This "faith in God" thing can be a confounding, frustrating pain at times. Faith in what? Because the world you live in is filled sometimes with gut-wrenching pain. And it isn't the turmoil in the wider world that gets you. It's the close-to-the-bone crap that levels you.
Here you have Freddie, (played by the lovely Cree Summers), praying to God to save Kim's father, a cop now lying in the hospital from a gunshot wound. And after a night of worry, Kim's dad pulls through.
But he's paralyzed, and that plain pisses off Freddie, much like us when life doesn't go exactly along the straight path we think it should go. Instead, we face unexpected twists in the journey that kicks us all off balance.
And yes, like Freddie, we're pissed. We're angry. We're ready to throw in this "faith" thing. Dwayne, with the ever-present flip-down shades, tells Freddie the story of how he prayed as a kid for a fancy new toy for Christmas and never got it. He got a coat.
But that winter coat kept him warm through a very cold winter. Then he tells her this gem. Sometimes when we pray, we get what we want. Sometimes, we get what we need. And sometimes we just get what we get. God helps us hang in there with what we get.
I always liked that. Because too many times, we waste energy trying to figure out why God is putting us through something. Maybe it's a test. Maybe it's not.
Who knows except God? And maybe after all is said and done, you figure out what God was doing and you learn whatever lesson you were supposed to learn and you become stronger in the end.
But again, who knows except God? Life is life and it isn't fair all the time. Good people get cancer. Bad people live to 100. You can't control what life throws at you.
But you can control what you throw back. Are you going to throw back anger and sadness and bitterness and hate. Or are you going to throw back love? Are you going to throw back peace? Are you going to throw back joy?
Faith can't be too hard that it can't bend in strong winds. Because life isn't going to break you, if you let it. You just have to keep moving. Don't stop.
I remember laughter, loud and stinging laughter on school buses, and I felt alone because they weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me. And it didn't matter what it was. It could have been the Hammer-time pants I was wearing that my cousin bought me for Christmas. It could have been my face pock-marked with pus-filled acne. It could have been the speech impediment I struggled with in elementary school.
It could have been any number of things that all tied into who I was at that particular time, young, awkward, not cool, kind of weird, uncomfortable as hell in my own skin. And my skin was thin, and sometimes I cried, not yet to the point where I could get my Kanye West on, that arrogant pain in the ass mojo.
I was me and I hated me, hated being me sometimes to the point that I fantasized about being someone else. Wished I had super powers to crush these bastards and silence the laughter. Leave them stunned at my greatness while I smirked at the awesomeness of the devastation I left in their wake.
That was then, when the sounds of laughter felt like needles pricking my skin, felt like punches against my face. That was then, when the teasing was relentless, and I felt like no one knew my pain. That was then, when I learned to still the tears and put on the stone face, act like this wasn't bothering me, even though it was.
This is now, years later, my love for myself a rebuke to the hatred I endured. This is now, when those bastards have now grown up and carved out whatever life they had. I wish them well. Because they can't hurt me no more.
They weren't perfect and neither was I. We were young, lost in a world we didn't quite understand. We didn't know the power of words to hurt and maim. Hell, we didn't know ourselves. We were just kids who didn't know how to be ourselves because we were too afraid. So all we did was go with the crowd and not against it.
This is now, when the acne has long gone and I don't know where those crappy Hammer-time multicolored disaster pants are. I am letting go because I like me, most of the times when I don't make mistakes, when I don't hurt people in the same way others hurt me. I love the human frailties and imperfections that make me who I am. And every bit of laughter at my expense toughened my skin, made me ready, in a way, to face the slings that would continue to be thrown as I grew older. Some slings pierced but didn't break me. Others crumbled before they got to me.
That's life, but only part of it. The other part are the hugs coming from the other direction, the sounds of laughter from people who share their joy with you and are not trying to stab you in the back.
Truth is, the love I have is stronger than the hate you bring.
She was a breathless wonder that left you speechless when she walked in, and every word you tried to utter sounded like stuttered utterances. It wasn't even eloquence but coherence that left you, mouth a slippery, slivery mess, throat clogged shut, eyes stuck in a trance.
This is what happens when a woman whose physical beauty is perfectly aligned with substance. She ain't Jessica Simpson bimbo but Nia Long and here you are hoping to be Larenz Tate on the microphone, all wanting to be the blues in her left thigh trying to be the funk in her right.
And this is good funk, the funk Parliament Funkadelic sung about, the funk that's hard to describe but you know it when you see it and you know it when you feel it. And you feel it when she walks into the room. You feel it when she smiles that smile at you.
It doesn't even matter that at this moment, you don't know her name. But you know that you will, that some invisible force will jumpstart your feet to walking over to her. Who cares if you have no idea what you will say when you are face to face with her? Something will dribble out, a simple hello to start off with, a witty phrase, anything to get her attention.
Because when she walked in, the atmosphere changed. There was a charge, and your blues turned to jazzy joy. Plans fell through and you decided to improvise, be spontaneous, and see where that took you. And you hoped all that took you to her and her to you and maybe this improvisation might lead to some beautiful music.
You stopped breathing when she appeared (you really didn't; it just felt like you did) and you weren't going to take another breath unless that breath brought forth words to say what you needed to say to her.
Because she was a breathless wonder that left you speechless, you had to say something. Is that all right? Yes, that's fine.
You know the cliche. Time stands still. But it's true as well. Time stops. It pauses in the moments that seem like agonizing hours between what you want to say and what you do say. And sometimes, particularly in the matters of the heart, you struggle with the words. You manage to stumble and stutter because the words you're about to say, the ones that are about to leave your lips, well you can't take them back, no matter how hard you try. Those words, "I love you," are stuck out there, hanging in the air between you and the person to whom you said those words.
And also hanging there is the aftermath of those words, the consequences of that "I love you." Obligation attaches to those words. Responsibility and commitment are behind those words, and if you don't mean them, you don't say them.
You don't say them because you fear your heart crushing if she rejects you, walks out the door, leaving your face twisted in pain. You stepped up and she stepped on the love you held out ever so gently.
But that's the risk you take when you dare love someone. You risk pain to get joy. It's like the quick shock of pain you feel when you put your shoulder back into place. You have to get through the hurt in order to feel the relief that comes immediately after.
Love is that thing where you just have to dive in and hope you don't drown. You have to push through the fear and have faith that this thing you put your soul into will survive, even when you know that there are no guarantees, that 10 years from the moment you said those words, this thing could fall apart. Hell, it could dissipate in the seconds after you say those words.
"I love you." Those words rarely pass my lips to any woman. I'm like all those sorry-assed men in romantic comedies, the ones with the walls built up over years of hurt and who are about to lose the "one," the one they're supposed to be with for the rest of their lives if only they could muster up the courage to say "I love you."
Closest I've gotten is "I like you," like you enough to kiss you, like you enough to hold your hands along busy city streets, like you enough to hold you in my arms on crowded dance floors. But not enough to turn like into love for the rest of my life.
I haven't crossed that threshold yet. So I look at this scene in Kevin Smith's highly underrated film, Chasing Amy, and am chilled at Holden's speech, even though I've seen it dozens of times over the years.
This is no cheesy Jerry Maguire/Tom Cruise "You complete me" speech followed by the "You had me at hello" from Renee Zellweger (God, that was cheesy and vomit-inducing dialogue created by the folks who give you Hallmark cards but I have to admit I was moved the first time I saw it).
No, what Holden (played by Ben Affleck who apparently can be a decent actor when he's not masquerading as an action star) gives is a dangerous, impossibly eloquent declaration of love in a way I wish I could if I were ever in the position of trying to convince a lesbian to go straight for me. And he knows what he's risking. He could lose a friendship. This could completely blow up in his face, and homegirl might just come to the conclusion that dude's a nutjob who has a "puppy-dog" crush as well as a frat-boy fantasy of making out with a lesbian.
The fact that it doesn't all come shattering down on his head (at least in that moment) is not surprising considering that this is a movie after all. Miracles happen all the time in movies, no matter how implausible they might seem.
But what gets me everytime is the unbelievable honesty and sincerity captured in that speech, the "oh screw it and go for it" bravado that Holden displays.
Sometimes in this life, you have to damn the consequences and do what John Mayer says, say what you feel. Say it with so much force and soul and guts and everything else that the other person has to hear you, has to see you and feel you. You have to spit, spill, leak it out so whatever you have inside of you fills the cup of life.
Yeah, that was hokey but that doesn't mean it's no less true. And it doesn't mean you pour out your soul to just anybody. That person has to be worth hearing your truth.
You'll know it, just as Holden knew it, that this moment, this pause between saying what you feel and saying nothing at all, could change your life in unimaginable ways and that the risk was worth it.
Because in the end, not saying anything when you should be saying everything is your voice wasted.
The poet Audre Lorde once said this in her poem, A Litany for Survival: "When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish/ when we are alone, we are afraid love will never return/ and when we speak we are afraid our words will never be heard nor welcomed/ but when we are silent, we are still afraid/ so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive."
"Some people call them imperfections but that's the good stuff." -- Sean, Good Will Hunting I love that line. It comes from a scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean is telling Will about his wife and how she used to fart in bed. He tells Will that one time his wife farted so loud that it woke her up. That was three years ago, he tells Will, and that's the things he most remembers, those imperfections only he knew about his wife. And he calls those imperfections the "good stuff." How can imperfections be considered the "good stuff"? How can imperfection be considered good? We spend our lives trying to be perfect, trying to make the right decisions, trying to live the straight and narrow, trying to make up for the mistakes of our past. But we often forget we're human, that we're flawed, that we are almost bound to screw up. That doesn't mean we don't take responsibility for our choices and it doesn't mean that some people screw up on such a grand scale that they deserve whatever is coming to them (i.e. people who continuously break the law, the ones who murder and rape and pillage without any concern for anyone else's welfare). I'm talking about imperfection, the little quirks in our DNA that make us who we are, make us the strange, irritating, intriguing people we are. I sometimes cringe at my high school self, the one who wore Hammer-like pants my cousin gave me as a Christmas gift my freshman year. Laughter from my classmates still ring my ears. I was acne-scarred, nerdy, and annoying. I harassed women on a regular basis because I was too chicken-shit to pursue them properly. At times, I was quiet to the point of being mute and other times, I was a wiseacre hiding my self-esteem issues. And at 37, I'm still weird, but much more confident in the imperfections I have. At the very least, I'm more aware of the imperfections that I need to change and the imperfections that are simply a part of who I am. The woman I marry will unfortunately find me a verbal equivalent of William Faulkner, given to stream-of-conscious conversations that flit from one topic to another like some kid afflicted with ADD. She will find me often disorganized to the point of insanity and hopelessly movie-obsessed. But I hope that the craziness that inhabits me will be balanced by the good qualities I do have. Knowing my imperfections allows me to accept the imperfections of another. In my younger days, I imagined my wife to be some combination of Halle Berry, Ananda Lewis, Sanaa Lathan and Angela Bassett, all examples of exceptionally beautiful, strong, intelligent black women. But at least in the case of Halle Berry, I realized that no matter how beautiful yo appear outside, you might have some issues on the interior. After all, Halle Berry has been through two very public relationships (David Justice and Eric Benet) that ended horribly and probably left some emotional scars. I've learned you have to look beyond the finely-shaped behind and the bouncy breasts and the piercing eyes. Dive deep and find the soul beneath. Relish the imperfections. Because in the end, those imperfections, the secrets that you and your significant other share, are the ones that you will cherish after the lust has faded. Good Will Hunting is a movie about acknowledging and accepting your past for what it was and moving on, seeing how that past shaped you as a person for good and bad, and seeing your imperfections not as a curse but as an indelible part of who you are. It is what it is. And you have a choice. You wallow in the pity-party of why you couldn't be someone else. Or you accept who you are, change the really bad stuff, and get comfortable in your skin. Because it's the only skin you got.
Five years ago, I started this blog on a whim. I didn't know what it would be, but I just wanted to have a venue for my pop-culture-obsessed thoughts. The blog eventually settled into a space for my thoughts on the latest movies. Often, in the minutes after sitting through a two-hour movie, I would rush back and fire off a missive about either how wonderful and entertaining the movie was (The Dark Knight) or how crappy and awful it was (Seven Pounds, so bad but interesting that I wrote about that movie twice). But I think now is the time to rethink the purpose of this blog, which I haven't updated since April. Maybe I'm burned out. Maybe I've run out of things to say. Maybe this is the end. But it isn't the end yet. I need some time to refresh. Until then, this space will be a bit empty. Sorry about that. Let me concentrate on other writing, both my full-time paid gig and my off-time scribblings that sometimes turn into poetry and other times turn into just mush.
I haven't written in this spot for a good minute. I don't have much of an excuse, except that I haven't seen much that's given me any motivation or inspiration to blog. It's not that I haven't seen any good movies lately, but none have been so good or so bad that I had, just had, to write about them.
That was the case until last night when as part of the Riverrun International Film Festival that's taking place here in good ole Winston-Salem, I had the chance to see the documentary Basquiat: The Radiant Child.
Jean-Michel Basquiant took the art world by storm in the early 1980s with his graffiti-styled paintings and drawings, a brilliant tapestry of work that spoke of the turbulent and exciting times in which he lived. He was only 27 of a drug overdose, another in a long line of geniuses who shined bright but burned quick.
As I saw watching the movie, I was taken in by the story of a man who grew up in the streets and managed to survive by his wits, who by raw unbridled talent made a name for himself first on the walls and trains of New York with the enigmatic tag of SAMO and then later in some of the most elite art museums.
Years ago, I saw the movie Basquiat, directed by artist and friend Julian Schnabel and starring Jeffrey Wright, who captured the nervous energy of Basquiat. But it is one to see Wright portray Basquiat but quite another to see Basquiat himself in archival footage and never-before-seen interviews.
We see a man who sought fame and found it not to his liking, a black man struggling to find his place in an elite white art world that kept defining him and his work.
Director Tamra Davis, through interviews with his friends, follows Basquiat's childhood in New York to his untimely death. In between, she allows us into his world, filled with late-night parties with his friend, Fab Five Freddy, and his insane work ethic.
The result is a nuanced portrait of an exceedingly complex artist, someone who wanted people to understand his work and to hear his voice. He wanted to succeed, no doubt, but he wanted to succeed on his own terms and to make uncompromising work.
The subtitle of this movie has it right. Basquiat was a radiant child, an artist whose work was too brilliant even now for this world, who created art that we still talk about.
And I find myself so much the better for being exposed to who he was and what he was about.
The acclaimed film critic lost his voice to complications from thyroid cancer four years ago. He can no longer relish solid food, drink good wine or talk about his favorite movies.
But in a way, his voice is still there, even if he can no longer move his lips. That's clear from this beautifully-rendered profile in the latest issue of Esquire.
I grew up on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Their show, "At The Movies," was required viewing for this budding movie enthusiast. I had to see if they gave thumbs up or thumbs down to the latest movies.
Siskel and Ebert were a contrast of physicality. Siskel was nearly bald and slim and given to harsh take-downs of films. Ebert had silver hair, a round face and a softer tone. They were like the good cop/bad cop tag team of film criticism.
But they knew their stuff and they were fair. Their arguments were well-constructed and not too high-falutin' for the average viewer. They just loved movies. It was that simple.
And I loved movies too. I didn't always agree with them. I still don't understand why Ebert loved Eyes Wide Shut, that strange film from the late Stanley Kubrick focused on marriage and S&M and that featured the now-divorced Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Chris Jones, who wrote the profile, captures a man finding new ways to communicate other than through his lips. Ebert scribbles his thoughts on Post-it notes while watching Pedro Almodovar's film, Broken Embraces. He taps out his musings on a blog, keeping his voice alive via the World Wide Web, a distant yet intimate form of dialogue.
And with his wife, Chaz, there is an ease of communication where words aren't needed that comes from 16 years of marriage.
This is no against-all-odds tale, some cliched-filled happy-go-lucky story. Instead, what emerges is Ebert as a man taking it one day at a time, dealing as best as he can with the crappy cards he has been dealt with.
He gets angry. He gets frustrated. You can see it in the shaking of his hands and the desperate grab for paper to put down this thoughts, even though the moment he starts writing, the feelings have already started to dissipate.
The picture that accompanies the story shows Ebert with large smiling eyes staring back at us. His face is thinner than I remember and it slopes into a weird V shape, the result of his lower jaw being taken out years ago because of the cancer.
I imagine him to be a loud voice locked in a quiet body bursting at the seams to make noise. But there are more ways to make noise than with your mouth. He writes. He scribbles. He taps his fingers across the keyboards on his computer.
Ebert can no longer speak but we hear him nonetheless.
Ryan Bingham has the bliss life, the kind we all think we would want, the one where we can live out of our suitcases and fly anywhere we wanted to, piling up frequent flier miles and staying in swank hotels.
In Up In The Air, Bingham (played with ever-easy charm by George Clooney) lives this life at a cost: He works for a company that other companies hire to fire people. And Bingham does his job very well, giving speeches about people who built empires who started right where Mr. or Ms. Laid-Off Worker is sitting.
It is a cold job he does with dignity and to do that job, he lives a disconnected existence.
And everything is swell, until his company decides that it would be cheaper to do the firings via video conference rather than in person. That threatens Bingham's out-of-suitcase lifestyle.
Plus, love, in the form of another corporate downsizer named Alex, also shakes up his obligation-free life of arrested development.
As directed by Jason Reitman (who gained enormous critical acclaim with his Oscar-nominated film Juno), this movie flits from sexy comedy to a screen version of the book Bowling Alone, which detailed the collapse of the American community.
Critics have hailed this as Clooney's best performance. That's hype, but it is a good performance, one that taps into Clooney's persona as the never-going-to-marry bachelor. The brilliance of his performance is he shows through Bingham the dark side of such a persistently solo existence.
It is only when he falls in love with Alex (sexy smart Vera Farmiga) that he realizes maybe the way he has gone about his life was wrongheaded and wronghearted.
Reitman, thankfully, keeps the movie from getting all mushy, and part of that comes from the real-life people who play the employees who get fired, their emotions red-hot. That decision grounds the movie, so to speak. He manages to sneak in a message or two about the devastation our ever-shrinking economy is having on every day Americans in a story about our increasing isolation from each other, the ease in which we hurt each other primarily because we've lost that need to connect in a meaningful way.
We're all about text messages and Facebook friending and twittering our lives instead of living our lives. And in the end, all that flying, all that living out of the suitcase, gets old and empty.
It is a important message that Reitman delivers without preachiness and with plenty of humor. And it makes me think I should probably fly more.
Book of Eli is a parable parading as an action flick, a mediation on the importance of literacy buried beneath decapitations done in silhouette.
And it is all cool and never preachy.
This is the first feature from the Hughes Brothers in nine years, the creative forces behind Menance To Society and From Hell.
Allen and Albert Hughes, in their new movie, decided to go western and apocalyptic, the result of some mysterious nuclear holocaust 30 years prior.
Denzel Washington is the titular Eli, a lone warrior in the tradition of Mad Max, armed with a gun, a blade and the last Bible on the planet. He has walked deserted roads and burnt-out landscapes littered with the remains of a world no one knows anymore.
Thirty years ago, a voice (presumably God) told Eli to head west with that Bible so that it may one day do good and be the key to mankind's salvation. And he has kept that path and cut the hands off anyone who dared touch him or what he simply refers to as the book.
We've seen apocalypse on the screen many times, men and women reduced to savages killing each other over scraps of food. The recently-released The Road covers much of the same ground the Hughes Brothers deal with here.
But the difference here is that it is not just water and food that are scarce resources; books no longer exist. And the villain, Carnegie (played by the wonderful and often creepy Gary Oldman) is the only other person in the film who knows and appreciates the power of books and the knowledge contained within.
Carnegie is the would-be dictator of a small town into which Eli enters, and once Carnegie finds out that Eli has the only Bible in the world, he sets out to do whatever it takes to get that book, knowing that he might be able to use it to control people.
Given the subject matter, it is surprising that the movie isn't as ponderous as one might think. The Hughes Brothers make ample room for humor and for cool action sequences that show Eli is rather deadly with his blade.
The cinematography is evocative, as one would expect from the Hughes Brothers.
And there is a twist at the end that won't be revealed here that, at least for me, deepened the movie.
No, the movie isn't all that deep but I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, a cool action flick that easily pleases those who love to think and those who just love a good knife fight and those who happen to love both.
