Fool for Love

Robert Altman's Fool for Love is one of those dark sombre romances that's almost more fun to write about than watch. The basic plot is traditional. A gorgeous woman (Kim Basinger as May) is in love and has been in love with a cowboy (Sam Shepard as Eddie) whose no good for her for over a decade. She tries to overcome her desire by dating someone less bold (Randy Quaid as Martin). When the two subjects of desire meet, an otherwise viscid, enigmatic, nocturnal love story suddenly has all of its secrets revealed, candidly, confidently, and non-chalently, a shocking synthesis of opposites cheerfully and disconcertingly materialized. This portion of Fool for Love's script, by clarifying the details the rest of the film has so cleverly hidden, carnal forbidden details forged by desire's twisted and recalcitrant whims, seems to be saying that if a polar synthesis is unleashed in order to explain two sets of taboo miscalculations (one the direct result of the other), while order will be briefly restored, that order's chaos will not be able to withstand externalized vindications. Hence, while the love remains, the situation becomes even more surreal.

Secret Honour

For those of you searching for a film that casts a humanitarian light onto the life and times of Richard Nixon, you should check out Robert Altman's Secret Honour. Within, we are introduced to Nixon and only Nixon as he rants and raves for an hour and a half about how he was universally coerced during his political career, drinks Chivas Regal, and ponders blowing his brains out. Played by Philip Baker Hall (Tom Cruise's father in Magnolia and one of Larry David's Doctor's in the early moments of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 4), this fictional version of Nixon breaks through the shallow conceptions which the media often employ to tether his volatile life to a mundane manipulative caricature. I'm no expert on the Nixon phenomenon, but Secret Honour does successfully accomplish the remarkable task of pointing out the socialist side of this iconic Republican, thereby accentuating the irrational's pervasive influence on so many attempts to isolate an individuality.

Not that I like Richard Nixon.