About: Bollywood/Hollywood a notable movie in that it is lighthearted, humorous, and family-oriented in nature, as opposed to director Deepa Mehta's other films which feature very serious themes and focus on social issues.
The film pokes fun at traditional Indian stereotypes, as well as at Bollywood (the film features several Bollywood-style song-and-dance numbers).
The film centers around the character of Rahul Seth (Rahul Khanna), a young, rich, Indo-Canadian living in Toronto whose widowed mother (Moushumi Chatterjee) is anxious to get him married after the freak-accidental death of his Caucasian pop singer girlfriend, Kimberly (Jessica Paré).
Furthermore, the mother proclaims that the impending wedding of her daughter Twinky (Rishma Malik) and Bobby will not take place until Rahul has found himself a bride first.
The pressure mounts on Rahul as he finds out that Twinky must get married to preserve the family's reputation because she is pregnant.
Rahul goes to a bar and there meets Sue (Lisa Ray). Thinking she is an escort, he hires her to pose as his fiancée.
Rahul eventually discovers that Sue is actually Indian (her name is short for Sunita), and despite his initial anger at her lie, the two grow closer -- due in no small part to a confidence boost Sue gave to Rahul's tormented younger brother, Govind, who incorrectly believes that no one cares about his welfare -- and eventually consider one another a fit match. Pleased, Mrs. Seth agrees to sanction Twinky's wedding.
Rahul and Sue grow more intimate, later to share stories about their pasts. It is revealed here that Sue was once offered as a bride to the well-meaning but dim-witted prizefighter known as Killer Khalsa; offended that her parents would even consider such a match, she has been playing mischief in revenge.
This mischief is not fully explained, but her liking for it is suggested by her audacity. Sue is quite immune to social norms; she speaks bluntly to all, particularly to Rocky, Rahul's driver, who she knows as a famous cross-dresser.
The blossoming romance is shaken, however, when Rahul is told that Sue was not only an escort, but a prostitute as well by a drunken friend at Bobby's bachelor party.
Sue is so hurt that he would question her honesty and integrity that she leaves him. He is forced to confess to his family that he never really courted Sue, but merely bribed her to act the part of his fiancee...
Source: Wikipedia
Tagline: Nothing is what it appears to be.
You might also enjoy: Bride & Prejudice
MAN OF LA MANCHA (1972)
About this film: Writer Miguel de Cervantes is arrested and tossed into a dungeon. The other prisoners stage a mock trial.
Cervantes wants to save his manuscript from being destroyed, so he stages his defense by telling them the story contained therein -- a tale of Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha.
The Interpreter
THE INTERPRETER
Silvia Broome: Do you think I'm making it up? Why would I report a threat I didn't hear?
Tobin Keller: People do.
Silvia Broome: I don't.
Tobin Keller: Some people like attention.
Silvia Broome: I don't.
Tobin Keller: Maybe you don't want Zuwanie at the U.N.
Silvia Broome: I didn't make it up.
Tobin Keller: How do you feel about him?
Silvia Broome: I don't care for him.
Tobin Keller: Wouldn't mind if he were dead?
Silvia Broome: I wouldn't mind if he were gone.
Tobin Keller: Same thing.
Silvia Broome: No, it isn't. If I interpreted gone as dead I'd be out of a job...
Tobin Keller: Your profession is playing with words, Ms. Broome.
Silvia Broome: I don't play with words.
Tobin Keller: You're doing it right now.
Silvia Broome: No. You are. If I wanted him dead, I wouldn't have reported it. I would sit back and let it happen.
...
Keller: Of all the people I've looked into since this thing started, the one with the darkest history is you.
From: The Interpreter
About: U.N. interpreter Silvia Broome allegedly overhears a death threat, "The Teacher will never leave this room alive," spoken in Ku, a rare African dialect that few people can understand.
The target, Silvia says, is Dr. Zuwanie, aka The Teacher, an African head of state, who'll soon be arriving in New York City to address a U.N. assembly.
Federal agent Tobin Keller is assigned to investigate Sylvia's claim; he thinks she's either confused or lying, but as he delves deeper into the mystery, he believes that she's telling the truth -- an assassination attempt will take place.
But as Keller digs deeper into Sylvia's troubled past and current links with the war-torn country of Matobo, he's troubled by suspicions that
Sylvia herself might be part of the conspiracy.
After a NYC bus is decimated in a possible terrorist attack, Keller races to uncover the truth, before it's too late: Who is Silvia? Is she a victim? A killer? Is she just an unwitting pawn in a violent political conspiracy? Or is she something else entirely? Starring Nicole Kidman, Catherine Keener, Sean Penn.
Tagline: The truth needs no translation.
Trivia: Ku is not a real language; it was created by the filmmakers, based on the basic grammar and vocabulary of Swahili and Shona.
You might also like:
The Parallax View
Shiri
Aeon Flux
AEON FLUX
Aeon: [narrating] Some called Bregna the perfect society. Some call it the height of human civilization. But others know better.
The Goodchilds built Bregna to ensure us a future. They built the Relical, a memorial to remind us of what we've survived. They built walls to protect us.
They tell us that outside, nature has retaken the world. But the real problems lie within. We are haunted by sorrows we cannot name. People disappear and our government denies these crimes. The Goodchild regime provides for us, as long as we stay quiet.
So we trade freedom for a gilded cage. But there are rebels who refuse to make that trade, who fight to overthrow a goverment that silences us, who fight in the name of the disappeared. They call themselves the Monicans. I am one of them.
...
Aeon: I had a family once. I had a life. Now all I have is a mission.
From: "Aeon Flux"
About: When disease wipes out most of the earth's population, there is only one city left; the protected city-state of Bregna.
Trading safety for freedom, the citizens of Bregna are completely controlled by the governing powers.
When underground rebel Aeon Flux is sent on a mission to assassinate a government leader, she discovers that there's much more at stake for the surviving human race than the death of a single man. Directed by Karyn Kusama.
Tagline: The future is flux./The perfect world meets the perfect assassin.
Other titles you might like: La Femme Nikita; The Long Kiss Goodnight; Shiri;
The Parallax View; The Terrorist; Ultraviolet;
Underworld
Ultraviolet
ULTRAVIOLET
Hemophage 2: How can you hope to defeat us? We're as strong as you.
Hemophage 1: We're as fast as you.
Violet: But are you one-tenth as pissed off as I am?
...
Violet: I think I had to know what I was willing to die for.
...
Violet: The only reason I saved your life is because whatever's in your blood can save mine. If they corner us, suffer no delusions; I will kill you.
...
Violet: Nothing can stop me.
From: Ultraviolet
About: Instead of creating a breed of tougher warriors, a genetically-engineered virus turns humans into Hemophages, a sub-species with superhuman abilities.
Sensing a threat to the stability of the ruling powers, a totalitarian dictator orders that Hemophages be exterminated on sight.
A single warrior survives; Violet, who has to save her life and that of a young boy, who might be carrying the only antidote that can make her human again. Starring Milla Jovovich.
You might also like: Aeon Flux; The Fifth Element; Underworld
The Reckoning
THE RECKONING
Lord De Guise: Do you really believe that your God has the power to protect you?
Nicholas: No. Nor the inclination.
Lord De Guise: Ah. Then what kind of God is that?
Nicholas: The kind who allows innocent children to be murdered.
From: The Reckoning
About: In 14th-century England, a disgraced priest joins a band of traveling players. They travel from town to town, performing their plays.
They arrive in a town where a deaf-mute girl has been condemned for witchcraft and murder.
Intrigued by the story, the actors stage a performance based on the crime; based on the re-enactment, they realize that the accused girl must be innocent.
The fugitive priest sees a chance to redeem himself, and sets out to save an innocent woman from death, even if it costs him his own life.
Starring Willem Dafoe, Vincent Cassel.
Lt. Green: If you keep knocking on the Devil's door long enough, somebody's gonna answer you.
From: Four Brothers
About: Four juvenile delinquents are adopted by a social worker. Years laters, they return to town together, to uncover the real reason for their mother's violent death.
Tagline: They came home to bury mom...and her killers.
Will: Look at me. Look at what I've become. I sometimes don't talk to another living soul for fucking days, weeks. I'm always on the move. I trust no one, nothing.
And it's got fuck-all to do with escape or withdrawal or fear. It's grief. For a life wasted. And now there's Davey. Another fucking wasted life. And I'm gonna find out why.
From: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
About: Will Graham is a former gangster who tries to make amends for his violent past, by walking away from everything he knew.
He's living in isolation in the remote countryside, when he hears that his younger brother has died. Will returns to his life of crime to find out the truth about his brother's death.
Tagline: For three long years, Will Graham led a quiet life. Things are about to change.
As a young woman, Camille Claudel (b. December 8, 1864 – d. October 19, 1943) was recognized for both her artistic talent and her physical beauty; nevertheless, she spent most of her adult life as a recluse.
Her love for portraying the human form resulted in certain sculptures that the state and an infuriated press censored as overly sensual and inappropriate for public display.
These circumstances may have contributed to the decline of her career and her mental state. In 1913 Claudel was committed to a mental asylum, where she remained until her death 30 years later.
Source: NMWA
"Je réclame la liberté à grands cris."
- Camille Claudel
Lytton Strachey: I tend to be impulsive in these matters, like the time I asked Virginia Woolf to marry me.
Dora Carrington: She turned you down?
Lytton Strachey: No, she accepted. It was ghastly.
Lytton Strachey: I must say, I find these new young people wonderfully refreshing, they have no morals and they never speak. It's an enchanting combination.
Lytton Strachey: If this is dying, I don't think much of it.
from: Carrington (1995)
Tagline: She had many lovers but only one love.
About: Movie based on the long-term relationship between painter/Bloomsbury bohemian Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey. Platonic, due to Strachey's homosexuality, their complex friendship lasted until Lytton Strachey's death in 1932.
Devastated by Strachey's death, Carrington died shortly thereafter, at the age of 38.
Based on the chaotic love affair between novelist George Sand ("Indiana") and poet/dramatist Alfred de Musset. His autobiographical work, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle(1835), is a fictionalized account of the relationship.
About: Sand was a disciplined writer, and as a divorced woman at a time when all property belonged solely to the husband, she wrote to support herself and the children.
De Musset had a destructive personality and found solace in opium and prostitutes. These differences came to a climax during a sojourn in Venice, a time that brought de Musset to the brink of death and Sand to another lover.
Source: Marta Barber/Miami Herald
"My profession is to be free."
- George Sand
Trivia: The film was shot in the actual rooms at Hotel Danieli which Sand and de Musset stayed in while they were in Venice. Co-leads Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel were a couple in real life.
Helene Hanff: I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to.
George Martin: How's the tea coming along?
Cecily Farr: It's almost ready
George Martin: What would we do without our cups of tea. Life would be insupportable, would it not?
Businessman on plane: Your first trip to London?
Helene Hanff: Yes.
Businessman on plane: You want a word of advice? Don't trust the cab drivers; they'll take you five miles to go three blocks...and, uh, don't waste your time looking at a street map. Nobody can find their way around London -- not even Londoners.
Helene Hanff: Maybe I should go to Baltimore instead.
Businessman on plane: No; you'll enjoy it. London's a great place. What kind of trip is it, business or pleasure?
Helene Hanff: Unfinished business.
From: 84 Charing Cross Road
About: A writer living in New York contacts a bookseller in London, igniting a long-distance friendship that lasts for two decades.
84 Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between Hanff and Frank Doel of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers located at the eponymous address in London, England.
Hanff, in search of obscure classics and British literature titles she had been unable to find in New York City, noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature and first contacted the shop in 1949, and it fell to Doel to fulfill her requests.
In time, a long-distance friendship evolved, not only between the two, but between Hanff and other staff members as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts, and food parcels to compensate for post-World War II food shortages in England.
Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed.
Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. A circular brass plaque on the building that now stands on the shop's former site acknowledges the story
Source: Wikipedia
Trivia: Based on the memoirs of screenwriter Helen Hanff.
[first lines]
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: [voiceover] My journey to maturity began in New York, in 1928. I was married to Charles Rawlings, the newspaper man and yachting enthusiast. I had been trying to write stories that I thought would be most likely to sell -- gothic romances were extremely popular -- and I had written dozens. I was desperate to express myself. Even as a child I'd been consumed with the desire to be a writer.
Tagline: The portrait of a woman who, at the edge of survival, found a world of meaning.
About: Journalist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings leaves her husband and career and moves to Florida to write her first novel.
The film opens in 1928 in New York State, where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Mary Steenburgen) advises her husband that her last book was rejected by a publisher, and she has bought an orange grove in Florida and is leaving him to go there.
She drives to the nearest town alone, and arrives in time for her car to die. Local resident Norton Baskin takes her the rest of the distance to a dilapidated and overgrown cabin attached to an even more overgrown orange grove. Despite Baskin's (and her own) doubts, she stays and begins to fix up the property.
The local residents of "the Creek" begin to interact with her. The grove languishes below her expectations and Rawlings writes another novel, hoping to get it published.
Rawlings submits her novel, a gothic romance, to Max Perkins, and it is rejected again. He writes her in return to tell her to write him stories about the people she describes so well in her letters, instead of the popular English governess stories she has been writing.
She does so immediately, beginning with telling the story of an impoverished young married couple (eventually becoming "Jacob's Ladder" published in Scribner's Magazine in 1931).
Max Perkins visits and accepts her story ("Jacob's Ladder"). Baskin asks Rawlings to marry him, and she accepts after much hesitation about her independence. Rawlings realizes her profound attachment to the land at Cross Creek, and her stories about Cross Creek become the basis for The Yearling. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
Source: Wikipedia
Calendar Girls (2003)
CALENDAR GIRLS
Cora: It's not naked. It's nude.
Marie: What's the difference?
Celia: Art.
Annie: None of us have been here before, love. I mean, for God's sake, my John didn't see me naked until the spring of 1975.
Chris: What happened in the spring of '75?
Annie: There was a lizard in the shower block at Abergele. Quite a few people saw me naked that morning.
[matter-of-factly, to Jessie, over breakfast]
Richard: You're nude in the Telegraph, dear. Can you pass the bacon?
[viciously]
Chris: You know, loads of people lose their partners to this disease; I bet they don’t all get fan mail. Doesn’t that make you a little bit of a success? A very successful bereaved woman. A celebrity widow. Saint Annie of Knapley. Eh? Eh?
Annie: I’m not a saint. Because I’d rob every penny from this calendar, if it would buy me just one more hour with him.
Chris: I don’t know what to say to her.
Rod: She’s your oldest friend, Chris. You don’t have to say anything.
From: Calendar Girls
About: A funny and touching dramedy about a group of women who work together to raise funds to buy an offbeat memorial for an old friend.
The Women's Institute (W.I.) in North Yorkshire produces a fundraising calendar each year; usually a bland calendar featuring images of the Yorkshire dales.
In 1999, the partner of one of the W.I. members is diagnosed with leukemia. As he goes through rounds of chemotherapy, he jokes that if the ladies plant sunflower seeds, he'll have to get better so that he'll be around to see them bloom.
His condition worsens and he dies. In order to raise funds to buy a memorial couch for the hospital visitor's lounge, the women decide to create a calendar of themselves in the nude.
They hope that they can sell a few hundred copies around their village, to raise funds to buy the sofa and have enough left over to donate money to organizations supporting leukemia research.
They get a little more than they bargained for...
The movie co-stars Helen Mirren (Prime Suspect) and Julie Walters (Billy Elliot). DVD extras include two mini-documentaries about the real calendar girls.
Tagline: They dropped everything for a good cause.
Trivia: The members of music group Anthrax make a cameo appearance.
The film is based on a true story. The W.I. calendar became an unexpected hit, and raised more than a million dollarss -- enough to pay for a new leukemia unit at the local hospital. And, as noted in the closing credits, a new sofa, too.
If you enjoyed this film, you might also like: Billy Elliot; Blow Dry; The Full Monty; Saving Grace
Stage Beauty
STAGE BEAUTY
Maria: Your old tutor did you a great disservice, Mr. Kynaston. He taught you how to speak, and swoon, and toss your head but he never taught you how to suffer like a woman, or love like a woman.
He trapped a man in a woman's form and left you there to die. I always hated you as Desdemona. You never fought. You just died, beautifully. No woman would die like that, no matter how much she loved him. A woman would fight.
From: Stage Beauty
About: Kynaston is one of the leading actors of his day, famed for his portrayal of female characters, particularly Desdemona in Othello.
His loyal dresser Maria longs to perform on stage but is forbidden to do so by law. Only men are allowed to play female roles.
Kynaston's rant against allowing women on stage is overheard by Nell Gwynne, King Charles II's mistress, and she convinces Charles to ban men from playing female roles.
Maria finally has her chance to take the stage, but she needs help to prepare for a role she's never acted before; she asks Kynaston, who initially despises her, but finally relents.
Their work together teaches them both about what it's really like to be a woman -- or a man.
New York Times investigative reporter Nicholas Gage returns to Greece to track down the men who tortured and executed his mother.
About: The movie is based on the book Eleni, the real-life story of Eleni Gatzoyiannis.
The mother loved her children enough to die for them. The son loved his mother enough to kill for her. In both stories it was children who transformed the situation. The power of forgiveness bent me in half.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon.com
I don't generally award 10 stars. But this true account of a mother's struggle in post-war Greece has haunted me for over twenty years. Since becoming a parent myself, I have often thought of her great sacrifice. It is a great mystery to me why this fantastic film has virtually disappeared from circulation. It's one of the most perfectly realized films you'll come across. The acting, direction, and photography are superb. Much of the opposition to the film in 1985 came from critics who insinuated an anti-Marxist political bias. They missed the point. The film depicts the story of a mother removed from the political machinations that are grinding around her. Eleni wasn't a reactionary, she was a loving mother.
Source: User Reviews/IMDB
Paco: You’re the height of selfishness! Can’t you think about anyone but yourself?
Leo: No.
from: The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Original title: La Flor de mi Secreto
Tagline: Every woman has a secret.
About: The Flower of My Secret tells the story of a romance writer whose own real-life romance is falling apart...[Marisa Paredes] runs the gamut of every possible emotion and creates a character that is memorable and moving.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon.com
Review(s): I agree with what the second reviewer says about this sensitive, passionate, lyrical portrayal of a courageous, strong, disciplined woman...the betrayals she suffers are as profound as her love is...Nothing misfired about this genuine masterpiece.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon.com
Lovely and touching...and maybe those aren't words fans normally associate with Almodovar... I disagree with the reviewer who termed this a misfire -- it's simply a more thoughtful film by this usually over-the-top director. Marissa Paredes shows stunning range as the main character -- at times both critically stung and deeply needy and yet passionate and cocky; boy, do you root for her. And the scene in which she is literally pushed by a mob of protesters into the arms of the man she could be truly happy with is one of the best in movies.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon.com
Trivia: Flamenco superstar Joaquín Cortés plays a supporting role as a moody, streetwise dancer. Flamenco legend Manuela Vargas plays his mother.
Frida Kahlo: At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.
Frida Kahlo: I just want your serious opinion.
Diego Rivera: What do you care about my opinion? If you're a real painter, you'll paint because you can't live without painting. You'll paint till you die.
Diego Rivera: There was this skinny kid with these eyebrows shouting up at me, "Diego, I want to show you my paintings!" But, of course, she made me come down to her, and I did, and I've never stopped looking. But I want to speak about Frida not as her husband, but as an artist. I admire her. Her work is acid and tender...hard as steel...and fine as a butterfly's wing. Loveable as a smile...cruel as...the bitterness of life. I don't believe...that ever before has a women put such agonized poetry on canvas.
Frida Kahlo: [as she's brought into the gallery] Shut up, panzon. Who died?
Frida Kahlo: I had two big accidents in my life Diego, the trolley and you...You are by far the worse.
Guillermo Kahlo: Who's there?
Frida Kahlo: The ghost of Frida Kahlo.
Guillermo Kahlo: I knew her!
Frida Kahlo: How are you?
Guillermo Kahlo: Lonely. Only you ghosts come to visit these days.
[last title card]
Title card: I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return. - Frida
From: Frida (2002)
From 1926 until her death, painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life. She did not originally plan to become an artist.
A polio survivor, at 15 Kahlo entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City.
However, this training ended three years later when Kahlo was gravely hurt in a bus accident.
She spent over a year in bed, recovering from fractures of her back, collarbone, and ribs, as well as a shattered pelvis and shoulder and foot injuries.
Despite more than 30 subsequent operations, Kahlo spent the rest of her life in constant pain, finally succumbing to related complications at age 47.
Source: NMWA
No, poetry. And an enduring horror classic; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written on a literary bet during a summer retreat in Geneva, Switzerland.
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and Dr. John Polidori spent the summer of 1816 together; Byron dared each of them to write a horror story.
Polidori wrote The Vampyre. Mary Godwin (she married Percy Shelley in December of 1816) wrote the classic horror novel, Frankenstein.
Trivia: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a 19th century feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and philosopher/novelist William Godwin.
Mary Godwin married Percy Shelley in December 1816. They settled in Italy (1818), living in Rome, Florence and Pisa. Percy Shelley died only four years later, in the summer of 1822.
Miguel de Cervantes: I'm a poet.
The Duke: They're putting people in prison for that?
Miguel de Cervantes: No, no, no, not for that.
The Duke: Too bad.
Miguel de Cervantes: I shall impersonate a man. His name is Alonso Quijana, a country squire no longer young. Being retired, he has much time for books.
He studies them from morn till night and often through the night and morn again, and all he reads oppresses him; fills him with indignation at man's murderous ways toward man.
He ponders the problem of how to make better a world where evil brings profit and virtue none at all; where fraud and deceit are mingled with truth and sincerity.
He broods and broods and broods and broods and finally his brains dry up. He lays down the melancholy burden of sanity and conceives the strangest project ever imagined -- to become a knight-errant, and sally forth into the world in search of adventures; to mount a crusade; to raise up the weak and those in need.
No longer will he be plain Alonso Quijana, but a dauntless knight known as Don Quixote de La Mancha.
Aldonza: You know what the worst crime of all is? Being born. For that you get punished your whole life.
Don Quixote: Not well? What is illness to the body of a knight-errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls, he shall rise again, and woe to the wicked.
Miguel de Cervantes: I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning "Why?"
I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams -- this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. But maddest of all -- to see life as it is and not as it should be.
From: Man of La Mancha (1972)
About: Writer Miguel de Cervantes is arrested and tossed into a dungeon. The other prisoners stage a mock trial.
Cervantes wants to save his manuscript from being destroyed, so he stages his defense by telling them the story contained therein -- a tale of Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha.
Joyeux Noël/Merry Christmas
JOYEUX NOEL/MERRY CHRISTMAS
Horstmayer: [Speaking to Lieutenant Audebert and his troops] Our artillery will shell you in 10 minutes, so I suggest you come shelter in my trench.
Le Major: Everyone to their posts!
Gordon: [a moment of indecision] Every man to his post!
Le Major: Quickly!
[the Scottish soldiers get in position along the trench wall]
German Soldiers: [Someone in the German trench stands up and walks into No Man's Land] No, stay here! What're you doing? Come back!
Le Major: Well, what the hell are you doing! Shoot the bloody Kraut!
[the Scottish soldiers look at each other; they don't fire]
Le Major: What are you waiting for? Shoot him, God damn it! Holidays are over!
[the soldiers shoot in the air to warn the man in No Man's Land, who begins to run toward the French trench]
Le Major: What the hell do you think you're playing at? Shoot him!
[Again the soldiers look at each other, shake their heads, and don't fire]
Le Major: Shoot him!
[Jonathan shoots the man, who falls midway between the French and German trenches]
Le Major: Stand down from your posts.
[They do]
Le Major: Shame on you, Gordon. Shame on you.
[Ponchel's alarm clock rings in No Man's Land. Gordon looks out to see Lieutenant Audebert running to help the man Jonathan shot -- Ponchel in a German uniform]
Ponchel: Be silly to die disguised as a German, eh?
Lieutenant Audebert: What the devil were you doing?
Ponchel: I had a German help me. I saw my mother. We drank a coffee, just like before...You have a son.
[Lieutenant Audebert can no longer keep from crying]
Ponchel: His name is Henri.
[Ponchel dies, and Lieutenant Audebert sobs even harder. Gordon and the Major look on from their trench, Gordon grave, the Major baffled]
[the Lieutenant lights a lamp, revealing the General seated in a corner. The Lieutenant notices him, resigns himself]
General Audebert: How did you let yourself...
Lieutenant Audebert: If you came to preach, leave now!
General Audebert: Don't you realize the gravity of this? It's high treason! Punishable by death.
[the Lieutenant just looks at him for a moment, continues with his business]
General Audebert: Only we can't execture 200 men. That's all that saves you. Not counting all the other cases of fraternization reported since. If public opinion hears of this...
Lieutenant Audebert: Have no fear, no one here will tell.
General Audebert: I hope not! Who'd want to?
Lieutenant Audebert: Want to? The men involved feel no shame. If they won't tell, it's because no one would believe or understand.
General Audebert: I don't understand you. Carousing with the enemy while the country's partly occupied!
Lieutenant Audebert: The country? What does it know of what we suffer here? Of what we do without complaint? Let me tell you, I felt closer to the Germans than those who cry, "Kill the Krauts!" before their stuffed turkey!
General Audebert: You're talking nonsense.
Lieutenant Audebert: No, you're just not living the same war as me.
Tagline(s): December, 1914. A true story which history forgot./Without an enemy there can be no war.
About: During World War I, as Christmas Eve, 1914, approaches, soldiers in the trenches defy the orders of their superior officers to declare a temporary ceasefire for Christmas Eve.
The men share rations, drink together, swap chocolates and cigarettes, play soccer in No Man's Land, and help each other bury their dead. Based on actual events during the Christmas Truce of 1914.
Trivia: Benno Fürmann, who plays Nikolaus, starred in Der Krieger und die Kaiserin/The Princess and the Warrior.
The song the soldiers sing is "Christmas in the Trenches," by folk singer John McCutcheon.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes,
and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away
from families of their own
...
Soon daylight stole upon us
and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared
to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart
that lived that wonderous night:
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
...
My name is Francis Tolliver,
in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I,
I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots
won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same
Movie based on the complicated, real-life love triangle between writers Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Miller's eccentric wife, June.
Anaïs Nin is best known for her diaries but also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style, as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception.
Source: Anais-Nin.de
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."
- Anaïs Nin
Mallefille: You promised to love me.
George Sand: I didn't promise to succeed.
Baroness Laginsky: I knew your father when he was young.
George Sand: Really.
Baroness Laginsky: Oh, yes. We girls were enraged when we heard he'd married that dancer, or whatever she was.
George Sand: You mean my mother.
Marie: She's in love with Chopin.
Franz Lizst: The Polish corpse?
George Sand: I am not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love. That is all.
Alfred de Musset: Her memoirs? Am I in it?
Publisher: No. It's about her childhood. I expect you come in later, after she chews up her husband, and about a hundred other fellows.
Alfred de Musset: It's true. She's a cannibal. She would drink the blood of her children, from the skull of her lover, and not feel so much as a stomach-ache.
Publisher: [exasperated] Alfred, go home. Put it into verse. I'll publish it -- and then, and only then, will you get paid.
George Sand: Always had disastrous relationships. And I never manage to stay in love.
Frederic Chopin: What?
George Sand: I don't know. I want too much, I think. Except when I hear you play.
Frederic Chopin: Well, we're no longer engaged. Uhm, her family didn't feel that I was a very good risk for a husband. You know, no one really expects me to live very long.
George Sand: Balls.
Frederic Chopin: I beg your pardon?
George Sand: I don't believe you're ill at all. You just need more strength. Take mine. Really -- I have too much of it.
Marie D'Agoult: He hasn't fallen in love with her, he has succumbed to her.
George Sand: We shall all be in our graves soon enough, but Chopin is eternal.
From: Impromptu (1991)
About: Based on the real-life love affair between writer George Sand and composer Frédéric Chopin.
"The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession."
- George Sand
Hildy Johnson: I just said I'd write it, I didn't say I wouldn't tear it up. It's all in little pieces now, Walter, and I hope to do the same for you some day. [She hangs up emphatically].
And that, my friends, is my farewell to the newspaper game.
Hildy Johnson: [Hildy's on the phone telling Walter how Earl Williams escsaped] Of course he had to have a gun to re-enact the crime with. And who do you think supplied it? Peter B. Hartwell. B For brains.
Wilson, reporter: Any dope on how he escaped?
McCue, reporter: Maybe the sheriff let him out so Williams could vote for him.
Hildy Johnson: [speaking to Walter on the phone]: There ain't going to be any interview and there ain't going to be any story. And that certified check of yours is leaving with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn't cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up.
Walter Burns: Hey, Duffy, listen. Is there any way we can stop the 4:00 train to Albany from leaving town?
Duffy - Copy Editor: We might dynamite it.
Walter Burns: Could we?
Walter Burns: We've been in worse jams than this before, haven't we, Hildy?
Hildy Johnson: Nope.
From: His Girl Friday (1940)
About: Screwball comedy about feuding newspaper reporters. Walter Burns (Cary Grant) is a hard-boiled editor for The Morning Post whose ex-wife and former star reporter, Hildegard "Hildy" Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is about to marry bland insurance man Bruce Baldwin and settle down to a quiet life as a wife and mother in Albany, New York -- but Burns has other ideas.
He tries every dirty trick in the book to stop Hildy from going off with Bruce, but none of them work.
When Hildy is on the scene during a jail break, she knows it's a hot story. Her reporter's instincts hit full boil and she calls in the tip.
Walter realizes he's got one last trick up his sleeve, and it's the only one that might actually work -- finagling Hildy into covering one last story...
Source: Wikipedia
Young John Bayley: I could get in trouble, having women in my room.
Young Iris Murdoch: I wouldn't say you'd had me, just yet.
Young Iris Murdoch: [to John] You know more about me than anyone. You are my world.
Iris Murdoch: There is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever -- that of the mind.
From: Iris
Tagline: Her greatest talent was for life.
About: Iris is a biopic that tells the story of Irish novelist Iris Murdoch and her relationship with John Bayley.
The film contrasts the start of their relationship, when Murdoch (Kate Winslet) was an outgoing, dominant individual as compared to her timid and scholarly partner Bayley (Hugh Bonneville), and their later life, when Murdoch (Dame Judi Dench) was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and tended to by a frustrated Bayley (Jim Broadbent) in their North Oxford home in Charlbury Road.
The film is based on Bayley's memoir, Elegy for Iris.
It was at Oxford in 1956 that she met and married John Bayley, a professor of English literature and also a novelist. She went on to produce 25 more novels and other works of philosophy and drama until 1995, when she began to suffer the early effects of Alzheimer's disease, which she at first attributed to writer's block.
Source: Wikipedia
Iris Murdoch wrote her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954, having previously published works on philosophy, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre.
She went on to produce more than twenty novels until 1995, when she began a four-year descent into Alzheimer's disease. She died in February, 1999.
Mansfield Park (1999)
Henry Crawford: There is only one happiness in life -- to love and be loved.
Fanny Price: Mr. Crawford, do not speak nonsense.
Henry Crawford: Nonsense?
Fanny Price: You are such a fine speaker that I'm afraid you may actually end in convincing yourself.
Henry Crawford: Fanny. You are killing me.
Fanny Price: No man dies of love but on the stage.
From: "Mansfield Park" (1999)
About: As a child, Fanny Price is sent away by her penniless famiy, to be raised by distant relatives, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. Despite her unstable social position, Fanny is determined to become a writer -- if only life would stop disrupting her plans...
Based on the novel by Jane Austen. Written and directed by Patricia Rozema.
First Official: One, you are legally dead and therefore cannot hold any property whatsoever.
Orlando: Ah. Fine.
First Official: Two, you are now a female.
Second Official: Which amounts to much the same thing.
The Khan: It has been said to me that the English make a habit of collecting...countries.
Archduke Harry: I'm offering you my hand.
Orlando: Oh! Archduke. That's very kind of you, yes. I cannot accept.
Archduke Harry: But I am England. And you are mine.
Orlando: I see. On what grounds?
Archduke Harry: That I adore you.
Shelmerdine: You're hurt ma'am.
Orlando: I'm dead, sir.
Shelmerdine: Dead. That's serious. Can I help?
Orlando: If I were a man...
Shelmerdine: You?
Orlando: I might choose not to risk my life for an uncertain cause. I might think that freedom won by death is not worth having. In fact...
Shelmerdine: You might choose not to be a real man at all. Say, if I were a woman...
Orlando: You?
Shelmerdine: I might choose not to sacrifice my life caring for my children, nor my children's children, nor to drown anonymously in the milk of female kindness, but instead, say, to go abroad. Would I then be...
Orlando: A real woman?
Orlando: Same person. No difference at all... just a different sex.
Narrator: She's lived for 400 years and hardly aged a day; but, because this is England, everyone pretends not to notice.
From: Orlando (1993)
About: Orlando is a drama and wry comedy based on Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, Billy Zane as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth.
Immortal youth Orlando learns about politics, war, sex, society, and birth -- first as a man, then again as a woman. A visually stunning, clever commentary on gender and society.
Christabel LaMotte: [voiceover] Dear Mr. Ash: I live circumscribed and self-communing. It is best so; not like a princess in the thicket, more like a spider in her web, inclined to snap at visitors or trespassers, not perceiving the distinction until too late. Thus it is unwise to call.
Christabel LaMotte: No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Roland Michell: There's no such thing as poets anymore.
[as Roland strips off, ready to dive underwater to follow a clue to the mystery]
Maude: Uhm...I realize this is a very repressed, British thing to say, but what the hell are you doing?
Roland Michell: How else are we going to find out if there's a cave?
[Dives into the water]
Maude: We could...ask someone.
Roland Michell: So what are we gonna do now? We gonna try to beat'em to France, or...or are we just gonna stare at each other?
Maude: That is the question, isn't it?
Roland Michell: Mm-hmmm.
Maude: I have another one for you.
Roland Michell: What's that?
Maude: What are you really doing here?
Roland Michell: Well, I uh -- I needed to see your face.
from: Possession (2002)
Tagline: A love that transcends time.
About: Possession is a literary drama written and directed by Neil LaBute, based on the novel of the same name by A. S. Byatt.
The film tells the story of two scholars, Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who investigate the affair of fictional Victorian era poet Randolph Henry Ash, described in letters between Ash and another fictional poet, Christabel LaMotte.
Source: Wikipedia
Sense & Sensibility
SENSE & SENSIBILITY
Marianne: Did you see him? He expressed himself well, did he not?
Mrs. Dashwood: With great decorum and honour.
Marianne: And spirit and wit and feeling!
Elinor: And economy -- ten words at most.
Elinor Dashwood: You have no confidence in me.
Marianne: This reproach from you. You who confide in no one.
Elinor Dashwood: I have nothing to tell.
Marianne: Nor I. Neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing and you because you communicate nothing.
Elinor Dashwood: What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering? For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.
Elinor Dashwood: Would you have him treat her even worse than Willoughby has treated you?
Marianne: No. But nor would I have him marry someone he does not love.
Edward Ferrars: Perhaps Margaret is right. Piracy is our only option.
Elinor Dashwood: Whatever his past actions, whatever his present course...at least you may be certain that he loved you.
Marianne: But not enough.
From: Sense & Sensibility
About: Sense and Sensibility is a period drama film directed by Ang Lee. The screenplay by Emma Thompson is based on the 1811 novel of the same name by Jane Austen.
When Mr. Dashwood dies, his wife and three daughters -- Elinor, Marianne and Margaret -- learn that their inheritance consists of only £500 a year, with the bulk of the estate of Norland Park left to his son John.
John's greedy wife Fanny installs herself and her spouse in the palatial home and invites her brother Edward Ferrars to stay with them. She frets about the budding friendship between Edward and Elinor and does everything she can to prevent it from developing.
Sir John Middleton, a cousin of the widowed Mrs. Dashwood, offers her a small cottage house on his estate, Barton Park in Devonshire and she and her daughters move in.
It is here that Marianne meets the older Colonel Brandon, who falls in love with her at first sight. Competing with him for her affections is the dashing but deceitful John Willoughby, who steals Marianne's heart.
Source: Wikipedia
The screenplay for the film took Emma Thompson four years to write. The film explores the difference in temperament between the quiet dignity of sister Elinor and the impulsive nature of Marianne -- sense and sensibility.
Shakespeare In Love
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
[on first hearing the tragic ending to Romeo and Juliet]
Philip Henslowe: Well, that will have them rolling in the aisles.
[Rival theater manager] Richard Burbage: The Master of the Revels despises us all for vagrants and peddlers of bombast.
But my father, James Burbage, had the first license to make a company of players from Her Majesty, and he drew from poets the literature of the age.
We must show them that we are men of parts. Will Shakespeare has a play. I have a theatre. The curtain is yours.
Viola De Lesseps: Write me well.
[Saying their goodbyes]
William Shakespeare: You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die.
[last lines]
William Shakespeare: My story starts at sea...a perilous voyage to an unknown land...a shipwreck. The wild waters roar and heave, the brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned...all save one...a lady, whose soul is greater than the ocean, and her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace. Not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story, for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola.
From: Shakespeare In Love
Tagline(s): A comedy about the greatest love story almost never told./Love is the only inspiration.
About: Set in London, in the 16th century. The manager of a failing theater is hounded by creditors, and his playwright, Will Shakespeare, has writer's block. He's all out of inspiration as he tries struggles to write a new play.
Young gentlewoman Viola loves the theater, and auditions for a part, disguised as a boy. Will thinks he's found a great actor for the new play. Viola thinks she's met the man of her dreams -- except that she's engaged to marry the oafish Lord Wessex.
Dramedy ensues, as the forbidden love affair provides fresh inspiration for Will's new play: Romeo and Juliet.
C.S. Lewis: Yesterday, a friend of mine, a very brave, good woman, collapsed in terrible pain. One minute she was fit and well, the next minute she was in agony. [...] Why? See, if you love someone, you don't want them to suffer. You can't bear it. You want to take their suffering onto yourself. If even I feel like that -- why doesn't God?
Harry: But she's not--
C. S. Lewis: Not my wife. No, how could she be? I'd have to love her, wouldn't I? She'd have to be more important to me than anything else in this world. I'd have to be suffering the torments of the damned.
Harry: Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.
C. S. Lewis: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.
C.S. Lewis: What's happening to me, Warnie? I can't see her anymore. I can't remember her face.
Warnie: I expect it's shock.
C.S. Lewis: I'm so afraid of never seeing her again. Of thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause. No purpose. No pattern.
Warnie: I don't know what to tell you.
C.S. Lewis: Nothing. There's nothing to say. I know that now. I've just come up against a bit of experience. Experience is a brutal teacher. But you learn.
Father John Fisher: Only God knows why these things have to happen, Jack.
C.S. Lewis: God knows, but does God care?
Father John Fisher: Of course. We see so little here. We're not the creator.
C.S. Lewis: Yes, we're the creatures, aren't we? We're the rats in the cosmic laboratory. I've no doubt the experiment is for our own good, but it still makes God the vivisectionist, doesn't it?
Harry: Jack...
C.S. Lewis: No. It won't do. It's this bloody awful mess, and that's all there is to it. I'm sorry. I am sorry. Just not fit company tonight, that's all.
C.S. Lewis: Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore, only the life I've lived.
From: Shadowlands (1993)
Set in the 1950s, the film focuses on reserved, lifelong bachelor C.S. Lewis, an Oxford University academic and author of The Chronicles of Narnia series of children's books, and his relationship with divorced American poet Joy Gresham.
What begins as a formal meeting of two very different minds slowly develops into an intense feeling of connection and love. Lewis finds his quiet life with his brother Warnie disrupted by the outspoken, feisty Gresham, whose uninhibited behavior offers a sharp contrast to the rigid sensibilities of the male-dominated university. Each provides the other with new ways of viewing the world.
Initially their marriage is one of convenience, a platonic union between friends designed to allow Gresham to remain in England. But when she becomes seriously ill, Lewis is shocked to realize that his true feelings run much deeper. Lewis' faith is tested as he tries to reconcile his belief in a just God with the very real suffering of someone he loves.
Source: Wikipedia
"Your bid -- for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity -- will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."
"...Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy [...] you will be -- or so it feels -- welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this.
What can this mean? [...] I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' I know. Does that make it easier to understand? Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like...'"
From: A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis
Trivia: C.S. Lewis was called "Jack" by close friends, among them J.R.R. Tolkien.
Vanity Fair
VANITY FAIR
Becky Sharp: Revenge may be wicked, but it's perfectly natural.
From: Vanity Fair
About: Poverty-stricken orphan Becky Sharp schemes her way way into the upper echelons of British society in Victorian Lonadon.
Tagline: All's fair in love and war.
Trivia: Based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding).
Investigative reporter Veronica Guerin’s coverage of Dublin’s criminal underworld exposed corruption, angered organized crime figures and led to her eventual assassination. Guerin was killed on June 26, 1996, when one of two men on a motorcycle fired six rounds from a pistol at close range as she waited in her car at a traffic light just outside Dublin. She was 37. Guerin was murdered two days before she was due to address a conference in London on "Dying to Tell a Story: Journalists at Risk."
Her death led to Ireland’s largest criminal investigation, resulting in over 150 arrests and a crackdown on organized-crime gangs that her assassins could never have foreseen.
Source: International Press Institute
About: In "Jane Eyre," a madwoman escapes from a locked room and wreaks havoc on the household.
But who was this mysterious woman, and what was she like, before later events turned her into a monster?
In "Wide Sargasso Sea," we see her life during an earlier period of time, witness her hasty marriage to a naive young Englishman, and learn that she is hiding a terrible secret which will eventually destroy both their lives. The film is a turbulent romantic drama set in 19th century Jamaica, based on the novel by Jean Rhys.
Mr. Brocklehurst: And what is hell? Can you tell me that?
Young Jane: A pit full of fire.
Mr. Brocklehurst: And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?
Young Jane: No, sir.
Mr. Brocklehurst: What must you do to avoid it?
Young Jane: I must keep in good health and not die.
From: "Jane Eyre" (1996)
"But I'll shut up Thornfield Hall: I'll nail up the front door and board the lower windows: I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with my wife...Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when my wife is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones, and so on-- "
"Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate, with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel; she cannot help being mad."
...
"I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal union with her...Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?"
"I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once."
"And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?"
"I have understood something to that effect."
"Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage. He sought me a partner betimes.
"Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds: that sufficed.
"When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me..."
Girl Scout: Is this made from real lemons?
Wednesday: Yes.
Girl Scout: I only like all-natural foods and beverages, organically grown, with no preservatives. Are you sure they're real lemons?
Pugsley: Yes.
Girl Scout: I'll tell you what. I'll buy a cup if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies. Do we have a deal?
Wednesday: Are they made from real Girl Scouts?
Gomez: [about Morticia] I would die for her. I would kill for her. Either way, what bliss.
[watching Pugsley sleep]
Morticia: It's so sweet. He looks just like a little entrée.
[Wednesday is hooking up an electric chair]
Wednesday: Pugsley, sit in the chair.
Pugsley: Why?
Wednesday: So we can play a game.
Pugsley: What game?
Wednesday: [strapping him in] It's called, "Is There a God?"
Morticia: Gomez.
Gomez: Querida?
Morticia: Last night you were unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. Do it again.
[Thing is gesturing wildly]
Gomez: Mor... Morticia... Morticia? Morticia what? Slow down! It's terrible when you stutter!
[Thing gropes around, finds a pen, and starts to write, but it's out of ink. Groping around again, Thing overturns a bowl of cereal, grabs the spoon, and starts tapping in Morse Code]
Gomez: Morticia... in... danger... stop. Send... help... at once... STOP!
[Gomez runs out.]
[performing Hamlet in school play; sword fighting]
Wednesday: How all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge. O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth. If I must strike you dead, I will.
Pugsley: [slashes Wednesday's left wrist; blood sprays out] A hit! A very palpable hit!
[Wednesday cuts off Pugsley's arm, Pugsley slashes her throat; there is lots of blood spraying everywhere, getting the front rows]
Wednesday: O, Proud Death. What feast is toward in thine eternal cell?
[drops both swords and falls to her knees]
Wednesday: Sweet Oblivion, open your arms!
[choking and gasping for breath, collapses, and dies]
Wednesday: [the audience sits aghast in stunned silence, covered with blood while the Addams give a standing ovation]
Gomez: Bravo!
Morticia: Bravo!
Gomez: How long has it been since we've waltzed?
Morticia: Oh, Gomez...hours.
Morticia: Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job.
From: The Addams Family (1991)
Tagline: Weird is relative.
Trivia: Based on the cheerfully macabre comic strip by Chaz Addams.
Jess: Anyone can cook aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?
Joe: Where do you normally play?
Jess: In the park.
Joe: No -- I meant what position?
Jules: Mother, just because I wear khakis and play sports does not make me a lesbian!
Jess: Why are you doing this to me, Joe? Every time I talk myself out of it, you come around and make it sound so easy.
Joe: I guess I don't want to give up on you.
Mrs. Bhamra: What did I do wrong in my past life?
From: Bend It Like Beckham
Tagline: Sometimes, to follow your dreams...you've got to bend the rules.
All Jessminder "Jess" Bhamra wants to do is play soccer. All her strict Sikh family wants her to do is get married.
Chaos (and hilarity) ensues when Jessminder sneaks away to join a soccer team, and tries to keep her training a secret from neighborhood busybodies.
When a critical match falls on the same day as her sister's lavish wedding, Jess is forced to choose what's most important to her -- her family or her dream.
Phil: Why didn’t you tell me?
Shelley: Maybe because you haven’t spoken to me for ten years, good enough reason?
Phil: Sandra?
Shelley: She thinks I’m still in clear, don’t she? Waiting for it to grow back. I can’t tell her.
Brian: You told us.
Shelley: Yeah, I told you. I can tell you ‘cause you don’t care. Not really. She cares so much her heart would burst, silly cow.
-
Sandra: Oh, you liar. You fucking liar.
Shelley: Sand-
Sandra: Out. Everybody out. Come on, don’t you have homes to go to? Scram, shoot, bugger off.
Brian: Hang on, Sandra.
Sandra: Oh, knew, did you? Of course you bloody did. And you and all, Phil? Yeah. Traitors all, everyone knew except the dizzy cow, here: ‘Don’t tell her, she’s only her fucking girlfriend, after all, what would she know?’
Phil: Sandra...
Sandra: Don’t you dare. You come around to my house after ten years of blanking me in the street, telling me I’ve got no elegance. Well, you’re bloody right, I’ve got no elegance. But I’ve got a big boot, and I’m gonna kick you out with it. Now get out. Out! And you, get out of my shop.
Girl in Chair: What about me highlights?
Sandra: Bugger your highlights, get out.
-
Sandra: Go on, love. It’s been waiting ten years, after all.
About: The hippest salon artistes in London descend on insignificant Yorkshire town Keighley with their most over-the-top, wigged-out hair design creations in tow.
Stress and sabotage are de rigueur, as duelling hairdressers compete for first place in the National British Hairdressing Championships.
Former hair design genius Phil and his son Brian run the local town barbershop; Phil's ex-wife Shelley and her lover own the town beauty salon.
Phil and Shelley haven't spoken in ten years, ever since she left him for Sandra, but when Shelley gets heartbreaking news, she goes all out to bring her fractured family together to work for one final, glorious win -- before it's too late to make amends.
A frothy mixture of high camp and light farce, balanced with scenes of greater emotional poignancy and depth; another engaging dramedy from Simon Beaufoy, who also scripted The Full Monty. Supermodel Heidi Klum plays a supporting role. Veteran actor Warren Clarke (Tony/Mayor of Keighley) played the role of Dim in "A Clockwork Orange" (1972),
[The Nihilists invade the Dude's bathroom. They're accompanied by a trained rodent.]
The Dude: Hey, nice marmot!
Walter Sobchak: Now so far, we have what appears to me to be a series of victimless crimes.
The Dude: What about the toe?
Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
The Dude: [repeated line by The Dude and others] That rug really tied the room together.
[Maude shows the porn video starring Bunny to the Dude]
Sherry in Logjammin': [on video] You must be here to fix the cable.
Maude Lebowski: Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.
The Dude: He fixes the cable?
Maude Lebowski: Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.
Jesus Quintana: Liam and me, we're gonna f*ck you up.
The Dude: Yeah, well, you know...that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
[being forced into a limousine by hired thugs]
The Dude: Hey, careful, man, there's a beverage here!
Auto Circus Cop: [the Dude asks the Auto Circus Cop if there are any leads on who stole his beater car] Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!
[laughs mockingly]
Auto Circus Cop: Leads!
The Dude: Yes, Walter, you're right. There is an unspoken message here. It's "F*ck you, leave me the f*ck alone!"
from: The Big Lebowski (1998)
Tagline: Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail.
About: The Big Lebowski is a comedy written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Jeff Bridges plays Jeffrey Lebowski, a burnt-out, unemployed Los Angeles slacker, who calls himself "The Dude."
He's commissioned to deliver a million dollars in ransom money and to recover a kidnapped trophy wife after he is mistaken for a millionaire with the same last name.
The plans go haywire and The Dude's friend Walter further complicates the ordeal by losing his going off half-cocked at the most inopportune moments.
The film co-stars Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore. The film's overall structure has been compared to, if not out-and-out inspired, by Raymond Chandler's novel, The Big Sleep.
While not a commercial success (the film grossed only $17 million domestically, just above its $15 million budget), it later became a cult classic.
Known less for its plot and more for its idiosyncratic characters, surreal dream sequences, unconventional dialogue and eclectic soundtrack, The Big Lebowski has been called "the first cult film of the Internet era." Fans' devotion to the film has even spawned the Lebowski Fest, an annual festival that started in Louisville, Kentucky in 2002, and later spread to several other cities in the U.S.
Source: Wikipedia
Armand: Nothing is beyond the reach of celestial clockwork.
Alcanie: Space is laden with illusions. You have to take risks.
About: Quirky re-telling of the story of Cinderella. Ariadna Gil (Belle Epoque) stars as Ana, who leaves her fiancé at the altar and hops a plane to Paris to fulfill her dream of becoming an opera singer.
About: Directed by Fina Torres, whose first feature film "Oriane" won the Camera d'Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. Torres went on to direct "Woman on Top", starring Penélope Cruz.
The film's soundtrack includes arias from Rossini's "La Cenerentola" (Cinderella) and art songs by Schubert and Schumann.
Connie: We've gotta go someplace where we can just blend in; somewhere where they'd never look for us, because there's no theater, no musical theater, no dinner theater, no culture at all.
Carla: Los Angeles.
Connie: Do yourselves a favor -- let your eyes crinkle, let your skin wrinkle. Our lines show that we've lived. If he doesn't love you when you look like a map, tell him to hit the road.
Robert: By night we're a duo act -- Peaches 'N Cream.
Lee: I hate our name.
Robert: I think it's beautiful.
Lee: That's because you're the Peaches part. I'm 'N Cream. My name is 'N Cream. What does that even mean?
Carla: Shut up, shut up, shut up! Your voice is giving me mono!
Lee: All queens rise.
[they all rise and put their hands on their breasts]
Brian: Oh, blessed Saint Mary of drag queens. Please grant your never humble servants and our new friends with grace, jewels, and support hose.
Lee, Brian, Paul, Robert: Gay-men.
Carla: Girlfriends, big or small, thin or fat, worship that body, it's the only one you've got.
Paul: No one fall on me this time. I'm delicate.
Connie: I like him! I saw him before, when we were still girls. He was standing out front. We had this moment, Carla. He was nice to me.
Carla: What are you talking about?
Connie: Right. Why would he ever be attracted to me? I'm a drag queen.
From: Connie & Carla
Tagline: Girls will be boys will be girls.
About: Musical theater geeks Connie and Carla witness a shooting and go on the lam, winding up in West Hollywood.
After they lose their jobs at a snooty spa, they hit a local dive bar, where a drag queen stage set of "Shake Your Groove Thing" gives Connie a loopy idea -- which just might pay off...
Review(s): Life is so full of minor irritations and quiet disappointments that it's difficult to get excited about anything anymore. Today I watched Connie and Carla, a movie that quietly worked its way up my Netflix queue and arrived with few expectations and little fanfare. Folks, to be blunt, I laughed my ass off.
This is essentially a cute story with good acting and some very funny moments. If you get weirded out by transvestites or are homophobic...well, you might want to pass on this one. But anyone with an open mind and a sense of humor should enjoy this flick. I know I did.
Source: User Reviews/IMDB
I am a total movie geek and am always on the look-out for the "keeper"! This movie was it. I watched it twice back to back and then went out to buy it. It's a silly, laugh-out-loud movie that makes me smile just to think about it. The musical numbers were great and I loved all the puns that were tossed around. If you're looking for an intellectual, highbrow movie, this isn't it -- but if you want to kick back and forget about all the horror around you and just laugh until you cry, try Connie and Carla.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon
Mrs. Peacock: What are you all staring at?
Mr. Green: Nothing.
Mrs. Peacock: Well, who's there?
Colonel Mustard: Nobody.
Mrs. Peacock: What do you mean?
Wadsworth: Nobody. No body, that's what we mean. Mr. Boddy's body, it's gone.
Mrs. White: Maybe he wasn't dead.
Professor Plum: He was!
Mrs. White: We should've made sure.
Mrs. Peacock: How? By cutting his head off, I suppose.
Mrs. White: That was uncalled for.
Mr. Green: Who would wanna kill the cook?
Miss Scarlet: Dinner wasn't that bad.
Colonel Mustard: How can you make jokes at a time like this?
Miss Scarlet: It's my defense mechanism.
Colonel Mustard: Some defense. If I was the killer, I would kill you next.
Miss Scarlet: Oh?
[Everyone looks at Colonel Mustard]
Colonel Mustard: I said if. If.
Wadsworth: Professor Plum, you were once a professor of psychiatry specializing in helping paranoid and homicidal lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Professor Plum: Yes, but now I work for the United Nations.
Wadsworth: So your work has not changed.
Professor Plum: What is your top-secret job, Colonel?
Wadsworth: I can tell you. He's working on the secret of the next fusion bomb.
Colonel Mustard: How did you know that?
Wadsworth: Can you keep a secret?
Colonel Mustard: Yes.
Wadsworth: So can I.
Mrs. White: [Smashes glass on fireplace] Please! Don't you think we should get that man out of the house before he finds out what's been going on here?!
Miss Scarlet: Yeah!
Professor Plum: How can we throw him outside in this weather?
Miss Scarlet: If we let him stay in the house, he may get suspicious.
Professor Plum: If we throw him out, he may get even more suspicious.
Colonel Mustard: If I were him, I'd be suspicious already.
Mrs. Peacock: Oh, who cares? That guy doesn't matter! Let him stay locked up for another half an hour. The police will be here by then, and there are two dead bodies in the study!
All: SHHHHHHHHHHH!
The Chief: Good evening. Have you ever given any thought to the kingdom of heaven?
Mrs. Peacock: What?
The Chief: Repent. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Miss Scarlet: You ain't just whistlin' Dixie.
The Chief: Armageddon is almost upon us.
Professor Plum: I got news for you -- it's already here.
Mrs. Peacock: Go away.
The Chief: But your souls are in danger.
Mrs. Peacock: Our lives are in danger, you beatnik.
Professor Plum: He won't be driving home, officer, I promise you that!
Miss Scarlet: No.
Cop: Somebody will give him a lift, huh?
Miss Scarlet: Oh, we'll-- we'll-- we'll get him a car.
Professor Plum: A long black car!
Miss Scarlet: [punches him in the stomach] A limousine.
Professor Plum: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?
Mrs. Peacock: No, just death.
from: Clue (1985)
Tagline: Seven suspects, six weapons, five bodies and one bullet.
About: Clue is a dark comedy film based on the board game Clue (also known as Cluedo). It is a murder mystery set in a Gothic mansion.
The style takes the idea in the direction of By Death and other various murder/dinner parties of mystery.
Six invited guests, given assumed names, are summoned to the secluded mansion, Hill House, on a stormy night. Mr. Green, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren) and Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn) are greeted by the British butler, Wadsworth (Tim Curry) and the French maid, Yvette.
Over dinner, the guests discover that each lives in Washington D.C., or is employed by the government. A seventh guest arrives, and is introduced as Mr. Boddy.
The group then gathers in the study where, one by one, Wadsworth reveals that each guest is a victim of blackmail, provides evidence concerning the guests' indiscretions, and then explains that Mr. Boddy is the man who has been blackmailing them all, and that the police will arrive in forty-five minutes.
After giving each guest a different gift-wrapped weapon ranging from a revolver to a candlestick, Mr. Boddy tries to convince the guests that they must kill Wadsworth or be exposed, and then shuts off the lights.
There is then much commotion followed by a gunshot. When the lights are turned back on, Boddy himself is dead...
Source: Wikipedia
Amos Starkadder: Seth, drain the well. There's a neighbor missing.
[reading Flora's first telegram to Mary] Sneller: Worst fears confirmed. Seth and Reuben too. Everything's changing. Send magazines!
Amos Starkadder: Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!
Flora Poste: Besides, I want to learn about real life.
Charles: What for?
Flora Poste: To put it in books.
From: Cold Comfort Farm (1995)
Tagline: She discovered a new branch of her family tree. The one with all the nuts.
About: The heroine, Flora Poste, having been orphaned. is looking for relatives to live with.
After rejecting a number of other offers, she chooses the Starkadders, relatives on her mother's side, who live in the isolated Cold Comfort Farm, near the fictional Sussex village of Howling.
Greeting her as "Robert Poste's child," they take her in to repay some unexplained wrong done to her father.
Each of the extended family has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run, supposedly cursed, and presided over by the unseen presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to be mad through having seen "something nasty in the woodshed."
Flora, a level-headed urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps the eccentric inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm adapt to the twentieth century.
Source: Wikipedia
Trivia: Early work by Kate Beckinsale. Also stars Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous). Based on the novel by Stella Gibbons.
The novel ends when Flora, with the aid of her handbook, The Higher Common Sense, has solved each character's problem. These solutions are:
Meriam: Flora introduces her to the concept of contraception.
Seth: Flora introduces him to a Hollywood film director, Earl P. Neck, who hires him as a screen idol.
Amos: Flora persuades him to buy a Ford van and become a travelling preacher. He loses interest in running the farm and hands it over to Reuben.
Elfine: Flora teaches her some social graces and dress sense so that Richard Hawk-Monitor falls in love with her.
Mr Mybug: falls in love with and marries Rennet.
Judith: Flora hires a psychoanalyst, Dr Müdel, who, over lunch, transfers Judith's obsession from Seth to himself until he can set her interest on old churches instead.
Ada: Flora uses a copy of Vogue magazine to tempt her to join the twentieth century, and spend some of her fortune on living the high life in Paris.
Catherine: Suzon, I forgot one thing. I heard a strange sound. I looked through Augustine's keyhole, and I saw her standing at the mirror with something shiny. I thought nothing of it, but now I'm sure she was sharpening a knife!
Augustine: You liar! I was holding my mother-of-pearl comb and cleaning it.
Gaby: At 3:00 am?
Augustine: Combs never sleep!
Tagline: Eight women. One dead guy.
About: Eight women find themselves snowbound in a house with a dead man. Secrets tumble forth, accusations fly, and confrontations turn steamy. Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Virginie Ledoyen, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart, Isabelle Huppert, Ludivine Sagnier, and Firmine Richard are all superb, investing their cardboard characters with a strange emotional resonance.
Source: Editorial Reviews/Amazon.com
Kate: I'm breathing, I'm breathing. You know, all men are bastards.
Luc: Well, not all, I mean, some are just trying to help.
Kate: You know, I never thought I'd be the kind of woman to say this, but it's true. All men are bastards.
Luc: The guy who was talking to you, he was, a--
Kate: A bastard. A Euro trash and Armani kind of bastard.
Luc: He was wearing a black suit, with a yellow shirt?
Kate: Yeah.
Luc: Yeah!
Kate: You know him? Ow. Of course you know him. All you bastards know each other.
Kate: And we had plans together, okay? We had plans for a home and a family. I would remind him of that, too.
Luc: He was obviously very attached to them.
Kate: And if all else failed...
Luc: You would get down on your knees and beg?
Kate: It's possible.
Luc: Oh ho! Now I can see it: There is the goddess, standing next to Charlie in her negligee, and you are there on your knees, begging. Poor Charlie -- tough decision!
Luc: That's all? You have no strategy, no armor, no bullshit?
Kate: Happy, smile. Sad, frown. Use the corresponding face with the corresponding emotion. But no. You want this mysterious--
Luc: Non. No no no. It is not me who wants it. I don't want it.
Kate: Well what do you want?
Luc: I want you...I want you...
Kate: You want me...
Luc: I want you...to...make Charlie suffer. To make him feel like even though you are right there in front of him, he can't have you.
[he realizes suddenly that he's talking about himself]
Kate: [to Luc] Donnez-moi un break, you can't make a vineyard out of one vine.
[talking about Luc's dream to create a vineyard]
Kate: So you'd risk everything for this.
Luc: Oui.
Kate: Do anything to have it.
Luc: Oui.
Kate: Get down on your knees and beg.
Luc: [with feeling] Oui.
Kate: Then what makes you so different from me?
Luc: I am thinking...you should not be flying anywhere.
Kate: I shouldn't?
Luc: In fact, I am sure of it.
Kate: You are?
Luc: I am thinking...I want you...
Kate: You want me...
Luc: That's all.
From: French Kiss (1995)
Tagline: Kate's stuck in a place where anything can happen with a guy who'll make sure that it does.
Summary: Mismatched allies Kate and Luc go on a road trip through France, bickering all the way. Fluffy but engaging. Jean Reno(Léon, Ronin, Tais-toi) plays a supporting role as a police detective.
About: Kate (Meg Ryan) knows exactly what her future will be: marry a Toronto doctor named Charlie (Timothy Hutton) and live happily ever after as soon as he comes back from a business trip to Paris.
Her plans are ruined when her man runs off with a beautiful French seductress named Juliette (Susan Anbeh).
Determined to get him back, Kate overcomes her lifelong fear of flying and boards a flight for Paris. Onboard, she's seated next to a Frenchman named Luc Teyssier (Kevin Kline), a crude petty thief whom she is forced to tolerate for the next few hours of the flight.
Luc hides a stolen diamond necklace and a small grapevine in her purse to get them past customs. After several mishaps in Paris, Luc finds himself forced to trail Kate across France to try to get the necklace back, but a funny thing happens along the way...
Source: Wikipedia
The Matchmaker
THE MATCHMAKER
Marcy Tizard: Yes, hello? I'd like to call the United States from the smallest f*cking room in the world.
Matchmaking patron: I'll tell you me favorite color: Bollix!
Marcy Tizard: Is being an idiot like being high all the time?
Sean Kelly: No, it's like being constantly right.
Marcy Tizard: I...I...I long to fax someone
Sean Kelly: I have a fax.
Marcy Tizard: You do?
Sean Kelly: [to Nick] If you lay a hand on me again, I'll be mailing it back to you.
Boy: The president's here! The president of America is here!
Lounging man: Well, fuck me, not another one.
From: The Matchmaker (1997)
Tagline(s): The most successful matchmaker in Ireland is about to hit a brick wall./A romantic comedy for the unromantic.
About: The Matchmaker is an offbeat romantic comedy about a cynical American woman who reluctantly visits the West of Ireland on a promo campaign for a U.S. senator.
Marcy Tizzard (Janeane Garofalo) is assistant to fictional Senator John McGlory (Jay O. Sanders) from Boston, Massachusetts.
In an attempt to court the Irish-American vote in a tough re-election battle, the senator's chief of staff (Denis Leary), sends Marcy to Ireland to go dig up some McGlory's relatives or ancestors.
Marcy arrives at the village of fictional Ballinagra as it is preparing for the annual matchmaking festival. She attracts the attention of two rival professional matchmakers, Dermot (Milo O'Shea) and Millie (Rosaleen Linehan), as well as roguish former journalist, Sean (David O'Hara).
The locals tolerate her genealogical search while trying to match her with various bachelors. Sean tries to woo Marcy despite her sharp tongue and resistance to his boorish manners.
From: Wikipedia
Tagline: A comedy about finding your heart and losing your head.
About: New York City food critic Julianne "Jules" Potter gets a phone call from her long-time best friend, Michael O'Neal, who has some surprise news -- he's getting married that week and needs her support or he won't be able to get through it.
Jules is shocked to realize that she's actually in love with her best friend. She flies to Chicago to hang out with Michael, but she also has another agenda -- sabotaging Michael's wedding to the perky Kimberly 'Kimmy' Wallace.
Kimmy puts Jules on the spot, by asking her to be the maid of honor. Jules consents, which establishes a comical Hyde/Jekyll scenario for her.
On one hand, she has to be Kimberly's dutiful maid of honor; on the other hand, she's got less than 72 hours to sabotage the wedding and carry off the man of her dreams.
The action escalates, as Jules tries every sneaky thing in the book she can possibly think of -- but every single one backfires, and she's running out of time...
Gaz: Told 'ya, robbing pipes, that's all.
Police officer: Gary, my friend, no bugger robs pipes in the buff.
Gaz: We do. Don't get your clothes dirty, do you?
Gaz: On Sale for £4.99 and we're still a fuckin' fiver short.
Gaz: I need an audience
Dave: You need a doctor.
Dave: Well, I just pray they're a bit more understanding about us, that's all.
Horse: You what?
Dave: Well, they're going to be looking at us like that, aren't they, Eh? I mean, what if next Friday 400 women turn 'round and say "He's too fat, he's too old and he's a pigeon-chested little tosser."? What happens then, eh?
Horse: They wouldn't say that, would they?
Dave: Why not? He's just said her tits are too big.
Lomper: That's different. We're...blokes.
Dave: Yeah, and?
[discussing possible means of suicide]
Dave: I know. You could stand in middle of road and have a mate run smack into you right fast.
Lomper: Haven't got any mates.
Gary 'Gaz' Schofield: Listen to you, we just saved your fucking life, so don't tell us we're not your mates, all right?
Lomper: Really?
Gary 'Gaz' Schofield: Yeah.
Lomper: Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Dave: Yeah, me and all, I'd run ya down as soon as look at ya.
Lomper: Oh, aye? Cheers.
Gerald: They've taken me sunbed, they've taken bloody everything.
Gaz: Kept hold of your chips, though.
Gaz: Gentlemen, the lunchbox has landed.
From: The Full Monty (1997)
Tagline(s): Six men with nothing to lose./The year's most revealing comedy.
Summary: Offbeat, funny. Comedic timing is spot-on.
About: The Full Monty is a black comedy. It tells the story of six unemployed steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act in order to make enough money to get somewhere else, and for main character Gary to be able to see his son.
Despite being a comedy, the film also touches on serious subjects such as unemployment, depression, impotence, and attempted suicide.
The year is 1972, and the place is "Sheffield... the beating heart of Britain's industrial north", as described by the narrator in a short film visualizing the city's economic prosperity.
Fast forward to a quarter century later to the same town but in a far different light than that of the early-1970s. The once-successful steel mills of then are closed and the lines are silent.
Gary "Gaz" Schofield (Robert Carlyle) and buddy Dave Osborne, desperate to make some money, are inside their former workplace trying to salvage a steel beam, with the intent of selling it.
In the next scene, Gaz is told by his ex-wife that she'll sue for unpaid child support for their son Nathan.
While Gaz, Dave, and Nathan are walking down a street, they see a line of women gathered for a Chippendales show outside a Working Man's Club they frequent.
Intrigued by the women's willingness to stand in line for a striptease act, Gaz hatches an off-the-wall plan -- he'll organize a striptease show of his own, to earn enough money to pay for his child support obligations. Gaz takes a look around and starts scheming how to make the show happen...
Source: Wikipedia
I brought The Full Monty home one evening when my boyfriend was not feeling well because I thought that a good laugh would cheer him up. His reaction to seeing the video box? "I'm already not feeling well. I don't want to watch a movie about a bunch of male strippers prancing around." And then we put in the movie and couldn't stop laughing.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon
Yes, it's about a group of unemployed Yorkshire steel workers who stage a strip show to make some needed cash. We already know that. What was so surprising to me was the very smart, sensitive, and totally hilarious way the film was made. The film is heartwarming without being sappy. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't love this movie.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon
Just about the time you think no one is capable of making a fresh and original comedy anymore, along comes something like The Full Monty, to surprise and delight you with wit and subtlety and insight.
A terrific little film with a lot on its mind, beneath the humor. Something to do with the dignity of work, of self-respect, and of the touching care one can find amidst people undergoing hard times. A gem.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon
French/arthouse version of Living in Oblivion, ie. a movie about trying to make a movie while the director is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only this one's got subtitles.
About: Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) in a story about the disasters that ensue as a middle-aged French film director attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent serial, Les vampires.
Taking place as it does largely through the eyes of a foreigner Maggie Cheung), it also a meditation upon the then-current state of the French film industry.
Cheung is employed to play the film-within-the-film's heroine, Irma Vep, a cat burglar, who spends most of the film dressed in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit, defending her director's odd choices to hostile crew members and journalists.
As the film progresses, the plot mirrors the disorientation felt by the film's director.
Source: Wikipedia
Trivia: Director Olivier Assayas married actress Maggie Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001. They again collaborated in 2004 on the film Clean. Irma Vep is an anagram for vampire.
Louis Mazzini: I made an oath that I would revenge the wrongs her family had done her. It was no more than a piece of youthful bravado, but it was one of those acorns from which great oaks are destined to grow. Even then I went so far as to examine the family tree and prune it to just the living members. But what could I do to hurt them? What could I take from them, except, perhaps, their lives.
Sibella: He says he wants to go to Europe to expand his mind.
Louis Mazzini: He certainly has room to do so.
Sibella: What would you say if she asked you about me?
Louis Mazzini: I'd say that you were the perfect combination of imperfections. I'd say that your nose was just a little too short, your mouth just a little too wide. But yours was a face that a man could see in his dreams for the whole of his life.
Louis Mazzini: I had not forgotten or forgiven the boredom of the sermon of young Henry's funeral, and I decided to promote the Reverend Lord Henry D'Ascoyne to next place on the list [to be murdered].
Sibella: I've married the dullest man in London.
Louis Mazzini: In England!
Sibella: In Europe!
Louis Mazzini: I want to talk to you for a minute. If you make a noise, I shall blow your head off at once. By the time anyone has heard the shot I shall be running back toward the castle shouting for help. I shall say that you stepped on the trap and your gun went off as you fell. So be quiet.
[Lights cigarette]
Louis Mazzini: When I've finished I shall kill you. You will the the sixth D'Ascoyne that I've killed. You want to know why? In return for what the D'Acoyne's did to my mother. Because she married for love instead of for rank or money or land. They condemned her to a life of poverty and slavery, in a world for which they had not equipped her to deal. You yourself refused to grant her dying wish, which was to be buried here, at Chalfont. When I saw her poor little coffin saw underground, saw her exiled in death as she had been in life, I swore to have revenge on your intolerable pride. That revenge I am just about to complete.
Louis Mazzini: It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.
From: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Tagline: A hilarious study in the gentle art of murder.
About: Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1949 black comedy produced by Ealing Studios.
The title is a quotation from Tennyson's 1842 poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere, which proclaims that "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."
The story is set in the Edwardian period. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is the son of a woman ostracised by her noble family for eloping with an Italian opera singer.
Upon her death, the D'Ascoynes refuse to allow her to be buried in the family crypt. As a result, Louis plots revenge, aiming to succeed to the Dukedom of Chalfont, but eight relatives stand between him and the title.
Louis sets out to murder them all, in various inventive and blackly humorous ways.
Complications ensue when Louis is torn between two women; the sensual and amoral Sibella, and the more refined Edith D'Ascoyne, the widow of one of his victims. Louis marries Edith, and Sibella becomes jealous.
When Sibella's dull husband Lionel kills himself, she hides the suicide note and, ironically, Louis ends up being tried and convicted of murdering one of the few people he didn't dispatch...
Source: Wikipedia
Nick: There needs to be more tension when you see him.
Nicole: I thought I wasn't supposed to see him.
Nick: Well, maybe you see him a little.
[Tito doesn't laugh when he's supposed to]
Nick: Cut! Tito...Didn't feel like laughing, did ya?
Tito: I did.
Nick: Oh. Guess I missed it.
[Little person Tito is not happy with the dream sequence]
Tito: Why does my character have to be a dwarf?
Nick: He doesn't have to be.
Tito: Then why is he? Is that the only way you can make this a dream, to put a dwarf in it?
Nick: No, Tito, I...
Tito: Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don't even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I've seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! "Oh, make it weird, put a dwarf in it!". Everyone will go "Whoa, this must be a fuckin' dream, there's a fuckin' dwarf in it!". Well, I'm sick of it! You can take this dream sequence and stick it up your ass!
Nick: Hey, Bob, you think you can make any more noise with the dolly, you creaky motherf*cker?
Nick: Great! I freak in your dream, I freak out in my dream, no wonder I'm so f*cking exhausted.
Wanda: Is everybody hurt? Is anyone okay?
Chad: Roll that motherfu*king camera, Wolfie!
Wolf: Kiss my ass!
Chad: YEAH!
From: Living in Oblivion (1995)
Tagline: He only needs three things to get through the day -- an espresso, an aspirin, and a miracle.
About: Living in Oblivion is a darkly comic, low-budget independent film depicting the making of a low-budget independent film, written and directed by Tom DiCillo and starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney.
Director Nick Reve is shooting a low-budget independent film in the middle of New York City. The catering crew are under-funded and apathetic, deciding not to replace a carton of milk that has been on the craft service table for a week.
Meanwhile, the first scene being shot that day is a difficult one: a young woman, Ellen, reproaches her elderly mother for not intervening when the father beat Ellen as a child.
However, on the set, just about everything that can possibly go wrong does go wrong during the scene -- shots are spoiled because of the microphone boom being visible; the camera assistant fails to keep the shot in focus; Cora, the actress playing the mother, forgets her lines; and Nicole, the actress playing Ellen, becomes increasingly unfocused and careless.
A dispirited Nick calls for a rehearsal without camera in order to refresh the actors. However, when Nicole berates herself for acting badly, Cora reassures her with a gesture that reminds Nicole of a similar gesture made by her own terminally ill mother.
Nicole is so upset by the memory that she turns in an unexpectedly passionate performance, and Cora, startled by Nicole's sudden intensity, is equally good. Watching them, Nick gets enthusiastic all over again.
Unfortunately, the brilliant scene was not captured on film; cinematographer and camera operator Wolf, who has been diluting the sub-standard coffee with the spoiled milk, was busy vomiting in the toilet.
Nick ruefully calls for another take. This time, a sudden and insistent beeping sound distracts the actors. Nobody can tell where it's coming from and Nick flies into a rage, berating everyone on the crew and cast for their inadequacies.
He then wakes up in his own bed; the beeping sound was his own alarm clock. He has dreamed the entire segment. It is 4.30am, and he is due on set...
Source: Wikipedia
Trivia: The film was shot in 16 days. Director Tom DiCillo didn't want to beg people for money to make this film, so he asked his actors if they would work for free. All of them agreed and most of them even put up money themselves. Eventually anybody who contributed a few dollars got a part in the movie.
Source: IMDB
Indie filmmakers will be most able to relate to the film and its hilarious take on the million and a half aggravations of trying to keep a film project going, but the film would also appeal to anyone who gets a kick out of witty black comedies. It might also appeal to you if it's just been that kinda day...
Norbert: What’s up now?
Walter: The hetero is coming.
Fränzi: Hetero? What hetero?
from: Maybe...Maybe Not (1994)
From the comic novellas Pretty Baby and Maybe...Maybe Not, by Ralf König. Gay/straight, carnivore/vegan, drag queen/gymbo -- everyone's got love trouble in this diverting comedy of errors. Occasionally crude, but entertaining.
Beatrice: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you.
Benedick: What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?
Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.
Benedick: Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted -- and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none.
Beatrice: A dear happiness to women; they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood that I am of your humor for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.
Benedick: God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.
Beatrice: Scratching could not make it worse, an 'twere such a face as yours were.
Beatrice: Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.
Benedick: Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains.
Beatrice: I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me. If it had been painful, I would not have come.
Benedick: You take pleasure, then, in the message?
Beatrice: Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point.
From: Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
About: After winning a battle, Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon and his noblemen come to visit his good friend Leonato. Among the men are Signor Benedick, and his friend Claudio, a young count.
Claudio has been in love with Leonato’s gentle and lovely daughter Hero (Kate Beckinsale) ever since before he went to war, and returns to find her as attractive as ever.
Don Pedro, learning of his young friend’s feelings, arranges the match, and it's agreed that Hero and Claudio will marry in a week’s time.
Benedick, on the other hand, just mocks his lovestruck friend, and says he'll never make an idiot of himself by falling in love with anyone -- least of all with Leonato's niece, Beatrice, who's just as cynical and sarcastic as he is.
While waiting for the wedding day, the bored Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) decides to arrange a similar fate for Benedick, as he sees that Benedick (Keneth Branagh) is already in love with Beatrice (Emma Thompson).
Of course, with Beatrice and Benedick slagging each other off every time they meet, arranging an actual love match might take a little ingenuity...
Source: Wikipedia
Young Sally Owens: He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards.
Young Gillian Owens: What are you doing?
Young Sally Owens: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He'll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he'll have one green eye and one blue.
Young Gillian Owens: Thought you never wanted to fall in love.
Young Sally Owens: That's the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn't exist. And if he doesn't exist, I'll never die of a broken heart.
Sally: They were right, he’d come back as something dark and unnatural.
Gillian: Jimmy already is dark and unnatural, I don’t care what he comes back as, as long as he comes back with a pulse.
from: "Practical Magic (1998)
Tagline: There's a little witch in every woman.
About: For more than 200 years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong in their small town.
It all began with their ancestor, Maria, who was accused of being a witch. The Craft has passed through every generation to sisters Frances (Stockard Channing) and Jet (Dianne Wiest), their nieces, Gillian and Sally, and Sally's two daughters; the women in the family never give birth to boys.
The Owens family is cursed: any man who falls in love with an Owens woman will die tragically. The women of the town are apprehensive of the Owens women and their lifestyle, viewing them as evil and connected to the Devil.
When Sally was a child, she so despaired of falling victim to the curse, she cast a spell that would protect her from ever falling in love.
The grown-up Sally is desperate for a 'normal' life and gives up practicing magic. She falls in love with the produce merchant Michael, due to a spell cast by her aunts, and marries him, in spite of the curse.
Sally truly falls in love with Michael. Sadly, yet not unexpectedly, Michael meets a tragic end, leaving Sally grieving and disillusioned with magic. She comes home to her aunts with her two daughters.
Gillian, impatient with life in a small town, moves away. She meets Jimmy, who eventually turns abusive. Gillian calls Sally for help and when Sally arrives, Jimmy kidnaps them both. Sally puts belladonna, a poison, into Jimmy's tequila to knock him out, but uses too much and accidentally kills him.
The panicked sisters attempt to resurrect him using a forbidden spell from their aunts' book of magic; a spell so dark the aunts refused to use it to bring back Sally's dead husband...
Source: Wikipedia
Gus: From now on, the only person who gets to yell is me. Why? Because I have a gun. People with guns get to do whatever they want. Married people without guns - for instance - you - DO NOT get to yell. Why? NO GUNS! No guns, no yelling. See? Simple little equation.
from: The Ref (1994)
Tagline: He's taken them hostage. They're driving him nuts.
About: The Ref is a black comedy about a burglar who gets more than he bargained for, when he takes a squabbling couple hostage on Christmas Eve.
The movie opens with Lloyd and Caroline Chasseur in marriage counseling on Christmas Eve; the session does not go well and the audience quickly learns of their problems.
Caroline has had an affair, and Lloyd is miserable and blames the problems with their son Jesse on his wife.
The movie switches to a criminal named Gus having broken into a house and stealing jewelry from the safe; however, he accidentally sets off the alarm, a trap door opens, and he lands in the basement.
He's able to get away but the getaway car driven by his partner Murray is no longer there.
While Caroline is in the market Gus spots her and with a gun to her back orders her to take him to her car.
He orders both her and Lloyd to take him to their house so he can hide out until he comes up with an escape plan.
Along the way the couple continues to argue, with Gus having to act as a referee to make them shut up.
Source: Wikipedia
Peter Marwood: What about what's-his-name?
Withnail: What about him?
Peter Marwood: Why don't you give him a call?
Withnail: What for?
Peter Marwood: Ask him about his house.
Withnail: You want me to call what's-his-name and ask him about his house?
Peter Marwood: Why not?
Withnail: All right. What's his number?
Peter Marwood: I've no idea. I've never met him.
Withnail: Well, neither have I. What the fuck are you talking about?
Withnail: Why can't I have an audition? It's ridiculous. I've been to drama school. I'm good looking. I tell you, I've a fuck sight more talent that half the rubbish that gets on television. Why can't I get on television?
Marwood: Well, I don't know. It'll happen.
Withnail: Will it? That's what you say. The only program I'm likely to get on is the fucking news.
Withnail: [sees a sign warning about accidents] These aren't accidents! They're throwing themselves into the road gladly! Throwingthemselves into the road to escape all this hideousness! Throw yourself into the road, darling! You haven't got a chance!
[Withnail eyes the money Monty has given them to buy wellingtons]
Withnail: I think a drink, don't you?
Marwood: What about the wellingtons?
Withnail: Bollocks to the wellingtons. We'll tell him they had a farmers conference and had a run on them.
Withnail: What happened to my cigar commercial? What happened to my agent? Bastard must've died.
[approaching the pub]
Withnail: Right, here's the plan. First, we go in there and get wrecked, then we eat a pork pie, then we drop some Surmontil-50's each. That way we'll miss out on Monday and come up smiling Tuesday morning.
From: Withnail and I (1987)
Tagline: They've gone on holiday by mistake.
About: Withnail and I is a black comedy written and directed by Bruce Robinson, based on his life in London in the late 1960's.
The film depicts the lives and misadventures of two "resting" (struggling and unemployed) young actors in 1969 London. They are the flamboyant, hedonistic and alcoholic Withnail, and "I", his more level-headed, responsible and anxiety-prone friend and the movie's narrator.
Withnail is filled with indignation over life's injustices, despite his privileged background. In fact, the only injustices life visits on him --and he is only offended by those that afflict him personally -- he brings down upon himself by his own selfish and self-indulgent schemes, or as a consequence of his extravagant, addiction-fed contumely.
He rages against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune all the more because he blames others for the adverse consequences of his exuberant arrogance and outrageous deceits.
Withnail sets the tone for the friendship, with Marwood going along with whatever Withnail wants to do. Despite his self-absorption, Withnail is always amusing and ready for adventure.
They live in a filthy Georgian flat in Camden Town. While they wait for a part, daily life revolves around getting coins to use in the meters that provide gas or electricity, going to collect Social Security payments, and waiting for the pubs to open so they can sit somewhere warm.
Needing a change of scene from the claustrophobia of their lives, they decide to take a recuperative holiday in the countryside.
And that's where it all goes terribly (more) wrong...
Source: Wikipedia
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
About: The apotheosis of revenge wears red eyeshadow and an intense, angelic look in Park Chan-wook's latest film, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
It is a perilous venture into the psychology of a woman pursuing her personal sense of justice, without ever finding salvation. The film is Park's last entry in his dazzling Vengeance Trilogy.
The ornate, vindictive plan of Lee Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae) unfolds like a sickeningly beautiful rose blossoming in the midst of the harshest winter.
Imprisoned for thirteen years for allegedly kidnapping and murdering a six-year-old boy, Geum-ja -- with her fascinating mixture of evil wisdom and naïveté -- wastes no time in winning over her cellmates' sympathies...all the prisoners become instrumental in the scheme Geum-ja has meticulously drafted for her future as a free woman.
Deprived of her baby daughter and of her youth, Geum-ja at first seems to accept her tragic destiny. However, she never strays from her plans to take a mighty revenge...
Walking on the thin tightrope between the feelings of compassion and repulsion that the protagonists of this dark thriller generate in the audience, Park confidently masters the complex narrative of this scalding moral tale.
He sculpts edgy characters whose strength is defined by their ambiguity: irreparably damaged by wrongs committed against them, their obsessive drive for revenge nonetheless takes on a sinister hue.
Without failing to cast a piercing glance at a society that abandons its citizens to their own private rule of law, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance investigates the lonely recesses of a lucid, wounded mind and renders the astonishing portrait of a sombre heroine whose heart is as pure -- and as cold -- as snow.
- Giovanna Fulvi, Toronto Int'l Film Festival (Sept. 2005)
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Center Stage
CENTER STAGE
Erik Jones: I do ballet because it has nothing to do with the people. Give me tiaras and boys in tights any day.
[During a pas de deux]
Sergei: I am your slave.
Eva Rodriguez: I'd believe it if you didn't stare at your fucking reflection when you said it.
Instructor: If someone wants to hear profanity, Miss Rodriguez, they can take a subway. They don't need to spend sixty dollars on a ballet ticket. Though she has a point.
Maureen Cummings: I am the best goddamn dancer in the American Ballet Academy. Who the hell are you? Nobody.
Jody Sawyer: She's so good.
Eva: Yeah, just ask her.
Maureen Cummings: Erik got injured today. And do you know the first thing I thought when I saw him go down?
Jim Gordon: What?
Maureen Cummings: I wish that was me.
Maureen Cummings: I'm just trying to be honest. That's what friends do.
Eva: I guess that would explain why you have so many friends.
Cooper: If you're still holding onto all that personal shit...
Jonathan Reeves: I don't have to hold onto anything. I got the girl.
Maureen Cummings: It's your dream, and it matters more to you than anything ever did to me. So I did it, but I can't any more.
Nancy Cummings: I know what regret feels like, and I don't want that for you.
Maureen Cummings: That's what ballet would be; a life of wishing that I found something I loved, instead of something I just happened to do well. I'm not you, Mom. You didn't have the feet. I don't have the heart.
From: Center Stage
Tagline: Life doesn't hold tryouts.
About: Ensemble dramedy about a group of young dancers at the American Ballet Academy (ABA) vying for a place in the company.
Trivia: Amanda Schull (Jody) is actually a former dancer, who has danced with the San Francisco Ballet in real life. Susan May Pratt (Maureen Cummings), who plays the most gifted and driven dancer in the school, had never trained in ballet prior to being cast in the role.
The ABA is fictitious, but based on the American Ballet Theater.
Mai Kishikawa: A weak first step transmits nothing.
Tamako Tamura: Dance is more than the steps. Feel the music and dance for sheer joy.
Toyoko: You've got nerve, you're hopeless.
Detective: You forced me. I said I couldn't dance.
Toyoko: Sometimes the worst-dressed dance best, like good dancers who say they can't.
from: Shall We Dance? (1997)
Original title: Dansu wo shimashô ka? (1996)
About: Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) is a successful salaryman, with a house in the suburbs, a devoted wife, Masako, (Hideko Hara) and a teenage daughter, Chikage (Ayano Nakamura).
He works as an accountant for a firm in Tokyo. Despite these external signs of success, however, Sugiyama begins to feel as if his life has lost direction and meaning and falls into depression.
One night, while coming home on the Tokyo Subway, he spots a beautiful woman dancing in a dance studio.
This is Mai Kishikawa, a well known figure on the ballroom dance circuit. Sugiyama becomes infatuated with her and decides to take lessons in order to get to know her better...
Source: Wikipedia
Genuinely charming. Characterizations alternately touching and hilarious, including supporting characters Tomio Aoki (Naoto Takenaka) and Toyoko Takahashi (Eriko Watanabe). There's an American remake (2004) of this film, but the remake is a bland imitation, with none of the offbeat, kooky charm of the original.
Scott: You know what I said about the rumba and it being pretend? I think I made a mistake.
Fran: You really are a gutless wonder.
Scott: There's a reason for this.
Fran: I don't wanna hear.
Scott: Listen to me.
Fran: No.
Scott: It's hard for me, too, Fran.
Fran: Hard? Hard. How hard do you think it's been for me -- to get you to dance with me in the first place? Franginpani Delasqueegymop. 'Wash the coffee cups, Fran', 'How's your skin, Fran?'. Hard?
Scott: You don't understand.
Fran: I understand. You've got your Pan Pacifics to win, and I'm back in beginners, where I belong.
Scott: I don't want you to be like them. You're better than all of them.
From: Strictly Ballroom (1993)
Tagline: A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.
About: Over-the-top, colorful, offbeat movie about non-conformity. Co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, who went on to make Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge.
Strictly Ballroom is the name of a 1986 play and its 1992 film adaptation. The play was written by Baz Luhrmann and Andrew Bovell, and the film by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce.
Co-lead Paul Mercurio (Scott) was formerly a dancer with the Sydney Dance Company. Tara Morice (Fran) was later cast in Aussie dramedy "Sorrento Beach", and had a small part in Moulin Rouge.
I was lured into Strictly Ballroom by an indiephile friend of mine, and I was certain it was going to be one long, boring Ingmar Bergman film of crane shots, brimming with double meaning and intellectual purpose. But the film opens documentary-style, with ballroom queen Pat Thompson so distraught over her son's improvisational dance steps she actually breaks down in sobs saying, "I keep asking myself why? Where did I go wrong as a mother?!!" I've never laughed so hard five minutes into a movie in my life.
Source: User Reviews/Amazon.com
Kavya: Take your time. I'm not in a hurry to live; and I'm not in a hurry to die.
Kavya: For the first time...for the first time, I’m happy. And the entire world wants to take him away from me. Why? Why doesn’t anyone want to see me happy?
Dr. Shekhar Saxena: Your wound has healed.
Kavya: Wounds don't heal. They hide.
From: Ankahee
About: Dr. Shekhar is on duty at a hospital when he's called to the emergency ward to treat Kavya, the reigning Miss World.
Shekhar is married, with a child, but when he meets Kavya, it's love at first sight.
Alone in the examing room, she tells him a secret. Shekhar lies to the press about the true nature of Kavya's injuries, and soon becomes the only person Kavya trusts.
Shekhar's friend Kunal, a psychiatrist, warns Shekhar against falling into a casual affair with Kavya; in his professional opinion, the woman is unstable and potentially dangerous.
Shekhar is torn between his duty to wife and child, and an uncontrollable passion for the tormented woman who might be his soul mate.
Caught between conflicting loyalties, he becomes the catalyst for a series of events that ultimately destroy the woman he loves.
Starring Bollywood favorites Esha Deol and Aaftab Shivdasani (Hungama).
Tagline: Trapped by a brutal love.
Trivia: The movie is based on the real-life love affair between writer/director Vikram Bhatt and Sushmita Sen (Miss World, 1994).
The film title, Ankahee, translates as Unsaid. The story is told in flashback, beginning with a visit to the dying Shekhar by his estranged daughter, Sheena.
More star-crossed lovers: Jeux d'Enfants; La Traviata; Romeo + Juliet; Veer-Zaara; Walk the Line; Wuthering Heights; The Bride With White Hair
Jerry: I'm only paranoid because they want me dead.
[Walking through a metal detector]
Jerry Fletcher: Why is this thing safe for me and not for my keys?
Dr. Jonas: In one hour, I want to know where she eats, where she sleeps, the name of her kindergarten teacher, everything.
Dr. Jonas: You shouldn’t watch, Jerry. It’s a moment without hope.
Jerry: You’ve never seen her run.
from: Conspiracy Theory (1997)
Tagline: What you know could kill you.
About: Conspiracy Theory is a drama/thriller film; the screenplay, written by Brian Helgeland, centers on an eccentric taxi driver who believes many world events are triggered by government conspiracies.
Jerry Fletcher is a seemingly mentally unstable New York City cab driver obsessed with conspiracy theories he likes to share with Justice Department attorney Alice Sutton, whom he once rescued from a mugging.
He frequently bursts into her office to explain one of his latest theories. Alice is a competent professional with an anti-authoritarian streak who investigates her father's mysterious murder in her free time, despite her boss's wishes.
She believes Jerry is a harmless eccentric and doesn't have the heart to throw him out or end his visits, although she doesn't think any of his theories hold weight.
When Jerry arrives at her office injured after being sadisticly tortured by doctors who kidnapped him, it appears that one of his theories may have turned out to be fact.
At the hospital, he begs Alice to switch his chart with the other patient in the room, as he is convinced he otherwise will be dead by morning. Despite her skepticism, Alice does so. The next morning, she arrives to discover the other patient has died of a heart attack and mysterious psychiatrist Dr. Jonas and numerous government agents have arrived to claim what they think is Jerry's body...
Source: Wikipedia
Dr. Helen Hudson: They held down jobs, they made decent neighbors. Their victims trusted them. The FBI estimates that there could be as many as 35 serial killers cruising for victims even as I speak.
Dr. Helen Hudson: The cycle is endless until they are caught. And they are caught by chance.
Dr. Helen Hudson: He's brilliant. This one is brilliant.
Reuben: You ought to get some decent locks on these. A six-year-old could get in here. Much less a motivated man.
Dr. Helen Hudson: That's the face of the next one he'll kill.
Monahan: How do you know that?
Dr. Helen Hudson: Why should I trust you?
Monahan: Because I'm all you've got.
From: Copycat
Tagline: One man is recreating the crimes of the most notorious killers in history. Only one woman can stop him.
Summary: Criminal profiler and psychiatrist Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) is brutally attacked after a lecture; the guard assigned to protect her is killed in front of her.
Psychologically damaged by the event, she's unable to force herself to leave the confines of her apartment, until a pair of detectives desperately need her help.
Someone is copycatting the horrific crimes of famous serial killers, and Helen is the only one with enough expert knowledge to help capture him before he kills again.
Trivia: The film references serial killers Albert Desalvo, Bianchi and Buono (aka the Hillside Strangler), David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Peter Kürten, and Edmund Kemper.
Review(s): This is an overlooked, intelligent, frightening thriller. It poses a sick, shrewd serial killer against a brilliant psychologist/writer/professor.
Weaver delivers an outstanding performance as the brilliant agoraphobic who has been emotionally devastated by a prior run-in with a serial killer.
Offers a Cliff's Notes review of the century's major serial killers, constant tension, crisp writing and outstanding performances. In short, it is a very good, very scary movie, and you should see it it you haven't yet.
Source: User Reviews/IMDB
Hector: You should start roadwork. Run three miles, four times a week.
Diana Guzman: Three miles? You gotta be kidding me.
Hector: At least three. At this rate, you wouldn't last one round in the ring.
Diana Guzman: But I got power, you said so.
Hector: Big deal! You got the endurance of a corpse.
Adrian: Why did you train with Hector.
Diana: You mean at all.
Adrian: Yeah.
Diana: Because I want to.
Adrian: Aren't you afraid of gettin' hurt?
Diana: What, and you're not?
Adrian: No, it's just-- It's a dangerous sport.
Diana: I didn't make the cheerleading team.
Diana Guzman: You still like me with my black eye?
Adrian: I think I like you more.
Adrian: My life with you is war.
Diana Guzman: Maybe. Maybe life is just war, period.
Hector: Inside, you know yourself?
Diana Guzman: Yeah. I do.
Hector: Then that's all you need.
from: Girlfight (2000)
Tagline: Prove them wrong.
About: Girlfight is a drama starring then-newbie actor Michelle Rodriguez. It focuses on Diana Guzman, a troubled teen who channels her aggression by training to become a boxer, despite the skepticism of both her abusive father and the prospective trainers in the male-dominated sport.
Girlfight was the debut film of writer/director Karyn Kusama, as well as Rodriguez's breakout role.
Source: Wikipedia
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter: Hate put me in prison. Love's gonna bust me out.
from: The Hurricane (1999)
Tagline: His greatest fight was for justice.
About: The Hurricane is an American film starring Denzel Washington. The script was adapted by Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon from the books Lazarus and the Hurricane by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton and The 16th Round by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.
The film tells the story of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, whose conviction for triple murder was set aside after he had spent almost twenty years in prison.
The movie received mainly positive reviews, but has been criticized for many inaccuracies by film critics and others including the families of the murder victims and their supporters.
Film critic Stephen Holden, writing for The New York Times, had mixed views of the film but did like the acting.
He wrote, "In telling the story of Mr. Carter's protracted and ultimately successful fight for freedom and justice, The Hurricane rides to glory on an astonishing performance by Denzel Washington...That is to say, Mr. Washington leans into an otherwise schlocky movie and slams it out of the ballpark. If his Hurricane is an inspiring portrait of nobility, it is because the actor never conceals the demons of fury and despair gnawing beneath his character's forcefully articulate surface."
Source: Wikipedia
Lowell Bergman: You'd better take a good look, because I'm getting two things: Pissed off and curious.
Lowell Bergman: You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get him to go on television. I do. I deliver him. He sits. He talks. He violates his own fucking confidentiality agreement. And he's only the key witness in the biggest public health reform issue, maybe the biggest, most-expensive corporate-malfeasance case in U.S. history. And Jeffrey Wigand, who's out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he's not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That's why we're not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets.
Agent: Do you have a history of emotional problems, Mr. Wigand?
Jeffrey Wigand: Yes. Yes, I do. I get extremely emotional when assholes put bullets in my mailbox.
Lowell Bergman: [On phone] I fought for you and I still fight for you!
Jeffrey Wigand: You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now -- staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it's all dark except for the tenth floor. That's the legal department, that's where they fuck with my life!
Lowell Bergman: Jeffrey, where are you going with this? Where are you going? You are important to a lot of people, Jeffrey. You think about that, and you think about them. [Pause] I'm all out of heroes, man. Guys like you are in short supply.
From: The Insider (1999)
Tagline: Two men driven to tell the truth -- whatever the cost.
About: The Insider is based on the true story of a 60 Minutes exposé of the tobacco industry, as seen through the eyes of a real tobacco executive, Jeffrey Wigand.
The 60 Minutes story originally aired in November 1995 in an altered form because CBS' then-owner, Laurence Tisch, objected. The story was later aired on February 4, 1996.
The movie was adapted by Eric Roth and Michael Mann from the Vanity Fair magazine article, "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Marie Brenner.
Grace: You told your brother there was someone else in the room.
Anne: There was.
Grace: That'll do, Anne.
Grace: Whoever took the curtains wants to kill my children.
Grace: Where's my daughter? What have you done with my daughter?
Anne: Are you mad? I am your daughter.
Grace: If you're dead, then leave us in peace.
From: The Others (2001)
Synopsis: Grace's husband has not returned from the war. She is left alone to look after her two children, both of whom are hypersensitive to light. Grace hires a small household staff. Soon after their arrival, odd things start happening.
Slow-paced but effectively creepy combination of 1940s noir/19th century gothic.
About: The scene is set on the island of Jersey, in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Grace Stewart is a young mother, who lives with her two small children in a remote country house.
The children, Anne and Nicholas, have a strange disease including photosensitivity (a special feature on the DVD indicates the disease is xeroderma pigmentosum), so their lives are structured around a series of complex rules designed to protect them from inadvertent exposure to sunlight.
The new arrival of three servants at the house (an aging nanny, an elderly gardener, and a young mute girl) coincides with a number of odd events, and Grace begins to fear that they are not alone.
Anne draws pictures of four people -- a man, a woman, a boy called Victor and a scary old woman, whom she says she has seen in the house.
She hears music from a locked room. Every time Grace enters and exits the room the door closes, but while trying to figure out why, the door slams in her face, knocking her to the floor.
Grace tries hunting down the "intruders" with a shotgun but can't find them. She scolds her daughter for talking nonsense about ghosts until she hears them herself...
Source: Wikipedia
Smilla: The only thing that makes me truly happy is mathematics. Snow, ice, and numbers.
Elsa Lubing: The Devil assumes many forms.
Smilla: It's one of those forms that I'm looking for.
Smilla: The number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. Like the numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing. Do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you're missing something.
Jakkelsen: Everyone thinks you're a cop. Is that what you're doing here, spying on me?
Smilla: Actually, I came for a quick fuck, but you spoiled it by talking.
The Mechanic: Smilla, why does such a nice person have such a rough mouth?
Smilla: I'm sorry I've given you the impression it's my mouth that's rough. I try to be rough all over.
[On the subject of love]
Smilla: I've been trying to avoid it all my life, so now it's here I just want to renounce it.
Smilla: The way you have a sense of God, I have a sense of snow.
from: Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997)
Tagline: Snow covers everything...except the truth.
About: Puzzled by incongruous details related to the death of a child, brilliant but irascible Smilla Jasperson (Julia Ormond) embarks on a personal quest to solve a troubling mystery.
Her childhood in Greenland has made her an expert on the quality and properties of snow. Smilla is the only one who realizes that the dead child's footprints prove he ran to his death. She becomes obsessed with finding out who was chasing him...
The film is based on the novel, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (original Danish title: Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne), by author Peter Høeg.
Paikea: A long time ago, my ancestor Paikea came to this place on the back of a whale. Since then, in every generation of my family, the first born son has carried his name and become the leader of our tribe...until now.
Koro: When she was born, that's when things went wrong for us.
Paikea: Why doesn't he want me?
Porourangi: He's just looking for something that doesn't exist anymore.
Paikea: A new leader? They exist.
Paikea: It's not Koro's fault that I'm a girl.
Paï: I wasn't scared to die.
from: Paï a.k.a Whale Rider (2003)
Tagline(s): One young girl dared to confront the past, change the present and determine the future./In the ways of the ancients, she found a hope for the future.
About: Whale Rider is a drama directed by Niki Caro, based on the 1987 novel, The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera.
The movie's plot follows the story of Paikea Apirana ("Pai") at the age of 12, who is the only living child in the line of the tribe's chiefly succession because of the death of her twin brother and mother during childbirth.
By tradition, the leader should be the first-born son -- a direct patrilineal descendant of Paikea, the Whale Rider, who rode atop a whale from Hawaiki. However, Pai is female and technically cannot inherit the leadership.
Pai's grandfather Koro Apirana, or Old Paka as his wife Nanny Flowers calls him, the leader of the tribe, is initially angry at losing his grandson and being left with a "worthless" female.
While he later forms an affectionate bond with his granddaughter, carrying her to school every day on his bicycle, he also resents her and blames her for many of the troubles facing the tribe.
At one point Pai leaves with her father, but finds that she cannot bear to leave the sea and returns home. Pai's father refused to assume traditional leadership; instead he moved to Germany to pursue a career as an artist.
Pai herself is intersted in learning traditional songs and dances, but is given little encouragement from her grandfather. Pai feels that she can become the leader although there's no precedent for a woman to do so, and patiently waits for her grandfather to realize the truth...
Source: Wikipedia
[In a book depository]
Georgina: Are we safe here?
Michael: Does Albert read?
Georgina: Cannibal.
Tagline: Lust...Murder...Dessert. Bon Appetit!
Summary: And now for something completely different...Sex, murder, food and revenge. And cannibalism. Peculiar but interesting.
About: The titular characters all come together at the lavishly realized Hollandaise Restaurant. Crime lord Albert Spica takes over a high class restaurant run by a French chef and populates it with his criminal underlings.
As Spica continues to abuse his power and goes on tirade after tirade between rounds of abusing the restaurant's staff and patrons, his wife (Helen Mirren) begins a secretive affair with a silent, well-read man who is a regular at La Hollandaise. Their affair goes on in the presence of many of the knowing restaurant staff.
Spica is eventually made aware of this and goes about tracking down and enacting a horrible revenge on the couple in a series of impressively staged and imaginatively grotesque scenes leading up to the ultimate in just deserts.
Source: Wikipedia
About: The film follows three main characters: Daïga, Camille and Théo, all of whom are isolated from mainstream society in some way.
Daïga literally cannot read –- she has just immigrated to Paris, from her native Lithuania. The headlines in the newspapers she can't decipher warn readers about a serial killer.
On the surface, the plot seems minimal, without clear narrative purpose. Scenes shift, and replace each other almost at random. The characters are always in motion; they have no home base. The streets, temporal scenes, anonymous places, are their natural environment.
Highly-recognizable Paris landmarks are replaced by empty streets, roofs, highways, alleys, hotel doors, roofs –- all contributing to the sense of dislocation and marginalization experienced by the main characters. They lack a past, or a clearly-defined present, or a future.
Time plays an important role in underscoring the themes of displacement in the film, as well; the scenes in I Can't Sleep take place between sunset and the fall of night, or between night and daybreak -- times of transition.
I Can't Sleep quietly but effectively explores issues of exclusion, urban indifference and isolation.
Narrator: Mankind, probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of open questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why do we believe anything at all? Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following question and so on and so forth. But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?
Manni: What if I were in a coma, and the doc said, "one more day?"
Lola: I'd throw you into the ocean. Shock therapy.
from: Lola Rennt (1998)
Tagline: Jeden Tag, jede Sekunde triffst Du eine Entscheidung, die Dein Leben verändern kann.
(English translation: Every second of every day you make a decision that can change your life.)
About: Run Lola Runis a film by screenwriter/director Tom Tykwer, starring Franka Potente as Lola. The story follows a woman who needs to retrieve 100,000 Deutsche Mark in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life.
Lola's boyfriend Manni is trying to prove his loyalty to a gang boss. Manni's final task in a particular job is to deliver 100,000 Deutsche Mark (about 51,000 Euro) to his boss Ronnie.
Everything goes wrong. Manni accidentally leaves the bag, with its 100,000 Mark, in the underground after bolting from two ticket inspectors. Someone else takes the bag and the money is lost.
Manni makes a desperate phone call to Lola, asking her to think of something. If he doesn't have the money by the meeting at 12 noon, he'll be killed.
Lola promises to get him the 100,000 Mark. Manni warns her that he'll rob a supermarket on the street corner if Lola can't reach him in 20 minutes. Can Lola get him the money and save his life? It's at this point that the three sequential alternative realities begin.
Throughout the film, Lola bumps into people, talks to them, or simply passes them by. Details of that person's future are subsequently shown in a series of still frames. Their futures changed wildly, depending on the details of the encounter -- whether Lola meets them a second sooner or later, or how she reacts to them.
In one scenario, a woman whom Lola accidentally bumps into remains poor and kidnaps an unattended baby after her child is taken away by social workers. In the second future, the same woman wins the lottery and becomes rich. In the third scenario, the woman experiences a religious conversion.
Several moments in the film allude to a supernatural awareness in the characters. For example, in the first reality, a nervous Lola is shown by Manni how to use a gun by removing the safety, whereas she does this automatically in the second scenario, as if she remembers her previous incarnation.
The movie itself begins by posing questions pertaining to the unpredictability of the world and the unknowable nature of human nature itself.
It suggests that drastically disparate consequences can alter the fates of different people from a one second change in the time of one person's running.
Source: Wikipedia
The rich human empathy of Almodóvar's recent films is passionate, heartbreaking and intoxicating. There aren't enough adjectives to praise this remarkable filmmaker, who is at the height of his powers. "Talk to Her" is superb, with outstanding performances from all involved.
- Editorial Reviews/Amazon.com
Jim Morrison: This is the strangest life I've ever known.
from: The Doors (1991)
Tagline: The ceremony is about to begin.
About: Biopic about the life of poet/philosopher Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors.
The film portrays Morrison as the larger-than-life icon of 1960s rock and roll, counterculture, and the drug-using free love hippie lifestyle.
But the depiction goes beyond the iconic: his alcoholism, interest in the spiritual plane and hallucinogenic drugs as entheogens, and, particularly, his growing obsession with death are threads which weave in and out of the film.
The film opens during the recording of Jim Morrison's An American Prayer and quickly moves to a childhood memory of his family driving along a desert highway.
Young Jim sees an elderly Native American dying by the roadside. The film picks up with Morrison's arrival in California and his assimilation into the Venice Beach culture, followed by his film school days studying at UCLA; his introduction to his girlfriend Pamela Courson, his first encounters with Ray Manzarek, and the origin of The Doors; Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore.
Jim convinces his bandmates to travel to Death Valley and experience the mind-expanding effects of psychedelic drugs. Returning to Los Angeles, they play several shows at the famous Whiskey A-Go-Go club and develop a rabid fanbase.
Jim's onstage antics and occasionally improvised lyrics often raise the ire of club owners; however, the band's popularity continues to expand.
As the fame of The Doors grows, Morrison's obsessions with death, sex, and drugs increase. The rest of the band grows weary of Morrison's missed recording sessions and absences at concerts.
Morrison is depicted arriving late to a Miami, Florida concert, becoming increasingly confrontational towards the audience and possibly exposing himself onstage. The incident is a low point for the band, resulting in resentment from the other band members and Morrison's trial for indecent exposure.
Morrison sinks deeper into an alcoholic haze and has mystical sexual encounters with Patricia Kennealy, a rock journalist involved in witchcraft. In 1971, Jim Morrison is found dead in a bathtub by Pamela in Paris, France, at the age of 27.
In a 1994 interview, Robby Krieger, the Doors' guitarist, agreed with interviewer Gary James' statement that the movie The Doors doesn't give the viewer "any kind of understanding of what made Jim Morrison tick."
Krieger also commented about the film in the same interview: "They left a lot of stuff out. Some of it was overblown, but a lot of the stuff was very well done, I thought."
In the book called The Doors, an anthology on the band compiled by its surviving members, Manzarek says, "That Oliver Stone thing did real damage to the guy I knew: Jim Morrison, the poet." In this book, Densmore says of the movie, "A third of it's fiction." In the same volume, Krieger joins Manzarek and Densmore in describing the movie as inaccurate, but also says, referring to the film's inaccuracy, "It could have been a lot worse."
Source: Wikipedia
Walk The Line
WALK THE LINE
Sam Phillips: I don’t record material that doesn’t sell, Mr. Cash. And gospel like that doesn’t sell.
Johnny Cash: Was it the gospel or the way I sing it?
Sam Phillips: Both.
Johnny Cash: Well, what’s wrong with the way I sing it?
Sam Phillips: I don’t believe you.
Johnny Cash: You saying I don’t believe in God?
Grant: J.R., come on. Let’s go.
Johnny Cash: No. I want to understand, I mean, we come down here and we play for a minute and he tells me I don’t believe in God.
Sam Phillips: You know exactly what I’m telling you. We’ve already heard that song. A hundred times. Just like that. Just like how you was singin’ it.
Johnny Cash: Well you didn’t let us bring it home.
Sam Phillips: Bring...bring it home? All right, let’s bring it home. If you was hit by a truck, and you was lyin’ out in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song, huh, one song people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth. One song that would sum you up, you telling me that’s the song you’d sing? That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day, about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re gonna shout it? Or -- would you sing something different. Something real. Something you felt. ‘Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain’t got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believing in yourself.
June Carter: You walked here?
Johnny Cash: Yeah.
June Carter: You walked here all the way from Nashville?
Johnny Cash: Yeah, well, walking's good for you.
Johnny Cash: Tell me you don't love me.
June Carter: It burns. It burns, it burns...
June Carter: I am not going down there. If I go down there--
Mother Maybelle: You already are down there, honey.
Johnny Cash: Jack was so good. He would have done so many good things. What have I done? Just hurt everybody I know.
Prison warden: Mr. Cash? Might I suggest that you refrain from playing any more tunes that remind them -- the inmates, that is -- well, that they're in prison?
Johnny Cash: You think they forgot?
Prison: Perhaps you and your wife could do another spiritual.
Johnny Cash: That's not my wife, warden.
About: Biopic about the early life of music legend Johnny Cash; covers his poverty-stricken childhood, the tragic death of his brother Jack, touring with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, and his star-crossed passion for June Carter. Recommended for: Johnny Cash fans, music lovers, and die-hard romantics.
Tagline: Love is a burning thing.
Trivia: There was no lip-synching in the movie; Joaquin Phoenix (Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (June Carter) perform all the songs themselves. Phoenix studied guitar for four years to portray Cash as realistically as possible.
Witherspoon learned to play the auto-harp, which she plays in a stage scene, and in the scene where she writes "Ring of Fire," a song she wrote about falling in love with Cash.
Real-life trivia: Cash gave a free concert at San Quentin, and found 22-year-old inmate Merle Haggard sitting in the front row. Haggard later became a country music legend.
Shooter Jennings portrays his real-life father, Waylon Jennings, in a scene late in the film.
The title of Cash's 1975 autobiography, "Man in Black," is the same title as his 1971 song, "Man in Black":
"I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/But is there because he's a victim of the times."
The movie Walk the Line focuses on the legendary love affair between Johnny Cash and June Carter. As Cash acknowledges in his autobiography, "What June did for me was post signs along the way, lift me when I was weak, encourage me when I was discouraged, and love me when I was alone and felt unlovable. She is the greatest woman I have ever known. Nobody else, except my mother, comes close."
Bishop: What do you think is the best, a game you think you can finish, but never do, or a game that seems impossible to win, but isn't?
Murphy: Why did you come? Because of me?
Ash: Isn't that a good reason?
Murphy: Have you ever been shot? Do you want to feel real pain in a real body?
Ash: Does it have to be this way?
Murphy: When one of us dies and that body doesn't vanish, the other one will know.
Bishop: Just as I thought, you are the only one who got through the gate.
Ash: Is this "Special A"?
Bishop: We call it "Class Real". Building it has taken huge amounts of very sophisticated data. In many ways, it's still very experimental.
Ash: In many ways?
Bishop: There's just one thing you have to do to complete it. That's finishing off the Unreturned. Your equipment and skill parameters are returned to default. All you have is a pistol and one clip of ammunition. There are neutral characters operating under free will. Hurt one of them and your game is over. There's no time limit. The only exit from the game is completion. If you get back safely, you can be one of us. Any questions?
Ash: Why did you send me here?
Bishop: Surely the answer to that lies within you.
Ash: Let me ask you something. Are you accessing from a terminal somewhere or are you part of the system itself?
Game Master: What does it matter? You couldn't confirm it anyway.
From: Avalon
About: In the not-so-distant future, players risk everything to play Avalon -- an illegal and potentially lethal virtual war game.
For one of the game’s greatest warriors, the "noble soldier" Ash, her search for Avalon’s legendary game stage "Class Real" will either lead to an entirely higher level of existence -- or be a journey from which she will never return.
Source: Amazon.com
First hour is riveting. Slower pacing, takes a philosophical tumble here and there, and the ending is not as satisfying as it could be, lacks logic.
Still worth a look for anyone who enjoys movies that are open-ended, somewhat complex or philosophically intriguing.
This film moves slowly and the plot isn't spoon-fed to the audience; if you enjoy thoughtful films, particularly films which provoke the viewer by posing questions without simple answers, you might enjoy Avalon.
If you dislike plot points which are open to interpretation or discussion, this film might just frustrate you.
Interesting live-action anime/manga film; scenes are superior to The Matrix. Please note, though -- although there are action sequences in this film, this is not an action movie. Subtitles.
Trivia: Directed by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell).
The Saint
THE SAINT
Dr. Emma Russell: You're not Martin.
Simon Templar: No.
Dr. Emma Russell: What is your name?
Simon Templar: I don't have a name.
Dr. Emma Russell: Sad. Will you have a name when we get home?
Simon Templar: I don't have a home.
From: The Saint
About: The film begins showing a young orphan Simon Templar living at the St. Ignatius Orphanage in the Far East.
The orphanage is run by a strict headmaster who doesn't care for the orphans. After he punishes the orphans, Templar and the boys rescue the girls who were locked away.
Templar plans to run away. Before he can escape, he tries to kiss his first love, but she dies after an accidental fall over a railing.
Fast forward to present day, where an adult Simon Templar (Val Kilmer) is a lone wolf and professional thief nicknamed "The Saint."
To throw off law enforcement, he assumes the names of various saints.
An unscrupulous industrialist, Tretiak, hires the master thief. His mission: to steal a new formula for cold fusion developed by brilliant scientist Emma Russell.
Templar falls in love with Dr. Russell, but reluctantly steals her formula in order to stop Tretiak from killing her. But the formula is incomplete, so Tretiak goes after Dr. Russell, the only one who can complete the equation...
Tagline: Never reveal your name. Never turn your back. Never surrender your heart.
Selene: Lycans are allergic to silver. We have to get the bullets out quickly, or they end up dying on us during questioning.
Michael Corvin: What happens to them afterward?
Selene: We put the bullets back in.
from: "Underworld" (2003)
Tagline: When the battle begins, which side will you choose?
Michael Kitz: Your having sent this announcement all over the world may well constitute a breach of national security.
Ellie Arroway: This isn't a person-to-person call. You can't possibly think that a civilization sending this kind of message would intend it just for Americans.
Michael Kitz: I'm saying you might have consulted us; obviously, the contents of this message could be extremely sensitive.
Ellie Arroway: You want to classify prime numbers, now?
from: Contact (1997)
About: Contact is a science fiction film adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan. It stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Ann Arroway.
The story follows the relentless efforts of the film's main protagonist, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, or "Ellie," to advance research with the SETI project.
The main protagonist, Ellie Arroway, is introduced as a child, fascinated by amateur radio.
After Ellie asks her father whether humans can talk to other planets, and whether there are other civilizations, the scene changes to Arroway in her late 20s, a brilliant scientist and researcher working on the SETI program.
While working at Arecibo, she meets Palmer Joss, a Christian theology student researching a book on science's impact on the Third World.
Despite her commitment to the SETI project, Arroway is ridiculed by her former teacher, Dr. David Drumlin, who pulls the funding and shuts down the project.
Ellie spends the next 18 months trying to find a new source of funding for her research and succeeds in obtaining a large grant from the reclusive billionaire industrialist S.R. Hadden.
Leasing time from the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, Ellie and her colleagues spend the next four years combing the skies until she detects a powerful signal of extraterrestrial origin coming from the direction of the star Vega composed of prime numbers, something which could not have happened randomly in nature...
The film explores what might happen if such contact indeed were made, and the enormous difficulties the human race might encounter in coming to understand that contact, with significant internal conflict occurring in differences over culture, human perception, politics -- and religion -- as the story plays out.
Source: Wikipedia
Aki: Look, I don't want to talk about it. The fact of the matter is it was worth the lives of you and your men.
Jane Proudfoot: You and your men?
Ryan: She thinks you're a man.
Jane Proudfoot: I think she's an idiot.
Neil: I know you're not a man.
Jane Proudfoot: I think you're an idiot, too.
Doctor Sid: Remember what happened to Galileo? They threw him in jail because he said the earth was not the center of the universe.
Neil: Looks like you've gained some weight.
Jane Proudfoot: It's called upper body strength, Neil.
Doctor Sid: Oh, and stay away from your friend the Captain. You save his life, he saves yours, one thing leads to another...I was young once, too.
Doctor Aki Ross: Doctor, there's a war going on. Nobody's young anymore.
Capt. Gray Edwards: I want you two back on the ship.
Neil: We're doing fine, Captain.
[Turns to see Jane fending off a horde of phantoms]
Neil: Jane is negotiating with extreme prejudice.
Grey: You've been trying to tell me that death isn't the end. Don't back out on me now that I believe.
Aki: We can't just leave everyone.
Capt. Gray Edwards: Everyone is dead.
From: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Trivia: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a completely computer-generated film (the 'actors' are pixels, too).
About: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is set on an alien-infested Earth in the year 2065.
The remaining humans live in "barrier cities" all over the world and attempt to free their planet from the Phantoms, an alien race.
The only hope for the planet comes from the scientist Aki Ross and her mentor, Dr. Sid, who have a plan to destroy the Phantoms without damaging the planet, but a general named Hein is determined to use the Zeus space cannon to destroy the Phantoms -- even if it means destroying the Earth in the process.
Since the phantoms are the end result of an alien war in which the combatants literally tore their planet apart, they represent the unsettling self-destructiveness of endless warfare on an entire ecosystem.
Source: Wikipedia
Arthur: I call on the powers of Heaven and Earth, aid me now! I call upon the God of Heaven, and the Goddess of the Earth, help me now!
Viviane: You call upon the God, and the Goddess? It is the Goddess who answers.
from: The Mists of Avalon (2001)
Tagline: Passion. Mysticism. Adventure. Journey beyond the legend of Camelot.
Trivia: Based on the book The Mists of Avalon by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley.
About: The plot focuses on Morgaine (often called Morgan Le Fay in other works), who is portrayed by Bradley as a woman fighting to save her matriarchal Celtic culture in a country where patriarchal Christianity threatens to destroy the pagan way of life.
The book also describes the lives of Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere), Viviane, Morgause, and other women who are often marginalized in other Arthurian retellings. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are supporting, rather than main, characters.
The Mists of Avalon is in stark contrast to other retellings of the Arthurian tales, which consistently paint Morgaine as a distant, one-dimensional evil witch or sorceress; with no real explanation given (or required) for her antipathy.
In this case Morgaine is cast as a strong woman in pain who has unique gifts and responsibilities at a time of enormous political and spiritual upheaval; as she is called upon to defend her indigenous matriarchal heritage against impossible odds.
Source: Wikipedia
