💎MY FAVOURITE THINGS💎 || Be My Friend

I’ve been finding this current moment particularly difficult to reconcile, especially when tuning into the rhetoric from our global leaders, much of which has brought out the worst tribal instincts within us. It’s crazy to think we were landing on the moon half a century ago and are now primarily focused on what lies within the glowing screens of our smartphones. And yet when we take the time to sit in history, whether through a well researched book, film or podcast, it helps us to see the forest from the tress. To accept that our current woes are incomparable to those faced by our ancestors. Such reflections have helped me tune out the noise and remember (at least for now) to savour the rollercoaster.

You Must Remember This 📻

I’ve been slowly making my way through The Invisible Woman, a ten-part audio series on the life of Polly Platt, a producer and production designer best known for being married to celebrated Hollywood filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. There is is something embedded in Platt’s life story that is so compelling and the series creator and narrator, Karina Longworth, goes to great lengths to bring this complex woman into focus. It’s the kind of revisionist tale that is crucial in better understanding the art of the past. Behind every creative artifact is a story and in the case of any celebrated male artist, romantic partners that bolstered their egos from the shadows. In the case of Platt, Longworth helps us to understand just how crucial her creative input was on Bogdanovich’s meteoric rise with films like The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc? and Paper Moon. The fact that Bogdanovich never mustered another hit after splitting from Platt is evidence enough. I’ve been a fan of You Must Remember This for years and was blown away to discover that Longworth recently married celebrated Hollywood filmmaker Rian Johnson (Looper, Knives Out) making her critical analysis of Platt’s life all the more fascinating.

The King of Staten Island 🎥

Billie and I took ourselves to the cinema for the first time in many months to catch Judd Apatow’s latest offering. And while I wasn’t blown away with The King of Staten Island, the coming of age dramedy nevertheless broaches new territory while shedding light on the age-old nemesis of trauma. Pete Davidson, the millennial hero of the moment, leads this quirky romantic comedy as a hapless young man living in the shadow of his late father (a beloved firefighter) and taking up space at home with his widowed mother. Maybe I’m just getting on in years but the saga of the man-child, popularized in so many of Apatow’s celebrated films from the nineties and noughties, seems to be wearing thin on me. That said, I was fascinated to learn that Davidson’s own life served as the catalyst for the story. His own father was a former New York firefighter and perished during the rescue efforts of 9/11.

Waking The Witch 📚

I’ve been researching the troubled history of witches and witchcraft in the development of a TV show. The initial idea was inspired by a trip to Lilium, a cute little cafe located up in the hinterlands outside Byron Bay which helped me stumble over Waking The Witch. Written and read by Pam Grossman, it offers a fascinating look at the sad and complicated history of the witch and its portrayal within a modern context. What is so horrifying, and ultimately tragic, is that its entire premise is entirely predicated on patriarchal fear of women and their innate sexuality. Looking at the current state of things and Grossman’s own personal history only confirms how far we have to go in righting the wrongs perpetrated by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum. While I’d like to think we’ve come a long way from these ignominious times, it’s troubling to think that the leader of the free world can proudly and publicly shame women at will with no apparent retribution.

Riding The Lapping Tongue 🗞

Terry Southern was not your average writer. Here was a man that helped conceive of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and was instrumental in making Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider a cultural monolith and agent of change. I don’t even know how I stumbled over this article, an electronic re-print from The Saturday Review following Southern’s leg of The Rolling Stones’ Exile tour in 1972. I love the way Southern frames the manic energy of Mick Jagger and his jaw-dropping stage persona. Reading this piece almost fifty years later is all the more remarkable, to accept that the frontman of the Stones continues to shake his septuagenarian booty the world over with that same lust for life. And while I tried (and failed) to fall in love with the Tequila Sunrise, the drink of choice aboard the Stones’ private plane (and the defining cocktail of the nineteen-seventies imho!) it nonetheless helped me to put my feet in Southern’s well-worn ropers.

"The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock -- shock is a worn-out word -- but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency. The Titanic couldn't sink, but it did. Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting. I want to blast it." — Terry Southern

The Mother of All Questions 📚

There is something embedded in Rebecca Solnit’s writing, a passion for knowledge and understanding which leaps off the page. In the case of this book, a collection of essays on feminism in the twenty-first century, Solnit gets at the heart of the matter. I love the way Solnit speaks to the uprising over the last decade, an eruption which she attributes to the birth of social media. In conjunction with this tidal shift, she speaks of the importance of men in speaking out in support of equal rights. All the same it is startling to realize that her praise for Aziz Ansari and Louis C.K., two ‘feminist stalwarts’ from a 2014 essay, have not aged so well in recent years. Waging an all consuming battle on language and the dialectical framing of gender in society, the New England native is a worthy (and necessary) foe to challenging the status quo. Her tireless pursuit of equal opportunity for women the world over is truly inspiring.

Labyrinth 🎥

With a dearth of new content from the studios in the face of this global pandemic, it’s been exciting to see many picture houses featuring a host of classics on their roster. This is how I came across Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, screening for one afternoon only last weekend. I’d never seen this nineteen-eighties classic and was blown away with the spectacle. Starring a baby-faced Jennifer Connelly seeking to right her wrongs in a labyrinthine maze, she comes across a wide variety of cute and cuddly characters on the road to saving her baby brother from eternal damnation. Seeing David Bowie in a pair of skin-tight leggings, surrounded by knee-high puppets was some kind of wonderful and made me miss him all the more. While this film would never be made today, I’m grateful that this wildly creative classic exists to show to my grandkids in 2050.

The Moods of Ernest Hemingway 🗞

This curious profile of Ernest Hemingway came to my attention after finishing Lillian Ross’ Picture a few weeks back. Published in 1950, a matter of months before the New Yorker staff writer went on to shadow John Huston on the making of The Red Badge of Courage, it offers a curious examination of the Illinois writer. While I cannot say I was ever a fan of his hobbies, from big-game hunting to his obsession with bull fighting, I was instinctively drawn to his love for adventure. The celebrated writer had a love for the exotic and spent much of his life traveling the globe in search of challenges to scratch this eternal itch (and turn into best-sellers). From my understanding of history, it was no easy task swimming against the current (even for a man!) and Hemingway’s revulsion for New York and its devotion to the bottom line comes across in this immersive profile.

Cold Mountain 🎥

This period war drama has been on my to-do list ever since making my debut feature film in Romania a few years ago. At the tail end of post-production for Far From Here, I found myself spending a week in a grading facility on the outskirts of Bucharest, parked beside a professional colourist. During my lunch breaks I was kept company by the garrulous manager, a woman who regaled me with tales of her most celebrated clients over the years. Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain was at the top of her list, a Hollywood blockbuster that was primarily shot on location in the Transylanian wilderness. Jude Law and Nicole Kidman shine bright in the leads but it was Renée Zellweger that stole the show with her abrupt arrival in the second act. I’ve been a big fan of Minghella ever since I laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley in my teens. The British filmmaker has a genuine love for character and stories and his attention to detail carries through in his adaptation of Charles Frazier’s novel.

The Changing World Order 🗞

My Papa turned me onto this fascinating ongoing series by Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates (an investment firm) and a founding member of the Billionaire Boys Club. Dalio seeks to put our current moment into perspective through an extensive analysis of the twentieth century and the shift in world domination in the wake of WWII. I love the way Dalio breaks down this transition, from America’s ascendancy in the face of Britain’s decline and his simplistic logic behind the hegemonic handover. As Dalio makes plain, this shift was entirely dependent on the bottom line and economic policies that enabled one world power to eclipse another. His no-nonsense approach to the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, a direct result of America’s stringent blockade on crucial exports to Japan is both enlightening and strangely satisfying. I’m looking forward to tucking into part two, which released earlier this week.

Screenplay 📚

As part of my PhD research, I’ve been reviewing every single screenwriting manual I can get my hands on. Syd Field’s Screenplay, first published in the late seventies was a groundbreaking book that effectively shifted the industry in Tinseltown and beyond ever since. It had been many years since I’d tucked into it during my film school days and its teachings have only ripened with the passing of time. There are so many age-old takeaways in Field’s breakdown that shed so much light on life as we know it. One of the most instrumental — action is character — is as relevant to a screenwriter as our personal lives and helps to remind that we are what we do not what we say. Field was lucky enough to learn under the great Jean Renoir in the nineteen-fifties and imparted this quote from Renoir’s father — the great Impressionist painter — which touched a nerve and compelled me to share with y’all.

“If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.” — Pierre-August Renoir

John Lewis 👤

While my knowledge of the late John Lewis was limited before his recent passing, reading about his monumental achievements over the course of his life have left me downright amazed. He was a living, breathing example of humility, a man who devoted his life to fighting for equal rights and opportunity for African Americans. It is incredible to realize the monumental progress made during Lewis’ lifetime, to accept just how much change has occurred within a century. And yet it’s important to remember that Lewis died under a President whose outright contempt for black lives (or any shade other than his rust-belt constituency) continues to transform the United States to its detriment. I was particularly moved by Jelani Cobb’s final thoughts, who helped me to appreciate the fact that Lewis, unlike his former leader Martin Luther King Jr., had to suffer through the rise of crack cocaine, gang violence and sub-prime mortgages (and subsequent evictions). I look forward to checking out Dawn Porter’s new documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble when it comes to a cinema near me.

Free - Fire and Water 🎙

I finally put Al Kooper’s memoir to bed this week but not without one final takeaway. There is a section dedicated to Kooper’s impulsive move to Atlanta, relocating in the early seventies on a whim. As Kooper tells it, there was an explosion of creative expression through the Georgian capital and it was here that he chanced upon a young Lynyrd Skynyrd in their very first club appearance. While Kooper helped put Florida quintet on the map, Skynyrd’s underlying sound was indebted by the British band Free. Formed in 1968, the British band generated a cult following but failed to translate this into commercial success until the release of their third studio album and their hit single ‘All Right Now’. The London natives went on to become one of the best selling blues bands in Britain before disbanding after the release of their fourth and final LP. There is a special kind of energy embedded in this record, an irreverence and moodiness that worms its way into the heart.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS |Be My Friend

“Polly was sort of an inconvenient woman. She was always speaking her mind, often when people didn’t want to hear it, and she would have sort of this presence on a movie set where she would really fight for what she believed in, but she wasn’t as tough as she seemed.”