Posts tagged right
“Kill Your Darlings” Is Full of Oddities
Dec 22nd
“Full of Oddities”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Kill Your Darlings is an odd little movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg that tells a story about him and other writers of the Beat Generation in 1943 in New York City.
For those of you in the audience who are too young to know and those of you who are old enough but might have forgotten, Ginsberg was an American poet best known for writing “Howl,” a 1956 long poem attacking American values who later in life was associated with Naropa University in Boulder.
The title refers to advice sometimes given to writers to eliminate the parts of their work they are most in love with, because those parts are probably the most self-indulgent, but in the movie it can also refer to an actual murder.
The movie begins when Ginsberg is 19 years old, and he is accepted to Columbia University, where he will meet other writers with whom he will get in and out of trouble, such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others who didn’t become as famous.
We also see some of Ginsberg’s home life with his father, who was also a poet, and his mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was a very troubled woman.
Ginsberg becomes friends with Lucien Carr, and through him he meets David at a weird party at David’s apartment, where David says about Ginsberg, “Under the right circumstances, even he might change the world.”
Remember, this was 70 years ago at a time when writers were serious, and they believed that their writing could change the world, which they hoped would be for the better.
If it also made them successful and famous, then that was better, too.
Ginsberg and his fellow writers also have a saying, “First thought, best thought,” which they believe to be performed and useful in their writing, but if you know anything about serious writing, such an idea would probably fall into that category of darlings which should be killed.
The movie is full of disjointed scenes, and the audience might have trouble keeping the story line straight and also keeping track of who all the characters are.
Of course, homosexuality plays a big role in the story, and this was at a time when homosexuality was illegal in numerous places.
Kill Your Darlings is full of many oddities.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“All Is Lost” Is Almost Hopeless
Nov 23rd
“Almost Hopeless”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
All Is Lost stars Robert Redford and was made from a script nearly free of dialogue and only 32 pages long.
However, that script could have been shortened to only one sentence: “A man is lost at sea all alone on a small crippled sailboat and struggles to survive.”
When the movie opens, we hear Redford’s voice say, “I tried to be true. I tried to be right. But I wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
Later on, we will learn the significance of those words and where they appear in the story, but first we see a title that says, “8 Days Earlier,” and the story begins.
Called only “Our Man” in the credits, Redford is asleep below deck on his 39-foot yacht when he is awakened by a loud noise and sees water coming into the cabin.
His boat has struck a floating cargo shipping container hard enough to damage both his boat and the container, which is now spilling its contents into the ocean.
And then we watch him struggle to survive and begin to consider our own mortality as surely as he considers his own.
He tries to repair the hole in the boat as best he can, pumps the water out of the cabin and cleans and dries it.
He dries and cleans his radio, finds a signal, and sends out the message, “This is the Virginia Jean with an SOS call. Over,” but he gets no response.
When a storm comes, he tries to secure everything aboard and puts on his gear for wet weather, but he gets knocked overboard.
His boat gets damaged even more, and later he also suffers a nasty gash to his forehead.
With water coming into the boat even more now, he gets his life raft, inflates it, and secures it to the boat and gets ready to abandon ship.
The water in the cabin is now up to his chest, and he retrieves everything he believes he will need, puts it all in the covered life boat, and climbs into it.
One of the items is a sextant, which is still in its box, appears to have been a gift, and he has to read the instructions on how to use it, so that he can plot his position on his navigation map.
All Is Lost is almost hopeless.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”