Fifty Shades of Russell Brand

Today the weird rash my son had all over his body yesterday turned into the oh-my-gosh-it's-creeping-toward-his-eyes! rash that had us pulling him out of school and, long-story-antihistamine, he's fine. 

He's fine, but my fine intentions of blitzing through a ton of work today are not, having been kneed in a bend-over spot and then spanked into a corner by the circumchances of parenting. 

Ergo, I wish today only to point out that I've been noticing a lot of my Christian-people-friends posting to Facebook that clip I shared a few days ago where Russell Brand went OFF on pornography.

That's not surprising, since the things Brand had to say were the sort of things that'd sit well not only with someone who's read a bunch of the research done on the effects of pornography on the human mind, but also to someone with a  more traditional view of human sexuality than is currently in vogue. 

What is also not surprising (and the reason I'm saying this) is that most of these Christian "Russell-Brand-re-postings" came with a header or tagline saying something about how they absolutely could not be-lieve that Russell Brand would have said something of the sort (And at 1:32 he just blew my mind!!!)! The implication being that someone like Brand (liberal, Hollywood, pinko-commie, etc.) should never have something—anything—to say that one should perhaps listen to.

I hesitate.

a murmuration

Today has been a bit hectic and a lot insane as I've been struggling to hit another arbitrarily-set pre-production deadline on the PINK film. So now I've got that tight feeling behind my eyes and I really don't feel like doing anything other than watch another murmuration of starlings.

Enjoy:

fifty shades of dearlordypleaseno

I shan't be commenting on the global phenomenon that is the suckily-written, Twilight-fan-fic smutbook Fifty Shades of Grey, nor on the movie that resulted. I just... can't even.

What I can do, though, is post this bit of Trews from Russell Brand, who bucks the tsunami of culture here to say some things that'll probably bring a lot of flames his direction. Holy mother of pearl, this scruffily-bearded British chap is batting a thousand in my little tally-book.

Barking Mad

All movies are minor miracles. But good, feature-length films...? 

That's cause for immediate saint-ification.

Even if you manage to somehow bottle lightning in the form of an actual, honest-to-Pope-Francis-Good Script, you've still gotta somehow throw an entire camel so that it flies through a hundred eyes of a hundred needles that've been tossed into the air by a hundred different people at precisely the right moment. On the very first try.

And how do you pull off this miracle?

By faith, dangit! Have you not been paying attention to all this religious terminology? You get down on your ever-humbled knees in front of the massive impossibility of it all and you say, I belieeeeeeeeeeeeeeve!

And then you do it. 

And so that is what we are doing.

Be Still...

A short film from my little brother's bestie, Judson (which, serendipitously enough, came to me via a former student, who randomed across it on the internets). Warning: DISTURBING IMAGES...


Be Still from Method & Scribe on Vimeo.

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN / EVERYTHING WILL BE OK

So I get up and I check my feed-read and I'm scrolling through the Go Into the Story website, which is about screenwriting stuff. And I'm looking through this one post that's called "Saturday Hot Links" because it's a bunch of links, and there's this one about a short film that won Sundance this year and has got everybody buzzing, which led me to another short film by the same guy named Don Hertzfeldt, which isn't a fake name, which is called EVERYTHING WILL BE OK. 

I saw that EVERYTHING WILL BE OK was about sixteen minutes long, which is longer than I'd normally want in a short film.

But it, too, won at Sundance, and also it was breakfast time.

So I thought I'd get a bowl of cereal and sit and watch it, which I did, which was a mix of these sugarless wheat squares I get from Aldi and then sweeten with a squidge of organic coconut granola on top.

So I'm watching and immediately it's weirdly interesting and I start thinking, okay, maybe I can post this to my blog when it's over. But it's sixteen minutes long and I'm only halfway through and I'm just about out of cereal and right then I realize, wow, eight minutes and I'm losing interest.

But it's not because it's not interesting. No, that's not it at all.

TWO FOR TEA is an official selection of RiverRun, 2015!!

The RiverRun International Film Festival is a fantastic, mid-sized festival in Winston-Salem and runs from April 16th-26th. TWO FOR TEA will screen in the 'North Carolina Shorts' section.


Two for Tea - Teaser Trailer from Ben Joyner on Vimeo.

Jesus Christ and the Case of the Counter-intuitive Kindness

Some of the folks who read this blog have an (understandable) knee-jerk reaction to any kind of "Jesus-talk." I appreciate their tolerance of my occasional forays into that territory, and their good-faith assumption that I'm not gonna try to sneak up and Bible-bash them.

But every once in a while I beg their indulgence and share something a bit more overtly Jesus-y—if only to explain to the more jaded-on-religion among us why it is that I'm still so hip to that Jesus cat (even if I, too, am a fair bit jaded-on-religion, as such).

This is one of those times.

I swear, though. Unless you're super-duper pissed-off about anything even remotely church-sounding, you might actually enjoy this little video from Dr. Richard Beck, an experimental psychologist who also happens to write a just-for-fun blog about theology.

Here 'tis...


Richard Beck: The Moral Circle from NPM GroupLeaders on Vimeo.