A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

This is the first Naipaul novel I've read, and I found the experience quite disorienting, in ways both pleasurable and upsetting. I think my upset is what will persist, and that may be a good thing.

I'm well accustomed to literature which travels a predictable path of indignation regarding the injustice of European colonialism. I don't know that I've ever read anything, though, that so fully encompasses the complexity of the relationships between all the various players in a colonial situation. The shorthand version of colonialism -- wealthy European whites exploiting poor African blacks -- conceals a plethora of more nuanced and complicated relationships. That seems a pretty self-evident thing to say, but I don't know of another text that brings it to the fore as forcefully as this. Instead of the basic master/slave dynamic, we find here highly complex systems of classes within classes, exiles within exiles, powers within powers.

An ethnic Indian trader prospering on the east coast of Africa moves with his mixed-race slave to an interior African country which was recently decolonized by a European power and is now tipping into a civil war sponsored in part by European interests and partially by ethnic and class divisions within the aboriginal culture. Everything that's wrong with colonialism (slavery, oppression) and all of its benefits (clean water, electricity) are on display. Everything that's wrong with independence (kleptocracy, recapitulation of colonial power structures) and all of its benefits (a sense of common destiny and self-determination) are on display. Human relationships are a hall of mirrors. "Everyone is a villager," and everyone's a kind of slave. As Naipaul puts it more than once, "It wasn't that there was no wrong and no right. It was that there was no right." He has no respect for any of the systems on offer, imperial or revolutionary or anything in-between, and his analysis of how the different constituents of the river town exercise, cede, and accumulate different forms of power -- economic, political, sexual, emotional -- is nuanced, precise, and persuasive.

All this is an easy sell as far as I'm concerned. I've written myself about what seems to be the sad inevitability of revolutions turning back into empires. The discomfort enters for me, though, because it does sort of seem like Naipaul is especially contemptuous of the revolutionary part of the cycle. There are passages here which remind me of Shelby-Steele-like rhetoric, which seem to accuse the oppressed of abetting their oppression, and that kind of thinking makes this white boy fidget with discomfort. It may well be a productive upset, though, because one thing I can say for sure is that few pieties about colonialism can survive a careful reading of this book.

The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

Almost unbearably delightful. It took me four nights to watch this. More than 30 minutes at a time was too overwhelming. A deeply decadent movie. It's hard to know how to talk about it. It's a crystalline analysis of Italian fascism, but it's also such a carnival for the eye . . .

Ketchup

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula (1974)

In honor of this week's public release of the Pentagon Papers, it's heroic journalism week here. We begin with this paranoid classic. The relentlessly louche Warren Beatty is pretty improbable as a crusading journalist, but the pure weirdness of the story is ample compensation. As usual in Pakula, banal and efficient modern spaces -- parking garages, convention halls, office buildings, airports -- intensify the horror and dread. This was made at a time when Americans were just getting used to living with the idea our leaders lie to us as a matter of course, but were still capable of being scandalized. Pakula captures the zeitgeist with verve.

The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann (1973)

Just doing my homework in anticipation of Olivier Assayas's upcoming Carlos, to which I'm looking forward despite myself. This is a very straightforward procedural and nothing to write home about. Its potentially explosive political implications are assiduously suppressed in favor of the cops and robbers storyline. The fun lies almost entirely in getting to see all these delicious shots of 60's Europe.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)

Completely satisfying emotionally as a love story, yet at the same time so critically astringent, there's no way you could call it a melodrama. A lonely widowed German charwoman of a certain age and a Moroccan guest worker fall in love. The forces of hatred, fear, and misunderstanding besiege them from both outside and from within. Love wins, but not until Fassbinder's made it clear that, as Wittgenstein put it, "love is not a feeling; love is put to the test." Utterly convincing, fascinating to look at. This was of course inspired by Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, but does that look like Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson there, eating dinner together? No, it does not. Everyone in Fassbinder's movie looks like a human being, which is part of what makes this picture so affecting.

Marathon Man, John Schlesinger (1976)

God, the 70's were so WEIRD! This is an incredibly strange movie. Dustin Hoffman's father was a victim of history (blacklisted during the McCarthy purges). One of his sons (Roy Scheider) has grown up to be a -- God, I don't even know what he's supposed to be, I think a CIA agent slash bagman for fugitive Nazis living in South America slash mobster. His other son (Hoffman) is a graduate student in history, writing a dissertation about "the role of tyranny in American political history." Yeah, um, better buy some extra typewriter ribbons, pal.

The plot here is hard to figure exactly, but I do know that it is extremely paranoid. Everyone--students, professors, businessmen, cops, government officials, bankers, and especially dapper elderly Germans--is lying, cheating, stealing, and, sometimes, performing dentistry without anasthetic. Furthermore, Schlesinger's apocalyptic Manhattan would make Travis Bickle's look good to Carrie Bradshaw.

It's all very washed out and depressing, yet I will say this: Movies were perhaps a bit more willing, at that moment in history, to go ahead and be washed out and depressing. Nothing's any less effed-up now than it was then, yet it's almost impossible to imagine something this effed up making it into production today. We still have plenty of critique and paranoia at the multiplex, but it's a lot slicker, more digestible, and easier to look at than it used to be, don't you think?

Analog Africa

These people have released five CDs, of which I own the most recent four, each of which is absolutely exquisite. You have never heard such sublimely funky grooves in your life. The Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou makes James Brown sound like Lawrence Welk.

The first CD is labeled "#3," because Analog Africa's first two releases came in the form of mp3 mixes. Both are available for free download on their blog, and also through the Paris DJs podcast.

Paris DJs is where I discovered Analog Africa, and it is itself an incredible resource. Their weekly free podcast features all sorts of never-made-it-off-vinyl-onto-disc deliciousness from all over the world. There are nearly 200 mixes to download, and they're all free!

Here's a direct link to the second Analog Africa mix: http://analogafrica.cybsys.net/mp3/AnalogAfricaSelectionVol.2.mp3

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog (1974)

Absolutely enchanting. The tenderest Herzog film I've ever seen, and the most poetic. Bruno S. is (and I do mean "is") the foundling who can see the world more clearly than anyone precisely because it's wholly alien to him. He refutes priests and professors, renders a high society party absurd and ludicrous simply through his presence, plays the part of one of the four riddles of the spheres in a carnival sideshow. And in the end, when asked by the priests if anything is bothering him, he says yes, it's a story, but he only knows the beginning of it:

It's about a caravan; and the desert; but I only know the beginning. I see a great caravan coming through the desert, over the sand, and this caravan is led by an old Berber, and this old man is blind. The caravan stops, because some of them believe they are lost. There are mountains before them. They check their compass, but they are no wiser. Then their blind leader picks up a handful of sand and tastes it, as though it were food. "My sons," the blind man says, "you are wrong - those are not mountains you see, it's only your imagination. We must continue northwards." They follow the old man's advice, and they reach the city in the north, where the story takes place. But how the story goes after they reach the city, I don't know . . .

Ketchup

Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman (2008). Former IDF soldier sets about unrepressing his repressed memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Waking Life plus Johnny Got His Gun, in Lebanon. Interesting to look at. I don't get why making it a cartoon is a good idea.

Miller's Crossing, Joel Coen (1990). I didn't like this bitter little movie the first time or the second.

Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq, Tony Lagouranis (2007). Useful. Complicated. Many of the ways in which this book is interesting are likely not ones of which the author himself is aware. Lagouranis believes he's written the story of his coming to consciousness and conscience during his time as an interrogator in Iraq. The book is that, but it's also -- I don't want to overstate this, because I suspect Lagouranis is an ethical and well-intentioned person, but it's true nonetheless -- an example of the very self-exculpatory style which Lagouranis deplores in his commanding officers. More accurate and more precise to say: Lagouranis's oscillations between "there's no excuse for what I've done" and "here's my excuse for what I've done" are themselves an important part of the story of the systemic failures of the Bush administration's strategy and tactics in the GWAT.

The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, Patric Kuh (2001). Poorly written but fascinating account of the rises and falls of the French ethos, California cuisine, and corporatism in the American restaurant business.

Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht (1947), directed by Joseph Losey for the American Film Theatre, (1974). Brilliant production starring the great Topol of Fiddler on the Roof fame. Really enjoyable and provocative.

I haven't yet seen In the Loop, or The Thick of It, upon which In the Loop is based, but I'm having a hard time either of them will surpass Harold Pinter's Party Time. I just watched a 1992 production of the play as filmed by Pinter himself. (The DVD is from 2004, and was produced by "Films for the Humanities & Sciences.) What an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. The lurches and swerves from naked aggression to high society chitchat to lyric flights of symbolic imagination to stammered disconnections of sign and signifier literally make me gasp. Just a short play -- 35 minutes -- but I'd set it next to any of Pinter's best, or anyone else's.

Septem8er Tapes, Christian Johnston (2004). Weird, irresponsible, self-satisfied, atrociously written mockumentary "about" a filmmaker who goes to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 to "get to the bottom" of the GWAT. Deeply strange. I not only don't get the point of it, I don't even get what the filmmakers might imagine the point might be.

The Situation, Philip Haas (2006). Well intentioned ham-fisted Americans-are-bad message movie about an improbably beautiful and beatific female journalist in Iraq.

I could, but won't, and probably shouldn't, write a book about representations of the GWAT in film.

Humana Festival 2008: The Complete Plays. Why am I always so surprised that so much contemporary drama is so trite and boring? After all, so much contemporary everything else is trite and boring, why shouldn't that be true of drama, too? One good play here: Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfriddo. A queer claustrophobic family drama. Title character is an outsider who comes into the family's orbit to simultaneously air the dirty laundry and soil a bunch more. Not really my cup of tea -- too much psychology, too much talking -- but very good at being what it is.

Lars and the Real Girl, Craig Gillespie (2007). Surprisingly sweet and affecting movie about a town that teaches a guy how to love. That sounds horrible, but it's true! I don't know how it doesn't lapse into sentimentality or broad comedy, but it doesn't.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (2008). Dispatches it is not, but the comparison will be made and not for no reason. Filkins was the Times' guy in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and these are the stories that aren't right for a newspaper but need to be told nonetheless, the ironic ones, personal ones, the ones that unfold over years and the ones that are contained in a single instant. You don't read this one for policy analysis, political history, or any of that big picture stuff; this is about people trying to stay alive in war zones.

Thief, Michael Mann (1981).
Manhunter, Michael Mann (1986).
I've always enjoyed Mann's glacial style -- that's a reference to both time and attitude -- but it sure doesn't hold up well over time. The interminable Tangerine Dream riffs in Thief and the interminable brooding of William Petersen in Manhunter don't feel slick and cool, they feel like you just ate a quart of quaaludes. Also, James Caan's entire torso is covered with hair and Mann makes sure you know it, often. Also, Caan blows up The Green Mill, which is inexcusable.

Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur (1998). Stylish pseudo-historical romp, great cast.

Network, Sidney Lumet (1976). The M*A*S*H of television. Did anyone make any movies in the 70's that weren't completely depressing in both form and content?

The Out of Towners, Arthur Hiller (1970)

Not a great movie to watch a couple days before you're scheduled to fly to New York. Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, decent Ohioans, experience every travel-to-big-city debacle known to humankind. I think Neil Simon wrote this expressly to keep Midwesterners from coming east. It's working; I'm straining to keep from canceling my trip.

The Eagle Has Landed, John Sturges (1976)

The 1970's were so weirdly ambivalent, so antic and so self-loathing at the same time. The Eagle Has Landed was the last film Sturges directed, and it has the sort of freewheeling playfulness you might expect from someone who's already chiseled his name in stone and don't need to prove nothing to nobody. Let's get this out of the way up front: The movie's about a bunch of Nazi paratroopers out to kidnap or murder Winston Churchill in the waning days of the war, and they're the heroes. Michael Caine, as the leader of this sort of Big Red One-esque band, establishes his bona fides as a good Nazi the very first time we see him, by standing up to some stormtrooper goons and extending the life of a doomed Jewish girl by about thirty seconds. Our hero may be a Nazi, and not a very effective counter to the final solution, but he is also, we're intended to believe, anti-establishment, and that, in 1976, seems to have been enough to qualify him as a good guy. Indeed there are a lot of Nazis in here who the film portrays as both despising Hitler but also faithful to their comrades, and so sort of perversely moral. Like I said, it's weird.

The whole thing reminds me a lot of MASH, another movie where everyone seems to hate the war and have no idea how to fight one, but when the shit hits the fan, everyone starts acting like they were born to be soliders. Here Larry Hagman plays a comically hawkish frustrated colonel a lot like Frank Burns, and Donald Sutherland's here too, playing a rake who believes in nothing but a drink and a shapely ankle until the instant the going gets rough and suddenly he's the steely eyed crack shot who saves the day and runs up the flag. I'd also suggest that the true believer Jean Marsh is not unlike Margaret Houlihan.

Loping open-ended nonsense, a total mess as a war thriller and as a satire, and pretty fun. If only because of how totally confusing it is as a cultural milestone. Have there been any American movies before or after the 1970's in which Nazi paratroopers, following orders, have been the protagonists? I would doubt it.

Pop Music is Boring; Long Live Pop Music

All the year-end music wrap-ups seem to be suggesting that Vampire Weekend, Santogold, Adele, TV on the Radio, Coldplay, Duffy, Goldfrapp, Fleet Foxes, Kanye West, The Kills, The Ting Tings, M83, and Lil Wayne are all geniuses. I just spent some time sampling these wares on iTunes and I find it all incredibly dull because -- and here's my combination confession and complaint -- it's all so incredibly derivative. Why would I buy Fleet Foxes when I already have Buffalo Springfield, Duffy w.i.a.h. Dusty Springfield, the Ting Tings w.i.a.h. Ladytron and the Human League and Heaven 17 and a zillion other eurotrash two-hit wonders, Kanye West w.i.a.h. Gang Starr, The Kills w.i.a.h. Opal and Suicide . . . .

That's the complaint part, but here's the confession: When I was freaking out about the Smashing Pumpkins in 1991, there must have been some smug 40-year old bastard writing on his blog (which were called "alternative newspapers" back then) about how he didn't see any reason to buy Gish when his Houses of the Holy LP still played just fine.

So viva la change. I guess I'm nearing pop music tenure. I even bought the new Portishead this year, only to be irritated that it wasn't the old Portishead. Which way to that grove where the elephants lie down to die.

Woyzeck, Werner Herzog (1979)

Klaus Kinski, man's best fiend, upsets my dog. Curiously, it's not the scenes where he's freaking out that she can't stand, it's the long, nearly silent, slow burn passages, where he's quivering bug-eyed and ready to explode at any moment. She kept leaving the room to avoid his gaze. But she also kept coming back, as though unable to resist him. It was weird.

Woyzeck is based on Georg Büchner's unfinished play by the same name. Herzog shrewdly began filming immediately after having completed a long shoot on another film with the same cast and crew, and shot the whole movie in eighteen days, ensuring that everyone would be exhausted and slightly hysterical. The title character, played with nearly comical intensity by Kinski, is a hapless soldier abused by doctors, senior officers, and his lover. As he caroms from clinic to barracks to home in fits of effort to find some dignity, he becomes more and more crazed. Things do not end well.

Herzog's mise-en-scène here is much flatter than usual, perhaps because he is conscious of the fact that he's filming a stage play. The spaces and angles are tightly constrained, even in exterior shots; the lighting is theatrically artificial; the depth of field very shallow. The feeling, looking at the screen, is that all the action is happening in a box about three feet deep, as if the TV were a kind of puppet theater.

Not anywhere near my favorite Herzog film, but an archetypal example of Kinski's style. And my own new best fiend, Sarah Kane, directed a version of the play in 1997, and I'm in a place right now where I'm looking for traces of Ms. Kane anywhere I can find them, because I'm deeply disappointed I wasn't aware of her work prior to her death. There, I've said it, the awful true thing. Herzog is very good at putting me in a place where I can do that.

Stroszek, Werner Herzog (1977)

An excellent example of how illuminating it can be to see your own country through the eyes of a foreigner. Stroszek is played by Bruno Schleinstein, the severely damaged man Herzog so brilliantly or revoltingly exploited or rescued (depending on your perspective) in his The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in 1974. Stroszek, an alcoholic petty criminal and busker, flees the narrow cobbled alleys of old Europe with a funny old professor-type in a beret (whose merry decrepitude reminded me of the great homeless chef in Tampopo) and a cow-eyed prostitute who's tired of being beaten by her pimp. The three of them arrive in the new world, buy a car, and drive to the middle of nowhere in frozen flat Wisconsin. The American dream consists of weak beer, bad food, sexual exploitation, lousy jobs, tv game shows, truck stops, racism, shag carpet, predatory lenders, and dark gray skies flicking out hard snow. Eventually, Stroszek ends up at a roadside tourist trap with a frozen turkey under one arm and a shotgun under the other, watching electrocuted animals do tricks. Dancing chicken, rabbit driving a fire truck, duck playing a drum. The soundtrack careening hysterical harmonica and hollers of Sonny Terry. They say Ian Curtis watched this just before he hung himself, and Sarah Kane references it in the last play she wrote before she hung herself: "The chicken won't stop dancing." Watch it with a friend.

The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino (1978)

I've wanted to look at this again, partially but not only because I've been thinking so much about the after-effects of combat. Still, I kept putting it off, remembering it as a three-hour meat grinder of the soul. And it is that. But it's also fresh as a daisy.

"They don't make 'em like they used to." I hate that kind of facile sentiment. But this movie is solid evidence for it. It's hard to imagine a contemporary film with a ensemble cast of such a caliber, a frame of reference of such scope, and crucially, above all, such incredible patience. Cimino famously melted down after this picture, but none of that can ever mar his achievement here. He lets each scene play out to its conclusion, whether it takes place on a battlefield in Asia or in a grocery store in Pennsylvania, and every scene matters.

Those raised on a irony-rich diet are saying about now "Oy, come on, this thing is tur-GID to the max." To which I say yes, and God bless America.

Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, John Cazale, George Dzundza. It's beautiful and excellent. I'd put it up there with The Godfather and Badlands, for real. Have a cup of coffee after dinner and go there.

Brass Target, John Hough (1978)

Thank God for Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics. They ain't no Cinémathèque Française (and Robert Osborne sure ain't no Henri Langlois), but they're as close as this country's going to come, and I'm grateful.

Is Brass Target a great movie? No, it is not. Is it worth renting on Netflix? Nope. But if you've been doing yard work all morning and you just want to sit in a dark room and eat watermelon and watch the likes of John Cassavetes, Sophia Loren, and Max von Sydow bat around a nice little post-war thriller about stolen Nazi gold, double-crosses, and the murky circumstances of General George S. Patton's death? AMC and TCM are there for you.

Mad Max, George Miller (1979)

Wow. By contemporary action-movie standards, this is practically a Disney flick. I'd always assumed this was a revenge-fantasy bloodbath, and so was surprised to find that it actually takes an hour and a half to piss Mel Gibson off, and then he gets only fifteen minutes to hunt down the bad guys. And do you know what he does when he finds them? He runs four of them off the road into a river, shoots one in self-defense as the guy's about to run him over, and watches as another is run over by a truck. It's all so quaint and delicate, as if the filmmakers finally couldn't stomach the idea of a law enforcement officer committing murder, even if it's to revenge the horrible deaths of his best friend, wife, and child. Only in the execution of the very last thug is there a hint of madness, and that happens off-screen. We've come a long way, baby. Here in the 21st century, this flick would make even a toddler yawn.

Along with its charming scruples, the movie also provides pleasure on the technical level as a masterpiece of low-budget filmmaking. You can just tell that all the interiors were done at someone's mom's house, and the exteriors off in such remote locations that there was no need to worry about a car, plane, dog, or donkey showing up to mosey through and wreck the shot.

Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese (1973)

My 1970's mini-festival continues. I'd forgotten what an intimate affair this movie is; with its small cast and constricted sense of space (almost everything happens in the bar where the guys hang out) it could almost be a play. I guess I'd always unthinkingly classified Mean Streets as a bloody shoot'em up gangster picture, but it really isn't at all. You don't see a gun until more than 45 minutes into the picture, and you can count the number of bullets fired in the entire movie on your fingers and toes. Can you imagine a contemporary movie about small-time hoods taking that long to start up the blasting? It's also just fascinating in general to see how big a deal it is to have a gun in this movie. When one does appear, everyone gets absolutely reverent. How things have changed! These days guns are as unremarkable as toothbrushes. Actually, you probably see far more guns than toothbrushes on the screen.

Anyway. The movie's really about the relationships between a handful of desperately bored friends obsessed with finding ways to amuse themselves and impress each other. Weirdly, it kept reminding me of college. Tightly confined spaces both physical and social, lots of intense relationships, lots of booze, constant oscillation between hysterical self-confidence and crushing fear, going deeply into debt with no foreseeable way of ever getting out. Above all: the insane conviction that self-destruction is the best escape from banality.

Badlands, Terrence Malick (1973)

"You want a second chance, then listen. Twelve noon, Grand Coulee Dam, New Years Day, 1964."

This script is so brilliant. I keep pausing every five minutes to write down lines and think of what excellent epigraphs they'd be.

Nice companion, in a way, to Mean Streets. Young people without a thought in their heads or a qualm in their hearts destroy themselves and others pretty much just out of boredom.

Malick is much more the poet than Scorsese, though. The musical counterpoints in Mean Streets are designed to make you squirm--a lesson which Tarantino took to what I hope to God is the ultimate extreme in Reservoir Dogs [don't click that unless you're a glutton for punishment]--and the occasional arty nonsequitur shots in Malick seem much more part of the fabric in Malick than in Scorsese, where they feel like an assignment for an admired but hated professor.

Fuck, what's to say. This is the Bonnie and Clyde we deserve and are.