Een van de nabestaanden heeft weer geklaagd over de uitvaart.
De dode in kwestie was Michael Gambon (1940 – 2023), de Britse acteur.
De klachtenbrief maakte gewag van het feit dat ik het tijdens de plechtigheid de hele tijd over mezelf had gehad en over hoe ik de film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) zag toen hij uitkwam, vierentwintig en getrouwd, nog kinderloos.
Dat was bij Cinema Cartoons en ik herinner me nog precies hoezeer ik onder de indruk was. Ik kocht daarna ook de soundtrack van Michael Nyman.
Ik weidde — aldus de klacht — ook te lang uit over de kannibalistische scène in The Cook en sprak te lang over hoe net dát deel van de geliefde van Helen Mirren door Gambon moest opgegeten worden.
In de film Tale of a Vampire (1992) komt Julian Sands ongemerkt het café binnen waar Suzanna Hamilton alleen aan een tafeltje zit. Hij gaat tegenover haar zitten maar zij merkt hem niet meteen op. Zij leest een boek.
Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire (1992), de conversatie over Forneret speelt zich af op 19:40.
— ‘Houdt u van Forneret?’
— ‘Kent u hem?’
— ‘Dichter, romanschrijver, dramaturg, vroege voorloper van het surrealisme, Frans.’
— ‘Dat klopt.’
— ‘Weet u, u bent pas de tweede persoon die ik ontmoet die zelfs maar gehoord heeft van Forneret in Engeland, laat staan hem gelezen heeft.’
— ‘Een van mijn favoriete gedichten van Forneret is “Un pauvre honteux”. Kent u het?’
— ‘Het gaat over een uitgehongerde man die zijn eigen hand opeet.’
Wij van Dodenstad graven ‘s avonds niet. Na zonsondergang houdt het werk op. De doodgravers zitten dan in hun barakken en ik kijk dan wel eens graag een film van een van onze nieuwe bewoners. Of lees een hunner boeken. Of bekijk hun gebouwen, schilderijen en beeldhouwwerken. Of ik luister naar hun muziek.
Vanavond keek ik achtereenvolgens naar The Maids (1975) en Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), want Glenda Jackson is dood.
David Prowse was an English bodybuilder and actor known for his parts in Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange and Jabberwocky.
In my book, he is the Frankenstein on the cover of Midi Minuit Fantastique 24 (12/1970) in a still from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), see above.
My gaydar was effective, I noticed while watching The Trials of Oscar Wilde that Fraser was gay. It’s good that they cast a gay man for a gay part in 1960.
Sean Connery was a Scottish actor, for a long time considered the most handsome man alive.
I have fond memories of four of his films:
In The Man Who Would Be King (1975), he is one of two British adventurers who first become king of Kafiristan, which is an actual historical region in Afghanistan. Kafirs are unbelievers.
In Highlander (1986) he is an Egyptian immortal who has to compete with Christophe Lambert.
In The Name of the Rose (1986), Connery is a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Thomas Aquinas.
But in Zardoz (1972) Connery is the funniest and the most memorable. Not necessarily in the good sense, because Zardoz is really a ridiculous movie, and not even in the “so bad that it’s good” category. But once you saw that movie, you never forget the image of Connery, like a kind of beefcake in orange shorts, with a mustache, with crossed suspenders.
I have to formally advise you not to watch that film.
The plot:
We are 2293. The inhabitants of Earth consist of two groups, the Brutes, the plebs, ruled by the Eternals, a small elite that is bored. Eternals use part of the Brutes, the Exterminators, as a band of chosen warriors to kill common Brutes. Sean Connery is one of them.
The Eternals have a god for the destroyers, Zardoz, a giant stone head that flies through the air and spews weapons.
The teaching that Zardoz preaches goes like this:
“The Penis is evil. The Penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken!””
Movies such as Zardoz were inspired by neo-malthusian overpopulation disaster scenarios distributed in books such as The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits to Growth (1971) by the Club of Rome. Those books were partly right. Today population stabilization is predicted by 2064. Then we return — I hope with enough secularists (the religious shall NOT inherit the earth) — to an ideal of two billion inhabitants. A gentle return. Two billion is ideal for our planet, we were two billion in 1927.
Although Zardoz was really a shitty film, there were some good films to come out of this dystopian eco-fiction scene.
There is Silent Running (1972), about a spaceship that takes the last plants of Earth into space and Soylent Green (1973), about a society where the starving inhabitants of Earth are encouraged to commit euthanasia. Euthanized people are then offered back to starving humanity as biscuit food, but now I deviate very far from Sean Connery.
Honor Blackman was an English actress, known for her sex symbol-ish parts in popular pulp of the sixties (The Avengers, Goldfinger and Jason and the Argonauts).
Radley Metzger cast her as Susan Sills (“the big game hunter, one of the world’s most efficient killers”) in The Cat and the Canary (1978).
“Men Will Deceive You” (1964), a version of Gainsbourg’s “La javanaise.”
She recorded the surprise hit “Kinky Boots” (1964) and the album Everything I’ve Got (1964) which featured an interpretation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise”.
