If i had to take them with me i would never get from my bed

Over the past two weeks or so I”ve been doing a lot of searching and a little writing that will hopefully result in my fourth feature length screenplay.  Isn’t that exciting!  I have no idea when it will get made, if ever, right now there are just some things I need to get out.  It’s actually maybe my “lightest” one yet, but not really.  Maybe there’s more jokes.  If you could call them that.  Whenever I work on big writings like this I find it helpful to listen to some kind of consistent music over the course of working in order to hold everything together.  For this project it has been a ton of Tindersticks.  Nothing about this music says light, but maybe that’s the point.  I’m really trying to come to terms with how to make something that is meaningful and serious without being so in your face “heavy.”  While it is true that I have often strived for understatement in some sense I still think I have maybe steered more towards a certain seriousness out of a desire to be “important.”  I watched A Woman Under the Influence a few weeks ago with Marla, it was her first time and we both wept quite a bit throughout.  Now I have no desire to copy Cassavetes and have complained about others doing so on this very blog.  But it really made me think about a few things.  Having just come from a school where a teacher literally told me that she wasn’t concerned about content and was more worried about if a student “could shoot” I thought that this movie was the best defense against this kind of mentality.  Cassavetes matured technically throughout his career and while I appreciate the more thoughtful visualization of Love Streams, none of the “mistakes” in Woman can trump his compassion and understanding for others.

I’m tired of things being pretty and I’m guilty of this too.  Towards the end of Wend and Lucy, a movie I liked over all, there was a shot that really annoyed me.  It was right after she had left the dog and it was just this wonderful tracking shot of Wendy in the train yard and it felt so false, because while the character was at the lowest point of the film the audience was given the treat of some eye candy that the character was not entitled to.  I’m not judging Reichardt’s compassion, which I feel she has a surplus of, but this desire to make pretty images is a hard one to overcome.  I’m not advocating intentionally ugly images.  I’m not sure what I’m advocating.

But really I was just going to post a Tindersticks album.  Maybe more on the movie thing when I have thought it out better.

This is their second album and it includes what is becoming one of my all time favorite songs, Travelling Light.