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Post by wmcclain on Jun 15, 2019 10:44:22 GMT
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), directed by George Roy Hill. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time, constantly jumping back and forth along his own timeline. Sometimes he's an earnest, somewhat dim soldier captured by the Germans in WW2, then a successful optometrist who, after a head injury from a plane crash, begins writing up the whole story. The happiest part of his life is the time -- after being kidnapped by aliens -- he spends on the planet Tralfamadore where he is placed on exhibit. Later they provide him with a human woman for mating: sexy actress Montana Wildhack. After a difficult but brief adjustment period they fall in live and have a child. She's the only one who understands about his time traveling. He has visited the moment of his death many times and it no longer troubles him. He accepts the Tralfamadorian perspective. They see Time as an actual fourth dimension, making all of space-time fixed and inalterable. This goes beyond fatalism ("whatever is going to happen is going to happen") to a recognition that what happened in the past is always happening, as is what will happen in the future. It's all always "now". Which is a sort of realization of eternity beyond time, made to conform to Vonnegut's customary view of the absurd, pointlessly tragic nature of life. I think the movie represents the book pretty well -- and the author was pleased with it -- but I read it just recently and don't know if someone who hadn't would get as much from it. The film gets the mood right. The book is "semi-autobiographical" in that Vonnegut witnessed the firebombing of Dresden as a POW. He said that he was not Billy Pilgrim, but that he tried and failed to write about Dresden for many years, but finally could only write about Billy Pilgrim, who had become unstuck in time... He gives the number of fatalities at Dresden as 135,000, making it worse than Hiroshima. The modern estimate is more like 25,000. Kudos to Valerie Perrine for being comically topless in 1972. When first arriving on Tralfamadore she panics and wrestles Billy to the ground. (Aside: That might be an interesting study: "Comical Nudity in Film". You get both arousal from sex and release by laughter, an alternative to actual sex. Was that the point of old burlesque shows? Maybe begin the project with 19-year-old Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy (1933): skinny-dipping one night, her horse runs off with her clothes. Come the dawn she is running from bush to bush). Score by Glenn Gould, playing Bach. Available on DVD.
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Post by teleadm on Jun 15, 2019 14:20:53 GMT
Maybe the best film version of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that's been done.
But I'm no expert!
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Post by petrolino on Jun 15, 2019 21:30:05 GMT
Maybe the best film version of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that's been done. But I'm no expert! I enjoy it too. Also, Keith Gordon's 'Mother Night' (1996).
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Post by bravomailer on Jun 16, 2019 1:18:57 GMT
Maybe the best film version of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that's been done. But I'm no expert! I enjoy it too. Also, Keith Gordon's 'Mother Night' (1996). Isn't the main character in Mother Night also in Slaughterhouse Five? I think he's the American Nazi who tries to recruit POWs for the SS.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 16, 2019 1:24:16 GMT
I enjoy it too. Also, Keith Gordon's 'Mother Night' (1996). Isn't the main character in Mother Night also in Slaughterhouse Five? I think he's the American Nazi who tries to recruit POWs for the SS.
You could be on to something as he sculpted an interconnected literary universe.
'In Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the use of being "unstuck" in time, having no time restraints, allows the author to foreshadow important events and create links between events separated in time. Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse-Five, travels back and forth in time to events that are significant in his life. Just as Pilgrim travels in time, so does Howard W. Campbell, Jr. from Mother Night. There are significant differences in the way that each character travels in time: Billy honestly believes that he relives certain parts of his life, while Howard moves in time with the use of flashbacks. As Billy can travel forward and backward in time, Howard solely recalls events in his life and cannot travel into the future.'
- Thesis (Anon.)
'I've just started binging on Vonnegut (for those interested, I've read Breakfast, Slaughterhouse, Cat's Cradle, and Sirens of Titan, and I just started Mother Night), and I've noticed a large amount of character and thematic connections between his works. From more research that I've done, I've found a load of connections between these novels: between setting, like Midland City Ohio (Deadeye Dick and Breakfast), Ilium (Cat's Cradle and Galapagos and Slaughterhouse); or characters, like obviously Kilgore Trout, and Korabekian (Breakfast and Bluebeard); and themes. Most noticeably, I just finished Sirens of Titan and found mentions of the world of Harrison Bergeron years before that short story was published. Part of the Vonnegut experience, it seems, is these connections, intricate enough that you could almost say he created a cogent universe for his characters to all interact in (kind of like Discworld, I guess). Building on this theme, I have two questions; does anyone have any other connections about Vonnegut that they enjoy particularly, and two; has anyone mapped or otherwise consistently analyzed this universe Vonnegut made, to suggest some sort of chronological continuity or else? Could there be a map, perhaps, of Vonnegut-world mapped out, like they've done with Discworld to an extent? Thoughts?'
- longlunchbreaks, Reddit
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Post by bravomailer on Jun 16, 2019 1:41:41 GMT
I think the "unstuck in time" element is Vonnegut's dark, semi-satirical representation of his war trauma, what's today called PTSD. Billy Pilgrim is suddenly taken away from his mundane present and pushed back to the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of Dresden.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 16, 2019 1:49:11 GMT
I think the "unstuck in time" element is Vonnegut's dark, semi-satirical representation of his war trauma, what's today called PTSD. Billy Pilgrim is suddenly taken away from his mundane present and pushed back to the Battle of the Biulge and the bombing of Dresden.
”I met him in ’65, and I was in the Workshop from ’65 to ’67. I spent the lion’s share of my time at Iowa with Kurt, and we’ve been close friends ever since. The only criticism he ever made of my writing was making fun of my fondness for semicolons, which Kurt never liked very much. He called semicolons ”transvestite hermaphrodites.” And so whenever we had a correspondence I would try to write him a letter that was one sentence connected by an infinite number of semicolons. But he was a great guy, and a particularly important influence on me at a young time, because I certainly knew from reading Dickens that you could break the rules in terms of putting comedy and tragedy in the same story or even the same scene. But Vonnegut was such a flaunting example of that in contemporary terms. He could write the most condemning stuff about human nature while being both funny and kind. I watched the Six-Day War in Vonnegut’s kitchen in Iowa City. My now-eldest son Colin was then two years old, and Kurt didn’t have any kids that age, so there weren’t any toys around for Colin. Kurt and I were trying to watch the war, but it’s tough to watch a war with a two-year-old. So Kurt got the idea that if we took all the pans and pots out of the kitchen cabinet, and gave Colin a couple of wooden spoons, then he could entertain himself, and we would have the appropriate background music for watching a war. And so that’s what we did. We gave Colin two wooden spoons, and all the pots and pans in Vonnegut’s kitchen, and turned up the volume. Kurt was a troubled guy. He had issues and episodes with depression — his mother had killed herself. I think the thought of suicide was one he held at bay, and the issue of depression was one he lived with, often by laughing at it. He was notorious for sort of being the most entertaining person at a dinner party until he abruptly got up and went home. And you kind of expected that from him. I was a neighbor of his for a number of years when I lived in Long Island — my year-round house was around the corner from Kurt’s summer house — and I would often come down to make coffee in the morning and find him sitting on the porch of my house smoking a cigarette. And he always said, ‘Oh, I just got here, and I just wondered if you were up,’ and he’d come in, and we’d have a cup of coffee, and he’d leave, and he’d say ‘Well, I’ll let you get to work.’ And then my kids would go outside and count the number of cigarette butts on the lawn, and by that we could come up with a fair estimation of how long he’d really been sitting there, waiting for someone to get up and make some coffee. His eccentricities were real. I once half-killed him in a New York restaurant, imagining at the time I was saving his life. At dinner he started to cough and hack in a terrible way, and he got up from the table, and I swore he was choking to death. I got my hands around his hips, but you can’t really Heimlich somebody properly when you’re only five foot six-and-a-half, which I am standing on my toes, and he’s a good six-two or -three. So I had no alternative but to knock him down on all fours and pound him from behind. And this is right in the middle of a pretty busy restaurant! I could imagine what people must’ve been thinking — ‘Crazy writers! Can’t they keep it at home or something?’ But I just hammered away on him down on the restaurant floor. And finally he was able to get his breath and say something, and he said, ‘John! I’m not choking, I have emphysema!’ That was the first I’d ever heard of it! This was back in the ’80s. I mean, if anybody was gonna get emphysema, it would’ve been Kurt with those nonstop Pall Malls over the years, but I didn’t know it at the time. He was a generous, generous friend. You’d always worry about him, how he was doing. If there was a message on your answering machine, you always thought, ‘Uh-oh, is he in trouble? Does he need to talk to somebody?’ And then you’d call, and it’d just be that he’d thought of something funny he wanted to tell you.
- John Irving
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Post by bravomailer on Jun 16, 2019 2:23:40 GMT
I recall a CSPAN broadcast of a roundtable discussion with Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and a third WW2 author whose name eludes me. Anyway, it was moderated by Stephen Ambrose. So Vonnegut was talking about being captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He and and a few other GIs were separated from their unit and hiding in the woods when a German officer called out for them to surrender. At this point, Ambrose interrupted and asked if the officer was speaking good English. Vonnegut replied, "It was good enough for me!"
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Post by petrolino on Jun 16, 2019 2:25:55 GMT
I recall a CSPAN broadcast of a roundtable discussion with Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and a third WW2 author whose name eludes me. Anyway, it was moderated by Stephen Ambrose. So Vonnegut was talking about being captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He and and a few other GIs were separated from their unit and hiding in the woods when a German officer called out for them to surrender. At this point, Ambrose interrupted and asked if the officer was speaking good English. Vonnegut replied, "It was good enough for me!" New version of 'Catch-22' looks awful. Tone seems all wrong in the clips which verge upon mugging. I'll give it a miss. I like Mike Nichols' movie anyways.
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Post by bravomailer on Jun 16, 2019 2:41:05 GMT
I recall a CSPAN broadcast of a roundtable discussion with Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and a third WW2 author whose name eludes me. Anyway, it was moderated by Stephen Ambrose. So Vonnegut was talking about being captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He and and a few other GIs were separated from their unit and hiding in the woods when a German officer called out for them to surrender. At this point, Ambrose interrupted and asked if the officer was speaking good English. Vonnegut replied, "It was good enough for me!" New version of 'Catch-22' looks awful. Tone seems all wrong in the clips which verge upon mugging. I'll give it a miss. I like Mike Nichols' movie anyways. I've endured five episodes. The gf likes it. I don't. If someone wants to make a somber miniseries about WW2, fine. But why take an existing masterpiece and contort it to your purposes? The book and 1970 film were mostly satirical, with moments of darkness. The miniseries inverts this, causing the satirical moments to lack humor and the rest of the scenes to drag. Too bad Clooney decided to omit General Dreedle (nicely played by Orson Welles) and replace him with a minor figure in the book (Scheisskopf) played by Clooney. It has nice cinematography and aerial scenes. The pervasive 40s music is unimaginative.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 16, 2019 3:01:46 GMT
New version of 'Catch-22' looks awful. Tone seems all wrong in the clips which verge upon mugging. I'll give it a miss. I like Mike Nichols' movie anyways. I've endured five episodes. The gf likes it. I don't. If someone wants to make a somber miniseries about WW2, fine. But why take an existing masterpiece and contort it to your purposes? The book and 1970 film were mostly satirical, with moments of darkness. The miniseries inverts this, causing the satirical moments to lack humor and the rest of the scenes to drag. Too bad Clooney decided to omit General Dreedle (nicely played by or Orson Welles) and replace him with a minor figure in the book (Scheisskopf) played by Clooney. It has nice cinematography and aerial scenes. The pervasive 40s music is unimaginative.
You have a solid reason to persevere. More power to you.
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Post by bravomailer on Jun 16, 2019 14:20:39 GMT
Maybe the best film version of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that's been done. But I'm no expert! I've seen three and I rank Slaughterhouse Five as the best by far. Mother Night is so-so and Breakfast of Champions isn't very good but it's not as bad as most people say. Here's Howard Campbell in Slaughtehouse Five. He's the main character in Mother Night.
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Post by koskiewicz on Jun 16, 2019 16:00:23 GMT
I've read all of Vonnegut's work. SH5 is a great film, and I really was pleased by the introduction of Valerie Perrine, which was the first time I ever laid eyes on her.
My favorites are Cats Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and the Sirens of Titan.
Also there was unverified speculation that the spoof novel, "Venus on the Half Shell" (Kilgore Trout) was ghost written by Vonnegut but other evidence points to Phillip Jose Farmer.
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Post by Sulla on Jun 19, 2019 3:48:11 GMT
I first saw this film and years later became a John Irving fan. Then I discovered the connection with Vonnegut and started reading some of his books. too. It's been a few years since I watched it. So after reading this thread, I pulled out my copy for another viewing. Such an original story.
I always like the part where Billy asks for the night canopy. When the lights dim, we can hear the Tralfamadorians say "Aww."
Next up is Mother Night (1996).
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