drive-in [1976]

 

with a title like that you think i could resist watching this flick?  hells no.  this is an interesting movie & document of a brand of american youth culture in the mid 1970s.  almost nostalgic even.  at least for me cuz i was around 9 years old when this movie was released & was going to the drive-ins as much as i could get my parents to take me & my brothers.

the gist is this.  one saturday - i think it is a saturday - a few of the local young-uns in a small texas town go roller-skating then later that night go to the drive-in.  in between we have a pair of goofy, good-natured ne'er-do-wells who plan on robbing the drive-in when the manager transports the night's proceeds from the ticket booth to the snack bar.  we have a group of local tuff guys replete in their gang colors, an orange windbreaker with the words WIDOW MAKERS stenciled on the back.  their leader, enoch, is a real dickhead who is or was dating the local beauty named, you better believe it, glowie.  glowie is real tired of enoch's shittyness & has set her heart on orville who is sweet & shy but drives a bitchin' convertible ss camaro.  orville has a sidekick too, his 12-year-old precocious little brother named little bit.  yeah, lotsa cornpone humor! 

at any rate, this is a surprisingly well-made, well-acted flick.  i read that the texas film commission wanted to develop local talent for their own film industry & gave the filmmakers enough money to create this movie populated with mostly unknown actors & local characters.  the score is chock full of great ol' country artists like george jones, loretta lynn, merle haggard et al.  the landscape is different from my own NorCal but the experience of being at the drive-ins remained very similar to my own life at the drive-ins in the 1970s.  right down to the public telephone at the snack bar.  speaking of the snack bar the movie honors the age-old intermission with showing one of the classic intermission shorts of the drive-in theater, the one where the alien arrives at a drive-in snack bar, orders a shitload of snacks, then flies away on his flying saucer.  then the snack bar attendant breaks the fourth wall & says, 'they come from miles around to enjoy our intermission.'

let me not forget the parody movie playing at the Remember the Alamo drive-in theater too.  it is called Disaster '76 a series of vignettes of the disaster movies that were popular at the time.  a whole lotta fun to see.  what happens at the end?  let's just say all's well that ends well.  including glowie & orville.  much of the humor is awkwardly executed but a moment here & there it hits the funny bone.  like the parody movie within the movie.  all the actors are pretty damn good in their roles.  the director, rod amateau, made a b-movie par excellence.  fans of b-movies, & drive-in theaters, will get a kick out of this pic.  it is also a good movie for the end of summer when the weather is still hot, the air electric & is still lazy enough to spend a little over an hour & a half on a movie that is so much of its bygone era.  for in that era of popular american culture, as dylan reminds us, 'i was so much older then, i am younger than that now.'

quote unquote

To have access to world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.  Literature was the passport to enter a larger life: the zone of freedom.

--susan sontag

Arrival (2016): First 10 Minutes | Opening Scene

i fucking love this movie

as a commenter said, the first viewing of this flick is one of awe; subsequent viewings are a tapestry of intense sadness

i come to these opening scenes over & again because they are genius filmmaking from the acting of amy adams to the score 'on the nature of daylight' composed by max richter to the art direction & the lighting & the photography & the editing & the mis en scene to the circles that inform each frame of this film yes i believe in my own humble opinion that this movie belongs with the best scifi cinema of this young century

this film never fails to bring me to tears

peace

quote unquote

Poets don’t convince.

They don’t conquer.
Their role is another, far from power: to be contrast.

* * *

The main component of all authoritarianisms is the inflation of the ego.

Totalitarianism warns you: if you dissent, you’re an enemy, in other words, something to be exterminated. Democracy tells you: think however you’d like.

* * *

I know
that if I don’t become no one
I will have wasted my life.

--rafael cadenas [translated by guillermo parra]

epitaph in a post-literate age

look ye upon my rood

hunka hunka burning love

William Burroughs and Ralph Steadman

having a beer on this hot labor day weekend sat. nite

i hear a gaze [looked it up on the google] of young raccoons outside 

in the back garden what sounds like some severe disagreements

between each other lotsa growls & hissing 

i am watching vids of william s burroughs on youtube 

& found this one with the artist ralph steadman 

taking polaroids of the grand novelist 

around the 3:07 mark you can see my man jim mccrary in the background

jim was the office manager for william burroughs & the interwebs 

are chock full of the poet's stories about his adventures working for & with burroughs et al.

including going shooting with the grand novelist & friends & artists & musicians etc etc.

i don't have much else to say except that it is cool to see one of my 

favorite poets & human beings here in this vid

did the summer fly past at supersonic speed for you too?  

peace & love

somewhere in the forest a cat cried meow

 

light in august

w/ apologies to william faulkner

morning heat

reading haiku on the toilet

late for work -- again