Well folks, here I am at the Phoenix, Arizona airport listening to Volume Three of LOST IN SPACE music... the latest chapter in the fantastic Crescendo series of Irwin Allen televised epics. More John Williams... more Salter, Stein and LaSalle... What better music to sit in an airport and pray for freedom?

I hate airports... there is the standardized Orwellian watch those around you... study their movements... don't trust anyone... eat bad food, buy bad clothes and sit in chairs designed to make you want to get up and wander... the airport.

So it is that while I sit here I find myself pondering and wanting to make better use out of this time... Naturally my thoughts turned to you. I must write.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD....

That's right... Yeah... yeah... I know you wanna hear about the screenings I just had for SLEEPY HOLLOW or JOAN OF ARC... but while sitting in this airport watching all these people wandering to and fro... out this window watching people with snub nosed lightsabers directing steel winged birdies of death to their umbilical cords... Yeah... I'm in a BRINGING OUT THE DEAD mood.

First off... why am I writing about it so late... Well... the main reason is I don't like seeing a Scorsese film with a large audience. You see... It just doesn't feel right to me. I want to discover his films the way I always do... Also... I want to pay... Yes, PAY for my Scorsese film. So I pick a dead movie going night... (Monday) a couple of weeks after it's been out... and I go.

There is usually me... and about 4 others. I sit back a little bit further from the screen than usual... I find I don't want to get too close to Scorsese's visions lest I fall in.

Now I've been purposefully staying away from the reviews for this film, but I heard this was 'one of his weakest films'. Ok...

Father Geek and I walk in... his second time to see the film... and we take our seats. I began before the screening to blur out of existence even the few scant people that exist here in my world. Even now... the airport is going away... the roars of planes a distant rumble now... That lady being worked on by the Phoenix Fire Dept... sitting in that wheel chair... It's amazing... One never thinks about becoming sick... having a heart attack or fainting in an airport... but yet... there it is... right there.

Looking at that guy with the clipboard... filling out the paperwork... grumpy face... as though he's pissed about something...

Yeah... these guys are human beings...

That's what I love about BRINGING OUT THE DEAD... It's a film about the redundancy of the universe of an Ambulance driver...

Imagine if you will that everyday of your life beginning the day you got out of education... you had to drive the streets of New York... On call for the dead, the dying, the bleeding, the addicted, the crazy, the beaten... the broken.

How many sad endings before a temporarily happy one? How many times do you save someone, only to be their deathcart 5 years later? Will you remember their face? What about the faces of all the people you lose.

Until this film, my favorite emergency care scene in a movie is in EMPIRE OF THE SUN, when Christian Bale is going to... 'bring her back'.. and her soul escapes as the bomb falls upon Hiroshima.

This film begins with such a scene... Nicholas Cage, down on his luck... beaten down by the world he scampers about in. He gets a call... Heart Attack... Can you imagine walking into a family reunion type of room with the mission to... Bring a dead man back to life? Not just a man, like he'd be on a street corner horizontal... but here... in this environment... He's a father... a husband... a loved one. Tears are shed... screams are unleashed. Here you look about the room... you can see the life he lived... the bed he lived and loved upon. You see what books he read, his favorite reading chair...

You have to block that out... just do your duty... three puffs and pump that heart back to active motion. You ask the question, "How long has he been out?"

"10 minutes," you hear from his beautiful daughter... you like her... you'd love to ask her out on a date, but you just realized her father will most likely remain dead... or become a vegetable. Your role has officially just become the comforter of the living and the hauler of the dead.

This is your life.

Sure...... Yeah... Starting out you could handle it... but how many nights till you begin thinking strange thoughts about it all.

How long till you begin recognizing street corners where you lost a beautiful girl? Or found that child broken in half by a taxi cab?

This isn't ER. This is grunt work...

This is the universe that Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese take us this time.

The film is hallucinatory... it's very Kerouac... stream of consciousness... You get the idea you are one of the loose marbles rolling about Nicholas Cage's brain pan.

Had I hated the story, I would have loved the visuals... Had I hated the visuals, I would have loved the audio. This is Scorsese territory. The colors of the city... the movement of his scenes... the slight of hand with camera movement...

Scorsese is the consummate filmmaker. Able to take you inside someone's mind, see their perception of the world around them. Put you in their shoes. Now... that doesn't mean you'll like being in those shoes.

I think GOODFELLAS is a brilliant film, but I don't want to watch it again because I really do feel that Marty captures what it is to be a common Mafioso suburban thug. I don't like their wives, houses, clothes, lifestyles... I love their banter and paranoia... their brutality... but not their banality. But... Scorsese and his writers have an uncanny knack of exposing the strange normalcy to the bizarre.

Now... some folks have been knocking the... ahem... brutality that Tom Sizemore's caffeine jacked bloodthirsty cadaver jockey spends the last segment of the film hungry for.

Except... My father knew this ambulance driver once back in the sixties that's sister had been raped... so he tracked the guy down... beat the shit out of him and took his cock and balls so that he would rape no more. Now... I've been hearing that story since the earliest memory... so in my eyes... Sizemore is toned down.

Now... why are so many not grocking the great Scorsese's latest? Well... I think for some it may be one of the same reasons I disliked PUSHING TIN. We don't want to think of the people we entrust our lives to as being strung out... three breaths from being in a padded cell.

But folks... they are people... Folks like you and me. Not every mailman is a gun-toting psycho... but there have been a few. Not every taxi driver kills pimps... but there have problem been a few. This movie is a look at these guys... in this extreme neighborhood.

If you really want to be disturbed about Ambulance drivers check out the fantastic MOTHER, JUGGS and SPEED. A more upbeat, but possibly more disturbing look at the world of sirens and gurneys.

Watch the BRINGING OUT THE DEAD... and be glad you don't have to go up and down these wet streets filled with pushers and prostitutes.... strung-outs and elderly... This is a street you don't want to drive down.

Once again I've found myself in a theater enthralled by the canvas that Scorsese dazzled me with. This is a wonderful companion piece for TAXI DRIVER... perhaps even a bit more nihilistic as well... Of course that's just up to your own perceptions.