All caterpillars ain't caterpillars.
where the Blackness be, I'm just a writer, and almost violence
¿What you heard?
“All caterpillars ain’t caterpillars. Some are worms,” says Carlton the Messenger at the Pan African Film Festival Spoken Word Fest, and I’m thinking, ‘What other film festival has a spoken word fest?’
But at this place, to shout out “come on, poet” to the artist word playing in front of the cinema screen just feels right because this is the Magic Johnson Theater at the Crenshaw Mall in South Central LA.
If there is to be exclamations and clapping in the middle of a show, it will be here because, just as all caterpillars ain’t caterpillars, all theaters ain’t theaters.
Some are also where the Blackness be.
What you doin’?!
I’m rocked up in that basement plugging away at a pitch deck when someone says “you should get a graphic designer to look at that.”
“What?”
“Bruce Block. Squint test. These two slides don’t match these other slides.”
I squint my eyes, and I see it for myself.
“Oh yeah.”
Something I’ve been realizing lately is that being an early-career filmmaker also means being a lot of other things that I don’t properly know how to be like an animator, a web designer, a producer.
Sometimes, I wanna throw up my hands and say “hey. I just write”... but then, who’s gonna do all of that other stuff?
What you seen??
MAGAZINE DREAMS (2023) caught me guilty of misjudging a film by its poster. Honestly, I was loathing seeing it, figuring it would just be a typical sports movie.
I don’t like typical sports movies, but in reality, it was anything but.
In fact, it was deeply atypical in that, over and over again, it sets up recognizable contexts for violence, but ultimately, the protagonist — unlike just about every other movie character I’ve seen in similar situations — decides against violence.
I would wager that this is the message of the film, that the option other than aggression is a legitimate and still cinematic alternative.