Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is my favorite movie for several reasons. Jim Carrey is my favorite actor and Kate Winslet is my favorite actress, both of whom star in this movie. I love fantasy/science-fiction, as long as it doesn't start going over the edge of what is known to be possible in reality. This movie is mostly a romance with equal parts drama and comedy, which mixes well with it's fantasy/science fiction aspects.
The film is non-linear, but not so much that it's hard to keep track of. Most importantly for me, the movie has a good ending; I can't stand stories without good endings unless it is a factual account of an event. Reality is disturbing enough. If I wanted to be upset and depressed, I would just watch the news. Also, no one dies in this film. I've never been able to understand why writers kill off characters for no reason. This may add to the drama, but again, I have enough drama in my life. I don't need any more when my objective is to relax.
I think Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have great chemistry together which really adds to the charm of this movie. Their unusual love story is a very touching one, and it gave me much to contemplate, especially since I have yet to find my own love story. In my opinion, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is a wonderful, unique film and this is why I consider it my best flick ever.
Adam
E-mail: AJP1028@aol.com
Age 21
Sunrise, FL 33323
Monday, April 20, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
The 400 Blows
My Best Flick Ever is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) [1959]. It tells the tale of Antoine Doinel’s (Jean-Pierre Leaud) painfully distressed and yet deliriously joyous ride on the cyclone of his own early adolescence. Home and classroom—customary habitats for the archenemies of many an adolescent—are here the joint headquarters for a pincer movement which drives Antoine through a gauntlet of humiliations that complicate and confound his struggle to define himself as an individual, a young man, a human being. Though trammeled by forces beyond his control, his will to determine his own destiny leads him into a friendship with a classmate, Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), and between them—kindred spirits—they forge a life of their own creation. Emboldened by mutual understanding and trust, they eschew the degradation and unhappiness of home and school by living life, adolescent-style, “on the hook,” falling timelessly from adventure to misadventure to yet another adventure, always with imagination, pleasure, and a deepening affection for each other (Rene was, in Truffaut’s actual life, Robert Lachenay, his lifelong friend and creative collaborator.). Antoine’s story begins in a Paris classroom—all boys—in what here in the United States would be an intermediate or junior high school. He’s drawing a moustache on the face of a pin-up girl that the kids are passing from desk to desk. Caught in the act by his teacher (Guy Decomble), he’s punished by having to forego recess and remain in class, writing repetitions on the blackboard of “I must not…” in regard to his miscreant behavior. Instead, he writes a denunciation of his teacher, whom he dubs Sourpuss. His troubles accelerate thereafter. Home from school, he’s now writing-out a further punishment, this time for his blackboard jeremiad. His mother (Claire Maurier) returns from work, sits down on Antoine’s bed—situated in the foyer which serves as his bedroom—draws her skirt up to her thighs and rolls down her stocking before Antoine’s captive and captivated eyes, all the while reprimanding him for having forgotten to buy some food item on his way home. Returning to school the day after a hooky jaunt with Rene, Antoine’s teacher asks him for a note from his parents explaining his absence. Flustered, desperate, searching for something to say, he blurts out, “My mother, she’s…she died,” which generates from his teacher the requisite compassion; until, that is, a knock is heard on the door at the back of the classroom. What we already know is that on the previous afternoon the class snitch saw Antoine and Rene pick up the bookbags they had hidden behind a doorway that morning, thereby freeing them to walk about the city unhampered, and on this morning he had gone to see Antoine’s parents, whom he asks—unctuously and insidiously—if “Antoine is feeling well enough to return to school today.” Antoine turns his head to the door of the classroom and sees, through the door’s window, both his parents and the school’s headmaster. Antoine’s father (Albert Remy) calls him to the back of the room and smacks him across the face before the entire class. And further, while playing hooky, Antoine caught sight of his mother lustfully kissing a man who was a stranger to him, and she saw that he had spotted her. Between his consternation about this encounter and his mortification at his father’s hands, he decides to truant from his home. Rene sequesters him at his home and keeps him secreted from his (Rene’s) parents in a back room, bringing him leftover food from the family dinner table. Back at school, Antoine is charged with having plagiarized a passage from Balzac, which confounds him because he had become so enamored of Balzac that he had committed the passage to memory and wrote it in class as if it came from his own mind. Despondent now, and without any money, he steals a typewriter from his father’s office but is unable to hock it. Guilt-ridden, he chooses to return the typewriter rather than simply abandon it, and in so doing is caught in the act, which results—at his parents’ request—in his incarceration in a reformatory My adolescence…exactly! Not, of course, in its particulars, but in its ethos. How could I not recall, for example, when watching the typewriter scene, the time I stole a pack of bubblegum baseball cards from the candy store, only to come back in a few days to buy another 5-cent pack and drop a dime on the counter and hasten away before I was asked if I wanted any change? The 400 Blows is no coming-of-age movie. It is adolescence. Pure adolescence. Show me an adolescent who has come of age and I’ll show you a miracle. Antoine, dazed and confused by the fusillade of humiliations raining down on him from both flanks of the pincer, is not about to put it all together. Too much of the-life-he-does-not-want-to-live impinges on his drive toward a more wished-for life, derails him from but at the same time becomes entwined with his quest for self-integration. Where can Antoine—the archetypal adolescent—go but into a state of mind that is crystallized in the movie’s final scene, which just happens to be the first of its kind—a freeze-frame (Ah, for the wonders of DVD, which in this instance includes a running commentary by Brian Stonehill, from which source I learned of this film-first.). So what’s to be seen in that final frame? We’re taken to it by a pan shot that’s more than a minute long. Antoine is successfully escaping from the reformatory. Having eluded his pursuer by hiding under a bridge, he’s loping along a dirt road that takes him to the sea, something he’s earlier made known he has never seen. At the shore he jogs—shoes-on—into the wavelets, pauses, turns back toward shore, pauses again, and there…right there…that’s where he’s frozen. This freeze-frame, this photograph, taken in the context of the moving picture in which it plays its part (and taken on its own as well, perhaps), serves me in late adulthood as the emblem of my early adolescence, the beacon of orientation that viscerally and resonantly illuminates my own journey through what was to be my second and final phase of timeless life. Its very immobility galvanizes scenes of paralyzing irresolution into memory. Antoine’s eyes radiate bewilderment, but also in evidence in those very same eyes is his ferocious determination to carry on, to find a way out. And conflated in that space, somewhere between the image on the screen and the one thrown off from behind the lens of my own projector (see Arlow), do I not also discern in those selfsame eyes an ember aglow with mischief, an undying ember without which life as it had to be lived then would have been unendurable? When I saw the movie must have everything to do with how much it means to me (nor could it have hurt that Leaud, in the film’s sequels, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, grew up to be my look-alike). The 400 Blows was released in 1959, which is when I saw it for the first time. In a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was about to become a non-teenager. Not that I was out of my adolescence, which, in my case, had a considerably longer shelf life. I was still thick into the ups and downs of adolescence, but I did have a hair’s breadth worth of distance from it; enough to allow me to watch Antoine in rapt fascination, knowing that I knew him and that he knew me. We had everything in common. Any disparities were negligible, readily flicked off. We both had an unhappy home life, though the dice did roll more in my favor in that I was not the object of parental lovelessness, as was the case for Antoine. For me, all I had to suffer was the detritus from the inveterate antipathy my parents had for each other. School? I, like Antoine, had to write a full blackboard’s worth of “I must not…” after a visit to my third-grade class by another third-grade class whose teacher singled out some of the best and worst of her students, and for the very worst she pointed to my buddy Jules, saying, “Who could possibly want this one?” and I said I did, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled him with me to my seat. Mrs. Birmingham, who’d actually fall asleep at her desk while sucking on the ink-end of her fountain pen, didn’t appreciate my gesture. I’d love to have played hooky with Antoine. I’d first join him at his amusement park for a ride on the Rotor—a spinning cylinder that splayed you by centrifugal force against its outer wall, where Antoine ecstatically pulled his legs off the cylinder’s floor by spreading them apart and then turning himself sideways to three o’clock—on which ride he was joined, a la Hitchcock, by Truffaut himself. Then I’d take him over to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, where we’d encounter yet another cylinder, this one about thirty feet high, and drop into it feet first and then slide out the bottom of it onto something like a roulette wheel that was whirring one way while a half dozen wheels within the wheel turned in the opposite direction, and you’d be wheeled from one wheel to the next, doing all you could not to slide off into the trough. Or we could, as I used to with Joe—my very own Rene—check out of Stuyvesant High School—the old one, on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, the Stuyvesant whose gym had a circular track as its balcony, under which were printed, black on silver, the names of the great Stuvesant jocks, like (speaking of film) one James Cagney, who in the early 1900's was the New York State diving champion—and mosey over to Julian’s Billiard Parlor on Fourteenth and Third for an hour or so of racks, then finish off the splendid day at another parlor, this one for ice cream, beneath the Third Avenue El at 28th Street, where Double-Dip, the gentlemanly proprietor with the white apron, would fashion-up a couple of banana splits. Where could I go with Antoine to in any way replicate the wondrous experience he had when he and Rene ambled into the back row of an auditorium filled with four-and-five-year-olds and watched along with them a Punch and Judy show, while we in the movie’s audience gasped in unison with the real-life four-and-five-year-olds who were filmed (unknowingly) as they witnessed—spellbound and in amazement—life’s joys and horrors enacted before their eyes by the puppets? Where could I go with him but to the movies? There was a time when I ran groups for parents who were having a hard time with their adolescent kids. I'd invariably ask them if they would want to relive their adolescence. At least ninety per cent of the time the answer would be no. I can only wonder as to how many of these parents would reconsider their answer were they to expose their adolescence, despite its inevitable travails and agonies, to The 400 Blows.
Tedari39
Age 69
Jefferson, NY 12093 My Best Flick Ever is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) [1959]. It tells the tale of Antoine Doinel’s (Jean-Pierre Leaud) painfully distressed and yet deliriously joyous ride on the cyclone of his own early adolescence. Home and classroom—customary habitats for the archenemies of many an adolescent—are here the joint headquarters for a pincer movement which drives Antoine through a gauntlet of humiliations that complicate and confound his struggle to define himself as an individual, a young man, a human being. Though trammeled by forces beyond his control, his will to determine his own destiny leads him into a friendship with a classmate, Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), and between them—kindred spirits—they forge a life of their own creation. Emboldened by mutual understanding and trust, they eschew the degradation and unhappiness of home and school by living life, adolescent-style, “on the hook,” falling timelessly from adventure to misadventure to yet another adventure, always with imagination, pleasure, and a deepening affection for each other (Rene was, in Truffaut’s actual life, Robert Lachenay, his lifelong friend and creative collaborator.). Antoine’s story begins in a Paris classroom—all boys—in what here in the United States would be an intermediate or junior high school. He’s drawing a moustache on the face of a pin-up girl that the kids are passing from desk to desk. Caught in the act by his teacher (Guy Decomble), he’s punished by having to forego recess and remain in class, writing repetitions on the blackboard of “I must not…” in regard to his miscreant behavior. Instead, he writes a denunciation of his teacher, whom he dubs Sourpuss. His troubles accelerate thereafter. Home from school, he’s now writing-out a further punishment, this time for his blackboard jeremiad. His mother (Claire Maurier) returns from work, sits down on Antoine’s bed—situated in the foyer which serves as his bedroom—draws her skirt up to her thighs and rolls down her stocking before Antoine’s captive and captivated eyes, all the while reprimanding him for having forgotten to buy some food item on his way home. Returning to school the day after a hooky jaunt with Rene, Antoine’s teacher asks him for a note from his parents explaining his absence. Flustered, desperate, searching for something to say, he blurts out, “My mother, she’s…she died,” which generates from his teacher the requisite compassion; until, that is, a knock is heard on the door at the back of the classroom. What we already know is that on the previous afternoon the class snitch saw Antoine and Rene pick up the bookbags they had hidden behind a doorway that morning, thereby freeing them to walk about the city unhampered, and on this morning he had gone to see Antoine’s parents, whom he asks—unctuously and insidiously—if “Antoine is feeling well enough to return to school today.” Antoine turns his head to the door of the classroom and sees, through the door’s window, both his parents and the school’s headmaster. Antoine’s father (Albert Remy) calls him to the back of the room and smacks him across the face before the entire class. And further, while playing hooky, Antoine caught sight of his mother lustfully kissing a man who was a stranger to him, and she saw that he had spotted her. Between his consternation about this encounter and his mortification at his father’s hands, he decides to truant from his home. Rene sequesters him at his home and keeps him secreted from his (Rene’s) parents in a back room, bringing him leftover food from the family dinner table. Back at school, Antoine is charged with having plagiarized a passage from Balzac, which confounds him because he had become so enamored of Balzac that he had committed the passage to memory and wrote it in class as if it came from his own mind. Despondent now, and without any money, he steals a typewriter from his father’s office but is unable to hock it. Guilt-ridden, he chooses to return the typewriter rather than simply abandon it, and in so doing is caught in the act, which results—at his parents’ request—in his incarceration in a reformatory My adolescence…exactly! Not, of course, in its particulars, but in its ethos. How could I not recall, for example, when watching the typewriter scene, the time I stole a pack of bubblegum baseball cards from the candy store, only to come back in a few days to buy another 5-cent pack and drop a dime on the counter and hasten away before I was asked if I wanted any change? The 400 Blows is no coming-of-age movie. It is adolescence. Pure adolescence. Show me an adolescent who has come of age and I’ll show you a miracle. Antoine, dazed and confused by the fusillade of humiliations raining down on him from both flanks of the pincer, is not about to put it all together. Too much of the-life-he-does-not-want-to-live impinges on his drive toward a more wished-for life, derails him from but at the same time becomes entwined with his quest for self-integration. Where can Antoine—the archetypal adolescent—go but into a state of mind that is crystallized in the movie’s final scene, which just happens to be the first of its kind—a freeze-frame (Ah, for the wonders of DVD, which in this instance includes a running commentary by Brian Stonehill, from which source I learned of this film-first.). So what’s to be seen in that final frame? We’re taken to it by a pan shot that’s more than a minute long. Antoine is successfully escaping from the reformatory. Having eluded his pursuer by hiding under a bridge, he’s loping along a dirt road that takes him to the sea, something he’s earlier made known he has never seen. At the shore he jogs—shoes-on—into the wavelets, pauses, turns back toward shore, pauses again, and there…right there…that’s where he’s frozen. This freeze-frame, this photograph, taken in the context of the moving picture in which it plays its part (and taken on its own as well, perhaps), serves me in late adulthood as the emblem of my early adolescence, the beacon of orientation that viscerally and resonantly illuminates my own journey through what was to be my second and final phase of timeless life. Its very immobility galvanizes scenes of paralyzing irresolution into memory. Antoine’s eyes radiate bewilderment, but also in evidence in those very same eyes is his ferocious determination to carry on, to find a way out. And conflated in that space, somewhere between the image on the screen and the one thrown off from behind the lens of my own projector (see Arlow), do I not also discern in those selfsame eyes an ember aglow with mischief, an undying ember without which life as it had to be lived then would have been unendurable? When I saw the movie must have everything to do with how much it means to me (nor could it have hurt that Leaud, in the film’s sequels, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, grew up to be my look-alike). The 400 Blows was released in 1959, which is when I saw it for the first time. In a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was about to become a non-teenager. Not that I was out of my adolescence, which, in my case, had a considerably longer shelf life. I was still thick into the ups and downs of adolescence, but I did have a hair’s breadth worth of distance from it; enough to allow me to watch Antoine in rapt fascination, knowing that I knew him and that he knew me. We had everything in common. Any disparities were negligible, readily flicked off. We both had an unhappy home life, though the dice did roll more in my favor in that I was not the object of parental lovelessness, as was the case for Antoine. For me, all I had to suffer was the detritus from the inveterate antipathy my parents had for each other. School? I, like Antoine, had to write a full blackboard’s worth of “I must not…” after a visit to my third-grade class by another third-grade class whose teacher singled out some of the best and worst of her students, and for the very worst she pointed to my buddy Jules, saying, “Who could possibly want this one?” and I said I did, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled him with me to my seat. Mrs. Birmingham, who’d actually fall asleep at her desk while sucking on the ink-end of her fountain pen, didn’t appreciate my gesture. I’d love to have played hooky with Antoine. I’d first join him at his amusement park for a ride on the Rotor—a spinning cylinder that splayed you by centrifugal force against its outer wall, where Antoine ecstatically pulled his legs off the cylinder’s floor by spreading them apart and then turning himself sideways to three o’clock—on which ride he was joined, a la Hitchcock, by Truffaut himself. Then I’d take him over to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, where we’d encounter yet another cylinder, this one about thirty feet high, and drop into it feet first and then slide out the bottom of it onto something like a roulette wheel that was whirring one way while a half dozen wheels within the wheel turned in the opposite direction, and you’d be wheeled from one wheel to the next, doing all you could not to slide off into the trough. Or we could, as I used to with Joe—my very own Rene—check out of Stuyvesant High School—the old one, on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, the Stuyvesant whose gym had a circular track as its balcony, under which were printed, black on silver, the names of the great Stuvesant jocks, like (speaking of film) one James Cagney, who in the early 1900's was the New York State diving champion—and mosey over to Julian’s Billiard Parlor on Fourteenth and Third for an hour or so of racks, then finish off the splendid day at another parlor, this one for ice cream, beneath the Third Avenue El at 28th Street, where Double-Dip, the gentlemanly proprietor with the white apron, would fashion-up a couple of banana splits. Where could I go with Antoine to in any way replicate the wondrous experience he had when he and Rene ambled into the back row of an auditorium filled with four-and-five-year-olds and watched along with them a Punch and Judy show, while we in the movie’s audience gasped in unison with the real-life four-and-five-year-olds who were filmed (unknowingly) as they witnessed—spellbound and in amazement—life’s joys and horrors enacted before their eyes by the puppets? Where could I go with him but to the movies? There was a time when I ran groups for parents who were having a hard time with their adolescent kids. I'd invariably ask them if they would want to relive their adolescence. At least ninety per cent of the time the answer would be no. I can only wonder as to how many of these parents would reconsider their answer were they to expose their adolescence, despite its inevitable travails and agonies, to The 400 Blows.
Tedari39
Age 69
Jefferson, NY 12093
ira@landess.net
Tedari39
Age 69
Jefferson, NY 12093 My Best Flick Ever is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) [1959]. It tells the tale of Antoine Doinel’s (Jean-Pierre Leaud) painfully distressed and yet deliriously joyous ride on the cyclone of his own early adolescence. Home and classroom—customary habitats for the archenemies of many an adolescent—are here the joint headquarters for a pincer movement which drives Antoine through a gauntlet of humiliations that complicate and confound his struggle to define himself as an individual, a young man, a human being. Though trammeled by forces beyond his control, his will to determine his own destiny leads him into a friendship with a classmate, Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), and between them—kindred spirits—they forge a life of their own creation. Emboldened by mutual understanding and trust, they eschew the degradation and unhappiness of home and school by living life, adolescent-style, “on the hook,” falling timelessly from adventure to misadventure to yet another adventure, always with imagination, pleasure, and a deepening affection for each other (Rene was, in Truffaut’s actual life, Robert Lachenay, his lifelong friend and creative collaborator.). Antoine’s story begins in a Paris classroom—all boys—in what here in the United States would be an intermediate or junior high school. He’s drawing a moustache on the face of a pin-up girl that the kids are passing from desk to desk. Caught in the act by his teacher (Guy Decomble), he’s punished by having to forego recess and remain in class, writing repetitions on the blackboard of “I must not…” in regard to his miscreant behavior. Instead, he writes a denunciation of his teacher, whom he dubs Sourpuss. His troubles accelerate thereafter. Home from school, he’s now writing-out a further punishment, this time for his blackboard jeremiad. His mother (Claire Maurier) returns from work, sits down on Antoine’s bed—situated in the foyer which serves as his bedroom—draws her skirt up to her thighs and rolls down her stocking before Antoine’s captive and captivated eyes, all the while reprimanding him for having forgotten to buy some food item on his way home. Returning to school the day after a hooky jaunt with Rene, Antoine’s teacher asks him for a note from his parents explaining his absence. Flustered, desperate, searching for something to say, he blurts out, “My mother, she’s…she died,” which generates from his teacher the requisite compassion; until, that is, a knock is heard on the door at the back of the classroom. What we already know is that on the previous afternoon the class snitch saw Antoine and Rene pick up the bookbags they had hidden behind a doorway that morning, thereby freeing them to walk about the city unhampered, and on this morning he had gone to see Antoine’s parents, whom he asks—unctuously and insidiously—if “Antoine is feeling well enough to return to school today.” Antoine turns his head to the door of the classroom and sees, through the door’s window, both his parents and the school’s headmaster. Antoine’s father (Albert Remy) calls him to the back of the room and smacks him across the face before the entire class. And further, while playing hooky, Antoine caught sight of his mother lustfully kissing a man who was a stranger to him, and she saw that he had spotted her. Between his consternation about this encounter and his mortification at his father’s hands, he decides to truant from his home. Rene sequesters him at his home and keeps him secreted from his (Rene’s) parents in a back room, bringing him leftover food from the family dinner table. Back at school, Antoine is charged with having plagiarized a passage from Balzac, which confounds him because he had become so enamored of Balzac that he had committed the passage to memory and wrote it in class as if it came from his own mind. Despondent now, and without any money, he steals a typewriter from his father’s office but is unable to hock it. Guilt-ridden, he chooses to return the typewriter rather than simply abandon it, and in so doing is caught in the act, which results—at his parents’ request—in his incarceration in a reformatory My adolescence…exactly! Not, of course, in its particulars, but in its ethos. How could I not recall, for example, when watching the typewriter scene, the time I stole a pack of bubblegum baseball cards from the candy store, only to come back in a few days to buy another 5-cent pack and drop a dime on the counter and hasten away before I was asked if I wanted any change? The 400 Blows is no coming-of-age movie. It is adolescence. Pure adolescence. Show me an adolescent who has come of age and I’ll show you a miracle. Antoine, dazed and confused by the fusillade of humiliations raining down on him from both flanks of the pincer, is not about to put it all together. Too much of the-life-he-does-not-want-to-live impinges on his drive toward a more wished-for life, derails him from but at the same time becomes entwined with his quest for self-integration. Where can Antoine—the archetypal adolescent—go but into a state of mind that is crystallized in the movie’s final scene, which just happens to be the first of its kind—a freeze-frame (Ah, for the wonders of DVD, which in this instance includes a running commentary by Brian Stonehill, from which source I learned of this film-first.). So what’s to be seen in that final frame? We’re taken to it by a pan shot that’s more than a minute long. Antoine is successfully escaping from the reformatory. Having eluded his pursuer by hiding under a bridge, he’s loping along a dirt road that takes him to the sea, something he’s earlier made known he has never seen. At the shore he jogs—shoes-on—into the wavelets, pauses, turns back toward shore, pauses again, and there…right there…that’s where he’s frozen. This freeze-frame, this photograph, taken in the context of the moving picture in which it plays its part (and taken on its own as well, perhaps), serves me in late adulthood as the emblem of my early adolescence, the beacon of orientation that viscerally and resonantly illuminates my own journey through what was to be my second and final phase of timeless life. Its very immobility galvanizes scenes of paralyzing irresolution into memory. Antoine’s eyes radiate bewilderment, but also in evidence in those very same eyes is his ferocious determination to carry on, to find a way out. And conflated in that space, somewhere between the image on the screen and the one thrown off from behind the lens of my own projector (see Arlow), do I not also discern in those selfsame eyes an ember aglow with mischief, an undying ember without which life as it had to be lived then would have been unendurable? When I saw the movie must have everything to do with how much it means to me (nor could it have hurt that Leaud, in the film’s sequels, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, grew up to be my look-alike). The 400 Blows was released in 1959, which is when I saw it for the first time. In a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was about to become a non-teenager. Not that I was out of my adolescence, which, in my case, had a considerably longer shelf life. I was still thick into the ups and downs of adolescence, but I did have a hair’s breadth worth of distance from it; enough to allow me to watch Antoine in rapt fascination, knowing that I knew him and that he knew me. We had everything in common. Any disparities were negligible, readily flicked off. We both had an unhappy home life, though the dice did roll more in my favor in that I was not the object of parental lovelessness, as was the case for Antoine. For me, all I had to suffer was the detritus from the inveterate antipathy my parents had for each other. School? I, like Antoine, had to write a full blackboard’s worth of “I must not…” after a visit to my third-grade class by another third-grade class whose teacher singled out some of the best and worst of her students, and for the very worst she pointed to my buddy Jules, saying, “Who could possibly want this one?” and I said I did, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled him with me to my seat. Mrs. Birmingham, who’d actually fall asleep at her desk while sucking on the ink-end of her fountain pen, didn’t appreciate my gesture. I’d love to have played hooky with Antoine. I’d first join him at his amusement park for a ride on the Rotor—a spinning cylinder that splayed you by centrifugal force against its outer wall, where Antoine ecstatically pulled his legs off the cylinder’s floor by spreading them apart and then turning himself sideways to three o’clock—on which ride he was joined, a la Hitchcock, by Truffaut himself. Then I’d take him over to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, where we’d encounter yet another cylinder, this one about thirty feet high, and drop into it feet first and then slide out the bottom of it onto something like a roulette wheel that was whirring one way while a half dozen wheels within the wheel turned in the opposite direction, and you’d be wheeled from one wheel to the next, doing all you could not to slide off into the trough. Or we could, as I used to with Joe—my very own Rene—check out of Stuyvesant High School—the old one, on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, the Stuyvesant whose gym had a circular track as its balcony, under which were printed, black on silver, the names of the great Stuvesant jocks, like (speaking of film) one James Cagney, who in the early 1900's was the New York State diving champion—and mosey over to Julian’s Billiard Parlor on Fourteenth and Third for an hour or so of racks, then finish off the splendid day at another parlor, this one for ice cream, beneath the Third Avenue El at 28th Street, where Double-Dip, the gentlemanly proprietor with the white apron, would fashion-up a couple of banana splits. Where could I go with Antoine to in any way replicate the wondrous experience he had when he and Rene ambled into the back row of an auditorium filled with four-and-five-year-olds and watched along with them a Punch and Judy show, while we in the movie’s audience gasped in unison with the real-life four-and-five-year-olds who were filmed (unknowingly) as they witnessed—spellbound and in amazement—life’s joys and horrors enacted before their eyes by the puppets? Where could I go with him but to the movies? There was a time when I ran groups for parents who were having a hard time with their adolescent kids. I'd invariably ask them if they would want to relive their adolescence. At least ninety per cent of the time the answer would be no. I can only wonder as to how many of these parents would reconsider their answer were they to expose their adolescence, despite its inevitable travails and agonies, to The 400 Blows.
Tedari39
Age 69
Jefferson, NY 12093
ira@landess.net
An American In Paris
My best flick ever is An American In Paris. Growing up, I had the opportunity to see a lot of musicals on TV and this one really stood out as my favorite. It is an early 1950's Gene Kelly musical co-starring Leslie Caron. Even on a black and white TV, I was fascinated and entertained by the creativity of the song and dance numbers. Towards the end of the movie, there is "The American In Paris Suite." Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron perform many different styles of dancing with such grace and beauty that it precludes me from watching any of the current dance shows. I really do feel this is my favorite movie.
Terry
TerryP8@aol.com
Age 53
Sunrise, FL 33323
Terry
TerryP8@aol.com
Age 53
Sunrise, FL 33323
Monday, April 6, 2009
Rain Man
Let me begin by saying that I love movies. My husband, two sons, and I usually watch between two and four films each week. I have several flicks that would fall into my list of all time favorites, each with its own significance to me personally, but for the purposes of this blog, I have chosen to write about Rain Man (released on December 16, 1988) starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. Not only is it one of the absolute best movies I have ever seen, but there are many different layers to this movie that have touched my heart and continue to resonate with me, year after year.
To those who have not had the pleasure of viewing this brilliant film, it is essentially the story of Charlie Babbitt (played by Tom Cruise), who is shocked to discover upon his father's death that he has an older brother, Raymond (played by Dustin Hoffman). Charlie is very angry that his wealthy father, Sanford Babbitt, did not leave him any money in his will, while Raymond, who is autistic and has no real concept of money, is left $3 million. So, Charlie decides to use Raymond as a bargaining chip for half of their father's estate. He takes Raymond out of the institution where he has been living for many years and brings him on a cross-country trip from Ohio to Los Angeles. What begins as an abduction turns into a journey of inner transformation for Charlie, and it becomes quite an adventure for the long isolated Raymond too. The scenes of their time in Las Vegas are one of the highlights of the film.
As a Special Education teacher, I taught disabled adults for 16 years, many of whom were autistic. I found Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant, to be astoundingly realistic, down to every detail and nuance. The Academy Award he earned for Best Actor was certainly well deserved for his phenomenal performance in a most difficult role. This film contributed greatly to raising awareness and understanding of autism. In addition to being a Special Education teacher, I am also the mother of two adult sons with autistic spectrum disorders, so I am grateful for this increased awareness. For many in the general public, this was their first introduction to the world of autism. Hopefully, after viewing Mr. Hoffman's moving performance, many people changed their negative perceptions about this condition for the better. Bear in mind though, that most autistic individuals do not possess the types of abilities the character of Raymond has and autistic savants are rare, occurring in approximately 10% of the autistic population, with only 10% of those reaching the same levels of ability as Raymond.
I can identify to some extent with Raymond because I share a few of the same compulsive qualities he displayed, although certainly not to such an extremely obsessive degree where these qualities completely limit my life. Yet, I have enough of my own idiosyncrasies that I can relate to how any compulsion can affect our lives. For better or worse, I have an ability to remember dates and events which is similar to Raymond's, although again, not to such an extreme degree. Also, I see patterns and connections everywhere without making any effort to look for them. It's hard to describe, but they simply appear to me in my mind very clearly. As Raymond says, "I see it."
Raymond's autism isolates him from the world and he protects himself through strict adherence to routines and rituals. His innate talents and vast knowledge are overshadowed by his limited grasp of reality, his extremely poor social skills, and his inability to participate in what the rest of us might consider to be a normal life. I have often struggled with a deep sense of isolation which thankfully, was counterbalanced by my equally deep need for socialization, understanding, and a connection to the world I live in. I wonder how long I might remain in my solitude without that balance and if I could find a similar comfort there to that which Raymond experiences. The thin lines between seclusion, loneliness, and solitude are barely perceptible at times.
There are a number of things that happened to Charlie that I identify with for various reasons. On the surface, I don't have much in common with the fast-talking, impatient, self-absorbed, imported car salesman who uses people and is not interested in their feelings. However, I know that in my teenage years, I was quite the "wild child" so perhaps I might have been perceived to be more shallow and self-centered by those who never took the time to know me. I do understand growing up in a family with repressed anger and secrets, where far too much is hidden ... where what lies in the shadows seeps into the fabric of a family, slowly eating away at it until the fragments that remain become far too fragile to embrace.
I was 23 years old when my father died and Charlie was in his mid-twenties. Charlie was not there when his father died, nor was he even on speaking terms with him. I was the only one of my father's four children he was estranged from when he passed away. Even though I tried to reach him in time, he died before I could arrive at the hospital. There were no final words of reconciliation or comfort ... no last glances ... no last chances ... no goodbyes. It has been one of the most painful regrets I have ever had to live with. Yet, when one of my precious twin sons lay dying in the NICU at 6 weeks of age, I believe this is why I found the strength to hold his tiny, frail body in my arms until his heart stopped beating and he took his final breath. No matter how heart wrenching, I could not allow another loved one to die without being present at the very end.
At the reading of Sanford Babbitt's will, Charlie is bequeathed his father's beloved 1949 Buick Roadmaster and his prize winning hybrid rose bushes. Charlie becomes furious about this, but I remember thinking when I saw that scene how much it would have meant to me to be left anything at all by my father, especially to be left items which were important to him. Turns out I wasn't even mentioned in his will at all which did not make me angry, but hurt me and, in my mind, confirmed my longtime belief that he thought very little of me. Naturally, this was painful for a long time, but is now all part of a deeper understanding of the situation. People don't always live long enough to work through their issues and improve their relationships with loved ones, but the relationship itself always lives on in the survivor, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, the hope remains that at least one person can come to terms with the reality of what was and choose to move forward through forgiveness, love, and acceptance.
Charlie had no idea that he had an older brother. To share the same father and the same last name is no small thing. Being denied the opportunity to grow up knowing all of your family, all of your siblings, is to be robbed of an important part of yourself. I have personal knowledge of this because I only became fully cognizant of my own older siblings when I was a teenager. I totally identify with Charlie when he says, "You know, I just don't understand. Why didn't he tell me I had a brother? Why didn't anyone ever tell me that I had a brother?"
Early in the film you learn that Charlie has a distant memory of a figure he called "Rain Man" who used to sing to him when he was very little. A turning point in the movie comes when Charlie finally realizes that Raymond is actually the "Rain Man" from his childhood and his heart softens towards his older brother. I must have been aware on some level that I had older siblings, yet this never fully settled into my consciousness until age 15 when I came across some of my father's legal papers while searching in a drawer for my birth certificate. I clearly remember certain things almost jumping off the pages at me ... my father's divorce from his first wife ... two children ... a house in Queens, etc. How could I not have known about all of this? Simply put, the family I grew up in was filled with secrets and I learned at a very young age not to ask questions. My curiosity was tethered to a very short leash which was always held in a tightly clenched heart. I learned to fear the answers and reactions I might receive, which transferred into a fear of asking questions in the first place.
On the surface, Rain Man has very little to do with me. Yet the story itself and certain scenes within the movie relate very closely to portions of my life. There were times in the film that Charlie had a look on his face or an inflection in his voice that I have such empathy for and fully comprehend. I find this to be a very touching film that echoes my belief in the power of family and the importance of acceptance. Younger brother Charlie's transformation through his efforts to establish a connection with his previously unknown older brother, Raymond, is especially poignant. One of my favorite lines in the movie is towards the end when Charlie says to the psychiatrist reviewing Raymond's case, "You have to understand that when we started out together, he was only my brother in name. And ... and this morning, we had pancakes." Shared experiences, even with people vastly different than ourselves, become learning opportunities and create memories upon which we can build bonds and forge relationships. These experiences are like planting seeds which can blossom and grow into something more than we could ever imagine if they are nurtured by caring and compassionate souls.
I see many personal touchstones and synchronicities in this film, from the very small (Charlie's girlfriend was named Susanna and I am Susan) to far larger issues such as family dynamics and the yearning to make a connection with someone under the most difficult of circumstances. My appreciation for this movie is deepened by the close affinity I share with my two sons who have autistic spectrum disorders and the amazing individuals I had the privilege of teaching during the years I spent in my profession. This movie provides much insight into the world of autism, which not only shapes the life of the autistic person, but all those who love and care about them as well.
Our inner universe is filled with minutia and within the infinitesimal aspects of endless details, our minds and hearts dwell in a place that only we are fully acquainted with. Spoken language falls short when trying to explain our true selves and only the sharing of experiences and feelings can come close to expressing what lies beyond words. However, once in a while, a movie comes along that speaks for us and resonates with us on such a personal level that we are forever attached to it. For me, Rain Man is such a movie.
Susan68
Age 54
email: STPitcher@aol.com
Sunrise, FL 33323 USA
To those who have not had the pleasure of viewing this brilliant film, it is essentially the story of Charlie Babbitt (played by Tom Cruise), who is shocked to discover upon his father's death that he has an older brother, Raymond (played by Dustin Hoffman). Charlie is very angry that his wealthy father, Sanford Babbitt, did not leave him any money in his will, while Raymond, who is autistic and has no real concept of money, is left $3 million. So, Charlie decides to use Raymond as a bargaining chip for half of their father's estate. He takes Raymond out of the institution where he has been living for many years and brings him on a cross-country trip from Ohio to Los Angeles. What begins as an abduction turns into a journey of inner transformation for Charlie, and it becomes quite an adventure for the long isolated Raymond too. The scenes of their time in Las Vegas are one of the highlights of the film.
As a Special Education teacher, I taught disabled adults for 16 years, many of whom were autistic. I found Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant, to be astoundingly realistic, down to every detail and nuance. The Academy Award he earned for Best Actor was certainly well deserved for his phenomenal performance in a most difficult role. This film contributed greatly to raising awareness and understanding of autism. In addition to being a Special Education teacher, I am also the mother of two adult sons with autistic spectrum disorders, so I am grateful for this increased awareness. For many in the general public, this was their first introduction to the world of autism. Hopefully, after viewing Mr. Hoffman's moving performance, many people changed their negative perceptions about this condition for the better. Bear in mind though, that most autistic individuals do not possess the types of abilities the character of Raymond has and autistic savants are rare, occurring in approximately 10% of the autistic population, with only 10% of those reaching the same levels of ability as Raymond.
I can identify to some extent with Raymond because I share a few of the same compulsive qualities he displayed, although certainly not to such an extremely obsessive degree where these qualities completely limit my life. Yet, I have enough of my own idiosyncrasies that I can relate to how any compulsion can affect our lives. For better or worse, I have an ability to remember dates and events which is similar to Raymond's, although again, not to such an extreme degree. Also, I see patterns and connections everywhere without making any effort to look for them. It's hard to describe, but they simply appear to me in my mind very clearly. As Raymond says, "I see it."
Raymond's autism isolates him from the world and he protects himself through strict adherence to routines and rituals. His innate talents and vast knowledge are overshadowed by his limited grasp of reality, his extremely poor social skills, and his inability to participate in what the rest of us might consider to be a normal life. I have often struggled with a deep sense of isolation which thankfully, was counterbalanced by my equally deep need for socialization, understanding, and a connection to the world I live in. I wonder how long I might remain in my solitude without that balance and if I could find a similar comfort there to that which Raymond experiences. The thin lines between seclusion, loneliness, and solitude are barely perceptible at times.
There are a number of things that happened to Charlie that I identify with for various reasons. On the surface, I don't have much in common with the fast-talking, impatient, self-absorbed, imported car salesman who uses people and is not interested in their feelings. However, I know that in my teenage years, I was quite the "wild child" so perhaps I might have been perceived to be more shallow and self-centered by those who never took the time to know me. I do understand growing up in a family with repressed anger and secrets, where far too much is hidden ... where what lies in the shadows seeps into the fabric of a family, slowly eating away at it until the fragments that remain become far too fragile to embrace.
I was 23 years old when my father died and Charlie was in his mid-twenties. Charlie was not there when his father died, nor was he even on speaking terms with him. I was the only one of my father's four children he was estranged from when he passed away. Even though I tried to reach him in time, he died before I could arrive at the hospital. There were no final words of reconciliation or comfort ... no last glances ... no last chances ... no goodbyes. It has been one of the most painful regrets I have ever had to live with. Yet, when one of my precious twin sons lay dying in the NICU at 6 weeks of age, I believe this is why I found the strength to hold his tiny, frail body in my arms until his heart stopped beating and he took his final breath. No matter how heart wrenching, I could not allow another loved one to die without being present at the very end.
At the reading of Sanford Babbitt's will, Charlie is bequeathed his father's beloved 1949 Buick Roadmaster and his prize winning hybrid rose bushes. Charlie becomes furious about this, but I remember thinking when I saw that scene how much it would have meant to me to be left anything at all by my father, especially to be left items which were important to him. Turns out I wasn't even mentioned in his will at all which did not make me angry, but hurt me and, in my mind, confirmed my longtime belief that he thought very little of me. Naturally, this was painful for a long time, but is now all part of a deeper understanding of the situation. People don't always live long enough to work through their issues and improve their relationships with loved ones, but the relationship itself always lives on in the survivor, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, the hope remains that at least one person can come to terms with the reality of what was and choose to move forward through forgiveness, love, and acceptance.
Charlie had no idea that he had an older brother. To share the same father and the same last name is no small thing. Being denied the opportunity to grow up knowing all of your family, all of your siblings, is to be robbed of an important part of yourself. I have personal knowledge of this because I only became fully cognizant of my own older siblings when I was a teenager. I totally identify with Charlie when he says, "You know, I just don't understand. Why didn't he tell me I had a brother? Why didn't anyone ever tell me that I had a brother?"
Early in the film you learn that Charlie has a distant memory of a figure he called "Rain Man" who used to sing to him when he was very little. A turning point in the movie comes when Charlie finally realizes that Raymond is actually the "Rain Man" from his childhood and his heart softens towards his older brother. I must have been aware on some level that I had older siblings, yet this never fully settled into my consciousness until age 15 when I came across some of my father's legal papers while searching in a drawer for my birth certificate. I clearly remember certain things almost jumping off the pages at me ... my father's divorce from his first wife ... two children ... a house in Queens, etc. How could I not have known about all of this? Simply put, the family I grew up in was filled with secrets and I learned at a very young age not to ask questions. My curiosity was tethered to a very short leash which was always held in a tightly clenched heart. I learned to fear the answers and reactions I might receive, which transferred into a fear of asking questions in the first place.
On the surface, Rain Man has very little to do with me. Yet the story itself and certain scenes within the movie relate very closely to portions of my life. There were times in the film that Charlie had a look on his face or an inflection in his voice that I have such empathy for and fully comprehend. I find this to be a very touching film that echoes my belief in the power of family and the importance of acceptance. Younger brother Charlie's transformation through his efforts to establish a connection with his previously unknown older brother, Raymond, is especially poignant. One of my favorite lines in the movie is towards the end when Charlie says to the psychiatrist reviewing Raymond's case, "You have to understand that when we started out together, he was only my brother in name. And ... and this morning, we had pancakes." Shared experiences, even with people vastly different than ourselves, become learning opportunities and create memories upon which we can build bonds and forge relationships. These experiences are like planting seeds which can blossom and grow into something more than we could ever imagine if they are nurtured by caring and compassionate souls.
I see many personal touchstones and synchronicities in this film, from the very small (Charlie's girlfriend was named Susanna and I am Susan) to far larger issues such as family dynamics and the yearning to make a connection with someone under the most difficult of circumstances. My appreciation for this movie is deepened by the close affinity I share with my two sons who have autistic spectrum disorders and the amazing individuals I had the privilege of teaching during the years I spent in my profession. This movie provides much insight into the world of autism, which not only shapes the life of the autistic person, but all those who love and care about them as well.
Our inner universe is filled with minutia and within the infinitesimal aspects of endless details, our minds and hearts dwell in a place that only we are fully acquainted with. Spoken language falls short when trying to explain our true selves and only the sharing of experiences and feelings can come close to expressing what lies beyond words. However, once in a while, a movie comes along that speaks for us and resonates with us on such a personal level that we are forever attached to it. For me, Rain Man is such a movie.
Susan68
Age 54
email: STPitcher@aol.com
Sunrise, FL 33323 USA
The Wizard of Oz
My best flick ever was The Wizard of Oz. I think I was about 3 or 4 years old, definitely before I started school, when I saw this film. My uncle (he was in his 20’s) had kidnapped my brother and me from the clutches and, ever watchful eye, of our grandmother (his mother). She did not want us to leave her house. Never did understand why not. I was so excited about getting out of my grandmother’s house that I could barely stand it, and then, add a MOVIE! It was the best! I had no idea what we were going to see. I sat next to my uncle and waited. The movie came on and I watched with curiosity and wondered what this was all about. I remember the sepia tone of the beginning part of the film. I remember the beginning scenes with Dorothy trying to explain about the dog (always wanted a dog) and Mrs. Gulch, what a scary mean thing she was. I felt terrible for Dorothy when she was brushed off by Auntie Em. And then she sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow “and I was hooked. I could see that place she was singing about. I could see exactly what she was wishing for. I was caught up in this somewhat scary story and then – the house landed. She opened the door and walked out into this strange new place. The colors of the scenery, the Munchkins, the songs, the surprise dead witch under the house, the ruby red slippers! Could it get any better – I loved every minute of it. I could not take my eyes off of the screen. As scary as it was I did not look away. Not even when the witch’s face took up the entire screen. I loved the flying monkeys, the idea of flying, and having wings. The Cowardly Lion was so funny, and his song, “If I were King of the Forest” was the best verbal play I can remember. What an introduction to the play of language! And the meeting with the “Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz”! He was so scary when he was just a floating head. And then...… he was just a fake. Grown ups. They can seem so powerful. And then to find out that you can have what you really want by wishing it or thinking it. Of course it wasn’t enough to just want it. In the end, Dorothy had to work for it, too. (I didn’t get that “work for it” part then.) By the time I walked out of the theater and headed home, my head was full with the thoughts and dreams about this wonderful and exciting place. I remember going to bed wishing I could get over the rainbow and live there. It seemed to be so much more than what I was living. What could compete with good witches traveling in bubbles, bad witches on brooms, flying monkeys, cowardly lions, yellow brick roads, talking apple trees and a "horse of a different color"? I have never been as lost or caught up in a film as I was with this one. Reality did not exist at that point. If I think about it now, I can almost see why it appealed to me so much. But I don’t want to ruin it. Some things are worth keeping in memory, as much as you can, the way they first came to you. This is one for me.
In the end, a fanciful place on a celluloid film has all the elements of this earth-bound place (whatever that happens to be in anyone's life at any given moment). Good and bad grown-ups and wonderful uncles that work their magic to get a niece and nephew a little down time away from the pullling and pushing of feuding grown-ups. How does a 3 or 4 year old child not get in anyones way while the grown ups are counting their chickens? Not easy if your limited to staying in eye sight. Too close to be able to get away. Close enough to see and hear what's going on with the grown ups. I did spend alot of time dreaming about different places and how to get to them. I ran away from home three times after seeing that film. Not because of the film ( I don't think). And not at three or four years old. But some time after that. Never got further than the Hudson River. (I was heading for the dock my father used to take us to when he wanted to get close to moving water.) My mother thought I was going swimming. She rode in with a police car to save me. But I was fine. I wasn't going swimming. I was just looking for ... someplace else to be. She didn't get it. In the film, Dorothy got to choose where she wanted to be. I wanted "someplace else" where it wasn't so contrary and difficult to live. Grown ups - can't live with "em, can't live without 'em. What's a kid to do? Go to a movie!
Lily
Age 55
email: vsparis@optonline.net
In the end, a fanciful place on a celluloid film has all the elements of this earth-bound place (whatever that happens to be in anyone's life at any given moment). Good and bad grown-ups and wonderful uncles that work their magic to get a niece and nephew a little down time away from the pullling and pushing of feuding grown-ups. How does a 3 or 4 year old child not get in anyones way while the grown ups are counting their chickens? Not easy if your limited to staying in eye sight. Too close to be able to get away. Close enough to see and hear what's going on with the grown ups. I did spend alot of time dreaming about different places and how to get to them. I ran away from home three times after seeing that film. Not because of the film ( I don't think). And not at three or four years old. But some time after that. Never got further than the Hudson River. (I was heading for the dock my father used to take us to when he wanted to get close to moving water.) My mother thought I was going swimming. She rode in with a police car to save me. But I was fine. I wasn't going swimming. I was just looking for ... someplace else to be. She didn't get it. In the film, Dorothy got to choose where she wanted to be. I wanted "someplace else" where it wasn't so contrary and difficult to live. Grown ups - can't live with "em, can't live without 'em. What's a kid to do? Go to a movie!
Lily
Age 55
email: vsparis@optonline.net
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
I don’t think I can do this because when I think of films what comes to mind are film moments, images that rest with me, come up now and then for no particular reason or at least no reason that I can discern.* For example, Death saying, “I remember the position,” after the knight knocks over the chess pieces in The Seventh Seal—that’s my best moment of all time (maybe). But then there was the moment of choice in Sophie’s Choice and the singing of The Marseilles in Casablanca.
*This is not exactly true. Since you presented this assignment I’ve sat back and tried to let movie images waft through my mind and am not sure of the accuracy—like I think I have an image of a boy from The Bicycle Thief and another of the sailors on The Potemkin from the film of the same name, a film that I saw with my parents when I was a little boy in some small room in Manhattan sitting on one of many folding chairs set out for the almost all left wing (old time communist perhaps) audience. And then—do I have it right or is I a fantasy—the association of my parents in the late fifties sailing to Russia on another ship also called the Potemkin…
David Koulack
70 years old
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3M 0G6
*This is not exactly true. Since you presented this assignment I’ve sat back and tried to let movie images waft through my mind and am not sure of the accuracy—like I think I have an image of a boy from The Bicycle Thief and another of the sailors on The Potemkin from the film of the same name, a film that I saw with my parents when I was a little boy in some small room in Manhattan sitting on one of many folding chairs set out for the almost all left wing (old time communist perhaps) audience. And then—do I have it right or is I a fantasy—the association of my parents in the late fifties sailing to Russia on another ship also called the Potemkin…
David Koulack
70 years old
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3M 0G6
My Best Flick Ever is "Gundam Wing Endless Waltz" released in 1997 in Japan, and later released in America in 2001. It is the end of the "Mobile Suit Gundam Wing" side story of the long-running "Mobile Suit Gundam" anime series. There is a depth to this film that most people might not expect. You realize this is more than a simple animated feature as illustrated by this quote, "History is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace, and revolution continue on forever."
In 2001, I developed an interest in the genre of Japanese Anime. I am captivated by the extremely creative art style. Also, I enjoy watching the explosive and exciting action scenes. Of course, anime movies are not for everyone. However, this my personal favorite.
Jason
email: JBP618@aol.com
Age: 23
Sunrise, FL 33323
In 2001, I developed an interest in the genre of Japanese Anime. I am captivated by the extremely creative art style. Also, I enjoy watching the explosive and exciting action scenes. Of course, anime movies are not for everyone. However, this my personal favorite.
Jason
email: JBP618@aol.com
Age: 23
Sunrise, FL 33323
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Introduction to MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com
What is it about movies that make them so immediately and so universally alluring?
A statement by Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou, Viridiana, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire, et al.) provides an illuminating response to the question. It was his observation that film, more than any other art form, is a simulacrum of the workings of the human mind. Perhaps that recognition has already come to your awareness; if it happens not to have, chalk-up the oversight to a “forest-for-the-trees” phenomenon that is testimony to the depth of Bunuel’s perception.
Where or when Bunuel said this, I can’t remember, but whenever he did, it was not the first time the observation had been made. Almost at the beginning of cinema’s history, there was this:
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is probably the esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and which we have understood from its psychological conditions. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tunes. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art form can furnish us. No wonder that temples for the new goddess are built in every little hamlet.
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study [1916], Hugo Munsterberg, pp. 153-4
The line of differentiation between the visual representations of life as seen on a movie screen and those we routinely—perhaps even continuously—experience within ourselves is virtually indiscernible. Those of us who are gifted with eyesight involuntarily give centrality to the visual image. As is the case for a movie director, visual images are the organizer, the cornerstone of our thoughts and feelings. And it’s not only the representations in and of themselves that draw us into a movie; it is, as well, the mechanics with which they are presented: the moving images, in real time, slow motion and speed motion; the flashbacks and flash-forwards; the close-ups; the fade-outs; the freeze-frames; the associative trails that lead us from one mis-en-scene to the next and then, perhaps, back again; the soundtrack, with its music and voiceovers and the commonplace sounds of the quotidian. All of it, all that we see and hear when we go to the movies, is a replication of the mental activities that constitute nothing less than the very essence of our existence. If you can think it, you can see it on film, and if you see it on film you can think it.
Though it is surely so that any work of art is valued to the degree to which it can be taken personally—a dear friend of mine comes to mind, who weeps whenever he visits the self-portrait of an aged Rembrandt—the kinship between the workings of a film and the workings of a human mind is so strong that the process of internalizing and then personalizing a movie is likely to be an especially seamless, subliminal occurrence. Put another way, when you’re watching a movie you’re not likely to have it in mind that what you are seeing is actually someone else’s creation.
Your host at MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com happens to be, by profession, a psychoanalyst. As such, I once worked with a patient who had a turn of phrase that palpably authenticated the Bunuelian line of thought. She would customarily introduce the narratives that comprised her life’s story by saying, as if out of a Bunuel textbook, “Let me tell you the movie that is playing in my head right now.” Her “movie,” in turn, could be linked to an actual movie, as it so often was, and as it is for virtually everyone. How many of us, for example, if we were to voice a sentiment of quintessentially wry irony, might simply be inclined to say, “I’m shocked,” and how likely are we to have precisely the same image in mind when we say it?
Jacob Arlow, also a psychoanalyst, used film to illustrate the dynamics of unconscious fantasy. (For the purpose of this site, the distinction between conscious and unconscious fantasy is inconsequential; indeed, psychoanalysts recognize that no sharp line of distinction can be made between the two, which Arlow himself points out in the very article from which I’m about to quote.). Here, in Arlow’s words, is the thought:
The contribution that unconscious fantasy makes to conscious experience may be expressed illustratively through the use of a visual model. The idea for such a model occurred to me several years ago. It was after Thanksgiving dinner and a friend had brought a movie projector to show the children some animated cartoons. Since we did not have a regulation type movie screen, we used a translucent white window shade instead. During the showing of the cartoons, I had occasion to go outdoors. To my amusement, I noted that I could watch the animated cartoons through the window on the obverse side of the window shade. It occurred to me that an interesting effect could be obtained if another movie projector were used to flash another set of images from the opposite side of the screen. If the second set of images were of equal intensity to the first and had totally unrelated content, the effect of fusing the two images would, of course, be chaotic. On the other hand, however, if the material and the essential characters which were being projected from the outside and the inside were appropriately synchronized according to time and content, all sorts of final effects could be achieved, depending upon the relative intensity of the contribution from the two sources [italics mine].
The line of differentiation between the visual representations of life as seen on a movie screen and those we routinely—perhaps even continuously—experience within ourselves is virtually indiscernible. Those of us who are gifted with eyesight involuntarily give centrality to the visual image. As is the case for a movie director, visual images are the organizer, the cornerstone of our thoughts and feelings. And it’s not only the representations in and of themselves that draw us into a movie; it is, as well, the mechanics with which they are presented: the moving images, in real time, slow motion and speed motion; the flashbacks and flash-forwards; the close-ups; the fade-outs; the freeze-frames; the associative trails that lead us from one mis-en-scene to the next and then, perhaps, back again; the soundtrack, with its music and voiceovers and the commonplace sounds of the quotidian. All of it, all that we see and hear when we go to the movies, is a replication of the mental activities that constitute nothing less than the very essence of our existence. If you can think it, you can see it on film, and if you see it on film you can think it.
Though it is surely so that any work of art is valued to the degree to which it can be taken personally—a dear friend of mine comes to mind, who weeps whenever he visits the self-portrait of an aged Rembrandt—the kinship between the workings of a film and the workings of a human mind is so strong that the process of internalizing and then personalizing a movie is likely to be an especially seamless, subliminal occurrence. Put another way, when you’re watching a movie you’re not likely to have it in mind that what you are seeing is actually someone else’s creation.
Your host at MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com happens to be, by profession, a psychoanalyst. As such, I once worked with a patient who had a turn of phrase that palpably authenticated the Bunuelian line of thought. She would customarily introduce the narratives that comprised her life’s story by saying, as if out of a Bunuel textbook, “Let me tell you the movie that is playing in my head right now.” Her “movie,” in turn, could be linked to an actual movie, as it so often was, and as it is for virtually everyone. How many of us, for example, if we were to voice a sentiment of quintessentially wry irony, might simply be inclined to say, “I’m shocked,” and how likely are we to have precisely the same image in mind when we say it?
Jacob Arlow, also a psychoanalyst, used film to illustrate the dynamics of unconscious fantasy. (For the purpose of this site, the distinction between conscious and unconscious fantasy is inconsequential; indeed, psychoanalysts recognize that no sharp line of distinction can be made between the two, which Arlow himself points out in the very article from which I’m about to quote.). Here, in Arlow’s words, is the thought:
The contribution that unconscious fantasy makes to conscious experience may be expressed illustratively through the use of a visual model. The idea for such a model occurred to me several years ago. It was after Thanksgiving dinner and a friend had brought a movie projector to show the children some animated cartoons. Since we did not have a regulation type movie screen, we used a translucent white window shade instead. During the showing of the cartoons, I had occasion to go outdoors. To my amusement, I noted that I could watch the animated cartoons through the window on the obverse side of the window shade. It occurred to me that an interesting effect could be obtained if another movie projector were used to flash another set of images from the opposite side of the screen. If the second set of images were of equal intensity to the first and had totally unrelated content, the effect of fusing the two images would, of course, be chaotic. On the other hand, however, if the material and the essential characters which were being projected from the outside and the inside were appropriately synchronized according to time and content, all sorts of final effects could be achieved, depending upon the relative intensity of the contribution from the two sources [italics mine].
From “Unconscious Fantasy and Disturbances of Conscious Experience,” in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, January, 1969, pp. 23-4
I couldn’t resist taking this meander into psychoanalytica because it so clearly illustrates the mental dynamic that obtains when you’re watching a movie. You, the movie viewer, become another projector. When you’re watching a movie, you are—both consciously and unconsciously—projecting your self onto images that appear before you on a screen, whose images are simultaneously being projected back onto and into you.
Colin McGinn, a philosopher and a movie-lover, did his best to put it as simply as possible in The Power of Movies:
I couldn’t resist taking this meander into psychoanalytica because it so clearly illustrates the mental dynamic that obtains when you’re watching a movie. You, the movie viewer, become another projector. When you’re watching a movie, you are—both consciously and unconsciously—projecting your self onto images that appear before you on a screen, whose images are simultaneously being projected back onto and into you.
Colin McGinn, a philosopher and a movie-lover, did his best to put it as simply as possible in The Power of Movies:
The pleasure of movies is partly the pleasure of integrating what we bring from the inside with what the world imposes on our senses. p. 54
What we’re going to do, then, here at MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com, is conflate the interior, movie-like images that represent your internal life with the exterior images reflected back to you on a movie screen. We want to chronicle those movies whose stories mean the most to you because of whatever it is that your story happens to be. We’re looking for the very personal. What very important, most personally meaningful story in your life is best illuminated by which movie? We are not looking for movie reviews. Whatever exegesis you do offer should be secondary at most, presented because of certain attributes of the film that enhanced your capacity to personalize it. In a nutshell, what we would like you to do is tell us what movie means the most to you, and why. It’s our belief that the interplay between your personal narratives and their cinematic reflections will provide an intriguing prism of perception through which to view the ethos of our age. MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com intends to become a library in which one can peruse the world from that particular angle of vision.
We welcome everyone of any age to sign-on as a contributor to MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com and give us your flick and your story. Make your posting anywhere from one paragraph in length to four pages, or about 2000 words. Whatever age you happen to be, please include that number in your posting. Also include your user name, email address and the city and state from which you are posting. This will allow us to compile what we expect will be some rather interesting data. Photographs are also welcome, especially if they have a bearing on the movie you have designated as your Best Flick Ever.
What we’re going to do, then, here at MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com, is conflate the interior, movie-like images that represent your internal life with the exterior images reflected back to you on a movie screen. We want to chronicle those movies whose stories mean the most to you because of whatever it is that your story happens to be. We’re looking for the very personal. What very important, most personally meaningful story in your life is best illuminated by which movie? We are not looking for movie reviews. Whatever exegesis you do offer should be secondary at most, presented because of certain attributes of the film that enhanced your capacity to personalize it. In a nutshell, what we would like you to do is tell us what movie means the most to you, and why. It’s our belief that the interplay between your personal narratives and their cinematic reflections will provide an intriguing prism of perception through which to view the ethos of our age. MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com intends to become a library in which one can peruse the world from that particular angle of vision.
We welcome everyone of any age to sign-on as a contributor to MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com and give us your flick and your story. Make your posting anywhere from one paragraph in length to four pages, or about 2000 words. Whatever age you happen to be, please include that number in your posting. Also include your user name, email address and the city and state from which you are posting. This will allow us to compile what we expect will be some rather interesting data. Photographs are also welcome, especially if they have a bearing on the movie you have designated as your Best Flick Ever.
PLEASE SEND YOUR POSTINGS TO ira@landess.net. I'll paste them into my blog, unedited. I will, however, not post any material that is pornographic, scurrilous or ill-willed.
Whereas many of you, like your host, characteristically look to find a #1 for anything and everything of interest to you, others of a more catholic sensibility could well be hard-pressed to do that. It may be more your style to have a Top Ten or even Top Hundred list, not to mention the possibility that you might not have any list at all. We nevertheless wish to have you as a member of our community. Uncharacteristic as it might be for you to hit the #1 key, just, for this occasion, put a gun to your head and pick a flick that you can live with as being your Best Flick Ever. Finally, if you can't, just can't, pull the trigger on a #1 flick, try this: take either two or three of your favorite genres and write about your Best Flick Ever from each of them (no more than 2000 words in toto).
Although, by the very nature of this site, both you and I will have only a one-off chance to participate as a contributor, we’d be happy to have you remain active in the MyBestFlickEver community by posting commentary in response to any of the films that have been chronicled. And, it is hoped, you’ll also find yourself wanting to correspond with other contributors by email.
Postings will be mounted by the order in which they’re received. They’ll be indexed by film title. Should MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com manage to become an organically growing community, the site will adapt accordingly. A possibility, for example, that at this time must remain inchoate is that we arrange to have photos or even footage of Your Best Flick accompany your posting. We could also set up a chat room. Let’s see how many postings materialize. The hope is that the site will be able to grow virally, so with that objective in mind, would you kindly forward the URL for this site—even if you yourself choose not to make a contribution—to as many of your friends (a baker’s dozen?) as you think are likely to be interested in the project.
Thanks. See you at your movie.
Whereas many of you, like your host, characteristically look to find a #1 for anything and everything of interest to you, others of a more catholic sensibility could well be hard-pressed to do that. It may be more your style to have a Top Ten or even Top Hundred list, not to mention the possibility that you might not have any list at all. We nevertheless wish to have you as a member of our community. Uncharacteristic as it might be for you to hit the #1 key, just, for this occasion, put a gun to your head and pick a flick that you can live with as being your Best Flick Ever. Finally, if you can't, just can't, pull the trigger on a #1 flick, try this: take either two or three of your favorite genres and write about your Best Flick Ever from each of them (no more than 2000 words in toto).
Although, by the very nature of this site, both you and I will have only a one-off chance to participate as a contributor, we’d be happy to have you remain active in the MyBestFlickEver community by posting commentary in response to any of the films that have been chronicled. And, it is hoped, you’ll also find yourself wanting to correspond with other contributors by email.
Postings will be mounted by the order in which they’re received. They’ll be indexed by film title. Should MyBestFlickEver.blogspot.com manage to become an organically growing community, the site will adapt accordingly. A possibility, for example, that at this time must remain inchoate is that we arrange to have photos or even footage of Your Best Flick accompany your posting. We could also set up a chat room. Let’s see how many postings materialize. The hope is that the site will be able to grow virally, so with that objective in mind, would you kindly forward the URL for this site—even if you yourself choose not to make a contribution—to as many of your friends (a baker’s dozen?) as you think are likely to be interested in the project.
Thanks. See you at your movie.
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