Tag Archives: FILM

Tomate,
A Film By The Elder Statesman

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Tomate from The Elder Statesman on Vimeo.

I am a fan of The Elder Statesman, the California-based, homemade-luxury brand from designer and CFDA Fashion Fund winner Greg Chait. Not surprising, since I’m a fan of anything original, and the idea of building a luxury brand around knits that, in another context, and with a lesser execution, might feel merely “outdoorsy,” is not just original, it’s audacious, and I love people who have the audacity to do whatever the heck they want, so expecting the world to stand up and take notice that the world goes ahead and does.

Tomate, the film embedded above, captures everything that’s quintessentially California about The Elder Statesman brand. It makes me want to crawl right in and take up residence in this Elder Statesman life, where silly and sunshine seem quite enough. It’s a mood movie, and just the right inspiration before I dive into a day of my own creative work.

FILM BY THE ELDER STATESMAN

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We’re Back!
The Power Of The Pivot

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Bird Taking Flight

 

Orange field

What can I say? Best laid plans and all of that. When we launched Revel In It last year, the plan was to post every day and send out a newsletter every week. But we’re lean and mean and, within 6 months, it became clear that wasn’t sustainable — at least, not if wanted to get anything else done (and I still have lots up my sleeve that I want to do and  am doing). And so, I’ve taken a play from the entrepreneur’s playbook and embraced the fine art of the pivot, a.k.a., “the fine art of finding what a thing is really for.”

To read more about pivots — and how they might apply to your life, even if you are not of an entrepreneurial bent — check out these articles.

Five Business Leaders Share Their Career Pivot Stories

The Pivot Point: How To Use The Energy Of Imbalance To Manifest Positive Change

My two favorite pivots of all time belong to Steve Jobs, who made the ultimate pivot when he turned his love for calligraphy into a game changing computer brand that leads with great design (and what, after all, is great design but a commitment to great aesthetic functionality) —

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Year’s Best:
Argo

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There’s a moment in the opening scene of Argo when I realized, “this isn’t your typical movie.” Argo is clever and funny and filled with the kind of tension-filled moments that make the thriller genre go round. But it’s more than that. Argo is entertainment of the highest order. It’s an oasis of greatness in the desert of mediocre event pictures that now litter the cinematic landscape. Set during the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979, it tells the story of Tony Mendez, a CIA operative who put together a fake movie (complete with a real script, real production offices, real Hollywood producer, and real write-ups in the entertainment trades) as cover for the operation by which he would ferry to safety six Americans who escaped the U.S. embassy in Tehran while the hostage-taking was getting under way. The six were holed up at the Canadian Ambassador’s house, but the clock was ticking.

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Lina Hanson & Kordo Doski’s
Revel Life

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This is the story of two beautiful immigrants who move to LA — from Sweden and Canada/Kurdistan respectively — and stake their claim on the American dream. It’s a real, Horatio Alger, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story, but in really fabulous boots, in this case worn by Swedish-born makeup artist and skincare entrepreneur Lina Hanson (who’s work has been featured in Vogue, Elle, W., InStyle and Harper’s Bazaar, and who’s painted the likes of Natalie Portman, Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Javier Bardem, to name a few), and her actor/filmmaker/business partner husband Kordo Doski, fresh off of making Kinetic, his first feature film as writer/director/producer and star, filmed in his native Kurdistan. We caught up with the international couple in their Los Angeles home on the day before they wed.

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Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki’s Almost Masterpiece

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I am a lover of the fall film. As a screenwriter, these are the kinds of films I aspired to write. Masterful, tour de force explorations of the human soul, in which characters undergo the kind of life-shattering experiences that force them to change. In these movies, the characters we root for nearly always rise to the occasion. They accept the challenge, they do battle (with themselves and the outside world), and often achieve their outside goals. But even if they do not, they are  transformed by the journey, made better for having endeavored toward some hard-to-attain goal — which makes for a happy ending of a whole ‘nother sort. I think here of a movie like Michael Clayton, writer/director Tony Gilroy’s beautiful masterpiece about a law firm fixer who comes face to face with his demons, and decides to wrestle them down. George Clooney’s Clayton looks who he’s been and what he’s been a part of in the eye. And though we can’t imagine how he fares after the end credits — what will he do for a living? who will he be now that his conversion experience is complete? — we leave the theatre or turn off the DVD believing that the low places have been made high.

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