Inconsistent

Nine posts in four days, then nothing for a week is not how I should do this. The idea was to find a conduit for daily (or mostly-daily) writing, however unstructured. I've not gotten the beats down yet. For the eight or nine of you reading along, apologies for not offering more explosive and timely internet content.

In other news, I'm a repeat offender, and a sentimental one at that. I'll be catching a 12:10 a.m. show of Star Wars Rots. The Luke to my Anakin will be Leah, who just turned eight and has shown an iron subconscious thus far in resisting the stuff of image-induced bad dreams. To allay any justifiable child-welfare concerns one might have with regard to keeping a child of that age out on a skool nite between the hours of midnight and, probably, three o'dark, I want to make clear that I'm designating the hours of seven to eleven-thirty as quiet sleep hours. And I'm sure they'll be spent sleeping, if by "sleeping" you mean looking at her pet turtle and finding excuses to get up and ask me questions.

The approaches and processes of filmmaking are as endlessly fascinating to me as they are divergent. Some guys subject themselves to a torture chamber-style quiet room and endure long sessions of agony and hair-pulling before emerging with a story that requires ghostwriting and last-minute polishing to render it an inconsequential bore. Others...well, others see a girl pushing a stroller and the stuff of life screams out to them. From the Cannes press notes, via Doug Cummings, comes this quote from one of the Dardenne brothers on L'Enfant:

This film probably dates from a day during the shooting of our previous film. We were in Seraing, on Rue du Molinay. In the morning, afternoon and evening, we saw a girl pushing a pram along, with a newborn baby asleep inside it. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular – just around and around with the pram. We have often thought back to this girl, her pram, the sleeping child, and the missing character: the child’s father. This absent figure would become important in our story… A love story that is also the story of a father.