Taps Film Quotes

Certain aspects of sex are troubling—the way it’s used as power, or the way it takes the form of perversions that exploit other people...Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way. Being explicit doesn’t tap into the mystical aspect of it, either. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.

I went up the stairs of the little hotel, that time in Bystřice by Benešov, and at the turn of the stairs there was a bricklayer at work, in white clothes; he was chiselling channels in the wall to cement in two hooks, on which in a little while he was going to hang a Minimax fire-extinguisher; and this bricklayer was already and old man, but he had such an enormous back that he had to turn round to let me pass by, and then I heard him whistling the waltz from The Count of Luxembourg as I went into my little room. It was afternoon. I took out two razors, and one of them I scored blade-up into the top of the bathroom stool, and the other I laid beside it, and I, too, began to whistle the waltz from The Count of Luxembourg while I undressed and turned on the hot-water tap, and then I reflected, and very quietly I opened the door a crack. And the bricklayer was standing there in the corridor on the other side of the door, and it was as if he also had opened the door a crack to have a look at me and see what I was doing, just as I had wanted to have a look at him. And I slammed the door shut and crept into the bath, I had to let myself down into it gradually, the water was so hot; I gasped with the sting of it as carefully and painfully I sat down. And then I stretched out my wrist, and with my right hand I slashed my left wrist ... and then with all my strength I brought down the wrist of my right hand on the upturned blade I'd grooved into the stool for that purpose. And I plunged both hands into the hot water, and watched the blood flow slowly ouf of me, and the water grew rosy, and yet al the time the pattern of the red blood flowing remained so clearly perceptible, as though someone was drawing out from my wrists a long, feathery red bandage, a film, dancing veil ... and presently I thickened there in the bath, as that red paint thickened when we were painting the fence all round the state workshops, until we had to thin it with turpentine - and my head sagged, and into my mouth flowed pink raspberryade, except that it tasted slightly salty .. and then those concentric circles in blue and violet, trailing feathery fronds like coloured spirals in motion ... and then there was a shadow stooping over me, and my face was brushed lightly by a chin overgrown with stubble. It was that bricklayer in the white clothes. He hoisted me out and landed me like a red fish with delicate red fins sprouting from its wrists. I laid my head on his smock, and I heard the hissing of lime as my wet face slaked it, and that smell was the last thing of which I was conscious.

(….) “What does it matter whose head those images came from? ‘Poetry is a conversation not a monologue,’ “ Fox quoted Cooper in a passable English accent. “A writer can only put the words on the paper; the vision has to come from the reader, right? It’s language, not paint, not film. That’s the beauty of it to me. Why do your woods or your Wood Wife, have to look precisely the same as Cooper’s?” “Well in terms of Miller’s work on Cooper-” “We’re not talking literary critique here. We’re talking about poems, words on a page,” Fox said, tapping his knee, “and what those words turn into when they slip inside your brain.” He tapped his head. “It’s magic; and magic disappears if you try too hard to pin it down.

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies. At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman's husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs. ("The Vane Sisters")

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

There was only one thing in the room that was different. For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped. It was next to a battered old television on which it was only possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it tried to show anything more exciting it would break down. It was a box. Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it. It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top. He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it. Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box. He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe, nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fish bowl. It was made of the most wonderful glass perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making. Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing. He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was exquisite. But it was a fish bowl. He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream. Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and this time the light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different angle and glittered on some fine abrasions on the fish bowl's surface. He held it up, adjusting the angle to the light, and suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed on the glass. "So Long," they said, "and Thanks ..." And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing. For fully five more minutes he turned the object round and around, held it to the light at different angles, tapped it for its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the shadowy letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to the television. He shook the little Babel fish from his ear and dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be needing it any more, except for watching foreign movies

It seemed like a hybrid of Spinal Tap, the British The Office, and something entirely original. Scenes would be blocked and rehearsed almost like a play, with entire scenes performed top to bottom many times. Two or three cameras would find the action and just follow the actors as they moved around. Actors often didn’t know when they were on camera or where the cameras were. “Spy shots” lent a sense of intimacy to moments. Actors were allowed to look into the camera to show their reactions to things and spoke directly to the camera with “talking heads,” used to further the story or display another side of what a character was feeling.15, 16 Camera operators were very close or very far away but a dynamic part of the action. We would shoot eight or nine pages in a twelve-hour day, which is about double what one shoots on a feature film.

... this film taps perfectly into the viewers’ sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood’s best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind.

Twenty-one years after the release of Kubrick’s film, a strangely similar scene played out in a University of California laboratory—with one major difference. In Alex’s place was an adult cat. Researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology, anesthetized a cat with Sodium Pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, forcing it to look at a screen. Scene after scene played on the screen, but instead of images of graphic violence, the cat had to watch something almost as terrifying—swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men. This was not a form of Clockwork Orange–style aversion therapy for cats. Instead, it was a remarkable attempt to tap into another creature’s brain and see directly through its eyes. The researchers had inserted fiber electrodes into the vision-processing center of the cat’s brain, a small group of cells called the lateral geniculate nucleus. The electrodes measured the electrical activity of the cells and transmitted this information to a nearby computer. Software then decoded the information and transformed it into a visual image.

That was one f the hardest things about breaking up. It's not a pair of bookends, the beginning and the end. It's the unravelling of the future. The flat we would never move into together, the cat we would never pick up from the shelter. It was all the times I wouldn't hear her go on about some boring film I couldn't sit through, or the way I wouldn't see her do that silly tap dance she does when she is trying on new shoes. It's all the things we used to do we'd never do again and all the things we'd never do for the first time together.

The potential for your artistry when truly tapped, will evoke certain specific reactions in the body, such as temperature change, a flight or fight response and even a change in saliva production. If you can commit to your craft this deeply, the level of specificity and authenticity of your performance will scale new heights.

To the villagers’ surprise, after Meghan was filmed with the children playing under the clean water bursting from the tap, she disappeared with Gabor Jurina. For hours Jurina photographed the perfectly coiffured actress hugging, squeezing and smiling with the village children. Each pose was followed by a change of clothing. ‘Meghan is a true humanitarian,’ Lara Dewar would say. Speaking of Meghan’s ‘authenticity’, Dewar praised her involvement with the children, letting them sit on her lap for the photographer.191 Once she returned to the village, Meghan was filmed admiring children painting images of their lives on paper supplied by the charity. The Watercolor Project, conceived by Matt Hassell’s staff, illustrated the value of the charity’s work to supply clean water. Strangely, Dewar would wrongly claim that Meghan was the ‘creator’ of the Project.192 Throughout the four-day trip Meghan was impeccably considerate to the accompanying team. She ensured there would be no repeat of her UN experience.193

That was one of the hardest things about breaking up. It's not a pair of bookends, the beginning and the end. It's the unravelling of the future. The flat we would never move into together, the cat we would never pick up from the shelter. It was all the times I wouldn't hear her go on and on about some boring film I couldn't sit through, or the way I wouldn't see her do that silly tap dance she does when she's trying on new shoes. It's all the things we used to do that we'd never do again and all the things we'd never do for the first time together.

Mostly on a whim, I tapped into Urano’s muscle memory and used my fingers to “select” the crest. My mana ended up thinly spread over the area I wanted to duplicate. “Whoa! It worked?!” A yellow film of mana now sat atop the paper. Somehow, I was on track to actually duplicate my crest! Trembling with emotion, I stared at the section I’d marked. “Am I actually going to do this? Is it going to work? Okay. Here we go. (COPY AND PLACE)!

You do not really want to meet your special love, you only want to dream that some night she’ll step out and walk, with her footprints vanishing on the sand as the wind follows, to your apartment where she’ll tap on your window and enter to unspool her spirit-light in long creeks of film on your ceiling.

There was a moral foundation to Walt’s movies that people tapped into—a basic moral foundation. In Disney films, you see strong values and role models. You see the importance of being kind to others, of serving others, of finding joy even in adversity.

My favourite description of sophisticated infidelity on the part of the female concerns a small brown bird, the dunnock. The male and female, the epitome of contented monogamy, were first seen as they hopped side by side across a lawn, pecking up morsels of food. When they reached a bush, the male went round one way, the female the other. As soon as the bush shielded her from her partner, the female flew in an instant into dense vegetation nearby. There, she copulated with a lurking male, then flew back to her position behind the bush. A few seconds later, male and female hopped back into each other's view, past the bush. Still intently pecking at morsels, the female acted as if nothing had happened. Nearly as appealing is the film, shown worldwide, of a female monkey foraging on the ground for food while being watched attentively from a high branch by her consort. Alongside her comes another male. He sits down, innocently picking at himself, hiding his erection from her consort. Every time the consort's attention is distracted, the other male taps the female on the shoulder. In an instant she stands and presents and the male inseminates her. So quick is their intercourse that by the time her consort looks back in their direction, they have resumed their previous activities — innocence personified.

a way, maximum aerobic output is like guitarist Nigel Tufnel’s special amplifier, in the classic film This Is Spinal Tap: Where most amps only let you turn the volume up to 10,

But Britain, where I’ve lived now for seventeen years, feels unreal too. I can’t quite trust in the clean water that flows from the tap; the full supermarket shelves; the orderly parks and gardens. I feel as though it’s built on a lie, on hidden or delegated suffering. As though I’m in a luxurious cinema watching a film, in a city where war is raging, and over the music of the opening credits I can hear, faintly, the screams and explosions filtering through, into the cosy velvet auditorium. And there’s enough truth in this, historically, to prevent me from dismissing it as mere trauma response on my part. Britain’s comfortable indulgences—its infrastructure, its economy, its food supplies—depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can’t admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn’t think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.

But Britain, where I've lived for seventeen years, feels unreal too. I can't quite trust in the clean water that flows from the tap; the full supermarket shelves, the orderly parks and gardens. I feel as though it's built on a lie, on hidden or delegated suffering. As though I'm in a luxurious cinema watching a film, in a city where war is raging, and over the music of the opening credits I can hear, faintly, the screams and explosions filtering through, into the cosy velvet auditorium. And there's enough truth in this, historically, to prevent me from dismissing it as mere trauma response on my part. Britain's comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can't admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn't think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.