I do not pretend to be a good film critic. I have very vague criteria for what constitutes a "good" film in my mind. Something I like about one film may be what I hate about another. Consistency does not have a ticket on this train. That being said,
"Crazy Heart"... I really like Jeff Bridges as an actor. I think he's one of the best there is. I can think of many films he's been in that rank near the top of my favorites. However, "Crazy Heart" - with an excellent portrayal by Jeff of a country musician on the downhill side of his career - is a poor attempt at copying the successful story format of Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" starring (another favorite actor of mine) Mickey Rourke. The storyline similarities are numerous and transparent... the personal struggle with substance abuse, the "long lost" kid from a failed relationship back in the heyday, the frail relationship with a woman with a kid... etc., etc., etc.
Hmm, down on his luck former "star" has trouble with fading fame and substance abuse, finds possible redemption and opportunity for another chance at love, lets self-destructive habits ruin any progress, hits bottom or something like it, starts the long road to sobriety (conveniently depicted via short montage or slow fade with "blank months/years later" graphic), realizes that happiness and success come in very small doses, learns to accept mediocrity, lights another smoke and heads toward the sun - with or without the girl - usually without. Audience leaves feeling good about themselves and their lives because at least they are not "him"...
While the Aronofsky film used silence, nuance and atmosphere to great effect, the Scott Cooper rip off - "Crazy Heart" just tossed in some bland stereotypical ingredients and stirred until a froth appeared. Then promptly sprinkled some bankable names on top. Adding the great actor Robert Duvall to a film does not guarantee quality (think "Gone in 60 Seconds"...). Maggie Gyllenhaal as the Marisa Tomei character helps a little (who doesn't like Maggie when she's cast right? - Secretary, SherryBaby, and many more), but not enough. And briefly tipping the hat to some great songwriters like Townes Van Zandt doesn't make it all better either.
(Don't get me started about the use of music in film and how that has become superficial and meaningless...) I suppose I could have made the same point about this film by just saying "I liked it better when it was called "The Wrestler", but that wouldn't be as much fun now would it?
Maybe I'll soon share my lists... my lists of films - good and bad - and why I feel one way or another about certain films.
I will leave with this: My top three, no, five films:
Quest for Fire, Citizen Kane, Cinema Paradiso, She's Gotta Have It, Wizards.
Reasons? Coming soon.
---
April addition:
OK, it pains me to omit "My Mother's Castle" and "My Father's Glory" from my little "top films" list. These two fantastic French cinematic masterpieces belong in anyone's list .. near the top. OK so call it "top seven films"...
Jan 30, 2010
Jan 27, 2010
Gone and back again
October 20th, 2003. (26 years to the day from the Lynyrd Skynyrd plan crash..)
I died.
I came back a little less then three minutes later - with the aide of several electric shocks to my chest.
My discovery? - Vast, infinite emptiness.. We are all simply energy. But we are ALL the same. We are not human. An absolute sense of being a part of something.. the ultimate sense of "belonging" - yet belonging as a connected mass.. not as a human.
Ours is an existence of happenstance.. chaotic culture.. existing not as individuals, but as elements - a part of something as large as any definition of the human concept of size...
Yin and Yang.
Orgasmic despair.
Pure bliss via the absence of any human connotations.. of ANYTHING.
This experience allows me - in life - to be fearless of "death".. to be at ease with my thoughts about the experiences of all my loved ones who have passed. There is no "suffer". There is no "heaven" save for the revelation of our true nature and the "comfort" of knowing that we are not "people" and cannot "know" anything.
I am not afraid of death. I do NOT want to feel ANYTHING close to the pain I felt with my heart attack.. but my apprehension is about the pain.. not the inevitable "destination".
---
Others who have had similar experiences:
"Bob Schriever, co-founder of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, was refereeing a high school football game seven years ago when he went into cardiac arrest, died and was revived.
He, too, questions the dream explanation. "Why are so many people dreaming the same thing? How can so many people, and there's hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced this, how can we all be dreaming the same thing and describe the exact same thing?"
Schriever says these experiences are so profound that only someone who has gone through them can truly understand.
Seven years later, he is still consumed with his own near-death experience.
"I think about that every morning when I wake up, first thing, during the day, I don't know how many times and every night before I fall asleep. I think about that. People do not understand or appreciate what we go through."
For Mrs. Geraghty, it's a daily struggle to put the pieces back together again.
"I've been someplace that not everybody can go, and there's not a lot of people you can sit down and have that conversation with," Geraghty said. "My own daughter tells me, 'It's freaky, Mom.' I've literally lost friends over this the minute they hear it."
Geraghty says she became depressed once she left the hospital because her perspective on her entire life changed. She still gets depressed, she says, and is on medication.
"I actually went to my doctor and said to her, 'I think I'm losing my mind. This can't be really happening,' you know, and she said it's OK, it's very hard to understand when you've been through an experience like that."
---
Depression? OK, I'll bite. But depression because of being privy to the fact that we are not what we seem to think. Possessing knowledge of the futility of it all.. how can I NOT be a little depressed?
What purpose life then?
I think, to release the energy within as love and compassion for the collective whole. Energy never stops.. it just changes.
I died.
I came back a little less then three minutes later - with the aide of several electric shocks to my chest.
My discovery? - Vast, infinite emptiness.. We are all simply energy. But we are ALL the same. We are not human. An absolute sense of being a part of something.. the ultimate sense of "belonging" - yet belonging as a connected mass.. not as a human.
Ours is an existence of happenstance.. chaotic culture.. existing not as individuals, but as elements - a part of something as large as any definition of the human concept of size...
Yin and Yang.
Orgasmic despair.
Pure bliss via the absence of any human connotations.. of ANYTHING.
This experience allows me - in life - to be fearless of "death".. to be at ease with my thoughts about the experiences of all my loved ones who have passed. There is no "suffer". There is no "heaven" save for the revelation of our true nature and the "comfort" of knowing that we are not "people" and cannot "know" anything.
I am not afraid of death. I do NOT want to feel ANYTHING close to the pain I felt with my heart attack.. but my apprehension is about the pain.. not the inevitable "destination".
---
Others who have had similar experiences:
"Bob Schriever, co-founder of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, was refereeing a high school football game seven years ago when he went into cardiac arrest, died and was revived.
He, too, questions the dream explanation. "Why are so many people dreaming the same thing? How can so many people, and there's hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced this, how can we all be dreaming the same thing and describe the exact same thing?"
Schriever says these experiences are so profound that only someone who has gone through them can truly understand.
Seven years later, he is still consumed with his own near-death experience.
"I think about that every morning when I wake up, first thing, during the day, I don't know how many times and every night before I fall asleep. I think about that. People do not understand or appreciate what we go through."
For Mrs. Geraghty, it's a daily struggle to put the pieces back together again.
"I've been someplace that not everybody can go, and there's not a lot of people you can sit down and have that conversation with," Geraghty said. "My own daughter tells me, 'It's freaky, Mom.' I've literally lost friends over this the minute they hear it."
Geraghty says she became depressed once she left the hospital because her perspective on her entire life changed. She still gets depressed, she says, and is on medication.
"I actually went to my doctor and said to her, 'I think I'm losing my mind. This can't be really happening,' you know, and she said it's OK, it's very hard to understand when you've been through an experience like that."
---
Depression? OK, I'll bite. But depression because of being privy to the fact that we are not what we seem to think. Possessing knowledge of the futility of it all.. how can I NOT be a little depressed?
What purpose life then?
I think, to release the energy within as love and compassion for the collective whole. Energy never stops.. it just changes.
Time to bounce...
Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
"Either that wallpaper goes or I do." - Oscar Wilde's final words.
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
"Either that wallpaper goes or I do." - Oscar Wilde's final words.
where to begin?
Hmm.. only eight years ago...
(ok.. seven and a half...)
- written during one of my "What the hell am I going to do?" times...
--------
Sat, 24 Aug 2002 - 6:26 pm
Here it is.
I feel like I've fallen into a classic existential crisis. Life seems to have no point or higher purpose. After years of working, I have exhausted my enthusiasm. I'm like an actor who's lost the motivation for his part, a ghost among many.
I feel no passion for anything or anyplace on earth.
Inspiration, I fear, is a thing of the past.
I struggle daily to hold tight my slight grasp on a thin line of hope.
A trait bred into me from my inception I'm sure.
I have no idea whatsoever of how I'll survive this, I can only convey my heart's absolute trust that, somehow, I will.
"Help", from anyone, is irrelevant and impossible, for this is as much an individual conflict as there possibly can be.
There are many people whom I love completely and wish great things for. But right now, I feel powerless to advance "the cause".
Self-medication isn't working as well as it has in the past. Hell, I can't even get motivated by sedation.
Just now, as I was writing this, a lightning storm knocked out power to the entire neighborhood. I sat on my symbolic throne of a porch and watched out over my concrete kingdom as elegant streaks of the purest light I've ever seen blaze across the sky, hundreds of miles in fractions of a second. Arcs, bolts, circles and shapes of white fire followed shortly by the most resonant rumblings of thunder, deep and soul shaking to the core. My neighbor notices me and calls me a "brave soul". Could that be true? Is bravery inherent within me?
It's been said that you cannot possess courage unless you are frightened. I feel no fear save for that of a listless complacent existence devoid of wonder, holding no inspiration, emptiness that spills over and floods my mind. Life, at this point, has soured my alternate plan of living a vicarious life through my children.
I'm a few weeks away from thrusting one of my silly childhood dreams upon my eldest son. Assigning him responsibility which he did not ask for. Foregoing the usual training involved with mastering a motorcycle and asking him to care for this one object I've held onto for the past 25 years. In essence, asking him to carry that weight.
Options for overcoming obstacles in my immediate path are hidden to me. I think they exist, but if so, they seem as far away as outer space.
What miracle comes now? Which "thing" is the "right" thing?
How do I explain "me" to my family?
--------
Then.. in 2004, I wrote this...
Don't know why, ain't no sun up in the sky...
I'm hypnotized by this sky tonight. No other sky like it anywhere, none. Cancun was close. Hawai'i's skies were broken into small pieces and reassembled ever so gracfully over the ocean. An Arkansas night is almost too bright with stars. Downward glances fill the skies in New York and Philadelphia, down past Delaware, Jersey, Baltimore and D.C.. This ain't Hawai'i. This is Kansas.
This sky growls. It screams and cries and says goodbye.
"Why am I here, again?" Because I'm drawn here as surely as a magnet to the north right now. Maybe a last fling with home and all it holds captive in what's left of my heart. Don't know why. Stormy weather. Storms build inside then explode, ever so gracefully, into the sky tonight.
Destiny awaits. Molded by my desires, just the way I like it.
Too bad I kill it so easily...
Rushing in and swimming against the tide of time, I rummage through my little treasures and am reminded of the beautiful ugliness of it all - the past, the future, the transfer of one to the other and the speed at which it crawls by.
Searching for gasps of air over shudders of emotion ringing in my heart, I long to understand things which can never be explained. My mind accelerates once more. I can't stop the years. I can't stand my fears. I'm overwhelmed by the mundane and bored with the chaos.
Have you been there? It ain't no picnic sparky, let me tell 'ya.
----
(.. just found this that I wrote in 2006)
10/13/2006 (these digits add up to 13.. go figure)
Waialua wandering, wake to surf sounds, break these walls down.
My nemesis is staring at me in the bathroom mirror.. he laughs at my tears, then tosses in a few more years. What are the odds that I would land here in such a perfect place, only to be longing for a far away face. Pretty good odds I would guess. That's how I "roll".. never content, hell bent for something else.
Should I swim? Should I float? Should I try to find a boat?
Decisions are best left to others as I would rather watch my fate from a distance.
I miss my father.
Three in college now, my youngest at "that age".
Where is the passion? Where is the rage?
This world is not the one I wished for. I wanted my offspring to be free to explore. The rest of the world cares not for us 'mericanos, on the contrary, they want us gone.. thanks to the fumblings of just one man. That beast. He stole my children's future away from them.
Hope is such a cruel idea. Dreams are just a fleeting image on a screen. Sometimes I just want to scream. "Give it all back!"
Truth will always win this game of hide and seek. Hidden for as long as they want it to be. For as long as we let it, which is usually forever.
To my kids: Please prove me wrong. Please show me that it will all be ok, in the end. For my end is near. To the women I love: Love me or hate me, but please learn from me. My heart is not like any other.
I can't remember where it was that I wanted to go so long ago.
Is this it?
I've got a gut feeling that I belong in other lands, in other hands, listening to other bands. Jazz for a brain, I'm cursed with free-form, improvisational, frenetic thought processes. Focus is something you do with a lens. My lens is too big.., or not big enough. Sleep with stars above, wish happiness for the ones I love.
I miss my father.
---
(Back to 2010)) - I made it through all of that, and so many other times of doubt and struggle.. I suppose things will be alright.
(ok.. seven and a half...)
- written during one of my "What the hell am I going to do?" times...
--------
Sat, 24 Aug 2002 - 6:26 pm
Here it is.
I feel like I've fallen into a classic existential crisis. Life seems to have no point or higher purpose. After years of working, I have exhausted my enthusiasm. I'm like an actor who's lost the motivation for his part, a ghost among many.
I feel no passion for anything or anyplace on earth.
Inspiration, I fear, is a thing of the past.
I struggle daily to hold tight my slight grasp on a thin line of hope.
A trait bred into me from my inception I'm sure.
I have no idea whatsoever of how I'll survive this, I can only convey my heart's absolute trust that, somehow, I will.
"Help", from anyone, is irrelevant and impossible, for this is as much an individual conflict as there possibly can be.
There are many people whom I love completely and wish great things for. But right now, I feel powerless to advance "the cause".
Self-medication isn't working as well as it has in the past. Hell, I can't even get motivated by sedation.
Just now, as I was writing this, a lightning storm knocked out power to the entire neighborhood. I sat on my symbolic throne of a porch and watched out over my concrete kingdom as elegant streaks of the purest light I've ever seen blaze across the sky, hundreds of miles in fractions of a second. Arcs, bolts, circles and shapes of white fire followed shortly by the most resonant rumblings of thunder, deep and soul shaking to the core. My neighbor notices me and calls me a "brave soul". Could that be true? Is bravery inherent within me?
It's been said that you cannot possess courage unless you are frightened. I feel no fear save for that of a listless complacent existence devoid of wonder, holding no inspiration, emptiness that spills over and floods my mind. Life, at this point, has soured my alternate plan of living a vicarious life through my children.
I'm a few weeks away from thrusting one of my silly childhood dreams upon my eldest son. Assigning him responsibility which he did not ask for. Foregoing the usual training involved with mastering a motorcycle and asking him to care for this one object I've held onto for the past 25 years. In essence, asking him to carry that weight.
Options for overcoming obstacles in my immediate path are hidden to me. I think they exist, but if so, they seem as far away as outer space.
What miracle comes now? Which "thing" is the "right" thing?
How do I explain "me" to my family?
--------
Then.. in 2004, I wrote this...
Don't know why, ain't no sun up in the sky...
I'm hypnotized by this sky tonight. No other sky like it anywhere, none. Cancun was close. Hawai'i's skies were broken into small pieces and reassembled ever so gracfully over the ocean. An Arkansas night is almost too bright with stars. Downward glances fill the skies in New York and Philadelphia, down past Delaware, Jersey, Baltimore and D.C.. This ain't Hawai'i. This is Kansas.
This sky growls. It screams and cries and says goodbye.
"Why am I here, again?" Because I'm drawn here as surely as a magnet to the north right now. Maybe a last fling with home and all it holds captive in what's left of my heart. Don't know why. Stormy weather. Storms build inside then explode, ever so gracefully, into the sky tonight.
Destiny awaits. Molded by my desires, just the way I like it.
Too bad I kill it so easily...
Rushing in and swimming against the tide of time, I rummage through my little treasures and am reminded of the beautiful ugliness of it all - the past, the future, the transfer of one to the other and the speed at which it crawls by.
Searching for gasps of air over shudders of emotion ringing in my heart, I long to understand things which can never be explained. My mind accelerates once more. I can't stop the years. I can't stand my fears. I'm overwhelmed by the mundane and bored with the chaos.
Have you been there? It ain't no picnic sparky, let me tell 'ya.
----
(.. just found this that I wrote in 2006)
10/13/2006 (these digits add up to 13.. go figure)
Waialua wandering, wake to surf sounds, break these walls down.
My nemesis is staring at me in the bathroom mirror.. he laughs at my tears, then tosses in a few more years. What are the odds that I would land here in such a perfect place, only to be longing for a far away face. Pretty good odds I would guess. That's how I "roll".. never content, hell bent for something else.
Should I swim? Should I float? Should I try to find a boat?
Decisions are best left to others as I would rather watch my fate from a distance.
I miss my father.
Three in college now, my youngest at "that age".
Where is the passion? Where is the rage?
This world is not the one I wished for. I wanted my offspring to be free to explore. The rest of the world cares not for us 'mericanos, on the contrary, they want us gone.. thanks to the fumblings of just one man. That beast. He stole my children's future away from them.
Hope is such a cruel idea. Dreams are just a fleeting image on a screen. Sometimes I just want to scream. "Give it all back!"
Truth will always win this game of hide and seek. Hidden for as long as they want it to be. For as long as we let it, which is usually forever.
To my kids: Please prove me wrong. Please show me that it will all be ok, in the end. For my end is near. To the women I love: Love me or hate me, but please learn from me. My heart is not like any other.
I can't remember where it was that I wanted to go so long ago.
Is this it?
I've got a gut feeling that I belong in other lands, in other hands, listening to other bands. Jazz for a brain, I'm cursed with free-form, improvisational, frenetic thought processes. Focus is something you do with a lens. My lens is too big.., or not big enough. Sleep with stars above, wish happiness for the ones I love.
I miss my father.
---
(Back to 2010)) - I made it through all of that, and so many other times of doubt and struggle.. I suppose things will be alright.
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