Debunking Personal Mythology Never Worked For Me

“And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, ‘We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.’”
-- Narrator from Magnolia

“I've never been nice my whole life, but I'll do my best... to be sweet.”

-- Bill from Kill Bill: Vol. 2

I have a bad habit, a really nasty habit.

I take everything and everyone for granted.

I really do, even though I keep telling myself I will stop. It is perpetual stagnation that paralyzes everything in my life.

I take movies for granted. I take them for granted in ways that should make a cynical cocksucker like myself ashamed for even going as much as I do. There comes a point where your own mythology needs to be debunked because let us face it, it is just mythology, nothing more.

Setting rules, rigid rules for such things should never be in the cards, but sadly my love of movies, like any other passion, is subject to burnout. It happens to me more times than I would care to admit.

Stagnation exists, even when I think it does not, it is still there, but it goes under another name-- routine.

I get married to routines.

Some of them are good-- going to the gym or reading a book a week, but my weekly cinematic excursions I have never been truly comfortable. I am not sure why this is, but I have always felt guilty about seeing so many films on a weekly basis.

Being a cinema junkie is one thing, being a cinema whore is quite another.


I burn out every couple of years and by some miracle there is always a film that manages to reignite my passion for a couple of months. There is a cinematic abyss where I just trail the perimeter hoping for a good time or at least hoping I am not looking a my watch a lot, but I am a natural born clock watcher. The banality of a day job and the fruits of a public education nurture the best clock watchers in the world. I take my watch for granted and that might explain why Fossils like to die on me.

I have a recurring dream.

Sadly the dream does not involve Jill Kelly, Chasey Lain or Christy Canyon.

The recurring dream is writing the script for a sixth Planet Of The Apes film. Yes, I have a dream where this scenario is real-- all too real. I had the dream last night and it was not pretty. I had managed to alienate more people in the course of this dream than everyone who was around me during my junior year of college. The year where I only talked about all things related to The Godfather films.

The months leading up to The Godfather Part III were very exciting. Not everyone shared my enthusiasm for the film before or after its release. After watching Paulo Sorretino’s Il Divo on Friday night, I am convinced Francis Ford Coppola was on the right track. The Corleones had nothing on the Italian gangsters and politicians that populate Il Divo.

Michael Corleone was not kidding when he said in The Godfather Part III:

“Italian politics have had these men for centuries. They are the true Mafia.”

Il Divo is a truly engrossing and fascinating film-- it is about the life and times of the Italian politician, Giulio Andreotti. A double feature of this and Matteo Gorrone’s Gomorra are enough to eradicate any romanticized notions of organized crime.

But back to those Planet Of The Apes films.


It looks like I have become the caretaker of Paul Dehn’s legacy in more ways than one. In my recurring dream, the sixth film seemed very real in every sense of the word. I could not shut up about writing it. I only had the vaguest notion that it would involve time travel and Apes possessing nuclear weapons-- possibly using the current nuclear desires of Iran and North Korea as allegories. I had not had this dream in a long time. I think these dreams ended after watching Tim Burton’s ill advised remake in 2001, which for all its faults seemed somewhat faithful to Pierre Boulle’s novel, Monkey Planet. As the screenwriter for this imaginary film, I was flipping out. I do not know who I was yelling at, but I do remember yelling this at someone:

“How the fuck can you make a Planet Of The Apes film without Roddy McDowell?”

I was always bummed that none of the obituaries ever mentioned that James Franciscus stared in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes or The Valley Of The Gwangi for that matter. That was the summer of 1991 and besides that outrage; I think I was in the midst of several futile infatuations at the time that drove me to a life of drink and slothfulness. Oh yeah, it was the summer of 1992, where we all drink too much St. Ides.

The dream last night seems dated now. It owes more to Eric Greene’s Planet Of The Apes As American Myth than anything else. More importantly these dreams represent the insanity of obsession.

It is the cinema that is my deepest love, but many times I have run from it. Maybe I blame previous bad experiences in Los Angeles involving me and earlier with one of my older brothers.

Los Angeles is the ultimate bitch of desire. She is the most beautiful and vile bitch the world has ever seen.

Yet, I want to go back to her. Forget that there is very little difference between Rockville Pike in Maryland and Ventura Boulevard in California.

I take the movies for granted; most of the time they have treated me well, but I take the shadows on the wall for granted. The quality time alone in the dark is exactly what I need at the end of the day. Going to the movies is first and foremost about escapism. I said escapism, not turning your brain off. Sadly, we have to do that at work sometimes, especially if our day jobs are nothing more than making other people richer and selling someone else’s inferior ideas.

Escapism should be fun, but it does not have to be stupid.

I am all about escapism, but I am also all about escaping from my obsessions as well. If the movies are truly this first love that began while watching the original King Kong in my parents’ bedroom when I was five years old; then I am a deceiver of epic proportions. I never wanted to “the guy” in the Closet Of Comics in College Park, Maryland arguing all matters of fandom and geekdom, but ever since that faithful day, I cannot seem to escape this role.

It was the end of the summer of 1994; I went over to buy some graphic novels while I was waiting for my mountain bike to be ready at College Park Bicycles-- I wished I rode that bike more. It was a sweet Cannondale. There was a bunch of guys talking about movies. I forget exactly what the exact thing was, but I remember the younger kid asking one of the older kids what kind of movies he liked since he was making fun of everything this kid was admiring and bragging about. He said something about John Woo.

That caught my attention. The younger kid had no idea who he was, but I chimed in telling him he was an action director god from Hong Kong.

We then went on about Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. This was month before Pulp Fiction was released, but I just saw Killing Zoe with a friend of mine at the now defunct Key Theatre. I then blurted out something along the lines that I used to worship Ridley Scott and John Carpenter, but they had lost me-- so had a lot of other filmmakers too at the time. I felt letdown by a lot of the guys I grew up-- John Landis, Joe Dante and George Miller.

These were guys I used to worship all the time beginning in Elementary School all the way up college-- although as the years went by, I fell in love with all of them all over again. I burned back the animal flesh of film snobbery as best as I could, but never good enough. I think the not going to film school always soured my obsession with movies. My parents did not want to lose another son to the film business. I never reconciled my dreadful college admissions process along with the fact that my brother, like myself, left Los Angeles too soon. I went out there way too late, but I regret that I left too soon everyday.

But I never wanted to become “that guy” who just talks about movies and nothing else. I have always fought to be more than that, but it is something that I cannot hide, no matter how hard I try. I was always meant to be a cinema junkie. I was always hoping for something more. I was hoping never to become “that guy”, but I failed miserably at avoiding that.

I take everything and everyone for granted.

I took David Carradine for granted. He died last week in Bangkok. He was there shooting a film.

Was it suicide? Was it something else?

I do not want to speculate on that right now. It is not fair to him, his family or his legions of fans. It is bad enough that I cannot get the opening scene of Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class out of my head right now.

This afternoon, I finally started reading David Carradine’s The Kill Bill Dairy-- I have had it for years, but I finally figured now would be a good time to read it. Quite a departure from Amy Chua’s Day Of Empire which I just finished. So far there is a brutal frankness that I really appreciate. Now I regret I never read his 1995 memoir, Endless Highway. I remember when it came out I was working at a Super Crown Books in Rockville, Maryland. I should have picked it up. I am really thankful that Warren Beatty had no interest in playing Bill. It would have changed the tone of both Kill Bill films. Do not get me wrong, I think Warren Beatty is a fantastic actor, but his heart was never in it.

Bill is an iconic role, a career defining role written by a person that specializes in career revitalizations.

I think Carradine put it best when he wrote:

“Quentin makes movies featuring cult people who can’t get work.”



I appreciate that kind of harsh, but honest writing about himself. He is no longer with us. It is still hard to fathom; he had a real lust for life. I have a soft spot for his work in Lone Wolf McQuade, Q, Death Race 2000, Kung Fu and countless other films.

Perhaps my favorite role is his portrayal of Cole Younger in Walter Hill’s masterpiece, The Long Riders. He acted with his real life brothers, Keith and Robert Carradine. It is one of those epic westerns which should never be forgotten. It is Walter Hill at the height of his powers.

Yet, I keep coming back to his work in the Kill Bill films, especially Kill Bill: Vol. 2, if for no other reason, he is and always will be Bill. Each scene is a pleasure to watch. From his entrance to his exit, it is our divine pleasure to watch him bring this character to life. His entrance does not disappoint. He haunts the whole first film just as Orson Welles’ Harry Lime haunts The Third Man and Marlon Brando’s Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s haunts Apocalypse Now.

When Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo does find Bill at the end, part of us is hoping they will run off together with B.B., but deep down we know that Beatrix has to have her revenge. There is a reason Bill is called “Snake Charmer.” Carradine’s charisma is not lost on the part. He has some of the film’s best lines. Yet it is their last exchange that is the most potent and the most fitting:

Bill: “How do I look?”
The Bride: “You look ready.”

It is this exchange which I thought of when I read the tragic news last Thursday morning.

I took him for granted (like I took George Carlin for that matter.) I always think they are going to be here, but that is never the case. The last thing I saw David Carradine in was Crank: High Voltage. He played a Chinese gangster named Poon Dong.

Crank: High Voltage represents the bastardized ecstasy that is Los Angeles. We are not talking about high art, but we are talking about a film that is a very hyper version of Michael Tolkin’s The New Age meets Martin Scorsese’s After Hours mixed with action insanity of The Transporter films on space crack. The film showed Los Angeles as it needed to be seen on the other side of the screen-- the film is a wild ride filled with one money shot after the other. The film is the perfect Jason Statham action vehicle.

Now it seems the film represented the passing of the torch from one action hero to the next, but more importantly, the film was escapism in the most purest form.

One thing is certain; I still take my chances in the dark for granted every weekend.

Sure, it can be like Russian roulette, but at this point, I really have no choice-- I am hooked on the movies.