GOD BLESS YOU, MR. VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut‘s death Wednesday night really feels like the end of an era. (Obits appear in the New York Times and GreenCine.com.) His metaphysical ramblings and anti-authoritarian sensibility made him the unofficial poet laureate of America’s sixties counterculture. And while his novel writing slowed down in the last decade, Vonnegut kept up the good fight, always speaking up for civil rights, intellectual freedom and against the war, especially in his column for the journal In These Times.
In 1972, George Roy Hill adapted his lyrical time-travel, anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five into one of the best — and least appreciated — of classic Seventies cinema. Structurally innovative, metaphysically playful, and deeply moving — along with an entrancing Glenn Gould score — this allegory of one man’s struggle to understand fate (and its inevitable mortal conclusion) is well worth watching, especially today in memory of its author.
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Nick Dawson
