TERRIFYING FILM.>

I'd downloaded it, and having read about the subject matter decided to watch early this morning. Admitted I haven't been able to watch it to the end, because I was so grossed out and utterly depressed by the suffering, humiliation, self-destruction, abuse, host-parasite relationships, friendship? I couldn't sit this one out, and purely impulsively pressed the eject button deciding I'd had enough... even though the performance by Ellen Burstyn is admittedly quite brilliant. I know the the devastation from own experience re hard-drug addiction, alcohol being one of them, and had a hard time, obviously *too* hard, to have it once again put in my face this intense, condensed, packed and extreme.

Maybe there's just so much "Aronofsky" one can handle, emotionally, humanly, within 36 hours... I'll contemplate watching it maybe at another time, but not in the near future.

I know a verse about his opponent, who reputedly knew everything.

<Here come I, my name is Jowett.

All there is to know I know it.

I am Master of this College,
What I don't know isn't knowledge!>

Sounds to me like the smart young filmmaker who made Pi has gone down the shock-horror route. It's not *always* a bad thing (Cronenberg, for example) but it often panders to a pretty numb demographic. Which means that viewers with fine-tuned sensibilities can suffer physical pain.

Lars von Trier, for instance, started with three excellent films, then became a raving monster.

I'm not a fan of the drug/drink addiction movie, in general. The majority are just dim-witted: descent into hell followed by courageous rise to redemption, like the American dream in a bottle.

A small number of exceptions come to mind. Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, because it was mostly psychological, and used restrained (for him) imagery. And Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, also curiously restrained, also with a great actor (Christopher Walken), and in 'aesthetic' black-and-white, like Lynch's Eraserhead. For once, the heroin/vampire metaphor wasn't merely exploitation.

But there are so many bad ones: the crass and the ugly, the exploitative and the redemptory. I'm kinda immune to them now, I think -- my film critic era gave me the ability to see anything as just light on a screen. It spoils the 'suspension of disbelief' thing, but it keeps sanity and sensibility intact.

Just yet another way of being numb and number, maybe. But it works for me.

Funny, actually. Leave out Cronenberg and Greenaway, and I could easily compile a top ten list of films, all of them in black-and-white. A random monochrome set might feature:

Dr Strangelove
Alphaville
L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad
Casablanca
Hamlet Goes Business
Touch of Evil
Eraserhead
Pi ...

The Addiction
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End

... and that's without having to delve too much into the vast number of superb noir films from the 1940s, say. Most of these are 1960 or later, when b/w-vs-colour was a choice.

Heh. For a moment there, I thought my 'top ten' had only nine entries. Then I saw that (helped by CG's mysterious line-break function) I'd unwittingly invented something called "Pi The Addiction".

Very telling, that. Three-point one-four one-five nine ...

Still, as much as I agree with your points, I still think there is a tipping point with risqué films, on an emotional level like this, that is determined by quite personal and hard to put into words norms and criteria... I was thinking of Leaving Las Vegas, with Nicolas Cage, of course to an extent overacted, but even then understated, very confronting, yet in a weird way "acceptable, honest enough" and a painful lesson.

And even though I am able to distance myself from movies quite expertly, you worded it perfectly btw, Aronofsky's Requiem tried to push way over my threshold, at this point. I always return to "try and keep sanity and sensibility in-tact" just like you. After all some horrific scenarios I experienced in real life in hospitals and such, and detachment from gory details isn't strange to me, to put it mildly.

<Fountain> - I indeed also (not to the degree of your reviewer's quote) have second thoughts about it, and I remain with this slightly paranoid impression that Aronofsky is out to stun, shock and disturb, and it has me extra alert and skeptical perhaps.

I may project some of my frustration and Angst, but in the end I think my need and longing for sanity keeps me quite alright on many things.

And I've never really 'got' Selby as a writer, despite regular recommendations over the years.

Maybe, as you imply, a "need and longing for sanity" is the ultimate protection against demons. Who needs Buffy?

OK, I wouldn't actually object if Buffy wanted to move in and slay demons, but you know what I mean.

[smiley]

PS. Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is deeply eccentric, and in some ways inferior to the original record by Viv Stanshall, where he did all the voices and songs himself.

My favorite character is Hubert Rawlinson, "now in his mid-40s and still unusual".

But here's to English eccentricity. After that recent brush with the opposite end of Her Majesty's Remedial Education System ... it's nice to be reminded of clever English types.

There's always *mack*, of course. I think the kerfuffle actually *embarrassed* him, the poor, dear chap.

Aronofsky may well still steer down the "wrong" course- but I wanted to respond to your interesting points about this.

I don't really disagree, but I want to emphasize something that <Pauline Kael> used to come back to over and over.

These "auteurs"- these rogues- these few- who fund on a shoestring and against all odds get their idiosyncratic and often iconoclastic visions on screen- sometimes they score massively with masterpieces.

But these same folk will often produce strings of duds or worse- obsessive repetition of obnoxious material.

So to add to your list, <Herzog> is a shell of himself- hasn't made a decent film in decades- partly because he won't address the clumsiness and lack of verisimilitude in his screenplays and direction of his actors.

When he had the services of such unusual and charismatic actors as <Klaus Kinski> and <Bruno S.>, he could get away with Romantic fabliaux and really weird screenplays- "realism" was not an issue.

But now it seems his German Romantic vision has fallen eternally flat- and his obsessive casting of the truly talentless <Brad Dourif>, over and over till you just want to...

Ok but you know what I mean eh? If <Herzog>, or <Cronenberg>, didn't feel entitled to pursue their Ahabbish obsessions- maybe they wouldn't have produced the few gems that they did- and there are more than a few in both cases, to say the least.

For <Cronenberg>, "A History of Violence" most recently.

<Kael> used to defend <Altman>, arguably her favorite director, along these lines.

She wouldn't try to defend the "value" of films like <Popeye>, but she'd say again and again that he is a real artist- who is willing to take great chances, risk all- to risk not just making one very bad film, but a whole slew of very bad films.

<Coppola> springs to mind as well- he went temporarily broke with a series of exceedingly ill-advised Zoetrope productions, made possible by the success of <Apocalypse Now>- which is a masterpiece by any meaning of that word.

But I do appreciate your point- I also feel that frustration, as I return, for example, to every new <Herzog> film in hopes for a return to form.

Just in case.

But yes of course me too I think "why don't they do something else" or "why don't they try something new" or "why don't they do what I want them to do."

Do check out <Fountain> though- it's in stark contrast to Aronosky's other work.

Also, you haven't seen the ballet film I take it?

If you haven't, you probably shouldn't be using it to support a wider argument about Aronofsky's oeuveouuvvre.

Well you could I suppose.

In fact, you did!

I even go further: I *like* the so-called dud Altmans and Herzogs. When I like somebody's work, in any medium, they have to produce a real stinker to turn me off.

I haven't seen enough Aronofsky to know. I *have* seen enough Von Trier to know that something changed for the worse.

Popeye was the cinematic equivalent of Captain Beefheart's 'Bluejeans and Moonbeams', where he sounds like Neil Diamond on acid. (Quite innaresting, that, ackshully...)

But it's <McCabe and Mrs. Miller> that terrified me more than any horror film I've ever seen, and it's not even a horror film. Now *that's* filmmaking. And what a performance he got out of Warren Beatty- playing him "against type"- and proving he could be a great actor.

You know I had trouble with a lot of <Von Trier> also- most of it in fact. I did love <Kingdom> and that wonderful horror film where the woman says "Nature is the Devil's church. Can you feel the breeze? That's his breath" although I can't even remember the name of it right now. It has Christopher Walken in it, or a Christopher Walken impersonator.

Either way... can't be bad.

But you recommended another Von Trier to me- which I watched half of and then had to stop- a crime thriller shot entirely in hues of crimson? Does that ring a bell?

I found it unwatchable- although whether that's testament to the film or my own philistinism is- as always- an open question.

<they can't stop being themselves>

Any advice?

I'm a little rusty. I tried to make a "lesson plan" today on my computer and ended up reading reports of Sasquatch sightings...

Who wrote this? A burrito to the first to guess:

'The Element of Crime' ... mebbe? Totally bonkers as a thriller, but I like it.

Some people, strangely, *can* stop being themselves. Some can even turn it on and off, like the late Farrah Fawcett.

Interesting conversation here, folk.

So much to load into one small word, I know. But it was 07:30 here, I'd been up all night, and semantic werewolves start howling as dawn breaks.

<- The dawn is almost here. I need my night's blood, my funding, my funding ....>

It may also have been a reference to a chap Niels knows much better than me, 'E Major'.

<It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing Hallelujah...>

I think 'baffled King' suits me, chessically. I sometimes pretend to be a Queen or hide in my Rook house, and I like to hop about like a Springer Spaniel, but I'm basically a battered old guy in check.

Major Major. From Catch-22. Shoulda included him too.

"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain it was love at first sight".

His vision of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish state in Alaska might even have come 'true', if not for a mysterious 'traffic accident' in Washington DC.

And it's got a Borges-meets-Kafka-and-Burroughs *aura*: the mystery of a dead schmecker, an opiate-addict derelict who could beat the world chess champion in secret.

It also explains, en passant, why the people who found countries go crazy in old age, from Washington to De Valera to Mugabe. Not Mandela, though.

Interesting idea for a book- I believe I shall order that one, although on first read of your post I thought you wrote "Michael Palin".

Secret Policeman's Other and such.

However, now that I can have books mailed to me just by clicking on an "auto-buy" icon, I will order your recommendation.

I wonder if it's possible to spend three years of savings in three weeks just by buying books...

It may simply have been cliche avoidance, but I always suspected some long-forgotten deal between Satan and the Conservatives. Wouldn't be the first.

BTW, Pauline Kael's chosen successor, Anthony Lane, shared a platform with me once. We were talking in public about - what else - Cinema and the French.

I winged it with crazy theories while he calmly analysed every scene in every French film ever made. Typical, I suppose.

I'm pleasantly surprised that old Bertrand Blier is back in the limelight with a film where cancer comes to say hello, literally. Not unlike my Larry Alzheimer idea, but I won't sue. Films like Les Valseuses and Buffet Froid made me what I am today.

<Darren Aronofsky’s new movie Black Swan, featuring Natalie Portman as the increasingly tormented ballet dancer Nina who has to perform the dual role of both the white and the black swan in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, left me both puzzled and fascinated. And, inevitably, it made me think of chess...>

I haven't had to mug old ladies yet, but it's probably just a matter of time.

I've moved on to reading Levitin's *other* book about music, 'The World in Six Songs'. Also Andrew Keen's dissection of social networking, Youchoob & blogs, 'The Cult of the Amateur'.

Ah, finally, a book! Between all the movies, and music talk, I thought I was gonna have to stay out of the way for another week. :p

As it were, the cited book has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of weeks now, since I happened to drop by the bookstore one day, and saw it just sitting there innocently, as if that was legal. And here I thought there was a law that any book recommended by you can't possibly be found in Israel?!

- I know, clearly, one half the truth, and that is one half more than they recognize

- The old adage from Santayana,

- that those who don't learn from history, are doomed to repeat it, is a lie

- there is no history

- everything we are is eternally with us

- Our question is therefore

- What can save us from our crazy insistence of spreading the <plight> never <widening circles>

[I'm unsure about those in <>'s - but I think I got it right by now]

You'll understand that by that time I'd gotten very caught up in the storyline, the direction, gravity, superb launching pad, etc. ... so I had to stop and rewind and rewind and again, because I couldn't make sure of those words in that last sentence! I had to get those right first. I thought my mind was playing funny uncool tricks on me. But even upping the volume didn't satisfy my quest for getting the words exactly right.

Of course I let it go and went on watching from there, crinching hearing adolfchen rant, and was at some point quite disgusted with some of the scenes and the shallow characterstudy squeezed into a mere 79 minutes, but there's more, good, bad, ugly, humour and all in between, but I'd like to hear your opinion first.

I'm turning in in a moment btw- dentist appointment tomorrow morning (yep- it's all happening at once here)- so no hurry of any kind, but that last sentence I quoted there has had me uncomfortably puzzled, and even more so because a dutch sub I managed to track down had a crap translation like, "the urge to spread evil."