Look for Tom Waits.

THE FISHER KING
Directed by Terry Gilliam

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

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

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

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

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

Jack: Hey, Anyone here named Jiminy?

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

Thug: It looks like night of the living dead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wiki

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

Another level they missed? Wall Street.

IMDb

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

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

trailer:
youtu.be/dQrqMkCuHqA

IN THE LOOP
Directed by Armando Iannucci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDb

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

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

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

MEAN STREETS [1973]
Written and directed by Martin Scorsese

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, this ain’t exactly the Godfather here.

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

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

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

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

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

Michael: Now’s the time.[/b]

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

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

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

IMDb

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

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

Why “Shortbus”:

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

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

trailer:
youtu.be/H8A1dwEhSMY

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

SHORTBUS
Written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sofia: Okay, I’m going down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there it is: outrage and fear:

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

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

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

IMDb

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

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

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

Nikolai’s tattoos:

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

EASTERN PROMISES
Directed by David Cronenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nikolai: He offered me stars. I accepted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The photography is just…

Well, here’s the trailer:
youtu.be/LlZDsMCW0U4

Once you become “political” you begin to see most everything in terms of “class”. This one is bursting at the seams with it. It’s mostly in what you own. And what you inherent. And the circumstances of your birth.

And the shit you have to take from those who [for all practical purposes] own you.

What’ll you do for money?

Mostly it’s about how, in the blink of an eye, things can go from bad to good and then back again. And how, sometimes, you only have so much control over it either way.

IMDb

[b]After filming for a short time, Terrence Malick threw out the script altogether and filmed for close to a year allowing the actors to “find the story” for the film as they went along.

The shot of locusts ascending to the sky was shot in reverse with the helicopter crew throwing peanut shells down, and actors walking backwards.

The image of Bill falling face-first into water was filmed in a large aquarium in Sissy Spacek’s living room.[/b]

wiki

The film was not warmly received on its original theatrical release, with many critics finding only the imagery worthy of praise. It was not a significant commercial success, although it did win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography with an additional three nominations for the score, costume design and sound. Malick himself won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite initially unfavorable reviews, Days of Heaven has since become one of the most acclaimed films of all time, particularly noted for the beauty of the cinematography.

DAYS OF HEAVEN [1978]
Written and directed by Terrence Malick

[b]Linda [voiceover]: There were people sufferin’ in pain and hunger. Some people their tongues were hangin’ out of their mouths.

Linda [voiceover]: You know how people are. You tell them something, they start talking.

Foreman: Man can earn $3 a day if he works hard.

Harvest Hand: Your sister keep you warm at night, does she?

Linda [voiceover]: You’re only on this earth once. And in my opinion as long as you’re around you should have it nice.

Bill: I saved your life today.
Abby: Yeah?
Bill: Yeah. I killed a shit-eating dog.

Linda [voiceover]: If you didn’t work hard enough they’d ship you right out of there. They don’t need you. They can always find somebody else.

Linda [voiceover]: This farmer, he had a big spread, and a lot of money. Whoever was sitting in a chair when he’d come around, why they’d stand up and give it to him.

Linda [voiceover]: He was tired of living like the rest of them, nosing around like a pig in the gutter. He wasn’t gonna move no more. He figured there must be something wrong with it and he ought to get it straightened out. He figured some people need more than they got and other people got more than they need. It’s just a matter of getting us altogether

Linda [voiceover]: I’ve been thinking what to do wit’ my future. I could be a mud doctor. Checkin’ out the eart’. Underneat’.

Bill: I hate seeing you out there stooped over. Men looking at your ass like you were a whore.

Linda [voiceover]: All of a sudden we lived like kings. Just nothing to do all day but lay around. We didn’t have to work. I’m telling you, the rich got it figured out.

Foreman [to Bill]: I know what you’re doing.

Linda [voiceover]: Instead of getting sicker he just stayed the same. He didn’t get sicker, he didn’t get better. They were kind hearted. They thought he was going out on his own speed.

Linda [voiceover]: I think the devil was on the farm.

Linda [voiceover]: Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have a half-angel and a half-devil in you.

Linda [voiceover]:This girl she didn’t know where she was going or what. She didn’t have no money. Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hopin’ things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.[/b]

She chooses to do what the writer and the director tell her to do and then it is up to us to start connecting all the different dots in all the different ways that all the different narratives can impose a “reality” on them .

And [as always] when you are coming of age as a beautiful and precocious young woman your options tend to increase in relationship to all the men seeking to impose their own on you. And so much begins at home. To what extent then is any of this ever wholly autonomous? Let alone understood. Context: Strictly middle class. Strictly apolitical.

And, of course, it is slanted in the direction the French cinema tend to approach these things.

Or maybe it’s just garbage in, garbage out. This is one profoundly fucked up family. And the father daughter relationship is…strange?

So many, many variables careening and caroming helter skelter.

Look for Alice from Monsieur Hire.

trailer:
youtu.be/z_gcsG4-5vw

A Nos Amours [To Our Loves] 1983
Written and directed by Maurice Pialat

[b]Father: You go out at night now?
Suzanne: It’s not a date. Just friends going to the movie.
Father: I want you to call it off right now.
Suzanne: You think bad things happen only at night? I can do what I want all day, but at 8:00 p.m., it’s all over?

Suzanne: Where are you going?
Mother: I’m meeting your aunt to tidy up the grave.
Suzanne: A lot of good that does Grandpa.
Mother: I didn’t ask you to come.
Suzanne: I wouldn’t go anyway. Except the day they bury you.

Suzanne [after being slapped in the face by her father]: Are you crazy?
Father: Stop treating me like some kind of idiot!
Mother: Hit her all you want but not in the face!

Suzanne: I can’t imagine you with another woman.
Father: Tonight I imagined you with Bernard.

Brother [slapping Suzanne again and again]: So you got screwed, huh, bitch.
Suzanne: Mom!
Brother: Who reamed you this time, bitch?
Suzanne: Well, it wasn’t you! Jealous?
[she spits in his face – he atacks her – the mother is hysterical]

Brother: I like to live in the moment.
Michel: Moment—it sounds like “mommy”.

Brother [at dinner party]: I don’t like him touching her. [To Jean-Pierre, her husband] Quit pawing her.
[brother moves over to sit next to Suzanne]
Brother [whispering to Suzanne]: Are you out to make it with Michel? Poor Jean-Pierre. What about Jean-Pierre’s buddy? Romain, with the big feet. Did you make it with him too?

Brother [to Suzanne of his father]: You never told me you visit him.

Jean-Pierre: Suzanne really loves you.
Father: Suzanne loves everyone. She’d love me dead, more than anything.

Father [to the son after the mother slaps him]: Go ahead. Defend your mother – who hit me. I hear you practice on your sister.

Brother: Life’s weird, huh?[/b]

The ironies abound here.

The Israel Prize? Never heard of it. But others have. And, for some of them, it is the center of the universe.

Here is what the film is about:

wiki

[b]Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a philologist who researches the different versions and phrasings of the Jerusalem Talmud. He and his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) are both professors at the Talmudic Research department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Uriel, a young charismatic academic, is extremely popular with the department’s students and the general public, and is also recognized by the establishment when he is elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The father, on the other hand, is a stubborn old-school purist in his research methods. He is unpopular, unrecognized, and frustrated by his would-be lifetime research achievement having gone unfulfilled, as a rival scholar, Prof. Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), published similar results one month ahead of Eliezer. Eliezer is also highly critical of the new methods of research used by his son and other modern researchers, as he considers them superficial. His ambition is to be recognized by being awarded the Israel Prize, but he is disappointed every year when he does not win it. His nature and the lack of recognition have made him bitter, anti-social, and envious of his son’s popularity.[/b]

In other words, inhabitants in a world of words—intellectuals squabbling “academically” over how to understand that world going all the back to, well, as far as you can go.

I’m sure the same sort of stuff [nonsense?] happens in all the other university departments as well. Even the hard sciences: What really happens in a black hole? what is the exact nature of quantum mechanics?

People become fixated on one particular thing. And suddenly it becomes very, very important that how they understand it is the way everyone else had better understand it too. We see it here all the time as well. But there are many things that can be undertood in more than one way. Then what? Then this: Gentlmen [and it is almost entirely men] start your egos!

To wit:

Director Joseph Cedar on why he decided to make a film that focuses on the Hebrew University’s Talmud department:

It is the smallest department in the university, but it is famous worldwide for its uncompromising methods, and its unforgiving attitude toward the notion of ‘mistake’. Once I started hearing stories from within this department, about mythological rivalries between scholars, stubbornness on an epic scale, eccentric professors who live with an academic mission that is bigger than life itself, even if its topic is radically esoteric…

trailer:
youtu.be/3DjUwSr0VFo

FOOTNOTE [Hearat Shulayim] 2011
Written and directed by Joseph Cedar

[b]Uriel [at conference]: Today I know two things I didn’t know then. One, even a father being a senior Talmud lecturer at Hebrew University is not something kids brag about at school. Two, and seriously, this time. If one really has to define our profession, the nature of our craft, the essense of its totality…our aspirations, our social ties, our dreams…we are teachers. Those who impart knowledge to others. Who take from the former generation and pass on to the next. That is our role.

Narrator: Eliezer Shkolnik came up with a revolutionary argument. A version of the Jerusalem Talmud circulated in Europe in the Middle Ages, different from the version we have today. He proposed this after discovering small differences between the version we have and the text quoted by the Sages of the time. Understand, this means hundreds, thousands of books, each having several versions of manuscripts. Eliezer Shkolnik analyzed all of them, for almost 30 years. A huge undertaking! Then, a month before he was about to publish this monumental work, his life’s project, another scholar, Professor Yehuda Grossman, by chance, found inside the bindings of books at an Italian monastery, the manuscript of that version of the Jerusalem Talmud. The original that was used by the European Sages. And so made all of Shkolnik’s work unnecessary. It actually proved Shloknik’s thesis, but Grossman published it before him.[/b]

Again, all this for something only a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny tiny percent of the world even gives a damn about. And all regarding a God that almost certainly does not exist.

Yonah: Basically, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that, unfortunately, your father will not receive the Israel Prize this year.
Uriel: You should be talking to my father about this, not me.
Yonah: This brings us to the good news. You will be receiving the Israel Prize this year.
Uriel: Excuse me?

They called the wrong Professor Shkolnik.

[b]Uriel: The legal aspects here are all well and good but we’re talking about life and death. My father has been passed over for 20 years! Finally, when he thinks he is getting the prize, you can’t take it away from him. It’ll kill him. I’m not joking here. It’ll kill him.

Uriel: How is he inferior to Hecht, or Goldberg, or Sheperman? Notice I’m not mentioning anyone here.
Grossman: I’m willing to argue why others are worthy. But I refuse to list the shortcomings I find in your father’s research.
Uriel: Naturally! Because in the end, this enables you to hide the fact that the grudge you hold against him is personal, not professional.[/b]

But then it all gets personal.
I’m with Woody Allen here regarding awards such as this: it’s either politics or all hopelessly subjective.

[b]Grossman: Uriel, there is no greater betrayal of your father and his principles than what you are aking of me. In spite of my criticism of him your father never validated a mistake because it was convenient. You know that.
Uriel: Yes, but he won’t.
Grossman: We will.
Uriel: So what?
Grossman: So what? It turns the whole system into a circus.
Uriel: No! It means there are things more important than the truth.

Uriel: Enough with this truth! So much aggression and violence you hide under the word, “truth”. I don’t believe in this romanticism. You don’t seek truth. You seek honors, just like other mortals. Such a terrible thing you are doing in the name of truth. It’s just a prize. That’s all it is. It’s not a betrayal of anything.[/b]

Grossman finally agrees to go along. But only if Uriel 1] agrees to write the “judges considerations” and 2] is never again nominated for the prize himself.
Now is it “just a prize”?

[b]Eliezer [to interviewer]: I believe the Israel Pize has lost much of its prestiege in recent years. When things got mixed up and the prize in Jewish Sciences started going to people who deal with rabbinical literature, folklore. The recent recipients are not researchers in the scientific sense. Studies on rattle in the Talmudic era, or the musings about the marital life of one sage or another, or cookie recipes in the Babylonian Diaspora, do not offer a scientific contribution and do not honor the institution of the Israel Prize.

Interviewer: Your son wrote a book about marital relations during the Talmudic era.
Eliezer: Uriel wrote many books.

Interviewer: I got the impression you and your son represent opposite schools of research.
Eliezer: I’ll illustrate it for you. Say we both deal with potsherds. Yes, broken pottery. One of us examines these potsherds, cleans them meticulously, catalogs them, measures them scientifically and precisely, tries to decipher which period they’re from, and who made them. And if he succeeds, he has done his work properly, and it has scientific value for generations. The other looks at the potsherds for a few seconds, sees they’re more or less the same color, and immediately makes a pot out of them. The potsherds may be from different periods, they may not exactly match, the main thing is, he has a pot! The pot is very nice, very attractive, but it has nothing to do with the scientific truth. It is an empty vessel. An Illusion. A tower with no foundation.
Interviewer: Sounds like this pot really annoys you.
Eliezer: There is no pot! That’s the point! It’s fiction. You can’t be annoyed with something that doesn’t exist.

Eliezer: Uriel excels in what he does. But I wouldn’t call it Talmudic research.

Uriel [angry after reading his father’s remarks in the newspaper]: Measuring potsherds all your life, with nothing to show for it. That’s science? It’s masturbation![/b]

The hate. The hate breeds hate.

Race, immigration, the working class, housing projects, men: Boom!

One is a Jew, one is an Arab, one is a black African. The rest: Various ethnicities comprising all manner of conflicting traditions tossed together into the same impoverished dumping ground. And then there is the white majority “out there” somewhere only more or less interested in what happens to “them”. Gee, what’s that a recipe for? Especially with the reactionary politicos and hate groups stirring up nativist sentiment. And the ubiquitous macho bullshit!!

Of course, some dudes thrive on it. They know nothing you can do will change anything. So they feed on imagining doing what you can’t do.

The solution is obviously political. But, just as obviously, no one has yet to figure out a way to translate that into reality. And the decades are ticking by. 20 years later and these explosions still pop up in the news from time to time.

wiki

The majority of the filming was done in the Parisian suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes. Real footage was used for this film, taken from 1986–96; riots still took place during the time of filming. To actually film in the projects, Kassovitz, the production team and the actors, moved there for three months prior to the shooting as well as during actual filming. Some of the actors were not professional. The film has a documentary feel and includes many situations that were based on real events.

trailer:
youtu.be/yk77VrkxL88

LA HAINE [1995]
Written and directed Mathieu Kassovitz

[b]Hubert: It’s about a guy who falls off a skyscraper. On his way down past each floor, he keeps telling himself: “So far so good… so far so good… so far so good.” But it’s not how you fall that matters. It’s how you land.

Vinz: Why aren’t you in school now?
Sister: It burned down.

Printed on Walmart’s t-shirt: ELVIS SHOT JFK.

Man: I don’t know the pig who lost his piece but I’d sure like to know the guy who found it.

Hubert: What are you going to do with it.
Vinz: Depends if Abdel dies.
Hubert: You gonna kill a cop?
Vinz: It’ll get me some respect.
Hubert: Icing a pig will get you respect?
Vinz: At least it will even the score.
Said: One thing’s for sure. With that piece you’re the big man in the projects.

Hubert: Kids want to punch more than bags now.

On Billboard: THE WORLD IS YOURS. Said changes it to THE WORLD IS OURS.

Vinz: I’m fucking sick of the goddamn system! We live in rat holes, and you don’t lift a fucking finger to change things. You’re my home boys, so I’m telling you. If Abdel dies, I hit back. I’ll whack a pig. So they know we won’t turn the other cheek now.
Saïd: Wow, what a speech! Half Moses, half Mickey Mouse.

Old Neighbor Lady: Stop ringing like that! Y’all think the world is yours?
Hubert [turns away]: This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real…

Hubert: Bullshit! You pointed a gun at a cop! We coulda been killed!
[an old man flushes the toilet and walks out of the stall]
Old Man: Nothing like a good shit! Do you believe in God? That’s the wrong question. Does God believe in us? I once had a friend called Grunwalski. We were sent to Siberia together. When you go to a Siberian work camp, you travel in a cattle car. You roll across icy steppes for days, without seeing a soul. You huddle to keep warm. But it’s hard to relieve yourself, to take a shit, you can’t do it on the train, and the only time the train stops is to take on water for the locomotive. But Grunwalski was shy, even when we bathed together, he got upset. I used to kid him about it. So, the train stops and everyone jumps out to shit on the tracks. I teased Grunwalski so much, that he went off on his own. The train starts moving, so everyone jumps on, but it waits for nobody. Grunwalski had a problem: he’d gone behind a bush, and was still shitting. So I see him come out from behind the bush, holding up his pants with his hands. He tries to catch up. I hold out my hand, but each time he reaches for it he lets go of his pants and they drop to his ankles. He pulls them up, starts running again, but they fall back down, when he reaches for me.
Saïd: Then what happened?
Old Man: Nothing. Grunwalksi froze to death.
Said: Why’d he tell us that?

Vinz: Games? Our bro’s in the hospital, remember?
Hubert: Stop carrying the world on your shoulders! You haven’t got the build for it!

Saïd: Hey, I see skinheads. Fuck Hitler!

Vinz: I feel like an ant lost in intergalactic space.

Hubert [watching a man come down the escalator]: Look at all the sheep caught up in the system. Look at that guy. Doesn’t look so bad all alone in his fancy leather jacket, but he is one of the worst. They let the system carry them along just like this escalator.

Vinz: I know who I am and where I’m from!
Man: Then go back there and shut the fuck up![/b]

There are people who imagine what they would do if they stumbled on the plane. Others imagine what they ought to do. But the point seems to be you never really know about things like this until you actually do stumble upon them. This is one particular trajectory. But there are hundreds and hundreds of others.

In other words, what’s in the plane is lots and lots of money. Four million, four hundred and ninety thousand dollars to be exact.

Money. Come on, let’s cut to the chase: In this culture it’s damn near everything. Or it can [or will] be sooner or later. Unless, of course, that’s not who you are. Which just leaves more for those who are that way.

As for the ending: I’m with Sarah.

Body count: 6

A SIMPLE PLAN
Directed by Sam Raimi

[b]Hank [voiceover]: When I was still just a kid, I remember my father telling me what he thought it took to make a man happy. Simple things, really…a wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who respect him. And for a while there, without hardly realizing it, I had all that. I was a happy man.

Lou: It’s the American Dream in a goddamn gym bag! And he just wants to walk away from it.
Hank: You work for the American Dream. You don’t steal it.
Lou: Then this is even better.

Hank: What if you were walking in the woods and you found a bag full of money. Let’s say four million dollars. Would you keep it?
Sarah: Of course not.
Hank: Why not?
Sarah: Well, to start with it would be strealing…I wouldn’t take it. It’s not right. But that’s just me. I wouldn’t.[/b]

Then Hank dumps the cash on the kitchen table. She sees it. Her eyes light up. It seems that’s not her after all. At first, she tries to talk herself out of it…but eventually she becomes the most calculating, ruthless one of them all.

[b]Hank: You didn’t kill him. We both did.
Jacob: What are you talking about?
Hank: He was alive when you left. I had to smother him. I guess that makes it my decision.

Sarah [showing Hank newspaper article, “Heiress’s Body ID’d By Feds”]: A 4.4 million dollar ransom.
Hank: We can’t say it isn’t stealing anymore.
Sarah: Well, Hank, it’s always been stealing, we just didn’t know who we were stealing from.
Hank: But we thought it was drug money.
Sarah: No, you thought that. This is good. I’m glad…
Hank: It’s good?
Sarah: Yeah, it’s good we know where it’s from, because I was starting to get worried. I thought it might be counterfeit or marked.

Lou: See, Jacob told me a little secret, Mister Accountant. I know what happened to Dwight Stephanson.

Hank: I put myself out for you. What do you do, you betray me.
Jacob: What are you talking about?
Hank: What am I talking about? It’s like there’s 2 sides now.
Jacob: Why are you both talking about sides? There’s no sides here.[/b]

Boy, has he got that wrong. He underestimated Sarah’s newfound greed. Not knowing about it, for one thing.

[b]Jacob: Do you ever feel evil?

Jacob: I mean, hell, Hank, I’ve never even kissed a girl. You know, if me becoming rich is gonna change all that, you know I’m all for it.

Sarah: Try to remember how people see you. You’re just a normal guy. Nobody’d ever believe that you’d be capable of doing what you’ve done.

Sarah [after Hank says he is going to get rid of the money]: Is that what you want? Walking off to the feed store every morning waiting for Tom to retire or die so you can finally get a raise? And Amanda. Do you think she is going to like growing up in somebody elses hand me down clothes and toys?
Hank: Don’t say anything more.
Sarah: And what about me? Spending the rest of my life with a fake smile plastered on my face checking out books in the library and then coming home to cook dinner for you? The same meals over and over again, whatever the weeks coupons will allow. Only going out to restaurants for special occasions. And even then always having to watch what we order, skipping the appetizers. And coming home for dessert. You think that’s going to make me happy?
Hank: That’s enough.
Sarah: No, no. I haven’t done Jacob yet. It’s back to the welfare office for him. The occasional odd job. But with Lou gone now. Just himself and his dog all alone in that filthy apartment…how long do you expect him to last?
Hank: STOP IT!!
Sarah: Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Everything just like it used to be.

Baxter: Well, it looks like we’re both going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Hank [shoots him]: No, just me.

Jacob: I wish somebody else had found that money.

Hank [voiceover]: There are days when I manage not to think of anything at all. Not the money. Or Jacob. Days when Sarah and I try to pretend we are just like everyone else. As if none of it had ever happened. But those days are few and far between.[/b]

Lots of prison films out there. So, which ones come closest to the way things really are? Who is to say. If only because it depends in large part on where the prisons are. The conditions in some are far more brutal than in others. This one is in Spain. And it is very brutal.

But this film does have a rather unique twist:

wiki

Juan Oliver wants to make a good impression at his new job as a prison officer and reports to work a day early, leaving his pregnant wife, Elena, at home. During his tour of the prison, an accident occurs that knocks him unconscious. He is rushed to the empty but visibly haunted walls of cell 211. As this diversion unfolds, convicts break free and hijack control of the penitentiary. Aware of the violence that is to come, the prison officers flee, leaving Juan stranded and unconscious in the heart of the riot. When Juan awakens, he immediately takes stock of the situation; in order to survive, he must pretend to be a prisoner.

There are some very, very scary dudes here. Big ugly motherfuckers. And shades of The Departed. But, again, with a twist. Everyone becomes convinced that everyone else is tricking them. They all start playing each other in this theatre of the absurd.

And whatever is deemed objective morally revolves around what you either can or cannot do.

trailer:
youtu.be/ZH4jRRAtQCA

CELL 211 [Celda 211] 2009
Written and directed by Daniel Monzón

[b]Prison officier: We call this patio the strip. The only air a DDS ever breathes. “Designated for Special Surveillance.” Murderers, psychopaths.

Juan [holding a pipe contraption]: What is it?
Officer: Worse than a musket. It’ll blow a hole right through you.
Juan: Can they get powder?
Officier: They can get anything. If you’ve got the dough you can have sushi delivered.

Officier [to Juan]: Never, trust any of them. Never forget where you are. And always look them in the eye. Never let them see you’re scared. In the eye, but watch the hands. They’re like magicians.

Prison official: What’s he doing? Why is he covering the camera.
Prison officer: Clever bastard. He’s tricking them. They think he’s an inmate.

Prison official: We are about to play a game of poker with a murderer. We’ll mark the cards of course.

Apache: You sure that new guy can be trusted?
Tachuela: Can anybody?

Tachuela: If you want, I can take a little stroll and have him checked out.
Apache: Not a bad idea.

Ernesto: I’ll see what I can do.
Malamadre: “I’ll see what I can do”. You see, Calzones? They always say that. “I’ll see what I can do”. They never talk straight and then people get hurt.

Malamadre: Relax, we all know you’re the big murderer here. Though you always kill from a distance. Boom and that’s that. I have the balls to gut you right here.
ETA leader: If any of you lays a finger on us, kiss your whole family goodbye.
Malamadre: You would be doing me a favor. My only family is my cousin and he’s a fucking prick.

Prisoner: Thye’re talking about us in English!

Apache: You better watch out. Somebody asked me to find out if you could be trusted.
Juan: And?
Apache: You can’t be. There’s plenty weird about you.

Tachuela [to Juan of the ETA leader]: You! You cut off his ear!!
[He does][/b]

Then things really go downhill.

Almansa: It was atrick all along. Juan isn’t an inmate, he’s a guard. He was supposed to start today but he got caught in the riot.
Malamadre: I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. This is a trick, you bastard. This is just paper and a photo.
Almansa: What Utilla said was true.
Malamadre: How the fuck do you know what Utrilla said?
Almansa: Juan isn’t our only insider.

But: Inside, outside. What’s the difference?

Go ahead, Francesca, make his day.

This is about a man who loves what he does and gets paid to do it. And about a woman who wants more than she’s got just a little bit less than what she is willing to give up to get it. This, in fact, is how dasein is embodied. Your life revolves existentially around the parameters of its own making. And, in this context, the choices you make. But every once in a while something new comes along and it has a chance to go in an entirely different direction. But an actual lived life, not the kind some talk about here. But it is less about making the right choice than in acknowledging just how complex [and situated] these things can become “out in the world”.

You see, she is up there and her fanily is down here. But not at all in the way I usually mean it. Personally, I think she was a fool for staying. After all, her children were practically grown. But what the hell could I possibly know about her reasons.

As for the part about love, I’ll just have to take their word for it. Congenitally, I seem to be defective in that regard. I don’t think I am emotionally equipped to feel it. Not like this.

IMDb

One of the few PG-13 rated movies to use the word “fuck” in a sexual context (Francesca’s line “…or should we just fuck on the linoleum one last time?”). The MPAA originally rated it R solely because of this line, but Clint Eastwood successfully appealed them to re-rate it.

Can you fucking believe it?

BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY
Directed by Clint Eastwood.

[b]Francesca: You just got off the train in Bari and stayed without knowing anyone there?
Robert: Yeah.

Robert: Things change. They always do, it’s one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort. Not many things you can count on for sure.
Francesca: I guess. Except I’m one of the people it frightens.

Francesca: Just because I have never seen a Gazelle stampede doesn’t mean I’m asleep in my life.

Robert: If you want me to stop, tell me now.

Francesca: And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone.

Robert: When I think of why I make pictures, the reason that I can come up with just seems that I’ve been making my way here. It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.

Robert: Don’t kid yourself, Francesca: you are anything but a simple woman.

Francesa: I was just going to have some iced tea and split the atom, but that can wait.

Caroline: Who knew that, in between bake sales, my mother was Anaïs Nin?

Robert: We’re hardly two separate people now. Some people search all their lives for this and never find it. Others don’t even think it exists.

Francesca: Robert, please. You don’t understand, no-one does. When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you’re expected move again only you don’t remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself. You never in your life think that love like this can happen to you.
Robert: But now that you have it…
Francesca: I want to keep it forever. I want to love you the way I do now the rest of my life. Don’t you understand…we’ll lose it if we leave. I can’t make an entire life disappear to start a new one. All I can do is try to hold onto to both.

Francesca [voiceover]: I realized love won’t obey our expectations. Its mystery is pure and absolute. What Robert and I had, could not continue if we were together. What Richard and I shared would vanish if we were apart. But how I wanted to share this. How would our lives have changed if I had? Could anyone else have seen the beauty of it?[/b]