Alec Baldwin as Blake, the hotshot head honcho in Glengarry Glen Ross. The entire speech was pure gold, but here’s just a little taste…
Blake: FUCK YOU, that’s my name!! You know why, Mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove a eighty thousand dollar BMW. That’s my name!! (to Levene) And your name is “you’re wanting.” And you can’t play in a man’s game. You can’t close them. (at a near whisper) And you go home and tell your wife your troubles. (to everyone again) Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted! You hear me, you fucking faggots?
True. Probing where nationalism ends and ideology begins is analogous to probing where society ends and the individual begins. It is always different for everyone. Even after watching the documentary Hearts of Darkness, I couldn’t really get inside Coppola’s head to guage his own intentions here. But there is no right or wrong way really to react to the lines from the film. We often react differently because our individual lives are so different in turn.
At least in my view. Which I don’t pretend is the only reasonable view to have.
Willard’s character seemed – to me – to be outside all of this. He seemed committed solely now to probing how and why Kurtz went from the man in the dossier to the man in the jungle. As a way perhaps to understand the changes in his own life. And the gap between him and the Vietcong was equally unbridgable.
We are all born of the same species but how we come to view ourselves and the world around us – especially in our “post-modern” world – can be both vast and varied.
And there are equally many diverse ways in which to approach “virtue”.
I have always viewed the Iraq war from the vantage point of political economy. It was a war over the oil. And a war rooted in the wants and the needs of the military industrial complex. In Vietnam there were a lot more people who viewed the conflict in ideological terms: Us vs. Them.
In other words, Western democracy [however nominal] versus Communist tryanny. In Iraq, the “jihadist terrorists” were merely the bogeyman used by the powers that be – what even Colin Powell called the ‘terrorist industrial complex’ – to rationalize the war. There is simply no comparison between the threat posed by Islamic extremists today and the Nazis in the 30s and 40s and the USSR/China in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
What I read in interviews is that Coppola simply wanted to make a californian war-film. He wanted to deviate from the plot of Johhny from the Bronx doing his dutiful service, to a wilder kind of picture. I am not sure that he had explicit moral or even historical narrative intentions as much as the desire to make a good movie.
The only point at which we see him truly involved is as he finds the head of one of his crew in his lap.
But what I meant is that the Vietnamese probably had not the first clue about what the Americans were doing there.
Still, similar ideological terms were what got the Iraq war the support it needed.
That may be true. In any case the war is not helping to reduce the extremism.
"I know this much about racing in the rain. I know it is about balance. It is about anticipation and patience. I know all of the driving skills that are necessary for one to be successful in the rain. But racing in the rain is also about the mind! It is about owning one’s own body. About believing that one’s car is merely an extension of one’s body. About believing that the track is an extension of the car, and the rain is an extension of the track, and the sky is an extension of the rain. It is about believing that you are not you; you are everything. And everything is you. Racers”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
“Here’s why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own…Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
"Who is Achilles without his tendon? Who is Samson without Delilah? Who is Oedipus without his clubfoot? Mute by design, I have been able to study the art of rhetoric unfettered by ego and self-interest, and so I know the answers to these questions.
The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles––preferably of his own making––in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
“a racer will never let something that has already happened affect what is happening now.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Dan: ace.
Ace: yeah Dan?
Dan: you have any more of that gum?
Ace: that’s none of your damn business and I’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs.
Leftie, Donnie Brasco
He is destroyed by speaking “spoke”. Powerful. The movie is good, never like movies Depp is in because of the quackball factor, which is absent here and he turns out to be the actor everyone says he is.
He was overshadowed by DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape but DiCaprio wouldn’t outshadow him here, not even Al Pacino does here even though he says the line.
