Category Archives: Film

Got to have faith

As I sit here smoking a skinny joint from the balcony of my posh Hollywood Hills mansion, I cannot help but remember the days when I slaved away in a dilapidated nursing home for $9 an hour.  The management were such scumbags to me there that they fought over giving me my yearly $0.30 raise and settled on a $0.15 raise for one year and a whopping $0.10 for the following. Thank-you sir may I have another!?
During those days when my boss would leave for the afternoon, I’d stare out the window and wonder how the hell I ended up in this mess. I would watch the sun go down slowly from my office window and know it was only temporary and that one day I would transcend this position by a million percent. I hated it there.
I don’t really care about mansions. I don’t really care about marijuana. I do care about options and possibilities. I don’t live in a mansion and I don’t smoke pot, but I would like the flexibility to do so if I wanted to. I have always had an interest in film. When I write my books, I envision them in three dimensions. I see them playing out in my head like the movie and that is how I often create realistic dialogue and dramatic tension. Some of the people I admire most are Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, both writers and famous filmmakers. Both are also individuals who would be considered late bloomers by society’s standards.
Tarantino worked at a Manhattan Beach video rental store until he was thirty. It was around this time a friend with connections encouraged him to write Reservoir Dogs. It took him three weeks to write the screen play and once made into a film it received high acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. The rest is history….
Kevin Smith has a similar story. Smith worked as a clerk at a convenience store. Around age 30, Smith maxed out his credit cards and borrowed money from family to create the epic film Clerks. The production of Clerks cost $30,000. It was filmed with a regular video camera in black and white. Smith used the convenience store where he worked as the movie set. Filming in black and white allowed him to conceal the fact that they were always filming at night (because the store was open during the day) thus giving them more flexibility for the chronological details of his script. After the completion of the film, he entered it into The Sundance Film Festival where it was picked up by Miamax almost instantly.

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Filed under Dreams, Fiction, Film, Inspirational, Life Lessons, Motivation

In Memory of Video Stores on HuffPost

Everyone is very sad and mourning the slow death of book stores, while video stores too are all but extinct. When I am elderly I will surely be telling tales of going to Blockbuster on a Friday night and browsing the aisles for the perfect weekend flick. “You mean there used to be stores where you would, go to to rent movies?” I can’t exactly imagine what type of movie technology we will have by that time, but I’m pretty sure the idea of going to Blockbuster on a Friday night will sound as alien as the stories my grandmother told me about the man who came around once a week to sell them big brick of ice for their ice box. Or how every other day, a milkman delivered fresh milk in slender glass bottles to her house. Or how each day they used to get two newspapers: one in the morning, the other in the evening. All of it sounds surreal.

I had a weird dream this morning. Aside from the beginning of it, where I was debating whether or not I should try out for American Idol, the rest of the dream was quite unusual. I was the passenger in a car. We drove through a shopping plaza parking lot. The sky was dark but then there was a rainbow that shot across it. My attention was diverted to the people who were walking on the sidewalk. There was something weird about them but at first I couldn’t figure out what it was, I squinted my eyes and looked harder, trying to perceive what it was that registered in my brain as odd-without-explanation, and then it hit me.

Please continue reading the article at The Huffington Post

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Filed under Film

In Memory of Video Stores

Everyone is very sad and mourning the slow death of book stores, while video stores too are all but extinct. When I am elderly I will surely be telling tales of going to Blockbuster on a Friday night and browsing the aisles for the perfect weekend flicks. “You mean there used to be stores where you would, go to to rent movies?” I can’t exactly imagine what type of movie technology we will have by that time, but I’m pretty sure the idea of going to Blockbuster on a Friday night will sound as alien as the stories my grandmother told me about the man who came around once a week to sell them big brick of ice for their ice box. Or the how three times a week, a milk man delivered fresh milk in slender glass bottles to her house. Or how each day they used to get two newspapers: one in the morning, the other in the evening. All of it sounds surreal.

I had a weird dream this morning. Aside from the beginning of it, where I was debating whether or not I should try out for American Idol, the rest of the dream was quite unusual. I was the passenger in a car. We drove through a shopping plaza parking lot. The sky was dark but then there was a rainbow that shot across the sky. My attention was diverted to the people who were walking on the sidewalk. There was something weird about them but at first I couldn’t figure out what it was, I squinted my eyes and looked harder, trying to perceive what it was that registered in my brain as odd-without-explanation, and then it hit me,

“Why are those people in black and white?” I asked my Aunt who I now noticed was driving the car. Though the dream was in color and looked much like reality, the people in it were black and white like an old TV show or movie.

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I Lost My Voice (Again)

I’ve been in a lot of abusive situations and dated so many people in which I ended up in some kind of off kilter romance. In these affairs I often found myself on the crappy end of a power play always expending a lot of energy trying to win the other person back. Staying in the situation causes a lot of mental anguish and stress. When you are in the midst of this, it is easy to lose your voice because you are people pleasing. Going through the gamut of emotions that come up in an abusive scenario cause your mind to exist in some sort of mental flurry- perhaps similar to the fight or flight reflex you often react rather than act. This mental flurry makes it difficult for you to live in the moment and you often lose track of your own wants and needs. When you are stuck in the middle of this much emotional stress, you are no longer paying attention to yourself and run the risk of letting others define you.

This happened to me a few weeks ago when I got sent to self-esteem classes by my counselor. I will tell you why she initially sent me. I was obsessing over whether or not the guy I was dating liked me. In fact I was very insecure about the whole thing. My counselor figured that he did. He asked me out didn’t he? She couldn’t understand why I was acting so insecurely and thought that perhaps self-esteem was the root of what was causing me to have insecurities in this new relationship. “You don’t have any self-esteem, Hayley. You don’t like yourself.” I thought about what she said.


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Filed under Dating, Film, Healing, Life Lessons

Trial and Error with Scarlett O’Hara

Gone-With-the-Wind-classic-movies-663199_1024_768Is it sad that Scarlett O’Hara, Vivien Leigh’s character in Gone with the Wind, used to be my idol? Is it ironic that I too grew up to be emotionally unavailable and heartless? I’m not really heartless (my boyfriend has dropped the H-bomb a few times during heated disagreements) but I am without a doubt “emotionally unavailable.” I can be compassionate, caring, concerned for others, but when people show the same feelings towards me, I am often just plain cold, and unsure of how to react. This is a common defense mechanism adopted by many who have experienced excruciating pain and rejection. It is just one of the results of abuse and neglect. I think this is why I idolized Scarlett O’Hara. It was not just her beauty and tenacity, but the strength and power she gained from being unfeeling. As a young girl who had already experienced much sadness, I too thought I could just put up an emotional wall like she did; rather than internalize the pain, I adopted her “I can’t think about that right now. If I do I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about it tomorrow,” attitude.

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