127 Hours is 5 days of torturous bliss

To be honest other than the sensational nature of the material I wasn't interested in a movie where the money shot was a man cutting off his own arm after being trapped for 5 days under a boulder. But the combination of Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slum Dog Millionaire) and James Franco (Spider-man 1-3 & Rise of the Planet of the Apes) was a frenetic alchemy that meshed flashback, recorded video and staggeringly quick edits into a visceral cinematic experience. Based on a true event, Mr. Franco plays Aron Ralston, a folksy dude who loves outdoor adventure. After briefly meeting and helping two lost female hikers find an underground lake its established that Ralston is a fun-loving person whose passion for hiking, skiing, mountain climbing is infectious. Promising to meet them later at a party he goes off alone to his doom. He falls down a steep narrow crevice were he ends up standing with his arm crushed between a huge rock and the wall of the ravine.

With only a days worth of water and a small utility knife, he realizes the dire straits upon him. He never looses his composure or humor even joking about being cheap and not spending extra money on a "real" Swiss Army Knife. There was one shot were he looks up through the thin opening of the ravine and see's a jet flying thousands of feet up over him. It gave you such a sense of perspective on how small and trapped he really was I was chilled thinking of what I would do in his position. Most directors and actors would now be stymied as to how to keep the momentum going. From here on out you know as a viewer it was 5 days of torture, tedium, delirium and drinking one's own urine. But Boyle and Franco expressed the lapsing of time with such grace, like Franco lifting his bare foot so that he could get just a tiny bit of sunlight or of him rewinding his vid-cam to long for his parents to keep him going was touching and soulful. And when that final moment arrived you cheered grotesquely with every bitter cut not because you wanted him to escape (that's a given) but because deep down inside you know you could not have made that horrific choice.

At 90 minutes the movie was both compact and jarring. The ultimate story of man facing himself and coming away better for it. Seeing the real Ralston swimming with his stub, snowboarding and playing with his newborn baby at the end of the film proved that he may have lost an arm but he gained and entire life.

Due Date passed it's point of freshness

Due Date passed it's point of freshness due in part to me unfairly comparing it to Planes, Trains & Automobiles the quintessential buddy/ disaster film. Robert Downey Jr. as the angry pensive straight man came across as wholly unlikable, not because he was upstaged by Zach Galifianakis' misanthropic retread of his weirdo character from The Hangover movies, but because Downey seemed to have dialed in his haughty-jerk-put-upon everyman. His "I just wanna get home." mantra seemed more boorish than haggard as was in the case of sorrowful Neal Page (Steve Martin) who was foiled at every turn by the brilliant oafishness of Del Griffith (John Candy). The set-up was ridiculous. After crashing into each other at an airport a series of ludicrous events (including using terrorism as a gag--I know groundbreaking) forced Peter the stuck up go-go architect and Ethan the unyielding buffoon to have to share a rental car cross country so that Peter wouldn't miss his first child's birth. What ensued was puerile jokes on masturbation, drinking the ashes of a dead person thinking it was coffee, crossing the border into Mexico while high on medical marijuana, and stale racial jokes about the possible paternity of the arriving baby to be that of Jamie Foxx. Instead of genuine sympathy for Ethan after his father's death our emotions were tweaked by director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) with soft piano music and tight close up of a teary Ethan. Those scenes felt forced and manufactured. The only truly funny moment was when our hapless adventurers stopped off at the Grand Canyon for Ethan to spread his father's ashes to the wind and he said "Dad, it's like you've been a father to me." There were a few funny cameos but Due Date veered too far off the road and totally missed the exit to comedy. Next time I'll take the detour.

Guest Blogger: Review of A Wrinkle in Time by Anthony L. Carter

Recently, I watched a very telling discussion with my favorite writer, bell hooks.

In this very powerful and straightforward interaction she shared the brilliant truth that the “work of ending domination “ is the “work of love”.

This point was brought to my attention again during the rereading of this wonderful book. A Wrinkle in Time is primary concerned with the ending of domination.

It is clear throughout this book that the only way that the Murry’s will survive and help others in the process is recommitting on a deeper level to the care of one another.

The brilliance of this book is the significance that is given to what many perceive as “faults”. It is their quirkiness, their difference, which will allow for love and redemption. At one point Mrs. Whatsit states: “Meg, I give you your faults.” (p.145). These faults, anger, impatience and stubbornness, allow the protagonist to survive, at a most crucial moment, and save her family as a result.

Unlike typical tales of heroes and their quests, Meg is never alone.

Through parental love and acceptance, she like her brothers, have been taught that they are more than enough. It is this nurturing upbringing that allows each of the children to take on the unthinkable.

The seemingly ubiquitous IT.

The introduction of this seductive and seemingly innocuous being is exhibited by happy children and their families smiling and enjoying life. Like a number of things that appear wonderful and yet turn out the complete opposite later, the smiles and joy hide a deeper and more sinister reality.

What is so frightening about this concept is that it is seductive to both the reader as well as the characters who encounter it.

However, as a result of being granted the gift of healthy emotional resources, the young protagonists are not so easily tricked. The children are taught to see with not only their eyes but with their minds, intellect and emotions.

They will not be duped.

My move reviews: The Help

This movie is not a social commentary on the horrors of American apartheid in the early 1960s. It's basically a chick flick wrapped in the demagoguery of preaching against racism and the downtrodden black maids, and the bad treatment they receive at the hands of skinny white debutantes. That being said I liked the movie. Sure it was filled with archetypes: Skeeter (Emma Stone) as the plucky, liberal I can see what nobody else can see main character, Aibileen (Viola Davis) as the steadfast dignified servant, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) as the whining spoiled racist and Minny (Octavia Spencer) as the sassy with a dark-side side-kick; but overall it was a solid film. Marketed as a drama I think its funnier moments were the best played. Viola Davis hums when on screen giving a layered performance that demands for her to be given bigger roles. She brings her anger and emotions almost to a boil then blanches them off making you want to lash out against the people that harm her. I enjoyed the chemistry between Minny and her hapless boss Celia Foote (played with some breadth by Jessica Chastain). They created a touching comic duo: Celia-"They [the debs] don't like me because of what they think I did." Minny- "They don't like you 'cause they think you white trash!" The few men in this movie are nothing more than set pieces used to propel the story forward by their dastardliness. One thing I must say...can we please stop violating pies. Over all this was a good movie.

Is Ben Affleck my Soulmate?

When Ben Affleck's character, Doug MacRay, reads in voice over that it's never too late to start your life over in the surprisingly good movie "The Town" (read my review here) it got me wondering. Can there be do-overs in life? And if not--at least second chances? Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald depressingly said "There are no second acts in American lives." But what if that wasn't true? As you know (because you've been reading my blogs), I have recently been wrestling with this very notion of trying to reinvent myself after years of toiling in worker bee pods in cubicle-covered fields of Mister Charlie's Corporate America. Each day I enter that giant glass phallus of greed, I feel globs of my soul ooze away, right there in the four-story marble lobby next to the company's $10,000,000 giant mural. I disguise my disgust at this gilded cage by doing my work well and collecting a paycheck. But my creative side that has yearned to be free since my first attempted manuscript at age 8—the story of a dinosaur who lost its way, which was my first foray into existential narration—feels as shriveled and as vulnerable as Korob and Sylvia's true stick bug-like forms that die without the use of their powerful transmuter at the end of Catspaw--one of my favorite Star Trek: TOS episodes. I remember being struck by their ultimate loneliness and smallness. It still makes me sad. I don't want to end up smoldering away into oblivion with the world's eyes averted.

When I released my first book I sent out an email blast to hundreds of people to build interest in Solstice. I received many well wishes and congratulations, but curiously, an author friend sent me an interesting reply. He offered his input on my thirst for success: "...Here is a telling statistic: there are only about 300 full time authors in America." He went on to say that even by selling 10,000 books I would only stave off poverty and reality for about a year. "The present set-up of the book market is not really conducive to success for the first-time author." Of course it wasn't all discouraging. He ended the email with: "However, hopefully you will be the exception."

My writing is not a vanity project (well, to a certain extent at least). I think all creative people have an inner desire to be praised for their work. But like Affleck and his gang of toughs learned in the movie "The Town," life has a way of drawing you back in. During the last several years I sometimes felt like Kali, the massive asteroid from Arthur C. Clarke's Hammer of God, was threatening to fall upon me. Looming in my horizon were the issues of dementia with my aging mother and financial calamity. I eloquently bellyached about it here. But this predicament almost seemed premeditated; an entrapment of sorts. With every joy and elation came a damnation. I was beginning to think I was cursed. I had been writing about witchcraft for almost 5 years afterall. I heard friends and celebrities toss around words like "passion" and "calling" which were abstract concepts to be sure. If God could be so straightforward with Jada Pinkett-Smith and JK Rowling it seemed my calling was printed on an index card at the bottom of a tree in a dense wood behind a giant prehistoric fern that I was supposed to find in the midst of a downpour. Over the past several years I've seen friends start successful career-changing endeavors on nothing more that whimsy, and even though I am ecstatic for their good fortune, I oftentimes feel like Celie dogging that mailbox while asking Mister "Anything come for me?"

Twice this past week I've heard two young men tell me that they want to do something different in their lives although they habitually procrastinate. I said to them, "Do it before it gets too late; Look at me." But then later I thought: Why is it too late for me? Now, I don't want to keep ladling on the complaints so I must recognize my part of the equation. I feel that I am in a renaissance of my life where I recently have reached a proliferation of work. I've written and created more in the last 6 years than I have in the previous 40. Maybe I'm a late bloomer. A second "careerer." Famed French director Robert Bresson, who was called the patron saint of film, didn't start filming until his mid 40s. Rodney Dangerfield sold aluminum siding for 15 years before getting back into show business at 45. Colonel Sanders didn't franchise his 11 herbs and spices until he was 65 after many years of failed ventures. And my personal favorite (and yes because he's a writer and, yes, because he's the author of one of my all-time favorite books), Richard Adams, didn't publish Watership Down until he was almost 53. So maybe I should shake the detritus of dispair from my shoes and forge ahead like a good rabbit should.

But one thing I've learned in this ordeal of life is to pray. Pray not for the material but the circumstance to better myself and the world I live in. Now, when I say prayer I don't mean the "Lord gonna bless me with a man and some money 'cause I sure done worked hard" kinda prayer. What I mean is a prayer for an inner peace that would lead you in the direction you must go, remembering along the way to stop and remember what you're working for. To pray and be thankful that you can work and work hard toward your goal. To say that you are grateful to get this second chance in a infamously unforgiving world. My hardships and trials will only serve as more coal for the engine of my creativity. I must learn to savor these times because many people only have mediocrity ahead of them and no clue how to end it. Maybe that's the point: To get out into your own life. Maybe it's not one index card but many index cards. Bad romantic comedies have taught us that there is ONLY ONE true love of your life. My ex said it best: "What are the odds that there is only one soulmate for you. With 6 billion people you probably have hundreds maybe thousands of soulmates. You've just got to find at least ONE of them."

And just like my old buddy Doug MacRay in "The Town" may not have found his soulmate, he did, however, find a way to try to get a second chance. And so can we all.

Darwin wasn't naturally selected

You know it's bad when the simple query, "why does the black guy always die first?" returns 7,990,000 results in 0.14 seconds. This specter has once again raised it's head this summer—no, not the jive-talking gold-toothed jiggabots of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen infamy—but in the movie X-Men: First Class. It would seem that one character won't be making it to the second class. Can you guess which one? I must confess, for the record, that I have not been a fan of any of the X-Men adaptations since Storm uttered one of the most sorry-ass lines ever written for a movie. EVER. "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else." I usually give filmmakers a lot of latitude when it comes to imagery when dealing with black people. I liked the 1986 musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Some critics and many friends have debated me over Levi Stubbs' voice performance as well as the architecture of the juicy red-lipped carnivorous vegetable Audrey 2. I wasn't put off by it and actually saw the satire of a cool R&B-singing plant helping Rick Moranis' pipsqueak Seymour Krelborn get the girl, all the while priming earth for conquest.

Being somewhat of a visual anthropological hobbyist (which is the study of culture(s) through films, photography, et al) I've been fascinated with imagery since early childhood. As a lad in the seventies I consumed a lot of racist material in the forms of cartoons, comic books and movies. From the black maid whose ashy legs and droopy stockings were all we saw as she bounced around screaming "Hep me! Hep! Itsa mouse!" on Tom and Jerry; to the creative leap many comic book writers / artists made by putting the moniker "black" in front of a black character's name as if we couldn't tell he was black by the way he dropped his "g"s when speakin' or his 3-foot wide afro-shaped helmet a la Black Lightning. Jared M. Breaks it down here. Let's not forget how Jeff Burton's Dodge, the quiet cerebral antonym to Charlton Heston's swaggering mid-life machismo, ended up stuffed and on display in the original (and still the best) Planet of the Apes. I guess that goes to prove that a black scientist ain't nothin' but a sandwich even in futuristic dystopias. Thank God for Star Trek--a place in the universe where people of different cultures, races, genders, and even species, could come together and become a grander mosaic. Here, the characters recognized that in their disparateness was their greatest strength. Whoopi Goldberg, who later played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, described Uhura as a role model for her, recalling that she told her family, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"

As a child I could not articulate any of these feelings of dissatisfaction. I just observed and absorbed. I just knew something—or an entire race of people—was missing. I think this, in part, fueled my desire to create. All too often we of the African diaspora are marginalized both by mainstream Hollywood and Madison Avenue. If you recall the commercials of the 1970s-80s, and if you saw brown faces in them, all you got was a lot of "sangin'" and dancin', as if black viewers could only digest the content if it were attached to musical numbers. My friend, L. Trey Wilson, the brilliant playwright, once told me of a party he attended where he met the producers of the groundbreaking Showtime series, Queer as Folk. One of the producer's response to Mr. Wilson's question of why a show about gay people was made up of an entirely white cast was that he felt he couldn't write an authentic black gay character sufficiently. Translation: So, instead of doing research or the unthinkable of hiring a person of color (there's no room for affirmative action in gay cable) they decided to omit black queers entirely. Really? Shylock said it best in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:

If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

At least in the original UK version, created by Russell T Davies of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame, one of the main gay boy's closest friends was a biracial girl named Donna. She had the best line of the entire series when Nathan was complaining that his mother was persecuting him and snooping through his things because he was gay. Her quip? "I'm black and I'm a girl. Try that for a week!"

So often we complain about the establishment and yet we perpetrate the worst kinds of stereotyping. I'm sure I will make many a enemy saying this, but I must take E. Lynn Harris and Tyler Perry to task on their overly melodramatic archetypes. Villainous Stephen Harris (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) and Brain White's (I Can Do Bad All by Myself) characters were written so broadly that I thought each was going to break out in maniacal laughter while twirling an imaginary mustache. And let's not forget to mention the hypocritical morality play: The Family that Preys. The overwrought plot's central adulterous affair between a black woman played meanly by Sanaa Lathan and her philandering boss, Cole Hauser, lacks sex-appeal or even sleeze. Of course, when the shit gets stuck to the Gucci loafer, the black woman bears the brunt of the fallout (losing her job, house, Mercedes AND husband) while her white lover continues in his marriage running a multi-million dollar corporation. Yancey Harrington Braxton and Basil Henderson were so patently Dynastysian in Not a Day Goes By and Mama Dearest by E. Lynn Harris that it was like reading flash cards written as Cliff Notes for Melrose Place or The Colbys for people who didn't understand all the pretentious campiness.

Ironically, it took a gay southerner to buck the kill-off and remediate the black characters to obscurity. Alan Ball's Trueblood took Lafayette (who was killed early on in Charlaine Harris's fist novel in the Sookie Stackhouse books) and Tara (an acquaintance of Sookie who is underused in the novels) seriously. He created great characters for two great actors; not only have their roles been expanded in the HBO smash-hit, but they've become fan favorites. They are never fodder, filler or throwaway characters yet they enrich the show. Devona Walker explains it here. Which goes to prove: when you see things in living color they become much more vivid.

By means of perfect selection

Are you doing what you're meant to be doing? And if you're not do you know why? In 1987 I knew what I was born to do. Since then not so much. With the exit of the Oprah Winfrey Show (heavily-laden with regular doses of platitudes, gratitudes, girl power and giveaways—You! And you! And you are going to Austraaiiiiiilia!! There is an absence of the feel-good-about-yourself politicking this soft, brown mother of the American exorcism-of-inner-child-pain-by-broadcast has taught millions to cherish. Ironically I've been ruminating over the very subject of "my passion" and "my calling" for the last few weeks; that coinciding with Oprah's last show was either devine or fate, anyway it gives me raison d'blog.

Unlike many I didn't take some lighting quick road leading me straight to my life's work. There were no 4:00 am whispers in the dark heat of a southern night—though I did have a dream of God that we'll get to later—imprinting me with an internal Marauder's Map of life's foul players visible for me to see and therefore avoid. Pride, hubris, debt, bad lovers, missed opportunities, illness, chicanery and pain. It seems that some are given clear instructions. Or rather they find that perfect mix of ambition and alchemy to influence the universe into absolute cooperation. This begs the question: was Oprah born or was she made? I've discussed my potency being gelded by life here. But those words were written during a particularly high period of lowness, self-pity and vexation. I have recently begun laying a course trying to chart my way through the fog of my life. Not trying to sound mawkish but I still remember those days at Johnson C. Smith University making everybody laugh when my best friend Terence Powers (RIP) and I, at the urging of our classmate Tini, would act out the seduction scene from John Boorman's classic Arthurian epic Excalibur. His Merlin to my Morgana; "Merlin, give me the Charm of Making. Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha" I would emote emotionally. Many uncontrollable giggling sessions were due to this role play during college nights where we would discuss metaphysics, race, sexuality and the indestructibility of thought. As if we were chatting at the Deux Magots or the Algonquin or members of the 306. Of those sessions more than most were fueled by cheap weed and even cheaper beer but scholarly discourse did occur on occasion. But those far off dreams of my early twenties seem so clear yet so distant. Like when Solstice ruminates over her long distant past in The Goddess of Light.

Her fingertips were dirty, blemished from the oil and dirt from the withered old sheets of paper bound in a crummy leather book. Slick dark circles enumerating the years that now spanned before her, hidden in the folds of these decrepit old journals. Solstice cracked open one of the dusty books and read from it as if it was scripture. Her growth as a tyrant marched from the pages like whispering embers rekindling a sodden log. Tendrils of despair and hate populated those empty spots in her memory where nothing resided but the void. The void that comes with living a long and hateful life.

It was all so important and clear then. I knew exactly what I was meant to do. Terence had a dream of being a grand essayist and poet living on the left bank in Paris. I was going to go to NYU film school then on to become a great film making living in Harlem. Let's see how that all worked out shall we? I am living in Harlem and as of yet my movies haven't left my desktop (unless one of you has blackmail in mind) and Terence did live in Paris until the French government asked him to leave when they found him in an illegally sublet apartment six years after his work visa expired. I felt film was my destiny and purpose in life. I made my first movie in 1974 when I was eight years-old with my mother's Yashika 35mm camera; where my Planet of the Apes action figures crashed-landed their spaceship in Candyland; Molasses Swamp was quicksand and there was a tribe of blood thirsty head hunting Lollipops. I created a slideshow with special effects (I drew laser beams on each slide with a magic marker). My mother and father was an audience of two and I remember having a tantrum when you couldn't see the laser beams when it was projected onto the screen. Next came the Building that had an Earthquake. It was a cross between The Towering Inferno and the Poseidon Adventure. A group of survivors in the world's tallest skyscraper had to make their way through debris after the building was bombed. There was murder, rape, intrigue and redemption. I kept a list of all my movies (and their running times by using my cousin's borrowed basketball timer). It was my mission in life and I was passionate about my own little Hollywood right there in Old Town. I created so many movies that for several years I even had my own awards show with a ceremony and everything. I really had big dreams.



Now both God and my zodiac has given me a mission that I haven't the slightest idea what that mission is. It shouldn't be this obscure. Maybe I should make a short film about finding it. Which leads me back to the dream I spoke of earlier. One summer between the fifth and sixth grades I had a nightmare. I was walking down the street between my mother's and my cousin's houses. Usually I would cut across the field but this time I was on the blacktop, then a gravel road. As I approached their driveway God approached me. I stopped and looked at him. He said "Daryl, I have a mission for you." Just as I asked him what that mission was an enormous hand reached out for me from behind a row of hedges and blackberry bushes. It was red and covered in pus dripping boils. It grabbed me by my white three hole belt that held up my red lee jeans and pulled me out of my brown earth shoes! I woke up screaming never knowing what my mission was. And that's been my problem ever since. Once for fun I looked up my horoscope chart online and a coworker passing-by saw it. She remarked that I had a kite aspect in my natal chart. When asked she said "The Kite pattern is a fairly rare chart configuration." She went on to say that people with kites are usually gifted and have a "mission" — YIKES — in life. There will be great difficulties but once started on their mission "then a kite pattern makes life fairly smooth." Madonna has a kite and *GASP* Oprah does too! Does this mean that I was born with some purpose in mind by the universe? Its a struggle many share and one that particularly perplexes me. I need to find out what my mission is. Besides it gives me another reason to blog next week.