Getting to Happy

Sometimes you don't want to smile. Sometimes you just aren't feeling it, the muscles in your face stretched thin by the stress you faced during the week.
Smiling can be hard when inside you want to rage, inside you want to punch someone, inside you want to cry or yell or throw a lamp upside someone's head.
There are days when smiling is harder than it seems, when the force it takes to make the tips of your lips go up instead of down doesn't seem worth it.
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was walking in Borders (my favorite place in the world) when an older woman told me I should smile. Apparently, I wasn't grinning enough. I wanted to tell her to screw off.
Don't get self-righteous. I'm sure there's a long list of people you wanted to tell to screw off as well and were tempted to replace the word "screw" with a much more succinct and vulgar verb.
And truth is there are days when you will feel sad and you will get mad at the world. And on those days, you will want to either smack yourself for some dumb thing you did or smack someone else for their stupidity.
This is life and this is the way life is. Smiling when you don't feel the joy that brings the smile isn't worth it. You might as well just frown.
Being able to smile in the face of life's storms is about having something more than happiness, something more than a temporary feelilng.
Being able to smile is about having a foundation upon which you face difficulties. It's about having an outlook that says this isn't going to last. This feeling, this circumstance, is not permanent.
Smiling is only the outer manisfestation of the inner work you have to do, as Terry McMillan puts it, to get to happy. You have to see life as half full and not half empty. You have to see that the darkness surrounding you won't last because there is light; you just have to chip at the crap in your life that's keeping you from getting to that light.
You either live or you die. And dying doesn't have to mean literally. It could mean spiritually. Death could simply mean allowing your soul to perish because you decided that this life isn't worth it.
Again, you either live or you die, and it's a choice you make every day. You live when you push open the walls of your heart and love. You live when you control your reaction to whatever crap life puts in your path.
You live when you feel the pain enough to learn from it and let it go, knowing that whatever the next chapter in your life only begins when you turn the page.
Smiling is a life-long journey of finding your joy, that effervescent thing that makes you you, and smiling comes from walking in the confidence that this is the right path, this is the right moment, this is the right you.

Walking

On Valentine's Day, I was sick. That achey-breaky feeling was all through my body and I could barely get out of bed. Hell, I had to keep telling my body to crawl itself out of bed so I could grab my phone and call my boss to tell her I wouldn't be coming in. My body said, umm that could wait. Let's just lay here for a bit.
Eventually, I did move...to the couch where I stayed for most of the day, fighting off body chills and sinus headache with Tylenol and chicken noodle soup. But I didn't feel like doing much of anything. This day, my body wanted to chill.
Being sick often forces us to slow down. We run through our days and we become blurs to ourselves, never slowing down to appreciate those seconds and minutes we have before us.
We don't walk. We race. Walking is that underappreciated aspect of movement. When you walk, you have to think a little about the steps you have before you, the breeze blowing through your clothes, the space between where you are and where you hope to be.
Walking, taking the journey from no where to somewhere, and sometimes, the weight of life makes the walking harder. But at other times, the joy makes the walking easier. And sometimes, it doesn't matter because the walking is the point.
Putting one foot in front of the other is more than half the battle. It's when we stop walking, when we stop moving, that we stop living, that we give up on life.
Walk, breathe, move. What else are you going to do?

Someday We'll All Be Free

Either before or after has there been a voice quite like Donny Hathaway, a voice so smooth and soulful, a voice that gets you right there, that unspecified, unspeakable, indescribable place that only you know is there because you can feel it.

It's that need for the kind of freedom that Hathaway sings about in this song. It's a longing for something that's not quite arrived yet. He tells me and you to hang on as the world spins and make sure that the spin doesn't spin you right out of existence, knock you on your ass. Because life is like that, the world is like that.

I feel better when I hear this song. Hathaway's voice is so soothing you want to float away with it to whatever world he is occupying because it has to be better than this. He sings like heaven has got to be.

The song reminds me of a poem by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie in which she speaks about wanting to "walk barefoot where barefoot has no name/a place where soul on earth is natural." And she finds that the place she has envisioned is already there inside of her.

I think that's where freedom lies. It's not always external. It's not always actual handcuffs and chains that bind us. It's us.

The time in which Hathaway sang this song was one of immense social upheaval. Blacks were fighting for their rights. Protests over the Vietnam War were heating up.

But the song is relevant today because it is centered around how we react to the chaos in our lives. That chaos could be political and social issues we are passionate about. And the chaos could be your own personal life, the stresses we encounter daily that drive us nearly insane.

"Hang on to the world as it spins around/ Just don't let the spin get you down/Things are moving fast/ Hang on tight and you will last." Because the hope is, our faith tells us, that someday we'll all be free. And maybe it's in telling our souls that that we are free already.

Because the truth is you can't be free if you don't think that it's possible. You can't be free if once the chains are cut off, you still act as if you're still a slave. You can't be free if you don't believe you're free, you don't feel you're free, you don't see you're free.

Freedom is not just a physical thing. It's a mental thing. It's a soul thing. As Ekere Tallie tells us, "stroll barefoot" into your lives "leaving behind thieves and tyrants trying to control it."

Coded Language

Words matter. In church, I learned over and over again that life and death are in the power of the tongue.

And too seldom we don't pay attention to the words we use or the ones that we hear.

Saul Williams reminds us of the power of words in the best sense. Let us take his message into the new year.

Hanging In

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.

No Love

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.

No matter what you do, you can't hurt me no more.

Blues for Her

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.

Chasing Me

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."

So speak.

Good Mike Hunting

"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.

Note on the blog

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.

Basquiat

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.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert cannot speak.

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.

Up In The Air

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

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.

Mourning Blockbuster

Blockbuster is closing. Not all of them, just the one around the corner, the one less than five minutes away that I could go to late at night when I wanted to feed my movie fix.

A large "Store Closing" banner hangs outside the building. Employees are overseeing the liquidation of everything in the store. In the windows are posters promoting discounts as high as 80 percent. And I am in mourning.

I know all about Netflix and everytime I go to Harris Teeter, I see the Redbox vending machines. But, for me, there was nothing like going to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

I cherished those moments of browsing, your eyes going over all those titles, some big studio blockbusters and others more independent fare. One night it might be the latest Michael Bay movie. Another night, it could be some obscure movie I had never heard of.

And of course, there have been plenty of times when the movies I picked absolutely sucked, such stinkers that the word "stinker" doesn't even do them justice.

But others have been wonderful movie-watching experiences, full of rich indelible characters and superb acting.

I found them through browsing, and that's why I loved Blockbuster. I could spend an hour just walking around, trying to choose, patient in my search.

The first time I used Redbox was this week. I got The Hangover, a hilariously raunchy movie. I struggled with how to use it. I stood at the Harris Teeter an embarrassing long time trying to figure it all out. And I was frustrated with the limited number of titles. You just had to choose quickly as a line formed behind you or just go empty-handed.

That never happened at Blockbuster. Not that you didn't go home empty-handed some nights. But you had the time to figure out what you wanted.

And the joy came when you happened upon some great movie you might not have discovered if you hadn't spent all that time browsing.

We live in this world where patience is a rarity. Time rushes by us, and we have to make these rapid choices. You can't wait and see.

The good things, the wonderful things, in life --- you don't see them right away. You have to browse because the beauty of life appears in unexpected places. You have to walk around searching a bit before you find it, whatever that it is.

And when you find it, whether it's that right movie, or that right person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you know it and you're happy that you took the time to find it.

That's why I'm mourning Blockbuster. I hate having to go to Redbox or order movies from Netflix. I want to walk around for awhile, pick something up, look at it for awhile, put it back, pick something else up, then rent it and see what happens. I may like it or I may hate it.

But no one ever said searching for gems was going to be easy. I guess I'll have to find my gems somewhere else.

Avatar

Avatar is gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking at times, seamless in its beauty, but the film is also pedestrian in its storytelling, predictable and weighed down by wooden dialogue and ham-fisted moralizing.

This is James Cameron's masterpiece, his comeback since he made the mammoth hit Titanic that catapulted Leonardo Di Caprio to fame so many years ago and the first two Terminator movies. The movie is price tagged at $230 million and was years in the making, with Cameron waiting for the technology to catch up to his imagination.

The result is a film vibrant with color and jaw-dropping special effects that look even better in 3D version. The magic is in how the special effects fade into the background, awe-inspiring in how realistic they appear.

But the special effects are supposed to aid in the telling of the story, and the story is simply this -- evil American corporation goes to Pandora to steal a mineral known as "unobtanium" that is key to Earth's survival. Standing in the way are blue-skinned gazelle-like creatures known as The Na'vi, and they're not about to watch their world be ravaged by these human colonizers.

Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington, who unfortunately was in that money-losing Terminator sequel this summer) is a paraplegic Marine recruited to go to Pandora and take his twin brother's place in a cool scientific experiment.

Scientists have spent years growing this Avatars, half-human, half-Na'vi, bodies into which human minds are implanted. Sully is the guinea pig and his mission is to befriend The Na'vi and convince them to relocate so their land can be scraped away.

Sully jumps at the chance to be in a body that walks and runs through lush jungles and leaps onto lizard-like creatures that fly into blue skies. But his plans to complete his mission go sideways when he meets beautiful Na'vi warrior (Zoe Saldana) and falls in love.

Of course, falling in love leads to outright rebellion against his superiors when he realizes what they're doing is wrong.

And for all the awesome CGI, it doesn't obscure the fact that this movie is unfailingly predictable. The dialogue is awful at times, though some humor manages to get through.

Cameron does remember that he is making popcorn entertainment, and he fills the screen with action sequences geek-lovers everywhere will adore.

But all of that stuff can't make up for the lack of a story you really care about. Take away the CGI, and you have Braveheart, without Mel Gibson. You have 300, without the bare abs.

Yes, Cameron makes incredible strides in the use of motion-capture technology that other filmmakers will be studying for years. But this isn't some gnarly breakthrough in terms of storytelling.

It is cliched to the point of numbness. It is knock-you-over-the-head pro-environmentalism to the point that Al Gore might get annoyed. Umm.. the Earth is precious, we are connected to the land, yada yada yada. We get the point and we might even agree with you but please don't preach.

Avatar is a good movie, for the most part, a lovely way to spend a weekend afternoon, lost in the magic of moviemaking. But next time, Cameron should spend more time on the story and less time on the expensive CGI.

The Princess & The Frog

Everyone knows what to expect from a Disney movie; they expect to transported to a magical place where dreams come true if you wish upon a star, a place where Prince Charming sweeps a young woman off her feet and they live happily ever after.

And in that sense, The Princess & The Frog is no different from the Snow Whites and Cinderellas of the past. Except this time our heroine is a black woman.

For some, that might not make much difference, but to black women who grew up watching Disney movies that only showcased white beauty, this historical milestone means a lot.

But it won't mean anything if the movie isn't good. Luckily, in this case, it is.

The Princess & The Frog is retro, capturing that two-dimensional animation audiences haven't seen in many years. It is classic both in style and narrative.

Anika Noki Rose is Tiana, a native of New Orleans who dreams of making her late father's dream of opening a restaurant come true. She isn't a princess in the traditional sense. Tiana is a hardworking girl who saves her money and refuses to party.

Into her life comes a prince transformed into a frog, thanks to a evil voodoo conman played by Keith David. Of course, we know how the story goes -- princess kisses frog and frog turns into prince.

Well, not exactly. Tiana turning into a frog too in this scenario and together, fussing almost all the way, Tiana and the prince begin a journey to become human again. They encounter a cast of characters including a Creole-speaking light bug and a trumpet-playing alligator.

The movie is infused with New Orleans culture, from the food to the music, and I found myself swept away in show-stopping musical numbers, many blessed with the powerful voice of Anika Noki Rose (who wowed audiences a couple years ago in Dreamgirls).

Disney movies are often predictable and this one is no different. But we enjoy the journey and we laugh and go aww along the way.

The performances are universally wonderful (even Oprah Winfrey in a small role as Tiana's mother) as our heroine slowly begins to learn that love is the most important thing in the world.

G-rated films are not my fare (ummm.... Die Hard is at the top of my favorite movie list and that's about as far from Disney as you can get). But I enjoyed this movie, and not just because we have a black woman in a Disney film.

It is because the movie is good, entertaining and with a message all us adults could stand to learn.

Precious

Black folks are sensitive about our image, and for good reason. Our history is one of misrepresentation, of dehumanization, one in which the act of a single bad apple is used to denigrate the entire race.

And when you look to Hollywood, you see a legacy of images seared into our public consciousness, one that elevates buffoonery and obscures our dignity. So anyone surprised by the controversy surrounding the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire just hasn't been paying attention.

Here we have a story about a obese, illiterate black girl who has birthed two children by her own father and endures horrifying physical and sexual abuse by her mother, poor dysfunctional black people living in the grittiest of conditions.

Precious exists, and so does her mother, Mary, and her father, Carl. They exist even though we don't want to see them. They exist even though we pretend they are as invisible as Ralph Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man.

The problem is that when it comes to Hollywood, it seems as if that's the only image we see, as if every black family is that messed up, that we all live in the ghetto, that bullets fly all the time in all of our neighborhoods. And when that happens, all the nuance of black life is lost.

This is why us black folk are so sensitive and it's why some people have reacted to Precious like this guy.

It was in this context that I approached the film, directed by the ever-provocative Lee Daniels, who made the equally controversial Monsters Ball. That movie garnered Halle Berry an Academy Award in a performance some raved as powerfully raw and others criticized as playing into the most awful stereotypes surrounding black women.

Given all the controversy about this movie, I ended up carried away by the simplicity of the storytelling and the pain-drenched performances by everyone. Daniels knows something all good storytellers know -- less is more.

He shows restraint in places where the novel itself is unflinchingly graphic. The abuse is there, but he pulls back just a bit.

More importantly, he allows Precious to tell her story. That's where the power of the novel and this movie lies, in Precious' voice, her ever-growing ability to tell her tale, both of tragedy and triumph.

It is in her broken English that she founds, gradually, the power of words.

Daniels allows us entry into her world, her confusion about her circumstance, her desire for something better, her anger at her abuse, her fantasies of being a superstar with a light-skinned boyfriend. Precious is a girl who knows not the meaning of her name, who is bowed down in self-hatred, who has never known love.

As teacher Blue Rain, who heads up an alternative school that Precious is sent to, Paula Patton is the shining light of love that Precious needs. And so are the others who come into her life, the students in Ms. Rain's classroom, the nurse (played by rocker Lenny Kravitz) and the social worker (portrayed by a nearly unrecognizable Mariah Carey).

But the revelation is Gabourey Sidibe, a relative newcomer in the game of acting, who fully inhabits Precious in a performance transforms stereotype into fully-realized human.

And comedian Monique gives a horrifying and heartbreaking performance as Mary, Precious' abusive mother who is wholly ignorant to her monstrous behavior.

But the movie isn't without its problems. I wonder, as others have, why the good characters in this movie, such as teacher Blue Rain, are light-skinned, while Precious and her parents, the most dysfunctional people in the movie, are all dark-skinned. Lee Daniels has said in interviews that he has had issues with colorism, that discrimination that black people practice against each other, and it shows in his casting.

The other problem I have is the ending. We find Precious dealing with the fact that she is HIV positive in a movie set in the late 1980s. I wondered what would happen to her? How long would it be before she died? Would she complete her education? Would she find work? Would she find a way to take care of her two children, one of which has down syndrome?

Neither the movie nor the novel answers those questions. We are only left with the hope that Precious' new-found determination and desire for better things will help her overcome her obstacles.

But in the end, I liked the movie. I saw the movie as art, as one that challenges us and moves us beyond our comfort zones, to get to a truth we may otherwise not want to see. I don't want to see just positive images of black people. And I don't want to see just negative images of us.

I want to see us as who we really are, human beings, flawed, some of us good, some of us bad, some of us in-between, complex, complicated, four-fourths man and woman. Human. The bottom line is that all of our stories deserve to be told, not just this one.

This Is It

I wanted to keep Michael Jackson frozen in time, just as he looked on the cover of his pop masterpiece, Thriller. There, he was dressed in a white suit with a black shirt, his brown skin smooth, his eyes intense, his aura all innocent, a singer still somewhat a child but also on the brink of coming into his own as a young man.
But the Michael Jackson who died at the age of 50 was something far different. His nose was halfway gone, his skin turned vanilla, the Jheri curl replaced with straight black hair. His face was skeletal. He didn't look human even though he was, no matter what anyone might say. His musical genius had long been obscured by his weirdness, the child-molestation charges he successfully fought, the money problems, the drama, oh the drama.
When he died, I mourned the death of an incredible entertainer who poured his soul into his music, and I tried to forget about the strange being he became in the eyes of many. So when This Is It, a documentary of his last days rehearsing for his 50-city tour, arrived in theaters, I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see Michael Jackson at his worst.
I finally gave in recently, however, my curiosity getting the best of me.
And what I found was that the Michael Jackson of old had never left, despite the media representations of his rather odd behavior. The passion that informed his life was ever present.
What the film shows is a man still at the top of his game, even if in a few days, his life would end. We saw what could be when a genius pushes for perfection. We saw what happens when magic is allowed to flourish.
I still cringed at the sight of Michael Jackson. He is scarily thin, and we never get to look into those eyes of his because in every scene he wears sunglasses.
But that tender voice of his is there. He, in that quiet way of his, sweetly admonishes when the music isn't quite right or something else is off in the performance. He tells a young guitarist that it is her time to shine.
The moments I remember the most are the performances, where we see that even with age, his dance movements are as sharp as ever. That falsetto voice of his still brims with soul.
Kenny Ortega, who was the producer for Michael Jackson's comeback, edits this archival footage with care and sensitivity, allowing us a rare glimpse of an artist in his rawest creative mode. We get caught up in the excitement of seeing Michael Jackson and his collaborators birthing something ambitious, something that, if Michael Jackson had lived, would have blown the eye-sockets out of anyone who had the pleasure of seeing it live.
That, we know all to well now, never happened. On June 25 of this year, Michael Jackson died. And the most heartbreaking footage of the movie is seeing dancers auditioning for the show talk about how overjoyed they are to have the chance to be on stage with Michael, their inspiration to dance, shout and shake their bodies to the ground. We see them almost delirious at the time they get to spend with Michael and you feel sad knowing that these are Michael Jackson's final days.
Yet, here is This Is It, a lasting testament to remind us that however strange, however odd, however troubled Michael Jackson may have been, he was also the penultimate entertainer, someone who gave us the beauty of his musical soul, who touched us all with his vision.

Before Sunrise

I remember her, that sweet smile, the slender figure, the walk in the park on a fall day more than a decade ago.

What I don't remember is her name. I was in college at the time, in a small town, and she was a prospective student coming in for a day or two to see if she liked my college enough to attend. For some reason, I was her guide for the day, showing her around, and in those hours, there was this irresistible connection, a magnet drawing us together.

We talked and laughed as we walked from campus into the streets of that small town, holding hands, my skin tingling with a nice warmth.

Later, however, in the dorm room where she was staying, she asked me about an upperclassman she was interested in, apparently a much more handsome guy than me, who I also knew to be a bit of a ladies man. It was a gut-punch but I smiled anyway. The pain eventually faded, as she did, because she ended up going to another school. I never saw her again.

I thought about that girl as I watched Before Sunrise, the 1994 film by Richard Linklater, the genius behind cult-classic Dazed and Confused.

The movie centered on Jesse and Celine (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train destined for Vienna. Jesse is a backpacking American headed to Vienna for his flight back home. And Celine is a French grad student who just got back from visiting her grandmother.

Jesse sparks up a conversation with Celine. The chemistry is undeniable. The connection is there, and when the train stops at Vienna, Jesse invites Celine to accompany him until his flight leaves the next morning.

And so they do, their conversation going from heady to bawdy and everything in between, those moments of laughter interspersed with quiet moments when the two hit that sweet spot of intimacy.

This isn't your typical romantic comedy. Jesse and Celine don't hook up within the first hour of the movie, then break up and finally rush toward each other in some inane climax after realizing they're meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The connection here is at first intellectual and gradually moves toward romance and there's no guarantee that they will end up together forever at the end.

In fact, they very well may never see each other again.

What I loved about the movie is that the connection isn't purely physical. There's this unexplainable emotional intimacy that develops between the two, some special chemistry drawing the two together and making it hard to let go.

There's a rhythm here, a rapid back and forth marked by pauses and brief and poignant moments of vulnerability. There's joy simply to be in one another's presence, something that I just don't think Facebook-based relationships can replicate (even though I admit to being a Facebook addict in need of Dr. Drew-like intervention).

At the end, Jesse and Celine promise to meet back in Vienna in six months. They never do. We know this, of course, because Richard Linklater decided to make a sequel called, appropriately enough, Before Sunset.

I saw this movie several years ago, way before I ever saw Before Sunrise. It was the rare sequel done years after the original that actually worked in that there's an added emotional tension, a history just surging beneath the surface of the characters' interactions.

Life got in the way and changed Jesse and Celine in surprising ways, but the connection was still there. They pick up where they left off more than a decade earlier, as if they never left each other at the train station at Vienna.

But they did and they can never go back. They have to live with the choices they made. Yet, the scene I loved the most is the ending, where they bask in the moment, an ecstasy of joy of that connection made so many years ago that never went away.

Before Sunrise and its subsequent sequel, I think, reminds us of the importance of searching for the bliss in those connections, even if some may be fleeting. This is where life is. This is where joy is. This is what we will remember when we see our lives coming to an end, and the more we have of them, the richer our lives are.