The Wrestler

Life changes. Before you know it you're all alone, you live for a day that's gone, you listen for a song that no-one listens to anymore, and one wrinkle turns into twenty and one day of not seeing your daughter turns into two-thousand.

And that thing you do best is not what people want anymore. Your body isn't what it was. You cling onto it because it's everything you know.

You want the roar of the crowd, but instead you have the squeal of your hearing aid. And you want to love a woman and you want to love your daughter, but how can you make it better than before? With relationships, you never know where you'll land, you can never handle the pain.

But with wrestling you know the score before you start. You'll take a beating for a while but you'll come out winning in the end. In a pretend world the people will always chant your name, you'll always be their hero. But in the real world, there's no guarantees.

People leave, and people change, and before long you're the only one left holding on.

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Cinema Memories

I was in Florida, and the weather sucked, so we went to see a movie. We loved it. We were both blown away by the brilliance of 'Spanglish' (We must've been high or something).

My friend Kev had never been abroad before. We took a trip to Denmark. We spent all our money on day one; by eating steak that was more expensive than our flights. Then I got ill. And Denmark is cold. So we stayed indoors... in the cinema. Kev didn't get to see much of Copenhagen but I got to see a lot of movies.

A girl who had the misfortune of being my girlfriend back in the day was treated by me to a romantic first kiss.. during a Michael Moore documentary. Isn't that what every woman dreams of? Looking back, it was probably the highlight of our relationship.

I saw 'This Is It' in New York with a woman I'd met only days before. We got pretty close, as humans often do, but now we're an ocean apart and Facebook is all we have.

I found a cinema in 'Sicily' which was just like Cinema Paradiso. It was magical, at least until the movie started, because watching 'Bridge To Terabithia' dubbed in Italian sucks.

And years ago it was just me, Abdul and Trev in the cinema. We sat in the front row, in fact, we sat on the floor, leaning back on our chairs, and we stared up at the screen and thought 'Spun' was the craziest film we'd seen in years.

And I walked out of 'Gothika' because it was awful. And 'Love In The Afternoon' was ruined a few months ago because I was stuck sitting next to the heaviest breather of all time. And I saw 'Juno' five times and I saw 'Lost In Translation' seven times.

And Jodie was the prettiest girl of my teenage years and we went to a movie but I didn't share my popcorn and I ate all of her big-bag-of-maltesers and after that she preferred James, which sucked because all he had going for him was everything.

And I remember seeing 'Elizabethtown' and thinking it was the best film ever, which it isn't; and i remember thinking 'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang' was the most hilarious thing of all time, which it probably is.

And those are the ones that come to mind now, but there'll be others.

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Blogs

Allure is a blog dedicated to the unexplainable allure of the screen stars of the 1920's and 1930's. I love it when bloggers dedicate their entire site to some small niche thing that they're passionate about. But then you read someone like FlixChatter, who covers a wider range of things, and you like it because you see how much care and energy goes into the posts.

What I like about Babs & Midge is that they find things on YouTube that you've never seen, or that you forget you remembered. But there are too many review blogs. Millions of people reviewing everything they come across. Who cares? Not me. But occasionally someone does it good, like Inspired Ground.

I like Happy Frog and I: Tales From The Lilypad, because you see a writer blossoming. Some posts are wonderful, some you struggle through; but each one is different. And you recognise a singular voice, that's how you know you're in the presence of a real writer.

Adventures In Nerdliness is a blogger I always read, and enjoy, even though I never know the films he talks about. I have no interest in them. But he loves what he loves. I love people who love what they love, who dare enough to be passionate about things that aren't what's sitting at the top of the charts. And Mix Tape is just plain cool.

And Masala Moodswings just commented on my blog, and I'm fascinated: "a fat Indian girl's take on (the lack of) sex and life". Masala Moodswings makes uncool cool, and HipsterCrite makes the uncool-cool somehow cool again, she just writes so darn good.

Clint is an interesting guy. Phoenix is a fantastic actress. Obsessed and Bored is a young actress who's taking us on her journey, sharing her audition videos, her ups and downs, and giving us an insight into being an actor. I like what she does.

And I'll finish on Talking Movies, because this is a guy who asks interesting questions and posts thoughtful blogs, but it does it in such a simple, down to earth manner. He doesn't ramble forever; he gets the job done in three paragraphs. If only we could all be so succinct.

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Sexy Sax Man - Hilarious

I love viral videos. I'm also kind of jealous, because I've never created one and probably never will. It's not how my brain works. I don't have that talent. Not that it's always about talent; sometimes it's just about humiliating someone.

But the Sexy Sax Man is absolutely hilarious. Before we talk more about it; watch it:

Did you laugh? I hope so. 

I always find repetition funny. Often a bad joke gets amusing merely by the fact it gets repeated. A topless guy playing "Careless Whisper" to unsuspecting Walmart customers is hilarious to begin with -- and it just gets funnier and funnier. 

A good viral video teaches us a lot about ourselves. Watching this, you can't help but notice how insane and power hungry the security staff get, but why? It's just a very funny guy and his filmmaker friend doing something fun--- and I am certain that, for the people who witnessed it, it's something they'll remember forever. 

The Sexy Sax Man teaches us so much about our society. The security staff aren't just security staff in a shopping mall--- they're the government who have all your details, they're the managers at your work who flip out if your cigarette break lasts two minutes two long, they're the airport security staff who waste your time for fifty minutes looking for bombs in your underwear. 

That's why this video is so funny. Because it's a big fuck you to the man. The Sexy Sax Man is above the law. He's being creative and hilarious in a way we rarely are in our well-planned, carefully constructed lives. He shows a side of us we crave for. He's liberated. And for the five minutes we're watching, we're liberated too.

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The Kid In The Front Row Manifesto

"It's not a memo, it's a mission statement." -J.M.

You don't even know what you're going to create yet, you have no idea what you're capable of. Your first screenplay or your fifth might be great, but what about your nineteenth? We have no idea. When Woody Allen was writing stand up routines for comics, he didn't know he'd write 'Hannah And Her Sisters' or 'Crimes and Misdemeanours.' That was twenty five years later.

You don't even know who you'll meet this weekend. You don't know what problems you'll overcome in the next ten years. You don't know what your favourite film of the next five years will be. Who knows what will inspire us? Who knows who our future muses will be? We often worry about not getting the gig or not being good enough-- but we're worrying about projects and jobs that don't even exist yet.

The world is changing and the world is getting smaller. There are thousands of people out there who love the things you love. And there are writers and actors and directors and camera operators and make up artists scattered all around the world who you don't know yet. But you will. Who knows what the future will bring.

There are no rules. We live in the generation that invented Facebook, that developed YouTube, that made the studio execs a little less sure how big their pools are going to be in the coming years.

This is our time to get good. And if we suck, let's work at getting better. You used to need money and contacts to make a film. Now you need a video phone and a YouTube account.

We are the generation of Zuckerberg. Of Banksy. Of communicating in 140 characters. Anything is possible. Art has been getting its ass kicked for a long time. But things are different now. We can have voices again. It takes effort and its a choice we have to make. We need to decide on what we value.

On the one hand we have movie franchises where they remake Spiderman every four years because they know we're dumb enough to buy a ticket, we have short films made to promote chocolate bars, we have countless movies of girls running around in bikinis saying dumb bullshit in horror films that can only be called original because they have a different title to the ones that came before. We have the same thing we see every year because we've become numb to the notion of actually being challenged.

On the other hand, we have art. Personal expression. Standing up for what we believe, what we love. Nobody wanted to let Chaplin direct, nobody was comfortable with George Carlin's comedy, nobody loved that band you love when they started out; it was just their girlfriends and parents.

Art takes longer. And it's harder. And someone is more likely to fund a project about a cheerleader who went to blow-job school than your passion piece about an Israeli sandwich delivery driver who takes a road trip to Sweden to find his son. But if you follow through with it against all the odds, you get to be Bob Dylan, you get to be Godard. But more than all that you get to be yourself. You get to be a kid in the huge playground that is the unstoppable and ever surprising oasis of magic that is the human imagination.

Be art. Be yourself. Be a film that means more than the sum total of its opening weekend figures. Be Charlie Chaplin, be David Foster Wallace, be Joni Mitchell. If we don't do this, who will?

I meet, tweet, email and speak to SO MANY hugely talented writers, directors and actors every single day. But most of the time they're struggling, or pissed off, or going through a rut. It's because we're in an industry that doesn't care about us because the industry is about money, about making rich people richer. Good films don't cost $120million to make, and cinema tickets shouldn't be double or treble the minimum wage, and you shouldn't have to sell yourself out day after day in the hope that by the time you're 80 you'll get to do the projects you're really passionate about.

Lets take our ideas, our talents and our energy and let's find ways to work together, to create the projects that really matter. Its time.

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