Here’s how it works. There’s you here and there’s eveybody else in the world. And you can make contact with any one of them if you only know the right combination of 6 – or sometimes less – people to contact. Simple.
Only it’s not [for most of them] because you have no idea which combination of folks it is.
Start here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
This is a very strange movie. Or it is for me. I’m not sure when I am or am not being put on. Is it meant to convey meaning in layers or is it layer upon layer of irony. It’s got a great big heart at the end of it and a great big mystery that will never be solved. But is all this just, “wink, wink”?
That you want it to be “real” is a testiment to how the film is able to draw you in below the surface. Or, again, some of us.
Then there are the trials and the travails of the upper middle class. And their shitbag kids.
Or maybe this is all just a surreal remake of My Fair Lady—with Will Smith as Eliza Doolittle.
IMDb
[b]The inspiration for Paul, David Hampton, died of AIDS on 18 July 2003.
Will Smith refused to actually kiss Anthony Michael Hall just before their kissing scene so a camera trick was used showing only the back of their heads. In an interview, Smith stated that Denzel Washington advised him not to kiss a man on-screen for it would harm his career. Smith stated that he regretted not going through with it saying “It was very immature on my part.”
Will Smith’s character in the film passes himself off as Sidney Poitier’s son. In real life, when Smith met Poitier for the first time, the veteran actor said, “Well, you’re almost handsome enough to be my son”.[/b]
trailer:
youtu.be/HLIyuYwbVnA
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Directed by Fred Schepisi
[b]Flan: My God!
Ouisa: Is anything gone?
Flan: How can I look, I’m shaking!
Ouisa: I want to know if anything’s gone!
Flan: Calm down.
Ouisa: We could have been killed! Oh, my God! The Kandinsky!
Flan: The Kandinsky!
Ouisa: It’s gone, oh my God! Call the police!
Flan: Oh, no, there it is. Oh! The silver Victorian inkwell!
Ouisa: How can you think of that thing?
Flan: Here’s the inkwell.
Ouisa: We could have been murdered!
Flan: A silver Jaguar. Why?
Ouisa: Slashed. Throat slashed.
Flan: There’s the Degas.
Ouisa: To go to bed at night happy and then murdered. Would we have woken up?
Flan: We’re alive.
…
Ouisa: Chaos, control. Chaos, control…
…
Flan: Having a rich friend is like drowning and your friend makes lifeboats.
…
Geoffrey: I wish you’d visit.
Ouisa: Oh, but we’d visit you and sit in your gorgeous house, planning visits to the townships, demanding to see the poorest of the poor. “Are you sure they’re the worst off? I mean, we’ve come all this way.”
…
Flan: It’s like when people say “Don’t think about elephants”, it’s all you can think about, elephants, elephants.
…
Flan: Blunt question. What’s he like?
Ouisa: Oh, let’s not be star-fuckers.
Flan: I’m not a star- fucker!
Paul: Well, you know my father. He’s perfect.
…
Paul: A teacher out on Long lsland was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. Weeks later, he returned to the classroom, shot the student - unsuccessfully, held the class hostage, and then shot himself - successfully. This fact caught my eye. Last sentence, Times - “A neighbour described the teacher as a nice boy, always reading Catcher in the Rye.” This nitwit Chapman, who shot John Lennon, said he did it to draw the attention of the world to Catcher in the Rye, and the reading of this book would be his defence. Young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said: “If you want my defence, all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye.”
…
Paul: What alarms me about the book - not the book so much as the aura about it - is this. The book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can’t function. At the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain. He folds. There’s nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme. The extraordinary last lines of Waiting for Godot.; “Let’s go.” “Yes.” “Let’s go.” Stage directions: “They do not move.” The aura around Salinger’s book - which, perhaps, should be read by everyone but young men - is this. It mirrors like a fun-house mirror, and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our times - the death of the imagination. Because what else is paralysis? The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world, this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what’s in here doesn’t match what’s out there? Why has imagination become a synonym for style? I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us.
…
Flan: I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it - loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remember asking my kids’ second-grade teacher: “Why are all your students geniuses?” Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade - camouflage. But your grade, the second grade… Matisses, every one. You’ve made my child a Matisse. What is your secret? I don’t have any secret, she said, I just know when to take their drawings away from them.
…
Flan: I want to get down on my knees and thank God. Money!
Ouisa: Who said “When artists dream, they dream of money”?
…
Kitty: We’re going to be in the movies.
Larkin: We are going to be in the movie of Cats! Yes!
Ouisa: You tell your story first.
…
Flan: When you see your little sister, don’t tell her that Paul and the hustler used her bed.
Tess: You put him in that bed!
…
Paul [as imagined by ouisa]: “The imagination. It’s there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams, that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies, it shrivels, it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.”
…
Shitbag son: You gave a complete stranger who happens to mention my name the keys to our house?! Dad, sometimes it’s so obvious to me why Mom left. I’m so embarrassed to know you! You gave the keys to a stranger who shows up at your office?! Mom told me you beat her, and you drank so much your body smelt of cheap wine. Mom said sleeping with you was like sleeping with a salad with bad dressing! Why did you bring me into this world?! You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!
…
Woody [another shitbag son]: You gave him my pink shirt? You gave a complete stranger my pink shirt? That shirt was a Christmas present from you! I treasured that shirt, I loved that shirt! My collar had grown a full size from weightlifting, you saw that my arms had grown, you saw that my neck had grown and you bought me that shirt for my new body! I loved that shirt! My first shirt for my new body and you gave that shirt away? I can’t believe you! I hate this life and I hate you!
…
Trent: When rich people do something nice for you, you give 'em a pot of jam
…
Ouisa: I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we’re so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection…I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.
…
Ouisa: The next chapter…
…
Elizabeth: “Quality of mercy is not strained”? Well, fuck you, quality of mercy!
…
Flan [to Paul on the phone]: What am I doing talking career counselling to you?!
…
Paul [on the phone to Ouisa]: That night was the happiest night I ever had.
Ouisa [to Flan]: That was the happiest night he ever had.
Flan [to Ouisa]: Oh, please. I’m not a bullshitter, but never bullshit a bullshitter.
…
Ouisa: Paul…We love you.
…
Desk Sargeant: It sounds like your friend was wanted for something else.
…
Ouisa: I read today that a young man committed suicide in Rikers lsland prison, and tied a shirt around his neck and hanged himself. Was it the pink shirt?
…
Ouisa: And we turn him into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punchline you’ll tell for years to come: “Oh, that reminds me of the time the imposter came into our house.” “Oh! Tell the one about that boy.” And we become these human jukeboxes spitting out these anecdotes to dine out on like we’re doing right now. Well I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience. How do we hold onto the experience?
…
Flan: What kind of behavior is this?
Ouisa: Tell me Flan, how much of your life can you account for?
Flan: Are you drunk? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you realize how important she is? What are you unhappy about? The Cezanne sale went through, the Matisse went through, we’re rich! Rich enough. Next month there’s a Bonnard.
Ouisa: These are the times I could take a knife and dig out your heart! Answer me! How much of your life…
Flan: -my life can I account for? All of it!
[pause]
Flan: I am a gambler.
Ouisa: We’re a terrible match.[/b]