A Brief Note on the Origins of the Movie Quote: “I’ll Flip Ya- I’ll Flip Ya Fo’ Real”
A few years ago, a good friend recommended that I watch the Clint Eastwood produced documentary on jazz legend Thelonious Monk. Always a great love of mine, I was eager and a bit embarrassed not to have seen or even known about the documentary. Anyway – it was a real pleasure, full of wonderful performances and lots of inside looks at a man who was brilliant in music and maybe at best, strained in the rest of his relations with the world.
And then there was another gem inside the gem. More than halfway through the movie, we see Monk backstage with a girlfriend of his, in what appears to be the kitchen of a restaurant in a club where he has performed. She gives him a gift, which is a pen. He’s reluctant and we can tell he’s not good with receiving gifts or with being cared for in this manner. He asks a few questions of her about the pen, then tries to write something, but the napkin gives yields too easily to his maniacal scribbling.
Thelonious Monk Video: From Straight No Chaser (1988)
Al Pacino in Cruising Tonight at the Silent Movie Theater
4/3/2009 @ 7:30pm / SERIES: ’70’s Queersploitation
“For equal opportunity skank in queer cinema, you can’t get much nastier than this incendiary pair of thrillers from 1980 which delve deep into the underbelly of New York’s post-disco gay scene and come up covered in grime. William Friedkin’s Cruising sparked a storm of protests as rookie cop Al Pacino goes undercover as a leather-clad bar boy hunting down a serial killer who knifes his hogtied victims in the back. Al learns how to sniff poppers and thrash around hilariously on the dance floor before finally getting his man… or does he? In depicting the underground gay bar scene in the most raw and uncompromising fashion, and in piling on layer after layer of claustrophobic red herring twists to deliberately make the audience as confused as Pacino’s character, Friedkin created a masterwork of ill ease, one of his greatest films to stand alongside The Exorcist and The French Connection.”
Cruising Dir. William Friedkin, 1980, 35mm, 106 min. | Tickets – $10
Trailer for William Friedkin’s Cruising Starring Al Pacino
In recent R. Crumb news, apparently he has finished the Genesis project. It’s 201 pages. He has also finished the Cover, the Introduction, the commentary (for the back sleeve) as well as the Map, which will be in the beginning of the book. The book is soon going to production, planned for a fall release this year.
