Bill Fay

Irreversable

Irreversable (2002, France) is a movie written, directed, edited, and photographed by Gaspar Noé. It stars Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. Several reviewers declared it one of the most disturbing and controversial movies of 2002, due to its explicit depiction of rape and murder. Much like Pinter's Betrayal, the events of the movie are portrayed with a reverse chronology.
So, my pal Josh and I were standing around drinking and talking about movies and this one came up. He'd said that there was no other, more disturbing movie. I thought of Pasolini's Salo... at first, and then Un chien andalou...In a Glass Cage. But he held to his own and told me to just rent it.
So I did. I was all alone in my apartment, at night, lying on my couch, coiling in revulsion as image after image of human carnage spun backward into the inevitable scene that, for me, undeniably cinched it for Josh.
The scene is with the thoroughly convincing (and by this I'm not sure what I mean exactly, as at times, certainly here, i simply do not understand the differences between acting and real life) Monica Bellucci.
I watched as in a darkened Paris tunnel, she is, at the risk of sounding thoroughly redundant, raped savagely. And the scene just goes on and on. And on. And then something happened to me. Out of nowhere, i nearly jumped up and off of my couch. I, quite literally, let out a gasp and scream utterly involuntarily. I actually had to get up and turn the dvd off for a while. Suffice to say, this movie fucked me up!

John Cale

John Cale has written some of the most beautiful, most intellectually challenging, and flat out rockin' music I have ever had both pleasure and displeasure hearing. And even though he's a raging cunt with an ego larger than his tour bus, (see footnote) he still, for me, remains one of my favorite songwriters of all time. His melodies are truly unmatched, his sense of literary tradition in lyrical narrative is brilliant, and his imagery will make you think you're floating on a soft silvery cloud.


footnote; Mr. Cale did an in-store performance in San Francisco and nearly threw a record at a very sweet friend of mine when asked for an autograph. Total cunt!

Hannah and Her Sisters

Hannah and Her Sisters is a 1986 romantic comedy which tells the intertwined stories of an extended family, told mostly during a year that begins and ends with a family Thanksgiving dinner. The movie was written and directed by Woody Allen and stars Mia Farrow as Hannah, with Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as her sisters.

The movie's ensemble cast also includes Allen, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Stern, Lewis Black, Joanna Gleason, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus all have minor roles, as do Tony Roberts and Sam Waterston, whose are uncredited cameo appearances. Several of Farrow's children, including a pre-adolescent Soon-Yi Previn, have credited and uncredited roles, mostly as Thanksgiving extras.

I think I have seen this movie more times than any other. It remains as vital to me today as it did the first time i saw it. Michael Caine's bumbling, ham-fisted Lothario, along with Max von Sydow's crusty and bitter cuckold, stand out with me notably. And I, a fellow hypochondriac nearly run for my computer to look up symptoms of insanity, laughing hysterically when Woody Allen self-diagnosis himself as having a brain tumor due to a temporary hearing loss. And of course, who could miss the inimitable Dianne Wiest, shoveling cocaine and mumbling her endless litanies of insecurity and self-hate while clothing shopping with the always clueless Mia Farrow.
I think, if I were counting, I've now seen this movie at least 15 times.

Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers (Swedish: Viskningar och rop) is a 1973 Swedish film about two sisters who watch over their third sister on her deathbed; both afraid she might die, but both hoping she does. The film was written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann.
This movie is one seamless and truly sublime psychological experiment. you wait, along with all the others for death. And then, when it comes, nothing really changes. until finally, suddenly this big slug to the belly comes and you nearly double over with grief. And it's exactly like that in real life, which makes this movie both masterpiece and miracle. How the hell does he do that? Unlike other Bergman movies, Cries and Whispers is saturated, thanks to long time cinematographer Sven Nykvist, in a deep crimson that envelopes and wraps around you like a death shroud. Which brings us back to the miracle part. The thing is, you've had it wrapped around you the entire time, you warm yourself with it, you subconsciously attempt to obscure the inevitable. But then comes the sock to the stomach and life is knocked right out of you.
For anyone who has not experienced the inscrutable pain of loss, this movie will either comfort you, or leave you wishing you were dead.

Mark Doty

Fog Suite



1. A FIVE-PANELED SCREEN

Fog-lacquered,
varnished in thin
pearl glaze,

the high dunes unfold,
a smudged sketch
for a folding screen,

panels inlaid
with cloudy ivory,
irregular patches

of grassy jade.
(The wide bay's
oddly still this morning,

despite the white activity
at its edges, just beyond the shore's
a huge, silvered-equipoise.)

The fog is thinking
of burning away, but for now

damp scarves
(unhemmed, like petals
of a white peony)

slide and tear
across this portion
of sky, sheets

of smudged paper
hung from heaven.
Trope on trope!

What I'm trying to do
is fix this impossible
shift and flux, and say

how this fog-fired
green's intensified
by sunlight filtered

through the atmosphere's
wet linens---a green
you could almost drink!

No trick of light
I'm talking about
but defiant otherness:

this sky's all
gorgeous trouble,
rain beginning

to fold the screen away.
Do we love more
what we can't sat

As if what we wanted
were to be brought
that much closer

to word's failure,
where desire begins?

2.

What I love about language
is what I love about fog:
what comes between us and things
grants them their shine. Take,

for instance, the estuary,
raised to a higher power
by airy sun-struck voile:
gunmetal cove and glittered bar

hung on the rim of the sky
like palaces in Tibet---
white buildings unreachable, dreamed and held

at just that perfect distance:
the world's lustered by the veil.

3.

Or else I love fog
because it shows the world
as page, where much
has been written, and much erased.

Clapboards lose their boundaries,
and phantoms of summer's roses

loom like parade floats lost at sea.
Is that what it is,

visible uncertainty?
This evening the thin fact of it
appears a little at a time,
shawling streetlamps,

veiling the heights:
clocktower and steeple gone

in roiling insubstantiality.
I take fog as evidence,

a demonstration of the nothing
(or the nothing much)

that holds the world in place
---rehearsal for our roles

as billow and shroud, drift
and cloud and vanishing act?

And, between these figuring lines,
white space, without which

who could read? Every poem's
half erased. I'm not afraid,

if feels like home here,
held---like any line of text---

by the white margins
of a ghost's embrace.

Dory Previn