My Favorite Movies

Positive proof that culture is not dead. Poetic drama can be set to film and it can be done well! Not a movie for the sleepy philistine.

The best musical EVER made. Romeo and Juliet come alive in the urban rivalries stirred by the turf wars between old immigrants and new immigrants to the USA. A beautiful film.

No exit from the sado-masochistic tendencies of your exploiters...

The most relevant black comedy to come out of the 20th Century. Kubrick's best film.

A vicarious romp through a set of prmitive communist social relations.

Martin Scorsese proves that he knows his music--Bob Dylan with an edge! Scorsese's cd blues collection is a masterwork of organization and quality choices. And, he can direct and he can make a GREAT movie!!!

Mastery in marital arts, mixed with reverence for the environment and NAIVETE about loyalty to your bosses.

Jarmusch teams up with Johnny Depp in a story which will knock your Western sox off.

Zampano is here! All the contingencies of life and making a living on the road. Kerouac and Dr. Moriarity couldn't have done it better or with more style. Anthony Quinn at his very best and Guilietta Masina is dazzling!

What does a woman in post-WWII Italiy do to make a living? One of the best of all of Felinis's filsm.

Defrocked minister leads tour groups into temptation in the jungles of a Mexican Eden. 'Sin' and resistance to sensuous pleasure are in the air.

George and Martha are having a party. Lots of fun and games will be played. Great performances all around. Liz was never better.

The personal is the political in this most excellent examination of provincial Italian life during the first half of the 20th Century.

A fine, but as usual, inadequate treament of Homer's epic. Polyphemus is great and Silvia Kochina is devestating as Circe. Show it to your kids with commentary before and dialogue after.

Now here's a dilemma for you. Do you report a murder or do you doubt whether you've actually seen it?

Quite possibly the most relevant science fiction film of the 20th Century.

The absurdities of becoming an appendage to a machine. Capital gets skewered in this great satire.

Workers take revolutionary action against the capitalist system/wage-slavery.

Possibly the best inside look at pre-civil rights Mississippi ever. Brando made Anna Magnani burn. Superb cast and performances. Make like you're a freedom rider and take the trip. Tennessee Williams wrote the play and the script for this film.

These magnificent seven save a town of cowardly farmers from a band of mafioso types who regularly collect their protection tribute from the producing class...in this instance, the peasants. See it.

How can a perfectionist guitarist live well, knowing that Django will always be better. Perhaps Woody Allen's best flick.

'We are your sado-doms. Will you be our willing subs? One of Sean Connery's best performances within a cast of great performances.

Anti-fascist film making at its best. Must be seen again and again to appreciate its depth.

This is the best war movie ever. The best way to describe it, I reckon,
is to pass on a newspaper article written by Ilya Ehrenburg during
World War II when all the things which happen in "Come and See" were
happening:

NIKOLAI VLADIMIROVICH -- ONE YEAR OLD Red Star, November 30 1943

How much the Germans have taken from us! They have taken from us not
only loved ones, homes, and possessions. Life was complicated. There
were dreams, joys, people, many books, many countries. But now
everything in me is unchangeably focused on one thing: on the German.
I see him -- blue-eyed and inhuman. He walks and kills, he sings and
kills, he laughs and kills.

Among the papers of the town head of the village of Vyazovaya, recently
liberated from the Germans, was found the following document:

"List of executed residents of the village of Vyazovaya, Uzninskaya
region:

1) Muzalevskaya Natalia Ivanovna. 43 years old. 2) Muzalevskaya Natalia
Nikolaevna. 18 years old. 3) Muzalevskaya Diana Nikolaevna. 16 years
old. 4) Muzalevsky Lev Nikolaevich. 13 years old. 5) Muzalevskaya
Valentina Nikolaevna. 9 years old. 6) Muzalevskaya Tamara Nikolaevna. 5
years old. 7) Muzalevskaya Rima Nikolaevna. 3 years old. 8) Davydov
Vladimir Ilych. 35 years old. 9) Davydov Anatoli Vladimirovich. 8 years
old. 10) Davydov Victor Vladimirovich. 5 years old. 11) Davydov Nikolai
Vladimirovich. 1 year old. 12) Pryadochkina Maria Petrovna. 60 years
old.

19 September 1942. Town head Muzalev."

Can this be forgotten? Is it possible to live knowing that people are
walking the earth who shot Davydov Nikolai Vladimirovich to death, one
year old, an infant, the baby Kolya, shot him and ordered his name
entered into a list? It is hard to talk about it, but impossible to
forget. We still have a long way to go. But we will get there. We will
find them. We will find them under their beds, in their vegetarian
cafeterias, at the ends of the Earth. We will remember the one-year-old
Kolya Davydov. We will remember much.

One of the best Westerns ever made. One eyed jacks are two-faced betrayers. They need to be dealt with.

Blanche tries to get her youth back by seducing youth and loses her honour and mind along the way.

"I don't nee no steenking bagez. Another of B. Traven's great novels, this time brought to screen.

What do you do when your wife commits suicide and your lover is experiencing down time with her main squeeze. When a love vacuum develops, passion can sometimes fill the gap.

He had won the Hashemites
to the Allied cause by promising, with FO authorization, that the
British would support their ascendancy in Arabia. When the British
betrayed that promise by backing the Sauds, and fobbing the
Hashemites off with an ersatz "Jordanian" kingdom and the poisoned
chalice of Iraq, Lawrence felt disgraced and personally betrayed.
He died a disillusioned and embittered man.

Capitalist democracy is bought and paid for by the highest bidders and they ain't you.

The sadism of daily life in the 60s drives a Swedish actress to a nervous breakdown. Retreating to a semi-monastic life with an equally sensitive nurse from a working class background, the actress and her minder discover their inner character structures are not that different from class society as a whole: resignation to a life of dominance and submission follows betrayal.

Superb film about love, trust and making a living during a time when the mob had control of the ILA union on the East Coast, due to the anti-Leftist union purges of the 50s.

The emptiness of amoral,narrow individualism. Paul Newman's best movie. Larry McMurtry did the script. Patricia Neal's best movie too. Brandon de Wilde would never be better.

A fine remake of a real classic. Naomi Watts was actually as good as Faye Ray. And the King was even better than his 30s father. This is one to see.

This is the original and what an orginal it was in 1933! A great film then and now.

George Pal's machines are the stars of this film. Good to watch with your kids and discuss afterwards.

One the best, most senstivie films about soldiers in battle ever.

Jail break to the tune of 'Sanctu'. Must be seen first, followed by 'O Lucky Man'.

The sequel to 'If'. The authorities are only trying to help you Candide.

Best boxing movie ever! Should only be seen after you have watched 'On the Waterfront'.

Dr. Frankenstein makesHIMSELF in to a monster. Geena Davis is HOT! Jeff Goldblum's best performance ever.

Branagh's Henry V is simply the best film recreation of the Bard's best history play.

Polanski's "Macbeth" will make you shiver with wonder.

Shakespeare's Richard III was to be nasty, brutish and cunning. Olivier is all these a more. But he cuts too much from the original play to fit his version into commericially viable movie time.

Anti-fascist movie making is not dead! This is one to see, Sam. Play it again.

Jane Wyatt and Ronald Coleman show us a Christian-Lamaist utopia which we can never forget. The meek have inherited the Earth in Shangri-la and they willingly practice moderation in ALL things. Sam Jaffe plays the High Lama whose religion of kindness has rubbed off on everyone else in the community. Actually, he's a 200 year old Catholic Priest, but he's had enough time and a set of fortuitous material circumstances: a significant geographical space with perfect weather, soil and best of all something which keeps people healthy and gives them extreme longevity. Shot during the real-time Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, this 1937 film imagines a better world is possible, a world of joy and peace, achieved through adequate production for use and need, combined with everyday kindness. See the version which includes the outakes which ended up on the cutting room floor--if you can find it. Jane Wyatt is nude in her swim scene...now there's an incentive. But remember the time and circumstances in which this film was made e.g. in 1937, racism was rampant and "moderate" racism was considered liberal. Segregation in the USA was the law of the land below the Mason Dixon Line and Jews were routinely excluded from housing which rented only to Gentiles. The Germans were living under Hitlerism and the Japanese were well on the way towards occupying significant portions of China. The Italians were living in a fascist dictaroship, gassing Ethiopians in a vain attempt to reconstruct the Roman Empire and Spain was locked in civil war and revolution at the same time. Hell, Durruti was defending the gains of libertarian communism, while shooting Franco supporters and Stalinists. The old Czarist Russian Empire had become the Soviet Union; ruling classes were trembling and world war was threatening to engulf the planet. So yeah, sometimes the dialogue is going to sound hokey i.e. outdated. No matter, "Lost Horizon" is worth seeing.

When Turner loses his beast, he loses his creative spark. Can he get it
back by boarding a hit-man on the run and will that monster be able to
successfully complete the psychedelic mushroom test devised for him by
his fellow bohemian tenants when he's confronted by a white hound dog,
chomping, chewing and presenting his psyche to him via hallucinatory
performance?

Best Jagger film ever. The film is worth seeing just to experience Mick
singing/doing "Memo from Turner". Who is Turner? That is the question.
Well, he's the businessman who's your boss. He's the order giving
sadist and you are on your knees, "licking policemens' button clean."

"Performance" asks these questions: Is artistic creativity related to
edging over normalcy and peering into the abyss? And what if you lean
too far? Will you fall into the nothingness of death?

At Altamont in 1969, Mick commented on stage that every time the band
started to sing "Sympathy for the Devil" something weird would start
happening with the audience. "Gimmie Shelter" is fine documentary
retrieval of that time and what happened during that song when a black
man drew his gun and white hound dogs posing as angelic protectors beat
him to death with pool cues because one of their motorcycles was tipped
over. "Performance" was made in 1970.

Film noir at its best. Set in the immediate aftermath of WWII ( 1946), "Crossfire" depicts the good, bad and ugly of that time. Monty kills Sam because Sam's a Jew and perceived to have been a slacker who got out of fighting the war. Monty doesn't like people like that. The truth is that Sam was a soldier too, but the truth is something which disappears when you're feeling right about the ideologies of hate you've been immersed in and the world is full of dirty this and thats badly in need of your brand of "cleansing". Monty is a sadist in winning soldier's clothing. The losers of WWII had more than their share as well. This movie got its makers in trouble when that other sadistic cleanser of America, Joe McCarthy got his hearings going. See it, just to see how good an actor Robert Ryan was. See it and get a taste of the dark side of post-WWII America. See it to get a taste of the good side of late 40s America as well.

What's an artist to do in a society where value is equated with money? As the film opens, Fast Eddie Felson and his sidekick Charlie are on the road, hustling small town, poolroom suckers all the way from Oakland to somewhere near Pittsburgh on their way to New York City. Eddie's goal is to play and beat the great Minnesota Fats at straight pool--call the ball number and call the pocket, first to 125 wins. Eddie carries his leather cased cue like a gunfighter and this showdown is to take place at the Ames Pool Hall. Paul Newman said once, "Ames in New York was on 47th Street on the second floor, just off Broadway." It's a dark place, an arena, a semi-lit coliseum where men play games for money. But, for Eddie, this game is more than just another hustle for money. He's come to claim the title of the best, number one, the champion and the only person standing in his way is Minnesota Fats.

Bert Gordon is the local money betting boss. Bert's a gambler. He's also a power broker for those who want to play games for high stakes. Gordon is a businessman, part finance capitalist, part lord. He's a cunning dude, made powerful by the usual exploitation of finance capital and usurers in general, percentage loans. He's also keenly aware of the character weaknesses of his bondsmen.

When Eddie plays Fats that first time, we see that he is a better pool player. Neither Eddie nor Minnesota are mere cheap hustlers taking the money of fools who bet their money on their skills versus theirs, but that is the way they make their livings. No, Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats are artists. They love the game they play and they play the game they love and they're the best at what they do.

Bert uses people to make money and to make himself feel powerful. The lower you are, the higher Gordon is. Ever conscious of his place at the top of the heap, Bert is there to see Minnesota eventually turn the tide on Eddie. Fats maintains his cool. Hubris comes before Eddie's long fall from a winning peak of $18,000 back to his $200 stake. Gordon sees this weakness in Eddie and declares Felson a loser, even as Eddie has reached his peak in winnings. Bert's money backs Fats and the game goes on way longer than its initial 26 hours.

"What beat me?" Eddie asks Gordon. "Character," Bert replies.

Eddie is spooked by Gordon's "loser" tag. He abandons Charlie, his long time partner and goes off to lick his psychological wounds. Charlie has disappointed Eddie with his all too human focus on saving enough money for his old age. Charlie doesn't doesn't understand Eddie's need to practice his art as his motivating factor in life--that motive stands above the security of money.

That's when Eddie meets Sarah. Sarah has been into a heavy bout of self-destruction. She doesn't want to live in a world where her humanity is treated as an object for sale. In her own way, Sarah has become a loser, hiding her failure to find a loving relationship in endless bottles of scotch. After the two meet, they retreat to Sarah's apartment for what appears to become a last tango in New York. At first though, Sarah rejects Eddie. "You're too hungry," she says to him after their first lustful kiss. But she realizes as Eddie does later, "25% of something big is better than a 100% of nothing." She takes a chance that Eddie and she might find love.

Sarah turns out to be right with her gamble. She falls for Eddie because she sees that Eddie is a lover, a man who is passionate about his art and about life. She sees what Bert's inherent sadism is as well. It's Gordon who feels weak and characterless in the face of passion filled men like Eddie and to women in love, like herself. She sees that behind Bert's mask, he sees people as mere things to be manipulated for his own accumulation of power.

At a crucial point in the lovers' dialogues, which take place between Eddie and herself, she asks Eddie why he thinks Bert is right about him being a loser. The implied question is what makes Gordon a winner. "He owns things," Eddie says about Bert, explaining why Felson and others think Gordon is a winner. Sarah replies, "Is that what makes him a winner?"

What is a winner? Someone who possesses the colour of money? Where does Bert's power come from? "He owns things." That's Eddie's answer. But after Sarah hears Eddie's rapturous description of pool as art, she says, "You're not a loser Eddie. You're a winner. I love you Eddie." At that moment, Eddie begins to understand what it's all about--his character is enriched by love freely given. He only begins at that point though. He only begins.....the play's the thing and at the end of his game with Minnesota Fats there is a felt mutual recognition and respect in the air. At the same time, the relation of lordship and bondage is broken on Eddie's newly found character, integrity, courage and solidarity. All this personal strength and solidarity has been brought to the fore by love.

Willie Mosconi, the best pool player ever, advised Gleason (Fats) and Felson (Newman) on pool playing and he plays a bit part in "The Hustler", as does one former Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta.

See this movie.

A great accomplishment, complete with monlogues by old timey Wobblies, CP members and lefti-wingers in general. A true masterpiece. The history this film encapsulates is usually consigned to the memory hole. The new dvd has added bits, including Warren Beatty's own take on how he made this fine movie.

Very long, very worth seeing. Based on Alfred Doeblin's novel of the same name, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is set in and around Berlin during the Weimar Republik era, the era immeidiatley preceeding Hitler's Thrid Reich. The workers of '20s Berlin are taking it on the chin. Mass unemployment reigns alongside the greed of the landlord and capitalist classes. People are reacting and acting in various ways to survive. As usual, some of the unemployed turn to crime; others to prostitution. Most of the film's cast will see the dawn of the "thousand year Reich" with their eyes only half way open. But life must go on and it will go on and it does go on in Berlin during Weimar. It's an exciting time as well, a time when the puritanism of the coutnryside is being exchanged for a chance to live free and wild in a sleepless city chock full of caberets and Kniepe. Of course, the Nazis didn't like this and neither did the conservative majorities of rural Germany. All this turmoil and potential for explosive change are seen by the audience of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" through the eyes of one guy, Hans Bieberkopf. Walk, ride, love, drink and despair with Hans Bieberkopf. Best bring along a case or two of good German lager while you're immersing yourself in the prelude to "Gotterdamerung".

Don't see this movie! I'm telling you, don't see this movie, especially at night when it's raining and you've got the lights out. Although "The Ring" has one of my favourite actresses in it, don't see it. Naomi Watts is terrific in so many ways and very convincing as Rachel. Still, the movie should not be seen. It's terrible! I do think that either the director or the writers knew about Salvador Dali's "Andalusian Dog" because the video tape that Rachel sees seems very much modeled on that early surrealist film. "Andalusian Dog" has its ants, while the video within "The Ring" has its fly. "The Ring" is the scariest ghost movie you'll ever see, which is why you shouldn't see it. It ranks up there with the FRANKENSTEIN-like flick, "The Fly" in terms of its frightening potential. It's well acted, well scripted and the music assists the mood, rather than getting in the way. It could have been titled: "Sleepless Around Seattle". "The Ring" gives it a Wagnerian tone. But no, this is a ring tone. Yeah, like from a phone where some insomniac child will tell you that you only have seven days to live because you watched "Andalusian Dog" or a reasonable factsimile.

Henry II is portrayed as someone who wanted love and Becket as someone
who wanted honour. Neither Becket nor Henry could link with the real
things as both of them were mentally tied to top-down power structures,
structures which empty the sovereign individual of self and suck it up
into the alienated lives of desperation we see all around us.

As for speculation about the sexual proclivities of aristocrats past, I
often wonder whether there is some not so hidden agenda at work--not
that I doubt that there were homosexual adventures in the past. It's
just a question of the possibility of historical accuracy in these
cases. Jean Anouilh's Henry II may have had some homosexual tendencies.
They didn't appear to me in the filmed version of "Becket", but
then,that's me. Yes, Henry wanted Becket's love; but not in the carnal
sense. He wanted it in the power sense--confusing absolute loyalty with
love. He wanted Becket to give up his subjectivity, to become an object
of his lord's power and Becket was pleased to do that until Henry made
the grand mistake of putting Becket under the domination of what Thomas
perceived as a greater power. Becket ultimately refused Henry's demand
for total obedience when he discovered "God" to whom he granted his
"love", his servility , under the guise of finding his "honour". Many
have gone down this blind alley of reified thinking throughout history,
in vain attempts to regain their lost humanity. They know not of having
given it away to a grand abstraction. The delusional "Jesus" O'Toole
once played in "The Ruling Class" observed that he knew that he was Him
when he discovered one day when he was praying that he was talking to
Himself. Becket transferred his self-alienated love to his God while
his more human, sensual affections were always weighted toward his
people who, according to the movie script, were the Saxons. Even so,for
Burton's Becket, obedience to perceived authority would always came
before human solidarity.

O'Toole's Henry II was given the best, blackest, most humorously human
lines in "Becket", while poor Richard had to play the Idealist, losing
himself and his life in an attempt to save the god of his own socially
engineered imagination from defilement.

Empress Matilda: Oh, if I were a man! King Henry II: Thank God, madam,
He gave you breasts! An asset from which I derived not the slightest
benefit.

King Henry II: Don't be nervous, Bishop. I'm not asking for absolution.
I've something far worse than a sin on my conscience: a mistake.

King Henry II: Let us drink, gentlemen. Let us drink, till we roll
under the table in vomit and oblivion.

King Henry II: Your body, madam, was a desert that duty forced me to
wander in alone. But you have never been a wife to me!

King Henry II: He's read books, you know, it's amazing. He's drunk and
wenched his way through London but he's thinking all the time.

King Henry II: So what in most people is morality, in you it's just an
exercise in... what's the word?

Thomas a Becket: Aesthetics.

King Henry II: Yes, that's the word. Always "aesthetics."

King Henry II: There. That's the Great Seal of England. Don't lose it;
without the seal, there's no more England, and we'll all have to pack
up and go back to Normandy.

King Henry II: I'm suddenly very intelligent. It probably comes from
making love to that French girl last night.

King Henry II: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?

King Henry II: Am I the strongest or am I not?

Thomas a Becket: You are today, but one must never drive one's enemy to despair; it makes him strong. Gentleness is better politics, it saps virility. A good occupational force must never crush. It must corrupt

King Henry II: Becket is the only intelligent man in my kingdom, and
he's against me!

To be sure, the King, the Norman aristocrat got his taste of the
whippings he so freely gave to his Saxon dogs, (aka his subjects).
Thus, an interesting turn of the power tables frames the film: the
Church militant lashing the State, in certain prescribed portions. And
so the class cultural power game of dominance and submission goes : The
standard albeit confused love of dominance/submission and reification.

Haw! Bill Clinton handshaking the Stones. Hillary is there too. Cut to
Bill and Hillary holding hands as they walk across the stage. It's a
back shot, low, beagle high angle.

Scorsese doing the Stones! Wow. He did the blues. He did Dylan and now
the Stones. The man knows his music; I mean, on top of being the best
film director alive. And this time, it's a concert at a relatively
small venue of the Beacon Theatre, as the boys play in New Yawk City
for a Clinton charity.

The band starts with "Jumpin' Jack Flash' and baby, it's a gas, gas,
gas. Mick moves like he's half his age. Probably has something to do
with running six miles a day. Keith is a bit slow and wiry, cracking a
sly smile. Old Charlie's good, as usual and Ronnie slides on his guitar
like a coke bottle down a ten mile incline.

The band looks like it has weathered many a 'crossfire hurricane'--you
can see it in their now craggy faces, especially when Scorsese directs
a cut to clips of those smooth, innocent, devil may care faces of the
past.

"Shattered" is next. Mick sings to New York, "To live in this town, you
must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. Rats on the West Side,
bedbugs uptown...." And the crowd is loving it, although with the
exception of some of the band's back up, one from Brooklyn (a lusty
lady), the other, a guy from from Queens and the third, a fellow from
South Africa, they've probably never had an existential taste of Big
Apple tough. It's all part of the Stones' conscious irony, singing
laughing, smiling as the charity crowd rock 'n roars its approval.

"She was hot" comes up next. And the swaying women in the front rows,
nearest the stage, all hot, look up.....mmmm, delicious...and this is
followed by a rip, snorting "All Down the Line". Then another from one
that classic albumn, "Exile on Mainstreet". Hey, this albumn was
blaring over the loudspeakers last, at the Fremantle Blues and Roots
Festival. It's duet this time with Jack White III. Sir Mick and Jack
White III sing "Loving Cup", a veiled bluesy kind of reference to a
certain part of the female anatomy. Well done, Jack the Third.

Ah then, Marianne Faithful. Wish she'd been there. Mick makes a
reference to how this was one of the first songs which the Stones wrote
and then gave away to Ms. Faithful. "As Tears Go By", with
a very pretty guitar, played by Keith, Mick on vocals.

Okay, so you get the picture. No, you oughta go see the picture. One
thing more though, "Champagne & Reefer". YES! Now, here's a piece which
Mick says he first heard Muddy Waters do. Geez oh peez-o. What a great
song! And who's on stage with the band this time? Buddy, mo-fo, Guy!
Duets with Keith and Ronnie's guitar playing and Mick on the
Mississippi saxophone. Sweet. And the lyrics will tear you up.

Wage-slaves tend to reproduce the lives which their parents lived, with minor changes of location and personages. It's also true that some young adults swear that they'll live life differently. There's an urge to avoid a meaningless existence. There is that youthful Kerouac-like urge to escape the Big Bourgeois Trap and instead, to jump in the car, put the peddle to the metal and be free.

Willy Loman was trapped. Arthur Miller wrote his play "Death of a Salesman", revealing the life of a tired, forgotten wage-slave near the end of life's road; loyal to his bosses, disloyal to his wife, while lying to his kids and at the same time supporting them financially through his tireless journeys for love and money. It's more than ironic that Elia Kazan directed 742 performances of "Death of a Salesman" in which Lee J. Cobb played the empty, hopelessness characterized in Willy. Ironic why? Because, among other things, Kazan's granddaughter has a significant role, playing Milly in "Revolutionary Road". Ah, but that's another story. See the film.

Willy Loman's world is just one aspect of this 1955-centered movie which can be mined by the mindful. There are so many others, including references to the movie version of Edward Albee's George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?". Ah yes, the 'bickerings' you say. Ah yes, the secrets, lies and use of sex as a weapon in the struggle between males and females in marriage. Ah, but there's even more to "Revolutionary Road" than this.

"Revolutionary Road" is about the desire for freedom, nay, the instinct for freedom which is constantly being stomped down within the Big Bourgeois Trap from the time you are a terrible two until you've finally grown up and realized that you must be an adult and conform. Either that or die or become a hobo or be thrown in an insane asylum as the mathematics Ph.d. John Givings has been in "Revolutinary Road". John (played excellently by Michael Shannon) is that kind of Francis Farmer non-conformist who has not grown out of his child-like bluntness, ergo, he must be shocked to keep from shocking others. (Was he thrown in the asylum by his ever loving mother, played by Kathy Bates?) He blurts out truths, even within proper, safe social settings. He blurts them out like the machine gun fire one might face as a soldier during WWII. Frank Wheeler (Di Caprio) has seen this kind of truth before. At first, he and April recognize it and embrace it. Frank was a soldier, facing death in the WWII, which in 1955 had only ended ten years before. It was at that moment of life or death truth, he confesses to his wife April (Kate Winslet), that he felt the most alive, even though he was frightened. And April, whose love for her husband has been challenged by the hum-drum life of housewifery in the safe, leafy suburbs of NYC, confesses that she felt the same, existential awakening when she first experienced love making with Frank, back when they were young and on their own revolutionary road away from the ordinary lives which their parents had lived. The moment of this mutual recognition leads to a very steamy sex scene in the kitchen. Surely, you are interested now, dear readers.

The thing is that Frank is now a salesman for the same company which employed his father and he sees the death trap of a Willy Loman lifestyle descending over him, much as Willy's children saw it destroy their father. April sees it too. But hell, they've now decided to chuck it all, the relative security of life in the burbs of the 50s to take a chance on April in Paris. Yes, to move the two kids and their married lives ('the whole catastrophe', to quote Zorba) to Europe where existentialist juices are imagined to be flowing as freely as the espresso at the Cafe des Deux Maggots. The prospect of finally 'finding themselves' blooms somewhere, just over the rainbow shrouded Atlantic Ocean. Yes, the chimes of freedom are flashing again after some years of marriage with its triumphs and disappointments. Their instincts have been re-awakened from the doldrums of everyday life in the 50s with the father kissing the wife a la Dagwood and taking off to bring home the bacon from the office which Mr. Dithers runs and the kids, of course, running around in the yard shouting, "Mommy" and "Daddy".

In the beginning of their relationship, both April and Frank really want this freedom from the Big Bourgeois Trap and they believe that this urge places them in another league from their peers. This urge sets them on fire with love for each other. Others see the spirit in them too, the ones who have already grown-up, conforming to the lies required of fear-filled wage-slaves in everyday life. They want to touch it; but are ultimately cowed by their social conditioning, rationalized as,"familial responsibilities". When Frank is offered a big promotion in sales (he will be an ad-man for the then, cutting edge exotic machines called computers), he is tempted to accept and give up on pulling up stakes in burbs and moving to Paris with April.

April is not of the same mind. She is still star struck with the idea of getting out, perhaps escaping to the sheltering skies of Tangiers with Paul Bowles, instead of ending up as yet another archetypal Lucy Jordan, wife to that ultimate tragic archetype of capitalism, Willy Loman. Thus, lovers become haters and the road to revolution in their lives turns into its opposite: death on the installment plan in middlebrow suburbia, complete with those occasional visits to a reputable psychiatrist, just so one can remain safely shrink-wrapped in the Big Bourgeois Trap.