© Adaptive Curmudgeon. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. Also it's lame.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Coimhéad fearg fhear na foighde”
Beware of the anger of a patient man.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
I have to admit that THE GRADUATE sticks with me, but not in a good way. Growing up in the 1970’s (I was born in 1961), that damn movie was held up to me as an icon of Great Film WIth An Important Message (™). What message? Don’t bang the cougars? How to terminally screw up your future in 106 minutes? What always stunned me is the number of people who consider that it has a happy, or at least hopeful, ending? Huh? *shakes head* I mean, can’t these people see the absolute deluge of shit that is going to land on those two twits in about 15 minutes.
Now EASY RIDER; there’s movie with a happy ending ;-).
‘Wizards’, Ralph Bakshi, 1977. Takeaway lines include gems like, ‘why do we lose? They have Science and Technology- we just have Love’, ‘I wonder if I brought my Scotch’, and ‘We don’t have time for taking care of prisoners, we just have time for War.’ Lots of wild symbolism in there, although the moral that I came away with may not have been the one intended. Mark Hamill is billed- has about 12 seconds of dialogue, then dies.
My Lady is very fond of Wizards. Me? Not of much. Bakshi has a reputation for ripping off the people who dream up he stuff he makes movies about. He did it with Fritz The Cat; R. Crumb didn’t get a dime, and detested the film so much he killed off the character. And he seems to have done it with Vaughn Bode’s creations CHEECH WIZARD and STRONTIUM 90, both of which certainly seem to have contributed to WIZARDS .
Now, if he had made imperishable masterpieces I might be inclined to be lenient. He didn’t. Wizards is OK. Most of the rest of his filmography is a mess.
I started to mention “Wizards” after the 1st movie post, but figured I was the only oddball who remembered & liked it. Then again, I like most of “Heavy Metal”.
Can’t say I cared for the end of “Easy Rider,” but then I’m a biker, & when I was younger one always wondered how many folks around here had seen it & wanted to reenact the ending.
I liked Heavy Metal and Easy Rider… but neither had the subjective “stick with you” factor.
Apparently I need to watch Wizards.