We decided to watch a few Jack Nicholson films after a discussion on the bus about who was LJ's favourite actor and he was one she chose. Started with Hal Ashby's The Last Detail because LJ had never seen it and I hadn't for over 30 years. It remains as powerful for me as the first time, this moving tale of two sailors escorting a third to prison. There's lots of humour, but the overriding mood is tragic, even philosophical at times, with both escorts forced to contemplate the meaning and validity of life experiences when confronted with the prisoner's naivety. A perfect, poignant ending too.
Next we watched The Missouri Breaks, again new to LJ and not watched by me for many years. It wasn't rated very highly by critics at the time but I think it's an oddball masterpiece of the New Western genre. Marlon Brando famously plays the regulator, Irish accent and all; eccentric hardly covers it. The film's worthwhile not just for his performance but the portrayal of outlaw life, it's futility and fatal consequences with Nicholson perfect as the horse thief with a heart. As much as it's a maverick Western, the script is intelligent, the direction perfect and the atmosphere of desperation in the face of a gradually changing American West pitched just right.
On the way to Work I happen to cycle past an architectural landmark once visited by Jack Nicholson as David Locke in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger. The Brunswick Centre was designed by Patrick Hodgkinson, completed in 1972. I often look at the flats, wondering what they're like inside. The main reason I visit the block is to go to Skoob Books in the basement.
Brutalist architecture in particular has featured in quite a few pieces of art I've made. Not just that style, but any modernist construction lends structure and geometry to work. Here's something from a while back. It's one of five versions...
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| Reality Is Only A Fleeting Solution (3), RTomens, 2017 |
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