Lost in Thought 004: I cried a couple of times this week

My mother came back from Honduras today. Honduras is a small Central American country surrounded by Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. It's also known as one of the most dangerous places in the world. She flew out last week when she received a call that my ninety-two-year-old grandmother, her mother had just passed away. My mother composed herself and let me know she'd be flying out in only a few hours. She didn't say much on the phone except "pobrecita mi mammita." Which closely but loosely translates to "my poor mommy." Her voice was so soft and shakey. I could feel my mother's pain over the phone, but I didn't break. I knew she had to go, but my grandmother's death and the thought of her in such a dangerous place made me feel sick.

A couple hours later, not able to sleep and while my son kept me company my sister face-timed me. We spoke about our grandma and our mother. We cried so much in just a few minutes. My son was confused, but he hugged me, kissed me, and wiped my tears. I felt so bad for my grandmother who in her last fifteen years battled altimeters, dementia, and went blind in both her eyes. She was fierce, funny, and Godly but in the cutest ways. She was never dogmatic about her beliefs just happy to be a part of something that made her feel whole.

When we were little we'd play pretend church, and she'd let my sister, and I preach a sermon of buzzwords we'd memorized from youth group. We'd sing hymns and read bible verses. We did this a few times a week for a couple of hours and a handful of years for fun. We were amazed that she would play with us for that long. She loved hearing the word of God and having her grandchildren pretend to be Godly was enough to engage her in shared faith and love. She loved us so much, and we adored her.

Because my mother left so abruptly, I didn't get to console her or do anything for her. I finally saw her today, and she showed me old pictures and videos of my grandma. The tears just rolled down my face racing to my chin, and each tear picked up more speed than the previous one. Thinking about that moment as write has me doing the same thing right now. It's incredible how we can feel each other's pain — a connected lost. I haven't seen my grandma in years, and when we face-timed last, she didn't even know who I was anymore. She had no memory of me. It's like I never existed to her. That's a haunting thought.

I gave my mother a big hug and kiss before I left and thought "I hope she never forgets me." The older we get, the less time we spend with the loved ones who raised us. Time slips away unless you track it. We create fewer and fewer moments and memories in the history of our lives. We understand and appreciate the beautiful moments because we endure the unexpected, tragic, or inexplicable experiences that attack us without mercy. The poetics of contrast pertaining to life are profound and enlighting, but they still suck and feel unfair. Pain is a by-product of life, so we have no choice but to endure and create the things that make that pain worth respecting, acknowledging and available as unexpected fuel to helps us overcome, smile and know better days are ahead even if a few more shitty ones are scattered in between.

Keep Writing 003: A Comment I wrote in a Writing Group.

I used to have an exhausting writing routine, but it was a way to force myself to write. I did it to shed the fear of sucking. I would read an hour of a screenwriting book. The book didn't matter since I read and reread books all the time. I just wanted a POV from a writing teacher to live by for that writing session. After that our I would take a fifteen-minute break. Hour two consisted of typing a script I loved. I mean word for word of a produced script like In Burges (I've typed that movie out three times). I looked at this exercise as practicing the way a master would practice. If it were basketball, I'd practice the jumper like Kobe; if it were soccer, I'd practice my bend like Beckham, chess; Bobby Fischer. You get the picture. In my mind, I'm writing and pacing the way a master paces himself, using description, abbreviations, inflections, montages, music, etc. just like him/her/them a grandmaster. 

It was super exhausting, but when that second hour and my second break was up, I was committed to writing five to ten pages with what I had accumulated. I now felt I had a little or a lot of "something" I didn't have before; another writer's perspective. I could interpret what I soaked up for my material when it came to structuring and style. It's eye-opening to see two, three, four writers covey the same shot, thought, idea in their own voice/style but still use the SAME structure. I read a lot, and I still rewrite scripts and pretend to be Edgar Wright, Christopher Nolan, Charlie Kaufman, Martin McDonagh, Stanley Kubrick, and so many others. But I no longer need it as my warm up. Now, I can sit there and hammer through ideas because I've shot the same jumper, kicked the same penalty kick, made the same chess move, or sang the same note to that song I've been belting in my car a few hundred times or more. 

We should all avoid cliches, but there's one constant and profound truth that exists because it's painfully obvious and true. Practice makes perfect, or least makes a first draft that's total shit, that you can eventually make into your ideal version. 
KEEP WRITING!

Captain Marvel Rant 002: What a Latin-American man thinks about your MOVIE, sort of...

I saw Captain Marvel with my kids, and I have some thoughts. So, bare with me as I ramble on and off-topic and all over the place as if I was spontaneously giving you a review in person.

The excitement! She's finally here. Our savior. Our Captain Marvel! Wait, let me set this up real quick. I watched the film with my two and half-year-old son and my nine-year-old stepson. My boys were all smiles during the REAL3D projection that I wish we'd seen in IMAX, but couldn't actualize due to time restrictions, my kid's nap patterns, and bowel movement schedules. I came prepared with a cool skater backpack that was just a cover for my daddy-bag carrying the wipes, diapers, extra snacks, action figures, and extra clothes. If these two needed to poop, I was not going to leave that theater.

Two slushies, a few drinks of water, what seem to be around five pounds of popcorn, and an entire movie with post-credit scenes later, I was proud that my boys made it all the way through. I looked at them and asked, what did you think? My nine-year said very slowly to draw out his inflection, "That was sooooooooo good, Batman!" (He's called me Batman since he was two years old. A story for another time). My two year just yelled, "Yea!" What did you like about it?" I asked. My nine-year-old said, "She was hilarious when I didn't expect her to be because she was so serious, too." I was genuinely impressed with that assessment. "Anything else?" I asked. "Yea, she was super tough and was fun to watch in the fight scenes." I looked at my two-year-old and asked: "What did you like?" Not expecting an actual reply, he responded with Da-ee (his word Daddy) I like da kid-cat. "ah, yes, the kitty cat," I replied, smiling. That's all the confirmation I needed. Well, that and my two-year-old kept saying, "das mama!" sporadically throughout the film. He recognized his fierce and loving mother in the superhero on screen.

I had a lot of issues with the flick, but I still loved this movie. Brie Larson made me care about Captain Marvel even though Carol's backstory and emotional beats were mishandled or poorly directed, "tomato tomahtoe." Set up and pay off weren't great, but it still kept moving forward. How? I'll bring you up to speed real quick. Veers, the character we come to know as Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, who is played by BRILLIANTLY by Brie Larson, is introduced to us as a Kree warrior hero in training. The Kree are a scientifically and technologically advanced militaristic alien race in the Marvel world. We've met a few of them already in previous films.

We are led to believe that she's a rebellious female Kree fighter who likes to march to the beat of her own drum and has a temper problem she can't appear to control. (Is that supposed to be a metaphor for all woman or pun or a joke?) I'm just pointing it out, not saying it is any of those things. Calm down, social justice warriors. I'll write way worse/thought out stuff to complain about. (I know I ended on a proposition shut up) As the film was coming to an end, I thought about how this movie is just like any other phase one movie, you know, setting up our hero, giving us the backstory/origin and showing us how she/he might fit in within the bigger puzzle that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Was that run-on sentence?) But it has the most significant responsibility of any previous film. Responsibility? Yes. Pay attention.

Captain Marvel is the twenty-first film in this cinematic world. There's so much to include, and it must have been challenging to try to adhere to the rules and breadcrumbs laid out by previous films and their timelines, which I believe ultimately came at a cost. It slightly hinders the storytelling when it came to showing us more about Carol Danvers because the filmmakers/writers, I assume, wanted to serve the Infinity Saga through-line. Still, it made the Captain not Carol matter to me much more before the ultimate showdown in the end. Why was I supposed to give a crap about a reunion with her former pilot, buddy? I never got a moment that solidified their trust, love, and empowerment of one another. A montage? Yes? But not a moment, a pay-off, a character reveal that was built up by beat by beat, scene by scenes ultimately culminating in a well-deserved sequence meant to make me care. Cheesy dialogue and flashy editing weren't enough to convince me. I've been shown so much more and so much better in a bunch of these films, so I expect more. The visuals were crisp, sure, but this was a time where "show don't tell" was not executed with enough character development, which led to lackluster emotional weightlessness — just an empty human shell. A Danvers cadaver. (#DadJoke) But this only applies to Carol. Who she was before doesn't seem to be too important to the filmmakers because the focus appears to be on her merely being a human but not what kind of human she was? I'm obviously guessing here and rambling. NEXT!

The villain. Ummm. No. I love Jude Law. Great actor and never disappoints, but the writing here failed him. He was just a cookie-cutter villain and his stakes, goals, reasons we're all familiar. SIDEBAR: How does this guy keep growing his hair back? I need his hair doctor or meds or money. He was just being the bad guy to be the bad guy. There's a reoccurring motif going on with the Kree in the MCU, and they need to remedy that at some point soon. Stop making them so predictable. And WTF was up with all the communication interference!? Are you serious? At least show me someone creating it, so I know there's a reason this super-advanced race can't build stable communication devices. Ridiculous.

Back to the Captain. When Veers (Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers) appears on screen the first time, there's this emptiness to her. She seems curious but robotic. Very Terminator-like if you ask me. I can tell she's not comfortable being who she is, so she uses humor to make herself feel better. The human inside her is trying to wake her up without knowing it since she believes she's a Kree. She doesn't know who she is, and that's very clear to me. The nuances in Brie Larson's performance are clearly being overlooked. She's playing a woman stripped of her life, her memories, her existence, and going along for a ride with a new purpose because of implanted beliefs and transfused Kree blood. She's essentially playing a robot seeking an explanation for her existence. She has to continually put on a front because she's not only fighting in her day to day life as a warrior, but she's fighting her own mind that's trying to wake her up from dare I say her own "sunken place?" She has interior and exterior conflicts. That's what makes her character work! She's a trained soldier on earth and then a trained soldier in the cosmos. Soldiers have a demeanor, a set of codes to follow when it comes to their self-presentation. I see that very clearly here.

She has two people living in her head! Two completely different versions of the same person are fighting for the driver's seat in the cockpit - and she has to find a way not to look crazy and lose control. She has to "be cool" I'm in the face of internal and external adversity. Brie Larson pulls that off masterfully. From the beginning of the movie, she's told she can't and shouldn't do something, anything but what she's told to do. I have heard people complain that she didn't have enough of an arc. I liked that she was bad-ass and realized she had the potential to be even more powerful than anything she could imagine. She still changed, but her change was from good to great, not from negative to positive. It's a strange way to explore this story, but it follows the rules of storytelling in a way where it made ME care about her.

I loved the Skrulls twist. I won't ruin that for anyone here, even though it has some gray areas of logic. The Stan Lee Cameo was the sweetest thing ever, and considering how much I love him and Kevin Smith, it hit me on so many levels. Ronin was useless. Again. The cat/Nick Fury thing annoyed me, but I love that Fury doesn't confirm or deny what happened to his eye. The movie is fun, and it's what I wanted. See it if you haven't. That's it for now! Someone made a poopy. GTG!

Daily Inspiration 001: I Love Lamp

There are three things in this world that I find to be viscerally expressive: music, dance, and the capture of both through film or video. In my most recent experience watching a variety of music videos, there was a commonality that bothered me. The narrative of the songs I was hearing was lost on me visually, and I didn't understand or see the dichotomy that the directors and or artists were presenting on screen. Music videos do not have to be direct in their message, but they should always enhance the song so that they can complement each other, and work as a combined art.

It is challenging to make a great music video, I've only made a handful on shoe-string budgets, but each one felt draining and the result was always just good enough. Every couple of months I see something that inspires me to get better at one my expressive crafts: filmmaking. I'm continually looking for inspiration to aid me in my daily creative endeavors, and when it hits me, I'm overwhelmed with an endorphin buzz so strong that I want nothing more than to share what I've experienced with someone else in hopes that they too are moved in some way. No one will feel what I feel, and reactions to any form of art will be different depending on the mood, environment, and context of an individual, but this is a video I have to share. I remember feeling something like this when I saw Bjork's "Pagan Poetry" and Kanye West' "Runaway" video. Watching these type of expressive videos make me want to become better at doing what I do. Whatever that may be at any given day.

The artist is Sia.

The song is "Chandelier."

Directed by Sia & Daniel Askill, featuring Maddie Ziegler of Dance Moms.

Just watch it, and play it loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLTu_mo3y42N38cL8PYh9_hZsYE-w19ptZ&v=2vjPBrBU-TM