A lot of interest was aroused by my assertion that Julie/Julia was among the best twenty films in English. Subsequent violent argument resulted in the death, poor man, of Patrick Dignam, who dared mention Gerry and The Tree Of Life and proved to be unhinged, in a suicide-bombing of the Cremorne Orpheum foyer only twelve hours ago. My list of the best twenty-FIVE films of all time (with the caveat that there are half a million I have not seen) is this.
Best film of all time: Downfall.
In no particular order, the other twenty-four:
Jules et Jim. The Hustler. The Seventh Seal. The Russian War and Peace. Danton. Pierrepoint. The Best Years Of Our Lives. Modern Times. Taxi Driver. Chariots Of Fire. Casablanca. Brief Encounter. Armacord. The Seven Samurai. The Barbarian Invasions. The Lives Of Others. Beneath Hill 60. The City Of Life And Death. It’s A Wonderful Life. The Road To Perdition. In Which We Serve. North By North-West. A Royal Affair. Army Of Shadows.
It is entirely possible that in another mood fifteen of these titles would be different and include, say, Love, Actually and The Syrian Bride and Barney’s Version and Double Indemnity and Wild Strawberries and Limelight (and, indeed, Julie/Julia), but there you go. The Hustler, Jules et Jim, The City Of Life And Death and The Best Years Of Our Lives and Army Of Shadows would always remain.
Over to you.
Name:
Midnight Express
The Deer Hunter
2001 A Space Odyssey
all had profound effects on me as a young man.
Amarcord is best Italian film ever. Night of the Shooting Stars second best Italian film.
You’ve been snared by the magician’s illusion, Bob. The Dignam who exploded so spectacularly in the Orpheum’s foyer was the doppelgänger, a mere hologram. The shimmering green aura surrounding his form was the giveaway.
The real Paddy continues to lie low and limit his public appearances to the bare essential, such are the risks of the Joycean legacy in belonging to the living dead.
You Canguro, you are a good man;
quick and hungry.
“my soul swoons slowly…..”
How about the best war films?
Downfall was very good. Bruno Ganz’s Hitler has never been better portrayed. The 60s Russian War and Peace was marvelous and out-hollywooded the Americans. But God was it long! The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now are also worthy contenders. I’ve not seen Beneath Hill 60 imagining it to be as dreadful as Kokoda. Remember that film? Surely Gallipoli is worth an honourable mention.
But the very best war film in my view is Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov towers over the rest. Hard to find on DVD you need to order it on eBay these days. Never been bettered to reveal the poetry and true horror of war.
It is a rule’of this website that you do not judge a film you have not seen. To say Hill 60 is like Kokoda is, in several senses, a war crime; in my view.
I ask you to apologise or I will ban you, even you, for life.
I said I thought it might be in the same league as Kokoda. I will now take a special interest in it and watch it and see if you are correct in judging it one of the best 25 films ever.
King and Country is my standout war film.
See Hill 60.
See King anbd Country
I HAVE seen King and Country. There us a scene in it where the roistering soldiers rehearse the young man’s shooting with him taking part in it.
It is utterly implausible. And very well acted.
Best line: ‘He made a damn fine cup of tea.’
Bob Ellis, You serpentine old fool!
You’ve removed your seminal embarrassment from this list!!!!
Where oh where is julie/julia????
Where is the catalyst, the symbol, the evidence, of your preposterously poor judgement???
Erased like an old Kremlin photo,
Gone.
Oh Bob, you keep performing these public acts of suicide – I shall have to call you Mishima from here on in.
You do realise there there scores of readers out there now looking at this act of subterfuge and grinning, disappointed, shocked, at the squalid nature of it all.
Reading your article I am overwhelmed with a Desperate Sadness.
A man of your history betraying himself so readily, so quickly,
So explicitly.
Heed my counsel Bob.
Before its too late.
Don’t leave us with these memories.
Not these ones.
After a lifetime of words and thoughts, a lifetime of admirers, me chief among them, seeking your word and thought,
do not let these examples of moral cowardice and intellectual laziness be your legacy.
Please.
Hold the line!
Hold your critical barricade!
There are enough of us here – let us prop you up in times of need.
Here Bob, hold my hand………
There you go,
Good man…
Be charitable. Time and doddering old age makes fools of us all.
if you could read you would notice Julie/Julia was on the list of the best twenty ENGLISH SPEAKING films and not on the list of the best twenty five films in any language.
I am truly sick of your lies and craziness and you are banned for life.
I am aware of the words you used, but
After your spirited and suicidal defense of “Julie” yesterday it comes as somewhat a surprise that you would abandon her so readily, so quickly, so earnestly….so thoughtlessly.
And that surprise, Bob Ellis, only to be buttressed and intensified by this bold declaration, from you yesterday, “Listing foreign films is impossible.”
So, you can see…the dilemma.
Bob, hold my hand….
steady Old Man, steady…
I hate you so much.
Do not think I am kidding.
You hate me?!?
Use that hate to steel your soul then Ellis!
Cite the lie!
Cite it!
Or retract and apologise!
Cite the lie!
Or retreat!
Damn your puerile polemics!
Damn your cowardice!
This is what happens!
Moral cowardice. This is a lie. Intellectual laziness. This is a lie. Desperate Sadness. This is a lie.
You lie all the time.
Bob,
You have accused me of A Lie.
On many occasions.
Yet have produced no evidence.
That is moral cowardice.
You have deployed the fallacy of misdirection (moving goalposts) by introducing “biography” into our discussion of Hill 60.
That is intellectual laziness (and deceit).
“Desperate Sadness” is no lie.
It is the truest expression of how I feel at seeing you reduced to such strategies.
As much as I hate Patrick Dignam, and I do hate Patrick Dignam, the younger one was too uninteresting to be the subject of a film while Streep played her role hamfisted and overblown. The best bit in the movie was the relaying of the information that the real Julia Childs had refused to meet the young woman. I was cheering at that point. It showed character. It showed class in the face of two bit modernity.
Was she overblown though, Reader1? I know little of her, but I recall, after Julia Child died, one woman wrote her happy memories of her, including one tv show where Julie’s false teeth shot out, whereupon, unfazed, she calmly reinserted them and continued. Suggesting that she may have had an overblown personality.
Meryl Streep did manage to convey a lot with the character. It was a lively performance. I was disappointed when it kept flicking back to the other story.
Me neither … I didn’t particularly enjoy the film at all.
That is unutterably gross. What makes you assume I’d go you? I wouldn’t.
Why?
Because I am witty, charming, handsome, fit as a fiddle and lean as a whittled green stick. I am brown as a nut, my shaved head reveals 3 small scars (remind me to tell you about them); I am intelligent, I read, and I like my garden, I sometimes , sometimes, can see around corners, and my taste for many things is impeccable. I have stood on Mt Sinai eating wafers and smiled and spoke to Robert De Niro in the Seagram lobby. I was the inspiration for Coppola’s “Lost in Translation”, I have followed the path of Stephen Dedalus and walked the Sandymount Strand. I am a good listener and I like Thai food. I drink (now) in moderation and have abandoned the tobacco. I wake at 3ish every morning to read or paint or watch film. I love these winter morns. I can quote chunks of shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Joyce, Dostoyevski, Whitehead and Russell, of Beckett, Woolf, and Stevens. I can quote bits of Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Eluard and Eliot and think the pioneer work of Duchamp and Malevich simply astounding. I think Hemingway and Burroughs over-rated and Barth and Pynchon not read enough.
I saw “Infra” and thought it remarkable. I have 4 identical polonecks and a neat sock drawer. I still prefer to write in pen and paper, I anger quickly and calm just as quickly, I am often melancholy but never maudlin (anymore). I saw Tom Waits sing “Small change” and drank with Nick Cave at Max’s in Petersham and I have seen police do terrible things. I wear readers now, my eyes straining to focus the finer print, and I still have 3 pairs of pointy toed boots. I never attended any of my graduations and only 5 people know of my post doc studies. I hid once in the bathroom of the Guggenheim to escape those who sought to manhandle me.
I am also quite modest.
So, I don’t assume anything.
Least of all that I would “go you”.
I know you don’t like me saying it but it’s important to me:
I am happy you found your dignity.
Seriously.
Well done Reader1.
Hm. Owing to an electronic accident I cannot erase this.
It will go soon, like him, from history.
Get rid of him, Bob. He is becoming very tedious.
Come on JG pick up your game. Any more than these mere flashes of your brilliance, erudition and sex appeal would certainly blind us but please find some other masking agent than petulance, vindictiveness, rudeness and insults.
What a hateful, patronising, grotesque knob end you are.
Well everyone Bob’s human after all, each of us with a point to make or a list of favourites will probably find an inconsistency to pick on between the Nora Ephron item and these lists.
I had the following and see no reason to deviate too greatly. Like Bob, in his own admission, there are millions of films I haven’t seen and so I stand hamstrung by my culture and the limits of my experience. Maybe Bollywood has managed to make a few better films than we usually give credit for?
Cool Hand Luke, The Great Dictator, One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, Being John Malkovich, 12 Angry Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, Pulp Fiction, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Usual Suspects, Blade Runner, Raging Bull, Life of Brian, Night on Earth, Seven Samurai, To Kill a Mockingbird, The third man, A clockwork Orange, Nosferatu and Citizen Kane.
I’d definitely add in Downfall on reflection, and The Hustler, Taxi Driver, It’s a wonderful life and of course the perennial favourite Casablanca are apt to round out any list of 25. Several are possibly better than my original list of 20, but one could argue that any such list is better for casting a wider net than listing one’s top ten Bergman films just because in certain company that’ll always get you a free pass.
My own quibble for what it is worth is that Bob seems of have an on again off again relationship with the Seven Samurai in the way I interpreted an earlier comment.
Great list.
My favourite film, I think, is They Might be Giants. But I also love The Song of Bernadette, if only for a two-minute section in which, whereas the parish priest has told her that after confirmation she can “begin to enjoy the proper pleasures like dancing”, Bernadette’s mother sits her down and tells her the realities of life for a woman: the scene is hard-hitting and gritty.
That’s what I like about film – comparing notes and not taking notice of anyone.
APOCALYPSE NOW [orig, not redux]; 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY; THE CONFORMIST; AMELIE; ANDREI RUBLEV; SOLARIS [Tark]; STALKER; RUSSIAN ARK; THE THIN RED LINE; PSYCHO [orig]; IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES; DERSU UZALA; THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS; HAROLD AND MAUDE; THE INNOCENTS; WAR AND PEACE [Russ]; HIGH NOON; WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF; WAGES OF FEAR; ROMEO AND JULIET [Zef]; AMARCORD; BRAZIL; ALIEN; SEVEN SAMURAI; THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA.
Special mentions: Kanzo Sensei; Bladerunner; The Road Home [Zhang]; Satyricon; Blood Simple, The Exorcist [not director's cut]; Time Out
This is a good list. Road Home is wonderful and should be on mine; likewise The Innocents, Andrei Rublev and Solaris.. Stalker is rubbish, haven’t seen Narayama; High Noon is a good thought, likewise Thin Red Line. Russian Ark a silly circus trick. Virgina Woolf hadn’t thought of but a splendid candidate.
Might put out best hundred soon, so as to get in some MGM musicals.
FW, sooo pleased you brought up Harold and Maude, bloody fantastic, also good to see In The Realm of The Senses and Dersu Uzula, two very good movies…
Benny’s Video
Apocalypse Now
Antares
Dog Days
A Separation
Cabaret
Hotel Terminus
Mousehunt
The War Game (Peter Watkins)
Farenheit 451
Fitzcaraldo
All the President’s Men
25th Hour
My Darling Clementine
The Ox Bow Incident
To Kill a Mockingbird
Downfall
Drugstore Cowboy
Le Dernier Combat
Le Grand Bouffe
Some of these I do not know.
Of these A Separation, Ox Bow Incident, Downfall, Cabaret and To Kill A Mockingbird and My Darling Clementine and All The President’s Men are flawless.
Fahrenheit is rubbish and the War Game now dated.
A few of these films I have never seen in a cinema, and I imagine Ox Bow and Clementine must be absoltuely glorious. F451 I have only seen on TV first time when I was a young teenager, and it looked very good and it seemed to me to have had a modern eye and made contemporary England look very strange and dystopic/utopic. It was my first expose to French Film although made in English. It has a great claustrophobic feel, and Julie Christie.
You maybe right, I will have to check it out, it has been a long time.
War Game is dated, but that whole way of making the doco/drama is now commonplace eg “The Office”, and the fact it was not screened although commissioned by the BBC at the time of its release gave it an extra mystique, and showed what the impact of film can have. I don’t have enough knowledge in Film History, but I think Watkins film method was a groundbreaker.
Bob, would you know the name of film from Iran, probably early to mid 80′s. where a Film Director goes to a village/town to cast a film and interviews people who want to be in his film?
allthumbs, is your Iranian movie one of these?
The Runner (1986)
Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986)
Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987)
Thanks for these leads, I will check them and hope either one is the right one, I don’t think it’s The Runner though.
Cheers again.
Three Austrian Directors I commend to you.
Michael Haneke
Ulrich Seidel
Goetz Spielmann
You obviously know Haneke,
I would lend you the DVD’s but if you did not return them I would have to hunt you down and kill you,but they don’t have subtitles.
“My Darling Clementine ….flawless”
Another John Ford great. They just keep coming don’t they
I think, when one does these lists, there should be two categories. The best (20) movies, and the best (20) movies excluding those with Audrey Hepburn in them. Otherwise, the first list gets too lopsided.
Not one film far mentioned so far that celebrates women as whole human beings.
The testerosterone stench is overpowering.
On reflection and omitting Audrey Hepburn movies: Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,The Big Country, The Killing, Z, In a Lonely Place, Lawrence of Arabia, LA Confidential, The Magnificent Seven, Rebecca, Dr Zhivago, Paths of Glory,Dr Strangelove, The Caine Mutiny, Jean de Florettes, Battleship Potempkin, The African Queen, Godfather 2, Nashville.
A good list. Lawrence ends badly. Don’t know In A Lonely Place.
Correct about Lawrence ending. In a Lonely Place is a film noir by Nicholas Ray.
I had not heard of it until I went into an obsessive film noir stage a few months ago. I certainly rate it as number one in this category, if that is indeed its category. It could also be described as melodrama, a movie about Hollywood or as Hitchcockian suspense.
And, in an out on a limb moment, I am calling it Bogart’s best.
Do not miss it.
My top ten:
http://garrygillard.net/blog/?p=6663
The Tin Drum was a great film. So were the Jean de Florette films.
Classic stories still win the day.
I think the art of story telling is fast becoming a lost art in the age of twitter and social media. I notice people turning on their mobile phones and ipads in picture theaters and silently clicking away once their attention span wanes.
Same with politicians.
Once there were great people; Now they are just empty vessels looking at their polling numbers.
Speaking of empty vessels, Bob is very quite about Gillard. Anyone notice?…
Tin Drum, yes. Jesus, what’s wrong with me. That could be in the top ten.
Frank, you are right, Tin Drum ought to be in anyone’d top ten…thanks for that..
What about the flawed masterpieces : Lindsay Anderson’s “If” and O Lucky Man, for example. Apocalypse Now; Lolita; The Deer Hunter.
Flawed, but still excellent and influential.
I don’t think Apocalypse Now is flawed, I think it is the perfect American War film about Americans at war and America at war.
I think it is a very deep meditation on the demise of American power, a rejection of American exceptionalism, and a very eloquent suicide note for the end of American society.
Hmm, perhaps the problem may be the various versions which are about. There are some pacing issues, and the last reel seems messy and not a successful ending. Still wonderful even so.
Doug,I talked to the projectionist at the Elsternwick Classic cinema here in Melbourne when I went to see the 70mm version many many years ago after the screening. There were no more than a handful of us at the flicks. He told me how he always used to like to turn up the volume at the moment the tiger leaps through the big green leaves and watch the audience physically jump.
In the non-redux version I see no pacing problems at all and the ending is fine as I am concerned, what ending would you have liked, what ending would have made it better?
Have a look at all of Van Gogh’s self portraits, some are so unalike you would be hard pressed to believe they were done by the same person of the same person, and yet he saw some element, some truth, some veracity in each of those portraits that he could still recognise, perhaps only one salient identifiable characteristic that gave him a sense of truth of himself and his painterly accomplishment. They had pacing issues, a messy real or two.
Messy last real huh, not a successful ending?
What do you want for $12 bucks and a choc-top.
Apparently Brando was so fat he couldn’t do the last scenes as required!
Coppola himself has stated that it is not as he would have wished, but he was left to edit what was actually in the can. He had several goes at it, and probably the best is the one you prefer. As I said below, Brando was so fat that he could not be used to re-shoot the final scenes, as Coppola apparently wanted to do. Is that clear enough allthumbs? I still think it is a very fine film.
His weight on arrival on Set shocked Coppola. Brando was unrehearsed and wished to spend endless hours improvising dialogue. In those final scenes, Coppola is off camera prompting him with questions. The best of his responses are what we see in the final scenes.
A very fine documentary by Eleanor Coppola, “Hearts of Darkness”, deserves its place near the top of any list of documentary features charting a film makers apocalypse.
Doug, either way, Brando, Buddha fat or thin as a rake, both would have passed the metaphor test. I assume Coppola was sparing Brando the inevitable press barbs that would have been aimed at him, with accommodating camera work. This was only known after the film was released and therefore can have no bearing on “flawed” argument. I thought today the end of the film may have been rushed,and that maybe that is what you were referring to as pacing issues, but then I remembered those true life panic scenes of the helicopter over the American embassy in Saigon as they fled like bedraggled hussies with their skirts hoisted, the rushed end seemed to be even more appropriate in light of the exit strategy of the US.
We can agree to disagree DQ, but don’t say a word against The Lion King, because that would make me mad, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.
I am perhaps not quite so preoccupied as Mr Ellis with movies produced since I was in nappies, so would have to include some lesser known gems.
The Miller and the Sweep
Peg o’My Heart
The Echo of Youth
Through the Back Door
Dombey and Son
La Kermesse héroïque
The Doll Maker of Kiang-Ning
Il Signor Max
Along Came Ruth
La femme du boulanger
Sally of the Sawdust
The Student of Prague
The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple
Mother Machree
The Sin of Madelon Claudet
Destry Rides Again
Boule de Suif
The Testament of Dr Mabuse
Hyppolit, the Butler
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
But let me suggest 25 contemporary films better than Julie/Julia and more deserving of a place on your list.
Election
Withnail & I
Hannah and Her Sisters
Groundhog Day
Husbands & Wives
The Big Chill
Biloxi Blues
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Crimes & Misdemeanours
Roxanne
Fresh
Raiders of the Lost Ark
There Will Be Blood
Jaws
The Bourne Identity
Life of Brian
This is Spinal Tap
Being John Malkovich
Sideways
Wall Street
Manhattan
The Real Blonde
Barcelona
Kolya
Henry Fool
18 films that I hold in high regard.
Quick Change (90)
Stone (74′ Sandy Harbutt)
2001 (68) & Clockwork Orange (71)
Fight Club (99)
Apocalypse Now (79)
The Missouri Breaks (76)
Mutiny on the Bounty (62)
Easy Rider (69)
The Vikings (58)
Kung Fu Hustle (04)
The Quiet Earth (85)
Ghosts …of the Civil Dead (88)
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (78)
There Will Be Blood (07)
Repoman (84)
Two Hands (99)
The Crime of the Padre Amaro (04)
19.
Hero (2002)
The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), and Electra Glide in Blue (1973) were films that made a deep impression at the time.
Seen more recently, Maximilian Schell’s performance as the war criminal on trial in the Israeli court is still stunning.
Can one rate Caravaggio against Van Gogh? Many films can shock, horrify, frighten, sadden…from a normal mood to these emotions is a short journey for many of us.
My affection goes to those that, like Van Gogh, make the everyday glow.
Those that can always make the huge haul of lifting a depressed mood: “Man of Flowers”, “Chariots of Fire” and “Monsoon Wedding”.
There is a certain corpse that hangs around in this blog with a very bad smell; cadaverine, perhaps or putrescine. It has a number of incarnations, some of them appear to make sense for a limited time before they rot and stink the place up.
Poor Patrick Dignam, eighty years dead by now, still stinking.
As with other incarnations better forgotten, it is time it was extirpated cremated and buried at least six feet deep.
All readers are asked not to reply to the creature: it only encourages it to stick around, and the corpse smell is annoying.
FFS Ellis, get it blocked!
What happened to the principle of freedom of expression? You know, the one that says “I may hate what you say but I’ll defend to the end your right to say it”?
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
I used to visit (and comment) on another forum which had an international collection of contributors, one of whom was a nasty right-wing American, wing-nut – is that the expression? He hated Australians, and so the Aussies were constantly taunted by him, threatened with litigation, violence, shooting death and so on, it was outrageous and unpleasant and we gave as hard as we got and we hated him, yet we never demanded of the moderator that he be banned.
What do you mean, I doth protest too much? Do you really want to keep the cadaver around? If I thought for one minute that any of that is true, close down the site now, as our host proposed not long ago. The creature continually promises to go and then like the zombie it is keeps returning to annoy all and sundry.
“Answer my questions” it says, “and I will never darken your door again”
Bullshit. It can’t help itself. The answers are obvious and to give them merely invites further criticism. I won’t play its game.
Erase it, obliterate it and FFS ‘Twere best it were done quickly.
Nasty attitude Mr. Quixote, not nice at all. To reduce another living breathing being to a piece of dead meat.
Granted, you may not agree with Paddy Dignam’s criticisms, but your attitude toward him as a text-based protagonist is none-the-less appalling, and your willingness to couch your language as you do reveals an ugly and unflattering side to your character.
I guess it’s so, that when the mask slips, we are revealed.
Who do we see here, Mr Quixote, the mask or the man?
[PD, if Mr Ellis blocks me, or if Doug Peyote calls for my blacklisting, 's ok. I can live with it, daresay I'll be joining a semi-illustrious band of verbal adventurers who've all failed the standard tests of communicative skills - coherence, fluency, grammatical accuracy and enough je ne sais quoi to cut the mustard.]
Patrick are you Canguro…hubby read Canguro’s poem here and said straight away: this is that Patrik bloke…is he wrong?
Do you really want to defend this creature, banned dozens of times from this blog in different guises , and from what I can gather banned from just about every other site it has ever frequented?
Sorry mate, but your attitude / comments at this stage remind me of the behaviour exhibited by the character Berus, played by Justus von Dohnányi in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Das Experiment
That actor, as a grandson of a German jurist and former resistance fighter and great-nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer would, it is assumed, have been keenly aware of the philosophical contradiction between the role he played in that movie and the courageous determination of his paternal ancestors to fight tyranny and restrictions of the freedom of expression.
And, as per a previous post which you may or may not have read, may I direct your attention to Martin Buber and Ich und Du, in which he outlines with both simplicity and profundity, a foundational position that we can utilise in our relationships with others. Worth trying, imho.
PS Do you understand the literary allusion which is Patrick Dignam? Look it up. Hint James Joyce, Ulysses.
Of course I’m aware. Don’t try to be gratuitous with me, wouldst my gutter persona be unleashed I will be dismissed from these pages for eternity.
re. Ich und Du, your response?
PPS this poster will appear to be sane for days at a time, before descending into madness again. It has been banned everywhere it has ever blogged.
You can be such a girl sometimes, Canguro. Some relationships ARE THEIR OWN SOURCE OF MEANINGLESSNESS. Active, present meaninglessness. We’re getting into physics now but I’m willing to bet Buber never thought of that. Take the source of meaninglessness away and you’re left with more meaning. Something from nothing or nothing from something – Buber’s choice.
Kind of begs the question then, doesn’t it?
Why engage, if meaningless?
Pointless, I’da thought.
I wasn’t engaging with my comment. I was talking about Buber. I could maybe go into why I believe the whole Thoreau-style quotation genre is fundamentally in error but I would have to try really hard. It came to me in a revelation earlier but then it passed. But it doesn’t matter how beatific, how moral or even how functional – as soon as you put it down on paper it’s an abstraction. There is no principle that can be caught in a butterfly net and stewed in aspic. Soil, as ever, is right.
Cool. I don’t disagree. Thanks for the clarification.
It is a fucking troll!
Get that through you head, and don’t try referring me to Martin Buber – refer it to a shrink.
I will never address it directly. I say it because its sex is still indeterminate, though 90% probability female by birth, despite the bullshit it publishes about itself.
The long, tangled quarrel with Quixote has dragged on so long that nobody but the two of you can remember what it’s about. You may have every right to be petulant, vindictive and rude. But who can tell any more?
You might protest that your concerns would be quite clear, if only we would read your posts carefully and in full.
There’s the problem, I’m afraid.
Could you not be briefer?
Part of the problem is that the aggravation is erased eventually, but my replies under intense provocation stand witness for posterity to amaze.
I’ve tried leaving it alone, but it always comes back, like the headless horseman. Do you know any good exorcists?
You can solve that problem simply by not responding, DQ.
As is, alas, you appear to react to each and every bait. Again and again.
Show us that it is simply water off a duck’s back, as you sais it was. Or take the advice that you gave to Helvi.
On the other hand, in these times certainly some groups feel that if someone irritates them they must be eliminated.
Are you perhaps a gang member, or a member of the industrial/military complex?
Kendall, are you R1?
Why should DQ give advise to me, R1 has been attacking me, and I finally started defending myself…
If someone needs to be told to behave better, it is Reader1, not me…
Hello oosterman. I gently told you before that I preferred not to be addressed by my surname. Well, you are an old woman, so perhaps you forgot. Or perhaps it is a Finnish custom to identify people by their patronymic. Not here, tho’, it must be a nuance that you missed.
I often read you complaining about R1,and that she is stalking you.
Oddly, I have read no comments by R1 that have in anyway mentioned or referred to you at all: it all seems to be, on this thread at least, in your imagination.
As does your persistent suggestion that I am someone other than who I claim to be. Your suggestion is, of course, offensive.
DQ suggested that you overlook/ignore comments from R1. As there are in fact none of these, this has obviously been too hard for you to do….or let go of.
That’s exactly what I need. I was wondering about that. You’ve hit the nail on the head.
So my response has been moderated out, R1, for whatever reason…
Interestingly. it completely distorts your response and makes it appear that you are endorsing helvi.
So, it is not only censoring my inoffensive comment, but distorting yours to make it appear that you support something that you don’t. Hmmm. I’ve read about this kind of thing. Surprised to meet it here – in a way.
If you dislike Quixote’s posts, or Quixote himself, you might note the fact and move on.
To keep circling back on the quarrel, to keep worrying at the bone of contention, to keep harping on…betrays a level of obsession which is inexplicable and obscurely embarrassing.
Which is the source of people’s puzzlement with you, Mr Dignam.
Polybius, maybe this is a lover’s quarrel…it’s going on for too long…it’s getting to be more than BORING.
Well, if it’s a lovers quarrel there’ll be no untangling it.
Thank you Polybius for your frank consideration.
I can offer no explanation other than the one already given; so unaccustomed am I to this (Quixote’s) brand of “argument” that my mind recoils in sheer horror.
I feel duty bound to expose it, uncover its workings and point to remedies.
You are correct however,
the failing is mine.
I shall have to acquaint myself with the feeling of Indifference.
To Quixote,
I shall leave your words unmolested if you, honour bound, refrain from EXPLICIT acts of fraud.
I can offer little else.
What strange creatures
lurk and prey
in the binary dark?
It matters not, Who, what or where.
For what is each moment, but a coin?
Heads or tails, heads nor tails.
It matters not.
What could it matter?
It is but a spattering, a spattering of ink that will fade away with the power.
For all the posturing and posterity, the pleasures, the pangs. What does it fucking matter?
Let the bastards wonder where they please for it matters not, not a moment more than any other, not a word over any other. How could it?
I am his majesty’s dog at Perth, I would suggest, Señor Doug, to leave a wide berth.
Good advice William; thank you.
And to F.I. Kendall, in a similar vein – I will try.
What shape must the utopia that forms on your brain resemble?
A world where everybody walks around with google translators tied around their necks? We can’t miss a beat, not a slur nor a sound. For Joesph Kony We slap the ground.
Nothing will ever be found Dignam. Nothing.
http://youtu.be/BNlS_Vbip_Q
The shape matters little Soil; all architectures or manifolds resolve, in the end, to the one.
I seek no utopia that is not my rightful inheritance,
It is a utopia fashioned from every soul who lived and breathed a life…..all the living and the dead.
It is a utopia mattered from all that is remembered and from all that can be found.
No history is, or ever can be expunged,….for how can it when each breath we take a register?
That You, William Soil, living, cite the words of a dead man, who in turn speaks of and to the words of another long buried, is testament to the proof you deny.
It matters.
All of it matters.
How can it not?
Who here would deny the proof of their life?
Who among us would excise their thread from this tapestry and declare it of no consequence?
Who among us would lose themselves…. only to wonder if their bleached bones will ever be found?
No, William Soil, it will all be found…..bleached bones and all.
And where will it be found, you ask?
On us, right here!
Tensioned on our heaving diaphragms!
Listen to Beckett,
“Perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
For the love of Joyce … fuck the fuck off, you pathetic, pretentious whack-job. You’re about as welcome as a brain tumour. Go away. Go the fuck away.
For the love of Joyce … fuck the fuck off, you pathetic, pretentious whack-job. You’re about as welcome as a brain tumour. Go away. Go the fuck away.
They’re showing Snowtown on Foxtel at the moment. I survived the kangaroo scene just. I even survived the brotherly rape. But there was talk of shooting the dog and that’s it. I’m out. I can’t do it.
I haven’t seen it but The Lion King totally sucks. It’s the wrong message to send to children. People who irritate need to be eliminated. Period. No circle of life. It’s called justice, Elton John, justice. Justice and old school common sense.
Would you like to dance, or prefer to sit this one out and watch the others?
I’m just blown away by Soil’s link. “This page cannot be displayed”. That’s deep.
The humble bag of concrete has henceforth lost its innocence. But if the film is in any way true to life, I think that young man should get a second chance. Although I did miss what must have been a crucial ten minutes. Looked like it had a bit of German Shepherd in it. Randy mongrels.
It was Auden reading his poem about the death of Yeats, “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living”. Auden moved to America, and in this reading much to the detriment of the poem, he affects the American pronunciation of afternoon, and though he tries, it does not sit comfortably in his mouth, and you can hear it, you can hear the concentration of trying to get it right, just before he says it, swapping from the arfter to the affter.
No second chances R1, when irritation = elimination.
Eight months and copious wordage on, with no prospect of revelation or change, does not equate to a second chance, key word being second. We’ve all been easily led at times, or at least I have. This bloke was genuinely in thrall to his circumstances. If his irritations could have been eliminated, he wouldn’t have ended up as he did.
I wouldn’t know a revelation if it came up and smacked me in the face, and as I understand it, that is what revelations do. The act of watching ‘snowtown on Foxtel” must be close to a revelation,(that’s semiotically speaking hey hey) and its a fine film that should be included in someone’s top 20.
Thanks for the dance, gotta go.
What happened in Snowtown was unnecessary. And yes, Foxtel does lend an aura of glamour to a production. Who needs the big screen when you can have Rupert channelling direct?
Downfall?
DownFall??
I was obsessed with this film when it came out, which coincided with my most depressive state to date. An outstanding film, but being drawn into that heavy, dark world of evil’s suicidal end, however alluring, is not something any decent person should allow themselves to be snared by. Despite the intentions, the moral vacuum of Hitler rises from the dead to seduce and dominate new minds in an even less moral age. All copies should be either destroyed or parodied to death on YouTube until the corrupted blood of this runs dry.
To restore a moral basis to excellent film, I nominate A Man For All Seasons (not Heston’s). Seek the source of
our civilization’s ruin and you’ll find it right where the axe thuds upon More’s neck
114 comments and by my reckoning no-one’s yet ponied up Newsfront. Putting aside my natural flair for arse-kissing, (which is surely a factor)…are you all tone-deaf cringing filmic Philistines!? This great sprawling mess of an epic is along with The Odd Angry Shot one of the few local beasts to really nail us. I understand you have a sort of kind of somehow little bit (lot) hot-cold & wretched relationship with it (for all the usual dreary petty film world reasons), BE, so forgive me if I’m being a gauche twat. But the thing stands up every day more as an authentic masterpiece – not to mention two generations prescient in its media-reconstructive archness – and I often wonder if you can’t help grinning privately with pleasure and satisfaction each time you sneak a glimpse these days. However much they might have fiddled with your original vision, the love and humanity and Australian-ness elbows its way rudely out regardless. I love this film. I wish we still made them like this.
What chance a stand-alone Newsfront thread, Bob? Give yourself a belated lap of honor – it’s fucking deserved. Five stars, mediocre hecklers be arsed.