Coming back from the abyss to say...

My hiatus from Scarlett has been embarrassingly, shockingly long. In fact, after a while, I felt almost afraid to venture back here for fear that, well, people might think I had no business returning. I've seen a plethora of films in the last six months that I have both loved and hated, about which I have had both opinions and thoughts. And while I have found it worthwhile to share those opinions and thoughts from time to time in the past, to be perfectly honest, my mind has been preoccupied with other endeavors related to film in more recent months.

So, it took a subject about which I am incredibly passionate to compel me to write this post tonight, which is Tribeca All Access ("TAA"), a tremendously successful advocacy and career development forum for both emerging and established directors and screenwriters who come from traditionally underrepresented communities within the film industry. Having worked with the program for the past five years, I can attest to the amazing results and singularly spectacular experiences that TAA has been able to afford its alumni. Past participants who were able to launch their projects in no small part because of TAA include: Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Paola Mendoza & Gloria LaMorte (Entre nos), and Cherien Dabis (Amreeka), all of whom have gone on to great acclaim on the film festival circuit and are now beginning to enjoy more attention from the mainstream.

During the Tribeca Film Festival, those filmmakers and screenwriters whose projects have been chosen to participate in TAA will be invited to participate in a series of workshops and panels, before pitching their narrative scripts or documentary works-in progress in a series of one-on-one business meetings with industry executives. After the festival, TAA continues to offer year-long support to its alumni as they endeavor to further their careers as well as realize their artistic goals. The early deadline for submissions this year has already passed (October 26), but the regular submission period will stay open through December 14. I cannot praise the program highly enough, as it remains one of the few forums in which mainstream Hollywood meets and actually seems to give a damn about new, exciting, and critically important voices that need to be heard within the dialog of American-produced cinema.

To find out more about this year's open submissions, click here. And if you do decide to submit, best of luck!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: P

I'm hard pressed to pick just one or two P words from Marlene's stunning chapter on the letter P.  No mention of "pink," one of my personal favorite voiceless bilabial plosives, but she does offer sound advice on P words on sartorial choices, The City of Light, small home electronic devices, and certain desserts.  For instance,

Pants
In Texas, when you want to say that a man is beautiful or handsome you simply say: "His pants fit him."

Across the country and across the pond from the Republic of Texas, though, I enjoy everything Marlene has to say about what is perhaps the greatest European city,

Paris
Home which keeps its promise.

Bonjour, merci, au revoir, la vin blanc!--they may be the only French words I know, but I like the sound of the next phrase that I can't quite translate.  Something to do with "Say lovely things to me," or "Speak to me, my love."  (French speakers, that's your cue to fill me in.)

Parlez-moi d'amour
Yes, please do.  The loving heart is a bad mind reader.

Just today, in fact, I happened to note on a list of things I need, a...

Pencil Sharpener (Electric)
Anyone who doesn't have one misses a great delight.

Indeed, sharpening that column of wood and graphite to a fine point is gratifying.  When you do it, you are prepared.  You are ready to write.  A good pencil is the perfect instrument to take your thoughts from your mind to your notebook fluidly.  When the lead is the right grade, the pencil fresh, and at a good length resting in your hand, nothing feels more organic against the grain of the page.  Long live the pencil (and the electric pencil sharpener)!  After all that writing you've built up an appetite, in fact, you're famished.  And if you've had a productive enough day, you don't just deserve a meal, you deserve a treat--you deserve a perfect slice of...

Pie
There is no better pie than lemon chiffon pie.

I'll take spiced plum with a butter crust, myself.  But it's no use splitting hairs, pie is something we can all agree on.  Simply, perfectly, pie!

Slipping Through Space

Here I am! 

Embrace the moment now while I am here, I have a feeling I may disappear again shortly.  It goes like this: I moved, I lived out of a suitcase for two weeks, I relocated, then sat--where I still remain now--in a temporary apartment in beautiful Ft. Greene, Brooklyn with a new iMac that has outsmarted me in the password department.  I'm locked out!

For the next few sentences or paragraphs I intend to ramble in a tone that is hopefully not too incoherent about the movies I've seen in the past month-and-a-half and the soul draining sadness I feel from the consistent lack of them in that time frame.  I am at the point where I'm writing post-it notes to myself, "Watch a movie!" lest I forget.  My eyes are lazy.  They're atrophied.  Do you know this feeling, when you're used to looking and watching, having that clanking bell of emotions reverberate inside yourself from seeing such things?  It's some life-validating source of curiosity that is suddenly pulled away from you, leaving your eyes to rest lazily upon the landscape with no newness. 

I haven't consistently seen in so long it is like a cataract dulling my line of sight.  The eyes dull to cinema when you don't watch.  You've got to keep up!  It's like practicing a sport.  If you live by consistency and dedication, your athletic prowess improves.  And so it is with the movies: the more you watch the more you see.

Alas!  I have been sleepwalking for weeks.


As my daily life begins to settle a few films have trickled in.  For instance, Paranormal Activity at the Brooklyn Pavilion last night.  I did a jig inside my head I was so giddy to be back at the theater, but then the movie started and I was unplugged from that amp.  How long would this alternating structure of daytime-nighttime documentation continue?  The sun rises and the feigned bickering of an impossibly wealthy 20-something couple fills the gritty video space with a weight as light as freshly sifted flour.  The night sets in--usually around 3:15 a.m., to be exact--and the creep show starts.  I'm a wimp who likes to be scared by spectacles like this, so my heart had a few starts (the footprints through the powder!  the door slam!), but in all, what a snooze. 


So, after my hiatus, I'll have to work my way up to better pictures.


Tonight I made it to the end of my old stand-by, My Man Godfrey (1936).  I keep a handful of DVDs unpacked in a stack of urgent belonging that I need at my ready.  There's my William Wordsworth anthology, the third edition of the American Heritage, a thesaurus, Marlene Dietrich's ABC, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, Clueless, and My Man.  Also, notebooks and pens.  In an apartment that's still decorated in brown corrugate, these are happy bits of equipage.  I put on My Man every other night or so for 15 or 20 minutes while I sit upright in a blue ladder-back chair eating my dinner from a large serving plate (new dishes have not been purchased yet), so it takes a while to get through a full movie.  Besides, I really only need a few minutes of comfortable distraction.


Tonight I finished it though, and decided again that Carole Lombard is my favorite actress of all-time, just behind Barbara Stanwyck.    My Man Godfrey is a perfect Hollywood narrative.  No surprises.  You know where the story is headed.  Carole Lombard plays an airhead we can love, and William Powell speaks with a cadence that makes you think the words are just dancing off his lips. 

 A day or two before I drove my moving van out of Chicago I caught Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are.  While I don't think it's a great film, for its jarring tantrum scenes that usually feel unprovoked, its overwhelming melancholy struck a true chord in me.  I haven't seen a children's movie that has ever been so eager to explore that emotion, unrelentingly.  The critical consensus marks that as a detriment to it, but I remember feeling a melancholy strangely similar to this as a kid that I could never articulate.  It was sweet.

Sweet dreams for tonight.  I hope to see Good Hair tomorrow!  Or maybe Capitalism: A Love Story.  Or Antichrist.  Or...