All done working on the Gondry movie. I wish I could blog more about it, but that's the way it goes. Again, it's hard to construct a blog on a regular almost daily basis without involving your personal / professional life and the way it goes when you do work like this is to keep it quiet. Understandably. There's a lot you can read about the movie online, including a New York Times article that's terrific. Director-File a great site on some of the best music video directors has more.

Likewise, I hadn't worked on a feature in quiet awhile and I'd forgotten how completely involving and overriding the process is in you life. I was commuting two hours each way into at least 14 hour days. Those were the good ones. I often like to check reality and consider that doctors - now they work hard. But I forgot that for crew who work on movies it's always been tough, the pay isn't the greatest, the hours are tremendous, and families don't see you as often. It is brutally hard work just by sheer number of hours and intensity. It's easy to shoulder that when you're a director - you're monomaniacally obsessed.

Oh and for the record, I was shooting material for the DVD, etc.

Here's the kind of stuff I should blog. Back in the 80s when Kubrick was prepping Full Metal Jacket, so the story goes, he requested a worldwide casting call (or someone working for him did) inviting actors to submit videotape auditions. I feel guilty for laughing at someone else's dream, but this purported tape from that request that's been going around for years makes me laugh just like the cameraman does around 2:14.



Other than that, catching up on sleep, reading books, obsessing over the new dual obsessions in the apartment - Nintendo DSes, one white, one pink. Nintendo's philosophy I'm starting to love more and more - give people good games that are accessible, instead of trying to blow them away with production values.

I've been speechless lately. Yes, I have been working on Michel Gondry's new movie Be Kind Rewind - a handful of days in between editorial on the latest video. Lots of frantic activity all night long in pretty cold temperatures in Passaic NJ, followed by long trips back home. I've become wholly nocturnal. There isn't much I can say about working on it, for obvious reasons. Back in film school in the 90s I saw a UK late late night documentary, a terrific series called Mirrorball that focused on several video directors and showed their work... I stayed up to watch Michel's episode after a friend had recommended I look at his videos. I was staggered and punchdrunk after seeing it all - someone whose work was so mindblowingly inspiring but at the same time so collossally good that you knew that it would be futile trying to ever reach that level. I really still believe that when it comes to videos Michel's work is untouchable - there will never be anyone as good as that, nor was there before him.

So what's it like following someone you hold in such high regard with a camera? Pretty imposing. I have a job to do so I try to focus on that and hope for the best and that I don't annoy him. And the entire cast and crew are wonderful, there is ultimately for all the hardship of making a film a nice atmosphere on set. I'm completely exhausted today and I probably won't be doing any more shooting on the thing and that makes me miss everyone.

More speechlessness...

The best film I've seen all year has only screened on cable. Spike Lee's When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts leaves me speechless. It's flawless filmmaking. It's hard to watch - four hours all told, with some moments near impossible to keep your eyes on the screen for all the futile rage this material makes you feel. What I wasn't expecting is what a lovely ode the film is to New Orleans itself, and the undercurrent of sadness runs deeper for knowing just what we have lost. Make no mistake; we have lost an entire American city in our lifetime.

I think about this a lot because I grew up - near a military base - with ever present presumptions that my life would witness something terminally apocalyptic. What I never expected is that we would lose an entire city due to our own negligence and ignorance and deeper issues we have about class and race in this country. 9/11 was paradigm shifting but constrained to a few city blocks. Why there isn't more continual outrage on the part of all citizens here about losing an entire city is a question I wish could be answered. For those who say it's unfair to compare the two because ultimately it may have been beyond our control as it was an act of nature - the portrait Lee crafts is undoubtedly damning in terms of what we did not do that could've saved lives and even a city.

I just read Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, which also left me speechless. I'll write about that later.

And my girlfriend's artwork leaves me speechless a lot. She doesn't trust me when I say that one of the things that made her attractive when I first met her is the art she makes. And I guess I feel bad saying that, because you don't want to like a person for what they do, but it is a mirror for what goes on in her head and the way she sees the world. She's been doing some painting lately and it's a comforting feeling walking through the apartment with her working in it. It's a nice feeling to be around someone who's making or creating, even though you probably annoy them being there. I wonder about most creative people - as soon as I've finished writing a treatment or an edit I rush to find her and ask what she thinks. Maybe this goes on in the background of everything that gets made when you have someone in your life.

Hope to be blogging more soon. That last post was once again a guest post. But it's all true. Except I did not give birth to an otter, I am one.

ive been playing a lot of video games. ive been coughing my lungs up. i gave birth to a sea otter. i have 11 kurt vonnegut books coming to my apartment. i have been hanging out with mos def on a michel gondry set. i need to start editing the annie stela video. i really need to eat more vegetables. i might want to invest in a coffee table. im going to quit smoking. i washed my hair for the first time in a week. i have really bad gas from theraflu. i need to pay my rent today. i need to sleep earlier. i want to learn some magic tricks.