WEIRDLAND: Drugs and lovely pathological relationships

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Drugs and lovely pathological relationships


Love and Other Drugs Trailer 2010 HD

Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie Reidy in "Love and Other Drugs" (2010)

Anne Hathaway as Maggie Murdock in "Love and other drugs" (2010)

"Talk surrounding Anne Hathaway's chances at securing an Oscar nomination for her performance as Maggie, a woman with Parkinson's, has been swarming for quite a while now as the trailer for Love and Other Drugs with Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai) has just arrived.
Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) adapted the script from Jamie Reidy's nonfiction book "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman", which centers on Reidy (Gyllenhaal), a drug rep for Pfizer in the late 1990s who eventually wrote a memoir that shined a light on the practices of the pharmaceutical industry. Reidy begins a relationship with Maggie while on one of his sales calls. Their love story plays out in the political and social context of the time.

Hank Azaria and Ben Stiller in "Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian" (2009)

Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, Josh Gad and Gabriel Macht co-star"
Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com

Ben Stiller, Maria Bello and Jerry Stahl at "Permanent Midnight" Premiere, on 15th September 1998 in New York City.

Drugs can be inspiring for pathological relationships. Let's read some fragments from "Pain Killers" (2010) revolving around Manny Rupert, an ex-addict undercover private eye and his investigation at San Quentin prison:

"On top of which, it now looked like the real reason we split was so she could free herself up for a studly convict. An Aryan brother she could bone in a prison pump-wagon . . . Love! I’m leaving out some details. I had a sixteen-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage. Lola wrote occasionally to ask for money in her mother’s handwriting. She lived with my ex-wife, Donna, who did public relations for pharmaceutical firms. I was in love with her samples. Donna caught me riffling her bags for painkillers on our honeymoon. That was before I cleaned up. I talked my way out of it by saying I needed a Kleenex. Then she caught me again, stealing sample packs she was supposed to distribute to doctors".
Excerpted from "Pain Killers" Copyright © 2009 by Jerry Stahl.

Read more about "Pain Killers" & "Permanent Midnight"

"When last seen, Jewish ex-cop, former addict, and three-time-liver-transplant-recipient Manny Rupert was married to Tina, who had dispatched her former husband by adding ground glass and Drano to his breakfast cereal (Plainclothes Naked, 2001). Now they’re divorced, and Manny, missing her desperately, is hired to go to San Quentin to determine whether a 97-year-old inmate is Josef Mengele. What follows is a truly black and bizarre mix of the horrific and the hilarious: Mengele really is Mengele, and he spends his time experimenting on inmates for Big Pharma. He is also a still-dangerous, preening egomaniac who believes his “research” should be celebrated by a jaded, corrupt America. And only jaded Manny and Tina (yes, she is back) are there to mete out justice. Along the way, Stahl takes intriguing and often funny shots at prison chic, reality TV, various aspects of prison life, Nazi “science”, and Christian porn Web sites. And, as the title suggests, Manny enjoys a staggering array of dangerous drugs and toxic substances" -Thomas Gaughan (Booklist)

Maria Bello as Kitty and Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl in "Permanent Midnight" (1998)

From Jerry Stahl's first and seminal non fiction book "Permanent Midnight" (published in 1995): *warning: adult content*

"I had never been with a woman straight. Never. Even when I was a kid, my first time, at fifteen, I was at least potted up. Half drunk. Something... Without drugs, for me, it was like simultaneously trying to enjoy yourself and watch yourself blown up to scoreboard size, every little move and murmur exaggerated and blasted back in your face. 'Oh, God', she whispered, pressing her other hand to my face as she spoke. 'Oh, God, do you remember that feeling when you just pushed the plunger?'... We were both breathing fast. Starting to sweat. 'You know', she went on, half gasping, accompanying her words with earnest, upward thrusts of her hips, 'When the stuff's inside you, but it hasn't hit yet'. Her voice sank to a throaty drawl. 'But you know it's just about to explode... You've got those first, like, tingles... you know the rush is about to hit... You're holding on, you're holding on'... 'And the light goes funny', I whispered, lips brushing the faint hairs of her ear. 'And the paint on the walls starts to pulsate, like suddenly you can see the air'... 'But you know in, like, three seconds it's going to shoot up your spine, your heart's going to explode'... 'Like Nagasaki', I groaned, 'like Hiroshima, behind your eyeballs, inside your brain', 'And you could die', she whispered, maneuvering, shifting so that she lay poised beneath me, letting go her own fresh-shaved pussy to work my cock with both hands, to open herself and guide me up inside her, 'you could die from the pleasure... you want to...' Rocked with pain and numb with ecstasy. There and not there, fucking her c unt but feeling the needle, making love with my muscles but shooting up with my mind, letting her words, her insane narcotic narrative, lift me out of my body, out of both our bodies, into some savage blend of memory and sensation and crippling, frustrated desire for an orgasm that couldn't come from sex, could come only from drugs and madness and injecting our selves to death..."
Copyright © 1998 by Jerry Stahl

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