Love

Change Is Good And If You Don’t Think So Ask Any 80-Year-Old Gay Black Woman

If a smiley Jackie Chan doesn’t inspire the world to legalize gay marriage then what will?

You know that David Bowie song, “Changes”? It’s the one where he develops a stutter in a very specific portion of the chorus. (Ch-ch-ch-changes/Turn and face the stranger/Ch-ch-ch-changes…) Yeah, you know the song. My own life has changed fairly drastically as I recently traveled down a few highways, back alleys, and pot-hole filled roads until I arrived at my new apartment in the middle of the Bronx. And as much as I would like to spend my next 900 or so words talking about the aesthetics of Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx and how I futilely searched for the movie’s pivotal supermarket before realizing Rumble was actually filmed in Vancouver, I won’t because that would be silly and this is a serious film editorial for serious film editorial readers in a serious film editorial kind of world. (And, no, I don’t actually understand what that means either.)

Hazy College Days, a Big Tattoo, and a Failed Love – Five Years of Watching Princess Mononoke

Unless you’ve seen me naked sometime in the past three years, you probably don’t know about the giant homage to Princess Mononoke that adorns my stomach. I’m a relatively inconspicuous young man, my most notable other features being a thick, scraggly beard and a pair of extremely plump red lips, so most seem to be a little surprised when I take off my shirt and they are faced with a piece of art that takes up approximately 50% of my torso.

The Apparition

And I awake with her in my arms and the bed is soft and enveloping and the room is dark and cluttered and neither of us have any place to be so we let the hours slip by unheeded. Absentminded conversations spin in circles as I hold her and the light flitters in and around the curtains with the rising sun. She stretches out and slips her lips into mine, but I flinch and jerk back as if I had been slapped. No, no, no, I remember this and I fear it. But she just smiles and kisses me again and the pain floods through my body, oozing through every pore.

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Took Personality Test: Failed

So, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test today and according to the test I am an ENTP. To that I resoundingly say, “Okay, maybe,” because I always kind of see myself in all of the personalities. That being said, the ENTP does seem to explain me a little better than I expected (or maybe my mind is just looking for answers and chooses to look at the results in a particular way).

Some things I learned about myself according to the test:

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As Tears Go By (1988)

8.5/10 – Grilled Seal of Approval

Wong Kar-wai movies (well pretty much every beautifully exotic foreign film too, I guess) offer great incentives to get out of the country and head back to strange lands on the opposite side of the Earth. The brilliant lights and colors and sounds of Hong Kong blend together with stunning women and sweeping operatic scores and mafioso and it’s easy to imagine myself standing in the rain in the middle of a bustling unusual city crying and begging my former girlfriend or wife or love or lover to come down from her apartment so we can talk and repair the broken strands of Us. There’s almost always a scene in the heavy rain in these movies, but I’ve never cared strongly enough about a disintegrated relationship to stand outside and beg for a small glimpse of her formerly familiar eyes, so it’s odd I would imagine myself doing it in Asia.

I told one of my ex-girlfriends, “No one’s going to love you more than I do,” (I was listening to a lot of Band of Horses at the time) and, of course, at that time, in that room, with us on her bed and her mouth spilling out the words that were cutting us apart, sure, I believed it. She, on the other hand, instantly saw through my bullshit, and simply laughed. Not in a mean way like she was making fun of me, no, but in a way that signified she knew she had more knowledge of the situation and that she knew she was the most mature person in the room and the one required to make the decision that must be made. She wasn’t mad at me, if anything she felt sorry for me. She felt sorry I was older than her and a whole lot more emotionally stunted.

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Surprise or Comfort?

You might end up with an outie when you’re looking for an innie.

There are a couple handfuls of perfectly excellent films I have avoided seeing because, for one reason or another, I already know too much about them. Sometimes a scene or a plot twist or a character seeps into the public consciousness and becomes its most representative, defining characteristic. Sometimes the entire film is referenced and dissected and quoted ad nauseam and completely loses its element of surprise. And while the element of surprise isn’t always an essential criteria for enjoying a film, if you have the choice between experiencing a great film that holds a promise of originality and a great film that has already become lodged in your cognizance, which would you choose?

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