Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Idiots

“People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.” Bill Watterson

And that's just on this planet, he suspected.

“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Mark Twain

Tell me about it!
You too?

“...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.” Frantz Fanon

Imagine then his reaction to MAGA.

“They say even death can't cure an idiot." Tite Kubo

And then the part about...birth?

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community...but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”. Umberto Eco

Let's explain that.

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.” H.L. Mencken

Let's run this by Wall Street.

[iambiguous]

Many big cities are known for particular neighborhoods. But it seems as though, in Boston, this is especially the case. Where you come from in Boston can sometimes make all the difference in the world. Take, for example, Charlestown. I know this in part because way back when, I was stationed at Fort Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts. I’d make the trek to Boston from time to time and discovered this thing about neighborhoods. Neighborhoods there. The good, the bad, the ugly.

For some folks, a thug is a thug. But for other folks a thug [and the thug life] can be ramped up [romanticized] into epic proportions. And the “innocent civilians” that might get mangled [even murdered] along the way are just the criminal element [civilians] equivalent of “collateral damage”. Loose ends, as Jems calls them. In other words, it’s too bad for them but the guy was a legend!

Still, some thugs are more thuggish than others. And some thugs are more powerful than others. And there are so many different ways to get people hooked into it. For one thing, you can get them while they’re young.

This one also takes you back to a Neil McCauley admonition: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” And here the crook falls in love with a woman whose testimony can put him and his gang away for 30 years.

In the end though we have the closest thing a film of this sort can have to a “happy ending”.

For two reasons:

1] Doug is by far the least thuggish of the thugs
2] the original ending was rejected by a “test audience” So, they simply changed it


The Town

Title card: One blue-collar Boston neighborhood has produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than anywhere in the world. Charlestown.

On the other hand, let's run that by Ben Harp.

Title card: “Bank robbery became like a trade in Charlestown, passed down father to son.” Federal agent from the Boston Robbery Task Force.

Then going all the way back to Adam and Eve?

Doug [voiceover]: Driver’s name is Arthur Shea. Former Metro Police officer, fifty-seven years old. Soon as his partner leaves with the coal bag, Artie cracks a Herald, and he don’t look up 'til the guy gets back. Marty Maguire. Cummins Armored courier. Five-ten, two-twenty, fifty-two years old. Picks up every Wednesday and Friday at exactly 8:12, makes a hundred and ten dollars a day, carries a Sig nine. And he’s about to get robbed.

"Be prepared". Like the Boy Scouts.

Claire: A few days ago my bank was robbed. Four men took over and opened the safe. They took me as a hostage. Uh...they blind folded me and drove me around. And then they stopped and let me out over at the beach and… and one of the guys told me to walk until I felt the water on my toes. It’s the longest walk of my life, I kept thinking I’d step off a cliff. And… and then I felt the water.
Doug: I’m sorry.
Claire: It’s not your fault.

On the other hand...

Claire: I lied to the FBI.
Doug: What?
Claire: When the guy attacked David, I could see the back of his neck and he had a tattoo.
Doug: Of what?
Claire: It was one of those fighting Irish tatoos. I’m afraid if I report it they’ll make me testify. What do you think I should do?
Doug: You tell the FBI. If the guy’s got a record, and I’m sure he does, they’ll have his tattoos on file. They’ll ring him up the next day. Robbery, weapons, he’ll get thirty years. Of course he’ll worry someone’s gonna come looking for the witness. FBI will probabaly want to put you in a WitSec, you know, witness security. You know, he’ll probably put you somewhere, like you know in uh… Cleveland or Arizona. You know, somewhere safe.

Unless, of course, he's just making that up.

Doug: I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.
James: …Whose car are we gonna’ take?

The other thugs as it turns out.

James: Tell me you got a move here, Dougie. Cause the only way I see it, is that you got sprung like a goddamn bear trap on some toonie pussy who happens to be the one goddamn person…fuck! the one person that can give us to the fucking feds.
Doug: Calm down. Don’t you think we need to be smart right now?
James: Smart? Let’s start fucking all the witnesses. Oh yeah I’m blowing the assistant manager, am I smart now? And no, I didn’t tell the other guys because they’d flip the fuck out! And I want the ready for the next thing.
Doug: I told you, the next fucking thing ain’t ready yet.
James: Then fucking make it ready!

Things get...complicated.

Frawley [to Doug]: You and your boys didn’t just roll a star market over in Malden for a box of quarters. No, you decided to bang it out in the North End at nine o’clock in the morning with assault rifles. You fucking dummies shot a guard! Now you’re like a half off sale at a Big & Tall - every cop is in line. Fortunately though, for you, this guard, who is two-thirds to a retard, has miraculously clung to life. Now, if it were up to me, and they gave me two minutes and a wet towel, I would personally asphyxiate this half-wit so we could string you up on a federal M1 and end this story with a bag on your head and a paralyzing agent running through your veins. This isn’t fucking Tommy Hopscotch anymore, Doug. But I did wanna say one thing: You’re here today so I can personally tell you that you are going to die in federal prison. And so are all your friends. No deal. No compromise. And when that day comes when you start trying to be my hero collaborator so hard that I have to slap you to shut up, and it will come, despite your pitiable, misguided, Irish Omertà. When your code of silence finally gives way to fear of trafficking in cigarettes to prevent sexual enslavement, I just want you to know that it’s gonna be me who told you to go fuck yourself.

Let's get back to that.

Frawley [to Claire]: We have our suspects. I came by to share this with you.
[he takes several photos from the envelope he’s holding]
Frawley: James Coughlin. Albert Magloan. Desmond Elden. Part of the crew that we tied into the bank job at North End and at least three other armed car robberies.
[he shows her the next photo, which is a mug shot of Doug]
Frawley: Look familiar? You opened the safe for him. He left you unharmed. And now the two of you are carrying on a relationship about which you lied to the FBI. I was wrong, you do need a lawyer.

Let's get back to that.

James: You know what your fucking problem is, you think you’re better than most people. Mister fucking clean, mister goddamn high and mighty. That’s what you think, but you grew up right here. Same rules that I did.

Next up: rules were made to be broken.
Well, as long as you don't get caught.

Fergus: You’re going to do this for me, or I’m going to clip your nuts, like I clipped your daddy’s.
Doug: Don’t talk about my father.
Fergus: Son, I knew your daddy. He worked for me for years. Years. Then he wanted his own thing. You play the horses? You know they either geld the horse with a knife or with chemicals. When your Daddy said no to me, I did him the chemical way. Gave your mother a taste. Got the hook into her. Ahh, she doped up good and proper. Hung herself with a wire, on Melnea Cass. And you, running around the neighborhood looking for her. Your daddy didn’t have the heart to tell his son that he was looking for a suicide doper who was never coming home. If there’s a Heaven son, she ain’t in it.

Not to be confused with the other Fergus, of course.

Claire [to Doug]: Is that your thing? It’s not enough to trerrorize someone…you have to fuck them too?

On the other hand, had it been James...?

Doug: I will never lie to you again. I promise. Ask me anything you want. I’ll tell you the truth.
Claire: Why? I won’t believe you.
Doug: Yes, you will.
Claire: Why?
Doug: Because you’ll fucking hate the answers.

Anyone here want to hear mine?

Krista: There he is; Mr Six Inches
Frawley: What happened?
Krista: You’re a crime stopper; figure it the fuck out.
Frawley: Sweetheart, I know you have oxycodone, cocaine and alcohol in your system. I know that you have five cars registered in your name and I know right now your daughter is sitting in the back of a state van, being driven by a stranger to the Department of Social Services. So, how long do you wanna do this?

That did it.
If only all the way up to the happy ending.

[iambiguous]

Absurdity

“I can't go on, I'll go on.” Samuel Beckett

Though I suspect not any more.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Albert Einstein

See I told you. Either that or I'm telling you now.

“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” Carl Sagan

Just for the record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Actually, I was once this optimistic myself.

“I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.” Clive Barker

Yo, William Lane Craig! You're up!!

"We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.” H.P. Lovecraft

Any religionists here?

[iambiguous]

The Sixth Sense.

I remember a short while after it came out. A friend of mine sent me a present. It was a framed quote:

“I see dumb people…they’re everywhere…they walk around like everyone else…they don’t even know that they’re dumb.”

Above the quote was a scene from the film. A scene with Haley Joel Osment looking down at Bruce Willis.

I knew it was a parodic take on the film, but since I generally don’t watch movies relating to the “supernatural” [which I don’t believe in] I had not gone to the theatre to see it. Then, when it came out on DVD, I did watch it. I still don’t much care for “supernatural” films but given the genre it was still entertaining to watch. Like, say, The Shining or Rosemary’s Baby. Certainly better made than most of them.

Of course, however “the dead” are portrayed in films, at least they are “there”. Better being that way [in whatever manner depicted] than being nothing at all. So films like this will always be popular just because it reinforces our predilection to believe in “life” – in something – after death.

But there’s no getting around the fact that before we die there’s the part about all the trials and tribulations of living. And they come into play here too. And into this murky mix of life and death comes…the Lord?

So, do you have a “sixth sense” that death is not really the end of things? But no way in which to confirm it with the first five? This one is for you then.

Toni Collette has said that she was so moved by the emotional resonance of the story whilst filming, she didn’t even realize it was a horror film until after its release. IMDb


The Sixth Sense

Malcolm: Vincent Gray. I do remember you. Quiet, very smart, compassionate. Unusually compassionate.
Vincent: You forgot cursed.

Bang, bang.

Cole [to Malcolm]: I’m going to see you again, right?

Dead or alive?

Malcolm: Wanna play a game? It’s a mind-reading game. Here’s how it works. I read your mind. If what I say is right, you take one step towards the chair. If what I say is wrong, you take one step back… towards the doorway. If you reach the chair, you sit down. If you reach the door, you can go. Wanna play?
[Cole nods]
Malcolm: Okay… When your mother and father were first divorced, your mom went to see a doctor like me, and he didn’t help her. So you think I’m not going to be able to help you.
[Cole takes a step forward]
Malcolm: You’re worried that she said she told him things - things she couldn’t tell anyone else… Secrets.
[Cole takes another step forwards]
Malcolm Crowe: You have a secret, but you don’t want to tell me.
[Cole takes another step forwards]

Next up: Malcolm's secret.

Stanley [teacher]: Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in this country. A lot of generations have lived here and died here. Almost any place you go in this city has a history and a story behind it. Even this school and the grounds it sits on. Can anyone guess what this building was used for a hundred years ago, before you went to this school, before I went to this school? Yes, Cole?
Cole: They used to hang people here.
Stanley: No, uh, that, mm-mm, that’s not correct. Uh, where’d you hear that?
Cole: They’d pull the people in, crying and kissing their families 'bye. People watching would spit at them.
Stanley: Uh, Cole, this, this building was a legal courthouse. Laws were passed here. Some of the very first laws of this country. This whole building was full of, uh, lawyers, uh, lawmakers.
Cole: They were the ones that hanged everybody.

Spooky enough for you?

Malcolm: Once upon a time there was this person named Malcolm. He worked with children. He loved it. He loved it more than anything else. And then one night, he found out that he made a mistake with one of them. He couldn’t help that one. And he can’t stop thinking about it, he can’t forget. Ever since then, things have been different. He’s not the same person that he used to be. And his wife doesn’t like the person that he’s become. They barely speak anymore, they’re like strangers. And then one day Malcolm meets this wonderful little boy, a really cool little boy. Reminds him a lot of the other one. And Malcolm decides to try and help this new boy. 'Cause he feels that if he can help this new boy, it would be like helping that other one too.
Cole: How does the story end?
Malcolm: I don’t know.

Anyone here know?

Cole: I see dead people.
Malcolm: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]
Malcolm: While you’re awake?
[Cole nods]
Malcolm: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?
Cole: Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.
Malcolm: How often do you see them?
Cole: All the time. They’re everywhere.

Next up: the dead here?

[iambiguous]

Nikola Tesla

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

Now, let's put them in the right order.

I don't care that they stole my idea . . I care that they don't have any of their own.

Anyone here stolen mine yet?

Of all things, I liked books best.

Or, for others, burning them.

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Any updates here?

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Examples, please.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

"In his head", let's say.

[iambiguous]

Leave it to Charlie Kaufman to write a screenplay about Charlie Kaufman writing a screenplay for a film. A screenplay adapted from [or based on] a work of non-fiction about one of the strangest men you are ever likely to come across on or off the screen. Or in or out of a book.

There is even the surreal scene with Kaufman and the actors from Being John Malkovich – another film derived from another one of his screenplays.

So parts of this are based on actual events, parts are partly based on actual events [hyperbolically as it were] and parts are completely made up. For example, Charlie Kaufman does not have a twin-brother. And John Laroche was not killed by an alligator.

In “reality”, Charlie Kaufman has [at least in part] one of the most cynical and pessimistic takes on the world you are ever likely to come on. The ending here notwithstanding. Especially for someone who is actually as successful in the film industry as he is. He gets away with it because there are so many other things he is able to convey with words as well. For example, they can entertain you.

Adaptation. Of course [as Susan points out] adaptation for plants is quite different from adaptation for people. See if you can guess the reason why.

This is really a love story though. Just not Charlie’s. And it is about those rare few of us who have what it takes to live life out on the edge…passionaitely. Having first found something that is able to bring it out in them.

Based on writer Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt the best-selling book “The Orchid Thief”. Kaufman quickly got into a writer’s block, since the book lacked the dramatic structure needed for a movie. So he decided to write a screenplay about himself struggling to write a book adaptation, exaggerating many of the story elements and characters, and making up new ones (such as a non-existent twin brother). Knowing that the producers would reject the idea, he did not tell them about the new direction he was taking the story in, and simply handed in the finished script. Although this move was supported by Spike Jonze, Kaufman himself believed it would end his career (it didn’t). IMDb


Adaptation

Charlie: [voiceover] Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’m a walking cliché. I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There’s something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I’m way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn’t fat I would be happier. I wouldn’t have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that’s fooling anyone. Fat ass. I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I’d be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool. I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that? Just be real. Confident. Isn’t that what women are attracted to? Men don’t have to be attractive. But that’s not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days. Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it’s my brain chemistry. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. Bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that. But I’ll still be ugly though. Nothing’s gonna change that.

Click? You betcha.

Laroche [viewing an orchid at a flower show]: Angraecum sesquipedale! A beauty! God! Darwin wrote about this one. Charles Darwin? Evolution guy? Hello? You see that nectary all the way down there? Darwin hypothesized a moth with a nose twelve inches long to pollinate it. Everyone thought he was a loon! Then, sure enough, they found this moth with a twelve-inch proboscis.

No, it's actually not nearly as obscene as it sounds.

Laroche [to Susan]: Point is, what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid look exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live - how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.

And for any number of men here, that flower would be...?

Susan [voiceover]: I wanted to want something as much as these people wanted these plants…I want to now what it feels like to care about something passionaitely.

You first.

Susan: I guess I’d just like to know how you can detach from something that you’ve invested so much of your soul in. I mean, didn’t you ever miss turtles? The “only thing that made your 10 year old life worth living”.
Laroche: Look, I’ll tell you a story, all right? I once feel deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. Had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I skin dived to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holdacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one morning, I woke up and said, “Fuck fish.” I renounce fish, I will never set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much “fuck fish.” That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean.
Susan: But why?
Laroche [shrugging]: Done with fish.

Me first?

Laroche: You know why I like plants?
Susan: Nuh uh.
Laroche: Because they’re so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.

Or, sure, to perish.

Susan [on the phone with Laroche]: So, whatever happened with your nursery…?
Laroche [thinking back]: Sometimes bad things happen and darkness descends.

And then we find out exactly what he meansby that.

Laroche [to Susan on the phone]: I killed my mom. And my uncle. That’s how I lost my front teeth. And my wife was in a coma for, like, three weeks. And she divorced me soon after she regained consciousness.
Susan [trying to react]: Well, I think if I almost died, I would leave my marriage too.
Laroche: Why?
Susan: Because I could. Because it’s like a free pass. Nobody can judge you if you almost died.
Laroche: Well, I judged her. Maybe I was being judged too. It was like a month after that, Huricane Andrew came along and just swooped down like an angel from God…and just wiped out everything I had left. Everything.

Acts of God some call them.

Susan [from her book]: “There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”

So they tell you.

Charlie [thinking to himself]: I have no understanding of anything but my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic, little existence. The only thing I’m actually qualified to write about is myself and my own self…
[suddenly…]
Charlie [gushing into a microphone]: We open on Charlie Kaufman. Fat, old, bald, repulsive, sitting in a Hollywood restaurant, across from Valerie Thomas, a lovely, statuesque film executive. Kaufman, trying to get a writing assignment, wanting to impress her, sweats profusely. Fat, bald Kaufman paces furiously in his bedroom. He speaks into his hand held tape recorder, and he says: “Charlie Kaufman. Fat, bald, repulsive, old, sits at a Hollywood restaurant with Valerie Thomas. Kaufman, repugnant, ridiculous, jerks off to the book jacket photo of Susan Or…”

Eureka! Well, if only in a world of words.

Susan [voiceover]: Most people yearn for something exceptional, something so inspiring that they’d want to risk everything for that passion, but few would act on it. It was very powerful…and it’s intoxicating to be around someone who is so alive.

I once acted on it. And, as I recall, I never did again.

Susan [from her book]: "Life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid…wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with, but…but a little fantastic and fleeting and out of reach."

How about you: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=0 ... =616&dpr=1

Robert McKee [responding to Charlie’s question about writing a screenplay in a world where “nothing much happens”]: Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!
Charlie: Okay, thanks.

A bit subdued to say the least.

Susan [voiceover]: What I came to understand is that change is not a choice. Not for a species of plant, and not for me. It happens, and you are different.

You know, after you grow a pair.

Susan [on the phone]: Do you ever get lonely sometimes, Johnny?
Laroche: Well, I was a weird kid. Nobody liked me. But I had this idea. If I waited long enough, someone would come around and just, you know…understand me. Like my mom, except someone else. She’d look at me and quietly say: “Yes.” Just like that. And I wouldn’t be alone anymore.

Supannika!
Let's just leave it at that.

Charlie: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald: I remember that.
Charlie: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at me. You didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie: How come you looked so happy?
Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.

I'm with Don here. On the other hand, look how that turned out for me.

Susan [holding John Laroche – who is dead – in her arms]: It’s over. Everything’s over. I did everything wrong. I want my life back. I want it back before everything got fucked up. I want to be a baby again. I want to be new. I WANT TO BE NEW!

I'm with Susan here. On the other hand, look how that turned out for me.

Charlie [voiceover]: I have to go right home. I know how to finish the script now. It ends with Kaufman driving home after his lunch with Amelia, thinking he knows how to finish the script. Shit, that’s voice-over. McKee would not approve. How else can I show his thoughts? I don’t know. Oh, who cares what McKee says? It feels right. Conclusive. I wonder who’s gonna play me. Someone not too fat. I liked that Gerard Depardieu, but can he not do the accent? Anyway, it’s done. And that’s something. So: “Kaufman drives off from his encounter with Amelia, filled for the first time with hope.” I like this. This is good.

Also, who will play Donald?

[iambiguous]

A look inside the broadcast news industry. And, first and foremost, it is an industry. A business. Making a profit through dispensing the news. But the profit is made through airing commercials. And the commercials are derived from corporations that, from time to time, become the news.

See if you can spot the conflict of interest. Commercials from car manufactures and defense industry giants and the finance sector. Commercials from pharmaceutical companies and energy producers and the military.

Of course, it goes without saying that this is not the focus here.

The focus here instead is mostly on the manner in which “the news” is becoming just another kind of “entertainment”. Only the most attractive folks are hired…and there is an increasingly fuzzier and fuzzier line between hard news and show business. Network light.

It is clearly a liberal narrative on all this. They have “integrity”. But it is a rather circumspect integrity. They are [by and large] the sort of liberals that folks like Phil Ochs sang about.

And the politics of “looks”. For some in the news industry, it’s the center of the whole fucking universe. And even off camera. Jane and Aaron are made for each other. And Jane holds in contempt everything that Tom stands for in the news business. But Aaron is nowhere near as attractive as Tom. So naturally Jane is attracted to Tom. Remember Lester and Cliff and Halley from Crimes and Misdemeanors? Same thing here. Sort of.


Broadcast News

Young Tom: I got my report card. Three Cs, two Ds and an incomplete.
Dad: Oh my. I see you studying so hard, Tom. What do you think the problem is?
Tom: I’ll just have to try harder. I don’t know. I will. I will. I will. I will.
Dad: Do you think it would it help if I got you a tutor?
Tom (suddenly hopeful): That would be great. It better help. What can you do with yourself if all you do is look good?
Title card: Future Network Anchorman

Young Aaron: Go ahead Steven, take your last licks. But this will heal. What I’m going to say never will. It’ll scar you forever. Ready? Here it is. You’ll never make more than $19,000 a year. Ha ha ha!
Steven: Take him.
Aaron: Okay, how about this? You’re never gonna leave South Boston and I’m gonna see the whole damn world. You’ll never know the pleasure of writing a graceful sentence. Or having an original thought. Think about it!
Steven: $19,000. Not bad!
Title card: Future Network News Reporter.

Young Jane: Dad, you want me to choose my words so carefully and then you just throw a word like ‘obsessive’ at me. Now, unless I’m wrong…and please correct me if I am… ‘obsession’ is practically a psychiatric term concerning people who don’t have anything else but the object of their obsession – who can’t stop and do anything else. Well, Here I am stopping to tell you this. Okay? So would you please try and be a little more precise instead of calling a person something like ‘obsessive.’
Title card: Future Network News Producer

Reluctant Interviewee: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fucking. Fucking. Can you use that?
Aaron: Depends on how slow a news day it is.

Nope, not that day.

Tom [to Jane, explaining how he got a news anchor job because of his looks]: Listen to me. You keep on thinking I’m somebody who lacks…confidence. That’s not it. I know I can talk well enough and I’m not bad at making contact with people, but I don’t like the feeling that I’m pretending to be a reporter. And half the time I don’t really get the news I’m talking about. It isn’t that I’m down on myself. Trust me, I stink.

On the other hand, he's William Hurt.

Jane: So, you’re not well educated and you have almost no experience and you can’t write.
Tom: Yeah, and I’m making a fortune.
Jane: It’s hard for me to advise you since you personify something that I truly think is dangerous.
Tom: Uh-huh.
Jane: I agree with you – you’re not qualified. So get qualified. You can insist on being better prepared. You don’t have to just leave it as (mimicking him) ‘I don’t write. I’m not schooled. I don’t understand the news I’m reading. But at least I’m upset about it, folks.’

Let's just note it was the way she said it.

Martin: OK. What about this? Here’s a tough ethical one. Would you tell a source that you loved them? Just to get some information?
Aaron: Yes.
George: Yes.
Ernie: Me too.
Jennifer: Sure.
George: You bet.
Aaron: Jennifer didn’t know there was an alternative.

That's a joke, folks. At least I think it was.

Blair: Oh, you think anyone who’s proud of the work we do is an ass-kisser.
Aaron: No, I think anyone who puckers up their lips and presses it against their bosses buttocks and then smooches is an ass-kisser.
Blair: My gosh…and for a while there I was attracted to you.
Aaron: Well, wait a minute, that changes everything!

Not really.

Jane: Tom isn’t ready for the job you’re about to hand him. Not near ready. Not by the longest shot. Aaron’s spent six weeks in Tripoli, he’s interviewed Gaddafi – he reported on the Eight-one story. I think he’s essential to do the job we’re capable of and I think it’s my responsibility to tell you that.
Paul: Okay, that’s your opinion.
Jane: It’s not opinion.
Paul: You’re just absolutely right, and I’m absolutely wrong.
[she nods]
Paul: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.
Jane [anguished]: No, it’s awful.

Tom it is then.

Aaron: Can you name all the members of the Cabinet?
Tom (flustered): Okay, let’s drop it. I’m not going to take a test for you – I mean if that came up in conversation I’d…
Aaron: We’re conversing…Oh my, the names of the entire Cabinet has slipped my mind. What are they? Don’t name them. Just tell me if you know.
Tom: Yes, Aaron. I know the names of the Cabinet.
Aaron: All twelve?
Tom: Yes.
Aaron: There are only ten.
Tom: You’re feeling good, aren’t you?
Aaron: I’m starting to… We may do the capitols of the states.
Tom: Fifty, right?

It's still Tom.

Aaron: You can’t end up with Tom because it goes totally against everything you’re about. I know you care about him. I’ve never seen you like this about anyone, so please don’t take it wrong when I tell you that I believe that Tom, while a very nice guy, is the Devil.
Jane: This isn’t friendship. You’re crazy.
Aaron: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Come on! Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like? He will be attractive! He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He’ll never do an evil thing! He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing…he will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit. And he’ll talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he’ll get all the great women.

So, who get's all the women here?

Aaron [to Jane]: …if things had gone differently for me tonight then I probably wouldn’t be saying any of this. I grant you everything. But give me this: he personifies everything that you’ve been fighting against. And I’m in love with you.
[Jane reacts]
Aaron: How do you like that? I buried the lead.

In other words, it's still Tom.

Aaron: I’m sorry that they’re sending you down for a while, but you’ll make it back…Where they sending you?
Tom: London.
Aaron [nonplussed]: London? That’s a promotion!
Tom: I don’t think so.
Aaron: It is. Yes – that’s where they had Rorish, for God’s sake, before they made him anchor. I can’t stand it – they’re grooming you for it all and you don’t even know it!

My guess: absolutely nothing has changed.

Jane: What do you think will happen to us?
Aaron: What will happen? Okay, that’s easy. Five or six years from now, I’ll be back to collect an award. I’ll be walking along with my wife and two lovely children – we’ll bump into you on the street, my youngest son will say something and I’ll tell him it’s not nice to make fun of single, fat ladies.

He meant obese, of course.

Aaron: Jane, you know how Tom had tears in that interview piece he did with that girl? Ask yourself how we were able to see them when he only had one camera and that was pointing at the girl during the interview. I’m fairly sure I was right to tell you.

Yeah, what about that, jane?

Jane: I’m not going.
Tom: Why?
Jane: I saw the taped outtakes of the interview with the girl. I know you ‘acted’ your reaction after the interview.
Tom: I felt funny about it afterwards. It’s verboten, huh? I thought since I almost did it for real the first time – but I get you. But that’s not the reason you’re not coming.
Jane: Of course it’s the reason. It’s terrible what you did.
Tom: We disagree on how God-awful it was. Why don’t you come with me and we can disagree and get a tan at the same time?
Jane (livid): Jesus, if you’re glib about this I’m going to lose it!! I was up all night and…
Tom: Jane, Jane…
Jane: …it made me ill. You could get fired for things like that.
Tom: I got promoted for things like that.
Jane: Working up tears for a new piece cutaway…You totally crossed the line between…
Tom: It’s hard not to cross it; they keep moving the little sucker, don’t they?

You know, between all the fucking commercials.

[iambiguous]

Stupidity

“It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire." Arthur Schopenhauer

Fuck that!

“Anna, Anna," Josh interrupts. "If I had a euro for every stupid thing I've done, I could buy the Mona Lisa. You'll be fine.” Stephanie Perkins

On the other hand: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+muc ... URT-reRWmz

“TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.” Douglas Coupland

That is one way to look at it. Let's start here.

“In the Universe it may be that primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.” Stephen W. Hawking

New thread?

“I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy.” Daniel Handler

Enough said?

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” Blaise Pascal

Let's run this by, well, you know.

[iambiguous]

Manchester, England. Some say the Industrial Revolution was given birth here. Maybe. But we do know that Joy Division was. So, how, historically are the two linked together? I don’t know. But somehow I’m sure.

Manchester and the working class. Same thing. So, what really were your options as a young lad back then? You could work in one or another of the many industrial components or you could form a rock and roll band. Or a new wave band. And you could then go on to become so integral to “the scene” that some folks would always approach it as before and after Joy Divison.

And, who knows, the band may be touring still today had Ian Curtis not been afflicted with [among other things] epilepsy. But he was afflicted. And on May 18th, 1980, he committed suicide. He was 23 years old.

Why “Joy Division”?

The world is full of irony.

And watching Ian Curtis perform up on the stage was nothing short of mesmerizing. And the music. Dark. Dark dark dark dark dark.



Joy Division

Title card: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” Marshall Berman

Next up: to be postmodern.

Morris: Punk enabled you to say “Fuck You!”. But somehow it couldn’t go any further. It was just a single, venomous, one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger which was necessary to re-ignite rock-n-roll. But sooner or later someone was going to want to say more than, “fuck you”. Someone was going to want to say “I’m fucked”. And it was Joy Division who were the first band to do that…to use the energy and simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.

You know, if that's even possible.

Genesis P-Orridge: Ian was a big Burroughs fan because his writing was very much a post-industrial nightmare. It was about bigotry and lack of ethics. The cynical, hate-filled, totalitarian, dark underside greed of Western society gone mad. The secret nature of perception. The cutup. It all seemed to fit and suggest there was a way to integrate that more artistic and literary idea into what was otherwise a paltry glam rock, prog rock wilderness.

You know, if that's even possible.

Title card: “…in the main he was reading Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Hesse and Ballard…It struck me that all Ian’s spare time was spent reading and thinking about human suffering.” Deborah Curtis

Well, it is everywhere.

Bass player: I just wanted us to be how we sounded live. I didn’t want it to sound melancholy. I didn’t want it to lacerate. I wanted just to lop people’s heads off, like Iggy Pop live. I wasn’t interested in depth or anything. I just wanted to, you know, kick them in the teeth.

Not unlike some here.

[iambiguous]

Marshall McLuhan

“Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”

Let's name names. We'll flip to see who goes first.

The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.

Whatever that means.

For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes.

Sure, why not?

Advertising is corporate form of art and the goal is to make an effect. Every artist- any painter, any poet or musician sets out to create an effect, he sets a trap to catch somebody`s attention. That is the nature of art.

Of course, the soup cans!

...homogeneity is quite incompatible with electronic culture...

Imagine then his reaction to the internet.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

Tell me about it! Here I mean.

[iambiguous]

Teen pregnancy: The comedy. The thoughtful comedy?
As though to say, “wouldn’t it be a much better world if this was the way we all reacted to kids having kids?”

Shocked but compassionaite. Troubled but understanding. Serious but cracking jokes.

Of course abortion is always an option, sure. But, come on, is there even a snowball’s chance in hell of it coming to that? In her world? Her world? Look for the word “cool” a lot.

There are, however, many other worlds to find yourself in with an unwanted pregnancy. Some a bit more daunting, threatening…agonizing? I mean, if everyone could only be like this [if every unwanted pregnancy could only be like this], we might be able to eliminate the need for abortion altogether!

Hey, but why spoil it by getting all serious, right? Or [worse] all political. Consider me sufficiently chagrined.

And then Eliot Page today. If you get my drift.



Juno

Rollo: Well, well… If it isn’t MacGruff the crime dog! Back for another test?
Juno: I think the last one was defective. The plus sign looked more like a division symbol so I remain unconvinced.

In denial in other words.

Rollo [to Juno]: You better pay for that pee-stick when you’re done with it. Don’t think it’s yours just because you marked it with your urine!

No, really, how does that work?

Rollo: So, what’s the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?
Juno: I don’t know. It’s not seasoned yet. Nope…There it is. The little pink plus sign is so unholy.
[shakes pregnancy tester]

Some are still shaking theirs.

Juno: I’m pregnant.
[pause]
Paulie: What should we do?
Juno: Well, I should just… I was thinking I’d just nip it in the bud before it gets worse. Because they were talking about in health class how pregnancy… It can often lead to an infant.

Our's did.

Su-Chin [protesting in front of the abortion clinic]: All babies want to get borned! All babies want to get borned!

Do they know that?

Juno: I don’t want to give the baby to a family that describes themselves as “wholesome”.

Baby Boom!

Mac: Did you see that coming?
Bren: Yeah…but I was hoping she was expelled, or into hard drugs.
Mac: That was my first instinct too. Or a DWI…

Gerta [the lawyer]: So, first of all, Juno, how far along are you?
Juno: I’m a junior.
Gerta: No, I mean in your pregnancy.

Oh...

Mark: '93. I’m telling you that was the best time for rock and roll.
Juno: Nuh-uh, 1977! Punk Volume 1. You weren’t there, so you can’t understand the magic.
Mark: You weren’t even alive!

Oh...

Leah: God you’re getting huge. How many months has it been now?
Juno: Um it’s coming up on the eighth. You should see me naked.
Leah: I wish my funbags would get bigger.
Juno: Trust me, you don’t. I actually have to wear a bra now and I have to rub this nasty cocoa butter stuff all over myself or my skin could get stretched too far and explode.

No bras these days, I suspect.

Juno: My dad had this weird obsession with Roman or Greek mythology or something and he decided to name me after Zeus’ wife.
Mark: Zeus’ wife?
Juno: Yeah and I mean Zeus had tons of lays but I’m pretty sure Juno was his only wife. And apparently she was supposed to be super beautiful but really mean, like Diana Ross. [/b]

Then the complication:

Mark: It just feels a little like bad timing.
Vanessa: What would be a good time for you?
Mark: I don’t know. There’s just things I still want to do.
Vanessa: Like what? Be a rock star?
Mark: Don’t mock me.
Vanessa: You’re trying to do something that’s never going to happen. And you know what? Your shirt is stupid. Grow up. If I have to wait for you to become Kurt Cobain, I’m never going to be a mother.

But then it sort of all devolves into…goo. Like much of the soundtrack.

[iambiguous]

Nature

“If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.” Maggie Stiefvater

Let's think of one.

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.” Jack London

Next up: the sheer surging of life here?

“Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.” Albert Einstein

Imagine his reaction to Elon Trump.

“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.” Christopher Paolini

On the other hand: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=7 ... =599&dpr=1

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity” John Muir

Next up: acts of God.

“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.” Emily Dickinson

You tell me.

[iambiguous]

Psychopaths. Seven of them. Characters in a book and the actual flesh and blood monsters. Though not monsters all of the time. But what difference does that make if, when they are monsters, you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In films, psychopaths can be made to seem rather entertaining. But surely the world would be better off “in reality” if there were fewer of them around. After all, these are guys who shoot people in the eyeball or stab them in the ear with an icepick.

Of course this film is strictly a comedy. A pitch gray comedy. Sans the parts that really aren’t that funny at all. Violent? A bit.

And then there are the sociopaths. Psychopaths can do terrible things because their brains are fried or are wired wrong. Sociopaths can do them just for the money or just because they feel like it. They enjoy doing it.

Not that any of this really matters. You’re too busy laughing. And it’s not altogether out of the question that a psychopath wrote the screenplay. And in this case the director too.

And let me ask you this: What’s the difference between kidnapping a dog and borrowing it?



Seven Psychopaths

Tommy: You ever shoot a guy in his eyeball?
Larry: I stabbed a guy in his ear once. Ice pick, right in his fucking ear.
Tommy: Yeah see, that’d be a different subject. That’d be ears.

Though not necessarily a category error.

Billy: How’s the Seven Psychopaths screenplay coming, Marty?
Marty: Slow, slow. I’ve got the title, y’know… just haven’t been able to come up with all the psychopaths yet.
Billy: How many you got?
Marty: One. And he ain’t really much of a psychopath. He’s more of a… kind of a Buddhist.
Billy: A Buddhist?
Marty: Yeah, I’m sick of all these stereotypical Hollywood murderer scumbag type psychopath movies. I don’t want it to be one more film about guys with guns in their hands. I want it… overall… to be about love… and peace. But it still has to be about these seven psychopaths, so this Buddhist psychopath, he… he doesn’t believe in violence. I don’t know what the fuck he’s going to do in the movie.

Next up: seven sycophants.

Billy: So what happens to the seven psychopaths at the end?
Marty: I…I don’t even know what happens to them at the start.

Same with the sycophants.

On Bonny’s dog tag: RETURN BONNY TO CHARLES COSTELLO OR YOU WILL FUCKING DIE

The part they weren't quite expecting.

Paulo: There’s something else, Charlie. The guy’s got about a hundred packs of playing cards, and all the jacks of diamonds are gone.
Charlie: The guy’s a fucking psychopath!

That'll do it.

Hans: Have some pride, in yourself. Have some faith in Jesus Christ as your lord and don't tell those scum sucking motherfuckers nothing.

My guess: Or else.
'
Hans: As Gandhi said – and I believe it wholeheartedly – an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, I believe that wholeheartedly.
Billy: No it doesn’t. There’ll be one guy left with one eye. Hows the last blind guy gonna take out the eye of the last guy left, who’s still got one eye! All that guy has to do is run away and hide behind a bush. Gandhi was wrong, it’s just that nobody’s got the balls to come right out and say it.

Gandhi...the psychopath?

Hans: Marty, I’ve been reading your movie. Your women characters are awful. None of them have anything to say for themselves. And most of them get either shot or stabbed to death within five minutes. And the ones that don’t probably will later on.
Marty: Well, it’s a hard world for women. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.
Hans: Yeah, it’s a hard world for women, but most of the ones I know can string a sentence together.

Let's run this by....you know.

Billy [after Marty tells the Vietnamese psychopath story]: That’s a great fuckin’ psychopath Marty!
Marty [sighs]: Yeah…But it’s not what I wanna really be writin’ about anymore.
Billy [pauses to think]: Hey new idea. How 'bout we change the title from “The Seven Psychopaths” to “The Seven Lesbians Who Are All Disabled And Have Overcome All Their Spazzy Shit And Are Really Nice to Everybody And Two of Them Are Black”. How 'bout that?

Too close to call.

Marty: Friends don’t make their friends die, Hans.
Hans: Psychopathic friends do. You’re the one thought psychopaths were so interesting, but they’re kinda tiresome after awhile, don’t you think?

The ones here certainly are.

Billy [with the flare gun to Bonny’s head]: Five… Four… Three… Two…
Charlie [after his gun jams…again]: Wait! Please go back to five. Please…
Billy: I’m not going back to five, man. I’m not going back to five.
[long pause]
Billy: Five…

Repeat as necessary.

Zachariah [to Marty on phone – after the end credits start rolling]: You didn’t think I was what? Serious? You think I’m not serious just because I carry a rabbit around?!..I’m going to be over to kill you Tuesday.
Marty: That’s good, I’m not doing anything Tuesday.
Zachariah: You sound different. You sound like you been through a wringer.
Marty [resigned, somber]: A little.
Zachariah: I…you know…Tuesday doesn’t really work for me. Can I get back to you?
Marty: Sure. I’ll be right here.
Zachariah: I know.

So, what to make of that?

[iambiguous]

By plane or by train?

Here is a man of God – a good man – who happens to like trains. So by train it is. The Express. But along the way he bumps into folks who don’t see God in quite the same way. Who don’t even see Him at all. But, as with the faithful, they too see the world in black and white: Money or no money. Dope or no dope.

And, on a train, the voyage takes longer. More time to meet strangers. More time for strangers to change your life. And when one attractive young couple meets another attractive young couple, well, you do the math.

And it goes without saying the strangers are mysterious. And that things between them may not really be what they seem at all. And that’s before the murder. And before the part when Ben Kingsley comes in full frame.

Who knows what about…what?

Then there is the part about keeping your eye on the doughnut or on the hole. Opposites may attract but that doesn’t make the differences between them go away.

The ending here is priceless. And it’s the one that True Detective missed. Well, in my opinion of course.

Look for Woody Harrelson in both.

Transsiberian (2008) had the misfortune of opening on the same weekend as The Dark Knight (2008), the second biggest film in history. IMDb



Transsiberian

Minister: Ours is not a gray world. Under the bright light of truth, it’s a world of clear contrasts. Black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. There is always a choice. But with faith, the choice is an easy one.

Whatever Mommy and Daddy said it was.

Roy [to Jessie]: It’s still not too late to fly.

If only they could know the future....they might have walked

Roy [competing with passenger’s tiger scar]: Hey, look at this. A deer attacked me.
Train passenger: A deer?
Roy: Yeah, a John Deere power mower!

Then an old man shows them another kind of scar: a Gulag number tattooed on his arm.

Roy: Do the Gulags still exist?
Train passenger: No, but if you want proof about America, you take a book. You want proof about Russia, take shovel. They’re all buried here. Scientists, priests, poets. There is no God, and there is no Siberia.

Taking a shovel here?

Jessie: Kill off all my demons, Roy, and my angels might die, too.

You tell me.

Abby: So how did you meet Roy?
Jessie: Well, Roy likes to say we met by accident. I was drunk, and I swerved into his truck head-on, going 40 miles an hour.

Sounds like it might actually be...true?

Carlos: Roy told me about your “bad girl” past, Jessie. I understand Roy. He likes choo-choo trains. But you? Why are you here? What are you looking for? A little bit of excitement? Like you had before when you were the chica mala? And there was nothing to hold you down? No compromise? When life was just…sensacion.
Jessie: Man, I sure wish I had known you back in the day. Nothing cleared your head faster than a good pointless fuck.

Or is that the point?

Roy: Hold on there Ilya, don’t tell me that you miss the USSR? I mean the USSR was a dark evil empire.
Grinko: Maybe so. But then we were people living in the darkness, now we are people dying in the light. Which is better? When it was USSR a man lived until 65 years, now it is 58 years. I know this fact very well, I am 58. In Russia now we say there are only 2 kinds people, those who leave in private jet, and those who leave in coffin.
Jessie: Which are you?
Grinko: I’m too old to leave. Just do my job.

Spooky [or ominous] enough for you?

Grinko [to Jessie]: In Russia, we have expression. “With lies, you may go ahead in the world, but you may never go back.” Do you understand this, Jessie?

New Thread?

Grinko: It seems, Roy, your wife has a little problem with the truth.

Whatever that might possibly be.

Roy [to Grinko]: We’re Americans!

Actually, that doesn't always work.

Jessie [to Abby in the hospital]: I need to tell you something…

About the money, as I recall.

Roy: What’d you say to Abby?
Jessie: Just something you once told me. In the hospital.
Roy [laughs]: You’re kidding. The doughnut thing?
[she nods]
Roy [still chuckling]: Honey, I don’t even know what that means. I was just trying to cheer you up…to make you look on the bright side.
Jessie: I know.

And then all the things neither one of them knew.

[iambiguous]

A tongue in cheek action thriller. And one of the best.

Another dip into the less than zero world of “hip” Los Angeles. By way of Hollywood. That’s the place where you are never really entirely certain if what you are watching is real…or just being filmed. So Harry takes full advantage of it.

He joins the cast. And so the satiric farce begins. People pretending to be someone that other folks think they really are.

But the line between real and fake is often so slender here that you don’t hardly recognize it as a satire at all. I mean, it is a satire, isn’t it?

Harry and Perry. What a team. One’s a crook pretending to be an actor and the other is a P.I. paid to coach him along. But then when Harry pretends to be a P.I…

And what would a wacky film like this be without a wacky love story. And wacky incest.

The film was given a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

Val Kilmer’s depiction of Gay Perry is generally considered to be the first openly gay character to front a Hollywood action movie.

In reference to the “Ike, Mike, and Mustard” quote. Ike and Mike are diner slang for salt and pepper shakers. Also, Pre-1950s, an “Ike, Mike, and Mustard” joke was an off color joke, generally with sexual references, that wouldn’t be told in polite or mixed company. IMDb


Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang

Harry [voiceover]: Hard to believe it was last Christmas that me and Harmony changed the world. And we didn’t mean to. And it didn’t last long, you know. A thing like that can’t. Now that I’m in L.A., I go to parties. The kind where if a girl is named Jill she spells it J-Y-L-L-E, that bullshit. That’s me there. My name’s Harry Lockhart, I’ll be your narrator. Welcome to L.A. Welcome to the party.

Thanks, Ironman.

Harry [voiceover]: Anyway, by now you may wonder how I wound up here. Or, maybe not. Maybe you wonder how silly putty picks shit up from comic books. The point is, I don’t see another Goddamn narrator, so pipe down.

Well, this is a...farce?

Harry [to man who is fondling a sleeping Harmony]: You know what, you better be her doctor. Walk away. Don’t think, just do it.
Man: What, are you her brother or something? It’s none of your business, man. I will fuck you up.
Harry: No, you’ll try. And that little experiment will end in tears, my friend. So again, for the cheap seats, do not think, walk the fuck away. Or let’s you and me go outside right now. It’s past my bedtime. Make a choice.

So he does. It’s hilarious. Think Nuke and Crash.

Perry: I’m interrupting. I feel badly. What are you drinking?
Harmony: Bad.
Perry: Bad? Sorry?
Harmony: You feel bad.
Perry: Bad?
Harmony: “Badly” is an adverb. To say you feel badly says that the mechanism which allows you to feel is broken.

Fucking English!

Harmony: The blond’s pathetic.
Harry: Because?
Harmony: Well, for starters, she’s been fucked more times than she’s had a hot meal.
Harry: Yeah, I heard about that. It was neck-and-neck and then she skipped lunch.

Pathetic enough for you?

Harry: Oh Wow. Woo. It’s tiny. Is this real?
Perry: Yeah, it’s a Derringer. It’s loaded. I call it my faggot gun.
Harry: Because…
Perry: Because it’s only good for a couple shots, then you gotta drop it for something better. You asked, Chief.

You tell me.

Perry: Jesus. Look up “idiot” in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?
Harry: A picture of me?
Perry: No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!

Or, for others, a picture of...me?

Perry: Don’t blame yourself. Listen. sometimes these things just happen.
Harry: For a reason. For a reason? Why? Because I fall off a building, 10 people in Baltimore survive a bus crash? Swell, they’re enjoying Baltimore. I’m lying here with my brains out.
Perry: I’ve been to Baltimore. You win.

Back to this: https://youtu.be/_TvDge63Iy8?si=jPXxqzKS328KZ3xm

Harry: Perry?
Perry: Yeah?
Harry: I peed on it.
Perry: What? You peed on what?
Harry: I peed on the corpse! Can they do, like, ID from that?
Perry: I’m sorry, you peed on…?
Harry: On the corpse. My question is…
Perry: No, my question, I get to go first: Why in hell would you pee on a corpse?!
Harry: I didn’t intend to! It’s not like I did it for kicks!

These things can get complicated.

Harry [voiceover]: I tell Perry about destiny. He’s shaking his head. About dream girls, he doesn’t care. I mention the underwear thing…he has a fucking conniption. And you? How about it, film goer? Have you solved the case of the dead people in L.A.?

We're still working on it, right?

Perry [to Dexter Clinic guard]: You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t “good cop, bad cop.” This is fag and New Yorker. You’re in a lot of trouble.

To say the fucking least?!

Perry [after Harry shoots guard]: What did you just do?!
Harry [confused]: I just put in one bullet, didn’t I?
Perry: You put a live round in that gun!
Harry: Well yeah, there was like an 8% chance.
Perry: Eight? Who taught you math!

No, really, what are the chances?

Perry [to Harry]: Homophobes never check there.

Not even virtually.

Harry [voiceover]: Yeah, boo, hiss, I know. Look, I hate it too. In movies where the studio gets all paranoid about a downer ending so the guy shows up, he’s magically alive on crutches, I hate that. I mean, shit, why not bring them all back. But the point is, in this case, this time, it really happened. Perry, like, lived. Yeah, it’s a dumb movie thing but what do you want me to do, lie about it?

Too close to call.