Last Tango
Hey guys. Hope you're all well. Rob, as we discussed, I will be in with Courtney next Thursday night around midnight or so. I am flying in to SA at around 8:00, then have to rent a car, get Courtney and drive to Houston. I do not want to rent a hotel and I rather doubt that I'll be welcome to stay the night at Erica's apartment, so I must drive that night.
Mark, I sincerely hope that the trailer mortgage gets taken care of in the settlement of Dad's estate. This whole thing has really put a bitter taste in my mouth, to put it mildly, and I really hope that we can at least salvage this much out of it.
Not too much going on lately with me here in Florida. I went to Alabama earlier in the week for a Dept. of Labor audit of our office (it went fine) and stayed at the Palace Casino & Resort in Biloxi. I actually made $100 at the Blackjack table too. It was fun.
I have seen some pretty cool movies lately, too. I saw "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" when the girls were here and really really liked it. In fact, I liked it so much, I bought it and another movie by the same screenwriter Charles Kaufman, called "Adaptation" and liked it a whole lot, too. Really cool shit.
Now for a movie to avoid . . . Susan gave me Dad's DVD collection a few months back. In it are some cool movies as well as some bad ones. Dad seemed to be a fan of mindless dreck like Bruce Willis movies but he also had that Stanley Kubrick collection too. Well, he also had a movie that is considered by most critics to be one of the greatest movies of the 20th century, "Last Tango in Paris." I had been meaning to see it for a long time finally got around to watching it the other night.
Jesus wept.
It starts with an unkempt Marlon Brando as he stumbles along on a Paris street under a bridge. A train passes overhead and he holds his ears, winces from the noise and screams "fucking God!" That's it, those are the first words spoken in the movie, and, believe it or not, it goes downhill from there. It's about an angry, cynical and emotionally damaged man whose wife has just committed suicide (gee, I wonder why?) and how he manages to emerge from his existential despair only by sexually brutalizing a woman 25 years his junior. I almost cried when I watched the infamous "butter" scene, too. I cannot see how anyone who claims to love girls, women or even people in general could find anything at all to admire in this movie. I felt so dirty after watching this awful movie that I had to take a shower afterward. "Last Tango" is an ugly and morally repugnant movie.
Look, I'm not arguing that all movies should be "The Sound of Music" or "Forrest Gump" or anything like that. But neither do I think movies should push our noses in shit like this one does, either. I know that this kind of nihilistic stuff was all in vogue in Europe and America in the late 60s and early 70s and maybe, had I been 39 back when the movie came out in 1972, I would have been one of its cheerleaders. But the fact is that I am the product of a diferent time and this movie insulted so many things that I hold dear, things like the simple fact that life is a good thing and that it is in the main good to love other people and have them love you back that I just kind of mentally recoiled from it.
This movie shows--glories, actually--in a middle aged man who repeatedly rapes a 20 year old woman. The fact that he mutters a bunch of incoherent pseudo-existential crap while doing so does NOT make it art, either, and anyone who argues otherwise is a moral cretin.
This movie has a festering hole where its heart should be. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and don't.
Mark, I sincerely hope that the trailer mortgage gets taken care of in the settlement of Dad's estate. This whole thing has really put a bitter taste in my mouth, to put it mildly, and I really hope that we can at least salvage this much out of it.
Not too much going on lately with me here in Florida. I went to Alabama earlier in the week for a Dept. of Labor audit of our office (it went fine) and stayed at the Palace Casino & Resort in Biloxi. I actually made $100 at the Blackjack table too. It was fun.
I have seen some pretty cool movies lately, too. I saw "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" when the girls were here and really really liked it. In fact, I liked it so much, I bought it and another movie by the same screenwriter Charles Kaufman, called "Adaptation" and liked it a whole lot, too. Really cool shit.
Now for a movie to avoid . . . Susan gave me Dad's DVD collection a few months back. In it are some cool movies as well as some bad ones. Dad seemed to be a fan of mindless dreck like Bruce Willis movies but he also had that Stanley Kubrick collection too. Well, he also had a movie that is considered by most critics to be one of the greatest movies of the 20th century, "Last Tango in Paris." I had been meaning to see it for a long time finally got around to watching it the other night.
Jesus wept.
It starts with an unkempt Marlon Brando as he stumbles along on a Paris street under a bridge. A train passes overhead and he holds his ears, winces from the noise and screams "fucking God!" That's it, those are the first words spoken in the movie, and, believe it or not, it goes downhill from there. It's about an angry, cynical and emotionally damaged man whose wife has just committed suicide (gee, I wonder why?) and how he manages to emerge from his existential despair only by sexually brutalizing a woman 25 years his junior. I almost cried when I watched the infamous "butter" scene, too. I cannot see how anyone who claims to love girls, women or even people in general could find anything at all to admire in this movie. I felt so dirty after watching this awful movie that I had to take a shower afterward. "Last Tango" is an ugly and morally repugnant movie.
Look, I'm not arguing that all movies should be "The Sound of Music" or "Forrest Gump" or anything like that. But neither do I think movies should push our noses in shit like this one does, either. I know that this kind of nihilistic stuff was all in vogue in Europe and America in the late 60s and early 70s and maybe, had I been 39 back when the movie came out in 1972, I would have been one of its cheerleaders. But the fact is that I am the product of a diferent time and this movie insulted so many things that I hold dear, things like the simple fact that life is a good thing and that it is in the main good to love other people and have them love you back that I just kind of mentally recoiled from it.
This movie shows--glories, actually--in a middle aged man who repeatedly rapes a 20 year old woman. The fact that he mutters a bunch of incoherent pseudo-existential crap while doing so does NOT make it art, either, and anyone who argues otherwise is a moral cretin.
This movie has a festering hole where its heart should be. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and don't.
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