The Lost Ones.

Growing up there was always a permanent carpet indention where my lean body would sit, way too close to the television with my feet kicked up in the air, hands firmly rested under my chin, fully immersed in one movie or another. With little to no exception, the movies were almost always genre films; westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, adventure/action.  “The Goonies”, “The Warriors”, “Willow”, “Ferris Bueller”, “A League of their Own”, and all the various versions of their like were my chosen darlings well into my late teens.  It is therefore shocking and perplexing to me how few of those movies make it into our cineplexes these days.  I don’t think future me could have convinced younger me that one day these types of films would disappear completely from our landscape. Were teens going anywhere? Was Romance? My dad grew up on westerns and gangster films, and I grew up on Clint Eastwood and Walter Hill whom even when they weren’t doing westerns were still doing westerns. I had Scorsese who made so many gangster films that even to this day over a broad and multifaceted career, he still gets accused of only being that – where possibly could it all go, I might’ve asked? “What do you watch in their stead?

“What interests me is treading on familiar territory. With the motorcycles and vampires, it makes the audience comfortable to know that there’s something familiar; i.e. there’s the genre thread through it. Then I try to turn the genre on its head or make an about-face, and just when I make the audience a bit uncomfortable, I go back and reaffirm—“Yes, its alright”

— Kathryn Bigelow

The quote above is from a 2017 profile with director Kathryn Bigelow in Interview magazine. Within its confines lie the intersection at which genre introduces commerce to art. The recognizable conventions, tropes, settings, are all apart of its commercial appeal, which makes it viable for consistency as a consumable good in the marketplace of image making. The “about-face” is the introduction, or injection of art into the commercial. This space where the artist stares into the reflections of past creations (and thusly contemporary expectations ) and challenges them by reupholstering trope, relocating the settings, transforming the identities of the heroes, transferring the power, or other number or reformations challenging the audience - which either heightens or hinders it’s immediate success in the present, while sometimes setting up its appreciation for the future. When Kathryn Bigelow takes the vampire film trapped in a contemporary setting, and splices it with the western, it causes a chain reaction of mutations and re-combinations that produce something refreshing enough, exigent enough to fulfill the demands of art while existing fully within the safer confines of ritual enjoyment. When John Carpenter mixes elements of the adventure, fantasy, comedy, and action film and then shifts those very same expectations we get something wholly of the legacy of these genres and yet distinctly apart enough to feel singular, fresh, which emotionally can feel just as good as brand new. The genre used to have what I like to call sitters, of which there were all kinds from big names like Ridley Scott, and Michael Mann, smaller ones like Craig R. Baxley, and everywhere in between Simon West and Irvin Kershner. They were likely to move into other types of films, just not very far from where they started. The jumps made were in sub-genre, or in budget, but they did not move out of making genre pictures.

“I was very sympathetic and identified with the New Hollywood”. But his films “are, or were, rather retro. That is to say, I didn’t tackle subjects. I wanted to do genre films”

— Walter Hill

Consider this; when Kathryn Bigelow made “Near Dark” in 87’ it was made on a paltry budget of 5 million dollars, it only made 3.4 at the box office. Ridley Scott’s “Legend” (1985) was made for 25 and made 23.5 at the box office. Walter Hill’s “Streets of Fire” was made for 14.5 million and made back 8. The point here is two fold; A. To quote Mel Gibson’s character in “The Patriot” “Aim small, miss small”, a small budget most likely means a small loss and B. Great ideas do not have to cost upwards of 100 million dollars. Hollywood’s undignified obsession with big returns is a product of late capitalism’s effect on an industry that formerly at least faked a desire to produce and foster artists as well as profit- has led them into a noose wherein they have become their own worst enemy. It has disintegrated the idea of “niche”. Every movie is try to appeal to every quadrant, to every person possible, and yet the consistently modest budgets of horror have constantly proved an almost MCU like record of success at the box office. Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was made for just under 5 million dollars, it made nearly 300 million at the box office. “M3GAN”, “Barbarian”, and this year’s major “Longlegs” were made on 10 million or less and grossed anywhere from 4 to 30 times their budgets, and yet execs in all their myopic wisdom have only brought from that that only horror is worth investing in. Despite the fact that historically Nora Ephron’s seminal rom-com classic “Sleepless in Seattle” made over 200 million on a 21 million dollar budget. That Penny Marshall’s “Big” made just over 150 million on 18. That “Predator” made 100 million on 18 and that the very next year when that same John Mcteirnan helmed “Die Hard” it made 140 on a 35 million dollar budget. Despite the fact that more recently the first entry in the John Wick franchise made nearly three times it’s budget back, and that trend would trend upwards as it went along. That last years “Anyone But You” garnered 220 million on a 25 million dollar budget. It might long since have been forgotten that The Matrix made almost half a billion on a 63 million dollar budget. I’m being exhaustive on purpose, because the evidence is overwhelming. No one seems to realize how vital the pocket films were to George Lucas (THX, American Graffiti), Steven Spielberg, (Sugarland Express, Jaws) and James Cameron, furthermore they have discouraged up and coming directors from even wanting to be one. Save for horror, directors today only aim for the extreme poles in which Hollywood has forced them to exist. No one seems interested in being the next Sam Peckinpah, Nora Ephron, or Kevin Smith, let alone a Michael Apted, or Kenneth Branagh, and even if there are some that should want to, they aren’t allowed to. Hollywood remains steadfastly willing to lose massive amounts of money on these titanic undertakings who’s marketing arms cost almost as much as it does to make the movie (“Fall Guy” I’m looking at you) in the first place. Movies that place directors who may not be ready for such largesse, and politics in career defining positions (Josh Trank) much too early.

Large budgets being conflated with better films a (most readily assumed because of availability of tech and resources) is a short sighted mistake, but a common one. An essential aspect of the genre film is necessity, the very same necessity that has been phrased as the “mother” of invention. The problem with making 100 million genre films is that by necessity it inhibits, impedes, and sometimes asphyxiates the other vital aspects of the genre film, like personality, deviation from expectation, and strange genre bedfellows, all of which involve risk, something that that much money on the line has discouraged studios from allowing to the point of near madness. Making movies for cheaper doesn’t guarantee a lack of this kind of interference, but it damn sure helps. Many of the greatest things we’ve ever seen on film were born out of the need to create when there wasn’t enough resources, this was true from Chaplin to Spielberg and beyond. This does not simply relegate itself to the physical, or in what we see. There is something about the charms of films made on relatively modest budgets, that many times when they didn’t have the resources to invest in more time-consuming dazzling sequences, they invested heavily in other aspects of the prodcution that woiuld make it pop, or end up enhancing the experience. The Sam Raimi of Spider Man and far worse “Dr Strange” is markedly different than the Sam Raimi of “The Evil Dead”, “The Quick and the Dead”, or “Drag me to Hell”. The inability of Spielberg and crew to get that very expensive shark to work properly, famously caused them to have to cut a lot of scenes of the shark, which allowed the movie to build up its legendary sense of tension. The beating heart, the central draw of the Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander movies are not its special effects but the relationship between Connor MacLeod and Ramírez. The western is powered by it’s themes and it’s simplicity, not by the audacity of its ambitions, this was the failure of “Wild Wild West”. Without personality, the distinct quality of the person behind the camera that becomes something the audience connects with and identifies readily, we lose out on Jerry Zucker’s to make “Airplane” or “Ghost”. Russell Mulcahy to make a “Highlander” or “Ricochet”. No Joel Schumacher to make The “Lost Boys” or a “Time to Kill”. No Ivan Reitman (his son now another casualty of the two stop indie darling to Tentpole pipeline) to make “Stripes”, “Ghostbusters”, or “Kindergarten Cop”. No Andrew Davis to make “Above the Law” or “A Perfect Murder”, all of which christened some movie star or another from Patrick Swayze to Steven Seagal, to Viggo Mortensen. The death of the genre film, is the death of the mid-budget, is the death of the movie star, is the death of our variety. The loss of our ability to enjoy a movie without the weight of being the next best movie ever made or a monument to cultural impact.

“I made movies to satisfy the studios production schedule, to see that those movies are received enthusiastically overseas today is something I never dreamed of. I never imagined such a thing happening”

— Seijun Suzuki

Both art and commerce co-exist when you have plenty of choices in between the polar extremes of a casino like environment. What we have now is not a co-existence, it is an oppression, it Is corporate tyranny over artistic expression. In a way our cinema has become a mirror image of our society, at this point there are only two classes; the supreme money makers and the impoverished. There is no in between, there is no middle class, there is no upper middle class. If horror as a genre seems to be “elevated” it is simply by its way of its isolation, as arguably the only genre film currently en-vogue, it has no one besides itself to mirror its artistic flexibility, not only in quality but discipline. Film critic André Bazin had this to say in his book “What is Cinema” about an observable set of westerns coming out of the evolution of the genre; “The superwestern is a western that would be ashamed to be just itself and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence - an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest, in short some quality extrinsic to the genre and which is supposed to enrich it”. The words should sound familiar to not only those tired of hearing about “elevated horror” but to those who insists upon its existence as an example of “nothing new under the sun” and of a key element in the making of a “superwestern” or elevated horror film – a disdain for the genre in and of itself. One listen to any of the tidbits of conversation Osgood Perkins had on the subject of horror, and that dissent Bazin mentions is made explicitly clear. What is also clear that these things are vital to a healthy eco-system. That competing interests, niche targeting, and paradoxical points of view are integral ingredients to that health.

“I think one of the things about being a director is, you should always try to re-create within yourself the kind of emotions you had watching film when you were very young.”

— Walter Hill

A lack of true genre films in our theaters (and by consequence a kind of specialist director) limits the economy of people as well as the actual economy of financing and profit, it limits the economy of directors, of costumers, set designers, effects people, and of course actors. It cuts off directors from cutting their teeth in a place necessity often becomes ingenious. Prevents risk, because the movies are almost always too expensive to take any. It all but annihilates the soft whisper of influence and forces filmmakers to instead try and recreate the work of their role models. Think of Nicolas Winding Refn talking about his own influences in the making of “Valhalla Rising”; “Valhalla Rising is a fusion of my upbringing, basically. Everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of. There’s the samurai, there’s the western, there’s the spaghetti western, there’s a sci-fi movie, a drug movie, there’s Snake Plissken, there’s Trakovsky, Herzog, Kubrick, and Malick. It’s just one big fusion of everything I grew up on”. If we don’t have a generational version of Carpenter to make “Escape from New York” which is the vine from which “Snake Plisskin” bloomed, (who himself evolved out of the womb of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns) if we don't have a Gary Marshall or Nora Ephron who in effect say “I love romance and pictures specifically about women” and I will continue to make my home in this arena rather than try to prove myself by moving upwards”, then what are we left with? It could be argued that we are seeing it right now, because this isn't new Hollywood has been stripping itself of one of its most vital forms for 20 plus years now. We have the aforementioned lack of variety in the types of films that we see in our theaters, in 2023 the only Western in the commercial mainstream cineplexes was Killers of the Flower Moon, (I would hesitate to call that picture a true genre piece) The Creator arguably the only major science fiction release, the last Indiana Jones was the only adventure film, and maybe two major rom coms were released. The true B-movie has all but disappeared unless you have a Tubi account. We are seeing less sex than ever before on our screens, we are seeing more rich people, and less and less working class folks depicted on our screens, and not surprisingly less working class actors on our screens. Though we may have more representation for people of color and black folks the representation is somehow more hollow and less complex or interesting than a great deal of the things that came before it. Every and any director who's compunctions might be geared towards becoming a genre director is instantly moved up into making tentpoles that frequently expose their glaring limitations rather than their shining strengths. Though the clarion call of “there are no movie stars today!” may indeed be a tale as old as time, and hollow, but it holds more resonance now than it may have ever before because so many actors who clearly have the stuff have none of the types of movies that uphold or properly display their talents. There is no real counter to the fact that any era of Hollywood routinely labeled as “the best” is an era in which genre is flourishing, it could also be said that many of Hollywood's worst eras were immediately followed by rejuvenation, so there is some hope. Then again (and I admit some bias here) something feels off about this particular time we are existing in. Something feels ominous. It may be the expressions of late capitalism and the clear desperation from those on high to maintain status quo despite its failings being so obvious in just about every institution standing, but this barren-ness, this steady decline of health in just about every facet of our lives, this shocking lack of invention, bordering on hatred has produced more anxieties than I’ve ever felt which then leads me to ask what is there for future generations to follow, to be influenced by, to challenge? Are the kids even leaving indentions on their floors anymore? When more and more folks are making phone calls in the theater, taking shots of the screen, are the movies even transfixing folks any more? What’s left when there’s not much left?… I shudder to think.

Beyoncé's Pray You Catch Me: A Gift of Melancholic Vulnerability

Beyonce is 40 just 40. I say that not in regard to how she's aged, But to what she's done what she's accomplished in what to me is a very short time. Her discography sounds and feels longer stretched out across time than her age. And it's a discography with a seemingly endless amount of ubiquitous hits and astonishing deep cuts. So one would think picking a fave would be a difficult task, but when thinking about my favorite Beyonce track it really was quite easy. Though I wouldn't say “It’s not close, it feels that way regardless of whether I would say or not. The track in question; 2016's “Pray You Catch Me”. The track for me represents everything that makes Beyonce great and everything that made lemonade the definitive classic that it is. It’s sung with the kind of precision and discipline that has made Beyonce one of our greatest vocalist. It’s distant enough, and yet as the rest of Lemonade would continue to amplify - it is intensely personal, to a point that goes beyond merely knowing the “what” of a painful event, or even the “how” of a personal response and or feels, and travels further yet into the recesses of a conversation with one’s subconscious to reveal a vulnerability rarely articulated by Beyonce or any artist. What I love about the song is how beautifully, poetically, and easily it captures the complex emotions behind betrayal by someone you love so deeply. It conveys precisely a contradiction of emotions to such an exactidude and level of relatability that I dare any listener to not start cracking a little bit when you ponder the existence and the connection between the words. “I’m praying to catch you whispering, I pray you catch me listening”. Would seem a conflict of interest but it’s exactly the kind of twisted form of emotional incongruity we display in such a weakened vulnerable position. The want, dare I say it can feel like a need- to both catch the object of our affection in the midst of their betrayal and to let them see us is a type of narcissistic revenge scenario wherein a play in our minds sees the person who has hurt us seeing that hurt and realizing what they’ve lost - as we now having found imaginary closure - find ourselves able to move on. I’ve been cheated on twice in my life and both times I found myself playing out scenarios much like the one Beyonce and Co. so remarkably describe, even now as Beyonce vocalizes “I can taste the dishonesty”.

“CONSTANTLY AWARE OF IT ALL, MY LONELY EAR PRESSED AGAINST THE WALLS OF YOUR WORLD”

It’s one of my favorite lines of music ever. Heart wrenching in its stilted disjointed word play , and so achingly descriptive of the isolation and incredulousness of the scribed lover. Lesser artist than Beyoncé and Co-Writer James Blake ( Kevin Garett is also credited but in spirit and soul this feels like James Blake) migh’tve gone with a more straightforward version of this to the effect of “Boy Im not dumb I been watching and hearing everything that’s going on”. But this is not an anthem about pain, its not Kelis's “Caught Out There”. Its not Bill Duke in the interrogation room in “Menace II Society” repeating “You Know you done fucked up Right”. It’s not even a vocalization, what’s being described isn't even a conversation, nothing has been revealed. We are being made privy to the hurt before the release, the calm before the storm, a journal, a scene written on page before it becomes reality, and that’s why it’s so powerful. Pray You Catch Me is the spiritual sister of Stevie Wonder's “Lately”. A quiet, imaginary back and forth reckoning with the harm caused by speaking only to the desire to have the other person merely see it on you. Like that great Stevie song there is no closure, there is no conclusion, the desire is the end, and it is the beginning, because the song is not really about the other person it’s about us, and her, and it’s a beautiful gift from a deeply guarded artist.

You Ask What I Love About Black Women?

“Seated black woman" by felix Eduardo Vallotton

What do I love about black women someone asked? This person was later exposed as not loving black women much himself, but I thought about the question, and it wasn’t enough for a simple tweet, so I kept going. When I saw the tweet the first thought that came to mind was siimply that she is home. There are very few comforts like that of being in the presence of a black woman. Not talking, not dancing, or walking, or even love making (though this is also very high on the list) but simply being in the presence of. Observing, listening, admitting. I love them in yellow, I love them in style, I love them dressed in sass, or in quiet affirmation. Black women are acutely adept at loving themselves and each other, even though either of those things can fail them, or be lost in the wilderness of American hatred. Yet there is no other place where you are as welcome, as loved, as well articulated as to where and exactly when you can get off, and just how fast you may go to hell, and that too is love, and that is home. I love the way a ray of sunshine bows to the visage of a black woman. I love the way they glide in celebration. I love the way they high-five in exaggerative form when they agree on something ferociously. I love the way they invented the eye roll, the side-eye and Twitter. I love the way they intuitively read folk. I love the way they chew gum, and talk shit. The way they smoke, the way they harass men they really like, or sometimes the way they act as if their completely disinterested after having clocked you from a cool kilometer away. I love the way they interact with each other. My mothers, and aunties, and sisters, and friends. They way they lean their head back, or forward, or to the side to infer a myriad of things from "You know he did" to "Listen", to "Dont play with me". I loved the way my grandmother had a million different ways to use "Mmmhmm" ( a quality which those who know me say I inherited).

My late Grandmother Leanna Brock

I used to be prone (in my mischievous times as a child) to watching my two sisters play with dolls from under their bed, cackling over my hands as they covered my mouth, pretending along with my brother not to be fascinated by their imaginations, their ability to carve into time and space, bend reality to their will. Often times I wondered if they were playing at all. There are expressions in the way black women speak and interact of a type of bond in those interactions that feels as if it's what actually holds the world together. As if the very matter of the planet would burst and fragment if ever we were to actually annihilate that bond. I love that a reprimanding from a black woman is much like the remedies from our grandmothers and great grandmothers -less about the remedy, and more about the care behind it. A black woman's mouth can be cider, or castor oil. I love that black women can find so much space in so little real estate. Despite the fact that the world seems to despise them ( though for me that spite is infatuation playing at being hate, but what does that matter if all the outward aesthetics are as harmful as genuine hate) they find a corner, a pocket, a gap, and they make it their own black ass space. I remember being at a party sometime ago, with a black male friend. It was Christmas, and the air was still, but crisp. It was Los Angeles so, it might've only been sixty five degrees which to us is below wind chill. It was an ugly sweater party, so the racial make-up of the host and guests that would be there was not in question- still, I was taken aback when we arrived, at just how white this party was. Both outside and in there were at least 90 people for each, and all of them white, except me, my eager to please friend, and one black woman off to the right at the border of the shadow in the unlit Kitchen. She stood with her drink, seemingly unbothered, unshaken, but also not impressed. My friend knew her, and tossed a very limp hello in her direction that fit snugly in between the over zealous hugging and Game show host greetings he gave to white folk I had a feeling he barely knew. I tried to mingle with some of the people I recognized, but I felt disproportionately uncomfortable. I wasn’t shy, or mistreated, although a couple of racist jokes had me playing out scenarios in which I could chop the teller in the throat and get away it, but "That shit ain't funny" sufficed. I came back from the cooler and found the black woman still there, holding that drink still, seemingly unbothered, and yet definitely uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part, gave me some hesitation admittedly. Maybe she wanted to be alone, maybe she had found her space, her sanctuary, and maybe she didn't want to share. I approached with a readiness to be on my way at the sight of a frown, or the straight forward answers one gets from black women and black women only when they're disinterested in sharing their time and space- but all that went away from the moment I introduced myself. We are still friends to this day. Black women on approach have this reputation for being mean, nasty, cruel even. I have experienced this on occasion, but far more often they have been like a warm light in a strange room. Inviting, sweet, warm.

The myth of the unapproachable black woman has persisted through media and word of mouth

Latia was all of these things, and more to the point she had created this very black space where she controlled the temperature, the the volume, the entrance. In this very white house she stood there and created this very black space. I wallowed in my uncomfortability, my friend swam in acceptability and respectability, but she claimed her space, cajuned it up, and then graciously shared it with me. Black men long ago seem to have decided to focus on some version of assimilation, either of the standardization of whiteness, or of their strategy and tactics. Black women seem to have had the better focus - the preservation of our culture, of our strategy, of our very soul, but the work is tiring , because it is alone and isolated and too long it's been celebrated through fetishized and demanded labor. Home is what you make it, what have we made black women? I know what black women have made themselves, and I know that biologically they make us, and in many ways they shape us, and for the better. There are bad black women, bitter , cruel, divisive, lost, Terfs, homophobic, and even misogynistic, but the institution of black women isn't poisoned. I can’t say that about black men. I still strongly believe in black men, and I love us, but we have been seduced not by Eve, but by our own Ego. We allowed ourselves to become obsessed with proving our worth to white men, to patriarchy, and white women, rather than to our women. We've discarded our freedom for an idea of it born in white supremacy. So what do I love about black women, I love that their idea of freedom is so pure, so complete, so far reaching , so hot, so scolding, so tangible, and all encompassing, that if we just listen, we would be moved so expeditiously to its gates, we would not need feet. What I love most though about black women, is simply that they exist.

Me and my late aunt robbie

The Last Dance and The Danger of an Agreed Upon Fantasy Presented as Reality

ESPN's much anticipated 10- part documentary “The Last Dance" was just about everything anyone could ask from a doc and more - if what you prize in documentaries is story, revlations and entertainment. It was riveting from start to finish, funny, insanely quotable, and a much more inviting portrait than I would've expected from its subject the notoriously introverted, and reclusive Michael Jordan. It was a fascinating character study not only of Jordan, but of his teammates, bosses, of the Bulls organization, and ultimately of us the audience. But, it is also undoubtedly a fiction of sorts, and one that we all engaged in, one that America frequently engages in, and I found myself troubled by the response to one particular aspect of Jordan's philosophical approach to the game. About mid-way through the documentary Jordan goes back to make his case regarding why it was that he feels he acted the way he did during his tenure with the Bulls, and why he won't apologize for it …

The statement was indeed emotional, and it was clear that Jordan meant what he was saying and that it was a still unresolved source of hurt, but it is still nonetheless a fiction Jordan relied upon to give himself the competitive edge he needed. We should absolutely NOT play that way, work that way, or act that way. It is a fiction the Bulls co-opted and cooperated with in order to make sure that their most prized asset could be his best self but it truly only contributed to Michael Jordan's greatness not to anyone else's. It was fascinating but not surprising to watch the reactions to this statement from not only his teammates on screen, but the audience watching in Twitter who had helped make the doc a must-see event. There was a range of responses, but it wasn’t a large one, and many seemed to support Jordan in his thinking. Others didn’t say anything, even fewer interrogated it.

Reading Phenomology ( a kind of approach to philosophy rather than a philosophical stance or position) it's almost immediately recognizable that a fundamental aspect of human civilization is an agreed upon reality. We have to agree upon what a stop sign looks like, what its signitifers are, what it means, and what its function is. If a group of us dont, it endangers others. The problem is, like most things that have evolved, much of our agreed-upon realities today have little to do with our survival and more to do with helping to justify perverted states of existence like inequality, or rape culture, or various forms of abuse. In other cases it's not so much that it is used to necessarily or directly justify as much as it is improperly correlated with a result rather than a consequence. For example in M Night Shyamalan's recent film “Split" it would not be a reach to say the supposition by the end of the movie is a very precarious, but often repeated notion that abuse makes us stronger people. This is directly extended from the idea that pain makes us better. A fair but now perverted notion found implemented in society prolifically from sport to boot camp. Pain though, is different from abuse, and abuse is what was inflicted upon Anya Taylor-Joy's character in Split, and what Michael Jordan in certain cases inflicted upon his teammates. Pain I believe is an essential and natural component to life directly tied to joy. There could not be one if you never knew the other. Most biological processes involve some form of violence and what could be construed as painful if the objects they were inflicted upon felt what is known as pain ( for all we know maybe they do). In order to make a beautiful garden we must tear and rip from the earth in order to plant the seeds . The lush soil found in places like Hawaii which makes for the exquisite greenery is in part due to the ash of the destructive force known as volcanoes. A human example would be that when I get down on the floor and do push-ups and ab workouts it causes me a great deal of pain but that subsequently leads to the joy of seeing gains. The agreed-upon acknowledgement of this experience leads to the commonality of the expression "No pain no gain". The more common the expression becomes, the more relayed it becomes, the more malleable and flexible it becomes. This becomes a problem because it is actually a rigid concept that best serves the master it belongs to, which is that of fitness. This flexibility, this movement into other realms foreign to it, ( the workplace, relationships ) starts to change its composition overtime, and the more shorthand it becomes, the more the words themselves begin to take on new meaning. They are now open (outside of the bubble and the safety of the realm in which they belong to) to dangerous infidels or invaders like misinterpretation, misconstruing, and conflation. To be specific, pain can become synonymous with abuse. Ignoring the most important distinction between the two, that one is a natural state of things, a natural occurrence, and/or consequence, the other is an act of inflicting the state upon another being. Slavery, Patriarchy, Capitalism, can all be said to contain elements of this position. Torture quite stubbornly supposes that information can be gained from the act of inflicting large amounts of pain, despite little evidence to support it…

These two ideologies stem from the same branch, and I would be remiss to ignore the fact that this is a distinctively male branch. My own personal theory ( one capable of being as off base as Jordan’s) being that it is women who are inherently, biologically, and then of course socially connected and indoctrinated to pain through the various processes of their body ( birth or the menstrual cycle ) and of their existence in a Patriarchal society where they are othered. Being so intimately familiar with pain, they tend to not obsessed with it. It is not dissimilar from the idea espoused by those who live in the hood that they don’t need to glorify it, because they live it (though this too can be interrogated as to its veracity). Women have no need to be curious about pain, because it is such a part of their existence and without curiosity there can hardly be obsession. Kay Wicker writing about what she grasped from Toni Morrison's books wrote …

““We make something out of our pain, we do not let it fester, because we have no use for it, whatsoever.” -Toni Morrison Taught Me Many Things but One Thing Changed My Life”

In her Essay on Beyonce's “Lemonade” bell hooks writes definitively...

“Violence does not create positive change.”

It's important to note this distinction and this difference, Men, who know very little about pain in their lives and are much more sensitive to it than women, are as concerned with it as white people are about crime. Curious about it to the point of obsession. Not knowing it and not having it be a part of our daily lives, it would seem in order to satisfy this curiosity we become either sadist or masochist or both. I want y'all to keep in mind this is not saying that a woman cannot be a sadist or a masochist, it is simply saying that it is definitely not fetishized as a part of the experience of womanhood like it it is men's, even though they are much better at dealing with it, and much more used to feeling it in all its various forms. Many of men's ritualistic activities are concerned with, and centered around inflicting or absorbing pain as a foundational principle, whether in sport or rights of passage. Historically or present day.

I say all this as a critique and an interrogation of one of the more problematic ideologies that I saw spring forth from the documentary. I saw people who even like to concern themselves with social justice espousing these views and sharing these views with Michael Jordan. Without thinking about what it is ultimately that he's saying. Which ultimately considering what he was doing is this : that abuse is somehow a necessary component to greatness, to getting the best out of people. This becomes important to interrogate because Amazon exists and one of the key components of white patriarchal capitalism seems to be abusing and exploiting a workforce in order to get the optimum amount of gain. Sports after all is commonly spoken of as a metaphor for life, so that many of life's lessons can supposedly be grafted from the games. But we have to be careful about grabbing so many said lessons from places where on many occasions wanton violence is sanctioned. This is not the Thunderdome folks, and much of what works inside those stadiums and those rings does not work outside of them in the same way torture does not work. Abusing co-workers, subordinates, and potential girlfriends is terrible as an application in life and yet I’ve seen them in many occasions used and trumpeted quite falsely and stubbornly as effective in things like docking pay, and “negging" women.

Here's the thing, Michael Jordan did not become arguably the greatest of all time because he abused other players and on occasion himself. Michael Jordan became the greatest of all time because he had a skill that he worked on tirelessly, (and he was very skilled in the first place) because he was on a team and an organization that wanted to win with people that were knowledgeable and knew how to apply that knowledge in ways that very few people could repeat. It must be understood that the Bulls scouting department like any other all time great team was in peak condition, and in fact it could be argued that whoever made up the department is amongst the greatest scouting department of all time. In effect it seems as though they did not miss, losing one great functioning player and instantly tapping another who was equal to, and on occasion better than the last. They had arguably the greatest coach in basketball and also arguably the greatest coach in sports history in Phil Jackson who understood all of the various egos in his locker room to such an extent that it can hardly be said enough that is quite possible this was his genius, and that it was a singular genius. There is the fact that Jordan came at exactly the right time where his contemporaries were not as good as he was. That he was in fact the best of his class, and those who are considered as his contemporaries were not actually his peers. Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, many of these men had already had established careers by the time Jordan arrived so that they were fading out just as Jordan was ascending. Add to that the changes in media, and media consumption, the meteoric rise of ESPN, and some great business decisions on behalf of Jordan and his partners, and all of these things came together as a perfect storm to make the conditions ripe for Jordan to be thought of in ways that no player before him and very few after him could ever be thought of, if any at all. The facts are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has six rings and he didn't have to abuse his teammates, Larry Bird although also highly competitive himself and possibly a masochist, did not have to abuse his fellow teammates in order to get his three, and LeBron James has three and may very well end with four and Tim Duncan has five and neither engaged in abuse of teammates. If engaged with as the fantasy that it is, then we can be fine with the propaganda and illusion as part of the drama of sport, but when it is treated as some sort of philosophical truth, or objective reality of the pursuit of success and greatness, it is incumbent upon us to demand interrogation and criticism of that idea rather than take it at face value simply because we now see the end result. Racism, sexism, gender essentialism, were born of this kind of laziness. Many of these stem from ( amongst other things) agreed-upon realities that were in fact subjective fantasies meant to explain away phenomenon, processes, and identities, which were complex, difficult to understand, or hard to define, and guess what, the formula for continued and sustained success in sport is complex, difficult to understand, and hard to define. We seem to be little better at finding rational answers than ancient cultures found for why the sun rose in the East and set in the West. Instead concocting potentially harmful and dangerous platitudes that seep their way into other areas of society where they serve masters of oppression.

I believed and empathized with Michael when he broke down in tears over the way in which people have framed his actions during his tenure with the Chicago Bulls. I believe that he feels as though that it was a necessary component to their winning ways, but that does not make it true. What it is, is a reality, he constructed to give himself a competitive edge that was agreed upon by his teammates and the organization in order to satisfy their best asset it's important to make that distinction so that we understand that while it may be a subjective reality it is most certainly not an objective reality and by far the worst reality that anybody should accept. There are many things to appreciate about Michael Jordan, including the sacrifices he would make for himself, and his rigorous work ethic, but the emotional and physical abuse of those around him is definitely not one of them.

Crooklyn: How I Met My Mother

I don't think I'm at all alone in feeling a deep connection with the Alfred Woodard's portrayal of Matriarch Carolyn Carmichael in Spike Lee's underrated, but finally recieving its due coming of age film "CROOKLYN". The performance is both brilliant, and luminous much like my own mothers smile. Woodard's open window into motherhood allows each of us to peer into the inner lives of our own mothers. Through her, the long suffering, the emotional and physical labor, the "everything to everybody" -ness of a woman, a mother and a wife is made as transparent as spring water in clean glass. Her tender but firm touch with her children reminds me so much of my own mother that with each viewing I am absolutely destroyed by her death as if it were my own. There is a scene where all the children are fighting and Woodard's Carmichael is about to lose it. It’s a scene so visually chaotic, so viscerally combustible, its audibly distraught and physically stressful to watch…

I had seen Crooklyn before, but I hadn't seen Crooklyn until this day almost a decade ago. I had heard my mother speak of her nervous breakdown, but I couldn't see it, and sometimes seeing it is vital, (this is the importance of different stories in filmmaking). My own mother raised 7 children, and I could now see her stressed put out beyond all belief, drawn and quartered by a husband, several children, and the life she wanted for herself while holding down various jobs, and being an rock upon which my father could lean on when the weight of the outside and very white world would crumple his shoulders. My thought was not only “wow I can’t believe she made it", but also no one human being should have to shoulder all of this. Later, I started to ask my mother sincere questions about her life before and during raising us, as well as her marriage to my father, and I found answers that disheartened me to my core. Beyond the divinity of childbirth, ( a branch of their existence so often confused as the root of it) women are rarely afforded their flowers, and rarer still given space to live outside of this wish fulfilled conceptualization of their existence. In Crooklyn Delroy Lindo is not unlikable, he is a decent father, he loves his children, plays with them lovingly, when he is connected with his wife he is sensitive and doting, and I dont see a toxic man, but I do see a free one. He demands respect in a house he occupies much more than he lives in, shallow and oblivious (in ways he would not be if the roles were reversed) to the ways in which his wife provides that freedom until her death. Unshackled by the hypothetical burdens of having to be a full time father (when let's face it he had the time) and a full time husband that has to take care of a half time wife, he can obsessively pursue his dream so that he can perform the one manner of wish fulfillment men take on for women which is that of the unbridled material consumer. He sees that dream so clearly, so intensively he cant see anything else, but that is a freedom he is afforded as a man. Freedom to explore how to do for, love for, find for ones self , with regards to no other. A woman can join the journey, but she is rarely an actual part of it, and rarer still a joint decider. A woman from early on in her life is being raised to be a caretaker, a performer for others. Listen, none of what I say is new, it’s been quantified, researched, and spoken to ad nauseam, by Judith Butler's and Nikki Giovanni's and even Oprah's. Look at the role Zelda takes in her own family as compared to her brothers, a legacy she is handed down from her mother, due to her father and brothers lack of ,and worse still freedom from. Are men never to have children? Should those old school home economics classses only have a litany of girls taking care of eggs and baby dolls and pet rocks?

Knowing what it is my mother sacrificed for me in order to give to me and my siblings autonomy, discipline, sage advice, and most importantly the love she gifted to us in her own unique brand of artistic sensibility and pragmatism, I am humbled, and realize a debt owed. Not a debt of life-giving but a debt of solidarity. One that calls upon me to be as knowledgeable, responsible, patient, and giving of my time with my future children as my mother was. With so little but a sinewy body and a ribbon made of faith that held in place a lid on our exposure to the cruelties of a world, she provided exquisite lives to her children. It says alot that despite many of the horrors of my childhood, the various traumas, it is difficult for me to recall them. Some of that is my own repression, some of that is that my mother covered them, and ate them, a sacrifice far too many mothers make with detriments I dont think we've mined the surface of. It is from my mother that I gather my artistry comes from, and it is a reflection of the flame she so happily encouraged and coaxed out of me. Enduring a tantrum of tantrums when my brothers and sisters bailed on my planned stage play for Darkman the sequel as directed and starring myself. It was her assuring me I was enough when I fell to third place in a school drawing contest, pressing me to follow a dream many others insisted was no more reachable than the icy rings of Saturn with a wire hanger. It was she clapping the loudest at my first performance on stage in "Charley's Aunt". It was through her faith in God I learned the power of that sometimes far too maligned contextual spirituality, and the power of it when used correctly. I love my mother for all she is to herself, and all she allowed me to be. All the vulnerability she gave to me, to cry over that girl that didn’t like me, but not to blame her. To hate fighting, but understand why its important to defend oneself, and to address me as myself, even when I was too uncomfortable in my own skin to utter who I was, and that is what Alfre Woodard brings me back to each time I watch Crooklyn. The immutable strength of that bond, but also of the innumerable harms and sacrifices women make, because rather than reflect, interrogate, and improve upon severely outdated and moded ideas of Motherhood, we slap-dashed a day of appreciation on the map of their humanity to mark the arrival of another year of indebted servitude rather than egalitarian child rearing and support. A "Keep up the good work" slap on the ass, followed by ignorance to what it is they do, while the promise of them doing it mostly alone remains in tact. Instead of the sentimental dog and pony show that it is, Mother's Day should be like a collective bargaining agreement appointment. A day for us to recognize what it is that women have done over the previous year, and how we can be better for the next. A time for adjustment and recalibration that allows us to start making ground on the considerable crevice that exists between the lives of mothers and mothers to be, and fathers of the same. Mothers day should be time of accountability and evolution especially as it pertains to child-rearing that calls upon men to be cognizant and accountable to their lacking, through the appreciation of the women who either birthed them, or are birthing for them, or for any being who takes on that role regardless of the act of birth. A day to actually get to know your mother outside of her motherness, and to expound upon your journey with your wife, or partner. Dont make mothers day the equivalent of the empty gestures associated with Black History Month. It should be a solstice celebration of mothers of all kinds, and by extension the women they are, not the “phenomenal cosmic power in an itty bitty living space” we’ve trapped them into. Happy Mother’ s Day to all the good mothers out there, and to the rest of us, be better, aim higher, take this day to look at them as role models for your own foray into child rearing not inhibited by sex or gender. For my own, I love her, and on that day I have one of my own. I will embrace them and remember to pay forward the debt that is owed. ❤

Hating Lawrence says more about us than the character.

In it's four-year running time Issa Rae's brainchild “Insecure” has become a staple of black must- see television. The hip, talented cast has procured a soap opera like audience that watches just as much for the arc of its three main characters, as to see themselves, or our own dating principles reflected in the show. I say three not because there aren't other characters who might qualify as a main character, but because I believe Issa, Molly, and Lawrence to date are the only characters who have what would qualify as a continuing arc on the show. Of those three there is no doubt that the lightning rod within that show has to be one Lawrence Walker. It’s amazing the swiftness with which Lawrence became the focal point of a very entertaining laugh out loud funny and sometimes problematic cultural (mostly along gender) divide as it pertains to Black Twitter.

Brief synopsis: Lawrence Walker is the now estranged boyfriend of the show's main protagonist Issa Rae. When the show opened we saw that there were bubbling and growing issues clawing at their relationship. Issa's character remarked that he had been unemployed (her actual words were “getting his shit together”) for at least four of the five years they were together. On her birthday, he remembered , but was so stuck in his own shit he ruined it, making her day as sad and pathetic as he felt. They weren't having sex, he barely moved, and the house was consistently in utter shambles. It is from these particular problems that most people's dislike for Lawrence stem as they have voiced it. The great bulk of it lying in Lawrence job status, and subsequently the misreadings, misinterpretations, and misdiagnoses of what Lawrence's issues were because the interest and sympathy was just not there for what was going on with Lawrence but rather how what was going on with Lawrence affected Issa. Heres the thing though, you're all Hella Wrong.

You'll notice I said “all” because I cannot speak about those who despise Lawrence without talking about those who have an unhinged amount of love for Lawrence aka #LawrenceHive. Though these very touched (mostly male) folks have gotten a lot quieter in recent times it's quite evident they still exist as the issue with them was less of anything to do with traits that Lawrence was actually displaying on the screen and more to do with traits they wanted to see in themselves that Lawrence became a reflection of. This is indicative (whether the show meant it or not) of the shows great brilliance.. if we're paying attention and not getting involved in the drama of choosing sides, Insecure is making clear exactly the messiness of dating and it's on all of us. The way that people act from within the show and the way that people respond outside of the show is a perfect example of the quote that goes “We judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions.” The funny thing is, what insecure has showed us especially as it pertains to the response to Lawrence (because in show they've actually done a great job of being quite fair to Lawrence as a person) is that even with actions we only pay attention to the ones that fit the narrative we want to see. Those who see Lawrence as some sort of a cherub only saw his good qualities and those who saw Lawrence as a fuckboi only saw his bad qualities,
or at the very least in each case they raise up the qualities that fit the narrative that they have pieced together and severely minimalize the qualities that don't.

It is that Lawrence is and was a decent guy, as in he’s right where the bar begins, he’s flawed but genuine, that there is not much to support this idea of the disingenuous cretins some folk seem highly invested into plastering onto his make-up. If you see the other kind of “Nice Guy" in Lawrence you placed that on him. Maybe because you’re one of those men, or maybe because your’re someone with a legit bone to pick against those type of men, maybe because he just rubs you the wrong way. Whatever the reasons, Lawrence is simply not that guy. There were and are very few times in the show he acts entitled. He is not the guy who had trouble with girls and or feels like he's always gotten the short end of the stick with women before Issa, he never once brings up his “niceness". His anger with Issa was not over her sleeping the "bad boy" instead of him, it was over the infidelity, and even still later he takes accountability for his role in making Issa unhappy.

There are a couple of phenomenons that I observed in rabid fandoms quite regularly (like sports). One being that my loyalty is misconstrued as never being able to say a single good thing about the other team. If I’m looking to sympathize, empathize with Issa, I cannot with Lawrence. The other being a type of argument that stems not from an actual event, or happening, or action but rather from the presumption (which is usually correct) that there is going to be a certain type of argument made. The problem being that the argument, the event, the person tend to merge. In other words in the case of Lawrence and Insecure it was predicted (and it happened) that “nice guys” guys would immediately see Lawrence as a vindication and validation of their feelings about women, but what was going on in the show didn't back any of this up, and those that argued Lawrence was trash, or a bad boyfriend weren’t backed up in the story either. The arguments that have and had been made about Lawrence on both sides have effectively become a philosophical argument to each other about “Nice guys” rather than the argument over what and who Lawrence actually is. You don't need to go out of your way to prove Lawrence isn't a genuinely good person so that you can disprove the inherently false idea that women historically leave good guys because theyr’re good. The argument is dumb on its face, and the actual argument should remain that being a good guy in and of itself is simply not enough to maintain a relationship no more than love Is.

Let's run down the facts from season 1 as it pertains to Lawrence. Lawrence was “getting his shit together” for four years. Though he had a five year plan that he was strictly adhering to, it would not be unfair to say he appeared to be lazy, unmotivated, pathetic, and prone to being in his feelings. As I've said before the house was regularly and shambles, he never seemed to get up and get dressed, he forgot issa's birthday, and with his friends as well as with Issa he showed a sometimes prickly sensitivity. With Tasha he acted like a fuckboi as well , but context matters and theres a difference between acting like a douche, and being one, and that difference is in repetition. Lawrence led Tasha on by way of his indecision (which let's face it has always been a core issue) BUT this is where the intentions portion of my previous quote comes into play. If in this show Lawrence was the only Avatar, as in the main and only protagonist I think it'd be much more easier for all of us to focus on the fact that the man was clearly in a state of depression (all the signs were there) and how that relates to his laziness and lack of motivation. I mean many of us are experiencing those symptoms right now, not just due to COVID-19 , but the current state of well…everything. If he was alone, we might be watching these episodes talking about the difficulties for any black person in this job market, and more specifically for a black person trying to gain access into the undeniably racist field of tech, and what type of effects that might have on anyone's confidence and their abilities to be sure about their footing or their next step. As Molly tried to explain to Issa once, when you’re lost and can't see the forest for the trees, its hard to find your way out, but this is a show about relationships, written by black women, focused on black women, as it should be. I only find it important to state because many times (again in a brilliant way) Insecure has landed up on one of the inherent problems of relationships; that alone your issues can be looked at just for what they are, but together they are now a part of “my” problem and that's what makes relationships so difficult . Being depressed on your time is great deal easier for me to look at and engage with , than being depressed on my time. More couples than we may acknowledge breakup over the inability to cope with one another’s mental state. Still more relevant to the point everything in the script implies Lawrence was formerly motivated, that there were plenty of good times. Lawrence was in alot of ways a very good boyfriend despite his drawbacks. He was very emotionally supportive, every issue that Issa would have at work he was an active listener, rarely if ever telling her what to do, just listening attentively and cheerleading. He did all the little things, and big things too, from having her spoon ready for her favorite pie on the last day it's available and picking up her dry cleaning, to taking down a video that was causing her major distress. Most importantly despite the fact that Issa was grossly and aggressively passive-aggressive, (her own words at the beginning of S1) refused to, and never did tell Lawrence exactly what her issue with him was after the birthday debacle, he intuitively checked his own core self for the answers and immediately went about fixing things. Cleaning up, getting back on his physical training, and subsequently taking a job that had to be a kick to his pride while still looking for the dream, and when he almost waded back in the waters of his ego about moving on from a job he has to try and focus on his app- Issa checks him and he takes it in full stride. The point being as my old acting coach once told me in class (after she noted a bad performance from me) we all screw up everyday, (more for some of us) it's what you do after that makes you. What Lawrence does after is still being emotionally attentive to Issa's needs without complaining, and without blaming her. He was always a caring lover to Issa, but it was once he stopped caring about himself that he became less attractive to Issa, which is the way it works. Issa herself acknowledges in a scene that takes place after she regrettably cheats with Daniel, saying she had started to take these things for granted. Hardly any of this is subtext, it’s not implicit, most of it is made very explicit in scenes and dialogue.

What Issa is speaking to here is not just guilt. If the act of falling in love is partially about minimalzing or having blindspot to the object of our affections weaknesses, then falling out of love is doing the opposite. As Issa was falling out of love with Lawrence, he went from her hero into some kind of a villain. As she is our avatar into the show, we saw him as she had, except unlike Issa the character (and much like being an outsider to a friends relationship) we didn’t get to experience what it was like to fall in love with Lawrence. So of course from that angle it could be hard to see why Issa ever fucked with Lawrence at all, but right there in plain text it’s made clear. Lawrence and Issa split because life happens, and because they were on different paths. Sometimes that may very well lead you back to that person, but it may also mean the end of relationship for the most part because, I’m sorry folks - most relationships are meant to end. “Insecure” is maybe the most aptly titled show on television. It reflects our own messiness right back at us, if we are willing to take notice. Our need to make villains and heroes out of every story, especially our own. Our biases, our selfishness, our internal conflict, our indecisiveness, our struggles with communication. Disdain for Lawrence is less a reflection of Lawrence the character on the show and more a reflection of an idea about a certain kind of guy that people should rightfully(women especially) despise, rather than the actuality of the character. Nonetheless, yall are Hella wrong . Lol

It Came from The 80’s: What We Can Learn from Maybe The Most Interesting Decade of Film.

Being born in 1979, having my most formative years shaped by countless hours spent in worlds other than my own, worlds that appeared on my TV screen during the formative years of the 80's aesthetic. I cannot claim this piece to be impartial,  or unbiased.  I am an ardent cinephile, I've seen many of the seminal film school standards. I love Marnau,  Kurosawa, Hawks,  Wilder, DeSica, Scorsese, and Wong Kar-wai as much as the next person,  and yet I can and do claim that the 80s was one of the best decades for film.  It was an era that was far more inventive,  at least as influential, and inclusive than it’s given credit for, and far less top heavy than any era of cinema before it.  Much like the fashion and music, the 80's in film was a bit of an anomaly.   It was in many ways a bastard child of its predecessors,  and a reluctant parent to its successors. Conceived in American  imagination, ingenuity, and post modernism as a reaction to the counter culture of the 60’s and 70’s. Both a reduction and an inflation of imagination born of (at least one) of the heights of American hubris,  exceptionalism,  and hypocrisy. In this vacuum, 80's cinema became a free-for-all, indicative of a lopsided economic windfall, avarice, and repetition, that ultimately does a lot to dispel our ideas about creativity.  While the socio economic world of those of us who lived outside the margins were beleaguered by many of these qualities,  the world of make-believe seems to have been bolstered by them.  With the advent of the high concept film, ( the brain child of mega producer Don Simpson meaning a film that could easily be explained in a couple of sentences)  itself the the outgrowth of the major success of Jaws and Star Wars,  the wallets of major studios expecting similar results opened up the door for an anything goes attitude amongst those that might otherwise have been shaky about green-lighting some of the wildest and most imaginative ideas put on celluloid.

Joe Dante's "Inner space" was one of many zany imaginative, ideas to make it to the silver screen in the 80s

Out of the ether.

Think about some of the films that came out in the 80s considering nothing like them had ever been made before.. Conan the Barbarian,  An American Werewolf in London,  Escape from New York,  Blade Runner,  Die Hard,  The Terminator,  Beverly Hills Cop,  Gremlins,  Ghostbusters,  A Nightmare on Elm Street,  Predator,  Big Trouble in Little China. Science Fiction,  Fantasy,  and the action pic were definitely not invented in this era,  but they most certainly endured a prominence,  effect,  and popularity never seen before or after for that matter.  Many of them defining not only their genre,  but the decade.

The Princess Bride, Die Hard, The Breakfast Club and and The Terminator became synonymous with the 80s.

Both Science fiction and fantasy had been explored infrequently and incompletely in previous decades I would gather mostly due to the fact that the technology to properly explore these worlds wasn't yet available.  Following the lasting creature effects of Jaws,  and the special effects in Star Wars the floodgates of money opened, and interestingly enough it seemed when wallets open so to did minds, especially as it concerns the imagination.  Later some of the decades most harrowing misses would become the tipping point that would bend the scale towards the risk averse marketing heavy principality of the current state. The effect of the outlandish approach of the Eighties in my world,  was that film (and to some extent television) began to rival my precious books in ability to take me to other worlds to imagine possibilities other than my own.  I, a black kid from the inner city of San Bernardino, California began to imagine worlds of my own, and from that formed a desire and a passion to become a storyteller myself,  and from that - a belief I could.  ESPECIALLY when in the 80s black men (Black women,  unfortunately were largely left out of this upward mobility until the 90s - ) started being peppered into major roles in major Sci-fi,  action, comedy,  and to a much much smaller extent fantasy films.  After all It can be argued that besides comedy it's been the realm of fantasy,  horror, or action/adventure  where marginalized people have thrived on film. From 1932's Freaks(Horror), to Coffy/Cleopatra Jones (action), Enter the Dragon (Action), Star Wars, Set it off, The Matrix, Blade, and of course Black Panther.   If there are first to be accomplished on film it is usually in these genres. As a black male child in the 80s I watched the ascension of black men in these genres. Billy Dee Williams  (Return of the Jedi) James Earl Jones (Conan the Barbarian) Eddie Murphy (48 hrs,  Beverly Hills Cop)  Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters)  Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon) Bill Duke (Commando,  Predator) Reginald Val Johnson (Die Hard)  Moses Gunn (The Never ending Story) - began to aid in (even the slightest of ways) my ability to envision my place in these worlds.  Thusly to me the decade in film represents two important themes ;  1. The importance of imagination. 2. Representation. These outlier performances and roles allowed me to form my own ideas about representation so that the stale statuesque visual identification of diversity presented in the 80s, led to my full bodied understanding of true representation as one of autonomous character motivation that interacts with, but possesses agency free of the other characters in the film.  In other words I got to think about what it might,and should look like, by seeing what did and didn't work.

The steady but still top heavy appearance of African American males in prominent roles in Fantasy, Comedy, Science fiction, and Action films was vital to my youth.

Take for example “John Milius's Conan the Barbarian”. It was the first and maybe only fantasy film produced even well after it premiered that allowed for women, black people and people of color in the world of Fantasy. Conan's open,  ambiguously-aged magical world was big enough and imaginative enough to include women and people of color in roles that didn't subject them to tropes or limitations common to storytelling before and for some time after 1982. In the lesser sequel both Grace Jones, and Wilt Chamberlain would join the cast, and it only made sense. In this world where Giant pythons the size of some dinosaurs exist,  along with witches,  and sorcerers who can transform themselves into snakes, and horned monsters, why not black men, and women, latino’s and asian men? These people were not just props, but skilled combatants, and powerful magicians, in places I had not and could not see myself. At the forefront of the film is James Earl Jones performance as Thulsa Doom. Large, regal, captivating, camp, Shakespearean. It was the earliest I can remember feeling the acting bug. His performance, and the richness of it, in combination with the way the film paid no mind to it, called no attention to it as if it had accomplished some great deed…Well that’s what made it feel great. This helped me : A.  Imagine that there could be a world in which people of color existed in realms in/and outside of known reality as powerful or more powerful than any reality I seen to date.  B.  Imagine people of color in realms that even in the great literature of giants like Tolkien,  Herbert,  and Lewis,  seemed populated only by white people.  C.  Imagine myself one day playing a role as any number of characters I found myself enamored with without restrictions.  Those who decry,  and  dismiss fantasy as escapism, insisting on some inherent superiority of realism dismiss not only the importance of escapism as an art form itself, but the importance of imagination and curiosity not only as a coping mechanisms, but as teachers.

“Taking one step away from reality to that “safe “ place of pretend, prepares us to look at the world’s harsh realities in the face. From there we can name the horrors and celebrate the joys before going back, with a clearer perspective on situations that bother us. ”

— Beth Webb writes in "The real purpose of fantasy" For The Guardian.

“We know encouraging an active imagination and curiosity in children benefits them immensely, including:

the development of problem-solving skills
fostering creativity
formulation of healthy coping skills for intense emotions”

— Rod T. Faulkner on why children should be encouraged to read Fantasy and Science fiction for Medium magazine very much so mirrors my actual story.

F*** it.. Do it

Conan was the start of a 10 year run of fantasy films seeking a major audience.  In the same year as Conan was released,  Jim Henson released a film made entirely of muppets set in a mythological world of made up creatures called The Dark Crystal.  And the most interesting factor here is that neither of these films were hugely successful. In fact a great deal of high concept fantasy or science fiction films did not even recoup their budget, yet it didn't stop the constant influx. The constant support these films received despite being mostly disastrous is a phenomenon in Hollywood I cannot explain, but it’s one I wish would return.  The Dark Crystal,  Legend,  Willow,  Blade Runner,  Tron,  Dune,  Labyrinth,  all now considered cult films were moderate to disappointing critically and profit wise and yet it didn't stop Hollywood from producing Ghostbusters,  Buckaroo Bonzai, The Princess Bride, Red Sonja,  “The Golden Child”, or “The Highlander”.  If there is anything to be mined from that decade it's not the half resurrected pet semetary that is nostalgia, or reboots of the mega franchises steeped in Reagan era exceptionalism.  It’s definitely not the era's white saviorism tropes or its tokenism as one stop progress while ignoring a more wholistic expression of identity (Stranger Things I'm looking at you) or post racial messaging and white saviorism tropes. It's that very particular hubris,  or can do spirit of persistence above and beyond the limited ambition of profit,  or whatever it was that allowed or emboldened the industry to continue to give these films a chance to find an audience.  The films were largely misunderstood, marketed incorrectly, or placed against stiff competition, and yet despite so many middling receipts in both the Sci-fi and fantasy realm Hollywood was admirably persistent in releasing at least two or three a year.   Considering the output of films on the whole was considerably less than in our current era and thusly how many of those were genres outside of fantasy, science-fiction, and action it makes no sense that we see even less fantasy these days,  and far less imagination. When a film like the criminally underseen "Hanna" which shares DNA with 80’s films like “D.A.R.Y.L.” , “Firestarter,” and “Cloak and Dagger” is made on a modest budget of 30 million,  doubles its budget,  and disappears into the ether with nothing learned,  gained,  or extracted from it,  it is woeful to me.

Action makes it mark.

 Action films in the way that we know them now, were most certainly defined by the 80s.  They found their surest footing in the years ranging from 84 to 87 with a prolific release of several major franchises,  and the creation of sub genres within the burgeoning genre like the buddy cop film (which had its origins in films like the “Defiant Ones”) and incentivized by the success of Walter Hill's “48 hrs” which begot films like Beverly Hills Cop, Running Scared,  Lethal Weapon,  and lesser copies like Tango and Cash,  Red Heat,  and a Dragnet remake to follow in successive years.   Snobbery about what makes a film that extends from the rigid confines of auteurism, relegated these films to some sub category of good, for reasons I can’t get anyone to properly define. What exactly makes Lethal Weapon or Jumping Jack Flash, lesser films? Jumping era’s if I may to make a point, I love Le Circle Rouge, I just love Point Break more. Bigelow’s commitment to bringing the wild premise down to earth and grounding it in subtextual sensuality, and air tight precision is nothing short of amazing. The chase sequence is arguably one of the 10 or so best action sequences in film history. Heading back to the 80’s what about the emotional heft of the opening Martin Riggs scene in Lethal Weapon, and the detailed slow burn of Riggs and Murtaugh’s growing love of each other both in Lethal Weapon and along the franchise as a whole. Along with Die Hard, Lethal Weapon is a masterclass in structure, pacing, and delivery that any filmmaker worth their salt should study. Furthermore I would put John Carpenter’s work in “Big Trouble”, George Miller’s in “The Road Warrior”, or Paul Veerhoeven in “Robocop” up against any of the best of filmmaking over the years. These movies exist in a bat shit crazy narrative limbo so well defined, and yet so nebulous that their replication appears impossible, and that alone is worth some acknowledgement as to their singular greatness. The most beautiful part of all this, is while the action picture was successful to a level almost beyond reproach (similar to the comic book film today)  this did not stop other genres from being equally as popular in the same decade.

The Johns

While the 80s churned out an increasing number of the genres I most loved,  it's didn't leave other already established ones wanting.  It’s something you definitely don’t see in our current era of film or any other. In the 80’s there really wasn’t a genre that didn’t seem to be in its full on heyday, and a great deal of them were established in that very era. The three Johns (Carpenter, Hughes, and Landis) almost certainly helped define the look and feel of an eighties film, and became the authors of the decade to the point their films and names are almost synonymous with it. The fact that all of them accomplished it with the versatility of a Michael Curtiz furthers my point. Horror, Teen dramedies, buddy comedies, science fiction and fantasy the John’s (especially Carpenter dabbled in it all, providing the 80’s with the eclectic spirit that I feel distinguished it from other eras of film. Looking out on the landscape how many teen dramas have you seen? Though recently they seem to be making a comeback with Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade, Love Simon, and Lady bird, notice how many of them are set in that very era. Horror of course never left, but what about what your horror consist of? In the 80’s it was unstoppable slashers, gremlins, critters, poltergeists, a possessed doll, werewolves, vampires, bad seeds, a guy with pins in his head, and whatever the hell Pumpkinhead was? It’s not purely the diversity of these horror projects, (horror has always been pretty diverse) but rather the gonzoness of these concepts, and that wild fact that they were actually greenlit in the first place. For his part Carpenter remade a classic with another classic, adapted one of Stephen King’s wilder short stories about a killer car, and brought us a Science Fiction/horror classic about consumerism (amongst other things) in “They Live”. Landis would delve into horror with “An American Werewolf in London” , and “Twilight Zone: The Movie” while also helming some of the definitive adult comedies of any time in “Animal House”, “The Blues Brothers”, “Trading Places”, and “Coming to America”. And Hughes, well Hughes all but created and then defined the teenage comedy , while still churning out comedies like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and Uncle Buck. These are incredible bodies of work indicative of an incredibly flexible and agile approach to movies.

Hughes , Carpenter, and Landis we're most certainly autuers, and provided much of the landscape for the 80s filmmaking.

Don Simpson's " High Concept " film ideology though maybe slightly contemptible at first glance,  was really quite genius in its simplicity.  By splicing together two genres of film that might not otherwise be put together you might be courting disaster, but also form the ingredients for something unique and unforgettable.  Like combinations of primary colors you can blend primary genres and concoct something not altogether original and yet it's own.   So when you splice a John Hughes film with vampire lore in horror you might get "The Lost Boys".  The buddy cop genre with science fiction,  and occult horror and arrive at the Ghostbusters. The hard boiled noir film with horror and conceive the underrated "Angel Heart". Never mind the political body horror brought on by the heyday of Cronenberg, or lynchian existential dread x pot boiler thriller in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”.  For all the lip smacking,  and kissing of teeth about that era by prominent film historians ( Wikipedia suggests Kent Jones believes it the worst decade for filmmaking, though I can't find, nor have I read, or heard it from his mouth) and even one of my favorite directors (Quentin Tarantino) the 80s was far more substantive than its given credit for, and of course it bears saying that much of the criticism around its supposed lack of quality boils down to cinematic snobbery for some, and a more specifically an elitist attitude and language that still permeates cinephilic circles today represented by terms like “Elevated Horror”.

““I’ve been reading comic books since I was a kid, and I’ve had my own Marvel Universe obsessions for years,” Tarantino responded. “So I don’t really have a problem with the whole superhero thing right now, except I wish I didn’t have to wait until my 50s for this to be the dominant genre. Back in the ’80s, when movies sucked — I saw more movies then than I’d ever seen in my life, and the Hollywood bottom-line product was the worst it had been since the ’50s — that would have been a great time.””

— Quentin Tarantino

 The 80’s was in fact not run by franchises and blockbusters. We saw a great deal of the rises of,  and some of the greatest works from our greatest directors in the 80's. Never mind the great films that came from directors we might not have seen be as successful afterwards.  Stephen Frears ( Dangerous Liasons)  saw his rise in the 80's,  Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark)  David Lynch (The Elephant Man,  Blue Velvet)  Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) David Cronenberg,  (Videodrome, Scanners,  The Fly)  Terry Gilliam ( Time Bandits,  Brazil) Michael Mann ( Thief,  Manhunter) Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) , The Coen Brothers ( Blood Simple, Raising Arizona),   and of course Spike Lee ( Shes Got to have it, Do the Right Thing) all saw their rise in the 80s. Meanwhile without missing a beat already proven master craftsman or imagination stations like Scorcese, Kubrick,  and Spielberg were still churning out some of their best work (Raging Bull,  After Hours, The Shining,  Full Metal Jacket,  Indiana Jones,  The Color Purple) .  Even outside the realm of American cinema Kurosawa (Ran)  Shohei Imamura ( The Ballad of Narayama)  Ingmar Bergman ( Fanny and Alexander) Louis Malle (My Dinner with Andre, Au Revoir les enfants)   and Truffaut (The Last Metro) delivered outstanding material.  The 80s seemed like a decade hell bent on recognizing the profitability,  and merits of a great variety of stories. In mid-stride 1985 saw Peter Weir's "Witness" with Harrison Ford,  Terry Gilliam's “Brazil”,  “Back to the Future”,  “The Breakfast Club”,  “The Color Purple”, “Fright Night”,  “The Goonies”,  “The Last  Dragon”,  “Krush Groove”,  “Pee Wee's Big Adventure”,  “Prizzi's Honor”,  “Ran”,  “To Live and Die in LA”,  “Teen Wolf”,  and  “A Room with a view”.  1985 is a great prism with which to grade this decade by. It is a testament to what I think makes the 80s one of the absolute best decades in cinema; genre parity, novelty, and quality.

Art by any other name.

As I’ve alluded to before, at the center of the argument that the 80’s is the worst decade in film is in my mind a long held snobbish cinematic prejudice against genre films.  It limits the realm of prestige to those films that blare out their importance from the top of  a mountain carved in realism and the most traditional elements of storytelling.  The aesthetics must be muted -almost drab,  the pacing so gradual it can on many occasions feel like a chore.  This framing is not inclusive, it doesn't allow for the fact that while storytelling is in essence the same no matter what story is being told, the components, elements, and structure of different genres require and ask of us different things. This mimics the limitations of its ownership and creates hierarchies where none need be. Art by any other name/genre is still art. This stale,  reduction of quality of story and importance can be dated back thousands of years, so obviously it is not new, though still on its face rather silly and egotistical...

““Then it seems that our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest.  “”

— Plato

Remarking on storytelling and its role in shaping and reinforcing narratives in society - plato argued for a (rather misogynistic if you read the rest in its entirety) kind of censorship continued from the prejudices of literature that treated newer genres of storytelling like Sir Larry Wildman treated Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street”.  This bias of prestige in art found its way into the early stages of Hollywood some thousands of years after Plato.   A tradition that created genre ghettos only just now being addressed.  Meanwhile in the here and now the 80’s  engenders a strange dichotomy of thought and emotion.  On the tail end of a re-emergence into the American Storytelling consciousness (because most of us who grew up in it are of age to become its champion) there have been plenty of trips down memory lane in current cinema and television.  But I would argue that the Abrams,  Duffer Brothers, Gunn's  and to some extent Letich's of the world have only put forth an effort to haphazardly reanimate a childhood remembered for all the wrong reasons.  What's missing is the true magic of delving into the void of the impossible, absurd, ludicrous, or wild in today's cinema.  We have been hijacked by realism, and the most banal conceptions of creativity and fabrication.  In this world of safe bets, risk-aversion,  and demure pragmatism,  creating entirely new worlds rarely goes beyond the conceits and restraints of this one. So you may imagine the far reaches of the universe in something like Besson's "Valerian", or even in Villanueve's upcoming “Dune" adaptation, but still confine it within the realm of a benign white supremacy.  When you do imagine something as wonderful as a “Wrinkle in Time” with people of color, and black folk, the bland tableau of digital VFX built on the ruins of the human imagination tames the gesture. Here the crossing into the veil of what we don't see is never really explored,  or mined to find its borders. Nothing remotely resembling the absurdity of Labyrinth,  the weird and strange beauty of Fantasia, or the fanciful, and repugnant inhabitants of Jim Henson's worlds based off of the work of a Brian Froud, the scale and grandiose camp of Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans) or the iconic weirdness and texture of HR Giger (Alien), never gets into the cinematic pipeline.  I  wonder the effect of this on new children.  My childhood  was a constant state of living in between two worlds... the one I actually inhabited, and the ones I frequently visited in my head. These world's were largely inspired by the books and films of my childhood.  A decade of film that allowed me to imagine broader possibilities in my own life.   The elasticity of my world came by way of celluloid dreams,   and my inner thoughts became expanded and emboldened by the likes of “Star Wars”,  “DragonSlayer”, “LadyHawke”, “Star Trek”,  “Rankin and Bass”, “Clash of the Titans”,  “Heavy Metal”, and “The Neverending Story”. These movies were of course themselves limited by aspects of racism, sexism  and other such worldly hindrances, but nonetheless much more fantastic and uninhibited than most of the supposedly daring films that came before or after. I miss having a sense of wonder about my world. I miss reading about the eight wonders of the world, the lochness monster, and the awe of invention. More importantly I miss having it backed up by the moving image in “Indiana Jones”, “Real Science”, and “The Abyss”. I don’t want reboots, the prostitution of nostalgia, and second class citizenship amongst film lovers. I want new explorations into new realms, with newer faces, and ideas. Made and greenlit with the same wild eyed devil- may-care attitude that regardless of why, seemed the convention in the 80’s.

1981's Possession remains one of the most daring, insane, and harrowing experiences cinema has had to offer.

What I think we can learn.

Hollywood's  answer I'm sure would be to issue out a legion of remakes of these very films, missing the point entirely. I’ll watch it, but I don't think we need a Dune remake we need the next version. The Dark Crystal (prequel/sequel?) was amazing,  I still want the one that does not yet exist.   I would like to see writers, and filmmakers  construct from the deeper recesses of their minds, and from the less cynical spaces where anything is possible, and executives to empower them to do so.  Reach out to that childlike abyss, and bring back the impossible into the film ribbons of our increasingly narrow reality. Allow a new generation of malleable minds to dream bigger,  and imagine the canvases of their lives beyond the very unspectacular now we may live in.  In a cinematic world where most creators and execs can't even imagine women and people of color in roles not specifically defined by their nationality or ethnicity, we should do this not just for the sake of entertainment or profit,  (though I do believe people like Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson have proven a highly active imagination represented on screen to still be profitable though also very white) but for the sake of future generations not made up of cynical worts who have long since forgotten the best of what those films like Star Wars conveyed in favor of nostalgic xenophobia and a "know it all" insistence on realism in very unrealistic worlds.  In their stead I want ones like Jordan Peele, or Taika Wataititi, or Kasi Lemmons, folk that can imagine female,  disabled, and ethnic heroes, as well as the world's they inhabit to be uninhibited by our own fragility.   World's like Wakanda in the upcoming Black Panther,  where very few if any white people exist, but for Asian peoples. And spectacular battles can be waged by all women,  like in Wonder Woman,  but with a woman of color at the head of it all.  All of that and more which can only exist when one doesn't feel confined by the fixed and corporeal limitations and imbalances of our own world.  Hopefully inspiring new minds to reach out with their own fantastic ideas and remind us all that a great story lies in any time,  any place, any person,  any genre,  and any decade. This is at the heart of my rebuttal against Netflix haters who dismiss the method off hand (as if they’re the only company or studio using an algorithm be it human or computer generated) and deride the content as if its subpar or forgettable. It’s the repackaged argument against the eighties, that suggest that the High concept film (a sort of human algorithm itself) in and of itself is, or was bad for film, and dismisses the greatness of a great deal of films based on aesthetics of originality. Great films and or television has no one way of being created. Taking what people seem to respond to the most, and splicing and integrating them can produce something original in and of itself. Netflix like the 80’s is no less great at producing some of the finest television than HBO and I’d argue they are a lot less top heavy. It’s worth it to interrogate their dominance on the scene AND to criticize the laughable integrity of the belief that they are doing this out a desire to give platform to the underprivileged. But maybe not reduce it all to a joke, and maybe people and rival studios would do better to learn to throw some of their own money or support at a weird show like the OA, or films with unique concepts like the Velvet Buzzsaw, and stop notoriously effing with the visions of creators. Maybe whatever reason they find , they should try to rediscover the motivation to get behind projects that sound so outlandish they just might work again. Maybe imagination still has a place in Hollywood, even if the impetus is not altogether saintly.

Kobe Bryant: An Actor Prepares.

There is something enigmatic about trying to piece together the words in this time to fit, to capture, portray a person whom you've never known but feel so inextricably connected to. To gather up the totality of a life is an impossible task, if accomplished at all most readily accomplished by the totality of opinions and feelings about said life than by any one account. All that much more when the life is as accomplished, complex, and visible as Kobe Bryant's. There will undoubtedly be opinions, and discussions regarding the darkness in Kobe's life, if not immediately, then soon. Rightfully so, not everyone whose life Kobe touched was for the positive. There are people whom he hurt deeply, a woman whom he scarred for life in one context or another no matter what your opinion of the verdict is. The anger will undoubtedly come to the surface in the light of his passing. There will be takes and discussions on his competive spirit, the trait most associated with Bryant. I won’t be discussing much of either, instead I'll be discussing the part (s) of Kobe I most enjoyed …The Performer.

I watched Jordan play during the height of his mastery, but I grew up watching Kobe. The key words are grew up. By the time I was old enough to not just watch, but truly understand and appreciate basketball MJ was gone and it was Kobe who was in his prime. I was transfixed by his attitude, not just the work ethic but the way he navigated being in the eye of the media . I’ve told many whom I know that Kobe was one of five or so people I didn't know who had an indelible effect on shaping how I see the world. On who I am. He was a black athlete who truly seemed unbothered an unconcerned by what the media or anyone else thought of him, and he was so young, though I still never grasped how to be that unfiltered, and unfazed, I nonetheless took it to heart. His confidence gave you confidence in him. I could only imagine the ways that that impacted those around him - family, friends, collaborators, and teammates. An argument that has persisted and disgusted me about Kobe is that he never made players better. Not only is that just patently false when you consider that with Shaq, Pau, Lamar Odom, Smush Parker, Mark Madsen, Luke Walton, its hard to actually name players who didn't have their best or some of their best statistical seasons alongside Bryant, but also when you consider who didn’t gain in any way from physical improvements to psychological from playing with, and sometimes under that confidence. You, the audience absorbed it , not only by osmosis, but by way of faith. A forgotten aspect of many of Kobe's scoring frenzies was that the Lakers were losing, many times with nothing left it seemed, and Kobe was unfazed, and the players followed by Faith..faith in ability, faith in consistency. This was always lost on those who insisted Kobe made no one better. What metric these folk used to make such a demonstrably false assertion I may never know, but my own suspicions are a narrow minded consideration of what “making someone better” is, a need to flush out the fans lingering fascination with a style of basketball no longer compatible with the NBA, and Kobe's initial aloofness (in and of itself no particular crime but especially punishable when you are a black person in the public eye ). His game, his brashness and to them his uppitiness, offended many white folk in the sports media who have always been obsessed with black humility, and worser still Kobes game backed it up. Kareem Abdul Jabbar had initially suffered through the same thing during his career, and truthfully his reputation and ultimately his legacy never quite recovered from the fragile agitation of various mostly white media outlets that saw his religion, and his unwillingness to kow-tow as a threat. Up until this moment I would say the same sort of disgruntled anger existed for and towards Kobe (though some of his was earned as well). Gruff, frank , and at times cruel, Kobe could and did sincerely hurt people. His admiration for MJ and the fact that it may have aligned with parts of him as it was - was a factor in much of what made him unbearable in his youth. He hurt people, he rubbed them the wrong way, and in at least one case he affected one woman for life, you dont just get that wiped clean..it matters, its becomes part of the whole, and it must be accepted as such. For some or all of these things there are those who will never forgive Kobe, never like him, and I will not argue that they should or that their stance is unrighteous. For me though, Kobe was a physical embodiment of progress, of change, of evolution, of craftsmanship, of unbridled dedication, that doesn't erase what he's done, but it frames it, making it whole. Kobe on court was an artist, which made his eventual transition to entertainment and storytelling one that we should have seen coming in retrospect. Every year it seemed, he went into his bag and brought out a new trick, a better step back, a left hand, some more intricate pump fakes, more strength, less weight, post moves, and even better -many came after he had already reached the pinnacle. Many of our greatest actors do this. They carve they craft, they develop, they evolve. These were Kobe's traits as well flourishes, his brush strokes to the canvas of a brilliant creative career. He played the tortured artist, a Van Gogh who played though the kind of injuries that today would be unheard of in an NBA that load manages players, and rest others for weeks for a tail bone bruise. There were broken fingers, metatarsals, viruses, and of course a ruptured Achilles that he returned to shoot two free throws on. It is a maniacal show of toughness, an almost magical display of will, and most definitely theater.

Like another one of my five most influential people Bruce Lee, Kobe's defining trait for me was his theatricality. Like actors, his performances ultimately came from preparation, imagination, and purpose. Like Bruce he shares this with Muhammad Ali. Not necessarily in chosen form of presentation, but in an instinctive understanding of theater, of how it works, of what it consists of, how it is made. Like Bruce Lee neither were the best because they could beat everyone, or in Kobe's case because their stats and accolades towered above everyone else's. Neither Bryant or Lee were exceptionally big, or exceptionally fast by nature. The largest chunk of their greatness came from working so tirelessly at their craft until it didn't matter. The craft became their gift, their genius. Thier greatest skill was in using their minds to break down their opponents. The pagoda from Game of Death. A gallery of foes who had unnatural skills and body types that posed natural problems, that they must overcome.

Creativity, Improvisation, study, movement, body control , in a way very akin to actors that no other athlete I’ve ever seen could come close to. It’s why he was so much more tolerable than most athletes in both acting as a discipline and comedy as a form. He was intelligent, focused, he had great timing, and a sense for what worked on camera, and on court, so it came much more naturally for him off court and in front of the camera like in this wonderful Apple TV commercial…

He had an inate sense for the moment, for time. He cuts in at exactly the right time, he listens, and he shuts up at exactly the right time. He has complete control of his body and ignores every young actors instinct to move to make something happen (Something Constantin Stanislavski spoke of at length in “An Actor Prepares”). You watch any one of his many highlight reels you will see all of this on display . His body could seem incredibly elastic at times, he had incredible timing. A sense for the time to strike, and to back up, he performed balletic-like movements in mid air which required an uncanny amount of control and made it seem effortless .

What great actors get, what movie stars get, what Bruce Lee, and Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington, got/get is the game is not just to be skilled, or knowledgeable - many others are those things, they understood the vital importance of theater, of narrative of magic. Watch Bruce Lee completely unfazed by a board being broken in his face , and Kobe completely unfazed by a ball being faux tossed at his face…

Same Energy. This is presence, swagger, toughness, character, and poise. Are you not entertained? Kobe provided that, he gave narrative to the “Kobe stoppers” that he always studied and then avenged his defeats, team defeats, thriving on the inherent storytelling aspect of these triumphs. The Celtics, the Shaq's, the clutch shots, the growl, the chest thumping, the shirt biting, the mid-air pirouettes, the arms extended in the midst of raining confetti, all theater..Stanislavski the actor prepares. He continued to evolve as a player, much more importantly as a man. Kobe went from a brash arrogant 18 year old kid trying to prove his worth at the cost of others, to a man whose worth was found in sharing his gifts with others. From problematic slurs against the gay community, to standing up for them. From eviscerating teammates, to lifting them up. Touting the importance of the WNBA, and intimate moments with his daughters and wife on the sidelines of games he admitted he had previously sworn off. His legacy is that of storytelling not only through his work, but his life. He left us all with the timeless message of tireless preparation, and will, at the intersection of fearless improvisation, and accountability. He left us with the Mamba mentality, a litany of games where we witnessed scenes akin to many films we've seen before. His 81 point masterpiece…definitely Wonder Woman in the trenches …

Story …the men were in the trenches and they were afraid and outmatched, and rather than leaving them to fend for themselves, I went out and became an inspiration. Whether you believe that's what happened or not, it’s clearly a demonstration of how Kobe used storytelling as a framework for his awe inspiring performance on court, as a father, as an artist. Kobe refused to leave his legacy with those who watched him. He created his own, he authored his own, and did it while giving his all in performances the likes of which we may never see again, and it is why Kobe is and may always be my favorite player/athlete all time and this actor is not yet prepared to let him go.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: Suicide by Sunlight

I don’t really enjoy Short films, or at least rarely. I may academically respect and appreciate them, but dont usually enjoy the experience. Many are not very good. They rarely have time to settle into themselves. They feature subject matters I don’t feel do well in short format, and save for a few exceptions the are not often visually intriguing. When they are, its it's a case of style over substance. With all that being said I watched two short films I actually enjoyed in the past few months, not just with my mind, but with my heart. One I can’t speak on just yet , (but watch out for Tayler Montague.) the other is Nikyatu Jusu’s “Suicide by Night.” A refreshing, imaginative, take on vampirism, that embraces the outsiderness, and paradoxical mortal rejection of blood at the core of vampirism through a lens of blackness, and womanhood. The result is a stylish, gory, sexy, inventive, profound short film. A film that funnels the darkness of parasitical behavior through a lens of socio- political angst that bends the light toward the darkness without ever losing its shadow. The shadow is the inherent parasitical nature of vampirism, the light shined in is from the vantage point that connects it to survival in a cruel world. It’s a perspective that lends itself to many of the fables and negative imagery that surrounds marginalized people, or even the way we feel about certain animals (snakes instantly come to mind) where revisionist history and anecdotal stereotypes paint survival instincts and defense mechanisms against predators as unprovoked violence .

Its fascinating to watch the way the Nikyatu's film manages through searing imagery to entertain, reflect, to repulse, and leave you wanting more, without the feeling of incompletion. This is something I'd love to see as a full length feature film, something that truly gives vampires and vampire lore the fresh coat of paint it so desperately needs. Watching a black mother struggle to keep her abilities, and powers in check, for the sake of family, children, and a safer existence within society is a ingenious approach to the genre. It brings up memories of Ganja and Hess, and yes Blackula (That movie is still far too disrespected), and even “Let the Right One In”, in as far as these films deconstructed the edifice, but not the foundation of vampie lore in brilliant fashion. Whether or not it is ever made as a feature length film, Suicide by Sunlight is a fantastic entry into Vampire lore, and something worth looking even if just for novelties sake, because sometimes even the hope of that is just enough.

The Oscars: This Means War, or at least it should.

The 2020 Oscar nominations were released yesterday, and well over some 48 hours later I am sick and tired, I am disgusted, and I am baffled, but mostly angry. I should explain the anger, or rather I want to. I am angry because I don't see this year's nominations as merely casual indifference, or woeful ignorance, but as a purposeful declaration of a social warfare of sorts. That may sound dramatic, and maybe it is, but I also dont believe there is much evidence to support much else considering what we've read and seen from many in the industry since April Reign started #Oscarssowhite. To be sure the Oscar's are just an old flabby over inflated pageant institution, but also it is an institution. An Institution invested in dictating canon. Sure we will always remember great films, but oscar noms and winners keep alive a tradition in storytelling that prioritizes white males as the inherent signifiers of greatness, of talent, of truth, and of purity in America cinema, and it is beyond clear to me that certain people from within the industry are tired of hearing from those outside their hegemony about the importance of different voices and more varied perspectives. You're not going to convince me that ( especially in this entertainment economy currently making its bones off the still mostly unpaid brand publicity offered by social media and its hashtags, fan castings, and memeification) that the academy board was unaware of the swell of disappointment and frustration hurled at their award season peers over their head-scratching omissions of the verifiably well received films, performances, and technical accomplishments of women and people of color this year. Especially when at least a couple of the films they declared worthy (Tarantino's Once Upon a Time, and Todd Phillips Joker) were as polarizing amongst the critical mass as they were. Especially while films like Lulu Wang's “The Farewell” , Greta Gerwig's Little Women, or Lorene Scarfaria's “Hustlers" received near universal praise and adulation. Critical praise should not be an isolated barometer, but in light of the wide crevice between these films it should count quite a bit. The Terry Gilliam's of the world are more than a few, and voices like his have been heard from the ranks of Oscar’s ranks very recently.

Todd Phillips “Joker” was the clear winner in this years oscar nods, despite being a polarizing film amongst critics upon its release

It could be said this may be a by- product of the academy's recent push to allow for films with more of a popular standing with mainstream audiences, but then while “Little Women”, and “The Farewell” never reached mainstream audiences (for a multitude of reasons that include distribution and marketing) why not the 150 million plus/over its 20 million budget “Hustlers”? The head of Bafta derided the lack of opportunity in the industry to defend the negligence of that institution. Hmm…you mean that institution who denied Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman their entire careers, and this year helped shut out Lupita Nyong'o, who gave arguably the performance of the year in Jordan Peele's “Us” - a film that didn’t quite receive the reception of his now seminal “Get Out”, but still far outpaced both Tarantino'sand Phillips films in critical regard, and wasn't far behind Once Upon a Time in Box office (especially when set against budget)? This is about several kinds of biases and prejudices. This was a clap back, or at least a stern stubborn affirmation of the previously held position of the last 100 or more years of cinema. Why else would one of their institutional peers hire someone of the constitution of the very non-asked for Ricky Gervais (whom mind you I somewhat like). Could be there was no one else…could be ratings, but neither of those are anymore solid than the possibility that Gervais was a representation of the animus of those tired of apologizing for what they feel are minor infractions, for being artist, for being taste makers, and as Terry Gilliam, and so many others have put it, for being white. There were too many categories, too many folk as close to objectively better than the chosen nominees, and that's before you get to the “like-clockwork” arrival of obvious miscues like the various Uncut Gems snubs. No actor, no director, no best picture nod(s) for a film that obviously made both an academic and social imprint on this year beyond most of the films they chose. The Oscars have long had a prestige bias, and that too is also coded, but the original language is so forgotten, so dated , so archaic that even its most ardent disciples don't ’t know what prestige is or means. Uncut Gems lack of nods is a case of a general lack of imagination and inspiration by the academy, and shows its age, but still mostly this feels like a pretty blatant repudiation of people of color, of women, of certain genres, and bias against certain types of performances, and stories. It's important to understand these things ( gender, genre, and racial bias) intertwine and intersect. Long held conscious and unconscious prejudices against various members of different sexual orientations, genders, and peoples are part and parcel of the biases against certain genres. Horror having a genuinely observable narrative obsession with femininity and empowerment, as well as masculine objection, rejection, and objectification around and about their bodies as postulated by folk like Laura Mulvey and Carol Clover, and also being arguably the most disrespected genre by both the gatekeepers of prestige and the Academy, cannot be reasonably construed as merely coincidence. Science Fiction, and action films have had a history of incorporating marginalized people throughout their cast and as leads in the narrative, long before drama which mostly insisted that if marginalized folk be presented it was in work or stories specific to their identity and not much else. Funny enough these same people who had no problem basing casting and story choices purely on rigid assumptions and definitions of identity take issue with the idea of identity politics based purely on identity. Whether Queen aliens, black oracle’s, sexual succubuses, slasher victims, psycho powered teenagers, over pressured asain males, possessed little girls, beleaguered wives or mothers, or women who dare object to motherhood, stories about women, gays, black folk, and people of color unencumbered by white male intruders, be they audience, characters, or directors have rarely been seen as worthy of the supposedly academic sensibilities of the academy as those made by white men, though the uber men villains of comic book films have (though both have thus far been iterations of the Joker ). The socially acceptable prejudices in white audiences towards black storytellers of color as to which depictions of what kind of black folks lead to nominations and wins are narrow, and many times guided by white hands with few exceptions. Slaves and struggling depictions of black folk will earn rave reviews, and most likely awards, but ultimately happy, or just average stories about everyday black folk less so. Dating back to Justin Lin and “Better Luck Tomorrow”, Mira Nair and The Namesake, all the way to LuLu Wang and The Farewell, and even to some extent the better received Parasite (Academy-wise) asain stories have been largely ignored , and same for many kinds of stories about Latinos, and worser still Native Americans. To blame the obvious industry wide problem of lack of opportunities is incomplete, lazy, and an insult to almost any filmgoers intelligence. Lack of opportunities doesn't explain why Bafta has famously excluded both Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman their entire careers. Lack of opportunities doesn't explain why “Kasi Lemmons's” American gothic classic Eve's Bayou was wholesale ignored in 1997. Why Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust received a similar ghosting, or why Smoke Signals, or American Me, or the Joy Luck Club received none of the kind of wide eyed adulation so many mediocre white entries like The King's Speech, Amistad, The Last Samurai, or Crash received. This is because the lack of opportunities are interwoven with the covert and overt lack of respect for storytelling outside the white hegemonic institutional paradigm, and tellers that do not regard the sensitivity of white viewers or allow them a pathway to ownership of the lens of perspective. It’s why “ Driving Miss Daisy", “The Help”, “The Three Billboard's of Ebbing”, and “The Green Book” can consistently do so well during awards season, and why “Widows”, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Dolemite is My Name”, “Queen and Slim”, “The Farewell”, “The Handmaiden” “Hustlers”, and more struggle so mightily, or receive various iterations of consolation prizes.

Lupita nyong'O's performance in Jordan peele's “us” bears many aesthetic similarities in choices and effect (though spiritually and conceptually it’s better imo) as Joaquin PhoeniX's joker, but received none of his acclaim come awards season.

There are most certainly prejudices beyond identity. Clear biases have existed for years towards action films since their inception into the mainstream production values of film. Mission Impossible: Fallout should have been an Oscar nominee last year, and any argument to the opposite will inevitably lead back to some version of an argument regarding low/high art, and prestige. For much of the same reason if I had my way so too should John Wick 3 be nominated as best picture this year, and I remain firmly convinced that films like Die Hard, or even Top Gun should've been best picture nominees in their day. Raucous comedies like Coming to America, CaddyShack, Friday, or the 40 year old Virgin are far too important to the American lexicon and popular culture, never mind being brilliant to have been ignored. Science Fiction films like Alien, The Road Warrior, Minority Report, and The Matrix are more than just their technical achievements, they were astonishingly directed, shot, acted films that offered far more than many of their dramatic contemporaries did to the culture and gravity of cinema. Most certainly Horror films like The Shining, The Babadook and Hereditary at the very least gave us legendary characters and performances the likes of which have rarely been seen in any genre, and yet none of them bore their performers any fruit come Oscar time. What is this, but the most extreme kind of prejudice?

1980's “The Shining featured two of the most harrowing and memorable performances of th 20th century, neither was nominated by the academy.

I’m not wholly on board with the dismissal of the entire institution (In as far as the idea of a celebration of the years best contributions to the medium) because I believe a ceremonious pathway to film canonization that allows a mass audience to be introduced to films they may have missed or been obstructed from seeing is both entertaining and important. The alternative way to answer in my opinion such a clear response to outrage culture as to lionize a movie in the Joker (who in many not so subtle ways acted as it’s own response to outrage culture and the subsequent imagined repudiation of white men) , is continued outrage followed by action the likes of April Reigns #Oscarssowhite . White supremacy in all its forms including artistic tends to count on apathy, and eventual exhaustion, so my definitely not solitary solution is continued outrage. Continued suggested and actual boycotts, less viewing of that show, and even more outrage after . The Oscar's needs to bust its whole ass on the uphill ice rink it created. If viewers and especially social media personalities hate watch and rebuke it online, nothing is gained, they got what they wanted. The ratings need to be an unmitigated disaster, the kind that gets folk removed. I remember ( before I was booted from Twitter) observing a detestable and rather lame occurence of men commenting under beautiful women's pics anything and everything but anything about them. It was ridiculous there, but here it would be welcome to anyone invested in change. Folks who move cinema online should talk about anything and everything but the Oscars on that night. The Oscars should not trend on that night. It should be as if it did ’t exist on one of entertainment's most important outlets. We need outrage that doesn't stop after the ceremony, outrage that begins at Sundance and Cannes. Outrage and action that acts as a collective Samuel L Jackson screaming “I dare you, I double dog dare you to disnclude us again!” Then in the words of my man “Kuiil” from “The Mandalorian” we will “Have Spoken". No one has to do this, and I get it if no one does, because hell there’s a lot of shit in the world and we could use some good old fashioned pageantry, but I be damned if it’s not exactly what the Academy has earned. Earned after years of giving its laurels to racists films, sexist men, and gross depictions of those different from their members, and especially most egregiously after suggesting Casey Aflac gave a better performance in Sad Manchester White people by the Sea than Denzel Washington on Spinal Tap “11” in “Fences" (Sorry I had to get that off my chest)

The Anti-Social Network

I find myself thinking about "The Social Network" quite a bit. I think it is maybe the definitive movie of our time for several reasons, it's energy, it's language, the diagnosis of a very acute toxicity in white male fragility, as the impetus for an entire network that became fundamental in the way an entire society communicates. I think mostly though about the underlining theme of exclusivity, and our obsession with elitism. Members of small collectives, that choose to crate signifiers that separate them aesthetically from the rest of their cohorts on this journey of existence. Within the film, there are Final clubs, and fraternities, legacies, teams, and of course the institution from wherein this all takes place Harvard University ( an Ivy League) . When Mark Zuckerberg himself alienated by the incompatibility of his glaring misanthropy with the social nature of these exclusive clubs - he does so without interrogating the value of exclusivity. Exclusivity is a favored tool of capitalism. A driver of ambitions, and greed, and an instigator for the rampant abuse of otherness as a consequence. It drives our interactions arguably towards the worst in and of us. This is represented in social media by a number of questionable attitudes, and behaviors, including encouragement to drive up the differential between our followers, and our follow count, thus announcing our prestige, unproductive forms of argumentation and conflict resolution that resemble the board room scene in the film, and yes misanthropy. Whether these conditions pre existed the advent of social media is unimportant to me, as what remains clear is that social media fosters them, (Just take a look at twitters questionable record for suspending accounts). Exclusivity, celebrity, sex, are the conditions through which we are funneled to our stations by selection of algorithms that follow closely the prototype co-created by Zuckerberg. Watching the social network, and being engulfed in the cultural omnipresence of social media, it is hard for one to ignore the metta-ness of it all. Not only from an aspect of watching the birth of something you now use prolifically, but through seeing how much of one of social media’s founding father’s values ended up as the dominant value system of social media. To what extent the film is an honest portrayal of what happened Im not sure, but watching Zuckerberg in interviews I’m sure the portrayal of Zuckerberg as anti-social is true. And that is the part I find most fascinating, disturbing, and ironic. An anti-social, young white male created the baseline for social behavior in the new millennium, and that never ceases to be unsettling to me.

SING!! "These are a Few of my Favorite Things.... in 2018"

We are approaching the end of 2018, a year that has felt like it took two. Two years into one of the worst presidencies in American history, (which is saying a lot considering the history of the American Presidency) the days and months of the year lugged itself through horrific stories of continued injustice, apathy, ignorance, violence, as well as a “Venom” movie. All this to say nothing about my personal battles with finances in constant flux and on and off bouts of sadness that as a therapist told me still stem from my brother’s recent death. Simply put, it has been a YEAR. BUT it has not been without its moments, and as we close out on my favorite time of the year, (the Holidays) I wanted to reflect on some of my favorite things this year in the world of entertainment. From films and performances, to social media, music, and commercials. So without further ado…..

It's only a crazy dream until you do it. #justdoit https://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/tennis

Nike’s “It’s only Crazy until you do it” Serena Williams ad.

It’s been a year for arguably the greatest athlete in the history of sport. She returned to tennis seemingly never having lost a step, only to find herself at the center of a perfect storm of the sport’s politics, racism, and sexism. Nike a company I still somewhat despise, did its own part to show solidarity or at least loyalty to its athletes through word and work. The two combined to make what I think is one of the greatest commercials of all time, striking in it’s simplicity, profound in its heart. The bond the ad illustrates between father and daughter, (more importantly black father and daughter) the lack of toxic authoritarian disciplines and thinking from within it, the edifice of craft, hard work, love, ultimately bring us to the realization of the power of a dream materialized. It is more than inspiring, it’s empowering. Something I rarely believe visual medium actually accomplishes, but in the few cases where it does, can feel almost magical.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”

We live in very, very cynical times, maybe rightfully so. Having been subjected to story after story of people who on the surface seemed good , but used this curated favor to do evil, we are increasingly suspicious of “good people”and their existence beyond ulterior motives and agendas. So it was beyond refreshing to listen for an hour and a half to the story of a man who did good in as much as is humanly possible - for the sake of good. “Won’t you be my neighbor” as a documentary is well paced, it considers its subject well, and without undue bias, but mostly it’s just sweet, loving, kind, endearing, and needed..Much like the man at the center of it.

“Pose”

The bold, colorful, self defining, soap opera debuted on fox and just a few short minutes into episode one announced itself as one of the most entertaining/important pieces of art this year. Not only a wonderful commentary on identity and the nature of what it actually means to be family, “Pose” told us the stories of the most marginalized of us all through the language of television, informing those of us outside of those identities of their experiences. And it did it with flare, with riveting narrative devices, and with the heart of revolution. Beyond that, “Pose” stood out this year to me as a form, a hint of what expressionistic art could be in a television world more and more dominated by realism.

Teyana Taylor “K.T.S.E.”

An album that was routinely dismissed by critics and fans alike turned out to be one of my favorite R&B offerings of the year. Very fair and earned criticism of Kanye West (even as it related to his handling of Teyana’s album) unfairly mired “K.T.S.E.” in unfair criticism. Taylor’s album (inverse of the most popular criticism against it) is a complete album to me. I often measure this by taking the title of an album as a statement of intention and seeing if the album maintains that core sensibility throughout, and Taylor’s album does just that. K.T.S.E. does not keep that same energy throughout in a staticky/strict sense of the phrase, but by maintaining the attitude behind the phrase. Once you understand that, even a seemingly out of place song like “WTP” feels a lot more in place. K.T.S.E. also breaks up the monotony and the stranglehold of what is sometimes endearingly, sometimes disparagingly referred to as “whisper singing.” From the opening intro “No Manners”, its violins sliding over its soul sample, with Teyana’s vocals stepping in calmly but confidently asserting her love and unapologetic desire for her husband, I was aware I was listening to something a lot closer to what R&B used to sound like than anything from a lot of my other favorite contemporary R&B crooners. There’s soul in the production and there is soul in Teyana’s voice, she runs at the intersection of a Rihanna/Daniel Caesar , and whereas most of R&B now is mostly about making a vibe album, which homogenizes its practitioners in favor of reminding us the audience a feeling or a moment, Teyana’s album commits to delivering both a vibe, and a real sense of who she is as a person. When I finished the album I left wanting to get to know Miss Taylor that much more, because of what she told me on the album, and HOW she told it to me.

“Inside the Pink”

I’ve never been much for Podcast, being that I mainly enjoy my information through visual means, and mediums, but a few podcast have managed to captivate and retain some space in my "scattegories-like brain. One of them is the very newly released “Inside the Pink” podcast co-hosted by Uchechi Chinyere, and Ayesha K. Faines. A podcast about the experience of women from the inside out, first two episodes have been bout “pleasure” and “blood”, and run the gambit from entertaining anecdotes to eye opening bits of women’s history. Only two episodes in the show seems to have found a footing most episodic anything’s don’t find until much later in their run. Inside the pink is something unique out there if not mostly for its two host’s incredible knowledge, and the interesting intersection of their beliefs. Not only between their persons but between their religions and their academia. The way they explore those spaces in a way that makes it incredibly accessible to the layman without condescension, and while being thoroughly entertaining is astounding. It also doesn’t hurt that each of them has a voice that could melt plutonium, so theres that.

“Film Twitter”

What has been deemed “Film Twitter” is a broad, vast collective of film lovers from all over the world. Hailing from various disciplines within the confines of filmmaking, art, criticism, and beyond, this space has been a safe haven for me as well as an education. I gravitate towards critics like Angelica Jade Bastien, (@angelicabastien), Matthew Zoller-Seitz, (@mattzollerseitz) Sheila O’Malley, (@sheilakathleen) and Candice Frederick, (@ReelTalker) but there is also those who speak to their experiences trying to make it within the industry like @cynfinite, (top right) or make distinctive connections between film and life like @kyalbr. I have learned about films I might never have been made aware of otherwise, treated to entertaining polls and questions, enraptured by anecdotes that made me feel much less alone in the world, pushed forward by tons of encouragement, and inspired by the presence of these people, a great number of who I wasn’t able to mention here, and might never have been able to meet otherwise. It’s been one of my favorite and most frequented places in social media this year, and the most lovely, and delightful of discoveries, rarely ever as exasperating to a newbie like me as it seems to be to others.

The Haunting of Hill House Ep 5 “Bent-Neck Lady”

As I wrote this, I remembered exactly what episode this was, and while I could easily put the entire show on this list, (seeing as how it was the most easily accessible TV memory for me this year) “Bent-Neck Lady” is the major reason it is the most accessible. The episode follows probably the shows most likable character Nell recounting her life both backward and forward in flashbacks, and vignettes, leading ultimately to the cause of her death alluded to in the very first episode. The reveal which discloses the identity of the ghost that has haunted her since childhood was as tragic as it was shocking. Director Mike Flanagan’s narrative choices are masterful, and actress Victoria Pendretti would easily be on my Emmy list for the astounding physical work she did portraying Nell’s crippling sleep paralysis, her emotional strain, and shock with subtlety, deference to the truth, and vulnerability. Because of the work of not only these two, but the editor, the ensemble cast, and the cinematographer, something as beautiful as it was sad and penetrating was created, and the last few minutes were the most shocking thing on television this year this side of the final minute of “Sharp Objects”.

Kids See Ghosts- “Reborn”

Decidedly the best track off of one of the better albums of the Kanye “Assembly line” release schedule earlier this year “Reborn” was really kind of an emotional landmark for my year. Cudi’s beloved crooning is the center piece of a song that features some of Kanye’s better production, and also some his his best, most introspective lyrics in some time ;

“Very rarely do you catch me out, Y’all done especially invited guests, me out, Y’all been tellin’ jokes that’s gon’ stress me out, Soon as I walk in, I’m like “Let’s be out” I was off the chain, I was often drained, I was off the meds, I was called insane. What a awesome thing, engulfed in shame. I want all the rain, I want all the pain, I want all the smoke, I want all the blame””

All in all “Reborn” is an anthem, one that when played loudly enough rattles the copper rust of despair off one’s bones, and leaves me feeling exhilarated and open to new possibilities, if only for a short while. It is a song so moving , so meaningful, inspirational in just a simple chorus, and a few bars, that in a year of so many lows, and so much despair for me, Ive often been moved to tears while exclaiming its uplifting refrain “keep moving forward”. In fact, I can feel myself welling up while writing this.

Tom Waits performance in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs “All Gold Canyon”

Tom Waits performance , much like the vignette that it occupies, much like the film the vignette appears in - The Coen Brothers “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” - is deliberate. It’s layered, and those layers are formed and then stacked very leisurely and neatly before you. It’s a puzzle of sorts , not so much in that there is a mystery to be solved, but that the complete picture is a mystery to you until the end, and that picture, well, it sticks with you. Waits performance was one of my favorite things of this year. I enjoyed watching him lumber around carrying that lived in, world weary weight in his body and in his expressions. Paying attention to the subtle ways in which informs us that though this man is lonely he is not sad. Muttering to himself without giving into the kind of dramatic flair that distracts from the authenticity of the intent, which is to show the audience this man has probably been alone quite some time, and quite possibly at this quite some time, but not necessarily that he is mentally unstable, which would look more like the muttering he performed as Renfield in 92’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. A lot of Buster Scruggs is absurdist in nature, extremely technical in its execution, deliberate in its pacing, but as Coen films tend to be , overstated acting wise (That’s not a bad thing in a lot of Coen films, though it grates me sometimes ). But Waits here (who can deliver ostentatious acting with the best of them) is understated, he and the vignette want to lull you into feeling the tedium of his work, to lull us into underestimating him just as the thief does, and in the doing wove a very natural spell over me, that along with the natural scenic and majestic beauty of the land he prospects (Thank Bruno Delbonnel for that) engraved its name on the bark of my best memories from 2018.

“The Contrast Podcast”

Created and co-hosted by married couple Sidney (Sunni) and Michael (Snax) Orisa “The Contrast’s” greatest quality is its realness, its authenticity. In a highly curated social media world where most conversations about love, marriage, relationships, sex, and finance are steeped in capitalist, materialist, gospel of prosperity language, here is a podcast from a middle class-ish couple that makes the struggle plain. I have never seen a couple, not even the beloved (For good reason) Will and Jada be so willing to exercise their demons, their hang ups, their insecurities in real time. It is sometimes uncomfortable, and regularly messy, and truly thats where the gold of this show is. Sidney and Michael are willing to disclose and sus out seemingly anything from taking a s*** to their own displeasure with each others idiosyncrasies and the harm they sometimes unwillingly or willingly inflict on each other. Doing this in the moment, in real time, as we listen is incredibly brave, and incredibly relatable. There is something really refreshing about listening to anyone in this day and time speak comfortably and without any seeming inkling of socially taught shame about financial problems, confidence struggles, and dinner at Red Lobster. Its not in the past, it’s present day, it’s now, and you come away from their podcast high, not in a temporary way that I think some “self help” advocates produce - ambition steeped in inadequacy - but in a way that sticks because you realize that someone else is going through a lot of what you are, in proximity to the place you are in, rather than from on high.

“Black Panther”

What was billed by black audiences as “The blackest event ever” lived up to the hype not only in terms of the film itself, but in the reaction by black audiences to the film and the experience. In fact, in my opinion, “Black Panther” the movie was nowhere near as indelible to me as “Black Panther” the experience, and the movie was pretty f*****g good. Every memory I have from the film is enhanced by the accompanying memory of the very black audience reaction to said scene. The work, the technical expertise, the storytelling, the politics, the women of Wakanda all meshed together with the memories outside of the film like the “M’baku challenge”, tons of black people in african garb, and the sound of Kendrick Lamar blaring out of seemingly every vehicle driven by black people in Downtown Los Angeles, Compton, and various other parts of LA I travelled, formulate in me a glow that still reverberates throughout my body. Black Panther was the natural progression of the persistence, and insistence of so many black people (especially those in social media “Black Twitter”) to see ourselves represented. The promise fulfilled from a continued legacy of unapologetic blackness, this latest iteration finding its power online, and using capitalism to encourage profiteers to see the value in the endeavor. The result?…One of, if not the greatest Marvel film ever, and the greatest movie experience I’ve had since I was a child.

Toni Collette in “Hereditary”

Look, I’m rooting for Glenn Close . She’s overdue, and her performance in “The Wife” is the only thing anywhere near the vicinity of Toni Collette in “Hereditary” the latest and probably best horror offering from A24 yet. But if I’m being honest with myself I know who the real winner of of this year’s best actress Oscar should be. Collette’s work in this film is an all-time great feat of acting. It’s the best performance this year period for me, pay attention to her reactions, especially those in the now infamous dinner table scene, or the instantaneous shock that sets in once she tells her son “she never wanted him”, or the progression of the body language in the gym scene, the way each facial expression, each accompanying gesture explicitly relates to a complicated emotion. Her character Annie, does not want to be there, she does not want to talk, but she needs to talk, it almost erupts out of her, she cannot help herself, and Collette’s body reiterates that to us. It’s a performance so lived in, so organic, so natural, it borders on seeming like possession. It is a cavalcade of unique choices, choices and expressions unique to Toni Collette, the kind that usually make for the rare occurrence where a role finds the one actor meant exactly for it. All Toni Collette did in this film was create in Annie Graham, one of the great women in horror, and one of the greatest horror performances ever. It’s a performance dipping in genius, and mastery, and it is the one thing I remember most about 2018 in entertainment. *Slow clap for Toni.

My definitive (Kind of) list of The 10 Best Tarantino Characters of All Time.

It’s hard to guess exactly where Quentin Tarantino’s legacy will land amongst the great directors of all time, even harder to gauge what that legacy will be if you’re asking for any consensus. Im not. I do however, aim to have some fun with what I feel will inevitably be part of his legacy - that is his ability to craft characters. Whether he has borrowed these characters or not, whether they adhere to strict definitions of character development or not, is irrelevant to me. What is relevant to me is that all of these characters are memorable, severely quotable, and indelible. From Headliners like the Murderous leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad Bill, to cameos, and one scene players like Brett in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s dialogue, camera, and set ups ensure almost no character is left behind. I don’t think there is a director or writer in History who could boast so deep a roster of characters as commonly quoted, or easily recognized as Tarantino and that alone is a testament to the man doing a whole lot of something right. Hate all you want on Tarantino, ( and honestly Tarantino has given us plenty of reason to ) but any criticism, (or hatred if that's your flavor) is incomplete without including the fact that this white male, (out of nowhere) with no pressure from any outside forces, made a whole ass career of making movies that made bad asses out of some of the least recognized people in Hollywood. Not only as actors but as people. Black men,Asian men, white women, black women, asian women, bringing back, reminding us of their genius, or making the careers of actors like Pam Grier, Ving Rhames, Lucy Lui, Robert Forster, Daryl Hannah, or Gordon Lui. In the spirit of acknowledging that particular form of genius I attempt what in actuality was a pretty tough assignment for me. To compose a list of my 10 favorite Tarantino characters all time. I did considerable damage to my brain cells trying to dig deep for academic reasons behind what I would ultimately deem a definitive list of the ten best characters he ever produced. That failed when it started to become hard to delineate between whether the reasons for one character topping another were the actors ability (Take Michael Fassbender’s Archie Hilcox in Inglorious Basterds whose basement tavern scene rivals the films opening for intensity, because he’s so damn good) Tarantino’s writing, or my own bias towards genre or type (Pai Mei almost made the list based on nothing else but my love for his appearance from other kung fu films). So I gave up on making this list being strictly academic, or really even academic at all and instead decided to base it more so in heart and memory than anything else. Quickly writing down the first 20 or so characters that popped into my head from his films that I know stuck with me, and then beginning the process of eliminating them by asking myself:

“Which one stuck with me more?

“What is it about them that makes me love them so much acting, writing, a combination?”

“How close are to they to being fully fleshed out characters?”

“How much does it matter to me whether the are good or not, and then why?”

Some fared better in other categories than others , but made up for it in another, but ultimately it came down to some combination of all of these things, and besides that an admission that it would be rather impossible to make a definitive list , but much more interesting to make my own in hopes it inspires others to tell me theirs. So without further ado, MY TOP 10 FAVORITE QUENTIN TARANTINO CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME…

10. Stephen - Django Unchained (2012)

Quite possibly the most despicable villain of all time, Stephen is one of the examples on this list of meeting the criteria of almost all four of my categories near or at the peak. So why then is he at the bottom of my list?…Because besides being probably the second or third name I came up with, besides being one of the most fully fleshed out characters in QT’s catalog, and because Samuel L Jackson so skillfully plays him with so many detestable nuances, I hate him. I abhor this character. To the point I feel some sort of way even revisiting Django. Stephen is the “House Nigga” to end all House Niggas, a terrifyingly re-animated boogeyman of black history, one made even that much more terrifying by the fact black men like him may very well have existed and still do.

9.

GoGo Yubari- Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003)

As O-Ren Ishii’s most trusted bodyguard GoGo Yubari is as lethal as she is loyal, and though she appears on screen for only an extremely short time GoGo leaves quite the impression. She is a sadist of the highest order. Vicious, confident, and bloodthirsty. Given a bigger part I’d find it easy to draw comparisons between GoGo and Anton Chigur in “No Country for Old Men”. They are agents of carnage, angels of death. There is no rhyme or reason to what they do. Chigur invites you to play his game of death, and plays at it being about chance, but GoGo invites men through the perversion of their own fantasies, and requires no such fiction about chance, she kills because she can, because she wants to, because it provides her with pleasure. I think of GoGo as the cinematic embodiment of that great hidden fear all men have of the power women have over them. That not so hidden fear that If only but given the inclination to use the completeness of our attraction to them, the desperation in our need to control them, how easy it would be for them to gut the lot us. Leaving us helpless to do anything but to watch. Watch out boys she’ll chew you up.

8. Winston Wolfe AKA “The Wolf”- Pulp Fiction (1994)

Harvey Keitel’s “The Wolf” character is in the running for THE coolest character in Quentin’s entire filmography, and that is saying quite a lot. A wonderfully unique amalgamation of Hercule Poirot, Humphrey Bogart, The Driver, and Michael Clayton, the wolf is an anonymous player in Tarantino’s fictional underground world. He plays by his own set of rules, his own personal code, and commands the respect of everyone around him. Oh and he drives an Acura NSX, (one of the coolest looking cars ever made… fight me). You get the sense the wolf is the kind of guy who color codes his socks and arranges them in alphabetical order by brand name. I mean any guy who walks around in a f***ing tux at 9 am in the morning means business. Now the Wolf on Tarantino’s paper alone is worthy of some mention on a list of his greatest characters, but it is the steam from Keitel’s performance that propels Winston to the top of my personal list. As portrayed by Keitel, Wolfe is fast talking , but concise, and his movements and gestures match each of those qualities. The Wolf isn’t much for ostentation and ceremony despite the tux and the car, so Keitel gives him distinctive purpose in each line, and each gesture that follows, he keeps his body lines linear, almost protracted, and his eyes filled with intent. In a role that last maybe five minutes, Keitel in collaboration with Tarantino’s distinctive style and language creates a character that stayed with the audience well after that and now we all know just why Jules’s whole demeanor changed upon hearing his name… “Shit negro thats all you had to say!”

7. Hattori Hanzo- Kill Bill vol 1. ( 2003)

This one is easy. Hanzo (gleefully played by veteran martial arts actor Sonny Chiba showing quite some range) was one of the first characters to pop into my head (almost instantaneously). This is in some part due to the almost mythical storied history of his character both in and outside of the film, and in part due to Chiba. Hanzo’s change from mild mannered, cheerful sushi bar owner ( Who sometimes loses his temper with his lazy, insipid assistant) to deadly serious sword maker is Superman-esque and one of the best and most delightful surprises in Kill Bill Vol 1. Im sitting here right now thinking of his charismatic banter with Uma’s Beatrix Kiddo, each of them playing their roles within a role to the hilt of the swords they will brandish, and Im smiling ear to ear just thinking about it.

6. Drexl Spivey - True Romance - (1993)

Gary Oldman. Leopard Print. “White Boy Day.”…Moving on.

5. Marcellus Wallace- Pulp Fiction (1994)

Big, Black, Bold and Direct. The opening scene of Pulp Fiction acts sort of like a Carnival Barker setting you up for the big entrance of one of the films two or three most indelible characters, Ving Rhame’s Marcellus Wallace. When he finally appears, at first off camera, later the back of his head just off to the left of the screen, a large band aid front and center - it does not disappoint. Rhame’s signature baritone voice, smooth and somehow calming, despite the air of menace underneath, wraps itself in Tarantino’s words and then wraps us the audience around his fingers. Maybe my favorite part about Wallace, is his ability to articulate without having to conform to the accepted patterns, cadence, and use of the english language. He is profane, he uses slang, but he is still very well spoken. I maintain that Marcellus Wallace’s opening monologue is one of the greatest introductions to a character on film, and spawned numerous knock offs, none of them quite like the original. I remember first watching this character on screen and thinking “I have never seen a black man on screen like this ever. He was a new age incarnation of Superfly, and for a young teenager like me, I can’t tell you how much seeing him on screen meant to me, but suffice to say a lot. I guess you could say that was my “Pride, f***in with me”.

4. Shosanna Dreyfus- Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Thing is, if I were going off of acting Uma Thurman’s the bride may very well have been n this very place. It was a virtuoso performance. A knock down dragged out, physical and emotional tour de force. Both these characters suffer immense loss, both exact revenge, but the difference maker for me was in the execution of said revenge. I mean sure the five finger death punch is cool, but did you burn the entire third reich alive in a theater while watching their own propaganda film? Cool, calculated, and highly intelligent, Shosanna doesn’t end up living to tell her tale like Beatrix, and she’s no warrior, but she sure knows how to deliver punch, and having the last laugh on the theater screen ( the title of one of German director F.W. Murnau’s finest films) while your enemies burn…that is glorious indeed.

3. Jackie Brown- Jackie Brown (1997)

My favorite thing about Jackie Brown is how relatable a ant-hero she is. In fact if she had a super power it’d be like, survival or something. She’s not a highly trained martial artist, she’s got no assets, no partner in crime, and no team, but she’s resourceful as hell, intelligent, and she knows the game. She plays only the hand she’s dealt and yet she still comes out on top. I’ve rarely seen this type of woman portrayed on screen, even more rare by a black woman played with all the world weary “F*** you pay me” sincerity few woman but Pam Grier could provide. Jackie Brown gets to win, (Still very rare on screen for a black woman) and she gets over on everyone because A. she’s a woman, and B. she plays it so straight, no one’s any the wiser as to whats going on underneath. In that way both “Jackie Brown” the movie, and Jackie Brown the character’s genius lies in their simplicity. The movie doesn’t try to hide a lot from you, and neither does Jackie. Jackie communicates in a straightforward no frills fashion, and so to does the movie, without much of the verbose grandiosity and flashy cinematic call backs of his other films. Truth is, both are better for it , Jackie is smarter for it, and we all get to reap the benefits every time we watch her do it again.

2. O-Ren Ishii- Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003)

If ever there was a stand- alone movie I’d like to see based upon a character from one of Tarantino’s films, O-Ren Ishii would top that list. The character is in possession of one of the most harrowing, tragic, bloody, bad ass back stories in movie history, and Lucy Lui is in total possession of the character. The anime backstory is the stuff of legend , but the power in the anime is boosted and given legendary heft when we arrive to see a fully grown Ishii at the head of the Yakuza table. The following scene is not just a glorious continued ode to anime, but a supremely well acted one, that places O-Ren in an unquestionable position of power, while allowing Lucy Lui to show off her considerable acting chops. Here’s the best part about Ishii..or at least my favorite part. She takes over as head of an all male organization and installs only women as her most trusted advisors, she is a fierce warrior capable of dispatching any number of these men, so there is nothing to be done about it, that’s a revolution I want televised. O-Ren Ishii ‘s story is a story we are all familiar with, the rise and fall of a gangster. It’s “Scarface,” its “The Godfather,” except this time it’s a woman.

Jules Winnfield-Pulp Fiction (1994)

You had to know we were headed here. It would very hard for me to compose any list of characters from Tarantino films and not have Winnfield come out on top, whether academic or more from the heart (as this one is). Winnfield is almost incomparable. There was very little like the loquacious, Jheri curled hitman on-screen before 1994, and very little like him after. Samuel L Jackson imbued Jules with a fire similar to Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell from “Night of the Hunter”, and later in the film, the weariness of Gary Cooper in “High Noon” and its a revelation every single time I see it. There is an equal amount of poetry in Tarantino’s unorthodox rapid fire dialogue, and Jackson’s animated baptist preacher delivery that bonds in such a way as to create the kind of art that transcends the paper. Mostly because Jackson’s performance despite having a clear rhythm also goes off book. Its one of the few performances wherein I genuinely feel the actor might have been possessed. It really borders on the spiritual, and as wild and outlandish a character as Jules is in conceptualization, Jackson grounds him in electrifying authenticity. Never a false note, never a beat that feels forced. In my lifetime I feel it’s one of the 10 or so greatest performances Ive ever seen, and Winnfield, Jackie Brown, and O-Ren are the only characters on this list that would be on the top of this list even if it was academic. They’re that strong… they’re that good.

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 28: THE BROOD

“MOMMIE DEAREST”

The covert and overt fear over motherhood are part of what lies at the core of the horror in David Cronenberg’s “The Brood”. The power (both physically and mentally) inherent in motherhood, and given over by a patriarchal society in which men are conditioned to believe that the job of rearing children is largely that of a woman's - never mind the unconscious fear of a woman who can create children independent of a man - are seated in the foundation of both the biological and psychological horror on display.  That Cronenberg wrote this film while still grappling with still raw emotions over a rough divorce is also germane, and an alternative reading of Cronenberg’s film finds it an “emotionally realistic horror movie about the collateral damage of divorce “ something I wholly agree with, while adding that considering the narrative allegiances he forms with the characters (especially Frank Carveth) and subconscious fears apparent in the writing it is apparent with whom Cronenberg most wants the audience to side with, or at least whose side he’s on. It's in the visual representation of a child almost literally bring clawed at and torn by the children of a Mother’s Rage. And in the recycling of a time honored tradition of men that holds that women often use children as bartering chips to keep a man in their life. As well as the subtle if not overt demonization of a woman (Frank’s wife Nola) who is being held prisoner in a cabin with every form of contact with the outside world regulated,  or restricted by the combined efforts of her husband and the veritable Dr Frankenstein of this wellness center Hal Raglan while he performs a very ethically questionable form of therapy on her.  But this is the terror of the film, the horror in the film again, in my opinion is rooted in Motherhood.

Since the film never seeks to acknowledge in any meaningful way the mothers own connection to her child, the horror she might feel being isolated by this mad therapist, or simply who she is beyond her trauma, and illness then in many ways she becomes not so much different than the Xenomorph queen in James Cameron’s “Aliens”. As a matter of fact she is referred to as the “Queen Bee” by a disgruntled former resident of the institute. Devoid of any real character development she is simply queen of a hive. Walled off from the world not only the fictional setting, but even from us the audience. She is the avatar of a complex combination of the inferiority, abandonment , and impotency linked with motherhood and pregnancy independent of male interference, and translated as horror.

End of The Brood

We are meant to be repulsed as Frank is - and that repulsion stems not only from the physically grotesque nature of the birth, or her almost ravenous licking of the blood off her child, but on a deeper level from this womans asexual ability to reproduce. I do not mean all of this to be a repudiation of the film (The Brood is a classic in my opinion, and not all good horror possesses messages good messaging), but rather to examine what is at the root of my own and (I suspect others) horror in this film, and in this scene which is one of the most memorable in Horror if you have seen it. What Cronenberg accomplishes here can and will be looked at as either subversive, or complaint in upholding horrors tradition of torturing, reducing, and (though maybe not in this case) objectifying its women. For me it is mostly the latter which in some strange way cements the horror of the scene and the film as effectively repulsive in more ways than one.

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 24: POSSESSION AND STARRY EYES

“Out of Body Experience”

I am somewhat free styling going off the top of my head riding in the direct moment, but I would definitely venture to say as truthfully as is possible that body horror is either the number one or number one A. most terrifying form of horror for me. And for today I'm going to do a sort of a double feature of 2 scenes that I think represented the best of this sort of sub genre within horror. Heck even within body horror, because there are different kinds and types for example; the sort of corporealistic body horror of a Cronenberg,  or in another case the mirror touch synesthesia that comes with watching someone have their Achilles tendon sliced.   In these cases the body horror is one of a psychotic kind as well as a physical possession of sorts. The kind of possession that leads to the loss of control of one's own body and then begins to look and feels as if damage is being inflicted upon that person's body merely by the act of being watched. I think the easier part for an actor to perform (and in I say this with an air of relativity) is a production of the effect of just the possession and of itself the entry of something foreign into the body. This is mostly an action, and can be reproduced to the audience through a strange or unfamiliar dance move, or a combination of some form of jerking, or convulsing simulating to the audience that something foreign has entered possession of your body.  The harder part, the part that I think both these actresses the legendary Isabelle Adjani, and Alexandra Essoe execute is the indication that you yourself, the owner of the body is still there, as well as the foreign invasion, because that is where the deepest fear is at, or at least that's the case for me. When done well you can look into the actor's eyes and feel like they are still there, afraid, fully aware of what is going on but unable to do anything about it because that the entity is too strong , the feeling to seductive, or enticing. There is a real terror behind possession, in my opinion, it's not merely something taking over. Without your knowledge that is scary in and of itself, but I think when we can identify with a feeling of complete powerlessness, being awake and held prisoner inside our own bodies, aware of what is going on and yet out of control, I think that's a few layers deeper in the psyche. As far as the actor, it becomes their job to kind of take on a form of double mindedness . In essence, they're playing 2 roles with their body when they have to disconnect the mind a little bit from the body, disassociate. You have to produce this kind of air or feeling that has no exact definition,in experience but what the actor can imagine, and reproduce this for the audience. In 1981 “Possession” and the lesser known but absolute gem “Starry Eyes” (2014) we see two actors who provide us with both the body horror in the physical nature and the horror that lies in a more cognitive nature, the consciousness, the awareness. The recognition that you're going somewhere else.

Adjani’s work is physically terrifying.  Watching her writhe,  contort, and scream,  and resist,  and give in,  is something that goes seemingly beyond the pale of acting and ironically into possession itself.  It's mortifying watching her descend into her attack,  and equally as mortifying to watch her return.  It's maybe THE Masterclass in physical acting,  and body work as Adjani seemingly incorporates dance and breathing technique into a canvas of her own creation to morph into something unlike anything ever seen on screen before or after.  Its harrowing in and of itself and one of the greatest feats of acting Iv seen on screen that haunts much more than any ghoul or goblin Ive encountered on the silver screen.

a maravilhosa atriz Isabelle Adjani dando um show de atuação na cena do metrô no filme Possessão de 1981. Cena de ARREPIAR! palmas para Isabelle :) the wonderful actress Isabelle Adjani giving a performance show on the subway scene in the film Possession 1981. chilling scene! palms for Isabelle.

In Starry Eyes ( which I again highly recommend) Alexandra Essoe’s possession is more gradual, less explicit but nonetheless still there. There is more of a seduction here, a wooing, by an entity that begins to take hold of her and Essoe’s work is again like Adjani both very much so in and out of her body. You can feel the lure of letting go, but also the fear of being out of control and - without giving anything away - taken over. Essoes scene is terrifying because it seems like it feels good, and sometimes thats the worst of the lures into darkness. Essoe is hyper expressive, and a lot of the work integral to the scene is done with her eyes, her voice, and her hands. Its very expressive work done by an actor who has a clear hold on what and who her character is, and - maybe an actors best friend - a hyper imagination. Its great work creating one of the more memorable scenes in my recent memory. Both scenes are representative of the power, the allure, the physical and psychological terror of possession communicated to us the audience via fantastic performances etching the terror in our minds eye.

AZIZ ANSARI, WINNERS, LOSERS, AND CONSENT

Aziz Ansari is a loser. I say this not as a statement of fact about his inherent human value, far from it - but as an educated guess as to the way men like Ansari are labeled, stigmatized, and eventually programmed  by a mentality that doggedly molds them into becoming the type of men who could so blindly and callously bulldoze through all the signs a woman might give that she's just not that interested in having sex with you.   Be it for the moment or ever,  this mentality,  this fixation I'm speaking of is  America's patriarchal obsession with winning and with meritocracy.  It's not that winning, or meritocracy exist at all,  it's the dangerous and extreme preoccupation with them.   Where starting from adolescence you begin to learn a bevy of false equivocations like hard work is equal to success, and something akin to the feeble philosophy of Ricky Bobby "If you're not first you're last!".  It is a stale and almost always homophobic existence where it's sissified to hand out participation trophies, even when in many cases they still give out a championship and placement trophies.    Think for a moment about what that says, in that philosophy participation itself has no value, and It doesn't take much of a leap to connect the dots between that kind of thinking and toxic masculinity. When everything becomes about gains, when ambition is unfettered. When the destination is so much more important than the integrity of the actual journey. When all our desires are conflated with objects and objectives so that even women are conflated with objects then this is where even something as simple as the pursuit of happiness becomes extremely corruptive.  It is why when #Metoo first broke and I saw a litany of cis-hetero men so self righteously engaged in going on about other men I immediately thought ( and tweeted)   how these men were living in glass houses soon to be bombarded with the stones from their past. I said this because I knew (as so many women did before me) that there just aren't too many men that haven't internalized to varying degrees this sort of conditioning and acted out on it.  In the hierarchal universe of masculinity, aggression is magnetism, and will is like gravity.  A hyper-focus on these two will bring a man anything he wants, including a woman's affections.  A woman has no more agency over this than any human does over the tides or the moon.  This is the paradigm under which Aziz Ansari is prime "Loser" material. The wrong color, and on the wrong side of masculinity.  These "Losers"  recognize there is something wrong with the picture of masculinity,  but are less interested in the pain it's causing women because they are indoctrinated by the same toxic philosophy.  So their problem is not that toxic masculinity treats women as prizes to be won,  the dangers it poses to women, or the the way it imposes such a narrow space of being for rest of us, the problem is women aren't attracted to them!

aziz ansari - two types of guys

 Unable to adapt the aggressive tunnel-vision-like commitment of supposed “Alpha” males, or to imbibe in the sociological currency of extreme good looks, Ansari and other men learn to use self depreciation as a venus fly trap of sorts.  They feign harmlessness , but possess the same toxic intentions as most other men. Besides that, there is an undercurrent of anger as articulated quite a bit in Ansari's comedy.  Through the  power and persistence of these narratives and the effectiveness of anecdotal evidence of and from other men,  this dogma entrenches itself in the minds and attitudes of the so called " Loser.”   The loser lacks value and therefore must strive and work hard to create that value.   He must earn more everything, and his focus must not be deterred. If he didn't earn it, it is directly due to some failing of his.  Never because maybe it was never meant to be,  or because the attraction wasn't mutual.  God may laugh at the well laid plans of men,  but men take them with the seriousness of a heart attack.

This dogma, and the ubiquitous nature of it's tentacles is so far reaching that I just don't think very many cis hetero men are completely innocent. Even fewer do much to topple,  or the upset the order of things.  It feels too vast,  "there's nothing we could do" we might say, (ignoring the fact that divestment from the central tenets and beliefs might be a nice start) because the ideology and the reward methodology is so alluring. I'm not innocent of it either in my past, but I was always aware something was off. I sensed it as a child I sensed it as a team and in my early twenties after trying for a few years to wear the mask, I knew it. Frankly 21 with any true sense of self, it becomes tiring using the same tired, contrived, disingenuous, and manipulative approach without contemplating in any meaningful and empathetic way how to genuinely connect with women.   Women are not a monolith anymore than any other subset of human beings.  They can,  do,  and should have varying levels of comfort,  attraction to, or with varying degrees of aggression and persistence. Within a woman who might be firmly in the camp of Aaliyah's hit "If at first you don't succeed,  dust yourself off and try again there has to be an allowance for her feelings to change or fluctuate.     The fact that men suggest that women adapt a one size fits all attitude towards interaction with men, (especially sexual interaction with men) is indicative of an abhorrent lack of self awareness, (for themselves and other men) unwillingness to be flexible (Toxic masculinity) a lack of actual interest in who it is you're talking to or having sex with (Objectification) and a crippling fear of rejection, (Male fragility) all of which are exactly what women have repeatedly referred to when they speak of rape culture. All of which I think you can breadcrumb to a patriarchal obsession with winning and meritocracy.

Rape culture is an incendiary term.  Mostly because of that same one size fits all context being applied to the word rape itself.  Men tend to visualize the trigger warning type material we might see in a film depicting how a woman's rape was the impetus for some man's righteous revenge. We see violent, vicous behavior, by violent vicious men and only that. The suggestion that there are leagues of men, our friends, our brothers, our fathers, Uncles, etc who would behave so repulsively is ludicrous, and therefore shot down on site as the worst kind of hyperbole and sensationalism.  Worser still, is the idea that there could be any other form of violation that would give us pause as to whether our conduct with women in general is petulant, insensitive, ignorant,  and or violent.   Rape has levels like any other crime does,  because consent has levels like any other interaction does.  But here once again is where a culture obsessed with winning comes into play.  Winning is almost always directly associated with hierarchy, hierarchy with order, order with right, and right with fair.  Fairness is often associated as  transactional, and transactions too often conflated with interaction.  You might often see men stalely relating  supposedly ambiguous cases of rape to "Buyers remorse" which belies a problematic attitude towards consent and ongoing agreement process between two people - an interaction is not the same as a transaction.  Not only is there the obvious distinction that transactions are most readily linked with objects,  but there is the fact that the approach even in the business world is fundamentally different and indicative of exactly the problems women have been outlining.  This is an excerpt from an article outlining the important differences between transactional and interactional approach in business written by Marty Stanley a CSP (Communications Service Provider)  for the American management association.

"When you talk to people, are you focused on the transaction or your interaction? A transactional encounter is one where you're going through the motions to get the task or the discourse done. Maybe you are texting, talking on the phone to someone else, or just dazed and confused, but the bottom line is that you're not engaged with the other person or the process.

Interaction occurs when two people are engaged in a dialogue or actively participating in the process. "

This in my mind directly touches on the heart of the problem with the male approach to consent.  In this transactional context, consent is not a living breathing conceptualization of a woman's agency, but rather a rigid petrified obstruction to be strategically removed in pursuit of an end goal. Masturbation with a body is the end goal not the shared experience of sex.  A sort of cognitive dissonance that obscures and blinds us to the fact that a woman and her vagina are not separate entities.   That the woman is not in effect a merchant to be haggled with over her desire for sex with you.

You may gain from an experience with a woman but your experience with a woman and especially her consent to any part of that experience should not be approached as a gain in and of itself.  Any affection given by a woman is something to be participated in while being present, not something to be gained or won through a deliberate manipulation hyper focused on a future outcome of your liking.  You don't win a woman's heart, you don't win her affections, and contrary to popular belief a woman's affections exist irrespective of male machinations. But I'm not at all surprised men are having trouble parting with "rape culture" because of its proximity to meritocracy and winning in the culture.  The ideology is far too prevalent in patriarchal doctrine.  A dangerous but persistent narrative that finds itself inextricably embedded in the cultures around sports,  prosperity, religion,  and of course human interaction.   We as men need a conscientious movement away from a mentality that frames love, marriage, and consensual sex with a woman as akin to capitalistic endeavors.  Wherein sex is a trophy, and women the opposition in the "Battle of the sexes".  A sport with clear winners and losers.  In that world there is a cultured myopia that allows for the rigidity of attitudes like " I don't worry about what my opponent might do I just worry about what I gotta do" or "Winning is everything".  These ideologies intersect,  and weave a pattern of behavior in us men that victimizes women,  and undermines their freedom,  while aiding and abetting the fragility of our own ossified and brittle existence.  I say this not to be mean,  cruel or clever,  but matter of factly.  I'm not a fan of call out culture I think it's largely ineffective.  I've never known a human being my entire life that would respond in any constructive way to a criticism that begins or ends with something that goes "You're a piece of shit", or "You're Trash" not individually or as a collective,  and especially not in front of an audience, besides that it can be performative.  That being said sometimes things just are what they are.  If the entire institution of manhood can provably be linked to such atrocity, and harm, historically (and it can) then trash is an appropriate label. I'm a man, men are human beings and we hurt and feel guilt and shame like anyone else,  sometimes moreso.  But guilt and shame unlike their portrayal in a certain very recent film (Cough Cough* “The Three Bilboards”) don't often produce useful and benevolent change.  In fact more often than not they encourage our worser demons in service of the protection of our individual or collective egos.  I believe most of us when reading about the woman's recollection of a night she deemed the worst of her life - feel some empathy for her, but sympathize with Aziz.  We are “sorry she felt that way” because we're not interested in exploring that place that guilt or shame that might shake the foundations of how we view women and sex. Admitting that Aziz was negligent, inattentive, and in the wrong means taking a hard look at all of our interactions. Which means we like Reggie Bush might have to forfeit our trophies. I know this not from the vantage point of some moral superiority, but from the vantage point of someone whose been there before and is unwilling to continue engaging in the deception.  Reading, and hearing from this woman and so many others in this current climate calling for abrupt and unequivocal change is the like the experience of muscle growth.  The constant tearing,  ripping, resting, and repairing of ones self,  that so often leads to pain, fatigue,  and a desire to quit.  Men reading that woman's story are going to respond  to that empathic ability to feel almost every bit of her apprehension as it relates to Aziz,  because the picture she paints is what many of us have suspected but ignored being on "dates" with women, where we are dead set on an outcome regardless of her actual desire.  Where we make it clear that our feelings are paramount,  (and any number of undesirable reactions could be the consequences of a refusal to go along with plans made) without consideration of their feelings and therefore without consent.  Those feelings of shame, or sympathy or guilt,  may last awhile, or be fleeting, but if not checked,  if not breathed in and meditated on,  it quickly turns into various deflections,  and  the raising of straw men arguments all in the name of protecting ourselves from any prolonged submersion in those feelings of guilt.  Guilt,  shame,  and conflict should not be avoided,  they should be embraced,  not wallowed in, but accepted as a natural part of evolving mentally.  We at this point should (and truthfully do understand) that rape, like murder can have varying degrees, while the harm remains largely the same. Involuntary manslaughter is not the same as murder in the first degree but the victim is still dead, the grieving process for the family is still the same.  If that family were to write about the pain that death caused them whether involuntary or not, and spoke about what measures they think should be taken to reduce the chances it happens to others,   how gross would it be to try and explain to them how culpable they might be?  And before you start in with death is not the same as rape I know that clearly.....

The point is not death and rape are the same it is that our actions have consequences regardless of intent.  That stifling the voices of those who suffer from our actions in defense of a tradition of lopsided courtship is disgusting.   As one person whose name escapes me pointed out in a TED talk on the staleness of our model of education...  hardly any of us have the same phone we had ten years ago because it would be outmoded and dated,  incompatible with the times.  Yet here we are as men currently using models of courtship and consent anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years old. We can do better for ourselves,  and more importantly for women.  Change is always scary,  the process disruptive,  and at times painful as I'm sure it has been for many women even while finally having a platform to be heard.  And yes it will be hard for us men as well - although for far different reasons.  But be honest,  what are the consequences?  A deflated ego?  A loss of popularity for a few years?  Before you go running to protect men like Aziz,  remember in the words of Marcus Burnett form “Bad Boys” "They tend to think Mike Lowry gon be alright.” Aziz will suffer more or less as is fitting with the crime and only in the realm of public justice. I doubt women are seeking to lock up every man guilty of bulldozing his way to consent mostly because they seem profoundly aware of how few men would be left... (Eh well.. Maybe they are)  BUT I digress,  all things considered there has been little to no corporeal consequences for men in this epoch.  And yet the advantages... A stronger more elastic society,  that lives up to the higher ideals of what American Society looked like in theory, but never in practice with less emphasis on results,  and more on the integrity of the pursuit is glorious. How amazing would that be?!  No one's coming to take away sports or winning,  or meritocracy,  but the blind obsession with the narrative around them that places an extremely singular premium on the consummation,  so that everything else is of little to no consequence including,  how we arrived there, who participated,  and to what proportion.  I want to encourage other men to stop being defensive,  and start being reflective.

 Think about why maintaining the status quo is so important to you.  Try to understand that any culture that is so fragile as to refuse any major changes for thousands of years is indeed brittle. To read about the pain of this woman -  caused as a result of Mr Ansari's combination of single minded  persistence,  insensitivity and  inattentiveness- and to think to yourself...even if she wasn't as crystal clear as she could've been,  should we need a four alarm fire to recognize there's smoke in the room?  Would it hurt us to stop trying over and over again for one woman and just invest in the one who says yes the first time?  To examine the irony of a statement like don't put the pussy on a pedestal while our parasitic reliance on it is such that your very manhood depends on it.   And to pull a Matthew McConaughey from "A Time to Kill" and consider what it might feel like to be surrounded by people who for the most part are bigger and stronger than you ( even when they're not)  and are pretty fucking bad at handling rejection...

Consider how "rape culture" exist in prison and asks yourself if in that environment if you would actually need to be threatened to feel the threat of rape?  And thusly how you would navigate interactions with these men. Before you get all self righteous about how someone should just leave - which is objectively true,  but subjectively improbable - think about how you might react of you  were surrounded by these bigger stronger,  economically more powerful people whose reactions to your outright refusal may run the gambit between your death and a tongue lashing.  This is the world we have created and fostered,  and it cannot be overstated.  But we can prevent years of future harm and devastation by actively engaging in self reflection,  and growth.  By moving away from our value being tied to merits and winning,  and into being great human beings.  And finally by teaching our young boys that winning and losing are subjective constructs.    That their manhood is not in heterosexuality,  or being a provider,  or conquering the world,  and imposing your will on it.  It's in integrity,  self awareness, accountability, and awareness of others,  it's respect, it's being a human being,   a "master of none" but a student of everyone.

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 21: THE DEVIL'S RAIN

“THE EYES HAVE IT”

I am 99.9 percent sure that I'm not educating anyone when I say there is something very important about our eyes..  Windows to the soul it's said...I'm not so sure that they aren't THE soul.  When the eyes seemed glazed over,  when there is damage to the iris, if the cornea is milky or cloudy,  or if the eyes are simply missing, the body seems like a hollowed out shell,  some part of our brain assumes a lacking in empathy in any number of known human conditions and expressions of emotion.   A Person can appear robotic, and historically,  as well as in horror,  these various conditions of the eye are associated with the demonic,  otherworldly,  or supernatural.

David Cronenberg's “Scanners”, Nicolas Roeg's “ Don't Look Now”, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Sam Raimi’s “Drag me to Hell” all represent different aspects of the ways in which the eyes can be used to demonstrate other worldliness.

   In horror, as in life, I don't think there's any other extremity that is as terrifying as horrifying,  as conducive to producing an empathetic nervous response as is watching someone's eyes be popped out,  pushed in,  burned out,  or injected with some sort of needle.   In a great deal of horror films these phenomena, and our cultural unease with them has been used to effectively produce a mood, or quite simply to frighten us. A character in possession of these characteristics maybe presented as some sort of gateway as in communication with some supernatural power or possessed by some demon, as is any person whose eyes have some of unique discoloration,  or whose eyes are completely missing. I had and still have this feeling of the eerie when watching this scene in 1975's The Devil's rain. I first stumbled upon this movie when I was younger up later than I was normally allowed watching those Saturday night late night movies that would come on on local networks. Needless to say this did not go very well, cheesy effects and all I saw those hollowed out eyes and I was done. Those final minutes of cavernous eyes, and a goat like Ernest Borgnine, and melting skin produced quite a few nightmares, for weeks after, but I was also very intrigued, and weirdly excited.

Featuring William Shatner as Mark Preston, Ernest Borgnine as Jonathan Corbis, Tom Skerritt as Tom Preston, Ida Lupino as Mrs. Preston, Anton LaVey as High Priest, and John Travolta in his first feature film role as Danny ("Blasphemer! Blasphemer!").

Much later on when I saw it again on the AMC in my 30's I found myself thoroughly enjoying it. It's cheesy, pretty poorly acted, and camou as hell, but it's also fun, and the scene in question were William, Shatner is awakened now a disciple like all the others, his eyes hollowed out of his head is still like the ultimate creep factor for me, I know what's going on, I know it's going to happen, and I can't stop myself from feeling that eeriness.  If you're looking to take a rest from having your nerves rattled by ACTUALLY scary films or psychological thriller films where your mental endurance is tested I highly recommend popping in the devil's rain and just enjoying seeing a silly, ridiculously bad in all the best ways B movie horror film featuring the likes of John Travolta, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Skerritt and William Shatner. Oh and don't cover your eyes.

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 20: JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING

“A STRANGER AMONGST US”

I'd like to start on a quick tangent that I loved how (for lack of a better word) diverse John Carpenter films were in the 80s.  I don't know if they were representationally correct.- Though it is my opinion they were the best by far of the time,  and truthfully ahead of their time -  but in truth, a lot of John carpenter's characters were just in general stock characters, even the leads.  It's not like Roddy Piper in "They live" was some paragon of character construction. He like so many of Carpenter's characters were functions of moving his philosophy forward,  and usually two dimensional avatars.  But whether in Halloween,  or They live, or Big trouble in little China, or Prince of Darkness, Carpenter always involved other cultures, and he gave them characters that weren't steeped in stereotypes from the era. And I am telling you, if you didn't grow up in that era, its just hard to convey to you just how a huge a deal it was watching Asian,  and African American characters be not only integral to the story but make it out ALIVE!!! - was in and of itself. 

Now to the scene at hand.  I mean this is just excellent setup, design,  and execution for teasing an outcome, and constructing a surprise.  Tension in an incubator,  and it burns hot enough to convince you to move your hands.  You have all these men trapped in one single room in a sort of “Monsters are due on Maple Street” type story that is The Thing in the first place.   And I love Carpenter's decision to get rid of any music. In this scene, you didn't need it at all.  In fact it's more effective that all you hear is the bellowing of the wind outside, which is a wonderful, nice additional effect, something I think reminds us of our earliest associations of wind with something wicked this way coming,  and the low whisper of the gas emanating from the flame thrower. 

Then you have this almost clue like elimination of whodunit. Cut aways from the business end of the flame thrower heating up the small rod -now acting as the jury for these men - to their anxiety ridden facial expressions.  We the audience actively trying to convince ourselves of who the monster is now that we know it is in the room.  Its fairly simple,  yet by playing on what we expect, on our desire to find out before the reveal  ( so as to relieve our own tension) Carpenter is able to elicit a genuine shock that I think begins with the line " I thought you'd feel that way Gary,  you were the only one who could've got to that blood, we'll do you last"    Automatically,  I think for a couple of minutes at least...We, the audience think we're safe.  It has been teased to us that there is a wait coming,  we've been given a misdirection, and then all of a sudden, just like that, it's PALMER!!!. 

Now celebrating it's 35th Anniversary, John Carpenter's The Thing (copyright Universal Pictures, 1982) has at least one memorable sequence that is simple to the point of elegance. The group's reluctant leader R.J.

Just like that I'm as out of my seat as Palmer himself,  as the alien life form springs forth from his body.  Possession is naturally a primal fear and scary enough on its own but it doesn't even end there, because now we must watch in dread, our cinematic empathy tying us to the rest of these men who are literally stuck on a chair next to this guy as he transforms into this monstrosity helpless to do anything about it,  and the actors sell the hell out of the terror.   When I tell you it's one of the most terrifying things i've seen on screen, I MEAN IT.   I've seen Carpenters version a million times, and I'm never not surprised when the canister hits the ground, and Palmer goes berserk, it's as hard to time as Bryson Tiller's last "Don't" in his hit song Don't.  And (especially if i've had enough time between viewings ) I'm never not terrified at the idea of being strapped to the thing as it jirates and convulses out of its host.  The acting is outstanding,  especially by the triumvirate of Kurt Russell,  Keith David,  and Donald Moffat,  - who has one of my favorite line deliveries in the movie "I know you gentleman have been through a lot,  but when you find the time,  I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!!! " It's an amazing combination of a genuine connection with the terror,  relief, and exasperation with the whole entire situation,  and I just don't know that I can think of any actor who could've delivered it better.  As good as maybe, but not better. And I get it, and we get it, it's part of just what makes it one of the most memorable scenes that I can think of when it comes to horror, and every time I think of the thing, I first think of this scene, because of the acting,  because it's grotesque, because it is absolutely terrifying,  because it builds its tension so well, because its surprising and shocking and all the things that I think culminate to make a great scene in the genre. 

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 13: RAVENOUS

“BONE APÉTITE”

If I could spend at least twice a day posting about Antonia bird’s Ravenous without annoying everyone to death, I most assuredly would. I’m really quite unsure as to why her film isn’t talked about in the same way that we talk about maybe a Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead as audacious breakout features. From its offbeat score, to its offbeat off kilter performances to its subject matter, ravenous is truly a unique movie..one of a kind if ever there was one. This scene in the cave is not only my favorite in the film, but is central to what makes this film such a wonderfully world apart film. Robert Carlyle’s uncanny, hair raisingly insane performance, the palpable fear in Jeremy Davies young soldier…that peculiar, unsettling score, the shocking discovery.

this tantrum is from Ravenous...if you could call it a tantrum

It’s representative of all the things that set this film apart from others. In tone, in the beats, and predictability as to exactly where this film is going to go. Antonia bird – in the best way possible – does what I think a lot of provocative filmmakers don’t do well, which is she told a story that provokes you without pretense. And while you will be able to discover new things with each new viewing of this film, you don’t have to watch it a million times to figure out what the hell is going on. Bird delivered a brutal, bloody, character study of cowardice, and power. A film plays with and blends genres, genres that I think are difficult to coalesce and still make a cohesive film. Horror, comedy, a supernatural, psychological thriller, that integrates themes of man versus nature, man vs man, nihilism, survival instinct, and power but doesn’t really set up camp in any of them. It’s beautifully directed, well shot, gripping, and superbly acted from top to bottom. With a pulse dropping score their ratchets up the stakes with every scene. I highly recommend it this Halloween, and again recommend knowing as little as possible going in if you haven’t seen it. Fix your bib, and prepare yourself for a delectable horror feast.