[quote]bond james bond wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]bond james bond wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]2busy wrote:
I’m in San Mateo for the rest of this week.[/quote]
Beautiful area.[/quote]
Hey DB, I finally watched Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf a few weeks ago. Fantastic! What a chore though.
I’m probably going to meet Testy1 this summer and maybe SteelyD in a couple weeks. Looking forward to it. It’s a shame both guys are bigger than me lol.
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A chore? As in, a chore to keep yourself from laughing so hard that your sides split open and puncture your spleen with your floating rib? Yeah, I know what you mean.[/quote]
Oh I was laughing all right. What was with the son? That part of it went right over my head. If you have the time I would like to hear your breakdown of the movie please and thank you.
By what a chore I ment that it was such a strong subject matter mixed with twisted humor that at the end I felt like I got beat up lol. My sister told me that while they were shooting that movie the actors were separated between takes so they could stay angry at each other or something like that. Liz Taylor nailed that role. I wanted to smash her in the face so many times and then feel sorry for her thirty seconds later. Did Richard Burton’s character really say at one point “monkey nipples”? I have a feeling he was into his cups during the whole shoot.
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The relationship between George and Martha is one built on illusions so that they don’t have to face the reality of their sad lives and their sad relationship with one another. For unexplained reasons, they cannot have children, so rather than face this fact, they concoct this imaginary son to mask the reality of the situation.
So, with the latitude associated with having an imaginary son, they are free to make up all sorts of details about him/it. Naturally, George and Martha use this as yet another way to attack each other psychologically by accusing each other of being the reason the son ran away and so on.
For whatever reason, George decided that THAT night was the night he was going to destroy all of the illusions surrounding their marriage and reveal to not only Martha, but the young couple as well, the true nature of their relationship. Hence all the insults and whatnot in the first 45 minutes and the “death” of the son and so on.
Martha is so twisted that, even when confronted with the reality that her husband has “killed” their imaginary son, she still has to put herself through some sort of grieving process, as if the son really did die. She is too out there to even confront reality in a “real” way.
The fact is that George and Martha are monsters of the rarest kind. Look at the horror they visit upon the young couple. “Get the guests” and so forth.
The film is still the only movie to be nominated for an Oscar in every category possible at the time. Elizabeth Taylor won the Academy Award for her performance, as did Sandy Dennis for hers. Burton and George Seagal were both nominated and how Burton didn’t win is beyond me.
And yes, he did say “monkey nipples”.
Burton and Taylor were married at the time and from what I’ve read, the movie was not much of a departure from what their actual marriage was like.