Being Where?



Essential. Peter Sellers is a genius. Hands down, no argument.

 There are movies which can speak to the viewer in a way that might suggest, "Hey, you're not alone in the world. There's others just like you."

I put this movie in that category.

When you have an artistic bent or temperament, there can be a distinct disconnect between you and the world. Some might say that there's a disconnect until you "find yourself" or at least mature enough to understand more deeply who you are and your possible place in the world, but I contend that artists have to go further in understanding why they are the way they are and ultimately accept themselves as different.

When I saw this movie, I felt a kinship not only with the director ( Hal Ashby), but with Chancey Gardiner-the hapless, lost soul who is so out-of-step with the world that he is still a child inside a man's body. I do not know what Ashby's intent or point was of this movie, all I can say is that I have much more in common with Chance the gardener than I do with any other film character I've seen. I am that inadequate, lost and fumbling than many might believe.

But I digress.

Chance is a hopeless man-child who may be slightly mentally challenged, but people around him trust him because he is an authentic person-he has no running agenda, wears no social mask, has no hangups or baggage, He simply IS, which is why I see him as the embodiment of Zen.

It's a beautiful and very funny movie with a fantastic cast and a wonderful story.

If you don't "get this one,

I understand.

My Napalm Morning

From absolute chaos, Coppola created
the epic tale of one man's journey to confront
his soul. A soul blackened by the horrors
of war.

This film nearly cost Coppola everything: his home, bank roll, family and sanity. This was the subject of Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. This documentary about the making-of  is essential for Apocalypse enthusiasts.

So much shit went wrong during the filming that it was almost as if the gods were trying their very best to stop Apocalypse Now from being made.

Then there was Brando-way overweight and being the trickster. He and Coppola had these long conversations about his character Kurtz until Coppola realized Brando was just stalling to get out of working. Meanwhile money is flying away.

But when Brando was on, he was really on. Improvising dialogue from a broken soul-lost in despair and no way to return to the world once known.

Outtakes (from the aforementioned doc) from Brando's improv's include a digression with a far-off monkey chatter ("He's my critic. My only critic.") and the famous, "I swallowed a bug."

When not hospitalized, Martin Sheen is marvelous as Cpt. Willard- a man who has stared into the darkness and has just a sliver of humanity left in him before he is fully enveloped. Willard is a fractured man with an angry darkness, but the emptiness has no tyet. fully overtaken him.

When he meets Kurtz, he is confronting a mirror of his soul. He then is imprisoned, deprived of food and water, and undergoes the psychological terror Kurtz unleashes. Willard dies, metaphorically, only to be nursed back to life by Kurtz for three reasons: in the hope that Kurtz might make him understand "what I've tried to be," to go back to the States and tell Kurtz's son all about his father and what he accomplished. The third, and maybe the most important, Willard is to kill Kurtz (the king slayer becomes the new king idea) and thus end his nightmarish existence.
This film is very powerful on a number of levels. You should not watch it too much. You think I jest? I gave my friend a copy of the VHS I owned. He gave it back to me after a week and told me that he felt like the movie was getting under his skin. He started to watch it obsessively.

Coppola captured something real in those frames. Call it depression, insanity or the dark soul-it's there.

I highly recommend The Complete Dossier which has the original, Redux and a shitload of extras.

Apocalypse Now – The Complete Dossier DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment) (2006) Disc 2 extras include:

The Post Production of Apocalypse Now: Documentary (four featurettes covering the editing, music and sound of the film through Coppola and his team)
"A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now" (18 minutes)
"The Music of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
"Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
"The Final Mix" (3 minutes)

Kubrick Kubrick Kubrick

What is it about Kubrick?

Is it his color schemes? Is it the extreme characters he brings us? His obsessive detail? The stories?

Little Alex: lad gone wrong or victim of society and
government?

A Clockwork Orange
2001: A Space Odyssey
Full Metal Jacket
Lolita

The moral dilemma of A Clockwork Orange was completely lost on me when I first saw the film. I was in love with the style of the clothes, the language, the outrageous characters and of course, the ultra-violence.

I admired Alex's courage and his defiance of all authority- even that of rival gangs. My peer group were pacifistic, nature-loving, leaning towards hippie, intellectuals with most of us not knowing how to defend ourselves against the assholes and bullies of the world. Alex and his droogies would mop them up. I envied his courage and power.

The central thesis:
"Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."


To this day, the great moral/ethical dilemma that Kubrick (and Burgess) proposed is still lost on me, but I've changed my view on the violence of the film. Or rather, time has made me much more empathetic to those who suffer physical pain. I've seen my fair share of suffering and when I see Alex and company pound the crap out of the homeless man, I winced a few times. The violence is demented and hard to watch, but it's done with such style.

  But every frame, every scene is a keeper without a false note throughout the film. It's damn near cinematic perfection as you can get. Is there a more stylistically unique film?

2001: A Space Odyssey

Imagine a young lad being dropped off at a movie theater, barely 11 years old, to see his first sci-fi film. I didn't know what the hell was happening on the screen sometimes, but the sheer escapism of movies was magical.   When I asked my brother about the psychedelic (not even a word in my wheelhouse yet) ending, he told me that the astronaut had become a "star child." Heady stuff for a young lad, but my brother did his best to explain the story to me because he had read the book.   The scenes with HAL 9000 are brilliant.

Full Metal Jacket

Clearly divided into two sections, we see Marine boot camp at its most brutal with an outstanding (and mostly improvising-a Kubrick no-no) performance by R. Lee Ermey.  The combat scenes are some of the most intense ever. When the squad encounters the sniper, the shit gets real. If this movie comes on cable, I am mesmerized and all things stop. The death of Cowboy still fucks me up.

Lolita   James Mason and Peter Sellers are brilliant in this tale of taboo love. Dark, creepy, funny and tense. Who else but James Mason could shoot crazy Peter Sellers with such grace? Who else but Peter Sellers could play the devious, pushy stranger who follows, threatens and eventually kidnaps Lolita?

Post scriptus:

Played with such subtlety, bartender Lloyd brings a wintry
chill to the ballroom scenes. Bladerunner, anyone?

The Shining   I have to mention this film sort of as a post script because in it contains some of the most disturbing images of a paranormal nature that I've ever seen. Steven King did not like Nicholson's performance because it was way over-the-top and through the years, I've come to agree. Watching Uncle Jack go through his crazy faces used to be fun, but now I far prefer something dialed way, way back.

Still, Kubrick had a way of getting into the psyche and setting it ablaze with his twisted images.  Blood flooding from an elevator, the ghosts that inhabit the hotel, the hotel itself and the maze at the end: how can anyone get these images out of their mind?  

Film of the Doc

Grizzly Man

Eeeeeow!

Werner Herzog has made a perfect documentary. The trouble is that it is a compelling as it is disturbing.

(spoilers)

I'll wait for you to make your decision to read further.

Mostly taken from footage shot by Timothy Treadwell (nee Timothy Dexter), an amateur wildlife enthusiast and self-proclaimed protector of grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness, Herzog tells the story of this man who believed that he had found his calling living, unprotected mind you, among these deadly giants.

Sounds completely daft, yes?

Treadwell was a lost soul who tried acting (He auditioned to be on Cheers, but lost to Woody Harrelson), alcohol, drugs, changing his name, surfing, and a variety of odd jobs. In short, he didn't fit in anywhere except when he first observed wild bears in Alaska. From then on, his life's work and fate were sealed.

To watch Treadwell's passion for these animals is to see a man fully in love with the bears, but clearly denies their wild and savage nature. These are animals that kill their young for food after all. What would a man mean to a ten-foot, 400 pound behemoth?

At best, lunch.

As passionate as Treadwell is about his beloved bears, he often reveals deep fissures in his mental stability. Even if he is performing for the camera, there is a hysteria which cannot be faked.

There are tender moments and moments of sheer beauty. A fox hangs about like a household pet. Footage of bears running on a foggy morning is magnificent. Stranger, interloper, or weirdo, he lived in their world and captured his subjects with such intimacy.

A great, great documentary and once watched, never forgotten.

More Film Fun!

Such a simple image, but it has influenced many generations of filmmakers.

The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman doesn't make films, he makes profound existential observations. Every frame is a perfect still, conveying the complex and mystifying contradictory nature of the human condition.

He reaches the desert places, the lonely isolated wastelands of the psyche. His films are not easy to watch. Sometimes they are almost unbearable.

His work has been copied by countless directors because the images are so strong, they leave an indelible impression. It's almost as if he has captured every imaginable archetype. And the faces. Glorious faces with a thousand stories told in a glance. How does he do it? I have no idea.

Bergman's The Seventh Seal is a masterwork that deals with the unanswered questions of existence: Who am I? What is my purpose? What is the purpose of life? And why does God seem so silent and absent from our lives?

From the opening scene where a knight (played by the glorious Max von Sydow) makes a deal with Death by engaging him in a game of chess to the iconic "danse macabre," final scene, this film shows the power of film in one of it's purest forms. No special effects, no annoying soundtrack, just dialogue and a thick, almost unbearable silence.

Bergman wrote about the silence of God and use of silence and space
in his films draws us into an almost breathless state of being.

Also:
Fanny and Alexander
Wild Strawberries
and I believe I saw Cries and Whispers. This might be the one that was brutal.

My Favorite Films

Ultimately film may be about money, but magical things can happen
and lives can be changed.

Pre-ramble

Before I got off (no pun intended) onto the subject of love, I had the intention of blogging about film.

Films are not just mere entertainment to me- I want to get lost into them, losing all sense of time and become deeply involved with the story and the characters. That being said, I also like a good, hokey ride with often outlandish special effects. In other words, you wanna go serious, I can watch some Italian surrealism for two and half hours with the best of them. You like creepy, stupid silly, I'm laughing along with you.

Around Christmas, we had some people over to the house. A person pulled out about 5 DVDs out of my collection and casually stated, "I'm going to borrow these."

While I was boiling inside, I did my best to be polite. You see, there are only a select few I would ever let borrow from my collection. Call it greedy, materialistic or selfish- your words fall on deaf ears. When it comes to my collection, I'm a prick. If I sense you are a person who is going to be meticulous and careful,, then you might get a pass.

One guy at work wanted to borrow my box set of "Band of Brothers." I did my best diplomatic "no." The thought of my collection laying around on someone's floor makes me ill.

"Some of those are not for loaning out, " was my best diplomatic answer. The movies she wanted to rent were given to me and I hadn't watched them anyways. She did borrow "Borat." I told her that she needs to keep it away from the kids and make sure it doesn't get damaged. I'm sure that didn't go down as well as I thought it did, but those discs are my babies and I keep them pristine.

I take films very seriously.

In no particular order, here's a partial list:

Amadeus

It reeks of cliche to state, "This film changed my life," but this three-hour masterpiece reached into me and changed things.

I was going to school at Peabody and my good friend, Bill (an excellent photographer), took  me to see what I presumed was going to another "art film." Art films are simply films that try too damn hard to have substance when it's pretty clear that the filmmaker is in love with one of the leads or in love with themselves.
(spoiler ahead)

Watching poor Salieri at the end absolving the inmates of the asylum because he was the "patron saint of mediocrities everywhere" was absolutely unnerving. Who, in the arts, has not tasted jealousy? Only the blindly arrogant.

I ran into some Peabody twit the next day and excitedly asked how he liked the film. His answer was one that matched the heartless, soulless pretentiousness that I encountered on a daily basis at school: "It didn't work," he stated triumphantly and then proceeded to point out historical errors. The idiot has missed the entire point of the film.

This visually sumptuous masterpiece is about how we ordinary people deal with our issues of blatant inadequacy when confronted with great talent, or in Mozart's case, blinding genius. We ask ourselves or God, "Why was so much ability given to this twit when I deserve it so much more?" I have met many a twit with so much natural ability that I had asked myself that question countless times.

Being humble becomes easier when you go to a big university or a small conservatory. It's one thing to be considered to be a good player by your high school peers, but another experience altogether when grouped with people from all over the world in a conservatory. The level you thought you were at (and all of its "specialness") dissipates like the morning fog when you see people doing things so effortlessly that cost you umpteen hours in a practice room just to come close to executing.

Salieri was destroyed by his jealousy. Was I going to let myself be eaten up by the same?

I told Bill on the ride home that Amadeus changed my life. Slowly, painfully and with the grace of time, I learned not to internally wince when someone mentioned how many gigs they had, what show they were doing or how many students they were teaching. I had to let jealousy go. It truly took a lot of time to let go and just be.