rigorousintuition.ca

Rusty relaxes as film takes leaf of absence
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Christine Sams, Entertainment Reporter
August 17, 2008

RUSSELL Crowe is looking forward to bonus time in Australia after the postponement of filming for his next project, Nottingham.

The Oscar winner said it would be at least seven months before the film gets off the ground in England, allowing him to spend more time at his Woolloomooloo home with wife, Danielle Spencer, and sons, Charlie, 4, and Tennyson, 2, and working on other projects.

"More time in Australia is always a bonus," Crowe said last week.

"I have another project based on the life of comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer."

It is understood he is considering playing the main role of Hicks — a controversial and brilliant American comedian who battled drug and alcohol abuse before dying from cancer at 32. Crowe confirmed Nottingham would not go ahead until March next year because director Sir Ridley Scott wanted the leaves on the trees in England's Sherwood Forest to be the right colour.

The delay meant local projects would get more attention — including a documentary Crowe is yet to name and the Bra Boys film, My Brother's Keeper, which was at second draft stage with Australian writer Stuart Beattie, he said.

SMH

That....actually might be genius-type good. I am hopeful,

A few years ago Alex Jones was reported to be in talks to play the late Bill Hicks, a fellow anti government Austinite.



Why do all the comic geniuses have to die?

8bit, I think we can predict with some certainty that Rusty will do a better acting job than Alex Jones. Besides, RC is not entirely unfamiliar with the Austin scene.

Yes, we all know what Bill Hicks actually said on stage and his great riff on the murder of JFK in Dealey Plaza and his vehement wrath against perception management and we'd like everyone to know about that part of Bill Hicks.

But there are harmful social processes that are exploited by experts when an icon gets the Hollywood treatment which are counter to the icon's values and the way they are socially sustained in the culture at large. This happens despite someone like Russell Crowe's good intentions.

Icons get commodified and diluted and that version gets embedded in more people's minds than the 'best of' mythic view of the icon.

The same Hollywood treatment has been given to other politically dangerous icons-
John Lennon, Che Guevara, Johnny Cash.

The principle exploited is: "Detail is anathema to myth."

The political myth of 'Bill Hicks on JFK' and other of his views which are revered as legendary on the internet will be mnemonically diluted with crap about his personal life and personal foibles etc. even as he becomes more widely known.
There's a cost-benefit dynamic at work that doesn't always work 'for us'' and tends to work 'for them' in ways not realized.

The icon is exploited as a carrier for viral marketing of things that power wants amplified.
The cigarette thing is HUGE politically and this needs to be dialed into the equation.

Just the SIGHT of him with a cigarette like those posted photos will create more smokers and tobacco addiction is an important social control in a number of ways.
Just the psychology of normalizing a toxic lifestyle assists fascist military and corporate agendas in many ways.

Remember Andrew Dice Clay's unnecessary career and Denis Leary ripping off Hicks' material, both while waving their cigarettes around as their 'fuck no-risk pussies' territorial markers?

Tobacco is used as a gateway risk in youth to make military recruiting of them more likely, just as alcohol and petty theft are encouraged, too, for the same reason.
CIA-Hollywood has been subliminally encouraging kids to smoke and drink for this reason, to make them less risk-adverse and vigilant against war and pollution.

I won't go into details but even Elvis movies were used as counterpropaganda for corporate toxic liabilities in the late 1960s because risk-averse psychology is directly related to military recruiting and thus national security. That's the psyops logic, anyway.

This is all complex. But truth-telling icons and politically-aware youth don't come out ahead in a deal with CIA-Hollywood. Just the opposite.

on edit: I just noticed the op article's mention of the Bra Boys film, My Brother's Keeper. I noted in another thread how that ties to General Wesley Clark and his running a US concentration camp for Haitian refugees with toxic consequences. There you go again.

The cigarette thing is HUGE politically and this needs to be dialed into the equation.

I agree with that much at least, but in my recent experience, most of the fascists have been on the side of the movement to criminalize tobacco use.

Combining this with the 'Anti-Intellectualism' thread...
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... hp?t=19814

Bill Hicks on anti-intellectualism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcPQhS8W8g4

Not ultimately doing a movie about Bill Hicks hasn't stopped Alex Jones from practicing his Bill Hicks impersonation - I remember seeing some footage of Jones's radio show a while ago, where every time he took his trade-mark mocking tone he actually looked more like Hicks than Jones.

Don't know about My Brother's Keeper/General Wesley Clark, Hugh, but I agree with everything else you say.

Except, they could even wow the world by giving us an even better than real-life politically-dangerous Bill Hicks, and it still wouldn't count for shit, for some reason. We'd be hugely entertained and invigorated for a day or a week, but...at the end of the day all we did was sit and watch a movie.

A movie about a guy who was brilliant and died young.

There are plenty of ways to show him at his dangerous best, to satisfy those who admire him because of his dangerousness, but to also tie an emotional albatross around the neck of his dangerous brilliance, so that the subconscious message recieved is "No, you really don't want to be a hero like Bill Hicks was. Better to keep your head down."

russell crowe played john nash in a beautiful mind,

i dont trust crowe one bit, hate his guts actually

sunny wrote:8bit, I think we can predict with some certainty that Rusty will do a better acting job than Alex Jones. Besides, RC is not entirely unfamiliar with the Austin scene.

Thank you Sunny.

I have no doubt Crowe is a more professional actor.

But have you ever watched an entire episode of Alex's local access tv shows? I watched them for years. I was introduced to the works of Bill Hicks and Alex Jones simultaneously by the same person. From the beginning I saw how Alex channeled Bill, sometimes actually doing bits from his routine. And for a time I thought they really looked alike. Then I began to imagine two different conspiracy theories ...

1 - Bill Hicks faked his own death and became Alex Jones.

2 - Bill Hicks' spirit migrated into (got trapped in limbo inside) Alex Jones' body.

... still I have a hard time imagining Crowe doing Hicks.

smiles

I've always looked upon smoking as being about personal choice and freedom (yea I know it's addictive, but I view that as a choice all well). Where I live, you can't even smoke in bars any more. It's the nanny state looking out for us. Not my idea of freedom.

Russell Crowe is a naff choice for Bill Hicks, in my humble opinion. First of all he's way too old. Hollywood will of course butcher Hick's life by giving us the reader's digest formula.... but what does it matter? 98% of America has never heard of Bill Hicks, so what exactly are they destroying? Nada. His art will outlast their B*llsh*t. They made a movie about Lenny Bruce-- which was actually pretty good-- but in the long term it hasn't altered his work one way or the other.

And the big difference between Bill Hicks and Alex Jones is that Hick's was intentionally funny.

Except, they could even wow the world by giving us an even better than real-life politically-dangerous Bill Hicks, and it still wouldn't count for shit, for some reason. We'd be hugely entertained and invigorated for a day or a week, but...at the end of the day all we did was sit and watch a movie.

...that's entirely up to each of us.

A movie about a guy who was brilliant and died young.

There are plenty of ways to show him at his dangerous best, to satisfy those who admire him because of his dangerousness, but to also tie an emotional albatross around the neck of his dangerous brilliance, so that the subconscious message recieved is "No, you really don't want to be a hero like Bill Hicks was. Better to keep your head down."

Good point, but that subtext is hardly subconscious is it? And again it's only the message you receive if you choose to receive it. And it poses the dilemma of how to spread the word about heroes like RFK or Lennon who were ultimately beaten down by The Man without implicitly reinforcing The Man's threat by depicting their historically factual downfall. One suggestion: Alt-history. Fuck what actually happened in the end. Fuck the fucking tragedies to hell.

Want to inspire the world with a biopic about MLK? Then don't fucking end a movie with his abominable murder-that-never-should-have-happened. Imagine that MLK had been literally unkillable, indestructible. Pretend that he miraculously survived the assassination attempt (and every attempt thereafter) and that he helped chase down the perps who tried to kill him, and that he helped usher in a vastly more just world. Show him as an old man in his glory, from behind or oblique angles so as not to break the spell of the alt-universe. Show how the perps plausibly could have been brought to justice, show how the world ought to have been and how it could be now if we make it so. That's one way to stop re-murdering the vanquished heroes in the end every time we try to celebrate their lives and spirits, one way to almost resurrect them. (Anyone who wants has my express permission to use that idea, if one would even need it.)

Fourthbase, from your keyboard to God's, or some fine director's, ears.

FourthBase wrote:Good point, but that subtext is hardly subconscious is it?

I much preferred it when I was saying something lucid and profound and learned, rather than something completely fucking obvious, thanks FB.

And again it's only the message you receive if you choose to receive it. And it poses the dilemma of how to spread the word about heroes like RFK or Lennon who were ultimately beaten down by The Man without implicitly reinforcing The Man's threat by depicting their historically factual downfall. One suggestion: Alt-history. Fuck what actually happened in the end. Fuck the fucking tragedies to hell.

Alt history has a smidgin less chance of saving us than the truth does, so I'll be sticking with the truth, or our/my best approximation of it.


Good to see you back, btw, FB.

erosoplier wrote:Alt history has a smidgin less chance of saving us than the truth does, so I'll be sticking with the truth, or our/my best approximation of it.

One fucking alt-history movie isn't going to somehow banish every account of the truth, for example we'd always still have the real pictures of a dead MLK and the riots and the brutal legacy since of the perps who killed him and subsequent murders of heroes like him. Do you really not get what I'm saying?