I haven’t programmed anything in twenty years. Well, okay, I’ve edited some scripts here and there. When I took my one and only programming class in high school, I really dug it. Pascal, I think. Very simple stuff. My teacher told me, in his Oklahoma drawl, “There’s lotsa opportunities for girls in computer science.” I don’t think either of us quite knew what that meant. But ten years later I’d fallen into the tech world in a most accidental and roundabout way. No training, no certifications, nothing formal. But I have now a dozen years of IT experience and can’t quite see going into anything vastly different.

——————

I started writing this post on April 21, 2010. I haven’t looked at the Python book much since then. I’ve been… going through stuff. I lack focus. I lack the ability to stay awake for more than an hour at a time. I lack free time. My free time is quickly filled and/or wasted. I am lazy. I am fearful. But I’m coming out of it. Maybe if I say this publicly it will become true. I am Marya.

1. I’m looking for a job.
2. Girl starts kindergarten Monday.
3. I have a lot to say about watching films through the eyes of little beastling children.
4. I’m programming shorts for Cinequest.
5. I’m starting Geeks Without Borders.
6. I’m making a short movie. It’s due in just over a week. I haven’t started it.
7. I am trying to choose my life.
8. I don’t know what that means yet.
9. I don’t remember what it’s like to feel good.
10. I am optimistic and terrified.
11. I’ve forgotten how to eat.
12. My sister married Carpenter McAttractiveman.
13. Twitter provides.
14. Everything will get better.
15. Good God, what a year this has been.

Watch this space. Wait, no, this space. Yeah. Or that one. Hell, one space is as good as the next.

I can only really talk about such things in reaction to others. So I’ll tell you first what my foil (spouse) had to say. In essence, it’s ham-fisted, reactionary, poorly directed, poorly cast, poorly acted, and the goddamn camera never stops moving. He found it repetitive and unrevealing and thought the hammered-home point was that we’re losing our past and our culture and our traditions and the new rowdy generation of multiculturality and loud music is destroying beauty. Something like that. (I wasn’t really listening.) (I’m kidding.) (Mostly.)

Whereas I thought it was lovely, gentle, nuanced, complicated, and all about letting go. There’s no judgment or condemnation. Here’s the past. It’s beautiful. We’re nostalgic for it but have no room for it. Thank goodness for museums. The ostensible main character is reluctant, but not passionate. He’s the most tied to the past because he’s the oldest and the closest to his mother. But there’s no judgment of the younger, less-tied siblings. Their willingness to let it all go makes perfect sense. Nothing nefarious in it. And the final scene was a perfect reflection of the opening scene. The old matriarch, owning her space, controlling everything gently but firmly, now replaced by the young girl with the same manner, a new version of her grandmother’s liveliness. The grandmother had been a wild and passionate youth, uncontrollable. The young girl is the same. This is life. This is change. It’s not evil. It’s beautiful. We can be nostalgic for the past while embracing the future. Our notions of art and beauty and life are no less valid.

Two of likely four shooting days have been completed on Child of God. We’re shooting this feature simultaneously with Amity (Child on Saturdays; Amity on Sundays), and within Child of God we are often shooting disparate scenes simultaneously. It’s enough to make this author a little schizo. I am acting, producing, shooting, kid-wrangling, singing, casting, catering, brainstorming, driving, negotiating, deliberating, pontificating, fuming, aching, capturing, sunburning, procrastinating. It’s an intense and exciting time.

Wake up, get the kids up, dressed, fed, Alejandro and Ali load up the equipment, we all pile into the van and head to the church. Alejandro shoots the sketch comedians (who are insanely brilliant) while Ali shoots me and “Cindy” (must remember to call her by her character name so the kids use it) practicing hymns while my children run rampant and (this is the hardest part) I ignore them. Then I wrestle the children into the van again, and off we go to pick up some lunch for the cast and crew. Standing in line for thirty minutes at Subway placing individual orders for fifteen while the beastlings sing and dance and ask to be held and touch the hot under-the-counter lights (That’s hot! Yes, dear, stop touching it.) Finally, the grandfolks take the kidlings away, and I don a DVX and shotgun and begin long takes of the deliciously funny improvisors, lying on the floor or doing exotic stretches in between said takes. Shoot until six, pack up, grab some dinner, return home, start capturing footage to various drives, charge batteries, make use of the massage chair, collapse into sleep, and start again the next morning with Amity.

I haven’t sung in decades, and it’s apparent. I’ve had a cough for about four months now (likely the consumption). And I was not raised with hymns, so… the learning curve is rather steep. I’m not going to really pull it off. Fortunately, Jennie sings beautifully and is patient with my (coughing) fits and (false) starts, and inability to remember which notes to hold a little longer for dramatic effect or BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THE SONG IS WRITTEN.

I’m having a crazy amount of fun. Stressful, hectic, manic, schizophrenic fun.

I’ve been in love with this movie since we started planning it a year ago. It may be very beautiful. Innocence and faith and strength and beauty and music and triumph over cynicism. Or it may have little to do with any of that. The joy of these productions is that they change according to what magic occurs every shooting day, and they change repeatedly during the (relatively) languorous editing period. All iterations have great beauty. I will fall in love with each version. I have fallen in love with every actor and every crew member. I love making movies.

I’m also looking forward to sleeping away the month of July.

This post was cross-published on the Child of God website. ]]> http://www.maryamurphy.com/?feed=rss2&p=50 0 http://www.maryamurphy.com/?p=23 http://www.maryamurphy.com/?p=23#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:12:30 +0000 Marya http://www.maryamurphy.com/?p=23 This post is not seasonally appropriate, unless you live in my home where it’s Christmas all year round.

My three-year-old daughter, Ailsa, has been Christmas-obsessed almost from birth. Her favorite book for at least her first year and a half was a soft Christmas Alphabet book. She’d pore over it forever. And then Puppy arrived when she was six months old, with his Santa hat, barking Christmas carols, and he became my second child and her inseparable companion. She loves red, she loves winter, she loves snow, she loves presents, Rudolph, Santa, Frosty, trees, decorations, lights, ornaments, candy canes, and everything Christmassy. With an insane passion.

A few days before Christmas 2008, my mother-in-law gave me two tickets to see The Nutcracker.  She dropped me and Ailsa off in downtown San Jose.  Ailsa was wearing her pretty green Christmas dress and a red hat I brought from Nepal and shiny black shoes. It was an abbreviated Nutcracker, a 45-minute version for kids.  Perfect. We were delighted.

Afterwards, we walked around Christmasland (where Carla walks in Canary) to look at all the decorations. We wandered for quite awhile, looking at all the decorated trees. I think we rode a carousel. 

And then we came to Santa’s house, which I’d never paid much attention to, and there were about ten people standing in line. A sign said Santa would be back soon, so I asked Ailsa if she wanted to wait, and she did.  But it was four-ish and her feet hurt (shoes too small) and she was very tired, so she went to a bench and sat while I held our place. And we waited and waited. And waited. I finally asked someone if they knew when it would open, and it was still going to be about fifteen minutes.  I asked her again if she wanted to wait, and she did. She held onto my hands and spun around and twirled and dazzled the people who watched her, with her beauty and her Ailsaness.  And finally the line started moving. It probably took about forty-five minutes all told. Ailsa was sleepy and distracted, and I kept thinking what a silly mistake itwas to force her to go sit on Santa’s lap. I thought she’d probably be scared of him once we got in there. 

When it was our turn, Ailsa entered, looked at Santa and positively beamed. She lowered her head and started to giggle, and then she hopped four times toward him, spread her arms out wide and smiled as she walked slowly into him. The Santa was pretty taken aback, I could tell. So were the elven volunteers. I bought a camera (disposable, STILL haven’t developed the photos) and took some pictures of her with Santa. The Elves took a photo of me with them too. Ailsa told him what she wanted (a red snowglobe with Santa in it) and gave him a big, parting hug and left with a candy cane.

It was unreal. A Christmas miracle. I cried a little. It was like she’d come home. Oh, Santa, my old friend. I’ve been waiting for decades to see you again. And she giggled throughout. Just shining.

I can’t worry about any of that. What happens next? We make the next one. We’ve finished a rough cut of Babnik and are gearing up for Amity. Same production level, same style, same apparatus. Canary will show at Fantasia Fest in Montreal in July. Around the Bay will be at Niles Essanay Film Museum in June, with Passion Flower, the beautiful project I’m trying to usurp from Jarrod Whaley. If anyone else wants to show any of them, we will be pleased. If anyone wants to distribute them, yay. But we don’t have the time or money or energy to focus on them any more than we have. They’re done. What’s next?

We make another movie.

Poppy knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s not nefarious. She’s not trying to torture Scott. Well, not exactly. But she is trying to seduce him. To win him over. She likely thinks her ebullience will benefit him. Shining a little Poppy in his life will make him happier. But she’s surely had enough experience with angry and damaged men to know that he will love her. And she wants that. She wants to exercize that power. She wants to flirt with the danger of it.

In the scene most often criticized in Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy chats up a crazy homeless man and follows him to a secluded area. It’s tense and ominous and tonally different from the rest of the film. I don’t take this scene literally. It’s a metaphor for the dangerous situation Poppy is knowingly walking into with Scott.

I’ve been Poppy. I’ve been casually cruel with such disarming charm that my victims forgive and love me anyway. Oh, Poppy. I’ll forgive you too. Because you do sparkle so.

I was never on set during the shooting of Around the Bay, and rarely for Canary. Alejandro would bring me home footage, and lay it at my feet like a proud cat who’s caught a particularly wily mouse. For each film a moment came where the tension I didn’t known I was carrying was suddenly released. An ending. Ahhhh. There it is. The ending. Oh, beautiful ending. Daisy and Wyatt at the harvest party. Carla and Chloe converge in the back of the van.

I was actually present for the shooting of Babnik’s ending. And maybe that’s the problem. I’m too close to it. I’m aware of what was intended, what was missed. Walter Murch said he never wanted to be on a set. He didn’t want his manipulation of the footage in post to be colored by whether or not he liked an actor, how hard it was to get a shot, what was happening just off screen at the time. With Around the Bay and Canary, I approached all footage with very little preknowledge. I knew some of the cast members and some of the directions the film wanted to go. But I was able to look at what was captured with innocence. Purity.

There is so much brilliance in the scenes I didn’t shoot. But I was there for the end, and I can’t achieve objectivity. Does Babnik have an ending? I hope so.

I’ve been having trouble getting a groove going on this here maryamurphy site, so I’m going to try to spew forth a bit about movies I’ve seen in recent days.

THE CLASS: As vivid and painful and fascinating as your own high school experience was while you were living it. So patient, unsensational, real. And that teacher guy is hot. It takes its time allowing the massive wall of students to develop into individuals and never imbues them with precociousness. We don’t see their troubled home lives, as the cliché would have it. Inarticulate glimpses in parent/teacher meetings are all we’re privy to, because that’s all the teacher sees. The central conflict is slight, but affecting. We’re moved more by the immersion in a full year of teaching. Very few false notes. Scenes continue beyond where most films would cut away. Punchline, cut? No…. let’s take it further until it becomes almost a spectacle of mundanity. The earnestness and misguidedness of the teachers are gently portrayed. Mistakes are made, battles won and lost, the world keeps on turning. The children are fantastic.

FORT APACHE: “A stench in the nostrils of honest men.” What else do I need from a film? Interesting to see John Wayne in a small role, but still quietly commanding every scene he’s in. His star power is has such a different flavor from Fonda’s. Fonda is necessarily weak next to him, but appropriately so. He’s a martinet. But they do dazzle together. I love movie stars.

GERRY: You gerried the rendezvous! I was crowsnesting, but you gerried the rendezvous! I haven’t been wild about the recent Van Sant trilogy. Elephant had some appeal, Paranoid Park not much, but Gerry… Gerry I really dug. Maybe the meandering, vérité nothingness worked better for me because they were charismatic movie stars? (See “I love movie stars,” ref. above.) Beautifully realized suspense. But I’d laud it for the creative language alone.

COBRA VERDE: I have such mixed feelings about Herzog. I could watch him cook and eat his shoe all day. It’s kind of like Dickens. I love Dickens’ stories, but the execution bores the crap out of me. Herzog is brilliant and his obsession with insane dreamers is a worthy one. Grizzly Man is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Kasper Hauser – woo! But what is it about most of his films? They fascinate me, but they don’t make me feel, I guess. Herzog doesn’t love his crazy dreamer characters. He identifies with them closely, yes. Is it self-hatred that comes through, then? Is that what makes it hard for me to muddle through? His self-adoration comes through too, of course. Herzog films may be more Herzog than any other director’s. Which may be his primary brilliance. Oh, right. Cobra Verde. Eh. But man, is Klaus Kinski watchable.

WENDY AND LUCY: A meditation on the vulnerability of a woman alone without even her dog to protect her. I disliked Reichart’s Old Joy, other than the brilliant ending. Wendy and Lucy was just consistent. A consistent gentle terror. I haven’t been broke in a long time, and it recalled vividly the stomach-dropping pain of unexpected expense. Williams played it very well. Understated, intense but not particularly bright girl, in over her head but unable to really react to any of it. A cipherish character. Beaten down. Surviving by a vague, untethered tenacity.

GOODBYE SOLO: A tour-de-force charismatic performance by Souleymane Sy Savane. I saw this film at a super-secret cult meeting of film-goers who arrive without knowing which movie they’re about to watch. The experience was delightful. I missed the opening credits (if there were any), and did not know the director was Iranian-American. But throughout I kept thinking, “This feels so Iranian!” Certainly there was the thematic affinity with A Taste of Cherry, but also in tone and pacing it felt like something Kiarostami might have made. Some weak performances, some stretched-thin plot elements, some flat-out bad movie-making, but Solo I could watch sleeping and be riveted.

SHINING THROUGH: Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas – two of my most hated movie stars. And yet, not bad! Now remake it with people I can stomach.

MAN ON WIRE: Okay, so I didn’t even finish this, and I hear the end was very moving and beautiful. I think it would have benefited from linearity. The great thing was that someone had a movie camera and was shooting everything at the time. It makes me want to shoot everything that’s happening around me all the time, just in case it can be used in 20 years. Which reminds me. Future Art Historians: I apologize to you now for throwing away most of my daughter’s precious drawings and paintings. Rent me a warehouse and I’ll be happy to preserve it all for posterity.

THE BAND’S VISIT: I had the feeling at first that this was going to be about the death of formality. And, sure, there’s a bit of that. But it’s surprisingly lacking any agenda. A lovely film. Inconsistent in tone and style, but very full of heart. The best scene has the young, hot band member teaching the terrified local how to seduce a girl at a roller rink.

THX-1138: Okay, seriously, what happened to George Lucas? This is such an intelligent, daring, provocative movie. The man who made this cannot have made Episodes 1-3. I know this has been said a thousand zillion times. But it’s all one can really think when watching THX-1138.

I give up for tonight. Many more to battle through. I’ll get better at this.

Annika (I totally want to steal that name if I ever have another girl-kid) brought to mind Sally Hawkins’ Poppy in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: personified sunshine and lightness. But where Poppy played carelessly with her angry, male counterpart, Annika approaches Lasse (Anders W. Berthelsen) with tentative persistence and struggles with her attraction to a possibly dangerous man. It’s difficult to imagine why this delightful, gorgeous, sensual woman is unattached. There are hints of past “normal” boyfriends, and we gradually perceive her to be under her mother’s control. Lasse accuses her of having a belated rebellion, but it seems to run deeper than that. Her attraction to Lasse, who is dark and unsmiling but magnetic, is immediate and enduring. The two leads are fantastic. Lasse’s pained brutality pitted against Annika’s ardent hope and new, but deeply-felt, need.

The director evokes menace in tiny ways: I held my breath as Lasse suddenly raised his arm while Annika’s back was turned; and Annika running alone, sensual and vigorous in early scenes, becomes terribly suspenseful after we learn a bit more about Lasse’s past.

It’s a redemption tale, or possibly a story of the triumph of love over reason. The final dancing scene conveys a happier and more whole Annika, glowing with possibility. Her choice in the end is her own, whether right or wrong, and she is fortified by the choosing as much as by love.