Rewind #27

CSS: Donkey (2008)

Okay, let's go. Let's move. Let's dance and shake your butt. Let's reverberate inside your brain. Let's shooka-shaaka. Let's twirl with the stars and feel the sweat on your body. Let's move. Let's groove. I remember eagerly grasping at bands with the type of energy that CSS flaunts. Fun and full of pop/groove/slash/reggae, vital and slammin! I love to hear a sound like this purge my brain of thought. It doesn't matter how important my perception of the world has become now that I'm reaching for the downside of thirty. Yeah, I'm more aware, more knowledgeable, hopefully have more wisdom and compassion. Yeah, I care about the presidential election and all of its possibilities, even though the only thing that matters is who will be anointing supreme court justices. Yeah, I have the ability to discern universal ideas with better clarity but goddammnit, sometimes it's so damn fun to lose yourself in the dance. Sometimes we need to find a dark room somewhere that doesn't give a damn about how well you dance, just dancing is enough. It's a place that most of us know in our eighteen-year-old hearts and you know what? Sometimes it's good to find a place where I feel like I'm eighteen again, even though I'm twice that age! Well, I found it with these spunkalicious brazilians and where else can I find it? Maybe, the beauty bar? Ohhhhhhhohoho, that's where CSS should play if they ever come to San Diego! Perfect!


Into The Wild: Sean Penn (2007)

Into The Wild is about a young man who rejects the plan. Graduating from college, society, along with his parents, have already decided the direction he must travel. Get a job, a new car, go to work, get in debt, buy a house, find a mate, start a family, get in debt, pay into the plan for the rest of your life and even though the plan offers promises of opportunity, idealistic dreams and riches galore, part of the plan's agenda is to keep you just short enough to never reach so high. Christopher McCandless decides that he really doesn't like that plan, so he drops out, vanishes into the wilderness, clinging to the natural world and its incredible view. He canvases the United States, keeping afloat with small work so that he can savor the experiential existence. Along the way, he connects with a few people honestly and sincerely but can never stay long enough to leave a lasting impression. Eventually he ends up dead in Alaska and thus, we have the makings of a remarkable story. Whereas, if he made it out alive to tell about it, no one would've read the book and made a movie about him. McCandless spends his entire life running away from the putrid hell his parents ensconced him in as a child. He hates them and what they represent with such a passion that he can't acknowledge their existence in any way. Yet, the way that he shields himself from human connection is an exact reflection of how he was raised. He acts exactly like his father in so many ways that it doesn't really feel like he's trying to embrace the life around him with extreme vitality, as much as push himself off a cliff. It's actually pretty hard to feel empathy for the guy. One of the reasons I like this movie is because Sean Penn did a great job reflecting all of it. The joy and the anguish, the selfishness and the earnestness. It wasn't simply a sympathetic view of what McCandless went through. It was an honest film, made extremely well, with beautiful cinematography and good performances all around. I like Sean Penn's movies. I think he has a perspective that meshes with the way my cinematic mind works. I remember watching him in a movie called State Of Grace, which was this really cool film about Irish gangsters in Hell's Kitchen made by Phil Joanou. That movie has much of the same style that Penn portrays in his films, so I think that he must've been learning a thing or two a couple of decades ago. Phil Joanou also made a movie called Heaven's Prisoners with Alec Baldwin that Xtimu and I saw in the theaters the first year we met. It wasn't a very good movie but in the middle of it, both Xtimu and I turned to each other and realized that it was one of the greatest movies ever made simply because we were sitting next to each other feeling the butterflies in our stomachs that rose up every time our hands touched. So I guess that must mean something in the grand scheme of it all, right?