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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Five Easy Pieces (1970)



  
"We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending"
A disaffected man seeks a sense of identity in one of the key films of Hollywood's 1970s New Wave. Once a promising pianist from a family of classical musicians, Bobby Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson, in his first major starring role) leads a blue-collar life as an oil rigger, living with needy waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) and bowling with their friends Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) and Stoney (Fannie Flagg).

Feeling suffocated by responsibilities, Bobby seeks out his sister, Tita (Lois Smith), and, discovering that his father is gravely ill, he reluctantly heads back to the patrician family compound in Puget Sound with a pregnant Rayette in tow. After a road trip featuring a harangue from hitchhiker Palm (Helena Kallianiotes) about filth, and Bobby's ill-fated attempt to make a menu substitution in a diner, he tucks Rayette away in a motel before heading to the house. There Bobby seduces his uptight brother Carl's cultured fiancée, Catherine (Susan Anspach), but Rayette shows up unexpectedly. As Rayette's crassness collides with the snobbery of the Dupea circle, Bobby loses patience with both. 


"A key American film of its era, Bob Rafelson's moody, character-driven tale of an upper-middle class dropout established Jack Nicholson as the foremost actor of his generation in articulating the values of the new generation."
One of the few honest American films about social class, downward mobility, family, and alienation, “Five Easy Pieces” is more of a character and mood piece than a straightforward, plot-driven narrative. Considering that the film was about alienation, marked by a pessimistic mood, and influenced by European filmmaking in approach and style, the movie was remarkably popular at the box-office, benefiting from the success of the a cycle of youth movies at the time.

 Emanuel Levy


    1. 7.5/10IMDb88%Rotten Tomatoes85%Metacritic

    1. Release date: April 1957 (USA)
      Screenplay: Reginald Rose
      Story by: Reginald Rose
      Awards: Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama, MORE
    2.         Director: Sidney Lumet

MORE ABOUT FILM

Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson on Five Easy Pieces’ Diner Scene


FIVE EASY PIECES SCRIPT 





Sidney Lumet

"Good camera work is not pretty pictures. It should augment and reveal the theme as fully as the actors and directors do."


Born in Philadelphia to Yiddish theater veterans, Sidney Lumet was a child actor before he ever sat in a director's chair. His transition from acting to television direction in the 1950s honed his legendary efficiency and ability to work intimately with actors. Over 50 years, he directed more than 40 films, earning a reputation for finishing ahead of schedule and under budget, all while delivering powerhouse performances.




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Original screenplay ending



Ending



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