philosophy in film

It was all so simple back then. No one was really crazy. Mental illness was just something the authorities invented in order to lock up folks who wouldn’t conform to what was [offically] prescribed to be normal behavior. And if anyone really was a few sandwiches short of a picnic it was all the fault of capitalism. Once the revolution happened mental illness would vanish off the face of the earth.

I [sort of] believed that myself back then. Now I [sort of] don’t.

Which isn’t to suggest the film doesn’t expose just how much bullshit is involved with “therapy” that presumes the problem is folks not acting “normal”. How many Nurse Ratchets [and her ilk] are out there still?

But so much mental anguish does revolve around people hell bent on establishing the right thing to do. And then for all the rest of us too.

But here is a crucial point:

IMDb: Louise Fletcher got the part of Nurse Ratched mainly because she could embody evil without knowing it. She believes she’s helping people even when she isn’t.

Lots of people don’t take that into consideration when they thump those who don’t share their own point of view about mental health. What really is “evil” today?

IMDb

[b]Many extras were actual mental patients. The cast and crew had to become accustomed to working with extras and supporting crew members who were inmates at the Oregon State Mental Hospital; each member of the professional cast and crew inevitably worked closely with at least two or three mental patients.

Most of Jack Nicholson’s scene with Dean R. Brooks upon arriving at the hospital was improvised - including his slamming a stapler, asking about a fishing photo, and discussing his rape conviction; Brooks’s reactions were authentic.

Louise Fletcher only realized that the part of Nurse Ratched was a hotly contested role among all the leading actresses of the day when a reporter visiting the set happened to casually mention it.

Author Ken Kesey was so bitter about the way the filmmakers were “butchering” his story that he vowed never to watch the completed film and even sued the movie’s producers because it wasn’t shown from Chief Bromden’s perspective (as the novel is). Years later, he claimed to be lying in bed flipping through TV channels when he settled onto a late-night movie that looked sort of interesting, only to realize after a few minutes that it was this film. He then changed channels.[/b]

wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_O … Nest_(film

Look for Anjelica Huston

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST [1975]
Directed by Milos Forman

[b]Dr. Spivey: Well, it says several things here. It said you’ve been belligerent. Talked when unauthorized. You’ve been resentful in attitude towards work, in general. That you’re lazy.
McMurphy: Chewing gum in class.

Dr. Spivey: Well, the real reason that you’ve been sent over here is because they wanted you to be evaluated… to determine whether or not you are mentally ill. This is the real reason. Why do you think they might think that?
McMurphy: Well, as near as I can figure out, it’s 'cause I, uh, fight and fuck too much.

Dr. Spivey: Why did you get sent over here from the work farm?
McMurphy: Well, I really don’t know, Doc.
Dr. Spivey: It says here that you went around…Let me just take a look…
McMurphy: It ain’t up to me, you know.
Dr. Spivey: One…two, three…four…You’ve got at least five arrests for assault. What can you tell me about that?
McMurphy: Five fights, huh? Rocky Marciano’s got 40 and he’s a millionaire.
Dr. Spivey: That’s true.
McMurphy: That is true.

Dr. Spivey: Of course, it’s true that you went in for statutory rape. That’s true, is it not, this time?
McMurphy: Absolutely true. But, Doc, she was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don’t think it’s crazy at all and I don’t think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that’s why I got into jail to begin with. And now they’re telling me I’m crazy over here because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don’t make a bit of sense to me. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that’s it.

Dr. Spivey: Do you think there’s anything wrong with your mind, really?
McMurphy: Not a thing, Doc. I’m a goddamn marvel of modern science.
Dr. Spivey: You’re going to be here for a period, for us to evaluate you. We’re going to study you. We’ll make our determinations as to what we’re going to do and give you the necessary treatment as indicated.
McMurphy: Doc, let me just tell you this. I’m here to cooperate with you a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I’ll be just right down the line with you. You watch. 'Cause I think we ought to get to the bottom of R.P. McMurphy.

Nurse Ratched: Have you ever speculated, Mr. Harding that perhaps you arevimpatient with your wifevbecause she doesn’t meet your mental requirements?
Harding: Perhaps. But you see, the only thing I can really speculate on, Nurse Ratched is the very existence of my life…with or without my wife…in terms of the human relationships, the juxtaposition of one person to another, the form, the content.
Tabor: Harding, why don’t you knock off the bullshit and get to the point?
Harding: This is the point. This is the point, Taber. It’s not bullshit. I’m not just talking about my wife, I’m talking about my LIFE, I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person, I’m talking about everybody. I’m talking about form. I’m talking about content. I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, Hell, Heaven. Do you understand…FINALLY?

Nurse Ratched: If Mr. McMurphy doesn’t want to take his medication orally, I’m sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way. But I don’t think that he would like it.

McMurphy: But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.

McMurphy: Which one of you nuts has got any guts?

McMurphy: Nurse Ratched, Nurse Ratched! The Chief voted! Now will you please turn on the television set?
Nurse Ratched [she opens the glass window]: Mr. McMurphy, the meeting was adjourned and the vote was closed.
McMurphy: But the vote was 10 to 8. The Chief, he’s got his hand up! Look!
Nurse Ratched: No, Mr. McMurphy. When the meeting was adjourned, the vote was 9 to 9.
McMurphy [exasperated]: Aw come on, you’re not gonna say that now! You’re not gonna say that now! You’re gonna pull that hen house shit? Now when the vote…the Chief just voted - it was 10 to 9. Now I want that television set turned on right now!

Dr Spivey: Do you like it here?
McMurphy: That fucking nurse, man!
Dr Spivey: What do you mean, sir?
McMurphy: She ain’t honest.
Dr Spivey: Miss Ratched’s one of the finest nurses we’ve got in this institution.
McMurphy: Well I don’t wanna break up the meeting or nothin’, but she’s somethin’ of a cunt, ain’t she Doc?

McMurphy: Is that crazy enough for ya’? Want me to take a shit on the floor?

Young Psychiatrist: Have you ever heard of the old saying “a rolling stone gathers no moss?”
McMurphy: Yeah.
Young Psychiatrist: Does that mean something to you?
McMurphy: Uh…it’s the same as “don’t wash your dirty underwear in public.”
Young Psychiatrist: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
McMurphy: [smiling] I’m smarter than him, ain’t I?
[laughs]
McMurphy: Well, that sort of has always meant, is, uh, it’s hard for something to grow on something that’s moving.

Candy: You all crazies?

Candy: You better quit on this. They’ll throw you in the can again, you know?
McMurphy: No, they won’t. We’re nuts! They’ll just take us back to the funny farm, see?

McMurphy: What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin’? Well you’re not! You’re not! You’re no crazier than the average asshole out walkin’ around on the streets and that’s it.

McMurphy: Want some gum?
Chief: Thank you. Mmm. Juicy Fruit.
McMurphy: You sly son of a bitch, Chief. Can you hear me, too?
Chief: Yeah, you bet!
McMurphy: Well, I’ll be goddamned, Chief! And they all, they all think you’re deaf and dumb. Jesus Christ! You fooled them, Chief. You fooled them. You fooled them all! Goddamn you!

McMurphy: A little dab’ll do ya.

McMurphy: I can’t take it no more. I gotta get outta here.
Chief: I can’t. I just can’t.
McMurphy: It’s easier than you think, Chief.
Chief: For you, maybe. You’re a lot bigger than me.

Chief: My pop was real big. He did like he pleased. That’s why everybody worked on him. The last time I seen my father, he was blind and diseased from drinking. And every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he didn’t suck out of it, it sucked out of him until he shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs didn’t know him.
McMurphy: Killed him, huh?
Chief: I’m not saying they killed him. They just worked on him. The way they’re working on you.

McMurphy: Wake up, boys. Wake up. It’s medication time. Medication time.

Nurse Ratched: Aren’t you ashamed?
Billy: No, I’m not.
[Applause from friends]
Nurse Ratched: You know Billy, what worries me is how your mother is going to take this.
Billy: Um, um, well, y-y-y-you d-d-d-don’t have to t-t-t-tell her, Miss Ratched.
Nurse Ratched: I don’t have to tell her? Your mother and I are old friends. You know that.
Billy: P-p-p-please d-d-don’t tell my m-m-m-mother.

Nurse Ratched [after Billy is found dead]: The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.

Chief: Mac…they said you escaped. I knew you wouldn’t leave without me. I was waiting for you. Now we can make it, Mac; I feel big as a damn mountain.
[he suddenly sees the lobotomy scars]
Chief: Oh, no…
[embracing McMurphy]
Chief: I’m not goin’ without you, Mac. I wouldn’t leave you this way…You’re coming with me. Let’s go.
[he smothers him to death][/b]

All I know is this: If I’m hell bent on snuffing it and a guy like this keeps poking his business into mine we’re both going down. Really, there are particular times when officious folks enrage you. And this is one of them.

Of course I’m not him and this story isn’t mine.

Everything always comes down to why you are checking out. Scripts like this can only work in particular contexts. In others they make no sense at all. For some folks, you talk them down. But, for others, you help them.

The most important thing though is this: You can only go in so far in understanding another when he chooses to end his life. This is what the film has the courage to explore.

trailer: youtu.be/U5IGC59Q9y8

GOODBYE SOLO [2008]
Written and directed by Ramin Bahrani

[b]Solo [to William]: What are you going to do at Blowing Rock, anyway? Are you going to go camping? Are you going there to chill with the trees and the birds? You like birds, big dawg? Are you going to fly away? You’re not going to jump, right?

Solo: I don’t get it, man. Isn’t it better to go to a motel first, drop off your luggage?
William: Why am I with you again? How come it’s always you that picks me up?

Solo: Why family don’t stay together in America? If that was in Senegal…That’s where I’m from. In Africa. You know where it is, right? Dakar. Family stay together. We take care of our parents, old people. Even if they don’t have teeth in their mouths anymore, we take food and we put it in their mouths.
William: Then why aren’t you there now?
Solo: I got to make money and send it back home, that’s all. You know what I mean? I’m going to go back there when I get old.

Solo: William, I’m going to Piedmont Circle Projects. I mean, I’m talking about Homicide Circle.
William: I don’t give a shit.

Quiera [to Solo]: And who the hell is that old man sitting on my sofa, huh?

Solo: I have my interview on Monday, and I’m going to ace it.
William: I really don’t give a shit. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know about Quiera or anything about your life!

William: I’m closing my accounts.
Solo: William, what do you mean you’re closing your accounts?

Solo: William, are you there? William. William, are you awake?
William: No.
Solo: What’s wrong? Please tell me what’s wrong with you. I can’t do this anymore.

Solo: I went to the cinema tonight. The boy was there. William, I saw his photo in your jacket. You left it in the taxi. Who is he? You told me you had no kids. Why are you lying to me? I’m telling you everything. Is he your grandson? William. William, I want to help you.
William: Did you talk to him?
Solo: William, please.
William: Did you fucking talk to him?
Solo: No, I didn’t. But he doesn’t know who you are, does he? Why don’t you tell him?
William: I want you to get your shit and get the fuck out of here.
Solo: William, why are you speaking this way? William.
William: Get the fuck out!
Solo: We’re friends now, and you want to leave me and him, the boy?
William: Who the fuck told you you could get into my life? Who the fuck do you think you are that you can touch anything that belongs to me? I told you from day one, stay the fuck out of my life!

Solo [on phone]: Hi, William. It’s me, Solo. I wanted to tell you I got the results of my interview. William, I failed. I thought you’d want to know.

Solo: William, I saw the other driver and he canceled the trip with you. I’ll take you tomorrow morning. That was our deal. What time should I pick you up?
William: 8 a.m.

Solo reading aloud from William’s notebook: “I made a joke about how bad a film was, and when he laughed, his lip twitched. He looked just like his mother.”[/b]

Films like this can exist only because we live in a world where films like this must exist. As long as men and women choose to differentiate right and wrong, good and bad, true and false etc. along religious and ethnic lines, inanities like this will prevail. Isn’t it time to shunt them aside so that new inanities can be put their place?

Politically the film unfolds at the time when Syrian President Hafez al-Assad has died and has been replaced by his son, Bashar al-Assad. Uncertainy fills the air.

As for the options afforded women, here things are nothing like the extremist Islamic communities, but the fact remains Mona’s father has set up a marriage with a man she has never met. This is a crucial sub-text here. The conflict between Israel and Syria plays out parallel with the conflict between the Muslim religion and women.

At least everyone here appears to be well off financially. Things almost always become more reactionary still the farther down the economic ladder you go.

IMDb

Filming was done in two different Druze villages, one pro-Syrian and one pro-Israeli, depending on the political tilt of the scenes. Also, since Israeli authorities would not give permission to film at the actual border, a mock-up was built some distance away.

wiki

The movie’s plot looks at the Arab-Israeli conflict through the story of a family divided by political borders, and explores how their lives are fractured by the region’s harsh political realities. Set in the summer of 2000, Mona, a young Druze woman living at Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, is about to marry a successful Syrian actor. Following the hostilities between Israel and Syria there is now the demilitarised UNDOF zone between occupied Golan and Syria observed by United Nations staff. Crossing of the zone is extremely rare as it is only granted by both sides under special circumstances. It has taken 6 months to obtain permission from the Israeli administration for Mona to leave the Golan. When Mona crosses she will not be able to return to her family on the Golan even to visit.

trailer: youtu.be/s0PkVJegZZM

THE SYRIAN BRIDE [2004]
Written and directed by Eran Riklis

[b]Title card: Majdal Shams, on the Israeli-Syrian border, is the largest Druze village in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. Druze loyalty is split between Syria and Israel, their nationality is “undefined”…

Tallel: I’m getting married today. She’s a relative from the Golan.
Director: So how did you meet her?
Tallel: They sent me a picture.

Village Elder: Listen, Hammed, you know how much we respect you. We’ve heard your son Hattem’s coming to the wedding. As far as we are concerned, he’s an outcast since he married the Russan. If he shows up, you won’t see us here.
Hammed: Hattem has not been here for more than 8 years. Today is his sister’s wedding. You know that this is his last chance to see her.
Village Elder: We’ll never forget what you did for our village…nor your years in jail. But this is different! If you prefer him and go against your releigion, you will lose our support, and we will cast you out too![/b]

This is how it usually works when you reduce everything down to God.

[b]Mona: I’m afraid.
Amal [Mother]: Don’t be afraid. Tallel will love you and you’ll love him. It won’t be like your previous marriage. It’s different this time.
Mona: What makes you so sure? Life with him could turn out to be a lot worse than my life now. Perhaps I’m going from one prison to another.

Mona: I’m marrying someone I know only from television.

Amal [to Mai her daughter]: God willing, your fortune will be better than mine. Don’t give in the way I do. Don’t you dare give up! I’ve already missed my chance but your entire future is ahead of you.

Syrian Offical: I told you already, as far as I’m concerned, she comes from Syria and she is going to Syria…she didn’t come from Israel.
Jeanne: Well, what am I supposed to do? People are waiting on the other side…on your side too.
Official: I have no idea. It’s their problem, not ours. You know the whole thing is part of an Israeli policy of declaring that the Golan belongs to them. We will never agree to that. You can tell them that.

Mona: It’s bad luck not to get married on your wedding day.

Jeanne: The problem is solved![/b]

With a bottle of wite-out. But then a new bureaucrat stumbles into the farce…

Not nearly as good as the Danish original but still a pretty good movie. The plot in and of itself is compelling. Two brothers stumble into a new perspective on things. It changes them. Then what?

The war in Afghanistan has always been trickier for me than the war in Iraq. I react to it more ambiguously. The Taliban are the foulest sort of reactionaries. Good riddance to them. But the war there was never really about that. And, unlike Sam, thousands really did die over there. Not counting all the folks we killed.

They left that part out though.

But not the PTSD. Not the part about nobody understanding.

This is a film where we are privy to something crucial about a character that the other characters are not. But even we are only privy to the tip of the iceberg. And this is relevant to our own lives too. To our own “self-understanding”.

Also, I have never bought into the “family” bullshit. As though just because someone is our brother or father or spouse we are automatically obligated to them for life. Here I think Ayn Rand [re Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrugged] was on to something. Over time, folks have to earn our respect and admiration. As well as our compassion and commitment.

IMDb

Jake Gyllenhaal learned of the death of his close friend and Brokeback Mountain co-star Heath Ledger while he was in the middle of shooting a scene for this film. Upon hearing the news, Gyllenhaal immediately walked off set, and returned to finish the scene two days later. He then took a longer bereavement leave before he was ready to continue with the rest of his scenes.

trailer: youtu.be/7xYyCCjLpZs

BROTHERS [2009]
Directed by Jim Sheridan

[b]Sam: It’s my brother.
Grace: He doesn’t deserve you.

Tommy: I’m Tommy.
Maggie: Mom doesn’t like you.
Grace: Maggie!
Maggie: That’s what you said to dad.

Tommy: You love it over there, huh?
Sam: It’s my job.
Isabelle: They only shoot the bad guys.
Tommy: Who are the bad guys?
Maggie: The ones with the beards.
Hank [father]: Your brother’s a hero. He’s serving his country and don’t you ever forget that.

Grace: Sam’s dead, Tommy.

Sam: Thanks for taking care of them. I didn’t expect that.
Tommy: It just comes naturally, you know.
Sam: Grace is something, huh?
[pause]
Sam: Did you fuck her?
Tommy: What? You kidding?
Sam: I’d understand. You thought I was dead. I’d forgive you.
Tommy: What’s going on in your head? What makes you think that?
Tommy: You guys just look like two teenagers in love out there. You can’t deny that.

Sam: You can tell me, Tommy. You gotta tell me, okay? I know you slept in my house.

Cassie: Did you see him die?
Sam: No.[/b]

See him? He was forced to kill him.

[b]Sam: What happened with you and Tommy?
Grace: We kissed. That’s it. I missed you. I thought you were dead.
[long pause]
Sam: I think you’re fucking Tommy.

Tina: Everyone needs some reassurance.
Tommy: Everyone’s different dad, you know.
Hank: What do you mean?
Tina: I just think it’s necessary that everybody has someone to listen to them.
Hank: Right, you know, these days they need therapy if they stub their toe. These guys are Marines. They’re trained for it.
Tina: They’re Marines but they’re still people and I don’t think that anybody is trained to shoot somebody.
Grace: What do you think they are trained for?
Tina: They’re trained to use deadly force, but nobody…
Hank: Trained to kill.
Tina: But nobody is trained to watch someone die.

Isabelle [screaming at her father]: WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST STAY DEAD?!!
Grace: Isabelle!
Isabelle: You’re just mad 'cause Mom would rather sleep with Uncle Tommy than you.
Grace: Isabelle, why would you say that?
Isabelle: Mom and Uncle Tommy had sex all the time!

Grace: Why would say that about me and Uncle Tommy? You know it’s not true.
Isabelle: I don’t like Dad. I’d rather have Uncle Tommy around instead of Dad.
Maggie: Me too.

Sam: You know what I did to get back to you?
Grace: No.
Sam [screaming]: YOU KNOW WHAT I DID TO FUCKING GET BACK TO YOU?! YOU FUCKING BITCH! YOU KNOW HOW HE SUFFERED? HE FUCKING SUFFERED BECAUSE OF YOU! AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY FUCKING HOUSE AND MY FUCKING KIDS, GRACE?! YOU’RE FUCKING MY BROTHER IN MY FUCKING HOUSE!
Grace: Sam, you know I didn’t. Sam, please.
SAM: I LOVE YOU GRACE! YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU? YOU KNOW WHAT I…GRACE, DO YOU KNOW WHAT I FUCKING DID…DO YOU KNOW WHAT I CAN FUCKING DO WITH THESE FUCKING HANDS, GRACE?!
[he slaps himself over and again in the head]
Sam: YOU…FUCK! GOD! FUCK!!!

Sam: I’m drowning, Tommy.

Grace: Sam, what happened over there? Why are you punishing yourself? I’ve loved you since I was 16 years old. But if you don’t tell me what happened you’re not going to see me again.
Sam: I killed him. I killed Joe Willis.

Sam [voiceover]: Who was that said “only the dead have seen the end of war”? I have seen the end of war. The question is, can I live again?[/b]

Some can. Some can’t. But let’s get back to what these particular wars are really all about.

If life really was meaningless and absurd it would probably look like this.

Minimalism they call it. In New York, Ohio and Florida.

It’s also a “cult favorite”. What makes a film one of those is as mysterious to me as what doesn’t make it one. I’m really at a loss to explain why I love this film myself. It blow me away when I first saw it all those years ago and everytime I see it I enjoy it all the more. Maybe it has something to do with being a nihilist. Or always having striven to fit in with the lumpen sort. Being one myself as it were.

Maybe only 5% of the population want to live like this someday. But I’m betting a much bigger chunk than that don’t want to live the way they are now.

Be prepared to do most of the work yourself in trying to assertain “what it means”. Not much apparently. But that’s the point.

As for the envelope filled with money…

IMDb

Director Jim Jarmusch was dismayed to discover all the money he paid for the rights to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” went to the record company, with nothing going to Hawkins himself. When the film earned a profit, Jarmusch took it upon himself to track down Hawkins (who was living in a trailer park, at the time) and give him some money. It was the beginning of a friendship between the two which lasted until Hawkins’ death. According to Jarmusch, Hawkins continuously promised to pay him back, despite Jamursch’s insistence that the money was a gift.

What a fucking great story.

wiki

[b]Film critic Pauline Kael gave the film a generally positive review:

The first section is set in the bare Lower East Side apartment of Willie, who is forced to take in Eva, his 16-year-old cousin from Budapest, for ten days. The joke here is the basic joke of the whole movie. It’s in what Willie doesn’t do: he doesn’t offer her food or drink, or ask her any questions about life in Hungary or her trip; he doesn’t offer to show her the city, or even supply her with sheets for her bed. Then Eddie comes in, even further down on the lumpen scale. Willie bets on the horses; Eddie bets on dog races. Eva, who never gets to see more of New York than the drab, anonymous looking area where Willie lives, goes off to Cleveland to stay with Aunt Lotte and work at a hot-dog stand. And when Willie and Eddie go to see her, all they see is an icy wasteland – slums and desolation – and Eddie says ‘You know it’s funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same.’ The film has something of the same bombed-out listlessness as Paul Morrissey’s 1970 Trash – it’s Trash without sex or transvestism. The images are so emptied out that Jarmusch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those black-outs have something of the effect of Samuel Beckett’s pauses: they make us look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently.[/b]

trailer: youtu.be/ToCSOp7FGT0

STRANGER THAN PARADISE [1984]
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

[b]Willie: You’re sure you don’t want a TV dinner?
Eva: Yes. I’m not hungry. Why is it called TV dinner?
Willie: Um…You’re supposed to eat it while you watch TV. Television.
Eva: I know what a TV is. Where does that meat come from?
Willie: What do you mean?
Eva: What does that meat come from?
Willie: I guess it comes from a cow.
Eva: From a cow? It doesn’t even look like meat.
Willie: Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don’t even have to wash the dishes.

Eva: I’m choking the alligator.

Eva [to Willie]: It’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and he’s a wild man, so bug off.

Willie: I got something for you.
Eva: What is it?
Willie: It’s a present.
Eva: Thanks. What is it? It’s a dress?
Willie: Yeah.
Eva: Oh. Thank you.
[she looks at the dress]
Eva: I think it’s kind of ugly. Don’t you?
Willie: No. I bought it. Why don’t you try it on?
Eva: I don’t really wear this style.
Willie: You know, when you come here, you should dress like people dress here.
Eva [tossing it aside]: I’ll try it on…later.

Willie: Hey, leave me some Chesterfields.
Eva: Can I get them in Cleveland?
Willie: Yeah, yeah, you can get 'em in Cleveland.
Eva: They taste good there, like here?
Willie: It’s the same Chesterfields.
Eva: Yeah?
Willie: All over America. Yeah.

Eddie: You know, last year before I met your cousin, I never know you were from Hungary or Budapest or any of those places.
Willie: So what?
Eddie: I thought you were an American.
Willie: Hey, I’m as American as you are.
[Silence. They begin driving into Cleveland]
Eddie: Does Cleveland look a little like, uh, Budapest?
Willie: Eddie, shut up.

Eddie [in Cleveland]: You know, it’s funny… you come to someplace new, an’… and everything looks just the same.
Willie: No kiddin’, Eddie

Willie [to Eva]: Here, let me tell you a joke, all right? There’s three guys, and they’re walking down the street. One guy says to the other one, “Hey, your shoe’s untied.” He says, “I know that.” And they walk… No… There’s two guys, they’re walking down the street, and one of them says to the other one, “Your shoe’s untied.” And the other guy says, “I know that.” And they walk a couple blocks further, and they see a third friend, and he comes up and says, “Your shoe’s untied.” "Your shoe’s un - " Aaah, I can’t remember this joke. But it’s good.

Eva [looking out over a frozen wasteland]: So, this is it, Lake Erie.

Eva: It was really nice of you to drive all the way out here to see me.
Eddie: It was nice of you to be here.
Willie: Eddie.

Willie: You take me to the dog races and now you tell me “you can’t win them all”.
Eva: What’s going on?
Eddie: Nothing. Nothing’s going on. We just lost all of our money.
Eva: At dog races?!

Eva: So what are we gonna do now?

Eddie: Where did she get all this money? And where did she get that hat?

Willie: I had to buy the ticket so I can get on the plane to take her off the plane.

Eddie [watches plane take off]: Aw, Willie. I had a bad feeling. Damn. What the hell you gonna do in Budapest?[/b]

No Rosemary’s Baby that’s for sure but I still found it to be servicable as a “horror film”.

The ninth gate or the ninety ninth gate, I see it is a metaphor for that part of human existence that will always remain mysterious, murky, malevolent…even murderous.

Something like this:

wiki

[b]Polanski approached the subject skeptically, saying, “I don’t believe in the occult. I don’t believe. Period”; yet he enjoyed the genre, “There [are] a great number of clichés of this type in The Ninth Gate, which I tried to turn around a bit. You can make them appear serious on the surface, but you cannot help but laugh at them”. The appeal of the film was that it featured “a mystery in which a book is the leading character” and its engravings “are also essential clues”.

Polanski read the screenplay by Enrique Urbizu, an adaptation of the Spanish novel El Club Dumas (The Club Dumas, 1993), by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Impressed with the script, Polanski read the novel, liking it because he “saw so many elements that seemed good for a movie. It was suspenseful, funny, and there were a great number of secondary characters that are tremendously cinematic”.[/b]

The “look” and the “atmosphere” of the film draws you in—into a world that would at least be intriguing to believe in. Anything is better than believing in nothing at all. And for all the rest of eternity.

THE NINTH GATE [1999]
Directed by Roman Polanski

[b]Witkin (caustically): You here? You didn’t waste much time.
Corso: Hello, Witkin. There’s a small fortune in there.
(smiles sardonically)
Corso: Help yourself.
Witkin: You’re a vulture, Corso.
Corso: Who isn’t in our business?
Witkin: You’d stoop to anything.
Corso: For a ‘Quixote’ by Ybarra? You bet I would.
Witkin (indignantly): Unscrupulous, thoroughly unscrupulous!
Corso: Good hunting!

Balkan [to Corso]: You’re right, of course. Your friendships don’t concern me in the least. Our relations have always been strictly commercial, isn’t that so? There’s no one more reliable than a man whose loyalty can be bought for hard cash.

Balkan: Ever heard of the ‘Delomelanicon’?
Corso: Heard of it, yes. A myth, isn’t it? Some horrific book reputed to have been written by Satan himself.
Balkan: No myth. That book existed. Torchia actually acquired it. The engravings you’re now admiring were adapted by Torchia from the ‘Delomelanicon’. They’re a form of satanic riddle. Correctly interpreted with the aid of the original text and sufficient inside information, they’re reputed to conjure up the Prince of Darkness in person.
Corso: You don’t say.

Balkan: Are you a religious man, Corso? I mean, do you believe in the supernatural?
Corso: I believe in my percentage. I also believe that books grow old and decay like the rest of us.

Telfer: Okay, where is it?
Corso: Where’s what?
Telfer: Don’t fuck with me!
Corso: I thought I already did.

Balkan: Tack another zero onto your fee.

Fargas: Old families are like civilizations, they wither and die.

Kessler: My latest work: “The Devil: History and Myth” - a kind of biography. It will be published early next year.
Corso: Why the devil?
Kessler [laughs]: I saw him one day. I was fifteen years old, and I saw him as plain as I see you now. It was love at first sight.
Corso: You know, 300 years ago, you’d have been burned at the stake for saying something like that.
Kessler: 300 years ago I wouldn’t have said it! Nor would I have made a million by writing about it.

Balkan: You must see Kessler again.
Corso: Are you kidding? Have you seen her secretary?
Balkan: Try the lunch break.

Balkan: Mumbo-jumbo-mumbo-jumbo-mumbo-jumbo…mumbo-jumbo-mumbo-jumbo-mumbo-jumbo…

Balkan [to the Satanic congregation]: Look around you, all of you, what do you see? A bunch of buffoons, in fancy dress. You think the prince of Darkness would actually deign to manifest himself before the likes of you? He never has and he never will. Never!

Balkan [nervous]: Corso.
Corso: What were you expecting? An apparition?
Balkan: You’re not wanted here, Mr Corso. Leave!
Corso: I’m the only apparition you’ll see tonight.
Balkan: You’ll find a check at my New York office. Payment in full.[/b]

That’s the last check he’ll ever write.

Iñárritu’s movies are always about the ways in which we’re connected to others…and in a manner most of us hardly ever think about at all. This film is the final part of a trilogy, including Amores Perros and 21 Grams.

But in our modern world, those connections can be global in scope. And Babel spans it. A seemingly insignificant event in a seemingly insgnificant part of the world can metastasize into a profusion of consequences…that then spread out far beyond what they ever could before.

Attempts at communication here become miscommunication instead. Then it’s either being or not being in the path of the inevitable fallout.

And then there is the element of culture: Mexico, Japan, Morocco. In some respects people are people are people. But in other respects where you come from makes all the difference in the world.

IMDb

The title refers to the story of the Tower of Babel in the Biblical Book of Genesis. In the story, the people of the world are all united and speak a common language. They begin to build a tower to reach the heavens and become godlike themselves. God, seeing this, decides to confuse the language of the people and destroy the tower. When the people could no longer understand each other they gave up work on the tower and spread out to different parts of the world. It also refers to the connections -or lack thereof- that come through the use of language. In each storyline the characters struggle with surviving and self-identification based on misunderstanding through a language barrier. This film ultimately looks at the fact that we are all intimately connected on a life-and-death level, yet the trivialities of langauge and misunderstandings break us apart. Also, the word ‘babel’ means a confused noise created by a number of voices, which is essentially what the story of the movie is about.

Babel at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_(film

trailer: youtu.be/chNzbahOn_w

BABEL [2006]
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

[b]Susan: Richard, why did we come here?
Richard: What d’you mean why? I thought you would like it.
Susan: Really? Why are we here?
Richard: To forget everything. To be alone.
Susan [sardonically, looking around at all the people]: Alone?

Richard: You’re never going to forgive me are you?
Susan: You know what I’m talking about.
Richard: Hey, I’m not going to argue.
Susan [after a long pause]: Okay. You just let me know when you’re ready to argue.

Chieko [flushing her panties down the toilet]: Now they’re going to meet the real hairy monster.

Yasira: Why are you home so late?
Abdullah: They closed the road, and we had to take the long way around. Apparently some terrorists killed an American tourist.

Mike: My mom told me that Mexico is really dangerous.
Santiago [in Spanish]: Yes, it’s full of Mexicans!

Doctor [in Arabic]: The bullet didn’t hit her spine but if she stays like this, she will bleed to death.
Richard: What did he say?
Anwar: He says she will be fine.

Doctor [in Arabic]: I have to stitch up the wound to stop the bleeding.
Anwar: He said he needs to sew up the wound.
Susan: What did he say?
Richard: He said you’re going to need some stitches, honey.

Richard: What kind of doctor is he?
Anwar: He’s a veterinarian. But he is good.

Abdullah: What the hell are you talking about?
Ahmed: Yussef killed the American and he spies on Zhora naked and Zhora lets him watch her…

Border patrolman: They don’t look like you, ma’am.

Richard: What about you? How many wives do you have?
Anwar: I can only afford one.

Richard: Find me an ambulance! This is your fucked-up country, it’s your responsibility!
Government official: The Americans stopped the ambulance. They want to send a helicopter but there are problems.[/b]

Political problems. It’s all over the news now: an act of terrorism surely.

[b]Yussef: I killed the American, I was the only one who shot at you. They did nothing…nothing. Kill me, but save my brother, he did nothing…nothing. Save my brother…he did nothing.

Mike: Why are we hiding if we didn’t do anything wrong?

Susan: I peed my pants.

Police: Ma’am, it was a miracle that we found those kids. I don’t know how you could leave them alone in the desert.
Amelia: I had to look for help. How are they?
Police: That’s none of your business, ma’am. Do you know how many kids die every year trying to cross this border?
Amelia: Sir, I raised these kids since they were born. I take care of them day and night. I feed them breakfast, lunch and dinner. I play with them. Mike and Debbie are like my own children.[/b]

Not any more.

Let’s take a break from all the serious stuff above and explore the truly absurd and meaningless.

Howard Stern.

I didn’t like him before watching the movie…but only because people I did like didn’t like him. I had never listened to him. After watching the movie I still didn’t like him. But I didn’t like him less than I thought I wouldn’t like him.

The guy [and the movie] are, however, really, really, really funny.

But then he’s not aiming the humor at me. Me being a while male too.

Besides, isn’t this one of the truly great love stories? Even though [admittedly] they’re divorced now?

Hey, only in America.

IMDb

[b]Mary McCormack originally did not want accept the role of Alison because of Stern’s controversial reputation. She accepted the chance to audition only because she wanted to meet director Betty Thomas. When McCormack told Thomas that she was refusing the role, Thomas encouraged McCormack to listen to Stern’s radio show and meet him in person. McCormack became a fan of the show and accepted the role.

Howard Stern, Robin Quivers, and Fred Norris were still doing their morning radio show five days a week during production on the film. Every morning, they would go immediately to the set after the show.[/b]

wiki

Private Parts received positive critical praise including Siskel and Ebert, Joel Silver and Gene Shalit. Stern in particular received high praise for his acting, as did Robin Quivers and Fred Norris. Paul Giamatti was also praised, notably propelling him to stardom. Although some critics claimed that the film glossed over his use of sexual and racial humor and that it was relatively brief on recent events of Howard’s career. It currently holds a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes

Note: Some explicit language

PRIVATE PARTS [1997]
Directed by Betty Thomas

[b]Young Howard: Mom, we’re half Negro?

Young Howard: And then I hit puberty. That made things worse because my penis never got any bigger. I mean, I was hung like a 3-year-old.

Howard: Oh, my God, man, she’s taking her clothes off.
Fred: I guess she forgot to close the door.

Howard: I got to tell you something. You are gorgeous, And…And you’re a great actress and everything, but I got a wife at home. I can’t cheat on my wife.
Brittany [naked in the tub]: Then leave your underwear on.
Howard: What?
Brittany: If you leave your underwear on, then you can’t cheat. It’s just like going swimming.

Howard [aloud to himself]: God, let me get away with this, and I swear I’ll never stray from Alison again. Never.

Duke of Rock: Hey, the Duke of rock’s gettin’ ready to walk, but I want you to stick around, because we got a brand-new morning man…looks like Big Bird to me…Well, now, how about that, kiddies? He’s gonna have Kermit the Frog come in here and sing the Alphabet Song. Isn’t that somethin’? Coming up next on the Big Bird show.

Howard: My name is Howard Stern, and welcome to the new morning show. And we have a new feature for you. This is, uh, something special. We have a traffic copter now here at WWWW. Let’s go up to Mama Look-a boo boo day in the traffic copter. Mama, you there? Hello? Mama? Uh.
[Helicopter Flying Sound Effect]
Howard: Hello?
Howard (as MamaLookaboobooday): Yes, hello. This is Mama Look-a boo boo day, the only black traffic reporter in the Detroit area, I’m proud to say.
Howard: Pleasure to make your acquaintance this morning, Mama. Tell me, uh, what’s going on in the traffic?
Howard (as MamaLookaboobooday): First, a political statement, if I may. “Kill Kill Kill the White Man” by Eugene Mamalookaboobooday. Eugene is my pen name 'cause I wrote this while I was in the Pen. “Kill Kill Kill the white man. Kill him until he is dead. Kill the white man. Thank you.”

Station manager: You talk too much. And very important, I want the time and the temperature 4 times every 15 minutes, not 3…4.
Howard [on the air]: My grandmother died last night. I spent all night with her in the hospital. She…She had a car accident. Her head went right through the windshield. By the way, uh…It’s 6:45 and the temperature is, uh, 58 degrees.

Howard [voiceover]: Isn’t Alison amazing? She’s in town, like, 2 minutes, and already she’s got a job working with a bunch of wackos…Excuse me. Mentally challenged.

Howard [on the air after the station switches to county music format]: Howdy, cowpokes. Uh, I know I shouldn’t be interrupting in the middle of a song, but I got to tell you something. I know a lot of you out there really love this music, but I just don’t get it. Explain it to me. And maybe it’s 'cause I went to college, and I never drove a truck and had sex with my daddy’s sister, but… I guess what I’m trying to say is, I…I don’t think I’m the man for this job. So this is your old pal Hopalong Howie saying I quit.

Howard: I feel like such a loser…I don’t want to be one of these disc jockeys that runs around the country, you know, looking for work all the time. I don’t want to end up like that. It’s so sad. It’s so apparent to me now what I should be doing. I should be talking about my personal life. I’ve got to get intimate. And every time I feel like I shouldn’t say something, maybe I should just say it, just blurt it out, you know? I just got to let things fly. I got to go all the way.
Allison: You didn’t go all the way before?

Station manager: Did he just say “penis”?

Howard: But this guy wrote a good book. The author has slept with over 16,000 women, and, uh, take it from him. He says wear tight pants.
Robin: If he slept with over 16,000 women, he wouldn’t have time to put on pants.

Station manager: This just came from the FCC. Did you say “testicles” on the air?

Howard [reading Mad Magazine]: Allison, I’m in the middle of important show research.

Dee Dee: A woman had an orgasm on the air!

Howard [of Fred]: This guy is total personality. He’s electric.

Howard: Lesbians equals ratings.

Kenny [Pig Vomit]: Uh, Mr. Erlick, if I may? Put me in charge of the Stern show. Let me ride herd on him, and I’ll mold that son of a bitch into another Don Imus. When I’m through whipping him, that boy will be asking permission to wipe his ass.

Pig Vomit: You goddamn motherfuckers. You fucking waltz in here, and you think you know everything, don’t you? Well, I fucking worked my fucking ass off to get to New York City, and you sure as fuck are not gonna fucking blow it for me!
Howard: I was just doing character…
Pig Vomit: Barry, Jerry, clarify the situation for him, please.
Lawyer (Barry): Page 108, paragraph 3, No jokes involving flatulence, excretion, urination, ejaculation, or other bodily functions.
Lawyer (Jerry): Also, no use of the seven so-called seven dirty words. These are cocksucker, mother-fucker, fuck, shit, cunt, cock, and pussy.

Howard [as the Match Game host]: Our first clue up is…blank willow. Blank willow. Let’s go over to Miss Brett Somers right now. Now, Brett, what did you have for us? Blank willow.
Robin [as Brett]: The only thing on my mind, Gene, was pussy.
Howard: Uh-oh. Pussy. Hey, all right. Hey, that’s kind of wild. Pussy willow, that’s what I would have said. All right, let’s go over to Dick Nixon, former president of the United States. What did you have? Blank willow.
Fred [as Nixon]: In any language, pussy.
Howard: All right! Now let’s go to our newest member of the panel, Mr. Jackie “Jokeman” Martling. Blank willow.
Jackie: Well, Gene, I didn’t write it too neat, so I have a sloppy pussy.
Howard: Sloppy pussy! We had a sloppy and a fuzzy pussy and a very big one. All right, now, let’s keep going. Now it’s gonna get a little rougher, OK? Everybody ready? Blank a-doodle-doo. Blank a-doodle-doo. Blank a-doodle-doo. Think about that while the celebrities are writing. Here we are. Let’s go over to our Dick Nixon, our own ex-president. What do you got there, Dick? Well, it takes a Dick to know a cock, and that’s what I wrote. Cock-a-doodle-doo.
Howard: Now, that’s what I would have said. That seemed like the obvious answer. OK, let’s go to our own Jackie “The Jokeman” Martling. Jackie The Jokeman?
Jackie: My answer is “cock”, and I wrote it really big, so I have a “big cock!”
Howard: I’m afraid you can’t say “big cock” on the air. That’s a no-no.
Robin: But I just said “pussy”.
Jackie [whining]: Yeah, she just said pussy!
Howard: Well, pussy’s okay. It’s the way you say it. “Big cock” coming out of your mouth is, just not good.
Jackie: Wait a minute. I can’t say “big cock”, but you can say “big cock coming out of your mouth?”
Howard: That’s right.
Jackie: That sucks!
[Pig Vomit, very pissed off, starts running for the studio]
Fred Norris: [as Richard Nixon] Did you just say “big cock coming out of your mouth that sucks”?
Howard: So Brett, what did you write down?
Robin Quivers: [as Brett Summers] Just like the boys, Gene. I’ve got “cock”.
Howard: Do me a favor. Hold that up for a second so I can see your “cock”.

Pig Vomit: You’re the anti-Christ. You know that, Stern?
[shouts]
Pig Vomit: YOU ARE THE MOTHER-FUCKING ANTI-CHRIST!!

Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for - are you ready for this? - an hour and twenty minutes.
Pig Vomit: How can that be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given? “I want to see what he’ll say next.”
Pig Vomit: Okay, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Pig Vomit: But… if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer? “I want to see what he’ll say next.”

Gloria: You know, I have to admit that I’m really not a very big fan of yours, but, in fact, l…
Howard: I know. You thought I was a disgusting, sexist, racist pig who had the maturity level of a -year-old, right?
Gloria: Yeah, exactly.

Pig Vomit [last lines - Pig Vomit speaks to the camera as road construction happens off-screen]: I bear no grudge against Howard Stern. He’s been very successful, and God bless him. God bless him. But I’ll tell something; I ain’t done too badly, myself. Uh, I manage a shopping mall down in Florence, Alabama. Yeah, it’s the number one mall in Colbert County. It’s number four in the state, so it’s not too bad, you know? Uh, I play golf several times a week, you know? But I’ll tell ya, if Howard woulda listened to me, I’d still be up there in radio. Still be doin’ radio, you know… How ‘bout that? That goddamn motherfucker, you know. I tried every
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: thing I could
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: think of, mold him into a proper kind of deejay, but that goddamn son-of-a-bitch
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: I’ll tell you, Howard Stern, man! That motherfuckin’…
[extended jackhammer and siren]
Pig Vomit: ! And I’ll say that with no shame, either! Man’s a
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: ! Foul-mouthed, immature… The man’s immature, you know? He’s like a
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: child. I’ll tell ya this much: There ain’t no God while Howard Stern’s walking the Earth, I’ll tell you that.
[jackhammer]
Pig Vomit: I gotta go.
[He walks away. To a passerby]
Pig Vomit: How 'bout that? Howard Stern, huh?
[to the camera]
Pig Vomit: Howard Stern can kiss my ass in hell!
[sustained jackhammer as Pig Vomit exits the frame][/b]

There was a game we played in elementary school. We’d sit in the circle and the teacher would whisper a story into the ear of the kid next to her. That kid would whisper it into the ear of the kid next to him. And on and on around the circle until, by the last kid, what was finally said aloud often bore little resemblance to the original story.

Same thing here perhaps. In the oral tradition of aboriginal tribes, “legends” were passed down over the centuries. But you can’t help but wonder about the gap between what happened originally and what is now said to have happened instead.

Sadly, the director chose to tack on an ending basically at odds with the actual legend itself.

The legend this film is based on ends with the hero killing the brothers who have been tormenting him. Paul Apaq, the writer, rewrote the legend because he felt that a message of hope was needed. IMDb

This is a whole other world. A world where “survival of the fittest” is about the only thing that makes sense. And for Atanarjuat at times it’s bare survival.

But it’s not really hard to recognize ourselves in it. It’s just that the individual here is far, far more integrated into the social narrative. And, men being men, the political narratives too. There are simply no alternative “lifestyles” from which they can compare their own.

So, what does it tell us about our own lives? What have we evolved from or devolved into instead? Well, for one thing, not many nihilists here.

Bottom line though is that much of the sexual shenanigans could have taken place here and now. It’s like watching a soap opera at times. And where there are men there are going to be treacherous sons-of-bitches.

IMDb

While this film would never get SPCA approval, every animal killed was used in true Inuit fashion; all the meat was consumed, and the skins were put to practical use.

At wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanarjuat … ast_Runner

trailer: youtu.be/u30kkn3FUHo

ATANARJUAT: THE FAST RUNNER [2001]
Directed by Zacharias Kunuk

They can’t go on, they’ll go on.

The old world and the new world can produce very different people. But the capitalists won and, for some, that is harder to endure than for others.

Reminds you of Goodbye Lenin!: creating a fantasy world in order to spare the feelings of one who is old and entrenched in the past. Both films came out the same year.

Here Communism is on the way out but capitalism is scrawny. And crooked. Money has long since replaced “one for all and all for one” and here the “ordinary folks” often struggle to subsist from day to day.

Still, they have their good times…and each other. But: For better and for worse.

We all become enscounced in a family dynamic we can only understand from one point of view. Yet somehow we have to figure out a way to integrate them all together. Or just walk away. If we can.

Why should we even care though? And, less and less, some don’t. Life can be cruel. What else is new.

trailer: youtu.be/B082aEXxk4k

SINCE OTAR LEFT [Depuis qu’Otar Est Parti] 2003
Written and directed by Julie Bertuccelli

[b]Marina [hanging up the phone]: I got cut off. Stalinist!
Eka: If being a Stalinist means being honest, patriotic, altruistic…then I’m a Stalinist! And proud of it too! Stalin was a great man.
Marina: A great man! He was a murderer!
Ada: Stop it, we don’t give a damn about Stalin!
Eka: Stalin never ordered anyone’s death. I can prove it.
[the electricity goes off—again]
Eka: Stalin would have sorted out this mess!

Marina [reading of Otar’s death in France]: “Our consulate in Paris has sent the following details. On June 11th Otar Goguebachvili was found at the foot of a scaffold. The French police say he fell from the fifth floor. He died from his wounds on the way to the hospital. The foreman is facing charges because your brother did not have a work visa. The building company denies having hired him. We confirm that your brother’s body has been provisionally buried free of charge in the concession for the poor in the Thiais Cemetary in Paris.”[/b]

Another one bites the dust. Another one takes his place.

[b]Eka [after Ada reads Otar’s “letter”]: Things can’t be all that easy for him. This time he hasn’t sent a bean.

Marina [in the shower when the water shuts off]: Life’s impossible in this fucking country!

Ada: Where’s the money from?
Marina: I won the lottery.[/b]

Then Niko shows up.

[b]Ada [to Marina]: I hate living with the dead…but I hate plundering them even more.

Ada [to Marina]: It’s over, that’s enough. I won’t do it anymore. I’m fed up with lying. You’ll do anything to please your Mum. For her to look at you differently. For her to love you a little more than Otar. That’s why you refuse his death, to continue competing. Because if he dies she’ll make a saint of him and you’ll cease to exist. But it has nothing to do with me. It isn’t my problem, it’s yours. Your fears, doubts, worries…sort them out yourself!

Tengiz [trying to explain Marina to Ada]: Don’t blame your mother. Our whole generation’s like that. We failed at everything. We’ve lived a lie our whole lives, without questioning it, since we were children, without realizing it, believing it was happiness.[/b]

And so, tacitly, they all come to share the same lie. They fall back on each other’s good intentions. Is this for the best? Or, more to the point, perhaps: does it work?

Baseball? Moneyball.

Like most everything else that capitalism touches [for better or for worse] it has become a commodity by and large. It is something to make money off of. That doesn’t stop a lot of the players and the fans from loving it for other reasons, of course. Just don’t lose sight of the bottom line. And part and parcel of that is this: the ballplayers themselves become mere commodities. Really, they are traded back and forth here like baseball cards.

But the beauty of any sport is how deeply embedded it is in the world of either/or. Either you win or you lose. Either you are good at it or you are not.

And there are almost always clearly defined rules for every aspect of it.

Not like other parts of our life at all.

But what happens if it becomes less and less fun to play because it becomes more and more about the science of statistics? Everything becomes increasingly more calculated…calibrated. The computer takes over. The “soul” of the game is lost. Or so some insist.

IMDb

[b]Of all the Oakland players from the season represented in the movie (2002), only one played for Oakland in the season that the movie premiered (2011): Mark Ellis (and he was traded away in the middle of the season).

The A’s won the AL west again in 2012 with the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball and a record setting 54 wins by rookie pitchers. The season has been informally called “Moneyball 2” by fans and the press.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film

MONEYBALL [2011]
Directed by Bennett Miller

[b]Title card: “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.” Mickey Mantle

Billy: The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. And now we’ve been gutted. We’re like organ donors for the rich. Boston’s taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old “good body” nonsense like we’re selling jeans. Like we’re looking for Fabio. We’ve got to think differently. We are the last dog at the bowl. You see what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies.

Peter: There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. And this leads people who run Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.
Billy: Go on.
Peter: Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who’s worth seven and half million dollars a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is…is…an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy’s got a great glove. He’s a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases. But is he worth the seven and half million dollars a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No. No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. And if I say it to anybody, I’m-I’m ostracized. I’m-I’m-I’m a leper. So that’s why I’m-I’m cagey about this with you. That’s why I… I respect you, Mr. Beane, and if you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing that you got Damon off your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Billy: Where you from, Pete?
Peter: Maryland.
Billy: Where’d you go to school?
Peter: Yale. I went to Yale.
Billy: What’d you study?
Peter: Economics. I studied economics.
Billy: Yale, economics, and baseball. You’re funny, Pete.

Billy: Pack your bags Pete, I just bought you from the Cleveland Indians.

Peter: It’s about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that no one else can see. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cut straight through that. Billy, of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe that there is a championship team of twenty-five people that we can afford, because everyone else in baseball undervalues them.

Peter: Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He’s a relief pitcher. He is one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him because he looks funny. This guy could be not just the best pitcher in our bullpen, but one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball. This guy should cost $3 million a year. We can get him for $237,000.

Billy: He gets on base a lot. Do I care if it’s a walk or a hit?

Scott Hatteberg: I’ve only ever played catcher.
Billy: It’s not that hard, Scott. Tell him, Wash.
Ron Washington: It’s incredibly hard.

Grady: Baseball and its fans will be more than happy to throw you and Goggle Boy under the bus if you keep doing what you’re doing. You don’t put a team together with a computer.
Billy: No?
Grady: No. Baseball isn’t just numbers. It’s not science. If it was, anybody could do what we’re doing but they can’t. You got a kid in there that’s got a degree in economics from Yale. You got a scout here with 29 years of baseball experience. You’re listening to the wrong one. There are intangibles that only baseball people understand.

Grady: Major League Baseball thinks the way I think. You’re not gonna win. And I’ll give you a nickel’s worth of free advice. You’re never going to get another job when Schott fires you after this catastrophic season you’re setting us all up for. And then you’re gonna have to explain to your kid why you’re working at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Billy: I’m not gonna fire you, Grady.
Grady: Fuck you, Billy.
Billy: Now I will.

Radio host: We’ve got Grady Fuson, former head of scouting for the Athletics. Grady, can you interpret for us what is going on?
Grady: They call it Moneyball.
Host: Moneyball?
Grady: Yes, and it was a nice theory, and now it’s just not working out.
Commentator: Billy Bean has build this team on the ideas of a guy, Bill James, who wrote an interesting book on baseball statistics. The problem is that Bill James never played, never managed. He was in fact a security guard at a pork-and-beans company.

Billy: Would you rather get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?
Peter: Are those my only two options?

Billy [to himself—with the team in last place]: What the hell am I doing?

Billy [to Peter]: When you get the answer you’re looking for you hang up.

Billy: Art, you got a minute?
Art: Yeah. Take a seat.
Billy: You can’t start Peña at first tonight. You’ll have to start Hatteberg.
Art: Yeah, I don’t want to go fifteen rounds, Billy. The lineup card is mine, and that’s all.
Billy: That lineup card is definitely yours. I’m just saying you can’t start Peña at first.
Art: Well, I am starting him at first.
Billy: I don’t think so. He plays for Detroit now.

David Justice: How you likin’ first base, man?
Scott Hatteberg: It’s, uh… it’s coming along. Picking it up. You know, tough transition, but I’m starting to feel better with it.
David Justice: Yeah?
Scott Hatteberg: Yeah.
David Justice: What’s your biggest fear?
Scott Hatteberg: A baseball being hit in my general direction
[Hatteberg and Justice share a laugh]
David Justice: That’s funny. Seriously, what is it?
Scott Hatteberg: No, seriously, that is.
[uncomfortable pause; Hatteberg leaves]
David Justice: Well, hey, good luck with that.

Billy: I hate losing even more than I wanna win. And there’s a difference.

Billy: When your enemy is making mistakes, don’t interrupt him.

Billy: It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it’s fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs. Doesn’t mean anything.
Peter: Billy, we just won twenty games in a row.
Billy: And what’s the point?
Peter: We just got the record.
Billy: Man, I’ve been doing this for… listen, man. I’ve been in this game a long time. I’m not in it for a record, I’ll tell you that. I’m not in it for a ring. That’s when people get hurt. If we don’t win the last game of the Series, they’ll dismiss us.
Peter: Billy…
Billy: I know these guys. I know the way they think, and they will erase us. And everything we’ve done here, none of it’ll matter. Any other team wins the World Series, good for them. They’re drinking champagne, they get a ring. But if we win, on our budget, with this team… we’ll have changed the game. And that’s what I want. I want it to mean something.

John Henry: For forty-one million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Pena and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and you paid two hundred and sixty thousand. I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It’s the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. But really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods, it’s threatening their jobs, it’s threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy. I mean, anybody who’s not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October, watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.[/b]

When it comes to man’s inhumanity to man this is barely a blip on the screen. And those who pop up here have nothing but the best of intentions spurring them on. Just ask them.

Racism. It is so pervasive [over the course of human history] some argue it must somehow be programed into our genes.
But so much of it is rooted in turn in class. In ignorance. In scape-goating. In the politics of race-baiting.

Like this for example: youtu.be/DtrC3rMP1lQ

And, needless to say, Christianity is everywhere here.

But then some will note: “Well, maybe taking them the way they did is wrong…but aren’t they really better off in the ‘modern world’”? And in some contexts this can surely be a considerably more complex state of affairs than in others.

This is truly a remarkable story. We are talking about three little girls [the oldest 14] making a 1,500 mile journey into the Australian outback. All to get home.

IMDb

[b]The world premiere of this film was held in an outdoor screening at Jigalong, the outback community where the girls were taken from, and where their families still live.

Everlyn Sampi, (Molly Craig), ran away twice during filming. In one instance, she was found in a phone booth, trying to buy tickets back to Broome.

The last scene in the movie, which shows the real-life Molly Craig walking with a walking stick, was shot first. According to Phillip Noyce, during an interview after a screening, Molly’s age and health made it so that it would be best if that scene was shot first.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit-Proof_Fence_(film

trailer: youtu.be/rB-jkydqADg

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE [2002]
Directed: Phillip Noyce

[b]Title Card: Western Australia 1931. For 100 years the Aboriginal Peoples have resisted the invasion of their lands by white settlers. Now, a special law, the Aborigines Act, controls their lives in every detail. Mr. A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, is the legal guardian of every Aborigine in the State of Western Australia. He has the power “to remove any half-caste child” from their family, from anywhere within the state.

Molly [voice over, in native language]: This is a true story - story of my sister Daisy, my cousin Gracie and me when we were little. Our people, the Jigalong mob, we were desert people then, walking all over our land. My mum told me about how the white people came to our country. They made a storehouse here at Jigalong - brought clothes and other things - flour, tobacco, tea. Gave them to us on ration day. We came there, made a camp nearby. They were building a long fence.

A.O. Neville: Er, now, this report from Constable Riggs about three little half-caste girls at the Jigalong fence depot - Molly, Gracie and Daisy. The youngest is of particular concern. She is promised to a full-blood. I’m authorising their removal. They’re to be taken to Moore River as soon as possible.

A.O. Neville: As you know, every Aborigine born in this State comes under my control. Notice, if you will, the half-caste child. And there are ever-increasing numbers of them. Now, what is to happen to them? Are we to allow the creation of an unwanted third race? Should coloureds be encouraged to go back to the black? Or should they be advanced to white status and be absorbed in the white population?

A.O. Neville: Now, time and again, I’m asked by some white man, "If I marry this coloured person, “will our children be black?” And as Chief Protector of Aborigines, it is my responsibility to accept or reject those marriages. Here is the answer. Three generations. Half-blood grandmother. Quadroon daughter. Octoroon grandson. Now, as you can see, in the third generation, or third cross, no trace of native origin is apparent. The continuing infiltration of white blood finally stamps out the black colour. The Aboriginal has simply been bred out.

Nina, Dormitory Boss [to Molly, Daisy and Gracie on their first morning at Moore River]: What’s your name? Where you from?
[they don’t answer]
Nina: You’ll get used to it.

Gracie [in native language to her cousins]: New clothes!
Miss Jessop [in English]: This is your new home. We don’t use that jabber here. You speak English.

Molly [to herself about everybody in Moore River] These people…make me sick! They make me sick.

Molly: We’re hungry.
Woman: Are youse that lot from Moore River?
Molly: Yeah.
Woman: What - you girls walk all that way?
Molly: Yeah.
Woman: 800 miles? I was there. Too scared to run away, but. Everyone was always caught, stuck in that boob. Youse got the furtherest. Where you heading?
Molly: Home.

Moodoo [tracker]: Pretty clever, this girl. She wants to go home.

Man: Good thing you kids ran into me. A lot of people worried for you. The police are up and down the country looking for youse. It’s in all the papers.

Molly [to Grandmother]: I lost one…I lost one.

A.O. Neville [dictating a letter]: To Constable Riggs, Police Station, Nullagine. At present, we lack the funds to pursue the missing half-caste girls, Molly and Daisy. I would ask to be kept informed of their whereabouts, so that at some future date, they may indeed be…recovered. We face an uphill battle with these people…especially the bush natives, who have to be protected against themselves. If they would only understand what we are trying to do for them.

Molly [voiceover as an old woman in the present day]: We walked for nine weeks, a long way, all the way home. Then we went straightaway and hid in the desert. Got married. I had two baby girls. Then they took me and my kids back to that place, Moore River. And I walked all the way back to Jigalong again. carrying Annabelle the little one. When she was 3, that Mr. Neville took her away. I’ve never seen her again.

Molly [voiceover]: Gracie is dead now. She never made it back to Jigalong. Daisy and me, we’re here living in our country, Jigalong. We’re never going back to that place.

Title card: Mr Neville was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia for 25 years. He retired in 1940. Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families throughout Australia until 1970. Today many of these Aboriginal people continue to suffer from this destruction of identity, family life and culture. We call them the Stolen Generations.[/b]

The age of innocence? Isn’t that the age before ironism?

Hmm. Is there an age after it?

Inncocence here being a proper place for everything and everything being in its proper place. And then extending that iron clad truth to people.

And given the way in which people actually are what could possibly be more ironic?

It’s not that ironists did not exist back then, but that they had to keep it all well hidden. After all, among the gentry a faux paux was not to be taken lightly.

But in a sense these people really were innocent in that it would never even occur to them the world could be understood in any other way.

In large part this revolves around conflicting notions of human freedom: is it aimed more outward or inward? Is someone completely at home in a particular world more or less free than another who flits about more ambiguously in several?

They are both gorgeous but once together how long would the passion last? How different was it really back then? And in being gorgeous many others would go after them, right?

Bottom line: Is he an honorable man…or a coward?

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE [1993]
Directed by Martin Scorsese

[b]Narrator: Carriages waited at the curb for the entire performance. It was widely known in New York, but never acknowledged, that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Narrator: The Beauforts’ house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ballroom. Such a room, shuttered in darkness three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past. Regina Beaufort came from an old South Carolina family, but her husband Julius, who passed for an Englishman, was known to have dissipated habits, a bitter tongue and mysterious antecedents. His marriage assured him a social position, but not necessarily respect.

Narrator: But only by actually passing through the crimson drawing room could one see “Return of Spring,” the much-discussed nude by Bougeureau, which Beaufort had had the audacity to hang in plain sight. Archer enjoyed such challenges to convention. He questioned conformity in private but in public he upheld family and tradition. This was a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper.

Narrator: On the whole, Lawrence Lefferts was the foremost authority on “form” in New York. On the question of pumps versus patent- leather Oxfords, his authority had never been disputed.

Mrs. Archer: Poor Ellen. We must always remember what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her. What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?

Narrator: They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world. The real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. These signs were not always subtle, and all the more significant for that. The refusals were more than a simple snubbing. They were an eradication.

Ellen: Can I tell you, though what most interests me about New York? It’s that nothing has to be traditional here. All this blind obeying of tradition. . . somebody else’s tradition. . . is thoroughly needless. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it a copy of another country. Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the opera with Larry Lefferts?
Newland: I think if he knew Lefferts was here the Santa Maria would never have left port.

Ellen: Is fashion such a serious consideration?
Newland: Among those who have nothing more serious to consider.

Newland: What could you possibly gain that would make up for the scandal.
Ellen: My freedom?

Ellen [to Newland]: Do you think her lover will send her a box of yellow roses tomorrow morning?

Narrator: He could feel May dropping back to inexpressive girlishness. Her conscience had been eased of its burden. It was wonderful, he thought, how such depths of feeling could co-exist with such an absense of imagination.

Ellen: Newland. You couldn’t be happy if it meant being cruel. If we act any other way I’ll be making you act against what I love in you most. And I can’t go back to that way of thinking. Don’t you see? I can’t love you unless I give you up.

Narrator: Archer had gradually reverted to his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with tradition. There was no use trying to emancipate a wife who hadn’t the dimmest notion that she was not free.

Newland: We had an awfully good talk. Interesting fellow. We talked about books and things. I asked him to dinner.
May: The Frenchman? I didn’t have much chance to talk to him, but wasn’t he a little common? Newland: Common? I thought he was clever.
May: I suppose I shouldn’t have known if he was clever.
Newland (quickly, resigned): Then I won’t ask him to dine.
Narrator: With a chill he knew that, in the future, many problems would be solved for him in this same way.

Narrator: The first six months of marriage were usually said to be the hardest, and after that, he thought, they would have pretty nearly finished polishing down all the rough edges. But May’s pressure was already wearing down the very roughness he most wanted to keep. As for the madness with Madame Olenska, Archer trained himself to remember it as the last of his discarded experiments. She remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

Mrs. Mingott: I gave up arguing with young people 50 years ago.

Newland: You gave me my first glimpse of a real life. Then you asked me to go on with the false one. No one can endure that.
Ellen: I’m enduring it.

Ellen: I think we should look at reality, not dreams.
Newland: I just want us to be together!
Ellen: I can’t be your wife, Newland! Is it your idea that I should live with you as your mistress?
Newland: I want… Somehow, I want to get away with you…and…and find a world where words like that don’t exist!
Ellen: Oh my dear…whare is that country? Have you ever been there? Is there anywhere we can be happy behind the backs of people who trust us?
Newland: I’m beyond caring about that.
Ellen: No, you’re not. You’ve never been beyond that. I have. I know what it looks like. A lie in every silence. It’s no place for us.

May: Newland! You’ll catch your death.
Newland: Catch my death. Of course.
Narrator: But then he realized, I am dead. I’ve been dead for months and months. Then it occurred to him that she might die. People did. Young people, healthy people, did. She might die, and set him free.

Narrator: Newland guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears. He understood that, somehow, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved. And he knew that now the whole tribe had rallied around his wife. He was a prisoner in the center of an armed camp.

Narrator: The silent organization which held this whole small world together was determined to put itself on record. It had never for a moment questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska’s conduct. It had never questioned Archer’s fidelity. And it had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, anything at all to the contrary. From the seamless performance of this ritual, Archer knew that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover. And he understood, for the first time, that his wife shared the belief.

Narrator: It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened. Their eldest boy, Theodore, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened there. It was here that Ted took his first steps. And it was here that Archer and his wife always discussed the future of all their children. Bill’s interest in archaeology. Mary’s passion for sport and philanthropy. Ted’s inclinations toward “art” that led to a job with an architect, as well as some considerable redecoration. It was in this room that Mary had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Larry Lefferts’ many sons. And it was in this room, too, that her father had kissed her through her wedding veil before they motored to Grace Church. He was a dutiful, loving father, and a faithful husband. When May died of infectious pneumonia after nursing Bill safely through, he had honestly mourned her. The world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever noticing. This hard bright blindness, her incapacity to recognize change, made her children conceal their views from her, just as Archer concealed his. She died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own. Newland Archer, in his fifty- seventh year, mourned his past and honored it.

Narrator: Whenever he thought of Ellen Olenska, it had been abstractly, serenely, like an imaginary loved one in a book or picture. She had become the complete vision of all that he had missed.

Ted [son]: The day before she died, she asked to see me alone, remember? She said she knew we were safe with you and always would be because once when she asked you to, you gave up the thing you wanted most.[/b]

This is the original. And it is better [in my opinion] than the Hollywood rendition above. But both are worth watching because the narrative delves into the very nature of identity and relationships out in a world able to jolt you into an entirely new frame of mind.

In my view, the mistake both films make is not putting the climactic scene from Afghanistan at the end of the movie. It would have been more dramatic because we [along with the characters on the screen] would grasp in an entirely different way the changes in Michael.

But no doubt about it: the events depicted in Afghanistan are far more powerful in this film than in Sheridan’s. You agonize more in imagining your own behavior.

This is one of the few films I believe should have been a lot longer. It would have been more gripping if more time had been taken to flesh out the relationship between the three main characters.

An examination of both films:

reuters.com/article/2009/11/ … O320091123
movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/mo … .html?_r=0

trailer: youtu.be/P5e2IM4QAMY

BROTHERS [Brødre] 2004
Written and directed by Susanne Bier

The ship is sinking. But not fast. Or [for some] not fast enough. Said to be a “metaphor” for post-revolutionary Iran, it can in fact be made applicable to many, many other contexts as well. An iron island in an iron world.

God and denomination. Ho-hum. They still rule the roost in many parts of the world. But out on a diplapidated oil tanker, moored a few hundred yards off the Iranian coast?

And the Captain. Is he more or less a benevolent despot?

And we still live in a world where it can be pointed out that these folks are some of the lucky ones.

That these people are struggling to survive from day to day on an abandoned oil tanker speaks volumes in and of itself. Given the relationship between God and oil in this part of the world.

trailer: youtu.be/3yoTgy3gDgI

IRON ISLAND [Jazireh Ahani] 2005
Written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

[b]Repeated line: God willing…

Teacher: The ship…
Students: The ship…
Teacher: …is in the sea.
Students: …is in the sea.
Teacher: The ship…
Students: The ship…
Teacher: …sinks more…
Students: …sinks more…
Teacher: …in the sea every day.
Students: …in the sea every day.

Captain [to Ahmad]: Say you’ve fucked up.

Teacher: Forgive him. Let him go. He is young.
Captin: If I let him go, there’ll be chaos on this ship.

Ahmad [after repeated dunkings in the sea]: I fucked up! I’m sorry Captain! For God’s sake! I fucked up! I fucked up![/b]

Keep them doped with religion…

The 25th hour is a whole other world. One almost all of us want to avoid.

Drug laws in America. Too draconian? Or not draconian enough? But Lee doesn’t show the side he does In Jungle Fever. Remember the Taj Mahal and Gator? Monty is the scumbag here in this regard. But, as always, it is the scumbags behind him that are the most frightening of all.

His other friend is hooked on Wall Street. And who then is the bigger threat to folks like us? The folks they’ll tell you really count.

Bottom line? In the end [or so it seems] fuck everyone. One way or another they all play a part in it. And [it goes without saying] DON’T TRUST NOBODY!

Not realistic at all for most folks but relationships like this are everywhere. And in the Big City they are often everywhere else too.

But [in the end] what are friends for if not to make you ugly before you go into the joint.

Look for 9/11. And [sigh] God.

trailer: youtu.be/z-WuU7w3FCk

25TH HOUR
Directed by Spike Lee

[b]Monty [putting abused dog in the trunk]: I’m trying to help you, you little prick!

Kostya: You’re bad luck, Monty. You bring bad luck on me. Always everything that can go wrong, go wrong. It is not just you and me anymore when we go out. It’s you and me and Doyle.
Monty: Who’s Doyle?
Kostya: Doyle! Doyle’s Law.
Monty: It’s Murphy.
Kostya: What? Who is Murphy? Who’s Murphy?
Monty: Who’s Doyle? It’s Murphy’s Law – “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
Kostya: Him! Yes.

Mary: I wanted to know why I got a B minus on my paper.
Jakob: You got what you earned.
Mary: Nobody else in that class can write! You know it! I know it! Everyone knows it!
Jakob: Don’t worry about anyone else. You’re not competing with them.
Mary: Yeah. But I am. Okay. I am competing with them. When you apply for college, you might have heard of this, they look at these things called grades and if your grades aren’t good enough…
Jakob: Your grades are going to be fine.
Mary: Vincent Phiscalla writes a story about his grandmother dying and you give him an A plus. And meanwhile, the night of the funeral, you wanna know where Rhodes Scholar Vince is? Getting smashed at a basketball party and slapping girls asses. I mean, what is that? A charity A+? You wanna know why everybody always writes about their grandmothers dying? It’s not because it’s so traumatic. It’s because it’s a guaranteed A+! And you sit there all sentimental “Oh, Vince it was very powerful, very moving.” No, it wasn’t. You didn’t care! I didn’t care! Nobody cared! That’s what grandmothers do. They die!

Phelan: Uhm, what’s the big deal with the unemployment number anyway?
Frank: Fellan…
Phelan: It’s, uh… Phelan.
Frank: Whatever, look…more jobs means fewer people looking for work, means it’s harder to find good people to fill those jobs, means you gotta raise wages to get them, means inflation goes up. You got it?
Phelan: Yeah.
Frank: No, I didn’t think so. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing and you’re handing out junk mail.

Naturelle: What do you want?
Monty: I want to be like that girl in the X-Men – that one that can walk through walls.

Agent Flood: Sh-e-e-e-it. Mr. Brogan, I do believe you’re fucked.

James [Pop]: This should never have happened. You could’ve been – you wanted money, you could’ve done anything you wanted – doctor, lawyer. That’s all I’m saying.
Monty: Don’t lay that on me. When Sal and his crew were squeezing you for the payments, I didn’t hear you wishing I was a law school student then. Not one word from you back then. Where’d you think that money was coming from – Donald Trump?

Monty [standing in the men’s bathroom, talking to himself in a mirror with “FUCK YOU!” written on it]: Yeah, fuck you, too. Fuck me? Fuck you. Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car - get a fucking job! Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped-up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35. Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin’ and dealin’ and schemin’. Go back where you fucking came from! Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds! Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for FUCKING LIFE! You think Bush and Cheney didn’t know about that shit? Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Worldcom! Fuck the Puerto Ricans. Twenty to a car, swelling up the welfare rolls, worst fuckin’ parade in the city. And don’t even get me started on the Dom-in-i-cans, ‘cause they make the Puerto Ricans look good. Fuck the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair, their nylon warm-up suits, their St. Anthony medallions, swinging their Jason Giambi Louisville Slugger baseball bats, trying to audition for “The Sopranos.” Fuck the Upper East Side wives with their Hermès scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes. Overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. You’re not fooling anybody, sweetheart! Fuck the uptown brothers. They never pass the ball, they don’t want to play defense, they take five steps on every lay-up to the hoop. And then they want to turn around and blame everything on the white man. Slavery ended one hundred and thirty seven years ago. Move the fuck on! Fuck the corrupt cops with their anus-violating plungers and their 41 shots, standing behind a blue wall of silence. You betray our trust! Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child’s pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. And while you’re at it, fuck J.C.! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin’ Otisville, J.! Fuck Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and backward-ass cave-dwelling fundamentalist assholes everywhere. On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fuel fire in hell. You towel-headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal Irish ass! Fuck Jacob Elinsky. Whining malcontent. Fuck Francis Xavier Slaughtery my best friend, judging me while he stares at my girlfriend’s ass. Fuck Naturelle Riviera, I gave her my trust and she stabbed me in the back, sold me up the river, fucking bitch. Fuck my father with his endless grief, standing behind that bar sipping on club sodas, selling whisky to firemen, and cheering the Bronx Bombers. Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row-houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope to the split-levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.
[pause]
Monty: No. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all, and you threw it away, you dumb fuck!

Monty: …everything’s gotten so strange, Pop. I look at these people around me, and I’m thinking, “These are my friends? I don’t even know these people.” You know, and – and Naturelle, even. Do I – do I really know her?

Jakob [staring down at the 9/11 construction]: Yeah, The New York Times says the air’s bad down here.
Frank: Oh, yeah? Well, fuck The Times. I read the Post. E.P.A. says it’s fine.
Jakob: Somebody’s lying.

Jakob: What do we say to him?
Frank: Don’t say nothing. He’s going to hell for seven years. What are you gonna do, wish him luck? Just get him drunk. Make sure he has one last good night.

Frank: Come on, Jake, don’t feed me that bullshit. Yeah, he got caught. But hello – Monty’s a fucking drug dealer. Shit. What, are you – you driving a vintage Super “B”? - No. He is. Yeah, paid for by the misery of other people. He got caught. He’s gonna get locked up. And I’ll tell you something else. You two are my best friends in the whole world, and I love him like a brother, but he fucking deserves it. He deserves it.

Agent Flood: You don’t read the papers much, do you smart guy? In New York? We’ve a wonderful thing called the Rockefeller laws. Let me educate you. You had a kilo in your sofa. That kind of weight makes it an A1 felony. 15 years to life minimum for a first offense. Now with that much spread in the sentencing guidelines, the judges take their cues from the prosecutors. So if the prosecutors wife busted his chops that morning, you’re fucked. You’re gone for good. If you get lucky? Really lucky? And let’s say he got some good trim the night before. Maybe he’ll plea you off to an A2. But that’s still 3 to 8 for first time, minimum. How much of that stretch you pull is all up to the mood of the prosecutor. And he’s gonna ask us, “Did he play ball?” So, why don’t you tell us about your friend, Nikolai? Let us make it easy on you.
Monty: [to Agent Cunningham] Can I ask you one question?
Agent Cunningham: Sure.
Monty: When you have your dick in his mouth, does he just keep talking like that? Cause it seems to me he just never shuts up. I’m just curious does that get annoying? You know, you’re fucking a guy in the mouth and he just won’t shut up?
Agent Cunningham: Look here, you vanilla motherfucker. When you’re upstate, takin’ it in the culo by a buncha guys callin’ you Shirley, you’ll only have yourself and Governor Rockefeller to thank for the privilege.

Frank: You know what a man should never ask in a Victoria’s Secret shop, Jake?
Jakob: What?
Frank: “Does this come in children’s sizes?”

Monty: Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends.

Monty: I’m not gonna make it, Frank.
Frank: Yes, you will.
Monty: There’s a thousand guys up there who are harder than me. I mean, in a room, some junkie doesn’t want to pay me, and Kostya behind me, I’m pretty scary. Up there, I’m a skinny white boy with no friends.

Frank [to Naturelle]: Fucking last 10 years, I’ve been watching him get deeper and deeper in with these friends of his, these fucks who you wouldn’t want petting Doyle. And did I say, “Hey, careful, Monty, you better cool out, man”? I didn’t say shit. I just sat there and watched him ruin his life. And you did, too, all right? We both did. - We all did.

Naturelle: I told Monty he should quit a hundred times.
Frank: Did you? Was that before or after you moved into his apartment?
Naturelle: Of all nights, please not tonight. Just don’t start.
Frank: Who paid for the apartment? Who paid for the Cartier diamond earrings… this silver dress you’re wearing? Paid in full by the addictions of other people.

Monty [to Frank]: I need you to make me ugly.[/b]

It’s not your America, it’s not my America, it’s their America. And that will make all the difference in the world. America is a frame of mind rooted in a particular set of experiences unfolding at a particular moment in time.

In other words, before it’s all those things that some of us will insist it is instead.

The rest is politics. Which is to say, why should hard working families ever have to live like this in the richest country on earth? And in that regard, those who “run things” here will always be scum to me. But, then again, that’s my America.

Imagine raising your own kids in “the dope addict building”.

Life is hard. But this film, in being based in large part on the director’s own life, shows lots of different ways to make it less so. But nothing ever makes it easy.

And always the same wrenching decision for some: With or without God?

Do you believe in miracles?

[nope]

trailer: youtu.be/CK4sLTF0MPA

IN AMERICA [2002]
Written and directed by Jim Sheridan

[b]Christy [voiceover]: There’s some things you should wish for and some things you shouldn’t. That’s what my little brother Frankie told me. He told me I only had three wishes, and I looked into his eyes, and I don’t know why I believed him.

Immigration Officer: How many children do you have?
Johnny: Three.
Sarah: Two.
Johnny: Two.
Immigration Officer: Says three here.
Johnny: We lost one.

Christy [voiceover]: We heard Manhattan before we ever saw it, a thousand strange voices coming from everywhere. And you’re not going to believe this, but we had to go under the water to get to the city. And we lost contact with everything; it was like we were on another planet.

Ariel: Cool!
Christy: Cool? Where’d you hear that?
Ariel: I don’t know, I just heard it.
Christy: Ugh, you’re already American, it’s disgusting![/b]

Hear, hear!

[b]Johnny: It’s a bit of a hole.

Christy [voiceover]:And then summer came, and with it the heat. And a new word; humidity.

Johnny: Give me the rent money.

Christy [voiceover]: Ariel was worried about a blind man called José.
Ariel: Christy, why can’t José see?
Christy: It’s not “José, can you see”, it’s “Oh say, can you see”.

Johnny: Why would youse wanna be the same as everybody else?
Ariel: 'Cause everybody else goes trick-or-treating.
Sarah: What’s that?
Ariel: It’s what they do here for Halloween.
Johnny: What do you mean? Like, help the Halloween party?
Christy: No. Not help the Halloween party. You don’t ask for help in America. You demand it. Trick-or-treat- you don’t ask, you threaten.
Sarah: You can’t do that on our street.
Christy: Why not?
Sarah: Because you can’t threaten drug addicts and transvestites, that’s why.
Ariel: What are transvestites?
Christy: A man who dresses up as a woman.
Ariel: For Halloween?

Johnny: Do you want me to lie?
Sarah: You’re the only actor in the world who can’t lie, Johnny. Not even for the sake of your kids.
Johnny: What does that mean?
Sarah: If you can’t touch somebody you created, how can you create somebody that’ll touch anybody?
Johnny [bewildered]: What are you going on about?
Sarah: Acting, Johnny. And bringing something to life, it’s the same thing. That’s why you can’t get a job acting, Johnny, because you can’t feel anything.

Mateo: You don’t believe.
Johnny: In what? In God? I asked him a favor once. I asked him to take me instead of him. But he took both of us. And look what he put in my place.

Johnny: Do you wanna be me? Do you wanna be in my place?
Mateo: I wish.
Johnny: Are you in love with her? Are you in love with her?
Mateo: No. I’m in love with you. And I’m in love with your beautiful woman. And I’m in love with your kids. And I’m even in love with your unborn child. I’m even in love with your anger! I’m in love with anything that lives!
Johnny: You’re dying
[long pause]
Johnny: I’m sorry.

Mateo: What was Frankie like?
Johnny: A warrior.
Mateo: Maselu masela.
Johnny: What does that mean?
Mateo: A warrior who is not afraid to go to the other side.
Johnny: The other side of what?

Christy [voiceover]: My mom had to go into hospital, so I thought about using my third wish. But I had to be careful. If the baby came too soon, the baby might die, and if the baby came too late, my mom might die. You have to be careful what you wish for.

Johnny [to himself]: “To be or not to be.” Blah, blah, blah. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to stick me head in the damn oven and end it all.

Sarah: If the baby dies, just don’t wake me up.

Christy: What if I have it?
Johnny: Have what?
Christy: Mateo’s disease.
Johnny: That’s not possible, Christy?
Christy: How do you know that?
Johnny: God won’t let that happen to you.
Christy: You don’t believe in God.

Ariel: I’m scared.
Johnny: Don’t be scared.
Ariel: Everyone’s dying.

Johnny: Are you okay little girl?
Christy: Don’t “little girl” me. I’ve been carrying this family on my back for over a year, ever since Frankie died. He was my brother too. It’s not my fault that he’s dead. It’s not my fault that I’m still alive.
Johnny: Ah, Christy.
Christy: Mom was always crying because he was her son. But he was my brother too. I cried too…when no one was looking. I talked to him every night.
Ariel: She did, Dad.
Christy: I talked to him every night, until…
Johnny: …until when?
Christy: Until I realized I was talking to myself.

Christy [voiceover]: It was as hard for Frankie to smile when the tumor was malignant as it was for my dad to cry after. But they both managed it. I’m going to switch this off now. It’s not the way I want to see Frankie any more. Do you still have a picture of me in your head? Well, that’s like the picture I want to have of Frankie. One that you can keep in your head forever. So when you go back to reality, I’ll ask Frankie to please, please let me go.[/b]

First of all, a pet peeve of mine. Call it the Jeopardy Syndrome. When someone accummulates an extraordinary amount of knowledge about many vast and varied things we call her “smart”. Someone who solves the New York Times crossword puzzle the fastest. Someone who wins tons of money on Who Wants To be A Millionaire. They know lots and lots and lots of facts about the world around us. Or they have a phenomenal memory.

But what does this sort of knowledge have to do with figuring out things like, say, “why do millions of people still live in festering slums like the one protrayed here—and throughout the entire Third World?” Let alone in proposing possible solutions to rid the world of them.

As for the movie itself…it’s a fairy-tale. A preposterous fairy-tale probably. The same people who believe in it believe they can go on the show, become a millionaire and then live happily ever after. The whole point of movies like this may well be that all the other slum dwellers can live through them vicariously. A brief respite from the reality of their actual lives.

[See the wiki article below for all of the controversies surrounding the film. And the politics]

IMDb

[b]Mercedes-Benz asked that its logos be removed in scenes taking place in the slums. The company, according to Danny Boyle, did not want to be associated with the poverty-stricken area, fearing that that might taint its image.

As of 2010, this and Schindler’s List are the only films to win Best Picture, Director and Screenplay at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and the Oscars.

Local Indian authorities decided to step in and move the children and their families from slums to new houses.[/b]

IMDb FAQs: imdb.com/title/tt1010048/faq?ref_=tt_faq_sm
wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controvers … illionaire

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE [2008]
Directed by Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan

Title Card: Jamal Malik is one question away from 20 million rupees. How did he do it?
A: He cheated
B: He’s lucky
C: He’s a genius
D: It is written

He’s incredibly lucky! Most of the questions just happen to coincide with events in his life that would allow him to know the answer. It’s called a script. It is written [in other words] in advance.

[b]Interrogator: A little electricity will loosen his tongue. Give him.
Srinivas: Yes sir:
Interrogator [to Jamal who has been tortured and is now hanging from the ceiling]: Okay. So, were you wired up? Mobile or pager? A coughing accomplice in the audience…or a microchip under the skin? Why don’t you save us both a lot of time and tell me how you cheated.

Srinivas: What if he knows the answers?
Police Inspector [whispering to him]: Doctors… Lawyers… never get past 60 thousand rupees. He’s won 10 million.
[pause]
Police Inspector: What the hell can a slumdog possibly know?
Jamal [quietly]: The answers.
[spits out blood]
Jamal [quietly and gently]: I knew the answers.

The mob [shouting]: THEY’RE MUSLIMS, GET THEM!

Jamal: If it wasn’t for Rama and Allah, I would still have a mother.

Prem Kumar: If I were you, Jamal, I’d take the 16,000 rupees and run. You will never get the next one.

Police Inspector: What happened to the girl, they blinded her too?
Jamal: They had other plans for her. It took me a long time to find out.

Jamal [to an American tourist couple after being beaten by a cop]: You wanted to see a bit of the real India?
[then angrily to the cop]
Jamal: Well, here it is!

Jamal: I just need Maman to like my singing, and we’re in the money, big money Latika.
Latika: And then what? Can we stop begging?
Jamal: Begging? Are you kidding? We’ll live in a big house on Harbour Road. You, me and Salim, the three musketeers.
Latika: Harbour Road? Really?
Jamal: Yes, in the moonlight. You and me. You’ll dance with me won’t you?
[dances]
Latika [laughs]: I hope you sing better than you dance.

Salim [holding a gun]: Maman never forgets, isn’t that right?
Maman: Oh, Maman can make an exception, huh?
Salim [pulling the trigger]: I can’t take that risk, Maman. Sorry.

Javed: My enemy’s enemy is a friend.

Salim: Shut up! The man with the Colt 45 says shut up!

Police Inspector: Well, well. The Slumdog barks.

Prem Kumar: Its getting hot in here.
Jamal: Are you nervous?
Prem Kumar [after audience laughs]: What? Am I nervous ? It’s you who’s in the hot seat, my friend!

Salim: I left a message for you at work.
Jamal: There was no message.
Salim: I definitely left a mess…
Jamal: There was no message! There was no message! THERE WAS NO MESSAGE!
[looks down at Salim starting to cry a little]
Jamal: I will never forgive you!
Salim [more to himself]: I know.

Salim: That… used to be our slum. Can you believe that, huh?
[pointing]
Salim: We used to live right there, man. Now, it’s all business. India is at the center of the world now, bhai. And I…I am at the center…of the center. This is all Javed bhai’s.
Jamal: Javed Khan…the gangster from our slum? You work for him?
Salim: Come on, who else do you think would save us from Maman’s guys, huh?
Jamal: What do you do for him?
Salim: Anything he asks.
[pause as Salim’s phone rings]
Salim: He’s coming. You need to go now. Take my card.
Jamal: What for?
Salim: You think I’m gonna let you out of my sights again, huh? You stay with me now, younger brother. Now, go. My place.
Jamal: Salim, where is Latika?
Salim: Still…? She’s gone, brother. Long gone. Now, go. Go to my place.

Jamal: I love you.
Latika: So what?

Prem Kumar: Final question for twenty million rupees, and he’s smiling. I guess you know the answer.
Jamal: Do you believe it, I don’t.
Prem Kumar: You don’t? So you take the ten million and walk?
Jamal: No. I’ll play.[/b]

In the corporate media there are lines the “news division” can go up to and tip-toe around. And 60 Minutes will dance around it with the best of them.

But there are some topics – crony capitalism in the corporate media, the nature of American foreign policy, the military industrial complex – which are still largely taboo. They always remain in the shadows. Even folks like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Ed Schultz etc. either play the game here, are co-opted or get bounced.

On the other hand, the tobacco industry is an easy target for liberals in the mainstream media. For one thing, they are not advertized on TV anymore.

But what happens when the President of CBS News stands to make a small fortune on the sale of CBS to Westinghouse and that sale might be jeopardized by a lawsuit against B&W?

Every once in a while [in films like this] you get to peek behind the curtain of America’s ruling class. The ending however says little or nothing about the really big lines.

And the last time I looked these very dangerous coffin nails – potent delivery devices for nicotine and carcinogens – are still perfectly legal to buy.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(film

THE INSIDER [1999]
Directed by Michael Mann

[b]Wigand: How did a radical journalist from Ramparts Magazine end up at CBS?
Bergman: I still do the tough stories. “60 Minutes” reaches a lot of people.

Wigand: So, what you are saying Mr. Sandefur, is it isn’t enough that you fired me. For no good reason! Now you question my integrity? On top of the humiliation of being fired? You threaten me?! You threaten my family?! It never crossed my mind not to honor my agreement…But I will tell you, Mr. Sandefur, and Brown & Williamson, too… Fuck me? Well, fuck you!!

Bergman: They’re afraid of you, aren’t they?
Wigand: They should be.

Wallace: Am I missing something?
John Harris: What do you mean, Mike?
Wallace: I mean, he’s got a corporate secrecy agreement - give me a break! I mean, this is a public health issue! Like an unsafe airframe on a passenger jet or some company dumping cyanide into the East River, issues like that! He can talk, we can air it! They’ve got no right to hide behind a “corporate agreement”! Pass the milk.

Lawyer: The unlimited checkbook. That’s how Big Tobacco wins every time on everything, they spend you to death. Six hundred million a year in outside legal - Chadbourne-Park, uh, Ken Starr’s firm, Kirkland & Ellis? Listen: GM and Ford, they get nailed after eleven or twelve pickups blow up, right? These clowns have never, I mean EVER…
John Harris: Not even once.
Lawyer: - not even with hundreds of thousands dying each year from an illness related to their product, have EVER lost a personal injury lawsuit! On this case, they’ll issue gag orders, sue for breach, anticipatory breach, enjoin him, you, us, his pet dog, the dog’s veterinarian, tie 'em up in litigation for 10 or 15 years, I’m telling you, they bat a thousand every time! He knows that, that’s why he’s not gonna talk to you.

Liane reading her husband’s computer screen: WE WILL KILL YOU. WE WILL KILL ALL OF YOU. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Agent: Do you have a history of emotional problems, Mr. Wigand?
Wigand: Yes. Yes, I do. I get extremely emotional when assholes put bullets in my mailbox!

Bergman [to FBI agent]: You’d better take a good look, because I’m getting two things: pissed off and curious.

Wallace: You heard Mr. Sandefur say before Congress that he believed nicotine was not addictive.
Wigand: I believe Mr. Sandefur perjured himself because I watched those testimonies very carefully.
Wallace: All of us did, and it was this whole line of people, whole line of CEOs up there, all swearing.
Wigand: Part of the reason I’m here is that I felt that their representations clearly misstated - at least within Brown and Williamson’s misrepresentations - clearly misstated what is common language within the company: “We are in the nicotine delivery business.”
Wallace: And that’s what cigarettes are for.
Wigand: A delivery device for nicotine.
Wallace: A delivery device for nicotine. Put it in your mouth, light it up, and you’re gonna get your fix.
Wigand: You’re gonna get your fix.
Wallace: You’re saying that Brown and Williamson manipulates and adjusts the nicotine fix not by artificially adding nicotine but by enhancing the effect of nicotine through the use of elements such as ammonia?
Wigand: The process is known as “impact boosting”. While not spiking nicotine, they clearly manipulate it. There was extensive use of this technology known as “ammonia chemistry”. It allows for the nicotine to be more rapidly absorbed in the lung and therefore affect the brain and central nervous system. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me, and really put me in trouble with Sandefur, was a compound called coumarin. When I came on board at B. and W., they had tried the transition from coumarin to a similar flavor that would give the same taste, and had been unsuccessful. I wanted out immediately. I was told that it could affect sales, so I should mind my own business. I constructed a memo to Mr. Sandefur indicating I could not in conscience continue with coumarin, a product we now know and we had documentation was similar to coumarin, a lung-specific carcinogen.
Wallace: And you sent the documents to Sandefur?
Wigand: I sent the documents forward to Sandefur. I was told that we would continue to work on a substitute but we weren’t going to remove it as it would impact sales, and that was his decision.
Wallace: In other words, you were charging Sandefur and Brown and Williamson with ignoring health considerations consciously?
Wigand: Most certainly.
Wallace: And on March 24th, Thomas Sandefur, CEO of Brown and Williamson, had you fired. And the reason he gave you?
Wigand: “Poor communication skills.”
Wallace: And you wish you hadn’t come forward? You wish you hadn’t blown the whistle?
Wigand: Yeah, at times I wish I hadn’t done it. There were times I felt compelled to do it. If you ask me would I do it again, do I think it’s worth it? Yeah, I think it’s worth it.

Wigand: How does one…“go…to…jail?” What does my family do? Go on welfare? If my wife has to work? Who’s going to look after the kids? Put food on the table? My children need me. If I’m not teaching…there’s no medical…no medical…even on co-pay, that’s like…Tuition…

Scruggs (low, personal): In the Navy I flew A-6’s off carriers… In combat, events have a duration of seconds, sometimes minutes… But what you’re going through goes on day in and day out. Whether you’re ready for it or not, week in, week out… Month after month after month. Whether you’re up or whether you’re down. You’re assaulted psychologically. You’re assaulted financially, which is its own special kind of violence. Because it’s directed at your kids…what school can you afford… How will that affect their lives. You’re asking yourself: Will that limit what they may become? You feel your whole family’s future’s compromised…held hostage…
[pause]
Scruggs: I do know how it is.

Wigand: Fuck it, let’s go to court.

Caperelli: Well, with tortious interference, I’m afraid…the greater the truth, the greater the damage.
Bergman: Come again?
Caperelli: They own the information he’s disclosing. The truer it is, the greater the damage to them. If he lied, he didn’t disclose their information. And the damages are smaller.
Bergman: Is this “Alice in Wonderland”?

Bergman [to Caperelli]: Is CBS corporate telling CBS News do not go to air with this story?

Bergman [after Kluster demands that Wigand’s interview be censored into an alternate version]: I’m not touching my film.
Eric Kluster: I’m afraid you are.
Bergman: No, I’m not.
Eric Kluster: We’re doing this with or without you, Lowell. If you like, I can sign another producer to edit your show.
Bergman: Uh, since when has the paragon of investigative journalism allowed LAWYERS to determine the news content on 60 minutes?

Bergman: Before you go…I discovered this SEC filing…For the sale of the CBS Corporation to Westinghouse Corporation.
Wallace: What?
Hewitt: Yeah, I heard rumors.
Bergman: It’s not a rumor. It’s a sale. If Tisch can unload CBS for $81 a share to Westinghouse and then is suddenly threatened with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Brown & Williamson, that could screw up the sale, could it not?
Kluster: (serene) And what are you implying?
Bergman: I’m not implying. I’m quoting. More vested interests…(reading from SEC filing) “Persons Who Will Profit From This Merger… (pause) Ms. Helen Caperelli, General Counsel of CBS News, 3.9 million. Mr. Eric Kluster, President of CBS News, 1.4 million…”
Hewitt: Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?
Bergman: Oh, no, of course they’re not influenced by money. They work for free. And you are a Volunteer Executive Producer.
Hewitt: CBS does not do that. And, you’re questioning our journalistic integrity?!
Bergman: No, I’m questioning your hearing! You hear “reasonable” and “tortious interference.” I hear… “Potential Brown & Williamson lawsuit jeopardizing the sale of CBS to Westinghouse.” I hear… “Shut the segment down. Cut Wigand loose. Obey orders. And fuck off…!” That’s what I hear.

Bergman: You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get him to go on television. I do. I deliver him. He sits. He talks. He violates his own fucking confidentiality agreement. And he’s only the key witness in the biggest public health reform issue, maybe the biggest, most-expensive corporate-malfeasance case in U.S. history. And Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!
Hewitt: You are a fanatic. An anarchist. You know that? If we can’t have a whole show, then I want half a show rather than no show. But oh, no, not you. You won’t be satisfied unless you’re putting the company at risk!
Bergman: C’mon, what are you? And are you a businessman? Or are you a newsman?! Because that happens to be what Mike and I do for a living…
Wallace: Lowell…
Bergman: “Put the corporation at risk”…? Give me a fucking break!
Wallace: Lowell…
Bergman: These people are putting our whole reason for doing what we do…on the line!
Wallace: Lowell!
Bergman: What?
Wallace: I’m with Don on this.

Wallace [to Bergman]: Do me a favor, will you - spare me, for God’s sake, get in the real world, what do you think? I’m going to resign in protest? To force it on the air? The answer’s “no”. I don’t plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio. That decision I’ve already made.

Wallace [after watching a preview of the “60 Minutes” Wigand interview that has been edited]: Where’s the rest? Where the hell’s the rest? [to Eric Kluster] You cut it! You cut the guts out of what I SAID!
Kluster: It was a time consideration, Mike.
Wallace: Time? Bullshit! You corporate lackey! Who told you your incompetent little fingers had the requisite skills to edit me! I’m trying to band-aid a situation, here, and you’re too dim to…
[Wallace is interrupted by Helen Caperelli, who walks up to him and Kluster]
Caperelli: Mike… Mike… Mike…
Wallace [ Caperelli]: Mike? Mike!
[there is a long pause]
Wallace: Mike? Try Mr. Wallace. We work in the same corporation doesn’t mean we work in the same profession. What are you gonna do now? You gonna finesse me? Lawyer me some more? I’ve been in this profession FIFTY FUCKING YEARS! You and the people you work for are destroying the most-respected, the highest-rated, the most-profitable show on this network!

Wigand [to Bergman]: You fought for me? You manipulated me into where I am now - staring at the Brown and Williamson Building. It’s all dark except the tenth floor. That’s the legal department, where they fuck with my life!

Wigand: I’m just a commodity to you, aren’t I? I could be anything. Right? Anything worth putting on between commercials.
Bergman: To a network, probably, we’re all commodities. To me? You are not a commodity. What you are is important.

Wallace: In the real world, when you get to where I am, there are other considerations.
Bergman: Like what? Corporate responsibility? What, are we talking celebrity here?
Wallace: I’m not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I’m talking about when you’re nearer the end of your life than the beginning. Now, what do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I’m going to do this? Become that? What future? No. What you think is “How will I be regarded in the end?” After I’m gone. Now, along the way I suppose I made some minor impact. I did Iran-Gate and the Ayatollah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Saddam, Sadat, etcetera, etcetera. I showed them thieves in suits. I’ve spent a lifetime building all that. But history only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network? Does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah.

Bergman: This news division has been villified by the New York Times! In print, on television, for caving to corporate interests!
Hewitt: New York Times ran a blow by blow of what we talked about behind closed doors! You fucked us!
Bergman: No, you fucked you! Don’t invert stuff! Big Tobacco tried to smear Wigand, you bought it. The Wall Street Journal, here: not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment, refutes Big Tobacco’s smear campaign as the lowest form of character assassination! And now, even now, when every word of what Wigand has said on our show is printed, the entire deposition of his testimony in a court of law in the State of Mississippi, the cat totally out of the bag, you’re still standing here debating! Don, what the hell else do you need?
Hewitt: Mike, you tell him.
Wallace: You fucked up, Don.

Bergman: I quit, Mike.
Wallace: Bullshit.
[Bergman shakes his head]
Wallace: C’mon, it all worked out. You came out okay in the end…
Bergman: I did? What do I tell a source on the next tough story? Hang in with us. You’ll be fine…maybe? What got broken here…doesn’t go back together again.[/b]

The whole thing is just made up. A fairy-tale. A fantasy. And once you start with that how do you go about fitting it into the actual facts of history? The Nazis. The Holocaust. The Second World War. About as far removed from a fantasy as the human condition gets.

If I were a Jew, how might my reaction to it be different? But since Jews are no less dasein that will always only be more or less relevant.

Still, some will put it up along side inventions like Maus and complain this is what the Jews should have done. That, in other words, they more or less just let it all happen to them. As though creating something like the Basterds was really all there was to turning the tide.

I don’t know what Tarantino’s reaction to that is. But it must be a whole lot easier to kill the Nazis when all you have to do is write it in the script.

Then there are those who complain he doesn’t take Nietzsche’s warning about becoming a monster seriously enough. Brutes going after brutes. The end justifying the means. Any means.

IMDb

[b]When asked about the misspelled title, director Quentin Tarantino gave the following answer: “Here’s the thing. I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.”

When asked how he got into the violent, baseball bat-wielding mindset of “The Bear Jew”, Eli Roth partially attributed his performance to the historically accurate costumes: “Being in wool underwear will make you want to kill anything.”

According to Brad Pitt, the film was shot sequentially.

Quentin Tarantino had all of the actors playing the Basterds go through a day of “scalping training” in preparation for the movie, and told them that the three best practice scalpers would be rewarded with close-ups of them doing just that in the film.[/b]

FAQs at IMDb: imdb.com/title/tt0361748/faq?ref_=tt_faq_sm
At wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS [2009]
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

[b]Col. Landa: Now if one were to determine what attribute the German people share with a beast, it would be the cunning and the predatory instinct of a hawk. But if one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat. If a rat were to walk in here right now as I’m talking, would you treat it to a saucer of your delicious milk?
Perrier LaPadite: Probably not.
Col. Landa: I didn’t think so. You don’t like them. You don’t really know why you don’t like them. All you know is you find them repulsive. Consequently, a German soldier conducts a search of a house suspected of hiding Jews. Where does the hawk look? He looks in the barn, he looks in the attic, he looks in the cellar, he looks everywhere he would hide, but there’s so many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Führer’s brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I’m aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.

Lt. Raine: My name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I’m putting together a special team, and I need me eight soldiers. Eight Jewish-American soldiers. Now, y’all might’ve heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leaving a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doin’ one thing and one thing only… killin’ Nazis. Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I sure as hell didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin’ air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die. Now, I’m the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German won’t not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they’re tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sound good?
The Basterds: YES, SIR!
Lt. Raine: That’s what I like to hear. But I got a word of warning for all you would-be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me personally. Each and every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis. Or you will die tryin’.

Lt. Raine: Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz?
[Stiglitz nods]
Lt. Raine: These are the Basterds, ever heard of us?
[Stiglitz nods again]
Lt. Raine: We just wanted to say we’re a big fan of your work. When it comes to killing Nazis I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.

Lt. Raine [Drawing a map]: Up the road apiece, there’s a orchard. Now, besides you, we know there’s another kraut patrol fuckin’ here somewhere. Now if that patrol were to have any crackshots, that orchard would be a goddamn sniper’s delight. Now if you ever want to eat a sauerkraut sandwich again, you gotta show me on this map where they are, you gotta tell me how many there are, and you gotta tell me what kinda artillery they’re carrying with ‘em.
Sgt. Rachtman: You can’t expect me to divulge information that would put German lives in danger?
Lt. Raine: Well Werner, that’s where you’re wrong, because that’s exactly what I expect. I need to about Germans hiding in them trees, and you need to tell me, and you need to tell me right now. Now take your finger and point out on this map where this party’s being held, how many’s coming, and what they brought to play with.
Sgt. Rachtman: I respectfully refuse.
Lt. Raine [a smack is heard offscreen]: Here that? That’s Sgt. Donny Donowitz. But you might know him better by his nickname. The Bear Jew. Now, if you heard of Aldo the Apache, you gotta have heard of the Bear Jew.
Sgt. Rachtman: I have heard of the Bear Jew.
Lt. Raine: What did you hear about him, Werner?
Sgt. Rachtman: He beats German soldiers with a club.
Lt. Raine: He bashes their brains in with a baseball bat is what he does. Now, Werner, I’m gonna ask you one more goddamn time, and if you still “respectfully refuse,” I’m callin’ the Bear Jew over here, and he’s gonna take that big-ole bat of his, and he’s gonna beat you to death with it. Now take your wiener schnitzel lickin’ finger and point out on this map what I want to know.
Sgt. Rachtman: Fuck you.
[pause]
Sgt. Rachtman: And your Jew dogs!
[the Basterds all laugh]
Lt. Raine: Actually, Werner, we’re all tickled to here you say that. Frankly, watchin’ Donny beat Nazis to death is is the closest we ever get to goin’ to the movies.
[calling offscreen]
Lt. Raine: DONNY!
Sgt. Donowitz [from offscreen]: Yeah?
Lt. Raine: We got a German here who wants to die for his country! Oblige him!

Sgt. Donowitz [watching Aldo carve a swastika into Private Butz’s forehead]: You know, Lieutenant, you’re getting pretty good at that.
Lt. Raine: You know how you get to Carnegie Hall, don’t ya? Practice.

Lt. Raine: You probably heard we ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business; we in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’.

Lt. Raine: You didn’t say the goddamn rendezvous was in a fuckin’ basement.
Lt. Hicox: I didn’t know.
Lt. Raine: You said it was in a tavern.
Lt. Hicox: It is a tavern.
Lt. Raine: Yeah, in a basement. You know, fightin’ in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you’re fightin’ in a basement!

Lt. Hicox: You know, we’re not looking for trouble, right now. We’re simply making contact with our agent. Should be uneventful. However, on the off chance I’m wrong, and things prove eventful. I need to know, we can all remain calm.
Sgt. Stiglitz: I don’t look calm to you?

Major Hellstrom: Did you hear that? That’s the sound of my Luger pointed right at your testicles.
Lt. Wilcox: Why do you have a Luger pointed at my testicles?
Major Hellstrom: Because you’ve just given yourself away, Cap’t. Your no more German then that scotch.
Lt. Wilcox: Well, Major…
Bridget von Hammersmark: Major…
Major Hellstrom: Shut up slut. (To Hicox) You were saying?
Lt. Hilcox: I was saying that makes two of us. I’ve had a gun pointed at your balls since you sat down.

Bridget von Hammersmark: I can see since you didn’t see what happened inside, the Nazis being there must look odd.
Lt. Raine: Yeah, we got a word for that kinda odd in English. It’s called suspicious.

Lt. Raine: Well, I speak the most Italian, so I’ll be your escort. Donowitz speaks the second most, so he’ll be your Italian cameraman. Omar speaks third most, so he’ll be Donny’s assistant.
Pfc. Ulmer: I don’t speak Italian.
Lt. Raine: Like I said, third best.

Col. Landa [to Aldo]: So you’re “Aldo the Apache”.
Lt. Raine: So you’re “the Jew Hunter”.
Col. Landa: A detective. A damn good dectective. Finding people is my specialty so naturally I work for the Nazis finding people, and yes some of them were Jews. But “Jew Hunter”? It’s just a name that stuck.
Pfc. Utivich: Well, you do have to admit, it is catchy.
Col. Landa: Do you control the nicknames your enemies bestow on you? “Aldo the Apache” and “the Little Man”?
Pfc. Utivich [confused]: What do you mean “the Little Man”?
Col. Landa: Germans’ nickname for you.
Pfc. Utivich: The Germans’ nickname for me is “the Little Man”?
Col. Landa: And as if to make my point, I’m a little surprised how tall you were in real life. I mean, you’re a little fellow, but not circus-midget little, as your reputation would suggest.

Lt. Raine: You know, where I’m from…
Col. Landa: Yeah, where is that, exactly?
Lt. Raine: Maynardville, Tennessee.
[pause]
Lt. Raine: I’ve done my share of bootlegging. Up ‘ere, if you engage in what the federal government calls ‘illegal activity,’ but what we call ‘just a man tryin’ to make a livin’ for his family sellin’ moonshine liquor,’ it behooves oneself to keep his wits. Long story short, we hear a story too good to be true…it ain’t.
Col. Landa: Sitting in your chair, I would probably say the same thing. And 999, 999 times out of a million, you would be correct. But in the pages of history, every once in a while, fate reaches out and extends its hand.
[he slowly sweeps his arms out in a grand shrug]
Col. Landa: What shall the history books read?

Col. Landa: By the way, that last part is actually true.

Col. Landa: You’ll be shot for this!
Lt. Raine: Nah, I don’t think so. More like chewed out.

Lt. Raine: You know somethin’, Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece.[/b]