Tag: Quotes

Philosophical Thoughts on Movie Watching from Siskel and Ebert

Why do we go to the movies in the first place? To have a vicarious experience. For two hours we sit there and if the movie works we stop being ourselves to some degree and become the characters on the screen. And then a review to some degree should talk about whether we enjoyed that vicarious experience. —Roger Ebert…

In a 20/20 interview, he took things even further. “When you disagree on a movie,” Ebert said, “you’re not disagreeing on the movie. You’re disagreeing on who you are. If I don’t like a movie and he does, then I’m not saying that the movie is flawed, I’m saying that he’s flawed.”…

Because the crosstalk was unplanned and unscripted, it occasionally ventured off into fascinating tangents. A Siskel & Ebert movie review could mutate at a moment’s notice into a debate about philosophy, morality, or spirituality. The occasion of the 1987 fantasy film Made in Heaven, about a young man who dies, meets his soulmate in heaven, then must return to Earth to find her when she is reincarnated in a new human body, inspired Roger and Gene to talk less about the movie than their own beliefs about the afterlife.

“I believe,” Siskel revealed, “that if you think of someone, whether it be here or in someplace else, that they come alive. I think the film had a religious content to it. So I found the film beautiful.”
“Yeah, but, of course, whether or not you believe in this doesn’t have anything to do with whether the movie is good or not,” Ebert countered.
“For me, it does,” Siskel responded.
“Okay, well, in that case you think every movie you agree with is good!” Ebert said.
“I have for years,” Siskel replied.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
Matt Singer

Note – recommended

Musical Transcendence – John Lurie – The History of Bones, Quotes from

I feel similarly about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who Evan also introduced me to. He took me to see him at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It started out with harmonium and a bunch of guys with mustaches sitting on the stage, singing almost like they were not really interested, more like they were mumbling.

This went on for quite a while. I turned to Evan and said, “What the fuck, Evan? Why am I here?” as the men with mustaches sat on the stage sort of singing.

But it built and built. And then it built more. Over a long period of time, it just slowly built, and somehow you were inside it. Hypnotized by it. And then Nusrat started hitting these lines that ripped into my soul. It was like I had been transfigured.

As the proper, polite people sat there in their seats at BAM, absorbing their culture as people of their class are supposed to do, it hit me so hard that I jumped up and started screaming in approval, “Fuck you! Fuck you!! Motherfucker!! Oh!!”

These two Gnawa guys came to my room and they were just beautiful. So sweet and respectful that it broke my heart. One of them played this homemade half-bass, half-guitar instrument that had no frets, and the other one had little metal maraca-like things and sang.

They both sat on the floor and we got stoned on kif. I took out my soprano and turned on my tape recorder. The little guy with the metal clacky things sang like he had a hole in his throat. It had the warmth of your father singing you to sleep. Sometimes the other would sing a response or repeat his phrase.

What a gift this was.

The music is fairly simple and modal. But it has an imploring tone that is beautiful. It is like the music is just gently asking, “Why, God? Why?,” acknowledging suffering but without complaining.

I played with them and something happened for me. I had one of those moments. An epiphany. It was not my being influenced by what they were playing. It was the freedom and the very sweet and open vibe that they had brought that freed me up. Something changed in my playing that night and stayed changed.

It was the purity in their reason for playing that really had hit me. That was what I wanted, more than anything: to be part of a tribe that played music for the right reason.

There was a kid named Larry Wright who used to play drums on a compound bucket in Times Square. This sixteen-year-old kid could play stuff that would make you positive that there must be reincarnation, because it was shit that he just could not know about. African stuff and jazz stuff that he clearly had never heard, as he only listened to hip-hop.

What was particularly interesting and inexplicably complicated were his segues from one beat to the other. Where he was finding his next beat, that was where this stuff would come out that would just make me do a double take. “How does this kid know that?”

The History of Bones
John Lurie

From amazon reviews:

WorldTraveler
5.0 out of 5 stars Ah, the good ole days…
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2021
Verified Purchase
I was introduced to John Lurie through the 800 number. Got my “chunk” and never looked back. Seeing them in the ‘90s was one of my favorite nights of music ever in NY.
At one point in the show, there was this beautiful pause, and the the audience was just hypnotized – I was seeing through a third eye – and all of a sudden, a bottle cap was accidentally dropped, and rolled for about 20 seconds making an oddly “clear” and strangely appropriate sound. I thought I was the only person who could hear it until John stepped up to the mic and quietly said “that was interesting”, thus breaking the spell in a gentle way that let us all gently land back safely on earth.
It was magical moment and the book made me realize I wasn’t alone hearing the magic that is the Lizards.

NOTE – Book highly recommended.

John Cheever – Desultory Quotes

“I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.”

“I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.”

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

“The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books. You read the books they write for little children and you’ll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.”

“Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

“The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7464.John_Cheever?page=1

eXistenz – trailer, quotes from

A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.

Allegra: So how does it feel?
Ted: What?
Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.
Ted: It feels completely unreal.
Allegra: You’re stuck now, aren’t ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there’s nothing happening here. We’re safe. It’s boring.
Ted: It’s worse than that. I’m not sure… I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you’re beginning to feel a bit like a game character.

Ted: Free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours.
Allegra: It’s like real life. There’s just enough to make it interesting.

Ted: What was your life like before?
Gas: Before?
Ted: Before it was changed by Allegra Geller.
Gas: I operated a gas station.
Ted: You still operate a gas station, don’t you?
Gas: Only on the most pathetic level of reality.

Ted: It’s none of your business who sent us! We’re here and that is all that matters… God, what happened? I didn’t mean to say that.
Allegra: It’s your character who said it. It’s kind of a schizophrenic feeling, isn’t it? You’ll get used to it. There are things that have to be said to advance the plot and establish the characters, and those things get said whether you want to say them or not. Don’t fight it.

Allegra: What the hell was that?
Ted: That wasn’t me. That was my game character. I wouldn’t have done that. Not here anyway.
Allegra: Our characters are obviously supposed to jump on each other. It’s probably a pathetically mechanical attempt to heighten the emotional tension of the next game sequence. No use fighting it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/quotes/?ref_=tt_dyk_qu

American Beauty – Quotes from

Brad Dupree: [reading Lester’s job description] “My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.” Well, you have absolutely no interest in saving yourself.
Lester Burnham: Brad, for 14 years I’ve been a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is if I start firebombing.

Lester Burnham: [narrating] Both my wife and daughter think I’m this gigantic loser and they’re right, I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back.

Lester Burnham: When I was your age, I flipped burgers all summer just to be able to buy an eight-track.
Ricky Fitts: That sucks.
Lester Burnham: No, actually it was great. All I did was party and get laid. I had my whole life ahead of me.

Colonel Frank Fitts: Where’s your wife?
Lester Burnham: Uh, I dunno. Probably out fucking that dorky, prince-of-real-estate asshole. And you know what? I don’t care.
Colonel Frank Fitts: Your wife is with another man and you don’t care?
Lester Burnham: Nope. Our marriage is just for show. A commercial for how normal we are when we’re anything but.

Lester Burnham: I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I’m just now waking up.

Angela Hayes: Who are you looking for?
Jane Burnham: My parents are coming tonight. They’re trying to, you know, take an active interest in me.
Angela Hayes: Gross. I hate it when my mom does that.

Donald Sutherland and Robert DeNiro – Quotes on the Acting Business, Interview Magazine

REZNOR: You thought, why’d they pick that take?

DASTMALCHIAN: Why did they pick me? To me, it was the only part of the movie that didn’t look like a real movie. It almost looked like home video. But process is everything to me, because I have no control when I walk away. If I love the process, which I really did on Late Night with the Devil, I genuinely let go. And then when it’s time to see the thing, I have no assumptions. I can think fondly of the experience making it. I’ve had experiences that were quite negative and then the product turned out fine, but I don’t really care for it.

REZNOR: That’s interesting. I had read long ago, at least I think I did, De Niro being asked, essentially, why are you in shitty movies? And his response was similar to yours. “It’s the process. I haven’t even seen some of the films, but I’m doing it because it was exciting to me, regardless of the context or the film that’s contained within. And I thought, “Really?” It felt like a stretch from my own perspective of being so attached to the work I do. But then again, scoring has opened my eyes to a lot of that same thing of, I’m part of the whole, I’m not the whole whole, and there’s a futility involved in trying to control things you can’t control.

DASTMALCHIAN: Yes.

How David Dastmalchian and Trent Reznor Tamed Their Demons

GUGINO: I’ll say two things, and then I’m really curious about your experience. One, on Red Hot, I was 18 and I was working with Donald Sutherland. He played my dad and, at one point towards the end of the shoot, he said, “Carla, do you know that feeling when you finish a job and you think you’re never going to work again?” I said, “Yes!” and I’m waiting for this advice, and he says, “It never ends.” That was great advice because he’s Donald Sutherland, he’s worked for his entire life, and if this man feels that way at this age, this is really good for me to remember.

Carla Gugino and Lena Headey Trade Hollywood War Stories

Intellect – Quotes from Emerson Essay

“The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.”

“The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions..”

“Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.”

“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”

“How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.”

Intellect
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sufficient Unto the Day is the Evil Thereof – Aphorism, Meaning of

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” is an aphorism which appears in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 6 — Matthew 6:34.

The wording comes from the King James Version and the full verse reads: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

It implies that we should not worry about the future, since each day contains an ample burden of evils and suffering.

Wikipedia


By Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14023625

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Quotes from

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

[Mary reads to Dr. Mierzwiak out of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”; the lines are from Alexander Pope’s poem “Eloisa to Abelard”]
Mary: How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Joel: Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.

[last lines]
Joel: I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.
Clementine: [pauses] Okay.

Mary: Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
[they click glasses]
Mary: Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Found it in my Bartlett’s.

Seeing God in the Everyday – Two Quotes

One of my favorite images can be found in the Book of Jeremiah, which is especially useful for those who fear God may be the evil trickster inviting them to change, only to trap them into a miserable life. Jeremiah’s God says otherwise: “‘Surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the LORD, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope’” (Jer. 29:11). God wants only the best for you, says Jeremiah.

You may also find some newer, more modern, images like the God of Surprises, who astonishes you with new and unexpected invitations to grow. Or perhaps you’ll come up with images of your own. One Jesuit friend was once on a long cross-country trip and ended up stranded in an unfamiliar airport, with all his flights canceled. A cheery travel agent patiently helped him sort everything out so he could book a new flight. It was a striking image of God, he said: someone who helps you find your way home.

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
James Martin

“My, how foolish I am!” my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. “You know what I’ve always thought?” she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

A Christmas Memory
Truman Capote

Tolstoy – A Calendar of Wisdom – September 26

All true wisdom and all true faith are clearly expressed in the same moral law.

All the world is subject to one law, and all thinking beings have the same basic intellect. Therefore, all wise men share the same idea of perfection.
—MARCUS AURELIUS

The more I dedicate my time to two things, the more they fill my life with ever-increasing pleasure. The first is the sky above me, and the second is the moral law within me.
—IMMANUEL KANT

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
—MATTHEW 7:12

Moral law is so obvious and clear that even people who do not know the law have no excuse for violating it. They have only one recourse: to deny their intellect, which they do.

A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul
Leo Tolstoy, Leo.

Trainspotting – Desultory Quotes

Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: [narrating] Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: [narrates] When you’re on junk you have only one worry: scoring. When you’re off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite. Got no money: can’t get pissed. Got money: drinking too much. Can’t get a bird: no chance of a ride. Got a bird: too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food, about some football team that never fucking wins, about human relationships and all the things that really don’t matter when you’ve got a sincere and truthful junk habit.

Diane: You’re not getting any younger, Mark. The world’s changing. Music’s changing. Even drugs are changing. You can’t stay in here all day dreaming about heroin and Ziggy Pop.
Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: It’s Iggy Pop.
Diane: Whatever. I mean, the guy’s dead anyway.
Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: Iggy Pop’s not dead. He toured last year! Tommy went to see him.
Diane: The point is, you’ve got to find something new.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/quotes/

Loss of WWI Youth – Chariots of Fire Speech

Master of Caius: I take the war list, and I run down it. Name after name which I cannot read, and which we – who are older than you – cannot hear without emotion. Names which will be only names to you, the new college, but which to us summon up face after face, full of honesty and goodness, zeal and vigor, and intellectual promise. The flower of a generation, the glory of England – and they died for England, and all that England stands for. And now, by tragic necessity, their dreams have become yours. Let me exhort you: Examine yourselves. Let each of you discover where your true chance of greatness lies. For their sakes – for the sake of your college, and your country – seize this chance. Rejoice in it, and let no power or persuasion deter you in your task.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082158/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu