i finished the federal part of my taxes tonight. i haven’t prepared them myself in over 10 years, and thought it would be educational. fuck. i think i learned that i will have them prepared next year. i was pretty spent after, and felt like staying in and watching a movie. phil came over and we watched one my dad designed, the last detail with jack nicholson, randy quaid, and otis young. i hadn’t seen it since i was much much younger.
my family moved to toronto for the duration of the shoot, and watching the movie brought back a lot of memories of the locations i had been, the dailies i had watched, and the pages i had read. my first snowfall and building a snowman with my brother and a bunch of the crew. the film is about a couple navy shore patrols taking a kid to the brig for an eight year stint to be followed by a dishonorable discharge. nicholson’s character has the proverbial mouth of a sailor, written by robert towne.
i think i can attribute some trouble i had in third grade directly to this film. we wrote and performed plays as an assignment in class, and in my youthful naivete i emulated the language i knew from this picture. i actually doubt i was naive at all, i was probably deliberately pushing hard against the provincial sensiblities of my audience of fellow seven or eight or nine year olds. there were a lot of fucks and assholes and motherfuckers in there as i remember. drug usage. and the action was set in a submarine in a sewer.
well some of the mothers of the other kids got wind of it and tried to get me kicked out of school. i think i actually got bounced to mister pola’s gifted class instead. i’m not sure, this was decades ago and i may be mythologizing a bit. but i definitely was having some serious memories associated with the movie.
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