Turning 41 Today: Garrett Hedlund

Watch the best of new films from around the world today by signing up for the FREE 3-DAY trial going to http://www.wildsound.ca (Also on Roku, FireStick, and your Itune (app))

[on Friday Night Lights (2004)]: I grew up on a farm, and Lucas in the jungles of Alabama, so I think we adapted very well. It’s just a lot that these guys are holding on their shoulders at such a young age. There’s a lot they’re dealing with, the town pressure or support, their home life, all of that causes a sense of internal insecurities. These guys are realizing how crazy it is that they’re going through all this at such a young age. I’ve been told I’m too good looking for certain roles, but that’s okay, it just motivates me to go deeper. Everything to me in life is like the second scratch. I’ve always had a longstanding dream, ever since I was a kid, where I was running on a big lake of ice and I kept running and kept running, just about to where I was trying to get to, and I fell through the ice, and then I couldn’t find the hole where I fell through to get back out again. It was always like this certain thing where I could only get so far before everything collapses. So I guess it’s a bit of living in fear. But I don’t try to put it that way, because I feel that is going to pull everything you fear toward you. It’s about acknowledging the fear for about five percent, and then ninety-five percent goes into shrugging it all off.

Turning 60 Today: Charlie Sheen

Watch the best of new films from around the world today by signing up for the FREE 3-DAY trial going to http://www.wildsound.ca (Also on Roku, FireStick, and your Itune (app))

  • My father gave me some pretty bad advice – keep it honest, which I did. People ask, why am I so honest with the press? I don’t have an answer. I suppose I’m honest everywhere else. Why should it stop here? Most of my shit sounds like lies. But all my stories are true, and that’s the problem. They call me the last honest man in Hollywood. But I care what people think, we all do.
  • It’s hard to be specific about what parts I may have lost. But ultimately, it’s what I’m known for.
  • Public speaking is a tremendous fear of mine. The Tonight Show (1962)David Letterman. I would always do a few shots or take an anti-whatever, some prescription relaxation deal and go out there and just kind of just flow with it.
  • I don’t know. I want to go home at the end of the day and feel like I left a certain part of myself behind. You watch a Pacino performance, a DeNiro performance, you sit back in wonder and watch what they did. I’m curious as to what it would take for me to get to that place.

Turning 59 Today: Salma Hayek

Watch the best of new films from around the world today by signing up for the FREE 3-DAY trial going to http://www.wildsound.ca (Also on Roku, FireStick, and your Itune (app))

If a man lets all of my dogs sleep in the bed with us, then that is the most romantic thing. You must love my dogs in order to love me. A man who is nice to my animals and doesn’t shoo them away – well, that’s the height of romance.

It sounds trite to go after men who are nice but when you’ve been hurt a lot it becomes appealing.

[on being pregnant] You are like a swollen whale and never looked worse in your life. And somebody goes, ‘You’re glowing.’ They don’t have the courage to tell you how bad you look.

You’ve got to take who you are and love who you are and do the best you can with what you’ve got. It goes for the figure, and it goes for everything else.

I have no advice because his wife is Lebanese like me and I know his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law and I know those kids cannot be in better hands. [On George Clooney’s becoming a father.]

Turning 61 Today: Keanu Reeves

Watch the best of new films from around the world today by signing up for the FREE 3-DAY trial going to http://www.wildsound.ca (Also on Roku, FireStick, and your Itune (app))

[1995, on his idea of happiness] Lying in bed with my lover, riding my bike, sports, happy times with my friends, conversation, learning, the earth, dirt, a beautiful repast with friends, family with wine and glorious food and happy tidings and energy and zest and lust for life. I like being in the desert, in nature, being in extraordinary spaces in nature, high in a tree or in the dirt, hanging out with my family, my sisters.

[1995] L.A. has been my place of abode for seven years and I have a little place in New York City. I don’t even have a house house, but I have been living in the same place in Los Angeles for a couple of years and it’s just now becoming a home. I like to be free and unfettered. I like the option of being able to do anything and go anywhere, anytime. I like to have my house open. A lot of my friends have keys to my houses and I like to have everything, you know, ‘What’s mine is yours,’ and to drink wine, talk and hang out.

[1995, on My Own Private Idaho (1991)’ You know what’s great? Right after I finished Dracula (1992), I went to Paris to visit a couple of friends, shipped over one of my Norton’s, my ’72 750 with California plates, and just hung out for two-and-a-half weeks. My Own Private Idaho (1991) had just opened at a theater right near my friend’s house where I was staying. I got stopped by a couple of American students who’d seen it and they bought me a beer. Which is what you should do in Paris: sit in cafés, talk, hang out. I had miraculous weather, so it didn’t rain on my parade. Then, I went to New York to visit friends, sat down, hung out, and the same sort of thing happened there. So, do I want more movies that lead to experiences like that? Yes, please.

DRAMATIC MONLOGUE Poem: Advocate Plea – For the Child, by Deidre S. Powell

Justice,
before you rule,
Please hear me—
not as counsel,
but as one who has stood in that midnight kitchen
through her words,
through her trembling hands,
fighting for Pêpê’s best interest—
a child the law claims to protect,

yet leaves trembling.
It is not enough
when his hand explodes against her mother’s face,
the sound sharp as a rifle crack,
making the glass in its frame shiver.
It is not enough
when her cheek blooms red,
then fades too fast for the lens to catch.

Pêpê—her mother’s pet name,
whispered like a shield.
At night she lies rigid in her bed,
listening to her mother’s muffled whimpering,
each sob a small surrender.
She learns too early that comfort is dangerous,
that silence is armour.
I hear her in the pauses her mother cannot fill,
in the way fear wraps itself around every word.

She is six.
Only six—
and already her eyes know how to measure a room,
track his every move,
clutch her mother’s skirt as though it’s the only thing
anchoring her to safety.
She memorises the path to the door,
ready to run before she’s learned to ride a bike.

Do you know what it is
to argue a case with your throat closing?
To know that “best interest of the child”
is not a theory,
not a balance sheet,
but a warm bed free from dread—
and still watch the law lean to “access”
and “parental rights”
as if they outweigh
a child’s right to breathe without fear?

He does not feed her.
He does not clothe her.
He does not keep her warm.
Yet he claims the right to hold her,
to call it love,
to shape her into a silence that will last her life.

The mother is shamed as bitter if she speaks,
while he—
who punched a hole beside her face—
walks away smiling.
And Pêpê learns to fold herself into small spaces,
to call fear normal,
to believe this is what families are.

Justice—
I see her years from now,
laughing in a sunlit kitchen,
her footsteps light,
her nights free from dread.
Your choice can make that real.

You are not deaf
to her small voice asking:

“Do I have to go?”

Your gavel can crush—
or shield.

Choose her.

Carve a future
where Pêpê wakes to mornings of peace,
where only her cereal crunches.

ACTION/FANTASY Festival Best Scene: DJINN, by Matthew Karram

In a Middle Eastern refugee camp, 16-year-old Saeed discovers a magical ring containing a Djinn (spirit) while hiding from bullies. The Djinn offers him three wishes. With his first wish, Saeed asks for protection from his tormentors, leading to the death of the bully Hassan. For his second wish, Saeed asks to return to the time before the war, which the Djinn grants. However, Saeed realizes he’s been sent back to the exact day the conflict began. Despite his attempts to save his family, history repeats itself – his father dies in a bombing, and he and his mother are forced to flee the city. Understanding that some events are destined to occur, Saeed uses his final wish to never have found the ring, returning him to his present life in the refugee camp, where he must accept his reality.

WILDsound Best Scene Reading: BLEEDING BEAUTIES, by Jason Parks

Inside The Laced House, a luxury cosmetic clinic wrapped in velvet and silence, seven patients are stripped of their identities and forced into grotesque fairytale roles-voiceless mermaids, sleeping dolls, obedient swans, and sculpted princes. Through invasive procedures, psychological conditioning, and relentless surveillance, their bodies become battlegrounds in a system that weaponizes beauty to control.