68. Everybody Hurts &...

Lyrics

When your day is long and the night 
The night is yours alone
When you're sure you've had enough of this life, well hang on
Don't let yourself go 
Everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

Sometimes everything is wrong 
Now it's time to sing along
When your day is night alone (hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go (hold on)
When you think you've had too much of this life, well hang on

Everybody hurts 
Take comfort in your friends
Everybody hurts
Don't throw your hand Oh, no
Don't throw your hand
If you feel like you're alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

If you're on your own in this life 
The days and nights are long
When you think you've had too much of this life to hang on

Well, everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody cries
And everybody hurts sometimes
And everybody hurts sometimes
So, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on 
Hold on, hold on 
(Hold on, hold on)

Everybody hurts 
You are not alone


This is a good song by REM, though I don't consider it to be amongst their best. The lyrics are well meant, but kind of dull. I think the video is pretty brilliant though, and it reminded me of the opening scene of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down. So I was going to write about that movie, until I found out that the opening scene of Falling Down was actually a reference/hommage to a Fellini classic I had not seen before. So that's the movie I watched. Incidentally I found out that that movie actually inspired REM to create this video. It is not very surprising. The first two REM songs in this list, were linked by me to a Bergman movie and to a Fellini movie. It is a coincidence, but REM is the kind of band that would very much like to be associated with Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

The Movie: 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

The French director Francois Truffaut once said that he was only interested in movies that were about the agony of making movies, or about the ecstasy of making movies. He probably loved 8 1/2 which is in the most literal way possible about the agony and ecstasy of making movies. And it is about nothing else really. I liked it a lot, but this is the first movie of Fellini I've seen. Once I have seen more of his movies I'd probably like it more, as this is mostly a movie about Fellini's inner life and about the way he makes movies. It is his most self-absorbed movie. How do I know it's his most self-absorbed if I haven't seen his other movies? Well, it seems damn near impossible to make a movie that's more self-absorbed than this one. It is also audacious and marvelously surrealistic. That said, I will probably never completely love the movie. Sometimes it feels a bit too devoid of content. I understand that's often part of the point of the movie, which at times plays like a rather wonderful self-parody, but still. You sometimes get the feeling that you are watching the most artistic and playfull making of/behind the scenes featurette ever. Only you haven't seen the movie it's about and aren't even sure if the movie exists.

That is sometimes a bit frustrating, but it is admittedly also what makes this film so brilliant. Now every DVD of a movie seems to come with a making of featurette. It's a shame DVD's didn't exist in 1963, because it seems Fellini could have had some great fun with it. Perhaps if you would have chosen to watch the making of featurette of 8 1/2 you would just see the movie again. Only the director wouldn't have been named Guido Anselmi and been played by Marcello Mastroianni, but he would have been played by Federico Fellini. Because 8 1/2 is in essence a movie about the making of itself. Besides Truffaut, i assume that Charlie Kaufman would be a fan too. The trickery of Adaptation is peanuts compared to 8 1/2, though I think for now that Adaptation is slightly better.

Fellini's fun starts already with the movie's title. The movie's called 8 1/2, because it's Fellini's 8 1/2th film. He had directed seven films of his own and was a co-director on one other before he made this, so he had made 7 1/2 films. In 8 1/2 we follow famous Italian director Guido Anselmi as he has trouble making his movie, while the cast, the crew and his financial backers all hound him. The boundaries between the movie Guido is making and Fellini's 'real' movie are blurring. So do the boundaries between fantasy and reality. But to talk about the boundaries between these things is actually irrelevant in this case. You could with just a little bit of effort determine which scenes are real and which are fantastic, but is beside the point. Basically all of this is is a reflection of Fellini's mind. All of it is the 'reality' of the movie. It is funny how there are constantly characters criticizing the movie Guido is making, while Fellini does exactly does same things in his movie that Guido is guilty off. And it is never clear what movie Guido is making exactly, but it is understandable that he has trouble making it. He wants to say something about Italian catholicism, but there is also something involving a spaceship. In the end it doesn't really matter what Guido's movie will be about, as we only basically see what happens behind the scenes of his movie. He fights with his actresses, one of whom is not happy with the fact that Guido will only use her in about 5 scenes in his movie. We only see her in about 5 scenes. As Guido says he wants to make a movie about everything, without inhibitions. He will cast a tap dancing farmer if he feels necessary. So he makes a farmer tap dance to see if he fits for the role. We don't know whether he cast him, but of course Fellini has now shown us a tap dancing farmer. Nearly every single scene in this movie works like this. And the movie gets perhaps even more warped when Guido watches the audition tapes for actresses that may get a role in his movie. And then an actress called Claudia arrives, who may or may not be Claudia Cardinale, but is played by her. She discusses what function she will serve for Guido's movie, and may or may not serve the same function for the movie we are watching.

In the end, it doesn't matter much what you think of this movie. There has never been anything like it, it is completely audacious and rarely has a filmmaker made himself so vulnerable as Fellini here does.