My butt is sore from skating. My friend and I went to a roller skating pop up event - a whole skate party - at the outdoor rink in Mar Vista last night. We skated for two and a half hours. There were lights and a DJ and a bunch of people who were way better at skating than me. It was like United Skates in the flesh. It's the first party I've been to in over a year. It felt really special.
I also finished my third draft of my screenplay Breaking Up Is Easy. I think it's really good. I submitted it to a bunch of contests (Nicholl, Austin, Screamfest LA, Slamdance) and spent a fortune. I'm fairly certain submitting to contests is NOT the way to go. You have to make it into like the top 0.5% for it to be useful, and even then nothing is guaranteed. Plus, you're at the mercy of random readers, most of whom are like interns at best. But I wanted to submit anyway. Wanted to get the script read by a few people at least.
It's 2pm already and I haven't changed out of my pajamas or really even left the couch.
MLog time! **SPOILERS**
BARBERSHOP
2002
Directed by: Tim Story
Written by: Mark Brown, Don D. Scott, Marshall Todd
Watched: 4/3/21
Calvin’s been running his dad’s old business, a barbershop in the southside of Chicago for two years. He wants to be his own man and open up a recording studio. He’s driven the shop further into debt with his side hustles and get-rich-quick schemes. So he sells the shop for $20,000. But during that day, he realizes what exactly the barbershop means to the community and what it means to him. Meanwhile, a couple of guys have stolen a cash machine from a nearby bodega. (They spend the entire movie trying to break into it without any success.) The police are looking for the thieves and pull in one of Calvin’s barbers. Calvin bails out his barber and the two of them manage to buy back the shop, track down the thieves, and get the $50,000 reward for finding the cash machine.
This was one of those chatty, slice-of-life movies. The best parts were the conversations among the barbers and patrons, their particular struggles and how the community helps them out. I always watch movies with subtitles on because the sound mix always seems to be off and I hate missing bits of dialogue. Whoever captioned this movie made the decision to write out all the dialogue in Queen’s English. It was like… not what the characters were saying at all. Like a character would say “bruh” clear as day, and the captions would read: brother. It was weird.
A lot of the best lines went to an older character named Eddie. Actually, the general message – monologue-wise – felt like a paen to respectability politics. Like, black people ought to be on time and not spend their money on Land Rovers, etc. etc. A bit along the lines of, if black people just shaped up then they wouldn’t have all these problems. Side note: it looks Kenya Barris wrote Barbershop 3 (2016); that could be interesting….
Rating: ★★★
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