April 3, 2021

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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April 2, 2021

Jumping straight into MLog BLog because I've been behind on that. **SPOILERS**

Theroux, Louis – GOTTA GET THEROUX THIS: MY LIFE AND STRANGE TIMES IN TELEVISION

Published: 2019

Read: 3/2021

Louis Theroux is a UK Documentary presenter. Which means he’s the one on camera interacting with subjects and asking them questions. His career’s focus has been largely on American fringe groups and cultures. A bit like an on-camera Hunter S Thompson, but a lot less drugs. I came to Louis’s book in my progression down the Adam Buxton rabbit hole. Louis went to the same upper-class boarding school as Adam and Joe. Louis’s parents were well-off and very liberal. His dad is the American travel writer, Paul Theroux. (His cousin is the actor Justin Theroux, who was the director character in Mulholland Drive!) The book talks about his early life and education, how he got into television (through a lucky break, landing an on-camera roll on Michael Moore’s show, TV Nation, even though he had had no previous TV experience), and a bit about the documentaries he’s done. Oh yeah, and a whole lot on his relationship with Jimmy Saville. 

Like I said, I knew of Louis’s only because he was a regular on the Adam Buxton podcast. This book was a pretty good inroad to Louis’s work. He’s funny and does a thorough (a Theroux) job of describing his docs and what the making of them was like. If I had seen a bunch of the documentaries in question, it might have been a bit dull. Like someone telling you exactly what was in a movie or book after you’ve already seen or read it. 

His privilege, in his route to a career in TV, hit me like a tidal wave as I was reading. He comes from a wealthy and artistic family, he had an elite education (private school then Oxford), he had dual citizenship because of his dad and was able to move from London to California and then to New York easier than I could have moved from Colorado Springs to Denver. Then, on top of all that, he also appears to get outrageously lucky. Not that one should ever really approach someone else’s journey as the blueprint for breaking in, but Louis’s is definitely not one I’ll be able to emulate. 

Stuff I like about him: doggedness, quick to a joke, slow to judgement, a penchant for getting out of his depth, but also a strong equilibrium that’s difficult to totally upset. 

Rating: ★★★

LE TROU

1960

Directed by: Jacques Becker

Written by: Jacques Becker, José Giovanní, Jean Aurel

Based on: The Break by José Giovanní

Watched: 4/1/21

Four cell mates are planning to escape when a new inmate, Gaspard, is moved into their cell. Gaspard is taken with how much camaraderie and good feeling there exists between the four. They all share their food parcels, sent in from outside. (And of course, as a French film, the food looks lovely. Cheeses, bread, jams, smoked meats.) Gaspard, in turn, offers to share his parcel of food. Eventually, the four let him in on their plan to escape. They’re working – folding cardboard into cardboard boxes – and they use the cardboard to cover the hole they’re digging in one corner of the cell. They break through to the basement of the prison, and from there, they go down into the sewers. The sewer line is blocked by concrete to prevent escape. So for several nights, the men take turns digging a hole around the concrete barrier. By the end of a night of working, they’re able to break through. They follow the sewers to outside the prison. But the two that do need to go back and tell the others. The five of them plan their escape for that night. However, Gaspard is called into the warden’s office. He tells Gaspard that his wife has dropped the charges against him. He should be out as soon as the magistrate drops the case, which could take a few weeks. 

Gaspard returns to the cell and assures his cell mates that he did not give away their plan. Gaspard had told Manu, one of the other men, earlier that he felt more right with them in their escape efforts than he had ever done before in his life. That night, as the men are ready to make their escape, a whole rush of guards shows up. They strip the other four prisoners to their underwear and get ready to send them to solitary confinement. Gaspard is led to his original cell. As he passes the four men, one of them looks at him and says “Poor Gaspard.” 

I love that ending. I feel like it was saying that Gaspard, even though he’s soon going to be free, is more pitiable than the men who now have to stay in prison. They experienced purpose, brotherhood, loyalty. He has none of those things. 

Man, there are a lot of long sequences in this movie of these guys loudly digging their holes. But those long sequences did help confer on me how much work these men were undertaking and how risky and claustrophobic it was. It has that underlying quality of joy. Working hard together towards freedom. Tricking the authority. Taking your and your brothers’ lives into your hands. There were wildly silly parts as well, like two of the men avoiding a patrol by shimmying around the opposite of a column, one of the men on the other man’s shoulders. 

It sounds like the other two films by this director worth seeing are Touchez Pas Au Grisbi and Casque d’Or. I will put them on my list. 

Rating: ★★★★

April 1, 2021

My friend who I wrote about a few days ago, assuming no one would ever read the post did read the post. WHOOPS. She was cool about it though, more bemused and interested than anything else. It's strange to operate in the world under certain rules -- what you can or can't say, do or not do, venture into or not -- and then to find out the rule was arbitrary. A line on a basketball floor rather than a fence. 

I helped someone on my basketball team submit an Individual Artist Fellowship application to the California Arts Council, yesterday. It made me feel good. I really hope she gets the money. 

The roller skating drama has continued. I had a better handle on what I wanted to say about it yesterday. But now it's the morning and I gave blood yesterday afternoon, not feeling up to snuff. But I will do my best anyway. 

I've been thinking maybe the movie there (or just episode of CSI, let's be honest) is a pretty blonde instagram skater is found dead in the rink. There are a lot of suspects. There's the local skaters who she's snubbed or scammed. There's the hockey players, sick of roller skaters taking over the rink. There's the rich neighborhood busybody who's upset about the music getting played in the rink. There's the skater's own Instagram-famous friends who are jealous because their skate pages aren't quite as popular. There's the skater who's signature move the dead skater stole and claimed as her own. 

The detectives would have to make inquiries on a number of lines. They'd try to understand the group dynamics. "Well, there's OG skaters, people who've been skating for a long time; there's the indoor skaters and the outdoor skaters." He puts up a photo representing the crowd for each. "There are the pandemic skaters." "Bandwagon?" "That's right." 

Then there's the breakdown along identity: race and ethnicity. Latinas passing for white and getting the same gigs as the white girls. Light skin vs dark. Gender and sexuality. And of course who you support vs not support. Who do you talk to on the rink. Who who you put in your videos. 

I admit my CSI episode is not the most sensitive way of handling this story line. It came to mind because there's so many possibilities for conflict, so many lines of division. So you could write it with a lot of suspects in frame, all coming from a different POV. Wanting the skater dead for a different reason. 

Man, I finished Louis Theroux's book Gotta Get Theroux This several days ago but still haven't written my Book Log (BLog) about it. Stuff's been coming up. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will dedicate the post to Louis Theroux. 

Happy April!