Coppola’s classic is considered by some to be the greatest war film of all time

A great cliché about war states that it brings out the best and worst in humanity. War results in a situation where the rules are thrown out, safeguards are dropped, and the extremes are allowed into the mainstream since “war is a continuation of politics by other means” as Clausewitz said long ago. Cruelty, treachery, kindness, heroism, are all amplified and become more prominent on this horrific stage. The Arab word “Jihad” is quite poignant when it comes to matters of war since it refers to both an internal and external struggle. And it’s precisely the essence of this dual-front battle that makes Apocalypse Now more than just a great war movie.

Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the Vietnam War setting serves as the external struggle and the backdrop to the more important battle, the one inside the soul.

Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) represents the inner struggle of the soul. A very talented and intelligent man, the tragedy of the war shakes the philosophical underpinning of his being and makes him reevaluate his entire existence. This reflection leads him to strip his identity old identity away and build a new one better suited to his new self. Yet his movement from the old to the new isn’t complete and the arrival of Captain (Marting Sheen) only reinforces the conflict within him. Coppola’s ambiguity nevertheless suggests that Kurtz is cognizant of the purpose behind Willard’s visit and blesses his own liquidation by his hands. Kurtz’s approval of his own slaughter demonstrates that he himself has no control over his own self even while he serves as a God-King over a tribe of hill natives who quake in fear of him. Therefore his elimination is seen not only as necessary, but as a release from the torment that he is going through.

Conrad’s novella was an attack on the brutality of European colonialism and Coppola merely substituted the Americans in place of them in his work. Is the assertion then that far away foreign wars are madness? It certainly seems that way.

John McCain and Col. Kurtz

Often derided by far-right types as a Manchurian Candidate, presidential hopeful John McCain shares with Col. Kurtz his megalomania. McCain has publicly stated that the “War on Terror” could last 100 years and has lashed out and threatened Russia over Georgia. A hawk’s hawk, McCain holds the belief that the USA is entitled to overthrow any regime it sees fit to overthrow. Like Kurtz, McCain has a loyal and fanatical base upon which to draw should the need arise. Yet McCain lacks Kurtz’s intellectualism and reflection. Kurtz’s ending words were “the horror, the horror”, which succinctly described his mental state and his attitude towards the violence in his midst. Does McCain ever reflect on what kinds of horrors he will unleash should he follow his words on foreign policy? In short, is Kurtz a more decent man than McCain, or has McCain not traveled as far into the jungle as Kurtz in order to come to the latter’s conclusion?

Coppola Reflects on Apocalypse Now 30 Years Later

Here are a few quotes from director Coppola on his masterwork:

The hardest thing in movie-making is to replace an actor. I’ve done it only once or twice. Harvey is a wonderful actor, totally different in approach and style to Martin. But given what I felt the character had to convey, I was convinced that he was wrong for what I wanted to do. There’d be many roles perhaps in which I would replace Martin with Harvey, as they are both wonderful actors and good people. It was a judgment call. It was difficult, but I do not think I was wrong. Something I am very grateful for is that this difficult moment did not cost me Harvey’s friendship – which shows what a fine and generous person he is, as well as a dedicated actor.

I spent several days with Marlon discussing the themes of the film and the specifics of the role of Kurtz (whom Brando had asked to rename Leighly). Marlon repeatedly resisted the idea that we could do the sequence in a manner following Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which I was proposing. He said adapting the novella wouldn’t work and came up with all sorts of thoughts, some relevant, some not, about which way we should go.

So I just sat patiently, worried though I was, listening and discussing many things with him, recording them and studying them later. Finally, after more than a week of this (I only had three weeks of his time), he showed up and I was shocked: he had shaved his head, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I knew that meant he had come around to doing the role more like the novella, which he had always insisted wouldn’t work. I said: “But Marlon, you said it wouldn’t work to do it like Heart of Darkness – you said you had read it and thought it wouldn’t work.” And he said: “I lied.” He had only read it for the first time that night. From that moment, we went into high gear and did what we could.

Zeppo Marx as Horatio Jamison in the 1930 Marx Brothers Film Animal Crackers. As usual, Zeppo plays straight man to his brother Groucho.

Growing up in the pre-cable TV era, our choices of programming were quite limited and local television stations had to rely on old movies and reruns due to the high cost of producing original broadcasting. Even though our selection was limited it was a blessing in disguise. Other than TCM buffs (like myself) and the annual Christmas showings of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol (the one starring Alistair Sim is the best, by the way), how often are the kids of today seeing the old black and white classics?

Some of my fondest memories growing up were thanks to these old Hollywood productions. I grew up watching Our Gang/Little Rascals on Saturday mornings which would play after the new cartoons of the time. On weekend evenings, my father and I would laugh hysterically at Laurel and Hardy and especially The Three Stooges. These shows would be repeated endlessly, and you’d learn them word for word, and slap by poke. They would take you back to a time that seemed so much simpler, so much more trusting and maybe naive. Whether it was real or not was beside the point.

Early Sunday afternoons, one of the stations broadcasting from Buffalo would play movies starring The Marx Brothers. At that age, Harpo Marx was by far the funniest because of his physical comedy. Whether mugging for the camera or revealing the inventory of his cloak, it was an easy segue from the physical comedy of Laurel and Hardy/The Three Stooges to Harpo. Yet I wasn’t completely sold on the Marx Brothers since so much of their humour went over my head. Nevertheless, I knew what I was watching was special and that there would be a time when I’d be better able to understand it and appreciate it.

I rediscovered the Marx Brothers during my university days and before you can say “Why a Duck?” I became a devoted fan. I recall watching A Night at the Opera and laughing throughout the entire film. The mix of anarchy with Harpo’s physical comedy plus the wordplay between Groucho and Chico along with the incredible singing and music of Il Trovatore won me over with ease. Shortly thereafter, I watched Animal Crackers (which I consider their best film) and was once again blown away by the multi-layered entertainment that was packaged so tight and neatly. Shortly thereafter, I bought every movie of theirs that was for sale and since then have watched them over and over again.

My favourite Marx brother for a long time was their lead, Groucho for obvious reasons. Since then, it has shifted to Chico due to his punning, scheming, and attempts at carousing. Chico would play the bridge between Harpo and Groucho.

The Marx Brothers sing a tune in Duck Soup

But what about Zeppo? He seems to be the Rodney Dangerfield of The Marx Brothers since he gets “no respect”. Only appearing in the Brothers’ first four films, Zeppo was relegated to playing the straight man as opposed to the anarchic humour of the other three brothers. Was this because he was untalented? According to the brothers themselves, as well as family members and friends, Zeppo was not only the funniest of the brothers, but was also able to seamlessly ape each of the brothers’ characters (and sometimes stand in for them). Some suggest that Zeppo wasn’t allowed to display his humourous side since he’d either overshadow the other three, or more likely because he would make Groucho’s act redundant. Being the kid brother (a whole 11 years younger than Groucho and 13 and 14 years younger than Harpo and Chico, respectively) Zeppo had to give way as the older three had already well established characters that were easily to translate to the screen.

Did this make Zeppo superfluous to the Marx Brothers? Not at all. Not only did Zeppo have the best singing voice, but more importantly Zeppo provided the bridge between the chaos of his three brothers with the high society that they would crash and upend. Chico, Harpo, and Groucho were obvious outsiders with Groucho representing a faux bourgeois character and harpo and Chico little more than con men. Zeppo was the presentable face yet still an outsider. Nevertheless, his character would realize the sheer lunacy that his brothers would unleash upon their upper society targets yet not lose his composure. In fact, he would be in on the joke the entire time, more often than not setting his brothers up for the knock down gag.

Nor was Zeppo’s straight man act necessarily a traditional one. It had its own symbolism and method as James Agee explained:

[Zeppo] added a fourth dimension as the cliché of the [romantic] juvenile, the bland wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist only in the world of the sound stage. [... He is] too schleppy, too nasal, and too wooden to be taken seriously.

Zeppo acted as the link between the Brothers and the real world, having one foot in each at the same time. Of all the Brothers, Zeppo was the one we could identify with most since he was an everyman in attitude and appearance, unlike the zany trio. It’s this link that makes Zeppo all the more significant and necessary and is why the later films under Irving Thalberg at MGM, and at RKO, and United Artists lacked that certain something. Zeppo’s successors as straight man/love interest seemed like cardboard cutouts who lacked that connection to the remaining Marx Brothers. It’s little wonder why most critics consider their work with Zeppo at Paramount to be their best.

The Marx Brothers in a publicity shot

Zeppo in His Own Words

In 1979, BBC Television conducted a series of interviews with stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Zeppo Marx was one of those stars and his interview turned out to be his last since he died only a few months later that same year. Here are some excerpts from this interview in which Zeppo is brutally honest about the past yet funny without being malicious. On growing up poor:

As far as I can remember we had a two-bedroom apartment and there were five boys and my uncle and aunt and my grandfather and mother and father, of course. Now all of those people were in a two-bedroom apartment. Five of us slept in one bed. We didn’t sleep well, but we were there. Those were very difficult times because we had no income; my father was a very bad tailor but he found some people who were so stupid that they would buy his clothes, and so he’d make a few dollars that way for food. Chico would get a job occasionally and Groucho of course would be singing in the choir some place and he’d get paid for it. And that was the way we got along. It was very difficult, we always owed the rent.

On their mother Minnie and her drive to have them succeed at an early age:

My mother was always trying to get the boys — Gummo, Groucho and Chico and Harpo — jobs, playing vaudeville. Cheap vaudeville really, four or five shows a day and maybe three days work and then get laid off for a week or two or something. She was always downtown where the theatrical district was, where the agents and the managers were hanging out, so she would always try to get us bookings. If some act was cancelled some place, she’d try to shove us in there. That was the early part in Chicago, not in New York because there was nothing like that going on in New York. We moved to Chicago because that was the center of the cheapie vaudeville circuits. That’s where my brother Gummo joined the army.

On the Brothers’ skirt-chasing and Groucho’s akwardness with the ladies:

Groucho couldn’t run as fast as Chico and the rest of us (LAUGHS) with that peculiar walk of his. It was a little more difficult for Groucho but he had his share of course. I never considered Groucho a very great lover. Chico was alright and Harpo and Gummo were fine.

He [Groucho] would get a girl and she would be very stupid and he’d sit and talk to her, oh, about Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan. He’d discuss this with this girl who had never heard of these things and he would try to impress ‘em that way where the rest of us would just get right to it. (LAUGHS) We didn’t waste time with Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan.

On Chico’s unreliability:

Well because he wouldn’t be very punctual at rehearsals or at shows. When the overture started he’d come running in and get right on the stage, no make-up or nothing. And then he was teh one who was the most lax of all of us in reference to the act, the show, the movie or whatever we were doing. And as a matter of fact we were all sort of straight away when there was a few minutes off. One would be over there and one would be over there and then Paramount — I remember in one picture, I think it was COCOANUTS, the director was going crazy because Chico would be in the dressing room with a girl or something and Groucho would be over somewhere and all of us were scattered.

The director says ‘alright boys we’re ready to shoot’ and no one is around. They’d have to have two or three fellows chasing us so they devised a nice plan, they built four cells on the set with locks on them and they put cots in them in case we wanted to rest or something and the minute the scene was over, whoever’s scene that it was would have to go in that cell so they knew where we were. And it worked out pretty good, but Chico got out of his cell quite often. (LAUGHS) But it worked fairly well.

On Groucho’s natural penchant for humour:

One story I love about Groucho is this: When we were in plays we would go to different towns with the plays and we didn’t have daily matinees, like in vaudeville, only Wednesday and Saturday, that was it. Now the rest of hte time we’d all play golf. We’d get in a certain town and we’d have the manager make arrangements for us to play at the best country club — 18 holes of golf. That’s how we got interested in golf.

Years later Groucho heard about a club that he wanted to go to and so he and his wife, Eden, went out there with their clubs, and went to the desk and he said, ‘I’m Groucho Marx, this is Mrs. Marx and we’d like to play 18 holes of golf.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m sorry Mr. Marx, you’re of the Jewish faith, aren’t you, and this club is very very strict about certain religions and people and I can’t let you play 18 holes of golf, because you’re Jewish aren’t you?’ Groucho said, ‘Well, can I play nine holes, my wife is a Gentile.’ (LAUGHS) That is one of the wonderful stories about him. That’s the typical Groucho. The other time they wanted to go swimming, and the same thing again about the restrictions and he said, ‘well can we go in up to our knees, she’s (LAUGHS) Gentile.’ He used that pretty good.

Another example:

The Friars club in this country is a theatrical club, and almost all performers belong to it, but Groucho. They used to play cards there and have things like that, and Groucho never spent much time there when he was a member — he didn’t have much use for it. So he wrote them a letter, to resign, saying ‘Dear Friars, please accept this letter of resignation as I don’t have any use for the club and I don’t get enough use out of it, and furthermore, any club that will have me as a member, I don’t want to belong to.’ (LAUGHS) Now that is still up on the bulletin board at the Friars, and this was years ago. It’s still printed in quite a lot of papers.

And a quick description of each of the Brothers:

Chico was, he was wild. He was the one to play cards. He’d chase women, he did everything he wanted to do; he’d gamble everything. If he had $100 he’d gamble the hundred. It was, I guess, a sickness with him, but that was Chico. I don’t think there was a day in his life that he didn’t gamble at something, a ball game, a football game, or race horses… anything you could gamble on, he would gamble. If he couldn’t find anything, he’d invent something. He was in a poker game once and it was a crooked game and Harpo saw two fellows cheating him, so Harpo went to the phone and called him. He said, ‘Chico, you’re being cheated.’ Chico said, ‘I don’t care, that’s the only game I could get. It’s the only game in town.’

Harpo was a love. He was very kind and wonderful. He married once and it was one of the greatest marriages that I’ve ever seen, he and Susan. They adopted four kids and they were always spending time with these kids, each of the two. If one wanted to do something the other didn’t want to, they wouldn’t do it, they had such a rapport and such love for each other. I don’t think they had an argument and it was just a perfect marriage, and that’s the way Harpo was. It was wonderful.

Groucho had three wives. I told you about those. Groucho was Groucho. He would insult important politicians and Chiefs of Police who came up in stage to do that ‘You Bet your Life’ thing, He would put people down like that. I would say he was cold. He was very good to me, later on when everything was over with show business, but he was cold. Generous up to a point where he would be generous to charity, things like that. I’d say fairly generous, yes. He’d buy good clothes, but he had such bad taste he’d look bad in them no matter what he paid for them. He wasn’t what we call a Beau Brummel.

Gummo was a love. The hero. He was with the boys ahead of me, and as I say, he went into the Army and I had to take his place.

He was in the dress business when he came out of the Army. He didn’t like show business but I think he felt, same as I did, that he was inadequate, that he wasn’t doing his share and he went into the dress business. He had a lot o friends in that business and he thought it would be a good business for him so he started the dress business and it didn’t take him long before he was bankrupt. He didn’t know a thing about the business. . It was typical because my father went into all kinds of business and was out three or four days after he started.

Then he wanted to come to the coast where I had a very big agency business. So I said ‘alright, you come to the coast and you join me, but first of all open an office in New York so you have a start there and then you’ll come out here.’ So he opened an office in New York and he did very well. He got Glenn Ford as a client, and he got quite a few other clients, so I said, ‘well come on out’ and he got himself a little house and I put him in my business and he did very well.

On missing his brothers:

I miss Gummo very much because he lived down here [Palm Springs] and we were together every day. We had lunch together every day and I miss him very much. Of course you miss your family and when you get older you have some people that you’re bound to miss. So (CHUCKLES) you have to do the best you can. But it’s hard to think about the kind of feeling that you had with these brothers and your friends.

Mickey Rourke gives a performance of a lifetime in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”

Like any event with a history, the cries of “sell out” appear pretty quickly and then reappear over and over again. The Toronto International Film Festival has not been immune to these accusations from film purists. This year the purists seem to have scored a small victory. Thanks to the chaotic state of the American economy plus Hollywood in general, studios have held back from unleashing their big ticket products in Toronto. The A-list stars are all here ensuring the cachet of the festival, but the films harken back to a more art house time.

This year’s festival has been marked by the strong return of realism. The film falling into the realist camp garnering the most buzz has been Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke. A.O. Scott of the New York Times takes a look at the resurgence of realism:

These are not the usual indie touchstones — we’ve already seen enough would-be Tarantinos, Altmans, Scorseses and Cassaveteses for one lifetime — but rather the new masters whose names seems to resonate everywhere except in American mainstream movie culture. “Treeless Mountain” shows a clear thematic affinity with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows,” while in mood and tone it recalls some of the work of the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

click here to read the rest of the article

“Greed is Good” – Michael Douglas as the corporate vulture Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”

The scene is certainly an unforgettable one. Gordon Gekko, the notorious Wall Street corporate vulture, stands in front of a shareholder meeting playing Robin Hood to the unsuspecting people in attendance as he confronts the executives of the company and pulls off a hostile takeover by appealing to peoples’ baser instincts when explaining that “greed is good”.

Although Gekko was meant to represent the cutthroat corporate culture of America in the high-flying 80s, many took his philosophy to heart. The argument went that man’s selfishness is what has propelled human invention and evolution. But is that the case?

Michael Shermer, writer, historian, and founder of The Skeptics Society tells us that this argument is in fact completely wrong. Read the interview with Michael Shermer here. Here’s a sample:

Why, if capitalism is so great, did the Enron scandal occur? Some have suggested that it was a few bad apples in the corporation.

The “bad apples” theory doesn’t explain what really happened at Enron, and it doesn’t explain the nature of corporate evil. Jeff Skilling, the CEO of Enron, set up what he thought was a Darwinian marketing environment. Skilling was a fan of Richard Dawkins’s important book The Selfish Gene, which Skilling misread. He took it to mean that evolution is driven by cutthroat competition and self-centered egotism. He liked the notion of the “survival of the fittest.” Skilling set up a Peer Review Committee, which became known as “rank and yank.” Everybody was ranked on a scale of one to five, and 20 percent of all fives had to be fired. The reviews were posted on a company website with a picture of the employee, increasing the potential for personal humiliation. Good luck being able to go out and have some fun with your teammates. Teammates! These are people who may be taking my job. Once you set up an environment like that, people begin violating rules. Skilling’s evaluation system led to a lot of behind-the-scenes wheeling and back-door dealing between department heads and managers, swapping review evaluation points. In addition to his belief in an outdated and untenable doctrine of social Darwinism, Skilling was a high-risk taker — short on dopamine, we might conjecture. What causes corporate corruption is an environment of evil established by the founders, corporate executives, and managers — a corporate psychology — that creates situations that encourage our hearts of darkness to beat faster.

Nebbish, fatalistic, existentialist, etc….

I was lucky enough to be exposed to Woody Allen’s work at a young age. I vividly recall watching Bananas with my father on television some time in the early 1980s and I remember not only finding the slapstick humour hilarious (which my father is quite fond of) but also noting that there were a lot of “smart jokes” in the film, most of which I was too young to understand. Nevertheless, I filed away the name “Woody Allen” in my mind for future use.

When Arts & Entertainment Television was launched (back in the days when you’d actually get to see some real art on television), the station would play a lot of his films. It was then that I was introduced to his other classics such as Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and my personal favourite to this day, Manhattan. At this point I in my life I was able to catch not just his jokes, but also the philosophical dilemmas in his films that were so self-referencing and personal. His neuroses, his paranoia, his existentialist defeatism, all were on display in all their glory for us to watch, to sympathize with, and often to share. Rather than discuss the merits of Woody Allen’s films, I think it best to simply state that they’ve been both smart and funny: a combination that seems simple yet so foreign in a time when smart and funny rarely intersect. A time in which we now live where smart is often associated with irony and funny is now in the realm of pubescent toilet humour.

The use of “smart” to reference Allen’s films stems from his wholesale insertion of philosophy in his body of work. Here are a few samples:

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible are the cancer patients and the terminal cases… the miserable is everyone else. So, be thankful that you’re miserable.

The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious”, and it goes like this — I’m paraphrasing — um, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you’re dressed for it.

Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do … I read Socrates. This guy knocked off little Greek boys. What the Hell’s he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it. And Freud, another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

Lennard Davis of The Common Review discusses Woody Allen and philosophy in: The Man Behind Woody Allen.

In the meantime, here’s a clip from his 1979 work, Manhattan:

Acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino is remaking “Inglorious Bastards”

Reports are surfacing that the script for Quentin Tarantino’s newest project, a remake of the WW2 flick “Inglorious Bastards”, has been leaked online. Here’s a description:

But the film project by the US director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, which is a remake of a 70s war film by Enzo Castellaris, has already created a furious response from German critics. One said the effects of the “collision” between pulp fiction and Nazi barbarity were “completely unpredictable”.

The film depicts scalpings, disembowelment and swastikas being engraved in foreheads as a group of American Jewish soldiers are airdropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans.

and more:

“This is pop culture meets Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with an unprecedented force,” wrote the film critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe, in an attempt to sum up the explosive effect the film is likely to have in Germany.

The trouble is that little distinction is made between Nazi and German, ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers or SS officers, to the extent that if the script is anything to go by, there is no such thing as a good German and all of them have to die.

It’s quite obvious that Tarantino will be putting forward a manichean look at WW2 in which Germans represent dark forces without any individuality nor saving graces and need to be exterminated without prejudice while the Americans represent the forces of light. Naturally such a clear distinction will upset Germans who reject the notion that all Germans were responsible for the actions of the Nazis, a position put forward most notably by Jonah Goldhagen. And being Tarantino, the sadism in the movie will be gory and preposterous, in keeping with the style he first displayed in Resevoir Dogs.

The key here will be to see what kind of character development will be allowed for the Germans in this film. Will they be allowed to have a bit of flair attached to the sadism? Or will they be robotic automatons thus rendering the movie a simple comic book?

The wonderful Chico Marx playing “All I Do is Dream of You” in the 1935 Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera”.

Woe is he who dares mock Tony Montana and his “little friend”!

Here’s an interesting article from Flixster that I’m sure will begin a few debates.

8 Timeless Classic Movies That Critics Are Afraid Of

LivePlasma is incredibly user friendly search engine for music and movies

I’m pretty sure that you’re like me in the sense that all your media these days is in digital form, whether on CDs/DVDs or on external hard drives. It’s quite convenient from user space point of view especially when you live in a downtown condo, but the lack of tactility makes it difficult to keep a running list of what you have in your head, whether it be movies or music. And if you’re like me, you like to explore and find new music or new movies based on tastes that you already have. For instance, being a fan of Broken Social Scene led me to bands like Manitoba and TV on the Radio. However this process was a purely accidental one, resulting from luck.

I’ve recently come across a free web application called LivePlasma which takes the luck out of the equation and gives you results fast and free. All you need to do is go to the site (it doesn’t require registration) and type in the name of an artist or actor or movie and LivePlasma will automatically give you dozens of options of bands or films that fit within that genre. Let me show you:

In my first try I typed in Pavement, one of my favourite indie bands of all-time and got this as a result within seconds:

Right away you can see Yo La Tengo, The New Pornographers, and Belle and Sebastien. Not bad!

Now, what about films? I typed in Gangs of New York (I’m a big Scorsese fan) and got the following:

The Road to Perdition, Minority Report, and The Green Mile. Okay, not exactly perfect but not all that bad for a free web application that saves you time from scratching your head or doing manual searches online.

The comedian explains why playing a tortured Catholic priest in the next X-Files movie won’t make us laugh

He’s a comedic legend from his native Scotland through the UK across the globe. From the shock of hair that’s adorned his head for several decades now to his thick Scottish brogue, Billy Connolly is an icon.

Now Connolly sets his sights on science fiction in the new X-Files movie entitled: The X-Files: I Want to Believe. But don’t be fooled: there won’t be any wisecracks from Connolly in his role as a Roman Catholic Priest.

“There are no laughs at all, which is brilliant,” says Connolly gleefully. “Father Joe is very disturbed, very dark. Doing a drama like this is a joy; you get to use your body in a different way, you get to use your eyes. I love playing dark characters, the darker the better, the more disturbed he is, the happier I get.” He fixes me with menacing eyes. “The most worrying thing is that the darker the character, the easier I find it. If he’s a really nice, intelligent man, I find it awfully difficult.”

Read the Elaine Lipworth interview with funnyman Billy Connolly about his not-so funny role in: Why Billy Connolly’s latest role is no laughing matter.