philosophy in film

Talk about the law of unintended consequences!

Especially when the sins of the father come back to haunt you.

Dwight is a beach bum. He lives in his car. He breaks into people’s homes in order to take a bath. He goes dumpster diving for food. He won’t strike many as all that sympathetic. But beach bums can have parents too. And when the man he thinks killed them is released from prison, he might be inclined toward a little revenge. And he gets it. Only it turns out that he is not the most competent of assassins. In fact, you won’t believe what unfolds after he kills him.

And the man he killed has a family as well. And they start to think the very same thing: pay back. Only they pretty much bungle that too.

But things are not really all that they seem. And then things start to get complicated. For Dwight. And for his sister.

And for the Clelands.

This one is all about the way that events can unfold in the most surreal of circumstances. We think this so we do that. And all that matters is the manner in which we connect the dots in our heads. We connect them one way, they connect them another.

And then the next thing you know the bodies start to pile up.

IMDb

[b]At one time Benny mentions “El Duce” who got hit by a train. This is a reference to “El Duce”, lead-singer of punk-Hardcore band “the Mentors”, who claimed Courtney Love offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt Cobain. He appeared in Nick Broomfield’s “Kurt and Courtney” documentary. He died under misterious circumstances after he made these claims.

Blue Ruin is the colour of Kate Winslets characters hair in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. She mentions it soon after they first meet on the train. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ruin
trailer: youtu.be/U_1mgieaGvY

BLUE RUIN [2013]
Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

[b]Policewoman: It’s Officer Eddy. I’d like you to come into the station.
Dwight: Oh, is it about the house, 'cause I could…
Policewoman: Dwight, sweetheart, I’ll explain. Okay? Just come with me. I apologize for the mystery. I don’t mean to scare you. You’re not in any trouble. Everything’s fine. You’ll be fine. But, honey, someone brought this by our stoop, and I just thought you should be somewhere safe when you found out…He’s going to be released.

Boy: Did you hurt Wade?
Dwight: Yeah. Wade hurt my parents.
Boy: I don’t think he did.

Sam [Dwight’s sister]: I know he’s out, if that’s why you’re here. The DOC sends a notification…and a restraining order.

Sam: So why now? Wade Cleland gets released. Well…
Dwight: I thought there’d be something on the news, but…there’s nothing.
[she looks puzzled]
Dwight: I killed him. Wade Cleland, I killed him.
Sam [startled]: What? Bullshit. When?
Dwight: I think yesterday.
Sam: Oh, God, Dwight.
Dwight: I thought he’d kill me first.
Sam: I’m glad he didn’t. And I’m glad he’s dead and I hope he suffered.

Dwight: Where are your children?
Sam: Home with the sitter.
Dwight: Let’s get back in your car.
Sam: What?
Dwight: They never called the police.

Dwight: I’ll turn myself in here, if that’s what you want, but I can’t do it until I know that you’re safe, that the kids are safe, so…
Sam: The Clelands need to be arrested.
Dwight: All of them? For what? Look, I…Just go. You can call the police from Pittsburgh if that’s what you want. Just so long as you’re not here.
Sam: It’s my house, Dwight.
Dwight: They know that. The car is registered here, and it’s not worth…Is there a gun in the house?

Sam [to Dwight]: I’d forgive you if you were crazy, but you’re not. You’re weak.

Teddy [one of the Cleland clan who tried to kill Sam]: Let me out! I’m dying! Let me out! Let me out, you son of a bitch. Help! Let me out of here!
Dwight: Not until I have a gun.
Teddy: Shit, I can get you a gun.

Dwight: Stay in the trunk.
Teddy: That’s easy. My leg’s broke.
Dwight: Were you coming for me or for her?
Teddy: Who?
Dwight: You came to my sister’s house. Were you coming for me or for her?
Teddy: Look, man. You.
Dwight: Why didn’t you just call the police, send me to jail?
Teddy: Same as you. Just keeping it in-house.

Dwight: Who’s the boy in the limousine?
Teddy: He’s just a boy. Not a concern.
Dwight: He said something about Wade. He said he didn’t think he’d hurt anyone.
Teddy: Couple dead niggers might disagree. He just meant Wade didn’t kill your parents.
Dwight: That’s not true.
Teddy: Well, that settles it, then. That’s how this works, man. The one with the gun gets to tell the truth.

Teddy: I didn’t do it. Wade didn’t do it. Our father, Big Wade, shot your dad. You don’t fuck with a man’s wife, his family.
Dwight: Whatever my dad did, he did with your mom. Together… it was a mistake.
Teddy: Well, shit’s not a mistake.
Dwight: Both of my parents are dead.
Teddy: Your mother being in the car, that was a fuck-up. I’ll give you that.
Dwight: If what you’re saying about Wade is true, then…
Teddy: Big Wade had cancer. Couldn’t let him die in prison. I’d have done the time, but I had two strikes. Little Wade, he could take the plea.

Ben: Just the one?
Dwight: Yes!
Ben: Sorry. I had to wait for him to aim before I could shoot. It had to be legal, at least on my part.

Dwight: What about the rest of his head?
Ben: Coyotes will get that. Long as there’s no teeth.
Dwight: They’re not gonna let this end…Not now.
Ben: Yeah. Well, I’m switching you to buckshot.

Ben [to Dwight]: I know this is personal and that’s how you’ll fail. No speeches. You point the gun, you shoot the gun.

[the Clelands listen to Dwight’s phone message]
Dwight: Hello. It’s me. Um, Dwight Evans. Wade is dead. And… Teddy is dead, too. He told me everything. I didn’t kill him. I mean, I… I guess I did. But it doesn’t matter. By my count, that’s two of yours and two of mine. I don’t know how this ends, but I’d like it to…Um…or it can keep going.

Dwight: You know what’s awful? Just 'cause my dad loved your mom…we all end up dead.

Dwight: The keys are in the car. The keys are in the car. The keys are in the car. The keys are in the car.[/b]

From the writer and director of Cinema Paradiso above.

This is a film that revolves around art. But art is always created by human beings. And human beings [well, a few of them] are in possession of some truly complex emotional and psychological reactions to the world around them. And not only to art but to others of their kind. Then things can easily become entangled in the gaps between what we see, what they want us to see and what is really going on instead.

And not just in regard to the art itself.

And here art is also entangled in commerse. And once money is involved the sky is the limit. The permutations then become practically boundless. For example, the element of scams creep in.

And then there’s the mysterious “mechanism”. Could it be a Vaucanson automaton?

And then last but not least there is the phenomenal number woman.

If, as someone once suggested, art is the least untrue lie, it is up to each of us to put our own particular spin on what we see here.

Still, this is one of those films that, as you watch it, you’re never quite sure if it is about the relationships themselves or if that is what you are being misdirected to focus on instead. In other words, nothing may seem to be at all what it actually is. Or, as Billy puts it: “Everything can be faked, Virgil…joy, pain, hate, illness, recovery…even love.”

A lesson Vigril is about to learn in the most brutal way imaginable. Talk about the long con! On the other hand, isn’t he really far better off in the end?

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Offer
trailer: youtu.be/_hK-gQb9pUk

THE BEST OFFER [La Migliore Offerta] 2013
Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

[b]Claire [on phone]: I’m not in the habit of speaking to people much.
Virgil: That’s a considerable stroke of good fortune. Talking to people is perilous.

Billy: Have we ever talked about money, you and me?
Virgil: Honestly, no.
Billy: It’s been good enough for you. It’s been good enough for me. What matters is that you’re satisfied. My only regret is never being able to persuade you that my paintings are evidence of a great artistic talent.
Virgil: A love of art and knowing how to hold a brush doesn’t make an artist. You need an inner mystery. A knack you’ve never possessed.

Servant: lt’s the lbbetson woman on the phone.
Virgil: Tell her to go to hell.
Servant: She’s crying.
Virgil: Serves her right.
Servant: She was hit by a car on her way to meet you.
Virgil: So much the worse for her. It’s no concern of mine.
Servant: She was left unconscious. She was lying in a pool of blood when the ambulance arrived.
Virgil: Alright. Put her through.

Virgil [Inspecting a painting]: It’s a fake.
Woman: How is that possible? It’s beautiful!
Virgil: I didn’t say it was ugly, I said it wasn’t authentic.
Woman: From an analysis of the pigments and wood, we thought it was pre-17th century.
Virgil: Even older.
Woman: Then it must be worth something.
Virgil: It is a work by Valiante, the female forger of the 16th century. She copied masterpieces, but couldn’t sign them as she was a woman, so she marked them with a personal code hidden in the folds of the drapery or in this case, in the gaze of the subject. The beam of light on the iris is nothing if not a V. That is Valiante. It is worth something, but nothing compared to the original.

Virgil: I honestly don’t get it. In the time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you beaten. I’ve watched you produce all manner of gadgets from most unremarkable ironwork. Optical, arithmetical devices, water clocks… Even that hairdryer that probably dried the locks of Jules Verne’s wife. But you’ve nothing to say about this curious contraption?
Robewrt: I’m surprised that an art connoisseur like yourself can get so carried away by a banal piece of ironwork.
Virgil: It’s not the object that arouses my curiosity, but it’s contradiction.

Virgil: And Miss Claire. How old is she?
Fred: About 27.
Virgil: What else can you tell me about her?
Fred: Nothing really. I’ve never had much to do with her. I don’t really know her.
Virgil: And yet you’ve been in the service of the lbbetsons for about 10 years.
Fred: Well, 11 years to be exact. I don’t have much to do with her. I’ve talked to her a thousand times at all hours but…
Virgil: But?
Fred: I’ve never seen her.
Virgil: How could that be?
Fred: It’s the truth. Not once.
Virgil: Why?
Fred: Because Miss Claire suffers from a very strange illness.

Virgil: Why do you systematically avoid meeting me? Why would you want to do business with a person who arouses such aversion in you that you can’t even look him in the face?
Claire: It’s hard to explain. You won’t believe me anyway.
Virgil: If I didn’t believe you, I wouldn’t be here playing hide and seek.
Claire: I don’t meet many people. It’s been a long time now.
Virgil: I see nothing serious in that. Everyone has moments when they prefer solitude to the multitudes.
Claire: I haven’t left this house since I was 15.
Virgil: I don’t think I understand.
Claire: You understand perfectly. This is my room. If there’s somebody in the house or in the villa, I lock myself up in here. I’ve always done that, even when my parents were here. I hardly ever saw them. I don’t see anybody.
Virgil: But why?
Claire: Why do you go around with your hands covered by gloves?
Virgil: lt’s a simple question of hygiene. I don’t see the connection.
Claire: You’re afraid to touch others. To touch their possessions disgusts you. I’m afraid of going to places where others live. These seem to me very similar personal choices.

Robert: How much would the automaton be worth if we manage to make it work?
Virgil: Think of a really, really high figure. Do you have one in mind?
Robert: Yes.
Virgil: You’ve probably pitched it too low.
Robert: You’re very good at talking without saying anything.
Virgil: I’ll take that as a compliment.

Robert: Why did you never marry, never have kids?
Virgil: The regard I have for women is equal to the fear I’ve always had of them. And to my failure to understand them.

Virgil: I took the liberty of remembering it’s your birthday. Happy birthday, Claire.
Claire [as though hearing none of that]: I read the valuation documents.
Virgil: Did you manage to understand some of it?
Claire: Of course. Ridiculous sums of money. Even a backwards child would know she’s being cheated.
Virgil: They need interpretation. They’re starting bids. There’ll be higher bids later.
Claire: Suppose there aren’t!
Virgil: Unlikely, but in that case, we’ll even things out. We’ll raise the margins on other more important pieces.
Claire: A gamble? Where I’m the only one that can lose? You’re trying to cheat me. It’s all to your advantage. You’re a fucking thief!
Virgil: I’m willing to resign the commission forthwith. I’ll have them replace all your mediocre bric-a-brac immediately. And do me the favour of disappearing completely from the face of the earth!

Virgil: Claire: It’s me. I’m here. What’s happened?
Claire [frantically]: There’s somebody in the house! Please get them out!
Virgil: Calm down. There’s nobody here.
Claire: There’s someone in the house!!!
Virgil: Calm down. It was me before, Claire. It was me. It was me. I hid in the room so I could see you.
Claire: You were spying on me? You were spying on me?! Get out!!! I want nothing more to do with you! Get out!!!
[he turns to leave]
Claire: Please, Virgil. Don’t go.
Virgil: Believe me, I don’t normally behave like this…
Claire: Neither do I.

Virgil [to Robert]: You should’ve seen her. Pale, like a Durer etching. She had the look of some creature terrified of the universe. And I could read my own terror in her eyes.

Virgil: What’s it like living with a woman?
Lambert: Like taking part in an auction sale. You never know if yours will be the best offer.

Claire: In an old article of yours I found on the internet, you said: There’s something authentic in every forgery. What did you mean?
Virgil: When simulating another’s work the forger can’t resist the temptation to put in something of himself. Often it’s just a trifle, a detail of no interest. One unsuspected stroke, by which the forger inevitably ends up betraying himself, and revealing his own utterly authentic sensibilities.

Virgil: You haven’t said anything about Claire.
Robert: If I didn’t know about her problems, I’d say she was normal. And she’s much more beautiful than you described. Really. I liked her.
Virgil: You’re going to make me jealous?
Robert: lf you want my advice, you pray that girl never gets better.

Virgil [of Robert]: Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to talk to him?
Sarah: For a while now he’s been talking about someone called Claire.
Virgil: Claire? I don’t understand.
Sarah: With him everybody’s got to be on their guard, all the time. That goes for you, too.

Robert [to Virgil]: If you were forced to choose between Claire and the automaton, which would you take?

Billy: Don’t go overboard, Virgil. She could have had her own reasons for disappearing.
Virgil: I can’t imagine what reasons. Recently, she’s been experiencing emotions and feelings that are incompatible with flight.
Billy: I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. Emotions are like works of art. They can be forged they seem just like the original but they are forgery.
Virgil: Forgery?
Billy: Everything can be faked Virgil: joy, pain, hate, illness, recovery… even love.

Robert [his voice through the robot]: There is always something authentic concealed in every forgery. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ll miss you, Mr. Oldman. There is always something authentic concealed in every forgery. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ll miss you, Mr. Oldman. There is always something authentic concealed in every forgery. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ll miss you, Mr. Oldman. There is always something authentic concealed in every forgery. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ll miss you, Mr. Oldman. There is always something authentic concealed in every forgery. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ll miss you, Mr. Oldman.

Virgil: I was here a while ago. Do you remember?
Little woman: Nine.
Virgil: What do you mean?
Little woman: You’ve been here nine times. Today makes 10.
Virgil: I was wondering if you saw a woman leave the villa.
Little woman: Medium height, light hair, a bit pale?
Virgil: Yes.
Little woman: That time was 231.
Virgil: Are you sure?
Little woman: Then another six. In a year and a half, I saw her go out 237 times.
Barman: What did I say? She’s a phenomenon, remembers everything.
Virgil: It’s not possible.
Little woman: You were at the villa 63 times. 36 during the day and 27 during the night, excluding the night of the accident.

Waiter: Are you on your own, sir?
Virgil: No. I’m waiting for someone.[/b]

Consider:

According to writer/director Steven Knight, the name Locke is partly a tribute to philosopher John Locke.

Why? How? You decide. From my perspective Locke seems more reflective [considerably more reflective] of Kant. Deontologically as it were. Bottom line: Doing “the right thing” can be really, really hard.

Or, consider this: the “John Fowles phone metaphor”.

Life, he suggested, is analogous to sitting at a desk awash with phones. Each phone represents a potential calamity or crisis in your life: death, health, money, work, family, love etc. We sit at the desk day after day after day waitng for the next phone to ring. It’s always never nothing.

Only here there is no desk. After all, in this day and age phones can be damn near anywhere. Anywhere that we are, in other words. Here they’re in the car. But it’s not the new technologies that make them ring, right?

Now, some will obviously put themselves in situations in which it is much more likely that the phones will ring. But that is also what makes their life all the more worth living. So it really comes down to striking the best possible balance somehow.

But then there is this: the times when the phones ring and they pull us in conflicting directions. Really conflicting directions.

Me? Well, let’s just say this guy gets more phone calls in one night than I get in an entire year. I designed it that way. Of course, that doesn’t make the calamities and crises go away.

IMDb

[b]The movie had an unconventional shooting schedule. Tom Hardy filmed his part in 6 days, shooting the movie twice per night as it was filmed in a single take. The other actors were in a hotel room, speaking on the phone with Hardy, who was on location.

Locke is a dialog-driven chamber play consisting of one continuous scene. With the exception of Ivan getting into his car at the beginning, a short overhead shot of the motorway midway and a brief pan-out at the end, the entire movie takes place inside Ivan’s car.

During Ivan’s drive to London there were 36 phone calls. 13 outgoing, 21 incoming, 1 ignored call and 1 went to voice mail. At least half the calls ended with Ivan being hung up on or Ivan hanging up on the caller.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locke_(film
trailer: youtu.be/qex1AFCbEho

LOCKE [2013]
Written and directed by Steven Knight

[b]Bethan [on the phone]: Have you even told your wife that someone’s having your baby?
Ivan: I’m about to do that. I have…I have a list of things that I have to do tonight while driving.
Bethan: So, am I on a list?

Katrina [on the phone]: So, go on, tell me. What is it?
Ivan: Last year, this job… You know, the job in Croydon. Do you remember? I was up and down there for three months. Remember? I stayed in the guesthouse. They gave me an assistant. She worked with me on the block construction. She was a secretary, quite old. We… We worked together. She’s quite old and she lives on her own. She’s 43 or something. She’s…
Katrina: Why are you telling me about some woman?
Ivan: This is the only time I ever did this, Katrina. The only time. Look, after the block was settled in, there were some drinks to celebrate. Now, the block going in is a big thing because it’s the base of a whole building. And she came back to the guesthouse. She isn’t what you would call an oil painting, but it was wet and cold, and she talked about being lonely and I talked about being happy. But I’m lonely sometimes, you know, when I was away, and…And there was this wine and… This was the only time I did this
in all our 15 years. And now tonight she’s giving birth. Tonight she’s giving birth and it’s mine.
[click. Katrina hangs up]

Gareth [on the phone]: I just spoke to Donal. This had better be more than good! Speak to me only about tomorrow morning, Ivan.
Ivan: Right, well…I won’t be on site for the pump tomorrow.
Gareth [exploding]: Sweet monkey Jesus! This is not happening!!
Ivan: The truth is, tonight I’m going to become a father. And she’s in London, so I have to be there.
Garteth: Okay, Okay. Jesus! I’m just gonna read you something, Ivan. “Good luck tomorrow with the pour. We just had it confirmed by CGO that this will be the biggest single concrete pour ever made in Europe outside of nuclear military projects. I know the day is in the safest of hands. Best wishes, Mitchell.” That is Mitchell Dean himself, the president of the whole fucking company!!

Gareth [on the phone]: You’re gonna abandon the biggest fucking concrete pour in Europe to hold someone’s fucking hand because she’s fragile?
Ivan: And because the baby was caused by me. That is my decision I have made. I have not behaved in the right way with this woman at all. I have behaved in a way that isn’t like me. But now I am going to do the right thing.
Gareth: What, and Chicago can go to fucking hell?
Ivan: It is a decision that I have made. I’m not gonna turn back.
Gareth: Do you know how many millions of pounds are riding on tomorrow? If any one of those pumps fucks up, Ivan, we are facing 10 million pounds worth of losses in 15 minutes. So if we get that 15 minutes for the whole morning, a total shutdown, $100 million.

Ivan [on the phone]: Well, you have the phone numbers of the plants, don’t you?
Donal: Yeah.
Ivan: Call them now, Donal. Call every one of those bastards, get them to repeat the order. C6 on the nose or we send those trucks back. Seriously, those fuckers will fuck you up with the water in the gullies if it rains tomorrow.
Donal: Well, it’s not gonna rain tomorrow. It’s gonna be dry. I’ve got a direct line to God up in heaven, you know.
Ivan: Donal, don’t trust God when it comes to concrete.

Donal: I just got off the phone with the plant in Stafford, and they said they know that it’s a C6 mix, but how far towards C5 can it go? In other words, if one truck had some C5, how bad would that be taken?
Ivan: Donal, what does it say on the whiteboard?
Donal: On the… It says C6.
Ivan: What does it say on every piece of paperwork and on every sign-off sheet?
Donal: It says C6.
Ivan: It says C6. And you know why? Because, eventually, when my building is complete, it will be 55 floors high. It will weigh 2,223,000 metric tons. Okay? My building will alter the water table and squeeze granite. It will be visible from 20 miles away. At sunset, it will cast a shadow probably a mile long. Now, if the concrete at the base of my building is not right, if it slips half an inch, cracks appear. Right? If cracks appear, then they will grow and grow, won’t they? And the whole thing will collapse.
Donal: Ivan, look…
Ivan: You make one mistake, Donal, one little fucking mistake, and the whole world comes crashing down around you. Do you understand? So you tell Stafford, C6.

Katrina [on the phone]: Of all the things in the world, I never thought of you doing this! You fucked some girl. You fucked her and then me. I looked at my diary and I checked. I remember when you got home from Croydon that weekend, and you had a big stupid
grin on your face.
Ivan: The block was in. I was happy with it.
Katrina: And I sit in the dark.
Ivan: It was once.
Katrina: Once! The difference between once and never is the whole world! The difference between never and once is the difference between good and bad!

Bethan [on the phone]: When will you get here?
Ivan: About 45 minutes.
Bethan: It’s like waiting for God, or… Waiting for Godot. Sorry, you’re not a theater man. And not a reader of books and not a talker. A builder. Funny, isn’t it? It’s funny it was someone like you, someone so opposite to me. All the things I love mean absolutely zero to you.

Bethan: I’ll let them do it because I love you.
Ivan: Okay then.
Bethan: Can’t you say it back just once?
Ivan: No, I can’t. I can’t. But I can be there as fast as traffic will allow.

Katrina: Ivan, I just found Sean looking through your pockets. He said you asked him for a phone number.
Ivan: Yes.
Katrina: Now, at this moment, you need a phone number?
Ivan: I know how it looks, but I need to…I need to confirm a stop and go. Tomorrow there’s a pour. It’s a big… It is historical. It is the biggest pour in Europe.
Katrina: Can you hear yourself, Ivan? I’m falling apart at home and you’re closing roads?
Ivan: It’s not a closure, it’s a stop and go.
Katrina: The woman is giving birth and you’re closing roads![/b]

And he has already been fired! It’s not even his job now to do this!!

[b]Ivan [on the phone]: Katrina, I love you. Okay? I made one mistake. I don’t feel anything for this woman, and I’m trying to do the right thing tonight, because she is on her own and the baby is my fault. And I know how it feels to be coming out into the world like this. There is someone being brought into the world and it’s my fault. So I have to fix it, somehow.

Katrina [on the phone]: Ivan, let me ask you a question. Do you still want me to give you the phone number so you can close the road?
[pause]
Ivan: Yes.
Katrina: Right, well, goodbye, Ivan.
[she hangs up]

Katrina [on the phone]: Ivan? I’ve decided.
Ivan: Kat, you know what? We can work this out. I know we can.
Katrina: No, no, no. I’ve spoken to my sister and my half-sister. And the difference between once and never is everything. So, that’s it. And it never is once anyway. I don’t want you to come back, Ivan. This is not your home anymore and I want you to stay away.
Ivan: Katrina, please, listen.
Katrina: We will make arrangements for seeing the boys. But, look, I… I don’t want you coming here. You were always more in love with your buildings anyway. Why don’t you go and live in one of them? I mean, right at the top where you like to look out and feel so pleased with yourself. Hey, I’m gonna wash everything here, wash it all out 10 times to get the dust of you out of it. I won’t have to deal with your footprints turning to stone on the kitchen floor anymore. It’s finished. This isn’t your home anymore.

Gareth [on the phone]: You know, I actually threw up earlier.
Ivan: Yeah?
Gareth: Fucking yeah.
Ivan: Well hear this, Gareth. When I left the site just over two hours ago, I had a job, a wife, a home. And now I have none of those things. I have none of those things left. I just have myself and the car that I’m in. And I’m just driving and that’s it.
Gareth: Ivan, you fucked up your life, that’s your business, but Chicago is going insane.
Ivan: Two words I learned tonight. Fuck Chicago. [/b]

Films like this come along from time to time. A hardened, battered man [usually an ex-con] who is just around the corner from throwing in the towel happens upon a young boy who has himself been battered by life and then some. Something in boy brings out something in the man that neither one of them ever expected to see.

Then it’s only a matter of how to end it. In the tradition of Hollywood or in the tradition of the real world. Or, as here, in the tradition of both.

Men. They are everywhere here. The kind of men that either will or will not rub you the wrong way. But the point I always raise is this: Look around them. What in the world would you expect of them given the manner in which the circumstances we see shaped their lives. They live out on the “margins of society”. Not quite working class and not quite lumpin. And when you are “just a kid” out there you’re not really a kid at all.

These are basically a slew of sub-mental folks that more or less live one day at a time. Needless to say from paycheck to paycheck. But at least they’re living. If you know what I mean. And some of them are clearly more decent than others.

File this one under “dark and slow”.

And look out for the undertow. Nihilism some will call it. But those who have never been caught up in it [most of you I suspect] don’t really have a clue how things like this unfold when you are born and bred to it.

IMDb

Gary Poulter, who plays the part of Wade the father a.k.a. G-Daawg, was a homeless man given the role by director David Gordon Green, who often casts locals in his movies. Poulter died on the streets of Austin on Feb. 19, 2013, 2 months after filming was finished.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_(2013_film
trailer: youtu.be/3WPLVEUx5AU

JOE [2013]
Directed by David Gordon Green

[b]Gary: Hey, you old man, you look at me. I got som’in’ to say to you. Every time we land someplace new, you say it’s gonna be different, but it ain’t. You mess up… a lot… then you leave a mess for me and Momma and Dorothy to clean up, and that ain’t right. That’s all I’m sayin’. Hell, I do what I gotta do. You do whatever the hell you want - whatever you can get away with. You’re just a… selfish old drunk. Yeah, that’s what you is. Yeah, this place is gonna be after us. Hell, they’ll be on you, and they’re gonna beat your ass. And I hate to see you go down. You know you’re my daddy. You know what you are, ain’t you? I’m talking at chu.
[Wade gives a long silent stare]
Gary: What’chu done this time? They’ll beat your ass, shit. That’s what they’re gonna do. You can count on it.
[Wade suddenly slaps Gary hard then walks away]

Gary: Let me see that snake.
Joe: Ain’t he a nice one? See those fangs? You get bit by those, you’re gonna die. Or you’re gonna wanna die.

Gary: What y’all doing? Y’all cutting these trees?
Joe: We’re killing trees.
Gary: What for?
Joe: Neidermeyer land. The owner hires us to get rid of what’s on it so they can come in and put strong pines on it. Nobody wants these trees. These trees are weak. They’re not good for anything.[/b]

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

[b]Gary: Is killing trees against the law?
John: Well, the lumber company can’t cut 'em down unless they dead, and so the lumber company hire us to come in and poison the trees so we can kill 'em and they’ll come in and die theyself. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a little minute now. Welcome to the program.

[repeated line]
Willie-Russell: I went through a windshield at 4 o’clock one morning and I don’t give a fuck.

Sammy: Who these white folks you got working?
Joe: Yeah, I’m not sure. They need work and I need help. Young, old, black, white, red, yellow. I really don’t give a shit, Sammy.

Mother: He loves us. Just…He just goes through a hard time.
Gary: Well, I ain’t gonna watch him sit there and hit you like he hits me, you hear me? Okay, Mama? Ain’t supposed to do that to no one.
Mother: You stay with your family. That’s what you need to do. You need to stay with your family. Your family’s all you got.

Joe: Hey, there you go. You look like a million bucks. You feel better now?
Gary [wearing some of Joe’s clothes]: I fell like a hundred bucks.

Connie: What are you thinking, Joe?
Joe: Nothing. There’s nothing I can do and I hate it.
Connie: That’s not true.
Joe: Yeah, it is. You look at me like I can make a move. What are you thinking when you look at me like that? Don’t you care? I don’t know who I am, but I know what keeps me alive is restraint. Keeps me out of jail. Keeps me from hurting people. A mark of some fucked-up faith that there’s a reason. A reason for all of this. A reason in most moments I shouldn’t do what I wanna do. I do as I’m told. These men who bust their asses work like dogs - and I believe in them - but every day they hurt. They get old, they peel back… There’s no frontier anymore. And I watch that boy, and I see someone who’s… nothing like me, but… he’s a child folks left behind. And he’s on a fence, balanced right there.
Connie: What do you want? What is it you want?
Joe: Nothing.
Connie: Just tell me what I can do. I like you.
Joe: I like you, too, but what’s the point in any of it? Fuck to this day. I mean, fuck to this day. It’s all just gonna boil up and wash us away. Maybe you’ll still be here. Maybe you won’t.

Joe [with a busted beer bottle to Willie-Russel’s face]: Christy, call the cops 'fore somebody gets killed. Would you do that for me, honey?

Joe [to Gary as they pass cops on the highway]: Don’t look at them. Don’t wave to them, 'cause they think you’re guilty of something when you wave. A cop can mess you up if he wants to.

Joe: My dog is about 100 pounds, brown and white, looks like a cow.
Town Woman: Looks like a cow?
Joe: Right.
Town Woman: You have a dog that looks like a cow?
Joe: Well, it’s not that big a deal. A lot of dogs look like cows.

Joe: Ah, the dog likes you.
Gary: She has a lot of scars.
Joe: Yeah, but all the others…all the others is dead.

Joe: Gary, why do you stick around like this? You’re old enough, smart enough to do your own thing.
Gary: What’s most important right now is me taking care of Dorothy and Mama, 'cause… we kind of got a family problem right now.
[his sister Dorothy stares out the window vacantly at them]
Joe: Hey there. Hey now. Don’t talk much, does she?
Gary: She don’t talk at all.
Joe: What do you mean?
Gary: I don’t know. Nobody knows. She just stopped one day.[/b]

We can guess why.

[b]Earl: Let me ask you a question, Joe, ‘cause I really wanna know. Why you wanna go back? Why you wanna go back to the damn penitentiary, man? ‘Cause you can’t keep going to folks’ houses, killin’ their dogs, no matter what else is goin’ on. And you can’t keep fist-fightin’ the law. Judge won’t put up with it. He don’t have to put up with it. That’s why they built prisons.

Earl: I haven’t mistreated you, Joe. Have I? Tell the truth.
Joe: No, Earl. You stuck up for me when you could.
Earl: And I used to be as bad as you.
Joe: At one time, you were worse.

Joe [looking at Gary’s beaten up face]: Oh, shit. What happened?
Gary: I need to borrow the truck.
Joe: What happened to you?
Gary: I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill that old son of a bitch. You think I won’t, but I will. And I’ma get mine back. I just need to borrow that truck.

Joe: I should have given you a boxing lesson.
Gary: I don’t need no goddamn boxing lesson. I know what to do. I’ll pop him right in the eye. He whupped my ass and threw me out of the truck 'cause he knew that I were gonna kill him! I can kill his ass. I can kill him just as good as you could.
Joe: I know you could, I know you could. I know it. But you don’t have to do that. Okay, son? Just stay here with me. You’ll be safe here. Bring your mama and your sister.
Gary: He gots Dorothy. He done run off with her. He met up with some bad men. I heard him talking about it. That man with the scarred-up face…the one that I beat down by the bridge? He been looking for me for what I done did to him. She don’t hurt nobody, Joe. Should have been me.
Joe: Do you know where they took her? Gary…tell me.

Willie-Russell [to Dorothy]: Hi. Hi. How you doing? You okay? Huh? Tell me something. You like funny faces?

Farmer: Then, if everything goes good on that acreage, I’ll have you help me supervise the Manea project next summer. Old bastards can be hard to work for sometimes, but, hell, if you worked for Joe, I think you’ll do just fine. You got any questions?
Gary: No, sir. When can I start?
Farmer: Right now, if you’re ready.
Gary: Yes, sir.
[extends his hand to shake]
Gary: So, you knew Joe?
Farmer: Yeah, sure did. Joe’s a good man. Good man to me, anyways.
Gary: He was a good man to me, too. [/b]

Imagine this: You are going about the business of living your grim, humdrum life [you’re a history professor] when out of the blue you spot yourself playing a bit part in a movie. Your doppelgänger. And, even if only in your head, you’ve got to find him. You do. But then things start to become, well, chaotic.

So, is there perhaps a method to the madness here? One that has simply not yet been discovered? And yet what can we really control when there are so many possible permutations “out in the world” – given all of the vast and varied ways in which our lives can come together. And/or fall apart. And that’s just in regard to the conscious mind. Once the subconscious mind becomes a part of it, all bets are truly off.

But then how much of this is meant to be taken literally? It may well just be a surreal, allegorical romp that prompts you to think about 1] who you are and 2] how you came to be that way.

Which, basically, is what I do.

And it clearly seems intent on conveying insights [however recondite] into the roles that men and women embody in the ever turbulent quagmire that are “relationships”.

As for the ending [related of course to “what’s it all mean”?], here’s one take on it:
slate.com/blogs/browbeat/201 … denis.html

IMDb

[b]The cast signed a confidentiality agreement that doesn’t allow them to speak and/or explain to the press the meaning of spiders in the movie.

While no explanation was given for the presence of spiders, it has been analyzed by many people that they represent as Adam/Anthony’s weakness to women, making him less dominant. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_(2013_film
trailer: youtu.be/FJuaAWrgoUY

ENEMY [2013]
Directed by Denis Villeneuve

[b]Title Card: Chaos is order yet undeciphered.

Adam [to the class]: Control, it’s all about control. Every dictatorship has one obsession and that’s it. In ancient Rome they gave the people bread and circuses. They kept population busy with entertainment but other dictatorships used other strategies to control ideas, the knowledge… how do they do that? Lower education, they limit culture, censor information, they censor any means of individual expression and is important to remember this, that this is a pattern, that repeats itself throughout history.[/b]

And we are certainly no exception, are we?

Mary: Wanna go to bed?
Adam: Hmm?
Mary: Want to go to bed?
Adam: No, I’m gonna finish up grading these papers, and then I’ll come join you, okay?

Talk about living in a world of words…

Adam [to the class]: Last class we talked about dictatorships, so today we’ll start with Hegel. It was Hegel who said all the great world events happen twice. And then Karl Marx added… the first time it was a tragedy, the second time a farce.
It’s strange to think a lot of the world thinkers are worried that this century will be a repetition of the last one.

So: How is all of this “academic” stuff relevant here? If it is relevant at all.

[b]Anthony: Hello? Hello, this is Anthony…
Adam: This is Anthony Claire isn’t it?!
Anthony: Who’s calling?
Adam: Um, I called before. I talked with your wife. It’s crazy.
Anthony: You’re the one! If you call here again, I will call the police.
Adam: No, no, wait, listen to me… Can you say something…keep talking!
Anthony: Who is this?
Adam: That’s crazy. That’s amazing. Your voice is just like mine…do you hear my voice? Your voice is just like mine.
[Anthony hangs up]

Anthony [on phone]: Listen…
Adam: Please, please just listen to me for a second! Just listen, just hear me out. I know this sounds crazy… I’m sorry I got excited before and I acted a little strange. Just hear me out for a second. I’ve seen three of your movies…and you’re great in them. You looked exactly alike. I called your wife earlier today and she said that she thought I was you. I’m just…I’m confused…and I know that this call is is just as confusing to you as it is for me. My name is Adam Bell, I’m a history teacher… and I just think that we should meet.
Anthony: Okay, okay, listen to me. Never call here again.

Helen: You’re messing with me. Right? Anthony! Who was on the phone?
Anthony: Helen, the same guy who called before. The same guy. That’s who was on the phone. I told you that. Why would I sell you any differently?
Helen: Are you lying to me? You’re lying to me.
Anthony: You’re acting crazy.
Helen: I’m not crazy! Who was on the phone!?
Anthony: I told you that it was a man who was on the phone.
Helen: Are you seeing her?
Anthony: Helen, I don’t wanna get into this.
Helen: Are you seeing her again?!

Helen: I went to see that guy.
Anthony: Who? What are you talking about?
Helen: That guy on the phone. I went to his work.
Anthony: Why did you do that? That’s dangerous, honey.
Helen: I wanted to know. He had the same voice. He looks exactly like you.
Anthony: What do you mean exactly like me?
Helen: What’s happening?
Anthony [after a long pause]: I really don’t know what you’re talking about.
Helen: I think you know. I think you know.

Anthony: Show me your hands, man.
Adam: Why?
Anthony: C’mon, show me your hands!
[Adam show him his hands]
Anthony: Maybe we’re brothers.
Adam: We’re not brothers.
Anthony: How do you know? Do you have a…do you have a scar on…on your chest? Like this one? You do, don’t you!

Mother: There must be some difference.
Adam: There isn’t.
Mother: You cannot be exactly the same.
Adam: Well we are.
Mother: Did you take your clothes off in front of him?
Adam: No.
Mother: Okay then. The last thing you need is meeting strange men in hotel rooms. You already have enough trouble sticking with one woman, don’t you?

Mother [to Adam]: You are my only son. I am your only mother. You have a respectable job. You have a nice apartment. And since we’re being frank here…I think you should quit that fantasy of being a third rate movie actor.

Anthony: Can I ask you something just man to man? Did you sleep with my wife?
Adam: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Anthony: Did you fuck my wife?
Adam: This is crazy.
Anthony: Answer the question, man. Answer my fucking question and then I will leave.
Adam: You’re fucking crazy!
Anthony: Alright. I’m fucking crazy? I’m fucking crazy? I AM FUCKING CRAZY!! Now, you brought my wife into this man. So I’m gonna bring your girlfriend into the picture as well. You want me out of your life? This is what’s gonna happen first. Your gonna give me your clothes and your car… I’m gonna take your girlfriend on a little romantic getaway. I’m gonna bring her back home tomorrow…and then I’m gonna come back here and I’m gonna bring back your stuff… and then I’m gonna disappear from
your life…forever. Then we will be even.[/b]

Then it all more or less collapses into your guess is as good as mine.

Adam/Anthony: Helen, did you plan on doing something tonight? Because I think I have to go out. Helen? Helen?

I’ve always enjoyed films centered around the confidence game.

The best ones generally revolve around con men conning other con men. This one doesn’t quite go there, but the bastard they do scam is such a slimeball you are particularly pleased watching them rub his nose in it. Or I sure as shit was.

In other words, these are grifters you can love. They basically only take those who deserve to be taken. Or the greedy bastards that end up being hoisted by their own petards. Besides, in their own way, these types are on the grift too. Only sometimes what they do is perfectly legal.

Plus it’s always fun trying to figure out just how many different scams are actually going on [the scams within the scams], who is involved in which ones and who you’re convinced are not involved in any of them. Only it turns out that they are. Who can you trust? In this world you’re never far removed from asking yourself that.

And almost all grifters are true “characters”. They live off the beaten path, playing [more or less] by their own rules. You either wish you could be them or considerably more like them.

Look for the mother of all jinxes.

IMDb

The plot to this movie shares a number of similarities to perhaps the most famous heist movie of all time, The Sting.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_(2003_film
trailer: youtu.be/6-AeSFk_wPY

CONFIDENCE [2003]
Directed by James Foley

[b]Big Al: Hey, Jake, when do I get to play the inside?
Jake: Gordo plays the inside. You are the shill, you know that.
Big Al: Yeah, but come on, all I do is cry and get insulted here.
Jake: What are you talking about? You should get a fucking Academy Award for the shill work you do.

Jake [to the camera]: It doesn’t matter what the con is. Insider trading, a line we got at a bookie club, insurance scam, whatever. You’ve seen the money and you want it. More of it. So who cares if you have to bend the rules a little bit? As long as nobody gets hurt. But then somebody does.

Jake [to the camera]: Tommy Suits always said, “A confidence game is like putting on a play, where everyone knows their part. The inside man, the roper, the shills, everyone, that is, except for the mark.”

Jake [to the camera]: So now you’re an accomplice in a homicide. Everything you thought you were in control of, just flew out the window, or is dripping down your leg. You should be running out the door, desperate to forget that this ever happened, and ready to repent your greedy ways. What about the money? Then there it is again, that itch. There’s a guy standing in front of you with a smoking gun, another guy on the floor bleeding all over the place, and all you can do is think about the money. You’re a sick twisted fuck. So we gotta make sure we give you the blow off. We have to make sure that you never ever come looking for us again. We have to get you off of our backs, forever. That’s why we give you the fix.

Jake voiceover]: Money. It can make you think you’re on top of the world. And if you believe that money can do all that for you, you are the perfect mark.

Jake [voiceover]: Wasn’t it Jack Kerouac who said, “If you own a rug, you own too much.” I don’t necessarily like Kerouac, and driving cross-country isn’t my idea of a good time, but the guy’s got a point. If you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. But when it comes to money, whether it’s finding it or losing it, you just have to remember how much of it is just luck. Just dumb fucking luck.

King [describing how he got shot in a white suit]: We’re checking our fingers and toes and we discover I got shot. I was the only one who got shot. You know why? White suit. I was the first one they saw, I was the first one they shot at, I was the first one they hit. You know what I learned that day?
Jake: Not to wear white after Labor Day?
King: No. Sometimes, Jake, style can get you killed.

King: You’re a good grifter, man. It’s hard to tell when you’re lying.

Jake: This is Lily. She’s the new shill I was telling you about.
Gordo: Whoa. Gordo: Whoa, whoa, whoa… Hold the fucking phone, what is this? Are we playing a con, or are we doing a rendition of “Our Town”?
Jake: Gordo, trust me. We need the help on this one.

Jake: What do you fucking suggest, Miles? You wanna run?
Miles: We never had a problem with that, before.
Jake: We never had a fucking problem like this before.
Miles: Yes, we have, okay? And we would have been beautiful about it. We would have had a bucket of fried chicken, delivered to the King with a nice Kiss My Ass card attached to it, and we would have moved on until the next local putz caught on.
Jake: We’re getting too old to run, Miles.
Miles: Yeah well, we’re still a little too young for San Quentin. Look, I’m… I mean, are you pissed off about Al? Look at me. Trust me, I’m pissed too. But I’m not 25-to-life pissed.

Jake [of Leon Ashby]: What you’re looking for in a mark is someone who has nothing to lose. No friends. No family. No life. You’re looking for a guy who doesn’t own a rug.

Lily: I get the feeling you could’ve bullshitted your way into anything. Why this?
Jake: I’m good at it. Lying, cheating, manipulating. It all came very naturally to me.
Lily: No, it’s more than that.
Jake: The thrill of it? I mean, didn’t you find it exciting tonight? The way you were working that guy Ashby… flirting, giving him your sweet little smile, brushing up against him, occasionally touching him, I have a feeling you were getting off on that tonight.
Lily: All I did was smile and shake my ass.
Jake: Yeah, but you did it very well.

Jake [voiceover]: They say a good chess player can see up to 20 moves deep. That means in some games you’ve calculated every move in your head. The game’s over, even before it’s really started. Like a game of chess, same with a con. You have to see that deep.

Jake [voiceover]: We called them the green Twinkies.

Jake [voiceover]: So I’m dead. But can I really blame Lily? Should I just have trusted her? Who knows? Sooner or later, someone’s gonna start asking the right questions. The Feds would want to know why were they sent in to just bust a couple of crooked cops. Manzano and Whitworth would ask how the drugs got into that duffel bag. The King and Price would ask, where their money really went. And everyone would ask, what agency was it that Special Agent Gunther Bhutan really worked for?[/b]

Take a wild guess.

Water wars. In particular, this one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Cochabamba_protests

Some say it’s the future. And not just in California. Though the continuing drought there generally gets all the press here in America. Instead, these conflicts will sprout up more increasingly across the globe. Some link it to global warming. Others link it to climate change in general.

And some link it to…imperialism.

The perils of imperialism. And the profits. And here it goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus. So basically we get to observe just how imperialism is able to link the present with the past; and how in attempting to shed light on it you can find yourself smack dab in the middle of its [still] brutal legacy.

Yes, there actually are people who think of “imperialism” as something that happened way back then. Way back in history sometime. When of course the rich and the powerful still sustain it in any number of ways today. You don’t have to enslave people to be imperialists.

Here though one might be idealistic about all of this [Sebastin] or one might be cynical [Costa]. Along the way however they tend to shift back and forth. It just depends on what is actually at stake.

Or [sure] one might just leave it all in the hands of God.

Look for crony capitalism in its most blatant and flagrant form. Only rarely does it go that far in the more “civilized” nations today. It doesn’t have to. In part because the citizens are themselves just plain cowed.

This film was dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn, who had much to say about the legacy of imperialism. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

IMDb

The scene where the little girl sees herself on screen was kind of a self homage by director/actress Icíar Bollaín. She wanted to transmit her first impression when she saw herself on screen being a teenager.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_the_Rain
trailer: youtu.be/3JKs8aSb7eo

EVEN THE RAIN [También la Iluvia] 2010
Directed by Icíar Bollaín

[b]Costa: We’ll just see the ones here. The rest can leave.
Sebastin: No, Costa, wait, we can’t do that.
Costa: Shit, we can’t see them all, Sebastin. If you prefer, pick the ones you like and get rid of the rest. But do it now! Come on. Come on. Come on. Choose the ones you like.

Costa [after the people in line refuse to leave]: What’s wrong?
Daniel [holding up a flyer]: “Everyone gets a chance.” That’s what it says. And my girl wants to act.
Costa: Yeah, her and 200 others…but we can’t see them all, understand?
Daniel: You don’t understand, white face. We’ve been waiting for hours. Some have come from very far on foot. Now you tell us to leave. You have to see all of us. We’re not leaving until you see us all. We’re not moving from here![/b]

And all to get $2 a day.

[b]Maria: Sebastin, tell me something. We’re in Bolivia. It doesn’t make much sense. Because we’re 7,500 feet above sea level, surrounded by mountains, and thousands of miles from the Caribbean.
Sebastin: Well, Costa thinks Columbus landed by parachute.
Costa: No, Costa knows this place is full of starving natives, and that means thousands of extras.

Sebastin: No, Costa, no. This could be a mess, really. Have you seen their faces? Please, they’re Quechua.
Costa: So?
Sebastin: What do you mean, “so?” They’re from the Andes! What’s Columbus doing with natives from the Andes?
Costa: From the Andes or wherever, they’re natives. They’re all the same.
Sebastin: No.
Costa: You can negotiate things here – hotels, transport, catering, whatever.
Maria: So, it’s about money.
Costa: Yes, yes! It’s always money, always, always. Well, in this case, very little money, right?

Anton [playing Christopher Columbus]: I, Christopher Columbus, humble servant of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the one true God, take possession of these lands and seas and all they contain. And with this act I proclaim sovereignty over these lands and seas on behalf of their most gracious Majesties.

Anton [playing Columbus to a member of his crew]: Mingle with them. The first man to find gold will be rewarded. Captain…treat them well. We need their food. And find out what arms they have.

Admiral [in the film]: I spoke personally with their Majesties, who instructed me to treat you with respect and cordiality. We ask that you recognize the Church and the Pope as rulers of the universe. And also that you accept the King and the Queen of Spain as rulers of these lands. In exchange, you will receive our love and our charity.
Native: And if we do not?
Admiral: Captain…
Captain: If not we will enslave you and dispose of you as we wish. We will seize your possessions and we will do you as much harm as we can.
Native: What do you want from us?
Captain: Taxes.[/b]

Gold, in other words.

[b]Maria: Alberto, can you tell us about your character?
Alberto: Well, my character is Bartolome de las Casas. He came to the lndies when he was 18 to take charge of a plantation and the Indian slaves who worked there. But later, traumatized by the massacres he witnessed, he devoted his life to the Indians. He became a Dominican. He was nearly murdered twice. On his deathbed – and I’m quoting verbatim. Don’t laugh, listen. He said, “I condemn the blindness of those who ignore the genocide and give orders to the world”. This guy was the father of international law, and I’m only in eight scenes!

Anton: He never, Beto. Christopher Columbus never questioned Spanish authority over the New World or royal authority. In other words, he was a conservative.
Beto: He was a radical! A radical! He demanded that Indians be treated equally as Spaniards!
Anton: Under the Crown!
Beto: But with the Indians’ consent. He was ahead of his time.
Costa: How the fuck did Disney pass on this?

Village woman [to the company cops]: What are you doing to the well? We dug this well with our own hands so our children could drink. You’ve got no right to close the well! How can we live with dirty water? You take our lands, you take our wells. Are you going to take the air, too?

Priest [acting in the film]: The Pharisees sent someone to ask John the Baptist who he was. And he replied, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness.” The Indians mine the gold which builds our cities and even our churches. Gold finances our conquests in far distant parts and so the great wheel of commerce turns. Not one of us is untouched by Indian sweat, least of all His Majesty and his bishops!

Priest [in film]: The truth has many enemies. The lie has many friends.

Daniel [at a political rally against the privatization of the nation’s water supply]: They sell our rivers against our will. They sell our wells, our lakes and even the rain that falls on our heads! By law! Friends, it’s incredible! They don’t allow us to collect the water that falls from the rain, by law! And who takes even the rain? A company whose owners are in London and California. Friends, what are they going to steal next? The vapor from our breath? The sweat from our brow? All they get from me is piss!!

Maria: Costa, they say that they want to mobilize thousands.
Costa: So?
Maria: From the countryside…from the city, the unions. People are furious. Imagine a documentary about this. Costa, let me do it.
Costa: No, I’m not spending another penny.
Maria: Costa, they’re going to raise hell. And if we don’t tell the story, we’re going to let a great chance escape.
Costa: I said no! I’m not a fucking NGO! This story has nothing to do with me.

Costa: Daniel, we’re going to make a fantastic film, you’ll see. No, really. Sebastin is preparing some amazing scenes – hundreds of guys in the ravine panning for gold.
Daniel [parroting back Costas on the phone in English]: “Fucking epic, and you’re there! You’re there, man! What? Two fucking dollars, right? And they’re happy.”

Sebestin [explaining the scene to the native actors]: It’s a horrific choice…heartbreaking. You can’t bear the idea that the dogs will eat the babies. We’ll see you talking to Hatuey and how you understand that there’s no other solution, that you have to make this decision and you have to make it together to give each other courage. So you’ll take the babies…slowly, wade into the river, put them in the water, and drown them.
Daniel: They won’t do it.
Sebastin: Look, I know it’s difficult, but we have to get them to do it. We need it for the film…
Daniel: Sebastin, they can’t even imagine the idea of doing it.
Sebastin: I’m not making this up. It’s what happened. We have to show it. It’s important for the film. Please.
Daniel: Sebastin, some things are more important than your film.

Man [to government official]: They’re burning the water bills.
Government official: Excuse me, a little domestic row. Nothing for you to worry about. Don’t worry.
Man: “Let them eat cake,” as Marie Antoinette said. It’s only an excuse for some fanatics to stir up the desperate and gain a name for themselves.
Sebastin: Forgive me for saying so, but I think their demands are reasonable.
Government official: Perhaps if you were better informed…We’re a country with few resources. It’s hard to maintain a water supply without major foreign investment. These people think that government money grows on trees. Very good. Given their long history
of exploitation, Indians’ distrust is embedded in their genes. It’s very difficult to reason with them, especially when they’re illiterate. But that’s how it is. We have objective reports from Harvard professors, the IMF…
Man: I’d love to see those bastards feed their families on 40 fucking dollars a month!
Government official: Anyway, in this globalized world…

Costa [after Daniel has been beaten up at the demonstration]: Can no one else do this water stuff? Are you listening? Ah… playing the silent, dignified Indian? Fucking great.
[pause]
Costa: If we catch you at another demonstration, you won’t get a fucking penny. Is that clear?
[Daniel says nothing…just stares at him]
Costas: I’ll tell you what. We’ll give you an extra $5,000 if you stay away from demonstration until we’re finished. Okay? What? Forgive me, it’s beneath you? Or not enough? Eh, Daniel? Not enough? $8,000? $10,000? $10,000, Daniel, $10,000. $10,000.
Half now, half when we finish! You’ve never seen so much money in your life! It’s your only fucking chance to get out of this shithole where you live, and you’re smart enough to see that! Or not?[/b]

He takes the money. But that’s all he does.

[b]Sebastin: What if he’s beaten up when he comes back? If he’s tortured, killed, or disappeared? These bastards can do anything. I don’t want that on my conscience.
Costa: But he’s in jail already! We didn’t put him there. And the bastard tricked us. Without the scene, there’s no film. You fucking know that.
Sebastin: Okay, but we tip him off.

Costa: Daniel? You promised me. We made a deal. You broke your word.
Daniel: Water is life. You don’t understand.

Priest [in film]: I beg you, Commander. This will turn the Indians against us for generations. The Crown will prosecute you!
Commander: I doubt it, Father.
Priest: This isn’t Christian!
Commander: Choose 13, and the rest go free. One for each disciple and one for Christ Himself! Want to choose them, Father?
Priest: This is a sacrilege.
Commander: No, Father. It’s an example.

Costa: I’m taking Belen to the hospital.
Sebastin: No, no, you’re crazy! No, Costa, listen to me! This confrontation is going to end, and it’ll be forgotten. But our film is going to last forever. Please, come with us. If anything happens to you, we’re all fucked!
Costa: Listen to me for once in your life! If anything happens to that child, I’ll never forgive myself.
Sebastin: The army is on its way! They’ll crush everyone! You too!
Costa: I can’t leave the child there! I can’t leave her there. Help me out, man, please.
Sebastin: Fuck!!
Costa: Help me, Sebastin, please! You go with the crew. I just can’t leave that child. I can’t.

TV reporter: The army is firing with live ammo! I’ve seen a dozen drop, but the demonstrators still charge. Rocks against bullets!

Costsa [showing Daniel a news story]: You’re in the news everywhere. “Multinational pulls out of Bolivia after water war.” That’s you.
Daniel: It always costs us dear. It’s never easy. I wish there was another way. But there’s not. And the toughest bit is still to come.[/b]

A boy named Sue? Hell, what if everyone you knew called you 1900?

If nothing else this film shows us just how far a “sense of identity” can be stretched given a particularly unique set of circumcstances. Simply imagine yourself having been brought into the world and raised as he was. What would be the odds that you would construe “reality” in the manner in which you do now?

  1. His momma just abandoned him. Put him in a cradle and left it sitting on top of a ship’s piano. The year was 1900. And he is raised in the ship’s engine room smack dab in the belly of the working class beast. Talk about a truly unique point of view.

One can almost [but not quite] imagine this as a true story. But the film works best as an attempt to capture the manner in which any one of us might find ourself in a situation so extraordinary that we ourselves grow up to be extraordinary in turn. Only [let’s be honest] that almost never really happens at all. But at least it allows us to imagine how it might. And yet even when it does one era gives way to the next and it becomes increasingly more difficult for the translations to be made.

What must it be like though to live in your own little world? To be able to?

And then the part about “the philosophy of the ocean” and “the philosophy of the land”. How in opposition they can be. Either literally or metaphorically. I’ve never lived on the water myself so a lot of that simply escapes me.

Look for the dude from The Mod Squad. Oh, and the power of music. And [as some folks might insist] the racism.

IMDb

[b]Tim Roth cannot, in fact, play the piano. He trained for six months to be able to “fake it” for the film.

Exterior shots of the ship are the inspired blueprints of the SS Lusitania and her sister ship the SS Mauritania. The ballroom in which 1900 plays his piano in had a dome similar to the dome the SS Mauritania had in her ballroom during the transatlantic period. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_1900
trailer: youtu.be/LA8v9MamhJE

THE LEGEND OF 1900 [La Leggenda del Pianista Sull’Oceano] 1998
Written in part and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

[b]Max [voiceover]: I still ask myself if I did the right thing when I abandoned his floating city. And I don’t mean only for the work. The fact is, a friend like that, a real friend - you won’t meet one again. If you just decide to hang up your sea legs, if you just want to feel something more solid beneath your feet - and it’s then you no longer hear the music of the gods around you. But, like he used to say, you’re never really done for, as long as you got a good story, and someone to tell it to. Trouble is, nobody’d believe a single word of my story.

Max [on the deck of the ship]: It happened every time. Someone would look up, and see her. It’s difficult to understand. There’d be more than a thousand of us on that ship, traveling rich folks, immigrants, and strange people, and us; yet there was always one, one guy alone, who would see her first. Maybe he was just sitting there eating, or walking on the deck, maybe he was just fixing his pants. He’d look up for a second, a quick glance out to sea, and he’d see her. Then he’d just stand there, rooted to the spot, his heart racing. And every time, every damn time I swear, he’d turn to us, towards the ship, towards everybody, and scream.
Passenger: [pointing] America! [/b]

Lady Liberty? You bet.
Let’s just call this the idealized rendition of the American immigrant.

[b]Danny: If my sons grow up to be a lawyer, I swear I’ll kill him myself.

Danny [to the engine room crew]: I found him the first month of the first year of this frigging new century. So I calls him, Ninteen Hundred.

Max [to Pops the music shop proprietor]: The problem was, as far as the world was concerned, he didn’t even exist…He was eight years old, but officially, he had never even been born.

Ship captain [as 1900 plays the piano]: 1900, all of this is quite against the regulations.
1900 [at 8]: Fuck the regulations.

Max: What the hell do you think about when you’re playing? Where does your mind go when you hit the keys?
1900: Last night I was in a beautiful country. Women had perfume in their hair, everything glowed. It was full of tides.
Max [voiceover]: He traveled. And each time he ended up some place different. In the heart of London, on a train in the middle of the country, on the edge of a giant volcano, in the biggest church in the world, countin’ the columns and staring up at the crucifixes. He traveled.

1900 [to Max who wonders why he never leaves the ship]: I think land people waste a lot of time wondering why. Winter comes and can’t wait for summer, summer comes and you never can wait for winter. That’s why you never tire of traveling or chasing some place far away, where it’s always summer. Doesn’t sound like a good bet to me.

Italian Immigrant [to 1900]: The voice of the sea, it is like a shout, a shout big and strong, screaming and screaming. And the thing it was screaming was, yoooou… with shit instead of brains… life is immense… can you understand that? Immense.

[Repeated line]
Band musician: End of the line!

Jelly Roll Morton [enters the hall for the duel, meeting 1900 for the first time]: I believe you’re sitting in my seat.
1900 [stands, good-naturedly]: You’re the one that invented jazz, right?
Jelly Roll Morton: That’s what they say. And you’re the one who can’t play without the ocean under his ass, right?
1900: That’s what they say.
[moves to shake hands, but gets snubbed]

Jelly Roll Morton [to 1900]: Your turn…sailor.

Jelly Roll Morton [before starting his last piece in the duel–to 1900]: You can stick this up your ass.
1900 [before starting his last piece of the duel-to Jelly Roll Morton]: You asked for it, asshole.

1900: Hey, Max, gimme a cigarette, will you?
Max [bitterly]: You’re not handling this well.
1900 [calmly]: Just gimme a cigarette.
Max: You don’t smoke. What is the matter with you? You could lick this guy with one hand, come on!
1900 [getting agitated]: You gonna gimme a cigarette?
Max [emphatically]: We’re gonna be chucking coal a couple a hundred years and all you can say is…
1900: Give me a fucking cigarette, will you?!

1900 [watching Jelly Roll Morton leave the ship]: And fuck jazz, too.

1900: It’s like a big scream, telling you that life is immense. Once you’ve finally heard it, then you really know what you have to do to go on living. I can’t stay here forever. The ocean would never tell me a thing. But if I get off, live on land for a couple of years, then I’ll be normal, just like the others. And then maybe one day, I’ll make it to the coast, look up, see the ocean, and hear it’s scream.

Max [voiceover]: I often thought about him during the war; if only 1900 were here, who knows what he’d do, what he’d say. ‘Fuck war’ he’d say. But somehow, coming from me, it wasn’t the same thing.

1900 [explaining to Max why he didn’t leave the ship and never will]: All that city… You just couldn’t see an end to it. The end! Please, could you show me where it ends? It was all very fine on that gangway and I was grand, too, in my overcoat. I cut quite a figure and I had no doubts about getting off. Guaranteed. That wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t what I saw that stopped me, Max. It was what I didn’t see. Can you understand that? What I didn’t see. In all that sprawling city, there was everything except an end. There was everything. But there wasn’t an end. What I couldn’t see was where all that came to an end. The end of the world. Take a piano. The keys begin, the keys end. You know there are 88 of them and no-one can tell you differently. They are not infinite, you are infinite. And on those 88 keys the music that you can make is infinite. I like that. That I can live by. But you get me up on that gangway and roll out a keyboard with millions of keys, and that’s the truth, there’s no end to them, that keyboard is infinite. But if that keyboard is infinite there’s no music you can play. You’re sitting on the wrong bench. That’s God’s piano. Christ, did you see the streets? There were thousands of them! How do you choose just one? One woman, one house, one piece of land to call your own, one landscape to look at, one way to die. All that world weighing down on you without you knowing where it ends. Aren’t you scared of just breaking apart just thinking about it, the enormity of living in it? I was born on this ship. The world passed me by, but two thousand people at a time. And there were wishes here, but never more than could fit on a ship, between prow and stern. You played out your happiness on a piano that was not infinite. I learned to live that way. Land is a ship too big for me. It’s a woman too beautiful. It’s a voyage too long. Perfume too strong. It’s music I don’t know how to make. I can’t get off this ship. At best, I can step off my life. After all, it’s as though I never existed. You’re the exception, Max. You’re the only one who knows that I’m here. You’re a minority. You’d better get used to it. Forgive me, my friend. But I’m not getting off.

Max: Oh, you can get off the ship alright, but the ocean?

Pops [returning Max’s pawned trumpet]: A good story’s worth more than an old trumpet.
Max: Okay, Pops. [/b]

Poker. You can play the game every now and then for no particular reason. Or you can live and breathe it. You can pursue it literally as a full time job. A professionial poker player that makes the rounds. And then he makes the rounds again. And again and again.

In fact I watched a documentary on the game a couple of weeks ago. This one: youtu.be/56gax2hNHtA

The movie Rounders features prominantly. This movie in other words.

I have played a lot of poker in my life. Especially in the Army. And in college. But never once did I ever imagine pursuing it beyond the pleasant distraction that it was. These guys are on a whole other level altogether. And then there are those who go far beyond the game itself. Intead it is the part about gambling they become addicted to. Poker just happens to be their game of choice.

What makes poker so fascinating for some is the way in which it intertwines skill with luck. You have to have the cards. Only sometimes you don’t. And that’s why it’s often the same people that end up at the final tables in most of the big tournaments.

Of course the part about gambling means the part about those who do things under the table. And it may or may not be connected to mobsters. And then there’s this: to cheat or not to cheat.

One thing you can bet on here is the ending. Only from the very beginning I was actually betting against it.

Look for the parts that are anything but, say, glamorous. And that part about the juice.

IMDb

[b]Matt Damon and Edward Norton played the $10,000 buy-in Texas Hold 'Em championship event at the 1998 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. During the first of four days, Matt Damon had pocket Kings and was knocked out by former world champion and poker legend Doyle Brunson who held pocket Aces.

According to a Howard Stern Interview, the film is partially based on comedian/actor Norm MacDonald.

Despite the rise in No Limit Texas Hold’em interest in conjunction with this film’s release, the characters play a wide variety of poker variants: No Limit Hold’em is played with Teddy KGB at the beginning and end of the film, the Judge’s game is a 7 card Stud game, the College Boys are playing Stud variants (notably Chicago), when Worm and Mike go the Chesterfield the first time the game is Forced Rotation (alternating hands of Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, Stud usually), Worm plays 7 card Stud later at the Chesterfield, the Taj Mahal game is Limit Hold’em, the Union game is a Draw or Stud game, Mike plays Draw or Stud (it appears in the short scene)with the Greeks, the Cigar Club game is 7 card Stud Hi-Lo, the Golf pro game is a Pot Limit Omaha/Stud game, and the State police game is 7 card Stud. By the way all the games played are part of the World Series of Poker competition (though the main event is No Limit Texas Hold’em) [/b]

IMDb FAQ: imdb.com/title/tt0128442/faq?ref_=tt_faq_sm
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounders_(film
trailer: youtu.be/-Qv4K-4-FZM

ROUNDERS [1998]
Directed by John Dahl

[b]Mike [voiceover]: Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.

Mike [voiceover]: Guys around here’ll tell ya…you play for a living. It’s like any other job. You don’t gamble. You grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that’s it. Get your money in when you have the best of it, and protect it when you don’t. Don’t give anything away. That’s how I’ve paid my way through half of law school. A true grinder. See, I learned how to win a little at a time. But finally, I’ve learned this… If you’re too careful, your whole life can become a fuckin’ grind.

Mike [voiceover]: This is Teddy KGB’s place. You won’t find it in the Yellow Pages.

Mike [voiceover]: The game in question is No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em. Minimum buy-in $25,000. A game like this doesn’t come together often outside the casinos. The stakes attract rich flounders, and they in turn attract the sharks. No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em is the Cadillac of poker. Each player is dealt two cards face down. Five cards are then dealt face up across the middle. These are community cards everyone can use to make the best five card hand. The key to the game is playing the man, not the cards. There’s no other game in which fortunes can change so much from hand to hand. A brilliant player can get a strong hand cracked, go on tilt…and lose his mind along with every single chip in front of him. This is why the World Series of Poker is decided over a No-Limit Hold 'Em table. Some people, pros even, won’t play No-Limit. They can’t handle the swings. But there are others, like Doyle Brunson, who consider No-Limit the only pure game left. Like Papa Wallenda said…“Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.”[/b]

How complicated can it be?

Mike [voiceover]: Here’s the beauty of this game. I just got top two pair on the flop, and I want to keep him in the hand. Against your average guy, I’d set a bear trap, hardly bet at all. Let him walk into it. But KGB’s too smart for that. So, what I’ve got to do is over-bet the pot, make it look like I’m trying to buy it.

And on and on…until he loses thirty thousand dollars.

[b]Mike [voiceover]: You don’t hear much about guys who take their shot and miss, but I’ll tell you what happens to ‘em. They end up humping crappy jobs on graveyard shifts, trying to figure out how they came up short. See, I had this picture in my head. Me sitting at the big table, Doyle to my left, Amarillo Slim to my right, playing in the World Series of Poker. And I let that vision blind me at the table against KGB. Now, the closest I get to Vegas is west New York, driving this lousy route handed down from Knish… to rounders who forget the cardinal fuckin’ rule…Always leave yourself outs.

Store Clerk: Hey, lemme ask you a question. In the legal sense, can fuckin’ Steinbrenner move the Yankees? Does he have the fuckin’ right to just move them?
Mike: How should I know that?
Store Clerk: You didn’t learn that yet?
Mike: No, we get to Steinbrenner in third year law school.
Store Clerk: Oh…

Mike [after Jo tells him they don’t have vtime for sex]: I’ll be really quick. You won’t feel a thing.

Jo: What kind of a job is that going to be, Mike um, writing an opinion on high stakes poker?
Mike: Hon, you’re the one that told me I should use my poker skills in the court room.

Jo [to Mike]: Worm. I just can’t believe you still know someone called “Worm.”

Mike [voiceover]: In “Confessions of a Winning Poker Player,” Jack King said, “Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.” It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can’t stop thinking of how I lost it.

Mike [voiceover]: Worm and I fall into our old rhythm like Clyde Frazier and Pearl Monroe. We bring out all the old school tricks, stuff that would never play in the city… signalling, chip placing, trapping. We even run the old best hand play. I can probably crack the game just as quickly straight up, but there’s no risk in this room. Now, some people might look down on Worm’s mechanics, call it immoral. But as Canada Bill Jones said, “It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.”

Mike [voiceover]: Worm really has become an artist, too. Discard culls, pickup culls, overhand run ups, the Double Duke…His technique is flawless. But his judgment is a little off. A few times, I have to fold the case on him, just so it won’t be obvious. Still, he plays the part of the loser to perfection.

Worm [of Jo]: She’s really got him by the balls.
Petra: That’s not so bad, is it?
Worm: It depends on the grip.

Mike [voiceover]: Amarillo Slim, the greatest proposition gambler of all time, held to his father’s maxim…“You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once.” This is a lesson Worm’s never bothered to learn.

Mike [to Worm]: I’m not gonna preach to you, but those two guys in there, they’re not rabbits. Roman and Maurice? They’re Russian outfit guys. Not as bad as KGB, but you don’t want to be fuckin’ with those guys.

Jo: I watched you, I stood by you while you lost everything before. I don’t think I can go through that with you again.
Mike: Jo, I wasn’t gonna lose! Why does this still seem like gambling to you? Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker EVERY YEAR?!! What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas? It’s a skill game, Jo. Jo: Great. So why’d you have to lie to me?
Mike: Because I knew you wouldn’t understand. Last night, I sat down at this card table. I felt alive for the first time since I got busted at KGB’s joint, okay?
Jo: You just told me you felt alive for the first time at a fucking card table.

Mike [analyzing the Professor’s poker game]: All right, here’s the thing. You only play premium hands. You only start with jacks or better split, nines or better wired, three high cards to a flush. If it’s good enough to call, you gotta be in there raising, all right? I mean, tight, but aggressive. And I do mean aggressive. That’s your style, Professor. I mean, you gotta… you gotta think of it as a war.

Professor: For generations, the men of my family have been rabbis. It was to be my calling. I was quite a prodigy. The elders said I had a 70-year-old’s understanding of the midrahs by the time I was 14. But by the time I was finished with my studies I knew I could never be a rabbi.
Mike: Why not?
Professor: Because for all I understood of the Talmud, I never saw God there.

Worm [after Jo walks out on Mike]: I guess the sayings’ true. In the poker game of life, women are the rake man. They are the fuckin’ rake.
Mike: What the fuck are you talkin’ about. What saying?
Worm: I…I don’t know. There ought to be one though.

Mike [after two fish join the poker game]: These two have no idea what they’re about to walk into. Down here to have a good time, they figure why not give poker a try? After all, how different can it be from the home games they’ve played their whole lives? All the luck in the world isn’t gonna change things for these guys. They’re simply overmatched. We’re not playing together, but then again, we’re not playing against each other either. It’s like the Nature Channel. You don’t see piranhas eating each other, do you?

Worm: Hey, I’m not gonna let a garbage can fall on my head.
Mike: No, you’re gonna jump out of the way and let it land on me.

Knish: You had to put it all on the line for some Vegas pipe dream.
Mike: Yeah, I took a risk. I took a risk.
Knish: You see all the angles.
Mike: You never have the stones to play one.
Knish: “Stones”? You little punk. I’m not playing for the thrill of fucking victory here. I owe rent, alimony, child support. I play for money. My kids eat. I got stones enough not to chase cards, action or fucking pipe dreams of winning the World Series on ESPN.

Mike [voiceover]: I’ve often seen these people, these squares at the table, short stack and long odds against them. All their outs gone. One last card in the deck that can help them. I used to wonder how they could let themselves get into such bad shape, and how the hell they thought they could turn it around.

Mike [voiceover playing against KGB]: Doyle Brunson says, “The key to No-Limit… is to put a man to a decision for all his chips.” Teddy’s just done it. He’s representing aces, the only hand better than my cowboys. I can’t call and give him a chance to catch. I can only fold, if I believe him. Or…

Mike [voiceover]: In a heads-up match, the size of your stack is almost as important as the quality of your cards. I chopped one of his legs out in the first hand. - Now all I have to do is lean on him until he falls over

Mike [voiceover]: I told Worm that you can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle.
[pause]
Mike: But you can’t win much either.

Mike [voicover]: The rule is this: You spot a man’s tell, you don’t say a fucking word. I finally spotted KGB’s. And usually I would’ve let him go on chewing those Oreos till he was dead broke. But I don’t have that kind of time. I’ve only got till morning. Not even Teddy KGB’s immune to getting a little rattled.

Mike: You’re right, Teddy. The ace didn’t help me. I flopped a nut straight.

Mike [voiceover]: Turned my ten grand into just over. Paid to Grama, six went back to the Chesterfield. As for Worm, well, I figure we’re even. And after the ten going back to the professor, I’m back where I started, with three stacks of high society.

Mike: People insist on calling it luck. First prize at the World Series of Poker is a million bucks. Does it have my name on it? I don’t know. But, I’m gonna find out. [/b]

The true story of this guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Salvador

Prison.

If you have ever watched episodes from the MSNBC doc series Lockup, you’ll be familiar with how characters like Bronson can come into existence. At least in environments like this. Everything in prison revolves around creating a world in which you are always expected to behave in a particular manner in order to be judged in a particular manner. The convict code. And since so much of your life in prison is beyond your control you become particularly obsessed with ordering about the part that you do. Bronson just takes it all to a whole other level.

And then all of this becomes entangled in the quest for fame and fortune. In the “modern world”. So: What part is “real” here and what part is “theatre”?

And then [of course] how does one go about “explaining” what it all “means”?

[b]Roger Ebert:

I suppose, after all, Nicolas Winding Refn, the director and co-writer of Bronson was wise to leave out any sort of an explanation. Can you imagine how you’d cringe if the film ended in a flashback of little Mickey undergoing childhood trauma? There is some human behavior beyond our ability to comprehend. I was reading a theory the other day that a few people just happen to be pure evil. I’m afraid I believe it. They lack any conscience, any sense of pity or empathy for their victims. But Bronson is his own victim. How do you figure that?[/b]

Let’s just say that Charlie Bronson had a high tolerance for pain. Either inflicting it or receiving it.

This is a world so far removed from the “tools of philosophy” that it might not even be possible for the more serious philosophers among us to come to terms with what that means.

See if you can connect the dots between what you see on the screen and what you are hear on the soundtrack.

IMDb

[b]Nicolas Winding Refn was not allowed to meet Charles Bronson in person since he is not from Britain, but was allowed to have two phone calls with him. Tom Hardy met with Bronson several times and the two became good friends. Bronson was impressed with how Hardy managed to get just as muscular as he was and how well he could mimic his own personality and voice. Bronson has stated he believes Hardy was the only person who could play him.

Charles Bronson was not allowed to see the film, but said that if his mother liked it, that would be enough for him. According to Refn, his mother loved it. In 2011 Bronson was finally allowed to see the film and called it “theatrical, creative and brilliant”.

Tom Hardy put on 42 pounds to play Charlie Bronson, doing 2500 press-ups a day for five weeks. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronson_(film
trailer: youtu.be/GMJ1c3qxOWc

BRONSON [2008]
Written in part and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

[b]Charles Bronson [the real Charles Bronson]: How would you feel, waking up in the morning without a window? My window is a steel grid, I 'ave to put my lips against that steel grid and suck in air, that’s my morning… 'cause I got no air in my cell. I have to eat, sleep and crap in that room twenty-three hours of a twenty-four hour day. You tell me, what human being deserves that? Apart from the stinking paedophile or a child killer. I don’t deserve that, I done nothing on this planet to deserve that. My bed is four inches off the floor, it’s a concrete bed, my toilet hasn’t even got a seat on it or a lid, and I 'ave to live like this month after month after month, and the way it’s looking it’s year after year after year. Now is that’s right then so be, but let somebody else 'ave a fucking go at it, 'cause I’ve had twenty-six years of this bollocks and it’s time to come out, and I want the jury at my trail to come and see how I’m living. But I’m not living, I’m existing.

Bronson [to the camera]: My name is Charles Bronson. All my life I wanted to be famous. Want to know what I would have done better if I had a vocation? Only I did not know which one. Not yet. I could not play. A sort of force of nature. The film is based on real facts. How could I explain it? I was raised normally. My parents were decent. They were honest citizens. Complied by society. I went to school. I tried not to disappoint them. But some kids liked problems.

Bronson [to the camera]: So … this is the post office where I went…this is is what I got…And that’s what they gave me …
Judge: Seven years.
Mother: Do not worry, son … you will not do seven years … You’ll be out in four years.

Bronson [voiceover]: Don’t get me wrong. For the majority of people prison is very hard. A monotonous, nightmare for 24 hours a day. Seven days a week. 365 days a year. Nothing but a living breathing Hell. But for me prison was finally a place where I could sharpen my skills. It’s like a battleground, isn’t it?

Bronson [to the camera]: You don’t want to be trapped inside with me sunshine. Inside, I’m somebody nobody wants to fuck with do you understand? I am Charlie Bronson, I am Britain’s most violent prisoner.

Bronson [voiceover]: Parkhurst. God bless that place. Accomodations was more than worthy of my royal self. Your own bed, toilet, sink. The food was of exceptional quality. Yes, Parkhurst was corker…the oldest in the world, what can I say? Meals at the exact time. Room visits … the staff always present to make you more comfortable.
[interspersed with shots of the brutal reality instead][/b]

They send him to an insane asylum.

Mental institution orderly: Okay, Peterson now that you are calm, these are the rules of Rampton. First rule: You do what we say.
Bronson: And the second rule?
Orderly: This is not a prison. There is no limit here to how long you’ll stay.

And then they stick needles in his ass. Think Cuckoos Nest.

[Bronson desperately trying to escape from the insane asylum. He meets a patient named John White who reveals that he is a child rapist. Disgusted by pedophiles and wanting to go back to prison, he unsuccessfully tries to kill White by strangulation before carried off by guards]
[cut to Bronson walking onto a theater stage set in his sub-conscious mind]
Bronson: I would now like to reenact what I call, “When Murder Goes Wrong”.
[Bronson as himself, facing audience]
Bronson: When do I go back?
Bronson (as nurse): Now now, Mr. Peterson, we aren’t going to start up all that silliness again, are we?
Bronson [whips back around to Bronson, now aggravated]: Listen, Nursey, I just wanna know when my trial is and when I head back to the slammer… 'right?
Bronson (as nurse): WRONG, Mr. Peterson! Now let’s not play sillybuggers, eh? I’ll just have to pop you in the botty with one of my special potions, mmm?
Bronson: WHEN’S MY TRIAL?!!
Bronson (as nurse): Ah-ah-ah-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk, no. Mr. White recovered, dear. There’s no trial!
[claps gleefully]
Bronson (as nurse): Isn’t that wonderful? However, you are being moved.
Bronson: Where?
Bronson (as nurse giggling and clapping ecstatically]: To Ardmore Asylum for the criminally insane!
Bronson: I deserve to go back to prison for what I did. I want my hotel room back!
Charles (as nurse): Well, I’m sure you’ll find yourself some solitary…
[Bronson turns back to audience and bows]

But then he spends the next 26 years in solitary confinement.

[b]Bronson: Twenty six years. Twenty six years in solitary…and I ain’t killed no one!! I’m not joking…not a soul!

Paul: All you need is a name.
Bronson: What’s wrong with Mickey Peterson.
Paul: You need a fighting name, like a movie star.
Bronson: Charlton Heston.
Paul: Look, love. No one gives a toss about Charlton Heston. The man’s a cunt. You’re more of the Charles Bronson type. Death Wish. It fits you down to a tee. Perfect. Charlie fucking Bronson.

Bronson [after getting paid for his first fight]: 20 quid? You’re having a fucking laugh, ain’t cha?
Paul: Oh spare me the Oliver Twist routine, Charlie love. You need to build your audience.
Bronson: I gave you fucking magic in there!
Paul: Magic? You just pissed on a gypsy in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s hardly the hottest ticket in town, darling.
Bronson: Right. When’s the next one.

Warden: Sixty-nine days. So tell me Charles Bronson, what did you do with those sixty-nine days?
Bronson: I was building an empire.
Warden: You’re ridiculous.

Bronson [to the prison officer he’s ordering to rub vaseline on his naked body]: On my arse.
[officer starts rubbing it on]
Bronson: Not in my arse, you fuckin’ homo!

Warden [after the guards have severely beaten him]: What would you like us to do, Charlie Bronson?
Bronson [through a leather gag]: Fuuucckk off.
Warden: You’re pitiful. You know that? And I can promise you this. You go further in this mindless behavior, in this nihilistic and godless fashion, I can promise you that you will die inside.

Bronson [of Phil the prison art teacher]: Right! That’s enough! He’s had enough, come on, get him out of here! Go on and get him the fuck out of here, he’s had enough! Come on! You fucking cunts! No class next week. Right! [/b]

Remember David Byrne’s “big suit” from Stop Making Sense? What the hell is that all about, you were wondering. Well, imagine instead that he wore a huge paper mache [cartoon character] head on the stage.

Is it just a gimmick? Is it supposed to mean something? Is it symbolic of one or another cliche being exposed?

Or, instead, is it more a manifestation of mental illness. Is the guy a genius or a fruitcake? And if he is just “sick in the head”…does that ruin everything?

Jon, in seems, is stuck in suburbia. He’s looking for a way out. So, how about hooking up with an “experimental band”? An experimental band playing really experimental music: the kind some call noise. At least until they get to the vocals.

You decide: youtu.be/0zA1Ld2ZnwE

This one explores all the usual dots that get connected [and then disconcected] between the artist and the art, between the band and the audience, between the music and the money.

In other words, if more and more people like the music can it really be deemed experiemtnal music at all? To be successful is [almost by definition] to sell out. Instead, to become a “great band” seems to revolve around just how relatively obscure you remain.

To be or not to be [size=150]BIG[/size].

It’s only a matter of time though before you begin to wonder if the whole thing isn’t really just…tongue in cheek?

IMDb

[b]Frank is based on late British comedian Chris Sievey’s iconic comedy character Frank Sidebottom.

All of the music performed by the band is played live by the actors on screen.

Troubled musician Daniel Johnston was one of the influences on the film. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_(film
trailer: youtu.be/Wk-hWzq67w4

FRANK [2014]
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson

[b]Don: You play C, F and G?
Jon: Yeah.
Don: You’re in.

Don [on the phone]: Hello? So Lucas has been sectioned and we need a new keyboard player. And Frank said, you know, “remember that grateful-looking boy who jumped on the stage last week uninvited?”
Jon: I wasn’t uninvited.
Don: So Frank said that he thought you brought something cherishable that night. But he can sound really muffled under the head so…I thought he said that you brought something perishable. You know, like food that decays easily - like fish or fruit. So I said, “come on, man, anybody can do that.” So anyways, we’re doing this really major thing over in Ireland Are you in?
Jon: Yes.

Jon: The head. It smells like sausages.
Don: He never takes it off.
Jon: Never?
Don: No, never.
Jon: He sleeps in it?
Don: Yep.
Jon: What about eating?
Don: He sucks liquid food through a straw that he funnels up under the neckline. Occasionally solids, but it’s not encouraged.
Jon: How does he clean his teeth?
Don: Look, Jon, you’re just gonna have to go with this.

Don: But let me tell you something…Frank, with all his issues, is without a doubt the most 100% sanest cat I’ve ever met. Me, on the other hand…
Jon: Well, you seem pretty sane to me.
Don: Yeah! But, no no, I spent a lot of time in a psychiatric hospital. I was labeled as severely mentally ill. I used to fuck mannequins.
Jon: Right.
Don: It’s a condition.

Jon [voiceover]: At the heart of it all is Frank. How to describe Frank? Mostly he seems friendly, though sometimes a little intense.
[cut to Frank chasing Jon through a field wielding a shovel]
Jon [to Frank]: Stop! It will be worth it!
Jon: He can hide himself away for days at a time. What goes on inside that head…inside that head?

Jon [voiceover]: Frank says he must push us to our furthest corners…
Frank: Lay an egg with me!
Jon: …and unlock the great music that hides there.
Frank: Get down there. Squat! Go on, lay an egg. Get that egg out. Squeeze that egg out!!
Jon: It can feel a little overwhelming at times.
Frank: It has no business being in there!!
Jon: But all in all, I am happy to be a part of this.

Clara: You should go home.
Jon: Frank picked me, okay? So it’s not up to you.
Clara: Excuse me?
Jon: He said I was cherishable, and he picked me to join the band.
Clara: You are fingers being told which keys to push.

Jon [voiceover]: Today we begin work on the album in earnest. Frank wants us to start everything from scratch. Note the color-coding. He’s created an entirely new musical notation system. We’ve designed our own instruments. He has initiated a strict regime
of physical exercise.
[cut to Frank punching a band member in the face]
Jon: Fortunately, we have a safe word for when things get too intense. It’s “chinchilla”.

Jon: Have you ever seen him without the head?
Don: God, no!
Jon: Maybe he’s facially disfigured, forced to wear a mask like the elephant man.

Jon [after Don hung himself]: Don used to be the keyboard player?
Clara: First it was Don, then it was Lucas. Now it’s you.

Clara [to Jon]: If you fuck everything up in America, I’ll stab you.

Jon [to the band in the van]: It’s just like Paris Texas, isn’t it?

SXSW woman: Actually, I gotta tell you guys. I mean, we know who you are. Simone and me, we found you, but the audience won’t have heard of you yet.
Jon: But more than 23,700 people watched us on YouTube.
Woman: Oh, 23,000 hits on YouTube is nothing.
Simone: Yeah, with those kind of views, maybe one or two people in the room will know you. Maybe nobody. Half a million hits, now that’s when you’re onto something big.

Clara: So you want us to change our sound?
Jon: Look, we’ve always demanded that the audience stretch their corners all the way out to meet ours. But what if…what if we pull our corners back a little bit? Just a tiny tiny bit and then everyone’s corners can meet in a place that’s still a really long way off. But it’s just a bit less…You know? And a bit more likeable. But not in a bad way.
Clara: I’m not playing the fucking ukulele.
Frank: I’m writing my most likeable song ever. I’ve always dreamed that one day I’d have a band member who shared my vision of creating extremely likeable music. So thank you, Jon. You gave me the little push I needed.[/b]

Frank plays his most likeable song. Let’s just say that Clara loves it, but Jon is less than impressed.

[b]Jon [voiceover]: Clara Wagner, our very own Syd Barrett, was arrested today and charged with assault after stabbing me in the leg. We will all miss Clara and sincerely hope our own crazy diamond will also shine on.

Jon [after tracking Frank down in Bluff, Kansas]: I’ve been very worried about you. I just wanted to find you to…Make sure you’re okay. How are things without the head?

Jon: What happened to Frank? Something must have happened to him to make him like that.
Father: Nothing happened to him. He’s got a mental illness.
Jon: The torment he went through to make the great music.
Mother: The torment didn’t make the music. He was always musical. If anything, it slowed him down.[/b]

Here’s how Bob puts it:

There are places in my neighborhood no one ever thinks about. And you see them every day and every day you forget about them. These are the places where all the things happen that people are not allowed to see.

And in the world today there are not too many places left where one or another rendition of this isn’t a daily occurence. That’s just what happens when you live a world where having or not having money is now more or less the center of the universe. And a world where how you get it is more often than not incidental.

And the deeper down you go into the working class the more the part about money can take you into any number of disconcerting [even dangerous] places. Especially when your life gets all tangled up with gangsters and thugs. And with Russian mobsters. And with cops and the robbers. These folks will get you embedded in all manner of ambiguous relationships. You never quite know who you can trust.

And Bob is just the bartender. Or, rather, Bob would like to be just the bartender. But here that’s a big difference. On the other hand, Bob is not always as dumb as he seems.

Look for Bronson.

IMDb

Last film appearance of James Gandolfini, he died one month after shooting had wrapped.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drop_(film
trailer: youtu.be/7lCiDIcqMe0

THE DROP [2014]
Directed by Michaël R. Roskam

[b]Bob [voiceover]: There are places in my neighborhood no one ever thinks about. And you see them every day and every day you forget about them. These are the places where all the things happen that people are not allowed to see. You see, in Brooklyn, money changes hands all night long. It’s just not the kind you can deposit in a bank. But all that money needs to end up somewhere. They call it a drop bar.

Bob [about looking after a puppy]: I mean, it’s a huge responsibility, right?
Marv: Well, it’s a dog. It’s not like some long lost retarded relative shows up at your door in a wheelchair and a colostomy bag hanging out of his ass. Says “I’m yours now. Take care of me.” It’s not that. It’s a dog.

Marv: “Find my money.” If we knew where their money was, it would mean we knew who robbed us. Which would mean we were in on it, which means they’d shoot us in the face. These fucking Chechnyans.
Bob: Chechens, Marv.
Marv: What?
Bob: They’re Chechens. They’re from Chechnya, but you call them Chechens.
Marv: Yeah, they’re from Chechnya.
Bob: Yeah, I said that. You don’t call people from Ireland Irelandians, do you?
Marv: What the fuck are you talking about?!!

Detective: So what up, Evandro?
Torres: You remember Marvin Stipler? Cousin Marv? He got pushed off his own book, nine, ten years ago, by the Chechens. His bar got held up. The bar’s owned by one of Papa Umarov’s shell companies.
Detective: What kind of dumb-ass holds up one of his bars?
Torres: You got me. Major Crimes up on the Umarovs?
Detective: We barely survived the last budget cuts. We’re not sticking our heads up to go after some Russian that John Q Public barely knows exists.

Bob: You need to see this, Marv.
Marv: No, I don’t. I don’t need to do anything. I’m just going to stand right here. I’m going to stand right the fuck here.
Bob: No. You really should take a look at this.
Marv: I don’t need to see Europe. I don’t need to see Dottie. And I don’t need to see what’s in that bag.

Eric: Hey, Bob. How you doing? Nice to see you. Say hi to Nadia. Don’t forget to stitch her up when she stabs herself, all right?

Nadia: He’s not just going to go away.
Bob: Eric? No. He doesn’t strike me as the type that wants to do that.
Nadia: He’s not. He killed a kid named Glory Days.
Bob: Yeah. Yeah. I heard that. I heard that. Richie Whelan.
Nadia: Yeah.
Bob: Why?
Nadia: I don’t know. He’s not a big fan of “why”, Eric.

Bob: Marv thought he was a tough guy. We had a crew once. Back in the day, when we was young, we made a little money but it was never, you know… So a mean crew rolls into town, and, you know…we flinched. That’s it. End of the crew.
Nadia: But you’re still in the life.
Bob: Me?
Nadia: Yeah.
Bob: No. No. No, no, no. No, I just tend the bar.

Bob: Marv, you can’t redo it. All right? They pressed, you blinked. It’s done. It’s over. It’s been over for a while now.
Marv: Well, I’m not the guy who wasted his entire life waiting for it to start.
Bob: I did that?
Marv: At least I had something once. I was respected. I was feared. When I walked into a place, people sat up. They sat up straight. They noticed. What’d you ever have? And the fucking bar stool you put that old biddy at. You bought her free drinks and don’t think
I don’t know that you did it on purpose? That was my stool and nobody sat on that stool because it was Cousin Marv’s stool. And that meant something. That meant something!
Bob: But it didn’t. Ever. It was just a stool.

Bob: Listen here pal, you can’t come walking into people’s lives and…
Eric: Listen to me. That is life. That’s what it is. People like me coming along when you’re not looking.

Bob: You see where this is going?
Eric: Yeah, kid had to be ripped off.
Bob: No. The kid had to be killed. So nobody’d know he’d paid Marv back off. So that’s what we did.
Eric: So you…
Bob: Yeah…killed him. Yeah, I did. I shot him in the face, twice. Then I wrapped his head in a towel, and I stabbed him in the chest in his heart, so he would bleed out, and I put him in my bathtub and watched him drain. Then I put him in an oil tank with laundry detergent and lye, and I sealed it back up. Want to know what his name was?
Eric: It’s 2:00, Bob. It’s 2:00.
Bob: His name.
Eric: I would not know, Bob.
Bob: Yes, you do. This is something you know.
Eric: I wouldn’t know that, Bob.
Bob: Guess.
Eric: Yeah?
Bob: Yeah.
Eric: I know it’s 2:00, and you got to open the safe!!!
Bob: Listen to me. His name…his name was Richie Whelan.

Bob [to Nadia]: Go out for a dinner still dressed like you’re in your living room. You wear those big, you wear those big hippity hoppity clown shoes and you speak to women terribly. You treat them despicably. You hurt harmless dogs that can’t even defend themselves. I’m tired of you man. I’m tired of you, you embarrass me. You know we would’ve kept coming back. That’s what he would’ve done. People like this they take something from you, and you let them, they just act like they can keep coming back and you still owe them something and they never, never change. You can never change their mind.

Nadia: You just… I mean, you just fucking shot him.
Bob: Yes, I did. Absolutely. He was gonna hurt our dog.

Chovka: So what do you think? Take down his name, put up yours. “Bob’s Bar.” Has a nice ring to it, huh? “Bob’s Bar.” “Bob’s Big Bad Bar.” I’m kidding, my friend. Lighten up.
Bob: Sure.
Chovka [to Andre]: Did he fit?
Andre: Yeah. Had to break his legs, but he fit fine.
Chovka [to Bob]: Smile. Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be okay. Go home. Get some rest.

Bob [voiceover]: There are some sins that you commit that you can’t come back from, you know, no matter how hard you try. You just can’t. It’s like the devil is waiting for your body to quit. Because he knows, he knows that he already owns your soul. And then I think maybe there’s no devil. You die…and God, he says, Nah, nah you can’t come in. You have to leave now. You have to leave and go away and you have to be alone. You have to be alone forever. [/b]

Sounds good to me.

[b]Torres: Are you going to the church closing tomorrow?
Bob: Yeah, of course I am.
Torres: They sold it. To Milligan Development. What’d I tell you? It’s gonna be condos with stained glass windows.

Torres: No one ever sees you coming, do they, Bob?

Bob: When you left the bar I know that meant stay away. I know that meant stay away, but you didn’t say it. So if you say it, then I will just go. Believe me, Nadia, I will leave right now. But you have to say it.
[long pause]
Nadia: Let me go get my jacket.
Bob: Yeah? Sure, great. Great.[/b]

As bleak dystopias go this one’s right up there with the rest of them. And it’s unique in that it is set in the near future in [of all places] Australia. Imagine you are struggling to stay alive in a dystopian Outback. Grim is where you start out. And then it is more or less every man for himself.

Of course some might argue that in the Outback the future here is pretty much the same as it’s always been.

And, apparently, the calamity happens not as a result of a nuclear exchange or some virulent pathogen spreading across the globe, but from the economic collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. It seems crony capitalism has finally fucked us all for good. Though it’s hard to imagine any of these folks having a clue about that.

It’s the sort of world one imagines the ubermen dream about. Dog eat dog right down to the bone. Except for the parts that aren’t.

And in focusing on just a handful of people intent on subsisting from day to day, it is much more effective in allowing you to imagine what it might be like to actually endure what most of us can barely imagine a “dystopia” to be. A rather intimate reflection on the end of the world.

And then the final scene. We find out why the rover is obsessed with finding his car. I sure didn’t see that coming.

IMDb

The scene which involves Rey (Robert Pattinson) listening to the song “Pretty Girl Rock” by Keri Hilson is a joke by the director to remind the audience of how pretty Pattinson use to look in the Twilight films.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rover_(2014_film
trailer: youtu.be/ChM2icbWo9w

THE ROVER [2014]
Directed by David Michôd

[b]Eric: I want my car back.
Archie: Yeah, I can see that. You ain’t gettin’ it back.
Eric: I want my car back. If you don’t give it to me now, I’m gonna get back in that truck
and I’m gonna stay on you till you do.
Archie: What makes you think I won’t kill you right here? Huh?
Eric: Nothing makes me think that.

Eric: I’m looking for my car. It’s got three men in it. Did it come through here?
Grandma: What’s your name?
Eric: Have you seen it?
Grandma: What’s your name?
Eric: Have you seen it?
Grandma: Do you want something? Do you want to sleep with a boy? I’ve got a boy here you can sleep with. He’s smooth like the inside of your arm.

Eric [back with a gun]: I’m looking for my car. Have you seen it?
Grandma: Tell me your name. I want to know your name.
Eric: Answer my question.
Grandma: Answer mine.
Eric [cocking the gun]: Answer my question. I’m not gonna say it again.
Grandma: Okay. I’ll call you “my baby.” My baby. There was a car and it had three men in it and it did what most cars do. It came in one direction and left in the other. That’s all I can tell you about it. The only detail I can tell you is the detail that pertains to this place. I can tell you what they drank. I can tell you what they smelled like. I can tell you what they said, if they said anything and if I heard what it was that they said.
Eric: What did they say?
Grandma: They didn’t say anything. They didn’t stop here.

Grandma: You must really love that car, darling. What a thing to get worked up about in this day and age. What is it about the car that you love so much? Can you tell me? What’s your name, sweetheart?
[Eric steps towars her and aims the gun…she brushes it away]
Grandma: Oh, don’t be silly. Now you’re just being rude.

Eric: Where are we going?
Rey: I can’t tell you nothing more than I already told you.
Eric [gripping him by the throat]: I don’t give a shit what you think you’ve already told me. Start fucking talking to me! Do you even know where we are?
Rey: What?
Eric: Where are we?
Rey: Where are we? I don’t know.
Eric: You don’t fucking know? So, how are you gonna get to where you’re going if you don’t even know where the fuck you are?!

Rey: 'Cause I believe in God and I know Henry believes in God. There’s no harm Henry would want to see me come to. I believe in that.
Eric: Look at the harm you’ve come to and where is Henry?
Rey: He’s waiting for me.
Eric: He’s not waiting for you.
Rey: Yes, he is.
Eric: No, he’s not. I’ll tell you what God’s given you. He’s put a bullet in you and he’s abandoned you out here to me. He feels nothing for you. He couldn’t give a fuck if you died tomorrow. God gave you a brother who’s not waiting for you. He gave you a brother who’s not even thinking about you right now. Just 'cause you and him came out of the same woman’s hole… The only thing that means anything right now is that I’m here and he’s not. Your brother left you to die. That’s what people do. You don’t learn to fight, your death’s going to come real soon. [/b]

On the other hand, what does he know? Still, he’s got Rey convinced. And later on that has consequences.

[b]Eric [after hearing a story from Rey’s past]: Why are you telling me this?
Rey: I just remembered it. It interested me. Not everything has to be about something.

Rey: I’m tryin’ to stop thinking about that little girl who died, but I can’t.
Eric: You shouldn’t.
Rey: But I can’t.
Eric: You should never stop thinking about a life you’ve taken. That’s the price you pay for taking it.

Soldier: When are you gonna say something, cunt? It’s over. It’s over for you.
Eric: I know that.
Soldier: That’s good that you know that.
Eric: Do you know it, too?
Soldier: Oh, I know it, champ. I told you it.
Eric: Do you know it’s over for you, too? Whatever you think’s over for me was over a long time ago. I’m asking about you.
Soldier: Are you threatening me?
Eric: No. A threat means there’s still something left to happen.

Eric [to the soldier]: I murdered my wife. I followed her to a man’s house and I watched him put his fingers inside her and I killed 'em both. No one ever came after me. Ten years ago. I never had to explain myself. I never had to lie to anyone. I never had to run and hide. I just buried 'em in a hole and I went home. No one ever came after me. And that hurt me more than getting my heart broken. Knowing it didn’t matter. Knowing you can do something like that and no one comes after you. You do a thing like I did, that should really mean something. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.

Eric: What feeling do you have when you wake up in the morning? When your feet touch the floor? Or before that, when you’re lying there thinking about your feet hitting the floor. What’s that feel like for you? Do you know what I’m talking about?
Soldier: No, mate. I don’t. No, mate. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Rey [to Eric after shooting the soldier]: Is that it? Phew! That was easy. Do I shoot him again just to be sure?
Eric: No.

Rey: I’m gonna kill him. I’m going to kill Henry.
Eric: Go to sleep.
Rey: There’s money up there too, we can take it if we want.
Eric: Go to sleep.[/b]

Here’s the thing [or one thing]: Many will look down on folks like this…while at the same time being inexorably drawn to the images they provide as a result of what they do. And what they do is basically to profit off the misery of others.

Nightcrawlers. They go out and slither about in the underbelly of a city like Los Angeles. In the dead of night. And then when human calamaties occur they are there to record them. And then they go to the folks who will pay them for what they do record. The more calamitous the consequences – the more that people suffer – the more they can make. Call it the eyewitless news syndrome. The business of local news.

At times they’re like a pack of vultures descending on a carcass. But in the pack Lou stands out. Not only is there almost nothing that he won’t do [on both sides of the law] but he is able to rationalize what he does do in a manner that is really hard to pin down. He’s a very strange man you might say.

And somehow this all seems to be a clear reflection of the “modern world”. It will simply resonate more with some than for others.
Consider:

Director Dan Gilroy on the impetus for the film: "I think to some degree it’s certainly an indictment of local television news, but I’d like to cast a wider net in the sense that all of us really watch these images. I would hope that maybe a viewer would take it further and maybe go, “Why do I watch these images and how many of these images do I want to put into my own spirit?'”

And I would imagine that in this day and age, where more and more people can go to the internet and connect with this grisly shit, there are all the more outlets for their wares.

IMDb

[b]During the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal talks to himself in the mirror, Gyllenhaal got so into the scene that he punched the mirror. The mirror broke and ended up cutting Gyllenhaal’s hand. He had to go to a hospital and get stitches. He returned to the set right after he got discharged from the hospital.

Jake Gyllenhaal memorized the entire movie like a play.

Jake Gyllenhaal lost 20 pounds for his role. This was Gyllenhaal’s own idea, as he visualized Lou as a hungry coyote. The coyote theme became so strong that it was considered as an alternate title. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film
trailer: youtu.be/1lEdwqwOttg

NIGHTCRAWLER [2014]
Written and directed by Dan Gilroy

[b]Lou [after watching a crew film a car crash]: Will this be on television?
Bill: Morning news. If it bleeds, it leads.
Lou: Which channel?
Bill: Whoever pays the most.

Nina [after viewing Lou’s graphic video]: That’s the lead. I want to beak it up and do a wrap-around from the scene. I want a walking stand-up, teaser at five, repeat on the half and I want the copy to start with a warning.
Frank: You’re going to show this?
Nina: With a warning.
Frank: It’s excessive.
Nina: We should have packages like this every day.
Frank: People are eating breakfast.
Nina: And they’ll talk about it at work.

Nina: I want you to contact me when you have something.
Lou: Something like this.
Nina: That’s right.
Lou: Bloody.
Nina: Well that’s only part of it. We like crime. But not all crime. Carjacking in Compton, for example. That isn’t news now, is it? We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is victims, preferably well-off and white…injured at the hands of the poor or a minority.
Lou: But bloody.
Nina: Well, graphic. The best and clearest way that I can phrase it for you, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our news cast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.
Lou: I understand. [/b]

This exchange couldn’t possibly be more matter of factly.

[b]Lou [to Rick]: Structure fire!!

Lou: You see, Rick, they’ve done studies, and they found that in any system that relies on cooperation, from a school of fish or say even a professional hockey team for example, these experts have identified communication as the number one single key to success.

Lou: TV news. What happened?
Woman: It was a shooting. I told the cops that he was waving a gun last week, but they didn’t fucking care.
Lou: Can you try one more time without swearing?
Woman: I’m not doing it again.
Lou: But this is for TV.
Woman: Yeah? I don’t have a TV.

Nina: That’s your third start this week.
Lou: I’m focusing on framing. A proper framer not only draws the eye into the picture but keeps it there longer, dissolving the barrier between the subject and the outside of the frame.
Nina: Is that blood on your shirt?

Joe [to Lou]: You’re not dropping your shit off, are you? Nobody does that. You need an air card if you want to be in the game. Import the video to your laptop. Cut the video. Upload to your FTP site and notify stations you got something for sale. Boom! Boom! Boom!

Joe [offering to make Lou his partner]: You want to be on the inside of this man because I’m going to be tag-teaming every call.
Lou: You keep talking like it’s something that I may be interested in but I’m not.
Joe: You don’t even understand the offer. If you did you would be fucking sucking my dick!
Lou: I feel like grabbing you by your ears right now and screaming, “I’m not fucking interested!”. Instead, I’m going to drive home and do some accounting.

Lou [to Nina]: I recently learned that most Americans watch local news to stay informed. But I also learned that the average half-hour of Los Angeles television news packs all of its local government coverage including law enforcement, budget, transportation, education and immigration into 22 seconds. Local crime stories, however, not only ususally led the news but filled 14 times the broadcast time, averaging five muniutes and seven seconds.

Nina: Friends don’t pressure friends to fucking sleep with them.
Lou: Actually that’s not true because as you know Nina, a friend is a gift you give yourself.

Rick [after Lou nearly crashes the car]: Seriously?! To get to a van crash on Moorpark? Who cares? What’s the rush? Why aren’t we at the rape at Griffith Park like everybody else?!

Nina [watching Lou’s video]: Home invasion in Granada. He got there ten minutes before the cops. How much of this can we show?
Linda: You mean legally?
Nina: No, morally. Of course, legally.
Linda [looking at the dead bodies]: Have they been identified?
Frank: It just happened, so you have to assume no, and that’s just one of the issues.
Linda: We can’t broadcast their identities without notifying the next of kin.
Nina: We’re not identifying them.
Linda: You are by proxy, by showing their faces.
Nina: We pixelate the faces.

Nina: $3,000.
Lou: I got $3,000 for the food truck stabbings.
Nina: There were more dead.
Lou: Those were poor Mexican people in a roach coach. Two of them were illegal. These are three wealthy white people, shot and killed in their mansion. Including a suburban housewife shotgunned in her bed.

Lou: Now I like you, Nina. And I look forward to our time together. But you have to understand, fifteen thousand isn’t all that I want. From here on, starting now, I want my work to be credited by the anchors and on a burn. The name of my company is Video Production News, a professional news-gathering service. That’s how it should be read and that’s how it should be said. I also want to go to the next rung and meet your team, and the station manager, and the director, and the anchors, and start developing my own personal relationships. I’d like to start meeting them this morning. You’ll take me around, you’ll introduce me as the owner and president of Video Production News, and remind them of some of my many other stories. I’m not done. I also want to stop our discussion over prices. This will save time. So when I say that a particular number is my lowest price, that’s my lowest price and you can be assured that I arrived at whatever that number is very carefully. Now, when I say that I want these things, I mean that I want them and I don’t want to have to ask again. And the last thing that I want, Nina, is for you to do the things that I ask you to do when we’re alone together in your apartment, not like last ime! So, I’ll tell you what. I have the van crash on Moorpark tonight. It was a couple of stringers actually. That could lead by itself on an average night. I’d be willing to throw that in for free. So what do you say, do we have a deal? [/b]

Oh yeah.

[b]Lou: I’m promoting you to executive Vice President of video news.
Rick: What am I now?
Lou: You’re an assistant.
Rick: Does it come with a raise?
Lou: Absolutely.
Rick: How much?
Lou: Pick a number, you pick a number.
Rick: Hundred…hundred…75 dollars a night.
Lou: Agreed.
Rick: Wait what about more?
Lou: Not now, we closed the deal.
Rick: I could have gotten more couldn’t I?
Lou: Absolutely.

Rick: You got a seriously weird-ass way of looking at shit. You know you do. You just don’t fucking understand people.
[later…]
Lou [to Rick]: What if my problem wasn’t that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them? What if I was the kind of person who was obliged to hurt you for this? I mean physically. I think you’d have to believe afterward, if you could, that agreeing to participate and then backing out at the critical moment was a mistake. Because that’s what I’m telling you, as clearly as I can.

Rick [dying…realizing that Lou set him up to be shot]: You saw him. You saw him!
Lou: I can’t jeopardize my company’s success to retain an untrustworthy employee.
Rick: You’re crazy. You’re crazy.
Lou: You took my bargaining power Rick. You used it against me. You would’ve done it again. Just admit it.
Rick: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Lou: I know. I know.

Detective: You filmed him dying.
Lou: That’s my job, that’s what I do. I’d like to think if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life. [/b]

You watch this all unfold and you’re thinking: Would legalizing dope make things better or worse?

And yet we all know the part about how the crimes that are committed to manufacture the stuff [or even at times just to use it] would plummet significantly if the stuff was legal. But then without the “war on drugs” the prison industrial complex would all but collapse. At least here in America.

This film is often touted for its realistic portrayal of the dope world. Especially the part where the belly of the dope beast meets the belly of the criminal underworld beast. But it was made nealy 20 years ago. So you can’t but wonder if and how things have changed since then. And not just in Denmark.

But let’s face it: some thugs, gangsters, hoods, scumbags are more interesting than others. Not many like that here though.

And, of course, some are more incompetent than others. And in this world incompetence [or just plain bad luck] can leave you up shits creek without a paddle. Sometimes without even a boat.

Especially if you are just a little fish pissing off one of the sharks. Time to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Let’s make a deal.

IMDb

[b]In a famous TV-interview with Nicolas Winding Refn and Kim Bodnia a reporter asked about research to make the film so realistic, the one thing the Winding Refn and Bodina had asked not to ask them about. The interview became thus very awkward. The interview appears on some DVDs.

After the release of the film, rumors circulated that the actors took real drugs to make the movie more believable. The entire cast and crew have denied these rumors.

In the scene, before Frank leaves Milo’s bar, you can see a picture of Zeljko Raznatovic - Arkan on the wall. Arkan was a Serbian criminal and later a paramilitary leader, notable for organizing and leading a paramilitary force in the Yugoslav Wars. During Arkan’s reign in racketeering business, wall calendars like this one (depicting himself, his wife or Red Star soccer club) were used to show that dues were payed. Zlatko Buric is originally from Croatia, but depicts a Serb in this movie.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusher_(1996_film
trailer: youtu.be/dLEaPB9UBWM

[u]Note: Some explicit dialog[/u]

PUSHER [1996]
Written in part and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

[b]Frank: What the fuck is this?
Brian: What does it look like?
Frank: It’s a gun. What’s a gun doing here?
[throws the gun to Tonny]
Brian: Can I get it back?
Frank: No, not right now.

Tonny: I once ejaculated a girl in the face, and she wanted me to piss it off.
Frank: Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ejaculated a girl in the face, and she wanted you to piss it off?
Tonny: Yeah.
Frank: Pervert! That’s fucking sick!
Tonny: It is not.
Frank: It’s fucking sick, man. Who was she?
Tonny: Your mother.

Frank: Why are we moving?
Swede: It’s safer this way. You got the stuff?
Frank: You got the money?
Swede: Let me see the stuff.
Frank: The money first.
Swede: Frank, the stuff first.
Frank: The money.
Swede: It’s always the stuff first.[/b]

Nope. First the cops.

[b]Frank: Christ, you guys know nothing.
Cop: We don’t know anything? What was it Tonny said? You do a lot of business with him? Look what I have here. A signed deposition from Tonny, your good buddy.

Tonny: What’s goin’ on? What are you doin’?
[Frank attacks him]
Frank: What did you tell the cops?
Tonny: What are you doin’? What the fuck are you doin’?!
Frank: What did you tell the cops? Fuck you!
[than he takes a baseball bat to him]

Radovan [to Frank]: You gotta be on 'em 24 hours a day, always reminding them what they owe. For instance, there was this Turkish guy once. He fucked up and owed Milo some money. So I went over to his place. I’d been there many times before, asking for the money in a polite way, without any luck. Finally, I took a knife, stabbed it in his kneecap and tore the shit up. Sometimes, I’d like to have another job. Believe me.

Radovan [threatening the junkie]: You got any idea how you’re gonna raise the money?
[the junkie shakes his head]
Radovan [pulls out a shotgun and gives it to the junkie]: No? I got an idea. You go down to the bank and ask for the money.
Frank: He can’t rob a bank!
Radovan: Of course he can. Anyone can rob a bank.
Frank: He can’t even hold that shotgun! Look at him, for Christ sake!
Radovan: He can and he will!
Frank: It’s four o’clock, the banks are closed.
Radovan [ignoring Frank]: He gets the money, problem solved.
Frank: He can’t do it, he’s too scared.
Radovan: Sure he can! Which bank? FRANK? Which bank?
Frank: I don’t care.
Radovan [to the junkie] Which bank do you use?
Junkie: The Amager Bank.
Radovan: Not that one, then. It would be stupid to rob you’re own bank.
Frank: There’s no other bank in this area. The Jyde Bank? Or how about…
Radovan: The Jyde Bank is fine!
Frank [after the junkie starts to threaten Frank and Radovan with the shotgun]: Take it easy!
Junkie: Frank, for fuck sake!
Radovan [he grabs the gun and beats the junkie]: You fucking dickhead! You don’t got he balls for that! Even if you had shot one of us, the other would have blown out your brains! Fucking dickhead! Get up! GET UP!
Junkie: Okay, okay. Just give me a line. I need some coke.
Radovan: You’ll get a line when I have my money.
Frank: Come on, give him a line.
Radovan: When I got my money! Then, he can have a line!
[The junkie puts the shotgun in his mouth and shoots himself]

Frank: What’s wrong?
Vic: Nothing.
Frank: What did that photographer say to you?
Vic: You really want to know?
Frank: Yeah…
Vic: He asked if I’d suck him off for 500. He thought I was a whore.
Frank: Aren’t you?
Vic: I’m not a whore, I’m a champagne girl.
Frank: Is it any different, getting fucked for 3,000 or 300?
Vic: There’s a big difference.

Frank: Listen, I can’t make it today.
Milo: Come now, we can talk…
Frank: I can’t come today, okay?
Milo: If you don’t come tomorrow…with that 50, you won’t be able to walk again. Okay?

Vic: What are you watching?
Frank: Just some stupid movie with Johnny Depp.
Vic: Who’s that?

Radovan: You got a gun, Frank? You don’t usually carry one. What were you gonna do with it? Are we goin’ to war?

Milo: Frankie, you’re fucking me! Come on, tell me a story. If we put aluminum foil on the fuse, we can go on all night. Unless you want to tell me a story.

Milo [on the phone]: Frank, we have a problem.
Frank: We?
Milo: It’s gone too far. Too many people talk about us. Bad for me, bad for you. Frank, my friend, we have to fix it, yeah?
Frank: How do you suggest we fix it?
Milo: How much do you have now?
Frank: About 70.
Milo: Okay, bring it here. Then we’re even, yeah?

Frank [to Vic]: We’re not going. It’s okay now. It’s no problem…What the hell would I do in Spain?
[cut to Milo’s apartment and Radovan laying down a plastic sheet on the floor][/b]

Gone Girl: An exploration into modern relationships. Or, rather, relationships as they seem ever to be headed in our late-capitalist, postmodern world.

In other words, what part is real and what part are they just making up as they go along?

Really. There are any number of historical and cultural contexts in which this sort of thing would be all but inconceivable. Worlds [communities] that revolve around one or another God or one or another set of social mores that cohere folks into a frame of mind that basically revolves around “a place for everyone, and everyone in his or her place”.

But it doesn’t much work that way anymore, does it? And not just with respect to sexuality or love. Nothing much is beyond the grasp of the new nihilism. Especially in a world where, increasingly, the Holy Trinity is now pop culture, mindless consumption and the worship of celebrity. Indeed, is there anything that anyone does nowadays that has not already been configured into one or another reality TV program?

In fact, in this film, once Nick and Amy become “celebrities” [fixtures on the Nancy Grace.com.ilk circuit] reality and TV reality become a virtual blur. At times, reality itself becomes the slipperiest of slopes. And Amy is to, say the least, calculating. So, from Nick’s end, everything must become completely rehearsed. In the end, however, he succumbs to the illusion itself. Or seems to.

And then there is that age old gap between what we think others are thinking and what they think we are thinking. And then how, again, especially in this day and age, we can never really be sure. And then there’s Amy’s diary.

Of course this is not only applicable to husbands and their wives. It’s also applicable to parents and their children. In fact, let’s face it, it’s more or less applicable to everyone.

IMDb

[b]When it comes to casting roles, David Fincher typically goes on the internet to look through pictures of actors to help him find the right type of actor for a role. When casting the role of Nick Dunne, Fincher spotted photos of Ben Affleck and noticed a particular smile Affleck had on dozens of pictures. According to Fincher, it captured a particular emotion in a scene of Nick Dunne smiling that showed the essence of the character. Soon after, Fincher cast Ben Affleck in the role.

Originally Nick was supposed to wear a Yankees cap in one scene. But Affleck, a die-hard Red Sox fan, refused to wear it. Ultimately he and Fincher compromised and in that scene he wears a Mets cap.

In order to figure out his character, Ben Affleck researched and studied several men who were accused and convicted of killing their wives. He paid particular attention to Scott Peterson.

Rosamund Pike claimed that per David Fincher’s request, she and Neil Patrick Harris spent two hours on set, completely alone, rehearsing their sex scene.

Rosamund Pike used a Dora the Explorer doll to practice her sex scene with Neil Patrick Harris. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Girl_(film
trailer: youtu.be/Ym3LB0lOJ0o

GONE GIRL [2014]
Directed by David Fincher

[b]Nick [voiceover]: When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers. The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

Amy: So, you write for a men’s magazine. God, does that make you an expert on being a man?
Nick: No.
Amy: It’s what to wear, what to drink. How to bullshit.
Nick: Never with you.
Amy: Ha, ha.
Nick: No, I mean it.[/b]

And, at the time, he did.

[b]Margo: So, is Amy gonna do one of those anniversary treasure hunts?
Nick: You mean the forced march designed to prove what an oblivious and uncaring asshole her husband is?
Margo: Wow.
Nick: Life. I don’t remember the point.

Margo [discussing what kind of wood item Nick is going to give to Amy for their 5th wedding anniversary]: So what are you going to give her?
Nick: I don’t know, there’s nothing good for wood.
Margo: I know what you can do. You go home and fuck her brains out. Then you take your penis and smack her in the face with it, and you say, “There’s some wood, bitch!”

Det. Boney: We’re gonna hold a press conference tomorrow.
Nick: You’re having a press conference?
Det. Boney: We wanna get the word out, right?
Nick: Yeah, it’s just all of a sudden, I feel like I’m on a Law and Order episode.

Amy [in her diary]: Everyone told us and told us and told us…Marriage is hard work. And compromise and more work, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

Margo: Well, did they ask personal stuff about Amy?
Nick: You know, they asked why didn’t she have any friends?
Margo: What did you say?
Nick: I said she was complicated.
Margo: Nick! Everyone knows “complicated” is code for “bitch.”

Det. Boney [holding up an envelope that reads Clue One]: Well, we have our first clue.

Amy [in her diary]: Want to test your marriage for weak spots? Add one recession… Subtract two jobs. It’s surprisingly effective.[/b]

There’s always that part, right?

[b]Nick: Do you really want to be the couple that has a baby to save their marriage?
Amy: “Save”?

Margo [to Nick after finding out about Andie]: Boo hoo, I got laid off. Guess I’ll fuck a teenager.[/b]

Amy is diabolical. How diabolical? The heart and the soul of it:

[b]Amy [voiceover]: I’m so much happier now that I’m dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And my lazy lying shitting oblivious husband will go to prison for my murder. Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That’s murder. Let the punishment fit the crime. To fake a convincing murder you have to have discipline. You befriend a local idiot. Harvest the details of her hundrum life and cram her with stories about your husband’s violent temper. Secretly create some money troubles: credit cards, perhaps online gambling. With the help of the unwitting, bump up your life insurance. Purchase getaway car. Craigslist. Generic. Cheap. Pay cash. You need to package yourself so that people will truly mourn your loss. And America loves pregnant women. As if it’s so hard to spread your legs. You know what’s hard? Faking a pregnancy. First, drain your toilet. Invite pregnant idiot into your home and ply her with lemonade. Steal pregnant idiot’s urine. Voilà! A pregnany is now part of your legal medical record. Happy Aniversary. Wait for your clueless husband to start his day. Off he goes… and the clock is ticking. Meticulously stage your crime scene with just enough mistakes to raise the specter of doubt. You need to bleed. A lot. A lot, a lot. The head wound kind of bleed. A crime scene kind of bleed. You need to clean; poorly, like he would. Clean and bleed, bleed and clean. And leave a Little something behind: a fire in July? And because you’re you, you don’t stop there. You need a diary. Mínimum three hundred entries on the Nick and Amy story. Start with the fairy-tale early days: those are true, and they’re crucial. You want Nick and Amy to be likable. After that, you invent. The spending, the abuse, the fear, the threat of violence. And Nick thought he was the writer… burn it, just the right amount. Make sure the cops will find it. Finally, honor tradition with a very special treasure hunt. And if I get everything right, the world will hate Nick for killing his beautiful, pregnant wife. And after all the outrage, when I’m ready, I’ll go out on the water with a handful of pills and a pocket full of stones. And when they find my body, they’ll know: Nick Dunne dumped his beloved like garbage, and she floated past all the other abused, unwanted, inconvenient women. Then Nick will die too. Nick and Amy will be gone, but then we never really existed.

Amy [voiceover]: Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. “Cool girl”. Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment: “She’s a cool girl”. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner. And then presents her mouth for fucking. She likes what he likes, so evidently he’s a vinyl hipster who loves fetish Manga. If he likes girls gone wild, she’s a mall babe who talks for football and endures buffalo wings at Hooters. When I met Nick Dunne I knew he wanted “Cool girl”. And for him, I’ll admit: I was willing to try. I wax-stripped my pussy raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two. I blew him, semi-regularly. I lived in the moment. I was fucking game. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it. Nick teased out in me things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humor, an ease. But I made him smarter. Sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people. We were the happiest couple we knew. And what’s the point of being together if you’re not the happiest? But Nick got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry. He actually expected me to love him unconditionally. Then he dragged me, penniless, to the navel of this great country and found himself a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl. You think I’d let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way. He doesn’t get to win. My cute, charming, salt-of-the-earth Missouri guy. He needed to learn. Grown-ups work for things. Grown-ups pay. Grown-ups suffer consequences.

Nick: Punch and Judy puppets.
Margo: Remember, he beats Judy to death and kills that baby.
Nick: So I’m Punch. We already knew that, Amy, what’s your point?
Margo: Does Missouri have the death penalty?

Officer Gilpin: You ever hear the expression the simplest answer is often the correct one?
Det. Boney: Actually, I have never found that to be true.

Tanner: So, what in God’s name is at your father’s house, Nick? And be honest.
Nick: I honestly have no idea.
Tanner [after spotting the yellow police tape at the house]: Whatever they found, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s very bad.[/b]

Oh yeah.

[b]Tanner: This is a ticking time bomb. You’ve gotta throw yourself on it.
Nick: People are gonna hate me.
Tanner: And then, they will forgive you. A guy admitting that he’s a gigantic asshole on television? People empathize with that. Sharon’s specials, they get 10 million viewers. She is a crusader. If she takes you on as a cause…
Margo: She’s going to ask real questions.
Tanner: I will drill you as if you were doing a deposition. What to say, what not to say.
Margo: A trained monkey?
Tanner: A trained monkey who doesn’t get a lethal injection.

Tanner: Nick, this case is about what people think of you. They need to like you. Now, you do this and you will reach millions of those people.
Nick: Maybe I only need to reach one.

Nick [after Margo checks the internet following his appearance on Sharon Shieber]: What does it say?
Margo: Oh, my God. You fucking killed it! They’re going crazy for you.
Nick: They disliked me, they liked me, they hated me. And now they love me.

Desi: You’re not bored?
Amy: Desi, how could I be bored? You can discuss 18th century synphonies, 19th century impressionists, quote proust in French. Nick’s idea of culture was a reality TV marathon with one hand down his boxers.

Nick [aloud to himself]: Come home, Amy. I dare you.

Nick: I’m leaving.
Amy: You really think that’s smart? Wounded, raped wife battles her way back to her husband…and he deserts her? They’ll destroy you.

Nick: Was there ever a baby?
Amy: There can be.

Nick to Det. Boney]: She told me she killed Desi. Not self-defense. Murder.
Margo: Can’t we get a wire?
Nick: That’s not gonna work. She had me strip naked, and stand in the shower.
Tanner: I swear, you two are the most fucked-up people I’ve ever known. And I specialize in fucked-up. You and Amy under the same roof? You should pitch that as reality television.

Nick: I can’t believe you’re just leaving now.
Tanner: You are not at risk anymore.
Nick: I’m the definition of “at risk.”
Tanner: You got a book deal, a lifetime movie, you franchised The Bar. You may wanna thank her.

Nick [after Amy makes him aware of the next “part”]: You fucking cunt!
Amy: I’m the cunt you married!


Amy [to Nick]: The only time you liked yourself was when you were trying to be someone this cunt might like. I’m not a quitter, I’m that cunt. I killed for you; who else can say that? You think you’d be happy with a nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby! I’m it.

Nick: Fuck. You’re delusional. I mean, you’re insane, why would you even want this? Yes, I loved you and then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other. We caused each other pain.
Amy: That’s marriage.

Nick [looking down at Amy but more in the way of a voiceover]: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do? [/b]

This one only really works because almost everyone is in agreement: World War II was one of the “good wars”. I mean, if you have to go to war, let it be against a particularly despicable monster like Adolph Hitler. It just doesn’t quite work when imagining the enigma machine in the hands of, say, Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein.

Or is that just me.

Alan Turing. He was the man who deconstructed the Enigma Machine. And in so doing made a remarkable contribution to the deconstruction of Hitler’s Nazi regime itself.

On the other hand, Alan Turing was also a homosexual. Back then. And back then is not now. Back then [war hero or not] he was arrested and charged with the crime of being a homosexual. He was sentenced to chemical castration. A year into his “treatment” he committed suicide.

He was also a genius. And he was also…different. And so he was bullied for it.

On the other hand, he wasn’t a woman. And “back then” that was yet another demographic in which blind prejudice was rife.

And then there is the part about thinking machines. All of the philosophical issues for example. And sooner or later when we go down that path the question of “determinism” will inevitably pop up. Though not so much here.

Here the focus was often more on the nature of intelligence itself. “Artificial” intelligence? On the other hand, from the point of view of nature, what does that really mean?

Anyway, Alan Turing was a man who made a difference. A big difference. It has been estimated that breaking the Enigma code attenuated the war by at least two years. And saved an estimated 14,000,000 lives. Not many folks can lay claim to an achievement like that.

IMDb

[b]Winston Churchill stated that Turing made the single greatest contribution in Britain’s war effort.

Benedict Cumberbatch confessed that in one of the final scenes of the film he couldn’t stop crying and had a breakdown. It was, as he said, “being an actor or a person that had grown incredibly fond of the character and thinking what he had suffered and how that had affected him.”

On 27 November 2014, ahead of the film’s US release, The New York Times reprinted the original 1942 crossword puzzle from The Daily Telegraph used in recruiting code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. Entrants who solve the puzzle can mail in their results for a chance to win a trip for two to London and a tour of the famous Bletchley Park facilities.

In an interview with USA Today, Benedict Cumberbatch said of Turing’s Royal Pardon, “The only person who should be pardoning anybody is him (Turing). Hopefully, the film will bring to the fore what an extraordinary human being he was and how appalling (his treatment by the government was). It’s a really shameful, disgraceful part of our history.”

At the interrogatory scene, Turing describes the famous “Turing Test”.

In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine’s ability to render words into audio. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely each answer resembles the answer a human would give.

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which he asks “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered.

More than 50 years later, no computer could pass the test.

“If any young person’s ever felt like they aren’t quite sure who they are, or aren’t allowed to express themselves the way they’d like to express themselves, if they’ve ever felt bullied by what they feel is the normal majority or any kind of thing that makes them feel an outsider, then this is definitely a film for them because it’s about a hero for them,” Cumberbatch stated at the European Premiere of the film at the London Film Festival, October 2014 [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game
trailer: youtu.be/S5CjKEFb-sM

THE IMITATION GAME [2014]
Directed by Morten Tyldum

[b]Alan [voiceover]: Are you paying attention? Good. If you are not listening carefully, you will miss things. Important things. I will not pause, I will not repeat myself, and you will not interrupt me. You think that because you’re sitting where you are, and I am sitting where I am, that you are in control of what is about to happen. You’re mistaken. I am in control, because I know things that you do not know.
[pause]
Alan: What I will need from you now is a commitment. You will listen closely, and you will not judge me until I am finished. If you cannot commit to this, then please leave the room. But if you choose to stay, remember you chose to be here. What happens from this moment forward is not my responsibility. It’s yours. Pay attention.

Commander Denniston: Why do you wish to work for His Majesty’s government?
Alan: Oh, I don’t, really.
Commander Denniston: Are you a bleeding pacifist?
Alan: I’m… agnostic about violence.
Commander Denniston: Well, you do realize that 600 miles away from London here’s this nasty little chap called Hitler who wants to engulf Europe in tyranny?
Alan: Politics isn’t really my area of expertise.

Alan: I like solving problems, Commander. And Enigma is the most difficult problem in the world.
Commander Denniston: Enigma isn’t difficult, it’s impossible. The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable.
Alan: Good. Let me try and we’ll know for sure, won’t we?

Commander Denniston: To decode a message, you need to know the machine’s settings. Now, the Germans switch settings every day promptly at midnight. We usually intercept our first message around 6:00 a.m., which gives you exactlyto crack the code before it changes, and you start again.
Alan: Five rotors. Ten plugboard cables. That’s…one million…
Peter: A thousand million…No, no, it’s, uh, I’ve got it. It’s a million, million. It’s in the millions, obviously.
Alan: It’s over 150 million million million possible settings.
Commander Denniston: Very good.
Hugh: If you want to be exact about it. 1-5-9 with 18 zeroes behind it. Possibilities. Every single day.

Alan [voiceover]: The game was quite a simple one. Every single German message, every surprise attack, every bombing run, every imminent U-boat assault…They were all floating through the air. Radio signals that… well, any schoolboy with an AM kit could intercept. The trick was that they were encrypted. There were 159 million million million possible Enigma settings. All we had to do was try each one. But if we had ten men checking one setting a minute for 24 ho urs every day and seven days every week, how many days do you think it would take to, uh, to check each of the settings? Well, it’s not days, it’s years. It’s 20 million years. To stop a coming attack, we would have to check 20 million years worth of settings in 20 minutes.

Alan [to Commander Denniston]: Enigma is an extremely well-designed machine. Our problem is that we’re only using men to try to beat it. No, what if only a machine can defeat another machine?

Stewart: My warmest welcome to His Majesty’s service. If you speak a word of what I’m about to show you, you will be executed for high treason. You will lie to your friends, your family and everyone you meet about what it is you really do.
Joan: And what is it that we’re really doing?
Alan: We’re going to break an unbreakable Nazi code and win the war.
Joan: Oh.

Alan [as a boy]: What’s that you’re reading?
Christopher: It’s about cryptography.
Alan: Like secret messages?
Christopher: Not secret. That’s the brilliant part. Messages that anyone can see, but no one knows what they mean unless you have the key.
Alan: How’s that different from talking?
Christopher: Talking?
Alan: When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean. They say something else, and you’re expected to just know what they mean. Only I never do. So, how’s that different?
Christopher: Alan, I have a funny feeling you’re going to be very good at this.

Hugh [to Alan]: You know to pull off this irascible genius routine, one has to actually be a genius.

Alan [to Joan]: Sometimes it is the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

Alan [voiceover]: Some people thought we were at war with the Germans-- incorrect. We were at war with the clock. Britain was literally starving to death. The Americans sent over 100,000 tons of food every week and every week the Germans would send
our desperately needed bread to the bottom of the ocean. Our daily failure was announced at the chimes of midnight. And the sound would haunt our unwelcome dreams.

Joan: So you-you theorized a machine that could solve any problem. It didn’t just do one thing, it did everything. It wasn’t just programmable, it was reprogrammable. Is that your idea behind Christopher?
Alan: Well, human brains can compute large sums very quickly but I want my machine to be smarter. To make a calculation and then, uh, to determine what to do next. Like a person does. Think of it. An electrical brain. A digital computer.

Hugh: If you run the wires across the plugboard matrix diagonally, you’ll eliminate rotor positions 500 times faster.
Alan: This is actually not an entirely terrible idea.
Joan: I think that was Alan for “thank you.”

Detective: That’s what Turing’s hiding. He’s a poof, not a spy.

Alan: What if… what if I don’t fancy being with Joan in that way?
John: Because you’re a homosexual? I suspected.
Alan: Sh- should I tell her that I’ve had affairs with men?
John: You know, in my admittedly limited experience, women tend to be a bit touchy about accidentally marrying homosexuals. Perhaps not spreading this information about might be in your best interest.
Alan: I care for her, I truly do, but… I-I just don’t know if I can pretend…
John: You can’t tell anyone, Alan. It’s illegal. And Denniston is looking for any excuse he can to put you away.
Alan: I know.
John: This has to stay a secret.

Detective Nock: I’m here to help you.
Alan: Oh, clearly!
Detective Nock: Can machines think?
Alan: Oh, so you’ve read some of my published works?
Detective Nock: What makes you say that?
Alan: Oh, because I’m sitting in a police station, accused of entreating a young man to touch my penis, and you’ve just asked me if machines can think.
Detective Nock: Well, can they? Could machines ever think as human beings do?
Alan: Most people say not.
Detective Nock: You’re not most people.

Alan [to Detective Nock]: Of course machines can’t think as people do. A machine is different from a person. Hence, they think differently. The interesting question is, just because something, uh, thinks differently from you, does that mean it’s not thinking? Well, we allow for humans to have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries, I hate ice-skating, you cry at sad films, I am allergic to pollen. What is the point of different tastes, different preferences, if not, to say that our brains work differently, that we think differently? And if we can say that about one another, then why can’t we say the same thing for brains built of copper and wire, steel?
Detective Nock: And that’s this big paper you wrote? What’s it called?
Alan: “The Imitation Game.”
Detective Nock: Right, that’s… that’s what it’s about?
Alan: Would you like to play?
Detective Nock: Play?
Alan: It’s a game. A test of sorts. For determining whether something is a… a machine or a human being.
Detective Nock: How do I play?
Alan: Well, there’s a judge and a subject, and… the judge asks questions and, depending on the subject’s answers, determines who he is talking with… what he is talking with, and, um, all you have to do is ask me a question.
Detective Nock: What did you do during the war?
Alan: I worked in a radio factory.
Detective Nock: What did you really do during the war?
Alan (laughing softly): Are you paying attention?

Alan [having a eureka! moment]: Helen! Wh-Why do you think your German counterpart has a girlfriend?
Helen: It’s just a stupid joke; don’t worry.
Alan: No, no, no, no. Tell me.
Helen: Well, each of his messages begins with the same five letters: C-I-L-L-Y. So I suspect that Cilly must be the name of his amore.
Alan [morevto himself]: But that’s impossible. The Germans are instructed to use five random letters at the start of every message.
Helen: Well, this bloke doesn’t.
Hugh: Love will make a man do strange things, I suppose.
Alan: In this case, love just lost Germany the whole bloody war.

Alan: Heil Hitler. Turns out that’s the only German you need to know to, uh, break Enigma.

Hugh: My God, you did it. You just defeated Nazism with a crossword puzzle.
Peter: There are five people in the world who know the position of everyship in the Atlantic. And they’re all in this room.[/b]

Then this…

[b]Alan: Sometimes we can’t do what feels good. We have to do what is logical.
Hugh: What’s logical?
Alan: The hardest time to lie to somebody is when they’re expecting to be lied to.
Joan: Oh, God.
Hugh: What?
Alan: If someone’s waiting for a lie, you can’t just, uh, give them one.
Joan: Damn it, Alan’s right.
Hugh: What?
Alan: What wouldthe Germans think if we destroy their U-boats?
Peter: Nothing. They’ll be dead.
Alan: No. So our convoy suddenly veers off course…a squadron of our air bombers miraculously descends on the coordinates of the U-boats…what will the Germans think?
Joan: The Germans will know that we have broken Enigma. They’ll stop all radio communications by midday, and they’ll have changed the design of Enigma by the weekend.
Alan: Yes. Two years’ work. Everything that we’ve done here will all be for nothing.
Frank: There are 500 civilians in that convoy. Women…children. We’re about to let them die.
Alan: Our job is not to save one passenger convoy, it is to win the war.

Stewart: Why are you telling me this ?
Alan: We need your help, to keep this a secret from Admiralty, Army, RAF. Ah… as no one can know, that we’ve broken enigma, not even Commander Dennison.
Stewart: Who is in the process of having you fired?
Joan: You can take care of that.
Alan: While we develop a system to help you determine how much intelligence to act on. Which ahh attacks to stop, which to let through. Statistical analysis, the minimum number of actions it will take, for us to win the war – but the maximum number we can take, before the Germans get suspicious.
Stewart: And you’re going to trust of this all to statistics? To maths?
Alan: Correct.
Joan: And then MI6 can come up with the lies we will tell everyone else.
Alan: You’ll need a believable alternative source for all the pieces of information that you use.
Joan: A false story, so that we can explain how we got our information, that has nothing to do with Enigma, and then you can leak those stories to the Germans.
Alan: And then to our own military.
Stewart: Maintain a conspiracy of lies at the highest levels of government? Sounds right up my alley.

Alan [voiceover]: They code-named it “Ultra.” It became the largest store of military intelligence in the history of the world. It was like having a tap on Himmler’s intercom.

Alan [after finding out Cairncross is a Soviet spy]: I-I have to tell Denniston.
Cairncross: No, you don’t. Because if you tell him my secret I’ll tell him yours. Do you know what they do to homosexuals? You’ll never be able to work again, never be able to teach. Your precious machine…I doubt you’ll ever see it again.

Alan [voiceover]: Advice about keeping secrets: it’s a lot easier if you don’t know them in the first place…Were they steaming my letters, tapping my telephone? Trailing my nervous walks? You know, I…I never did find out.

Joan: Alan, what’s happened?
Alan [after a pause]: We can’t be engaged anymore. Your parents need to take you back. Find you a husband elsewhere.
Joan: What’s wrong with you?
Alan: I have something to tell you. I’m… I’m a homosexual.
Joan: Alright.
Alan: No, no, men, Joan. Not women.
Joan: So what?
Alan: I just told you…
Joan: So what? I had my suspicions. I always did. But we’re not like other people. We love each other in our own way, and we can have the life together that we want. You won’t be the perfect husband? I can promise you I harboured no intention of being the perfect wife. I’ll not be fixing your lamb all day, while you come home from the office, will I? I’ll work. You’ll work. And we’ll have each other’s company. We’ll have each other’s minds. Sounds like a better marriage than most. Because I care for you. And you care for me. And we understand one another more than anyone else ever has.
Alan: I don’t.
Joan: What?
Alan: Care for you. I never did. I just needed you to break Enigma. I’ve done that now, so you can go.
Joan [slaps him]:I am not going anywhere. I have spent entirely too much of my life worried about what you think of me, or what my parents think of me, or what the boys in Hut 8 or the girls in Hut 3 think, and you know I am done. This work is the most important thing I will ever do. And no one will stop me. Least of all you.
[pause]
Joan: You know what? They were right. Peter. Hugh. John. You really are a monster.

Alan [voiceover]: The war dragged on for two more solitary years…and every day we performed our blood-soaked calculus. Every day we decided who lived and who died. Every day we… helped the Allies to victories, and nobody knew. Stalingrad. The Ardenne. The invasion of Normandy. All victories that would not have been possible without the intelligence that we supplied. And people… talk about the war as this epic battle between civilizations… freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus Nazism, armies of millions bleeding into the ground, fleets of ships weighing down the oceans, planes dropping bombs from the sky until they obliterated the sun itself. The war wasn’t like that for us. For us, it was just half a dozen crossword enthusiasts in a tiny village in the South of England.

Alan [after telling the story of Enigma]: Now, detective, you get to judge. So tell me, what am I? Am I a machine, am I a person, am I a war hero, or am I a criminal?
Detective Nock: I can’t judge you.
Alan: Well then, you’re no help to me at all.

Joan: I would have come. I would have testified.
Alan: And what would you have said, that I, uh…I wasn’t a homosexual.
Joan: Alan… this is serious. They could sendyou to jail.
[she notices hi8s shaking hands]
Joan: Your hands. You’re twitching.
Alan: No-no, I’m not. It’s the medication.
Joan: The medication?
Alan: Uh, well, the judge gave me, um, a choice…uh, ei-either two years in prison or… ho-hormonal therapy.
Joan: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Alan: Yes, yes, that’s right. Chemical castration.

Joan [to Alan]: Do you know, this morning I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn’t for you. I read up, on my work, a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal…I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.
Alan: Do you do you really think that?
Joan: I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

Title card: After a year of government mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing committed suicide on June 7th, 1954. He was 41 years old. Between 1885 and 1967, approximately 49,000 homosexual men were convicted of gross indecency under British law.

Title card: Turing’s work inspired generations of research into what scientists called “Turing machines”. Today we call them computers.[/b]

Atlas Shrugged: The movie. Released on April 15th. Tax day. How’s that for clever symbolism? Or how about making Eddie Willers the only black hero? He’s one of them…but not really. He is supposed to reflect the working class equivalent of the objectivist. His brain allows him to behave morally, but he does not have enough smarts to actually be one of the true Heroes here.

The true Objectivist hero is always the man of ideas. Why? Because Objectivism revolves around the idea that only when the individual has come to grasp the one true nature of morality “metaphysically” can he go on to run railroads and invent new energy sources or own and operate steel mills and the like. Even if not to this date “in reality”.

Everything apparently starts with concocting a rational philosophy of life and than living one’s life wholly in accordance with it.

Of course, that quickly exposes the glaring gap between the rhetoric of the Objecitivist hero and the reality of the world that we now live in: the fact that [so far] Atlas has not shrugged. In fact, he has never even come close.

The fact that it took the Objectivists literally decades to even make this movie speaks volumes in and of itself. On the other hand, it garnered only an 11% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. So, from their perspective, they must be on the right track. Objectivists of this ilk never feel they are on the right track unless “the masses” hold them in contempt.

But, then, as cartoon characters in a world where the heroic can only be sustained “in their head”, I’m sure they are thoroughly convinced that, with the movie finally out there, it is only a matter of time now before the John Galts among us gets the ball rolling. And not just in New Hampshire either.

Sad to say, in the film the characters are even more cartoonish than in the novel. I honestly did not imagine that was even possible. What is particularly ludicrous is the manner in which the crony capitalists are portrayed. The film is set in the year 2016 and you would think the folks running the corporations in America were practically socialist:

James Taggert: How are the Mexicans going to develop the area with a single passenger train a day?..That Mexican line was helping those destitute people to get back in the game…You can’t just take everything away from people who need our help

You also might be wondering how they managed to make the railroads the most important form of transportation in the year 2016. Well, they made the price of gasoline $37.50 a gallon.

No doubt, even Ayn Rand herself would have been appalled at this effort.

Still, who can deny that Rand was always able to put a spin on capitalism that its detractors are never really able to make go away.

This film was always going to be inferior to The Fountainhead. And that’s because the more you try to integrate the Objectivist plot into the world at large the more preposterous it becomes. With The Fountainhead you could at least imagine some success when the story revolved solely around one individual trying to live out his own personal philsophy. But once the the fate of the whole world is at stake, it all collapses into sheer absurdity. How else to explain the manner in which the gap between the novel and the world just keeps getting wider and wider and wider. But then, perhaps, no wider than the one between the Wealth of Nations and the Communist Manifesto.

IMDb

[b]According to Variety, The Godfather (1972) producer Albert S. Ruddy spent years trying to bring the novel to the big screen, attracting the interest of Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway along the way.

In the late 1970s, NBC had plans to bring the novel to television as one of the multi-part mini-series popular at the time. Ayn Rand wanted Farrah Fawcett to star, but the project never materialized.

Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among the actresses considered to play Dagny Taggart, with Brad Pitt being considered to play John Galt. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged:_Part_I
trailer: youtu.be/6W07bFa4TzM

ATLAS SHRUGGED PART 1 [2011]
Directed by Paul Johansson

Galt: Midas Mulligan.
Midas Mulligan: Who’s asking?
Galt: Someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profits of his energy.
Midas Mulligan: That’s funny. That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.
Galt: We’re alike, you and I.

This is always how the exchanges unfold when two of the “heroes” meet. Never once does someone say something that the other does not concur with wholeheartedly.

James: You’re lucky.
Dagney: What?
James: Other people are human. They’re sensitive. They can’t just dedicate their whole lives to metals and engines. You’ve never had any feelings. I don’t think you’re ever felt a thing.
Dagney: No, Jim. I guess I’ve never felt anything at all.

And this is how the exchanges always go when one of the “heroes” engages one of the “collectivists”. Almost as though it is all…scripted?

[b]Dagny: I’m not interested in their opinion.
James: Then whose do you go by?
Dagny: My own.

Rearden: I’m curious… is it alright with you that I’m squeezing every penny of profit I can from your emergency?
Dagny: I have to get the Rio Norte completely re-railed in nine months or Taggart Transcontinental will crash.
Rearden: They’re doing their best to make it harder for you aren’t they?
Dagny: Yes, but it’s useless to get angry with people like my brother and his friends in Washington. I don’t have time for it. I have to undo what they’ve done.
Rearden: And after?
Dagny: After, they won’t matter anyway.

Mother Rearden [after Readon gives his wife a bracelett made from, Reardon Metal]: Another man would have given his wife a diamond bracelet if he wanted to give her a gift - for her pleasure not his.
Lillian: No, the chain is appropriate. I think it’s the chain by which he keeps us all in bondage. Henry has poured his metal today and I have the first trophy.

Rearden: What are you doing with yourself these days?
Phillip [his brother]: I’m working for Friends of Global Awareness.
Rearden: I know them. What do you want?
Phillip: Money.
Rearden: Doesn’t everyone? Call my office first thing in the morning. I’ll authorize a hundred grand for you.
Phillip: You really don’t care about helping the underprivileged, do you?
Rearden: No Phillip, I don’t, but it’ll make you happy.
Rearden: Oh, it’s not for me Hank. It’s for the benefit of the less privileged. You think I can have the money wired to my account?
Rearden: A wire? Why?
Phillip: Well, the thing is, it’s a Progressive group. They wouldn’t appreciate your name on a check.
Reardon: You’re kidding me.
Phillip: No, it would embarrass us to have you on a list of our contibutors.[/b]

Hank obviously has a lot to learn about being a hero.

Paul: They say you’re intractable, you’re ruthless, your only goal is to make money.
Rearden: My only goal is to make money.
Paul [whispering]: Yes, but you shouldn’t say it.

The set up for the ubermen:

[b]Readon: What do you want?
Francisco: I want to learn to understand you.
Reardon: What for?
Francisco: If it wasn’t for you, most of these people would be left helpless. Why are you willing to carry them?
Reardon: Because they’re a bunch of miserable children trying to stay alive desparately and very badly.
Francisco: Have you told them?
Reardon: Told them what?
Francisco: That you’re working for your sake, not theirs.
Reardon: They know.
Francisco: Yes, they do. But they don’t think that you do.
Reardon: What do I care what they think.
Francisco: Because it’s a battle. A battle in which one must make one’s stand clear.
Reardon: What battle? I don’t fight the disarmed.
Francisco: But they have a weapon against you. It’s their only weapon but it’s a terible one. Ask yourself what it is sometime. There’s a reason you are as unhappy as you are.
Rearden: What exactly is your motive here?
Francisco: Let’s just say it is to give you the words you will need for the time you will need them.

Reardon: Don’t worry, I didn’t come in here for sex?
Lillian: Thank you, dear. What did ypou come in here for?
Rearden: The next time you decide to throw a party, can you stick to your own crowd? Don’t bother inviting people you think are my friends.
Lillian: But Henry, you don’t have any friends.

Dr. Potter [after offering Reardon government money]: Why is it so important for you to struggle for year after year, squeezing out meager gains rather than accept a fortune for Rearden Metal?
Reardon: Because it is mine. Do you understand that concept? Mine.

Dagny: Dr. Akston? One more question. I need the name of your student who worked at the 20th Century Motor Company.
Dr. Akston: I know why you’re here, Miss Taggert. The se ret you’re trying to solve, it’s greater…and I mean much greater…than an engine that runs on atmospheric electricity.
Dagny: I’m not going to give up finding the inventor of that motor.
Dr. Akston: Oh, don’t worry, Miss Taggert, when the time comes, he’ll find you. [/b]

Drum roll please…

Ellis: Who the hell are you?
Galt: My name is John Galt. I live in a place we call Atlantis, and I think you’d fit in there. It’s a place where heroes live; where those who want to be heroes live. The government we have there respects each of us as individuals and as producers. Actually, beyond a few courthouses there isn’t much government at all. Bottom line, Mr Wyatt; if you’re weary of a government that refuses to limit its power over you, if you’re ready at this moment to claim the moral right to your own life, then we should leave, and I’ll take you there. I’ll take you to Atlantis.

Strike! Strike! Strike!

It’s like you’re talking to yourself, dude

On the other hand, with 111,440 views, I’d like to think that a few others are listening. They get the point of the thread, even if you don’t.