Movie Review: 'Rita Working Title' looks at the relationship between a writer and her words

Creative writers are devoted first to their words. It is a relationship that, like others, must be watered in order to grow and then nurtured in order to develop into its own. Michal Bat-Adam’s Rita Working Title is about this relationship and how, if a writer does not know herself well enough, the relationship can circle around going only where it’s already been. Or it can just stop. Words can divorce a writer.

Rita Working Title is not a cop-out by Bat-Adam to avoid the lame and unforgiving “untitled” for the film. Although it could benefit from a colon after Rita, the intrigue of not having one is kind of nice; it adds to the exploration of the film. Rita, the woman, the screenwriter, is the working title. The movie she cannot seem to write, or complete, is also the working title, for how easy is it to name what has yet to be born? Since a writer often becomes what is being written, since a writer writes best when she writes what she knows, Rita and her work are working titles.

The whole thing really is quite nice, charming even. In the course of this 100-minute production, Rita manages to write, for the audience to watch come to life, four different screenplays, none complete because she says she’s tired of writing the same old story of desire unfulfilled. Though for the viewer, the lack of fulfillment comes when the story is abandoned just when it starts to get good.

In each script, Rita plays the main character, yet another indication that she truly is this working title, lost if you will. It’s not until her best friend, a terribly attractive professional actor named Gadi discovers that he has no idea who or where he is, for, as the co-star in her script attempts, he plays a taxi driver, a mechanic, an accordion player and a bachelor with a broken heart. Gadi decides he cannot go on like this.

Of course, it is up to Rita to write them both out of the mess she created. And no, the film is not a let down. Rita does in fact clean up her mess, and she does it in the way that most creative writers do. She divorced the words.

Movie Review: 'The Path of the Skeptics': an art gallery on film

The Path of the Skeptics was like viewing an exhibition in a museum more so than watching the film it actually was in the Landmark Theatre Thursday night. Perhaps it was that, having been my first experience with a short film (it ran exactly 30 minutes), I obsessed over every frame. I was taken by the extreme amount of grace given to each shot and the amount of care given to those things in the shots.

By Italian filmmaker Filippo Feel Cavalca, The Path of the Skeptics (La passeggiata dello scettico) displays just how significant some meetings are. The story is Danilo’s, an agnostic philosophy student, on the anniversary of his mother’s death. His mother, Celeste, was an artist, which explains why the film could be made into a series of stills and sold as framed art. As Danilo remembers it, she was “enraptured in blue.” Throughout the short, blue flower pedals, very much alive and very much a symbol of her, rain down turning the screen into a spring dance.

When the priest, Don Luciano, comes to bless Danilo’s house, the two find that they share not just a common love for philosophy but a need for God as well. And so their paths cross, putting both men’s existence into context: “Freedom can frighten a man,” says Don Luciano. With that, they are both left with a choice.

Cavalca didn’t let one minute go unused in The Path of the Skeptics. A film done so well is like stepping into the rooms of an art gallery, for if the gallery also uses the entire potential of its space, the visitor is left open-eyed and full.

Movie Review: Newton I. Aduaka's 'Ezra' is a film about Love as much as War

There is much to be taken away from a film in which, in the first 15 minutes, a child, no more than nine years of age, is shot and killed as an example for the other children to do as they are told.

Ezra is a Nigerian film about the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone; it is about the real and the abstract: child soldiers, blood diamonds and AK-47’s, fire, and community—its ancestors, elders and the village—love, war, remembrance, forgiveness. It is especially about forgiveness, about love and war, about the three as experienced by the children, the child. Ezra.

He is the 16-year-old soldier who cannot remember killing his parents or others’ during the attack of his village. His story is fragmented, a collage of stolen lives told in flashbacks. His sister, Onitcha is witness to parts of his truth. Through the siblings’ accounts, Ezra is both boy and man.

His walk is so tall and hard, for everything and for nothing; the fire in his eyes is more a ravaging blaze than a rising sun; the gun he carries is an extension of his arm, less a symbol of manhood than a telling of childhood. But despite what he has seen and done, despite the war around and in him, he is found. Her name is Mariam, or Black Diamond. A soldier herself, though for a different camp, she chose this life. She also chose Ezra.

It is easy in the 110-minute production to forget that the story unfolding is the story of so many. The film points out that just eight years ago, nearly 120,000 children were serving as soldiers in Africa. Director and script writer, Newton I. Aduaka based the film in fact, and he did well to script and show not just the face of a child ripped from childhood and recast as a soldier but the spirit of this child as well.

A film so full of what war does can leave a viewer with many how’s and why’s, but this may not be Aduake’s sole purpose. Ezra is also about love. Represented unconditionally in Ezra’s sister Onitcha who receives a beating when she attempts to follow her brother instead of go home, love is reason enough to fight, to dance, to live.

In one scene, he sits with a sketch pad in hand drawing Mariam, now his wife. She leans into him, smiles, and whispers what his next action shows: On his pad, he makes round what was initially her flat belly. The scene reality-checks the viewer, reminds him or her again that this is a story of the boy who is also the man named Ezra. A smile floats past his lips as he looks down, too humbled to look into her, an act that suggests that love can be ageless and care not for lives taken, that it’s only to be received.

And, yes, with much to be taken away from a factual film as this, the softer side should not be discounted though the questions should come. Love that reaches beyond what was stolen or forgotten is reason enough.

Listening to music differently

There’s something in the blues that moves my everything—my skin, my spirit—in that familiar, Langston Hughes lazy sway kind of way. But this morning, I noticed the music, though it sounded the same, still running over with the yearning of a drought-plagued South for rain in July, its affect on me was different. The blues pulls at the heart, paints over pain as a lover, bitter but sweetly, says good bye to her love. My body still swayed, my fists still clenched to almost white, but my heart did not move beyond me. I have been heading to this place for some time—this place where music can be enjoyed and felt without having a direct connection to my current state: I don’t have the blues. My man loves me, lays with me, and the sun shines through his smile. There is no wish in me for the blues to burn, for the love to be returned or loved harder. I only want to continue to feel, to move as the current of a lethargic, forgotten body of water, to listen as the river speaks to me through the weary, I-been-born-to-roll-on-and-die, just-feel-me-cuz-ain’t-nobody-else-feelin-me blues. Because what beautiful shades of blue.

just a thought

Poetry has become a type of reward. I do my work. I work hard and well. I maintain focus, though it is at times like pulling teeth. Becoming a critic is an interesting thing, especially considering that, as a poet, I have only ever wanted to appreciate. The effort is there. The writing is getting better, tighter. The effects can be seen in the lines. Let me say to you or to me, I mean, this is my blog, that my relationship with poetry is the most sincere, most intimate, and perhaps the most sacrificing I have ever been in. Forrest Hamer, my sweet friend and mentor, he knows well of this. Apparently, it's normal. But I'm running here. I just touch keys to say that I am smiling inside. There is a poem behind this screen and freelance articles to be revised. I am a working writer who knows well of love. It is learning to maintain it, in all of its moods and colors, that I still must learn to know better.

Lizz Wright's The Orchard gets prose poetry out the wannabe critic

Being moved by good music is like being loved by a good man. I should know. My man is love, is music. And when my man’s words love me, ain’t no sound more better, more like life. I hold my breath sometimes just to hear them, feel them, feel him better. I do the same thing when it comes to good music. Cuz ain’t nothing between me and these songs but the same kinda distance that’s between my man and me, so I hold to these songs, their words like I hold to the smell of him, like without it, I just, I just fold in on myself, curl my body around the memory of him cuz he was once in the this very space and in this very space I didn’t really curl my body around him right, enough. I just get moved by good music, by Lizz singing those sexy come-lay-with-me blues: I wanna make love to you/when the lights are low/scream to you babe/just to let you know/all I want/is just a little touch from you/just a little bit attention/you know is gonna see me through . . . . and I smile cuz I got a good man lovin me whose good lovin hands I’ll be fillin soon. I smile. I smile and I manage to keep myself together as her blues become mine and mine never mind the feelins. They get a voice so good, my lips part as the music steps out of me to sing words I can hold on to.

Why Black History Month

"If the branch is to flower, it must honour its roots." Titinga Frederic Pacere

I was told by a “diluted” Caucasian (her word, not mine) that there should be no Black history month. I tried to listen, to be open to her ideas, but I couldn’t. I shut her down with the Black hand side before I even shook my head in uncertainty to what I’d actually just heard tumble from her lips.

I believe her explanation was something like ‘Black history being American history and having a month set aside for something that is the whole country’s is silly.’ But like I said, I turned from cool, unthreatening Sam to a force to be reckoned with, to much darker than my yellow skin suggests. I turned into a representative, something I have never quite been fond of but this girl who refers to herself as diluted, who actually gave voice to such self-hatred, while I’m thanking my white momma every day that she married daddy and birthed ain’t-too-proud-to-speak me.

I spoke. Of sober mind and body, I spoke to the very sweet though very ignorant girl. I asked her what she knew about Black history that didn’t involve the physical enslavement of my people (no way the girl had a clue about mental bondage though she was obviously dying of it herself). I asked her what she could tell me about Black history that didn’t involve Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or Malcolm X. I asked her to name me five, just five, Black authors. She sat in silent ignorance, my voice smothering her bliss, the confines of my car holding it to her face to smell. She knew she stunk. She knew she misspoke. She has been overly sensitive ever since.