Run, sprint, ride your bike as vigorously as you can on over to the Mayan right the hell now. Then run up those steep ass stairs of one of the upstairs theaters and treat yourselves to my new favorite film Reprise.
It’s a Norwegian film about friends and writers and it’s amazingly well-written and directed and the editing is all innovative and awesome and the whole thing is at once happy and sad and funny and heart-breaking and brilliant. Ahhhh! I want to marry it!!!!!
I finally feel a tad better about my struggles with the creative process…for some reason most writers (or wannabes, I guess) I meet in real life are strangely optimistic (and most of the time seemingly unrealistic) about the whole writing thing. They don’t really seem to question the merit of their work and they force their writing upon people with “Praise me!” faces and upon receiving the subsequent forced praise, beam all proudly and don’t even bother to question the merits of such shallow compliments (“Well, uh…it’s good. Why? Uh…lots of reasons…and I need to leave now. I’m late. For um…yeah, gotta go”). Then they get rejected and wonder why…but then put it out of their heads and blame it on other people’s weird taste. And then they just look at me blankly when I try to tell them about all of my mental anxieties that inevitably surface when I’m working on something and how I immediately hate everything I complete, making the editing process almost unbearable, and how I wish I would’ve been born with any other talents but I have a sickening compulsion only to write and be read. I’m always kind of worried about this generation of young people, like maybe too many people with not enough talent get praised by their peers and probably the school system in order to ensure they have incredibly high self-esteem…but then they don’t end up as intelligent, I think. Sure, they may be happier (a fool’s paradise and all that), but I think it’s a sign of true intelligence when you experience a healthy amount of self-doubt. It shows that you’re critical, that you’re thinking, that you’re looking to improve shit. Not to say I have a healthy amount of self-doubt with my writing; mine’s just an overwhelming sickness. I can only hope I get something brilliant written and published/made (depending on whether my novella/essay collection/screenplay makes it to the finish line first) before I have the typical artist breakdown. Bah humbug.
Anyway, the two main characters in Reprise made me feel way better about my struggles as a writer…and it depressed me, but ultimately gave me a lot of hope. Like I’m not alone and things don’t have to be so hopeless (at least not in all cases). And other people (in a film, yes…but someone wrote that film!) have the same fears about being derivative or trying too hard to force feeling and such. It was good to see.
I’ve seen one film in each of the last three years that’s completely blown me out of my seat: Half Nelson in 2006, This Is England in 2007, and now Reprise in 2008. Tons of amazing movies came out last year (There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grindhouse, I’m Not There, Michael Clayton, No Country For Old Men)…but somehow none got to me the way those three films have. They each captured something in me and were all amazingly written and directed and acted and they made me happy yet sad (hey, I’m a happily sad person…or a sadly happy person? Hmm, which is better?) and they gave me a lot of hope in the future of art and filmmaking and writing and yes, humanity. Amazing, truly amazing. I hope it keeps up each year and then I’ll make a definitive list of these films and write a book about it…and it’ll get stuck in the editing process, but fuck, what are you gonna do?
I'm a writer, music freak, pop culture critic-at-large, natural born lover, and professional crayon drawer.
