Join our Ongoing Discussions!

In honor of the summer vacation we are holding off on the next film discussion till September 6th. In the mean time I hope you will take the opportunity to catch up on the movies that you missed over the last six months since this blog began (see list on right). And please, continue to post your fabulous comments. The 'Lee Just Watched' list will still be updated bi-weekly. ENJOY!!

Join our discussion of the movie 'Deep Water'!

"Donald Crowhurst sailed over the horizon and into oblivion..."

Watching Donald Crowhurst's sad demise in ‘Deep Water’ brought to mind memories of the 1969 Sydney Pollack film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”. In both films (one fiction, one documentary) desperate people hope to solve their problems through the winning of a publicly viewed contest. Once on the treadmill they were unable to get off even though they surely realized that staying the course could only lead to self-destruction.

The stories of the other eight sailors who joined the London Sunday times single-handed, non stop, round the world yacht race were to me entirely different. Whatever their motivations they all appeared to have the ability to negotiate their lives and this contest with self-knowledge and the freedom of choice that comes with a relatively healthy mind. At least from what I saw Crowhurst had neither and was doomed from the start.

Most intriguing to me aside from the Crowhurst drama was the story of sailor Bernard Moitsessier and his wife Francoise. The interview with her and the footage of Bernard and Francoise revealed how different their situation was from that of Crowhurst and his family. This couple clearly made their choices with self-awareness and a grounded sense of reality.

Some quotes I found interesting:

* “Single handed sailing has this element of deliberately risking death which makes it intriguing to people who are not running that risK themselves.” (Murray Sayles, Sunday Times)

* "This was the “start of adventure journalism. …..You were inventing the story; you were not just reporting it.” (Harold Evans, Sunday Times editor))

* “The breakthrough was the Marconi single side band radio, which was just coming onto the market in the middle sixties. Small enough to go into a yacht, it turned single handed racing into a spectator sport.” (Sunday Times journalist)

* “The thought of someone suffering, being so alone in such extraordinary solitude when he had a loving family waiting for him back home…How did this situation get so out of control?” (Daughter of Donald Crowhurst))

* “Most of us don’t have big dreams that we care about so I think it’s up to us ordinary mortals to support the ones who do have big dreams.” (Eve Tetley, wife of sailor Nigel Tetley)

* “It’s human to fail, it’s human to try and cover up your failings and he did it in a quite spectacular and disastrous way.” (Son of Donald Crowhurst)

* "Poor Crowhurst, he was caught in a kind of reality trap….offering him fame…fortune…to put temptation in peoples way, as I understand it from my religious friends, is sinful. And we put temptation in his way, innocently perhaps, but we did.” (Murray Sayles, Sunday Times)

Nine men doing the same thing for nine different reasons. What drives any of us to do what we do? And how many of us are driven enough to do what we love?

EOS, BMH, LLI (see KEY on right side)