Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Marijuana Movie Night. Enjoy your family and bird (be it tofu, chemical & filler fed or free range).

Gimme Shelter - The Super Bummer Ending of the 1960s

In the biblical retelling of history, Woodstock would be played by Abel and Altamont would be Cain. Gimme Shelter starts out as most rockumentaries do; the band playing live in concert. The Rolling Stores are kicking off their American tour playing in New York City
and there is a feeling of optimism which seems to radiate off all of them. This is cross-cut with the Stones in a film editing room watching this concert footage, but here they are strangely subdued. The documentary flips back and forth between them seeing the footage in this room and us being shown the footage.

There is more of the Stones performing live in different part of the U.S. along with several behind the scenes negotiation leading up to the Altamont concert which acts as the climax. The final 40 minutes of this 90 minute documentary is solely the Festival being set up and then the actual day of the concert which is very uncomfortable to watch. The event is in shambles from the very start. The "peace & love" vibe is nowhere to been seen. Much of the crowd seems too fucked up or too ampted up to be among the teaming mass of 300 thousand other people. Mick Jagger is punched in the face soon after arriving. The Hell's Angels were casually hired for security, but ended up causing more fights than stopping them. There are assorted freakouts which are horrifying to witness. People seem ready to kill each other or at least fight for no reason. It looked and felt ugly. The film ends with footage of a man with a gun charging the stage and getting stabbed by one of the Angels and stomped on by the rest.

The 60s didn't end in a marijuana cloud of good times and worldly love, but with the deaths of four people (not to mention multiple injuries) at what was suppose to be the bookend to the Woodstock Festival. Some dreams don't fade away, but are cut down and die bloody.

A Salute to Drunks - Barfly

 Bukowski made it no secret that he hated movies which might have been cultivated by his growing up in Los Angeles. So when French film maker Barbet Schroeder came along and wanted Bukowski to write a screenplay which he could make into a film, it was no small feat. Buk claims in the mini documentary I Drink, I Gamble and I Write that Schroeder called him up out of the blue and said he'd pay him twenty grand to write Barfly. Regardless if this is true or not, Barfly ended up being the marriage of a few different strains of weird talent.

Even with such Hollywood acting luminaries as Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke starring (it was 1987, so Rourke was at his zenith for fame), Schroeder insisted on filming in locations in downtown skid row LA, dive bars of many different stripes and SROs. Often enough, Bukowski came down to the set and was treated as few other writers were in the history of Hollywood (read: Well). Maybe it was the fact that what helped secure the funding was Schroeder going into a production office and threatening to cut off one of his own digits with a power saw. A pure Bukowskian gesture in itself which helped finally get the movie made.

Bukowski had been writing about the drunk, hopeless, poor, dispossessed, hateful, ugly, greedy, and damned in his many short stories, novels, essays and poems for years before this picture. Perhaps because Schroeder was not from here enabled him to make such a brilliant film about an unseen and untold America without it feeling ugly or antisocial. We will never know if it was a little bit of dumb luck or just some good goddamn poetry in motion. But as Henry Chinaski said about dumb luck; it also counts. And this is good enough for me.

Fashion! Models! Drugs! Lesbians! Nudity! 23 year old Angelina Jolie! Addiction! AIDS!

Besides the really bad soft jazz distractingly placed into a good percentage of this film, Gia has something for everyone. Some of the nude scenes are long and border on Skinemax takes, but it was an HBO produced movie so what do you expect.

If you watch this alone, please don't tell me, you perv!