Altered States

The month of December in my personal spiritual journey is ruled by Dionysus, the god of partying, so I've been listening to party music like 'Mama Told Me Not To Come', 'Spill The Wine', 'Got to Give It Up', 'Celebration' and 'What You Waiting For?' but the real meat is the movie choices that go along with this deity. For the wine god, I've chosen movies that involve partying on the good side and drugs on the bad side. Probably the ultimate movie in this list would be 'Boogie Nights' which I watched a couple of nights ago, but last night was 'Altered States' directed by Ken Russell and starting William Hurt and Blair Brown. Blair is currently on the TV show 'Fringe' which I love. She plays the FBI's contact with Massive Dynamic, but this movie came out 30 years ago when she was a fiery young red head. This was William Hurt's first movie starting a period of time where he was a box office star in the 80's. It's based on a book by Paddy Cheyefsky, who also wrote the amazing 'Network' a few years before. Unlike 'Network' which 30 years later still seems very relevent if not prophetic, this movie comes at the end of the 'druggie' 70's. When most people think of drugs they think of the 60's, but that's when they started. In the 70's drugs saturated the culture and spread across the country. The year this movie came out, Reagan was elected President and the drug era came to a screeching halt at least above ground. I was wondering what this movie would look like with today's technology to recreate all the trip scenes, but this movie wouldn't really have an audience now. It still has a lot of interesting concepts though they're probably better understood under the influence of something green. Some of the trip scenes are still pretty amazing and aren't too dated. Bob Balaban, who's been in the Chris Guest movies as well as 'Close Encounters' as the interpreter and a very famous scene in 'Midnight Cowboy' is Hurt's assistant and a very young John Larroquette has a small part as an X-ray technician. My favorite line is when Hurt's just come out of the self-deprivation tank and can't speak so they get X-rays of his neck and show them to the attending physician and he says 'This guy looks like a fucking gorilla'.