philosophy in film

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]

A “fictionalized” true story.

The fucking Nazis. And here is another slice of them. And how many times do I tell myself, “Never Again”. But not in the way one is supposed to.

There are things we are watching here we have no real understanding of at all. After all, even those who were participating were often on a need to know basis. There are those who know [and manufacture] the big picture and those who do not. And we [like them] are never, ever sure of the part that politics is playing. Or the “personal” stuff.

Really, with so much at stake: WHO CAN YOU TRUST?!

Orders countermanding additional orders as agendas [in conflict] are played out. And everyone basically on the same side. Or so they will tell you. And the “beautiful and mysterious woman”—the femme fatale? Yeah, she’s in this too.

Then there is war with and without a family. With and without children.

But sometimes war has nothing to do with that.

IMDb

[b]Based on actual events that occurred in Denmark during World War II.

The movie is named from the nicknames of the two main characters. Flammen refers to the colour of Bent Faurschou-Hviid’s copper red hair, after a failed attempt to dye it blond. Citron (Danish for Lemon) got his nickname because, while working for the Citroën motor-car company in Copenhagen, he sabotaged German cars and trucks.[/b]

trailer:
youtu.be/qJnfNAEwQ8U

FLAME AND CITRON [Flammen & Citronen] 2008
Written and directed by Ole Christian Madsen

[b]Flame [after shooting a man dead]: You often asked me why. Why? One good reason. The Schalburg Corps. Danes in German uniforms. Traitors. They are…vermin.

Flame [voiceover]: Who else would celebrate 3 killings in a place swarming with Germans?

Flame [voiceover]: Karl Heinz Hoffman. Head of Gestapo. He’s the one hounding us. Make no mistake. He’s the biggest mass murderer Denmark has ever seen. But you already knew that.

Flame: I need to know how you know my name.
Ketty: Someone must have let it slip.
Flame: Yes, but the question is who.
Ketty: Don’t worry. We’re on the same side.
Flame: We are? Is it Winther?
Ketty: Don’t ask me about that or anything else. Don’t come here again. It’s the last thing I need.

Flame: I forgot that we are not killing people, but Nazis.

Gilbert: A partisan. A soldier without a front. Are you a good soldier? Are you prepared to pay the price?
Flame: What price?
Gilbert: What do you think? Your life. You see, there can only be three reasons for fighting in a war. Firstly, career opportunity. It’s widespread but does not produce good soldiers. You have a fear of dying and only think of peace. Secondly, ideology. Love of the mother country. That is much more intriguing, but the dreamer breaks down. He doesn’t have the strength. He’s shallow. The frivolous and presumptuous nature of youth. Unless he’s passionate. Fanatical, if you will. That makes for a good soldier.
Flame: And thirdly?
Gilbert: Hatred of your enemy. Hate seduces you into doing things you never thought yourself capable of. Unless the hatred is caused by a personal neurosis.
Flame: What are you saying?
Gilbert: The neurotic is intelligent and he has doubts. If he is beterayed his hatred fades and doubt sets in. War does nothing for the neurotic. The gentle, loving father is not to be found in war. Your cause, Christensen, is legitimate. Now you must become a good soldier.[/b]

Flame puts the gun to his head. But, instead of shooting him, he turns and walks away. He’s played. Or is he?

[b]Resistance leader: Three days ago, the Gestapo retaliated for the attacks on German officiers. Stopped a streetcar and threw 8 grenades at the 29 passengers. You can imagine the consequences.

Flame: We can bring it to Japan. When we’re done with the Germans. We can go to Japan with the Americans.
Citron: Flame and Citron in Japan?

Flame [voiceover]: Where were you? Where were you when the uprising started? Where were you on June 26th when Copenhagen resisited? At long last, people had had enough. At long last, they’re doing something. It’s getting close. Real war…But we’re just waiting.

Ketty [to Flame]: Hoffman just named you the No. 1 enemy of Germany. He raised the reward to 20,000 and you break into my room?

Ketty: But why kill at all?
Flame: What else can you do? My father sent me to Germany in 1940 to train as a waiter and a chef. The hotel manager was a Nazi. The chef was a Nazi. Several of the waiters were Nazis. I served Nazis everyday. One of the girls at the hotel was Jewish, but no one knew. Then the chef found out about it. He turned her in. She was beaten to a pulp. I don’t want that to happen here. Sabotage makes no difference. The only thing you can do is eliminate them. One by one. Down to the last one.
Ketty: Was the Jewish woman your girlfriend?

Winther: I found the informer. Unfortanately it’s one of us. Mrs. Ketty Selmar Sjoberg. She is to be liqudated immediately.
Flame: You’re mistaken. I know her.
Citron: Then why hasn’t she informed on Bent [Flame]? Why inform on Carl and Brains, when Bent will get her 20,000?
Winther: You should ask Bent about that.[/b]

No, you should ask Winther. Or maybe not.

[b]Flame: Does Winther work for the Gestapo?
Ketty: No, he just erases his own tracks.

Flame: He was right. Winther has disappeared. He ran for it. We’ve been shooting innocent people. We’ve shot innocent…
Citron: Shut the hell up! Shut up. I sure as hell didn’t kill innocent people. I shot a German officier, and a German officier is not innocent. You come and tell me he was in the resistance. Are you stupid? Winther! What did you expect? That’s rich people for you! In a nutshell, they are greedy and full of shit. You should have shot her when you had the chance.
Flame: What are you saying?
Citron: She’s fucking with your brain. A girl knows your real name, you fuck her and “bam!” she’s an oracle.

Flame: Why didn’t I see it? He’s in Stockholm and we are being hounded by the Gestapo. Is that justice?
Citron: There is no just or unjust any longer. There is only war. From now on we choose our own targets and go after them. Hoffman.
Flame: Yes.

Hoffman: Tell me, Flame, do you really think you make a difference with all that shooting? Don’t you realize you’re just a tool for someone with less pure motives?

Spex: The incident with Mrs. Selmer was a mistake and has been explained. A simple misunderstanding.
Citron [slamming his glass to the table]: A misunderstanding…I’m sorry. A misunderstanding? And in a minute when I shoot you, it’s just a “mistake”. Can we agree on that?

Citron: The little boy is dead. He kept looking at me. I held him in my arms, and he kept looking at me. I could tell that he wanted to say something but he wasn’t able to.

Hoffman [handing Ketty an envelope]: The money order for the 20,000 kroner reward. You can cash it tomorrow. We also found a letter at his place. It’s for you.
[Hoffman leaves and Ketty opens the letter]
We hear the voice of Flame: “Do you remember when they arrived? Do you remember April 9th? I think you do. Everybody does. I’ve been thinking and thinking. No matter what they say, I don’t believe it was you. You’re not like that. Where do we go after this? When it’s all over. I don’t know. Can we ever go back? Can we ever go forward? Perhaps. Perhaps not. At this moment there is only The Flame.”[/b]

The rotten bitch?

[b]Titlecard: After the liberation, Flame and Citron received a grand funeral. In the days following the service, their coffins stood side by side. In 1951, Citron was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom. It was accepted by Citron’s mother. Flame received the same distinction.

After Flame died, Ketty Selmer moved to Stockholm. She then settled down in Majorca, where she died in the mid-nineties. She never spoke of Flame.[/b]

Here’s more on Ketty Selmer from an interview with the director by Diane Sippl at kinocaviar.com

DS: Who was Ketty, really? A fashion photographer? A courier for the Resistance? A double agent?
OCM: Ketty, who betrays Flame in the end, had affairs with the Gestapo, with Winther, with other Resistance fighters, as well as with women (she was bi-sexual). She operated as a Russian spy at the same time. She was brought up very poor in Copenhagen and became a “dancer” — in those days it was the term used for “stripper” — at the age of eighteen. She was a very active sexual woman.
DS: Is Ketty a classical femme fatale?
OCM: We dug up Ketty Selmer when we researched the film. She’d been there — people knew of her — but they didn’t suspect her at all. They had no idea of who she was. And she acted as she did toward Flame, I think, because she was under pressure. She was afraid of dying, because she was “between chairs,” as we say. She was way out of her league.

A good movie is one where you really, really don’t know for sure what the hell is going to happening next. Especially in a context this potentially volatile.

Still: Is every working class family in England exactly the same? Well, if all you know about them comes from what you see in the cinema then, yeah, I guess they are.

And, in describing them, dysfunctional is right at the top of the list. And then impoverished. They seem to go together. It’s all their own fault though. Any conservative can explain why.

But everything is really about the gaps between the exteriors some show the world and the interiors that are considerably more vulnerable. People live this way. I once lived this way. And if you never have, what the fuck can you really know about it?

There’s hope though: Hip Hop. Dancing. Being an “artist”. And how hopeless is that? For most of course. And the audition turns out be for “dancers” of an entirely different sort anyway.

IMDb

[b]Katie Jarvis, who plays Mia, had never acted before this film. A casting director spotted her having a fight with her boyfriend at a train station and offered her the role.

The film was shot chronologically, and the actors were shown only the part of the script they would be filming the following week - none of them knew what would happen to their characters later in the film.[/b]

wiki

The film currently holds a 90% “certified fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 132 reviews. The New Yorker’s David Denby writes, “Fish Tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as The 400 Blows”.

Trailer:
youtu.be/gg1yMOdjyp0

FISH TANK [2009]
Written and directed by Andrea Arnold

[b]Mia [shouting to Keeley’s father]: Can you give Keeley a message for me? Tell her I think her old man’s a cunt!

Connor [mother’s boyfriend, to Mia]: You dance like a black…It’s a compliment.

Tyler [little sister]: Whatcha doin?
Mia: Mind your own fuck face.
Tyler: If I’m a fuck face, you’re a cunt face.[/b]

That kinda working class family.

[b]Tyler [to Connor leaving the house]: I like you. So I’ll kill you last.

Tyler [after her mother throws her out of the kitchen]: BITCH!!
Mia: I’ve got the ChildLine’s number if you need it.
Tyler: YOU’RE A BITCH YOURSELF!![/b]

Tyler’s about 5 years old.

[b]Joanne [Mia’s mother, to Connor]: She’s never had a boyfriend.
Mia: I just fucked him upstairs actually.
Joanne: Oh, that’s nice.

Joanne [throwing an envelope at Mia]: It’s about your new school. You get to stay there. You can fuck as many ASBO boys as you like there.

Mia: I ain’t going.
Connor: That place might teach you some manners.
Mia: It’s nothing to do with you, is it?
Connor: You need sortin’ out you do.
Mia: So you keep saying. But you’re nothin’ to me, so why should I listen?

Connor [to Mia]: You all love your booze in this family, don’t you?

Tyler: Connor’s gone.[/b]

And there’s a reason for this. Yeah, that one.

[b]Mia: Where’s your horse?
Billy: She was sick. Had to shoot her.
Mia [looks down at lock. Sits down. Cries]: Oh.
Billy: She was 16. It was her time.
Mia: [crying, looks up] Oh, right.

Tyler: Why do you need so much stuff?
Mia [packing]: Just in case.
Tyler: What about the referral unit?
Mia: You can have my place.
Tyler: I don’t want it. They’re full of spastics and idiots.

Mia: I’m leaving then.
Joanne [dancing]: This is one of your CDs.
Mia: Yeah. It’s Nas.
Joanne: Yeah, it’s great.
Mia: You can keep it.
Joanne: Well, go on then. Fuck off.

Tyler [burying her face in Mia’s abdomen] I hate you!
Mia [tenderly]: I hate you, too.

Tyler [to Mia in a car heading for Wales]: Bye, you skank! Don’t forget to text me. Say hello to the whales![/b]

Music from Nas over the closing credits:
youtu.be/c_1-DSzBDwc

The gist:

Ten years ago, after being accused of a hideous murder of a mother and her twin daughters, Sean Veil became paranoid, filming himself twenty-four hours a day to have an alibi if necessary.

A very strange film to look at. An even stranger one to wrap your head around. You can imagine someone possibly being reduced to this. But you have a much harder time imagining yourself.

It’s a thicket of half-truths and lies. And less than coherent at times. Put your thinking cap away and just tumble down into the fog.

It is less a “psychological thriller” [as it is described] than a psychopathological thriller. A truly dystopian “ambiance” pervades. But probably the kind of world killers like this inhabit. Unless of course they are far more “ordinary” then we would ever care to admit.

It is also a commentary on our tabloid culture. Everything is grist for the entertainment mill. Crime in particular. Individuals become merely characters to be played…parts to be molded and manipulated into whatever “drama” sells the most merchandise.

One thing for sure: No one would ever believe this is based on a true story.

It isn’t, is it?

IMDb

Lee Evans actually shaved his head and eyebrows for the film, despite being warned that his eyebrows may not grow back again.

Lee Evans. He’s a standup comedian by trade. He played Tucker in There’s Something About Mary. This is a, uh, somewhat different character.

trailer:
youtu.be/NbyAuFPKmls

FREEZE FRAME
Written and directed by John Simpson

[b]Sean [voiceover]: 24 hours in a day. 1,440 separate minutes in which someone could meet their end at the hands of someone who may or may not look like me. 86,400 seconds in which someone could breathe their last. That’s time to be accounted for. All 31,536,000 seconds of life or death each and every year.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to remember: 1] Paranoia is a malfunction of the ability to reason. I can reason. Therefore I am not paranoid. 2] the principle characteristics of the paranoid personality are delusions, hostility, suspicions. I am not deluded. I am not suspicious. I may be hostile but that is only because they really are out to get me.

Sean [voiceover]: 9 years, 11 months, 28 days and 1553 murders since. 975 of which were unsolved. How many more are they trying to pin on me?

Sean [to Saul at book signing]: I have a question! How does an innocent man get justice in this country?! How does he get his reputation back?! His sanity?!

Sean [to reporter]: I don’t give interviews. Not without editorial control. Words can be distorted, twisted, reeditied. Things can be made to seem more than what they are.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to remember. 3] It’s everywhere. All around me. The threat. I feel it. You never lose it. They make sure of that.

Sean [voiceover]: If I could, I’d live here. Set up home right on this spot to be surveilled 24 hours a day. My whereabouts always known as fact. Verifiable, indisputable facts. That would be sheer heaven.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to remember: 4] The first law of forensics. Lockhart’s Theory. Every contact leaves a trace. I leave nothing anywhere that they can trace back to me.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to unlearn. 1] CCTV is now to be avoided. It won’t be easy. Seeking out cameras is now encoded in my DNA. Like a cop to corruption, like detective Emeric to a payoff.

Emeric: The question is Sean how come your tapes don’t match her tapes?

Detective Mountjoy: You seem kind of relaxed, if you don’t mind me saying. For a man who’s about to spend the next 30 years sucking unwashed dick.
Sean: You seem kinda jealous, if you don’t mind me saying.

Katie [straddling him]: How long do you think you can hold out, Sean? Come on, let it go. You know you want to.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to remeber: 5] Never have sex without a condom. Ever. Once they get a hold of your sperm, you’re fucked.

Katie: Don’t worry, Sean, this is one part of your life that won’t be going on tape.

Sean [voiceover]: Things to remember: 6] Never stop filming yourself. Ever. Off camera is off guard.[/b]

One more thing to remember: Make sure the web-cam is working!

Jeffery is right: It’s a strange world. But, come on, how many of us ever find it this strange? More to the point though is that we know it can be. It’s out there. And the more it’s depicted in films like this the more it is likely to spread. A paradox?

We never really know just how close we are to Frank. Maybe he lives next door. Or maybe you’re Frank. One of them. I’ve bumped into some strange folks right here in ILP’s la la land. And, of course, they’ve bumped into me.

And then there is Dorothy. Is she a creature of Frank or did she come into that world predisposed to move it along. And who would have thought that Isabella Rossellini was as spooky as Dennis Hopper. In “real life”. At least back then.

Basically, I think it is all just a metaphor for the mystery of existence itself. Why things happen in one way and not in another. And what lies below the surface of any particular understanding of it. The stuff underground. The stuff “civilization” is just a veneer covering up. Lots of films like that, of course. But this one is especially effective in juxtaposing them.

In one ear and out another.

IMDb

[b]Several of the actors who were considered for the role of Frank found the character too repulsive and intense. Dennis Hopper, by contrast, is reported to have exclaimed, “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank!”

Isabella Rossellini actually was naked under her velvet robe when she did the “ritualistic rape scene”, a fact that her partner Dennis Hopper was not aware of, until the cameras started rolling and his co-actor opened her legs for him to kneel between. This scene was the very first time the two of them ever worked together.

In interviews, David Lynch has told of how Dorothy’s nude scene was inspired by a childhood memory of his, when he and his brother, going home from school, came across a dazed naked woman walking down the street. Lynch has said that it made him cry and left a profound impression on him.

The bugs seen writhing and fighting at the beginning of the film symbolize the dark and violent world that lies just barely beneath the veneer of simple small-town life, as typified by the immaculate green lawn. A product of small-town upbringing himself, Lynch often explores the darker side of what is often stereotypically seen as the simple, decent life of rural comunities.[/b]

Blue Velvet at wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Velvet_(film

BLUE VELVET
Written and directed by David Lynch

[b]Radio announcer: It’s a sunny, woodsy day in Lumberton, so get those chainsaws out. This is the mighty W.O.O.D., the musical voice of Lumberton. At the sound of the falling tree, it’s 9:30. There’s a whole lotta wood waitin’ out there, so let’s get goin’.

Jeffrey: I found an ear.
Detective Williams (matter of factly): You did? A human ear?
Jeffrey: Yeah. I’ve got it here in this bag. I thought I should bring it to you.
Detective Williams [looking in the bag]: That’s a human ear all right.

[repeated line]
Jeffrey: It’s a strange world.

Jeffrey: There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience. Sometimes, in some cases, it’s necessary to take a risk. I got to thinking. I’ll bet a person could learn a lot by getting into that woman’s apartment. You know, sneak in and hide and observe.

Sandy: I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.

Dorothy: What’s your name?
Jeffrey: Jeffrey
Dorothy: Jeffrey what?
Jeffrey: Jeffrey Nothing.

[repeated line]
Frank: DON’T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME!

Frank: You’re stay alive, baby. Do it for Van Gogh.

Dorothy [to Jeffrey]: Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!

Jeffrey: Frank…is a very sick and dangerous man.

Sandy [after Jeffrey tells her about Dorothy, Don, her son and Frank]: It is a strange world.
Jeffrey [fiercely]: Why are there people like Frank?! Why is there so much trouble in this world?!
Sandy: I don’t know. I had a dream. In fact, it was on the night I met you. In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed that love would make any difference, and it did. So, I guess it means that there is trouble until the robins come.

Dorothy [to Jeffrey]: I looked for you in my closet tonight.

Jeffrey: See that clock on the wall? In five minutes you are not going to believe what I’ve told you. Number one…

Sandy: You’re not going back to her apartment, are you?
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Sandy [very concerned]: Jeffrey, why?
Jeffrey: I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m involved in a mystery. I’m in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret.

Dorothy: I have your disease inside of me.

Dorothy: You think I’m crazy don’t you?
[pauses]
Dorothy: I want you to stay. Don’t hate me.
Jeffrey: I sure don’t hate you.
Dorothy: I’m not crazy.
[pauses]
Dorothy: I know the difference between right and wrong!
Jeffrey: That’s good.
Dorothy: You’re my special friend.
[walks toward Jeffrey, a knowing smile on her face]
Dorothy: I still have you inside of me!

Frank: Hey you wanna go for a ride?
Jeffrey: No thanks.
Frank: No thanks? What does that mean?
Jeffrey: I don’t wanna go.
Frank: Go where?
Jeffrey: For a ride.
Frank: A ride! Hell that’s a good idea!

Raymond: He’s a pussy, Frank!
Frank: Yeah, but he’s our pussy.

Frank: What kind of beer do you like?
Jeffrey: Heineken.
Frank [shouting]: Heineken?! Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Dorothy [to Jeffrey]: I love you! Love me! [To Sandy] He put his disease in me!
Jeffrey: Sandy, please…
Sandy: Jeffrey, what is going on here?
Jeffrey: I’ll tell you…
Dorothy: He put his disease in me.

Sandy: Where is my dream…?[/b]

You know, the robins. And, sure enough, at the end, they do show up.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family myself. Nothing like this though. This one is more fucked up than the folks in Fish Tank. And it’s not even from England. But what’s England got on working class families from the deep South?

Here of course the rich are even more fucked up than the lower middle class. And it takes an unemployed football coach from South Carolina [who, if nothing else, is colorful] to nudge them in a more satisfying direction.

And then there is The Incident. Some families have one and some don’t. Or some have a series of less traumatic events. One of this magnitude though can put whole future in the crosshairs. There is before and there is after. Period. End of story. And nothing is ever quite the same. But the movie unfortunately barely scratches the surface here.

To wit: The movie vs. the book:

[b]wiki

While the film was a box office hit and raised Streisand’s reputation as a director, its numerous changes from the original novel upset some Conroy purists. Conroy and Johnston eliminated most of the novel’s flashback scenes. They describe Tom Wingo’s relationship with his siblings in great detail. In the novel, these flashbacks form the main plot and take up more of the novel than the romance between Streisand’s character, Dr. Lowenstein, and Tom Wingo. The removal of the flashbacks makes the relationship between Wingo and Lowenstein the central story in the film, whereas in the novel, it is not. Another character in the novel - the second Wingo brother, Luke, who appears only in flashbacks onscreen - is vitally important to the novel, and his death is a major plot point. In fact, the title of the book derives from a poem written by Savannah about Luke and his struggle against the government after the seizure of Colleton. In the film, “The Prince of Tides” is the title of a book of poetry written by Savannah and dedicated to Tom. Luke only appears intermittently, and only as a child, and his death is only vaguely described.

IMDb

Those who have both seen the movie and read the book say that the novel is much richer in detail, as well as more disturbing, than in the movie. Savannah’s story, as well as the tiger’s role, were larger in the novel. Luke, who is the real ‘Prince of Tides’ in the book, was almost entirely left out of the movie and the bonds between the three children were played down, while Tom’s love affair with Susan was made the central theme. The killing of the three escaped prisoners also was handled differently in the book, such that Tom killed one and the tiger killed the other two. Several viewers have commented that there were so many stories in the 600-page book that at least 4-6 different films could be shot and never repeat the same information.[/b]

This is very, very true. While I liked the movie [and Conroy helped to write the screenplay] the novel is much, much better. This has Hollywood written all over it. But watch the film and then read the novel. The novel becomes all that much more satisfying.

Look for George Carlin.

THE PRINCE OF TIDES
Directed by Barbara Streisand

[b]Tom [narrating]: There are families who live out their entire lives without a single thing of interest happening to them. I’ve always envied those families.

Tom [narrating]: I suppose Henry Wingo would have been a pretty good father - if he hadn’t been such a violent man.

Tom [narrating]: From my mother I inherited a love of language and an appreciation of nature. She could turn a walk around the island into a voyage of purest discovery. As a child, I thought she was the most extraordinary woman on earth. I wasn’t the first son to be wrong about his mother.

Tom [narrating]: I don’t know when my parents began their war against each other - but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.

Tom: Now girls, have I ever told you the facts of life?
Jennifer: Oh, not this again.
Tom: Stay away from boys 'cause they are all disgusting, self-indulgent beasts that pee on bushes and pick their noses.

Sally: I just don’t know how you feel about me anymore.
Tom: Don’t take it personally. I don’t know how I feel about anything anymore.
Sally: God, you’re pathetic.

Tom [narrating]: It was only my sister who could force me to come to this God-awful city. This city that roars down on you. She loved it all. The muggers, the winos…the bag ladies, the wall-to-wall noise. She loved it because it had nothing to do with our childhood. Luke and I hated it for exactly the same reason.

Tom: I’m sick of my sister’s attraction to razor blades - and I’m sick of shrinks who can’t do a fucking thing to help her!

Tom: What the hell is going on here? Why is she strapped down?
Susan: Her team felt she had to be restrained…
Tom: Why? She has enough drugs to anesthetize a whale!
Susan: Her team decides…
Tom: Quit calling them her team! Sounds like she’s trying out for the Giants.
Susan: What should I call them?
Tom: Let’s be creative. Let’s call them assholes.
Susan: Let me tell you something about those assholes. I’m grateful because they saved your sister’s life.
Tom: Well, I don’t like to see her strapped down!
Susan: I don’t care what you like. She’s still a threat to herself. There’s no point to this unless we keep Savannah alive. And I don’t care if it takes drugs or voodoo or reading tarot cards…I want her alive.

Tom: It’s the Southern Way; when things get too painful, we either avoid them or we laugh.
Susan: When do you cry the Southern Way?
Tom: [laughing] We don’t.

Tom: My mother should have raised cobras, not children!

Tom [narrating]: By the second week, I’d developed the New York willies. The guilt that every out-of-towner feels if he’s not improving his mind every goddamn second. I made a list of things I should do. Museums, plays. See three foreign films all at the same time.

Susan: So you feel your mother betrayed you?
Tom: I was talking about my wife!
Susan: Oh…

Eddie: How’s Savannah? When can I see her?
Tom: I don’t know, Eddie. It’s like talking to a fern.
Eddie: Well, I’m glad she’s improving.

Tom: You know, it’s an art form to hate New York properly.
Bernard: No, it’s not. It’s a cliché.

Tom: What if I’d done the same to your son?
Susan: It’s not the same thing!
Tom: I’ll make him a Presbyterian quarterback!
Susan: It’s quite different. My son didn’t try to kill himself.
Tom: Give him time, Lowenstein. Give him time!

Tom [to Susan]: Mother got the island in the divorce settlement. She immediately sold it to the government for a lot of money. They wanted to put up a power plant. Luke went crazy. He made some threats. The government laughed. He blew up a construction site. They quit laughing. He went on waging his own private war. Hurt some people. Savannah and I tried to stop him, but the government stopped him first. Shot him in the head.

Susan: How did you deal with his death?
Tom: I shut down like a broken motor.
Susan: And according to the Southern way, still no tears.
Tom [laughing]: Oh, I cry sometimes, Lowenstein. I cry at weddings, at the Olympics. I’m real big at the national anthem.
Susan: But not over Luke?
Tom: What the hell for? It wouldn’t bring him back.
Susan: No. But it might bring you back.

[Luke blows the TV to hell with shotgun]
Luke [to Henry]: TV’s broken you son of a bitch. Now you can watch your kids blow out their candles.

Tom: How about Luke? Do you ever think about Luke? Does he ever cross your mind?
Lila: Who taught you to be so cruel?
Tom: You did, Mama, you did.

Susan: How old was Savannah when this happened?
Tom: Thirteen.
Susan: What were you doing while this was going on?
Tom: I don’t know.
Susan: You don’t know? Maybe you ran for help?
Tom: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Susan: Why do you think you didn’t?
Tom: I don’t know. Just because.
Susan: That’s a child’s answer, Tom.

Susan: You said before that three men came in. What happened to the third man?

Tom: What was happening to me was unimaginable. I didn’t know it could happen to a boy.

Tom: Luke, two. Mama, one. While I did nothing.

Bernard: My father hates you, Coach Wingo.
Tom: Yeah, but he loves you.

Herbert: That Stradivarius is worth over a million dollars!
Tom: Well, if I drop it, it won’t be worth shit.
Susan: Don’t do it, Tom.
Tom: Apologize to your wife, Herbert.
Herbert: You’re bluffing.
Tom: I may be, but its a powerful bluff, isn’t it, asshole?
[Tom throws the fiddle high in the air over the penthouse balcony]
Herbert [screaming]: I’m sorry, Susan!
[Tom catches fiddle]
Tom: Sincerity becomes you, Herbie. Now apologize to me for your unforgivable breach of etiquette at the dinner table tonight, you possum-bred cocksucker.
Herbert: I’m very sorry, Tom.[/b]

Being people we get into binds. Predicaments. And sometimes the circumstances are very complex. And we can only see them from a point of view. Over here, over there. It’s the same. And the law sometimes barely scratches the surface in coming to grips with it. But it is all we really have in the best of all possible worlds. All we can do is struggle to make it more “just” in a world of conflicting assessments regarding what that means.

Rooted in the middle class rooted in the big city, A Separation is able to move far enough away from the struggle over class and religion to explore a family’s dynamics with greater depth. In other words, with a greater degree of ambiguity. The heart and soul of a modern day dasein. Only here within the context of sharia law. But:

wiki

After the 1979 overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty by the Islamic Revolution, the system was greatly changed. The legal code is now based on Shi’a Islamic law or sharia, although many aspects of civil law have been retained, and it is integrated into a civil law legal system.

Iran is not Saudi Arabia. And Tehran is not inhabited by hicks from the sticks. But religion is still an important factor in gender relationships. Only with more leeways and loopholes.

As for the poor and working class, God apparently still prefers for them to wait for their just rewards. You have to die first. This seems to be rather universal.

And then there are the god-awful indignities of being old.

IMDb

Iran’s official submission for the Foreign Language Film category of the 84th Academy Awards (2012).

What does that tell us about the content then? And it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film over here. What does that tell us? A peculiar hybrid it seems.

A Separation at wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Separation

trailer:
youtu.be/B2Sswx_vrWk

A SEPARATION [Jodaeiye Nader az Simin] 2011
Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

[b]Simin: Does he even realize you are his son?
Nader: I know he is my father!

Simin: He can have everything, I just want my daughter.
Nader: Our daughter is attached to me. She doesn’t even want to go with you.
Simin: She doesn’t know better.

Judge: You can’t file for divorce over every little problem.
Simin: A little problem? My problem is not little. It is my daughter.
Judge: It is his daughter, too. He has rights, too. My finding is that your problem is a small problem.

Caretaker [calling the equivilant of a religion hotline]: Hello. I have a religious question. I am working in a house. There is an old man I am taking care of. I wanted to ask…Parden me, but he has wet his pants. I wanted to know if I change him, will it count as a sin?..No one is here. He is 70 or 80 years old and he is senile…The urgency is that the poor guy has been sitting like this for half and hour.[/b]

It’s okay. This time.

[b]Termeh: If you hadn’t left, Dad wouldn’t be in jail.
Simin: You’re dad’s not in jail because of me. He hit a pregnant woman.
Termeh: She came 'cause you left.

Nader: I told Mrs. Kalani they are coming to investigate. To beware.
Termeh: Beware of what?
Nader: Beware of…That they are coming to investigate. Is that not okay?
Termeh: If she is to tell the truth, why should she beware?

Nader: I went there cause I have a sense of humanity.
Hodjat: Where was your sense of humanity when you were hitting her ?

Termeh: Did you lie?
Nader: What?
Termeh: Did you lie?
Nader: About what?
Termeh: When you said you didn’t know she was pregnant.
Nader: Why?
Termeh: You said you didn’t hear Ms. Qahraei and Razieh speaking.
Nader: Yes.
Termeh: Then how did you know that Ms. Qahraei gave her the number? Didn’t she say it at the same time?[/b]

Uh, oh.

[b]Termeh: If you knew she was pregnant, why did you hit her?
Nader: Look, I did know she was pregnant, but in that moment I didn’t. I had forgotten. This matter was not on my mind at all.
Termeh: Well…well go tell these exact things to the interogator.
Nader: My dear, the Law doesn’t understand such things, It says either you knew or you didn’t.

Termeh: Didn’t you say it’s not serious?
Nader: It got serious.

Nader [to Termeh]: If you think I’m guilty, go get your mom. We’ll call them and go pay them.[/b]

A narrative is a narrative is a narrative. The fact that it comes from aboriginals doesn’t change that. It’s a way for people living in a particular community to make sense of a particular world from a particular point of view. And because we are all people in ways that overlap we can take from the story things we find useful or meaningful. Sometimes we see ourselves here and sometimes we don’t.

Of course this narrative doesn’t have a whole lot of science behind it. Especially the part about “back at the beginning” when we are all little fishes in the waterhole.

But the most important point is always this: If you believe something is true then you act as though you believe it is true. And those who come into contact with you have no choice but to react accordingly. The rest [hopefully] is moderation, negociation and compromise.

Or else there is conflict.

wiki

De Heer rejected claims he is a white director making an indigenous story: “People talk about, what is a white director doing making an indigenous story? They’re telling the story, largely, and I’m the mechanism by which they can.”

trailer:
youtu.be/9Vzf9BAVGZc

TEN CANOES
Directed by Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr
Written by Rolf de Heer

[b]The storyteller: Once upon a time, far far away [gales of laughter]…Nah, not like that. I’m only joking. But I am going to tell you a story. It’s not your story. It’s my story. A story like you’ve never seen before.

The group: [all walking in a line]
Canoeist: Everyone stop!
[all stop and turn]
The Storyteller: That one is Djigirr. Djigirr talk too much, but maybe he heard something.
Canoeist: I refuse to walk at the end. Someone ahead keeps farting.
The group: [laughter] Not me. Not me.
Canoeist: It’s you again. You’re always so silent. Silent but deadly. Admit it.
Canoeist: Alright, it’s me.
Canoeist: You’re rotten inside.
Canoeist: I’m rotten inside.
Canoeist: You get to the end of line.

The storyteller: The men are cutting the bark off of trees to make canoes. And they talk about women, like always.

The storyteller: Then one day there was this stranger…He had the smell of someone very dangerous.

Canoeist [pointing to the stranger]: See how his prick is covered?
Canoeist: Maybe it’s a small one.
Canoeist: Never trust a man with a small prick.

Canoeist [looking down at a dead man he had just speared]: It’s the wrong stranger.

Canoeist: What if they come looking for us?
Canoeist: Deny everything.[/b]

They do but it doesn’t work.

Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. The seven deadly sins in order of severity. Most of us have committed them, of course. If not in that particular order. And with a greater or a lesser degree of malice aforethought. But then that’s what rationalizations are for. To explain it away.

Or how about these: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, and Humility. The seven cardinal virtues. Aside from the first, no doubt, we’ve all been down these roads too.

Another religious nut doing God’s will. Just considerably more inventive this time. Oh, and also “independently wealthy”.

The thing about Detective Somerset is this: he has earned his cynicism. It’s not just a jaded, nihilistic “philosophy of life” rooted in the intellectual equivalent of ennui or existential angst. He has seen the worst life can dish out. But how far is that from all the other things life can be?

IMDb

[b]An interesting coincidence is that Se7en portrays religion in a pejorative light, and in private life, Brad Pitt openly admits his disdain for religion of any kind.

The ending narration of Somerset quoting Ernest Hemingway was an added compromise that neither David Fincher or Morgan Freeman particularly cared for. The decision came from New Line after poor test screenings regarding the dark ending.[/b]

SEVEN [SE7EN]
Directed by David Fincher

[b]Somerset: Did the kid see it?
Taylor: What?
Somerset: The kid.
Taylor: What the fuck sort of question is that? You know, we’re all going to be really glad when we get rid of you, Somerset. It’s always these questions with you. “Did the kid see it?” Who gives a fuck? He’s dead, his wife killed him. Anything else has nothing to do with us.

Somerset: I meant to ask you something before, when we spoke on the phone: Why here?
Mills: I don’t follow.
Somerset: Why all the effort to get transferred? It’s the first question that popped into my head.
Mills: I guess the same reasons as you. The same reasons you had before you decided to quit, yeah?
Somerset: Y… You just met me.
Mills: Maybe I’m not understanding the question.
Somerset: Very simple. You actually fought to get re-assigned here. I’ve just never seen it done that way before.

Police Officer: Nothing’s been touched. Everything’s like I found it.
Somerset: What time was death established?
Police Officer: Like I said, I didn’t touch anything… but he’s had his face in a plate of spaghetti for about forty five minutes now.
Mills: Wait a minute, no one bothers with vital signs?
Police Officer: Did I stutter? This guy ain’t breathing unless he’s breathing spaghetti sauce.
Mills: So that’s how it’s done around here.
Police Officer: I beg your pardon, Detective, but this guy’s been sitting in pile in his own piss and shit, if he wasn’t dead, he would have stood up by now.

Taxi driver: Where you headed?
Somerset: Far away from here.

Mills: Fuckin’ Dante… poetry-writing faggot! Piece of shit, motherfucker!

Somerset: In any major city, minding your own business is a science. First thing they teach women in rape prevention is that you should never cry “help.” Always scream “fire,” because people don’t answer to “help”. You holler “fire” they come running.

Mills: He’s fuckin’ with us!
[Mills bends over a desk]
Mills: See this? This is us.

Mills: Honestly, have you ever seen anything like this?
Somerset: No.

SWAT Team cop [preparing to break down a door]: SWAT goes before dicks.
Somerset: They love this.

Mills: Has he tried to speak or communicate in any way?
Dr. Beardsley: Even if his brain were not mush, which it is, he chewed off his own tongue long ago.
Somerset: Uh…Doc, is there absolutely no chance that he might survive?
Dr. Beardsley: Detective, he’d die of shock right now if you were to shine a flashlight in his eyes. He’s experienced about as much pain and suffering as anyone I’ve encountered, give or take…and he still has hell to look forward to.

Mills: He’s a nut bag. Just because the guy has a library card doesn’t make him Yoda.
Somerset [with the lightbulb going on over his head]: How much money have you got?

Somerset: For a long time, the F.B.I.'s been hooked into the library system, keeping accurate records. They monitor reading habits. Not every book, but certain ones are flagged. Books about… let’s say, how to build a nuclear bomb, or maybe Mein Kampf. Whoever takes out a flagged book has their library records fed to the F.B.I. from then on.
Mills: You got to be kidding. How is this legal?
Somerset: Legal…illegal. These terms don’t apply. They can’t use the information directly, but it’s a useful guide. It might sound silly, but you can’t get a library card without i.d. and a current phone bill.

Somerset [Reading from one of John Doe’s journals]: “What sick, ridiculous, puppets we are, and what a gross, little stage we dance on. What fun we have, dancing and fucking, not a care in the world. Not knowing that we are nothing. We are not what was intended. On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn’t notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Crazed Man in Massage Parlour: GET THIS THING OFF OF ME! GET THIS THING OFF OF ME!

Mills: You didn’t see anyone with a package, a knapsack, something under their arm?
Massage parlor employee: Everybody that comes in here has a package under their arms. Some guys are carrying suitcases full of stuff.

Mills: Do you like what you do for a living? These things you see?
Massage parlor employee: No, I don’t. But that’s life.

Somerset: This isn’t going to have a happy ending. If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he’s Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations, but he’s not the devil. He’s just a man.

Somerset: People don’t want a hero, they want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto and watch television.
Somerset: I just don’t think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.
Mills: You’re no different. You’re no better.
Somerset: I didn’t say I was different or better. I’m not. Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is the solution. I mean, it’s easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It’s easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It’s easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work.

Mills: We are talking about people who are mentally ill, we are talking about people who are fucking crazies.
Somerset: No. No, we’re not. We’re talking about everyday life here. You can’t afford to be this naive.

Mills: I don’t think you’re quitting because you believe these things you say. I don’t. I think you want to believe them, because you’re quitting. And you want me to agree with you, and you want me to say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re right. It’s all fucked up. It’s a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin.” But I won’t. I don’t agree with you. I do not. I can’t.[/b]

We’ll see about that.

[b]Detective: He cut off her nose…
Somerset: …to spite her face.

Somerset: If John Doe’s head splits open and a UFO should fly out, I want you to have expected it.

John Doe: Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.

Mills: I’ve been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you’re insane? Maybe you’re just sitting around, reading “Guns and Ammo”, masturbating in your own feces, do you just stop and go, “Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!”? Yeah. Do you guys do that?

Mills: Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people.
John Doe: Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man…a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you’d point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!
Mills: Murderers?
John Doe: A woman…
Mills: Murderers, John, like yourself?
John Doe: [interrupts] A woman…so ugly on the inside she couldn’t bear to go on living if she couldn’t be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let’s not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that’s the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I’m setting the example. What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed…forever.

Mills: I seem to remember us knocking on your door.
John Doe: Oh, that’s right. And I seem to remember breaking your face. You’re only alive because I didn’t kill you.

John Doe: Don’t ask me to pity those people. I don’t mourn them any more than I do the thousands that died at Sodom and Gomorrah.
Somerset: Is that to say, John, that what you were doing was God’s good work?
John Doe: The Lord works in mysterious ways.

[Somerset looks at an object in the road]
Mills: What do you got?
Somerset: Dead dog.
John Doe: I didn’t do that

Mills: What was in the box? What was in the box?

John Doe: She begged for her life…
Somerset: Shut up!
John Doe: She begged for her life and…
Somerset: Shut up!
John Doe: She begged for her life and the life of the baby inside her.
[Somerset punches him]
John Doe: Oh… he didn’t know.

Somerset: David. If you kill him, he will win.

Somerset: Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.[/b]

I like prison movies. I don’t know why. And no, actually, I’ve never done time inside one.

Of course when the movie revolves around escaping from prison you are drawn mostly to how ingenius the plan is. And the sympathy you feel for those trying to get out. The best in this regard being [in my view] Escape From Alcatraz*. If for no other reason it actually happened. This one didn’t. The end in fact is particularly problematic: What the hell really did happen? And what was happening instead only inside his head? Shades of The Usual Suspects. Or, uh, Dallas?

So, taking all that into account, I think you’ll find The Escapist [cliches and all] is well done—but only if the twist at the end doesn’t end up pissing you off.

Aside from that, is this a realistic portrayal of how prison life is in a London Penitentiary? You tell me. It is one brutal thugfest. Remember Oz?

*Other good ones: Stalag 17, Papillon, Midnight Express, The Shawshank Redemption, The Great Escape.

IMDb

Director Rupert Wyatt said he based the plot on the Ambrose Bierce short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. This is the book the lead character Frank Perry is shown reading and shows Rizza near the end of the film.

Look for Damian Lewis. He plays the terrorist here too.

trailer
youtu.be/FkiMZ5LXJJY

THE ESCAPIST
Written and directed by Rupert Wyatt

[b][The prisoners are racing – and betting on – ants]
Prisoner [pointing to an ant]: There’s a handicap! This one is missing a leg!

Prisoner: CATWALK!![/b]

New meat in other words. New holes.

[b]Perry: Stare at something else.

Drake: No chance. I’m a thief, not a magician.

Brodie: What about tools?
Perry: The Lord provides.

Perry [to Brodie]: Oh, one more thing. Just make sure you don’t get murdered tonight.

Perry: We’ve got options with Tony.
Drake: Yeah, I prefer the option that murders him.

Batista: If Tony knows, then Tony knows. He’s the devil on your back now. But if you want to trade, I give a trade. Ket’s a dangerous drug, but deadly when poisoned…you got me? If it looks, smells and tastes like Ket, Pssshoo!..who will know?
Perry: No one touches Tony. Rizza…
Batista: Rizza? Who is going to tell Rizza? Junkies die every day.

Perry: And Lacey, what happens to him now? He won’t be in the hole for long. Rizza will make sure of that. We’ll leave him for Rizza.
Drake: Which weighs more Frank, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?

Rizza: You know the one thing you’ve got going for you, Frank? You’re too old to die young.

Rizza: Where is he?
Perry: You know something? I’m free now. Like my little girl.

Perry [to Rizza]: You’re still living. But less and less. Inside, you own this place. You run things. You’re the king. But look around you, what do you see? It’s all pretend. It’s all made up. You own nothing. Nothing except cells, bars, and a rusty metal staircase. You’ll never live because outside you don’t exist. No one will remember you, no one.[/b]