Texas and High School

This past week, I had the good fortune of travelling to the Lone Star state and attending my cousin's high school graduation in the wee-small town of Baytown. While I still consider myself a bastard-Texan (born in El Paso, lived in Baytown, have plenty of family in Fort Worth and Baytown), with every visit to my old hometown, I'm always amazed to see the stark cultural differences between SoCal and SoTex. I won't go into all the differences since that'd take up another entry, but it was both refreshing (people are so darn polite and friendly over there) and weird (the mullet is alive and well in SoTex as well as big trucks).

It was strange attending the graduation. It was the first high school graduation I'd been to since my brother graduated in 2001. Sitting there, it reminded me of how much I love high school and the idea of it. A gray middle-world between your childhood and adulthood. There was a sense of loneliness and uncertainty in that packed football stadium. Expectations. Failure. I love it.

All in all, I had a great time catching up with that side of my dad's family, regardless of my bulging waistline from partaking in all the good food. Filipinos know how to eat.

PG

PS Had the pleasure of seeing Arcade Fire last night at the Greek...it was fan-tastic.

Bresson...where have you been all my life?

Given my close proximity to all things film, it's amazing that I haven't gotten around to watching any movies directed by the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson. My good friend Alex brought in a scene from Au Hasard Balthazar into the directing class we had together last fall. I found it interesting and borrowed the DVD, but haven't seen it since. So, perchance, I happened upon another Bresson classic Pickpocket, and, finally, watched a Bresson film...and I wasn't too impressed. In fact, I was downright bored half the time. Actors reciting their lines as if their reading it off the floor (they constantly looked at the ground). Long shots of people just walking. If not, for a smoking hot babe of an actress (the Natalie Portman-esque Marika Green, the aunt of another babe Eva Green), I wouldn't have gotten through it.

But...I was watching the Criterion Collection DVD (a cineaste's dream) and watched all the supplements which convinced me that I was all wrong. Although I must admit a lot of Bresson's appeal to me veers into sheer intellectualism, I love the fact that he used non-professional actors only once and that he strove to instill a sense of spirituality into his films. While his films weren't commercial, they were trying to do something that hadn't been done before. It's inspiring to put it mildly.