“Nowadays people look at life as a speculation. It is not a speculation, it is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice.
Are you beginning to reform me? It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
Oh gossip is charming. History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
There is nothing as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education.
People call something an experience they mean it was a mistake.
Women do not want to be understood, they want to be loved.
No love is pure and simple as the love of food.
Everyman is born truthful and dies a liar.
Girls begin by loving their mothers but as they grow they judge us. It is because of men that women distrust other women.
If a man can tolerate his own past then why should he not tolerate that of his wife.
I cannot always explain myself to myself let alone to you.
It takes practice and skill to live without regret.
In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting want you want and the other is getting it.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produced the serious people the serious people the fogs, I do not know.
I do not think now that people can be divided into the good and bad, as though they were two separate races, or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion and jealousy, sin. Bad women as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. Ideals are dangerous things, realities are better, they wound, but they're better. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil sin and innocence go through it hand in hand.”
Thus I spent Friday afternoon, leap year day, 29th February 2008 on the Amalfi Coast in the cinematic reproduction of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, called A Good Woman, seen in theatre in 2004 and now on DVD, and with the help of the Penguin Plays of Oscar Wilde, 1960 reprinted paper back edition which also includes The Importance of being earnest, An Ideal Husband, A woman of no Importance and Salome.
It was an excellent antidote to what I now regard as an even worse nauseating immoral film that the Foreigner, Escape to Athena. It is difficult to judge who was responsible for this insult to Greek people and all those, on all sides of World War II who fought and died bravely in the service of their country.
Elliot Gould can be forgiven for playing an extension of Mash, which although a comedy made out of war, restricted itself to the work of the front line medical unit, where humour is the only defence against insanity. Roger Moore and David Niven also played their normal roles, while Telly Savalas appeared to take his part seriously. I watched the film broken only by getting my lunch, taking in some parcels for a neighbour and checking the incoming mail just to see if it had any redeeming features apart from some glorious views of the Greek Island said to be Rhodes and which I have visited for a week. I must find time to do a volume of memories of that visit.
For two hours John Gielgud addresses the audience in a condensed poetical landscape of biblical, mythological and Shakespearean images conjured from his 20 books while Peter Greenaway uses every cinematic device available to him in the early 1990's to populate the rest of the screen with tableaux upon tableaux of Fellini figures out of Satyricon. Michael Nyman provided the music which merits attention on its own. Ideally one should be able to turnoff the music and vision and listen to the words, then listen to the words with the music, then just watch the images without sound, and then before experiencing the whole once more spend a day studying the twenty page study of references produced by Steven Marx of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo and ignores the superficial article in Wikipedia. Most people will not like or enjoy the experience, or devote the time, even to watch the film, Prospero's Books from start to finish, once.
You also have to be in the right mood and frame of mind to experience Monster's Ball the 2001 film which led to an Oscar, A Bafta, a Golden Globe, an MTV award and the Screen Actors Guild award for best female performance to Halle Berry. The film and the award has had its critics among inverted racists who as with the previous film failed to appreciate its brilliance in uncovering layers of human reality. For me this is a film about two individuals deciding that they could share their lives after having to cope with tragedies wish would destroy most people. Billy Boy Thornton lives with his openly racist father whose wife committed suicide. Billy Boy, a widower works with his son, played by the late Heath Ledger who came to the fore with Brokeback Mountain as prison officers, preparing for an execution (The Monster's Ball) which affects them both, but his son more so as he finds it difficult to cope with the event and father and son row, with the consequence that the son kills himself in the presence of his father. Before these events Billy Bob satisfies his sexual needs with functional experiences with a prostitute, but then he becomes impotent and his inability to cope with his life leads him to resign from his career job.
The executed prisoner is black and has committed a crime which justifies execution according to state law and it take places because there are no mitigating circumstances. The man desperately tries to convince his son that while he is has been a bad man the boy represents everything that is good in his life. The boy finds his father's death difficult to cope with and develops an eating disorder and then is fatally knocked down in a hit and run accident in the presence of his mother. Thornton passes by, as do other white drivers, but returns to try and help, having recognised the woman as working in a restaurant he visits. He takes the boy to hospital and after his death he begins a relationship with the mother, who is losing her home, using the rent money to buy alcohol. It is only after they become lovers that Thornton finds out she is the wife of the man he helped to execute, and she only finds this out after she has moved in with him after being evicted. The relationship also faced an early crisis when she visit his home and meets his father who treats her in a stereotype racist way toward a desirable black female. Thornton reacts by placing his diseased father in a nursing home. His father pleads with his son not to be left to die in this way to no avail. The film ends as the new couple sit out eating ice cream looking forward to a future together. In the 1950's British theatre, and much of British film drama and romance was contrived and controlled with at its best the Plays of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Then with Look Back in Anger and the plays of Arnold Wesker a contemporary reality was brought to stage and screen as people were shown to talk and behave as the majority. Room at the Top. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, together with Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey each concluded that one should seize any opportunity which becomes available but then be prepared to pay the price, which in some instances will last a lifetime. The combination of bringing home this reality and living with the threat of an annihilating third world war pushed people further into what is now described as the swinging sixties, although my experience was of generation who cared deeply about others and were prepared to do something about it as well as having some enjoyment with friends and lovers. The Monsters' Ball follows in that tradition of describing things as they are and despite all that had happened to them, and their own part in their respective downfalls, I felt this was a relationship that would not only last but remain meaningful. Neither would ever be able forget their past but the very experiences of pain and failure they had experienced separately would cement them together.
I write this in the early hours of Saturday as the wind howls to gale force with the prospect of reaching hurricane force in some part of the Northern England during the rest of the night. I go to bed content, not so much from the film or writing about them but from the sight of a pure black acyclic canvass. At present its seems wrong to add anything to it, even a signature of some kind on an edge. I feared this would happen. I can see myself wanting to abandon everything else and just explore what I can do and what I cannot.
Are you beginning to reform me? It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
Oh gossip is charming. History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
There is nothing as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education.
People call something an experience they mean it was a mistake.
Women do not want to be understood, they want to be loved.
No love is pure and simple as the love of food.
Everyman is born truthful and dies a liar.
Girls begin by loving their mothers but as they grow they judge us. It is because of men that women distrust other women.
If a man can tolerate his own past then why should he not tolerate that of his wife.
I cannot always explain myself to myself let alone to you.
It takes practice and skill to live without regret.
In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting want you want and the other is getting it.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produced the serious people the serious people the fogs, I do not know.
I do not think now that people can be divided into the good and bad, as though they were two separate races, or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion and jealousy, sin. Bad women as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. Ideals are dangerous things, realities are better, they wound, but they're better. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil sin and innocence go through it hand in hand.”
Thus I spent Friday afternoon, leap year day, 29th February 2008 on the Amalfi Coast in the cinematic reproduction of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, called A Good Woman, seen in theatre in 2004 and now on DVD, and with the help of the Penguin Plays of Oscar Wilde, 1960 reprinted paper back edition which also includes The Importance of being earnest, An Ideal Husband, A woman of no Importance and Salome.
It was an excellent antidote to what I now regard as an even worse nauseating immoral film that the Foreigner, Escape to Athena. It is difficult to judge who was responsible for this insult to Greek people and all those, on all sides of World War II who fought and died bravely in the service of their country.
Elliot Gould can be forgiven for playing an extension of Mash, which although a comedy made out of war, restricted itself to the work of the front line medical unit, where humour is the only defence against insanity. Roger Moore and David Niven also played their normal roles, while Telly Savalas appeared to take his part seriously. I watched the film broken only by getting my lunch, taking in some parcels for a neighbour and checking the incoming mail just to see if it had any redeeming features apart from some glorious views of the Greek Island said to be Rhodes and which I have visited for a week. I must find time to do a volume of memories of that visit.
For two hours John Gielgud addresses the audience in a condensed poetical landscape of biblical, mythological and Shakespearean images conjured from his 20 books while Peter Greenaway uses every cinematic device available to him in the early 1990's to populate the rest of the screen with tableaux upon tableaux of Fellini figures out of Satyricon. Michael Nyman provided the music which merits attention on its own. Ideally one should be able to turnoff the music and vision and listen to the words, then listen to the words with the music, then just watch the images without sound, and then before experiencing the whole once more spend a day studying the twenty page study of references produced by Steven Marx of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo and ignores the superficial article in Wikipedia. Most people will not like or enjoy the experience, or devote the time, even to watch the film, Prospero's Books from start to finish, once.
You also have to be in the right mood and frame of mind to experience Monster's Ball the 2001 film which led to an Oscar, A Bafta, a Golden Globe, an MTV award and the Screen Actors Guild award for best female performance to Halle Berry. The film and the award has had its critics among inverted racists who as with the previous film failed to appreciate its brilliance in uncovering layers of human reality. For me this is a film about two individuals deciding that they could share their lives after having to cope with tragedies wish would destroy most people. Billy Boy Thornton lives with his openly racist father whose wife committed suicide. Billy Boy, a widower works with his son, played by the late Heath Ledger who came to the fore with Brokeback Mountain as prison officers, preparing for an execution (The Monster's Ball) which affects them both, but his son more so as he finds it difficult to cope with the event and father and son row, with the consequence that the son kills himself in the presence of his father. Before these events Billy Bob satisfies his sexual needs with functional experiences with a prostitute, but then he becomes impotent and his inability to cope with his life leads him to resign from his career job.
The executed prisoner is black and has committed a crime which justifies execution according to state law and it take places because there are no mitigating circumstances. The man desperately tries to convince his son that while he is has been a bad man the boy represents everything that is good in his life. The boy finds his father's death difficult to cope with and develops an eating disorder and then is fatally knocked down in a hit and run accident in the presence of his mother. Thornton passes by, as do other white drivers, but returns to try and help, having recognised the woman as working in a restaurant he visits. He takes the boy to hospital and after his death he begins a relationship with the mother, who is losing her home, using the rent money to buy alcohol. It is only after they become lovers that Thornton finds out she is the wife of the man he helped to execute, and she only finds this out after she has moved in with him after being evicted. The relationship also faced an early crisis when she visit his home and meets his father who treats her in a stereotype racist way toward a desirable black female. Thornton reacts by placing his diseased father in a nursing home. His father pleads with his son not to be left to die in this way to no avail. The film ends as the new couple sit out eating ice cream looking forward to a future together. In the 1950's British theatre, and much of British film drama and romance was contrived and controlled with at its best the Plays of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Then with Look Back in Anger and the plays of Arnold Wesker a contemporary reality was brought to stage and screen as people were shown to talk and behave as the majority. Room at the Top. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, together with Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey each concluded that one should seize any opportunity which becomes available but then be prepared to pay the price, which in some instances will last a lifetime. The combination of bringing home this reality and living with the threat of an annihilating third world war pushed people further into what is now described as the swinging sixties, although my experience was of generation who cared deeply about others and were prepared to do something about it as well as having some enjoyment with friends and lovers. The Monsters' Ball follows in that tradition of describing things as they are and despite all that had happened to them, and their own part in their respective downfalls, I felt this was a relationship that would not only last but remain meaningful. Neither would ever be able forget their past but the very experiences of pain and failure they had experienced separately would cement them together.
I write this in the early hours of Saturday as the wind howls to gale force with the prospect of reaching hurricane force in some part of the Northern England during the rest of the night. I go to bed content, not so much from the film or writing about them but from the sight of a pure black acyclic canvass. At present its seems wrong to add anything to it, even a signature of some kind on an edge. I feared this would happen. I can see myself wanting to abandon everything else and just explore what I can do and what I cannot.
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