Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

St. Nick  (2009)

Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

Those who have some film festival familiarity with Lowery’s most recent short film, the largely stop-motion A Catalog of Anticipations, may be surprised by his methods here (including many long, slow, fixed, often wide shots), and how long he takes to establish their patterns. In some ways, the title of the short is applicable to the feature: Lowery literally catalogs his character’s movements, showing in painstaking detail how the kids take on some perversion of traditional male and female roles (without anything doing perverted): the boy playing fix-it, building a home by any means necessary and available to him; the girl playing mother to their new “pet” (the decayed skeleton of what used to be a dog). You wait for something to happen, and then you realize that it’s happening — St. Nick reveals itself as a string of vignettes about two lost souls old enough to get themselves lost and enjoy it, but too young to be able to fully grasp the length and obstacles of the road ahead to the point where they, like we, know to wait for the other shoe to drop. They don’t try to get a TV, or comics, or toys. They seem happy to do nothing but what they need to do to maintain their lives. We become comfortable with being with the brother and sister in each heightened moment, whether she’s crafting the world largest, messiest dessert sandwich, or he’s stumbling on a woman playing guitar on her porch and subsequently falling into some kind of love. And then suddenly Lowery gives his characters steeper stakes.

St. Nick would make for an intriguing triple feature with two other recent lyrical kids-on-their-own indies, Children of Invention and Treeless Mountain. In those films, the circumstances that lead to the siblings’ separation from parents leaves an imprint — a resentment, a frustration, a determination to get along with or without adults. In St. Nick, our unnamed brother and sister share only that determination, and increasingly, the sister seems like she’d be just as happy at home playing with the dog, with dinner guaranteed. In Children and Treeless, we meet sibling pairs in which the eldest takes on the de facto role of the little adult out of particularly dire necessity. In St. Nick, we meet a sibling pair where the eldest has created a condition of dire necessity in order to prove himself as an adult. The tragic irony is that, as a self-destructive hero in a Western of his own making, he’s mired in necessarily childish make-believe.

This review originally appeared during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. St. Nick screens tonight in New York at Rooftop Films. See also David Lowery’s recent blog post about sitting in a waiting room with Steven Soderbergh.

The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog is reporting that, thanks to donations totaling $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable/Ovation TV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reversed their decision to end their film program in October, and will now keep the program alive “at least through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.” The Culture Monster post doesn’t indicate whether or not the LACMA’s Michael Govan and the film fan activist group Save Film at LACMA will go through with the much-hyped “popcorn summit”, scheduled to take place on September 1, to discuss LACMA’s film future, but apparently the Museum is newly committed to “thinking about the history and future of film as art as well as film’s increasing importance in the larger narrative of art history.”

Interesting side fact/road to conspiracy theory: David Segal’s recent NY Times profile of The Weinstein Company blamed Harvey’s acquisition of Ovation as one of TWC’s biggest missteps. Is Saving LACMA Film the Brothers’ way of backing up Inglourious Basterds’ big opening weekend with a big “we’re back” gesture? Maybe!

Under discussion:

Quiet City  (2007)

The following review appeared during the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival. Luke and Brie Are On a First Date is now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video on Demand.

Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’s Quiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.

Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.

Twitter hasn’t “verified” her account so it could be a fraud, but here’s hoping that this really is Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall mixing it up on the Twitters. It’s plausible — if you condensed the bitchy, dishy voice of her autobiography into 140 character missives, this Twitterstream is what it would look like. My ten favorite moments of her Twitter stream thus far:

10. When she posted the Twitpic of her walking out of Max’s Kansas City en route to Studio 54 to meet “Mr.Warhol and Mr.Nureyev”.

9. Her response to people complaining about her lit cigarette in said picture, spread out over five tweets, including this commentary on the perks of old age: “The good thing about being 84 is that I can smoke as much as I want, If I was smoking 2 packs a day on the set of To Have and Have Not…..when I was 19 and I am still around 65 years later I can continue smoking as much as i want.”

8.  “in LA to discuss with Mr. Scorsese his Sinatra biopic in the works, I wonder who he is going to cast to play me.Who would you guys cast?”

7. Bacall says she’s been offered a role in Quentin Tarantino’s new film opposite Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper, in which she would play “the villainess.” “I have never been offered to play a schitzophrenic Russian heroin addicted Kidnapper’s mother before. haha.” Haha indeed.

6. Her first tweet: “I can’t get this God dam thing to work!”

5. Her bio, in which she plugs her autobiography and astutely namechecks her three best films: “Read my book By Myself and Then Some and watch my movies The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not and Written on the Wind”

4. When she admits that her granddaughter made her watch Twilight. “she said it was the greatest vampire film ever.After the “film” was over I wanted to..smack her accros her head with my shoe, but I do not want a book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die…”

3. …”So instead I gave her a DVD of Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu and told her, now thats a vampire film! and that goes for all of you! watch Nosferatu instead!”

2. When she calls out her 19 year old, scotch-addled grandson for hitting on a cater waitresses “with Jayne Mansfield size breast and Liz Taylor eyes, men do scumble into the female flesh temptation so fast.”

1. When she then posts a twitpic of said grandson, looking like a complete tool.

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.

The plot is the same. The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s noose-scarred hillbilly Aldo Raine, is only on screen for about half the film. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by  Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk-talk, bang-bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that Hitler and Goebbels will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star (Diane Kruger) and British film critic-turned-military officer (Michael Fassbender), separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

The film’s guiding spirit is encapsulated in an exclamation by Landa in the first scene: “I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading.” Tarantino has made a movie about World War II filtered through rumor — verbally-transmitted urban legends, to be precise. There is no casual conversation in Inglourious Basterds; virtually every scene involves an interrogation and a chance for someone to brag about and/or live up to their reputation. Concsious of the world they live in — ie, not Hitlers, not ours, but Tarantino’s — characters on both sides of the divide take an active role in their own myth-making, to make sure that word gets out as to who they are and why they are to be feared, and everyone takes great pride in knowing that word is getting around. The film’s most oft repeated phrase is “What have you heard?”

This myth-making provides both Basterds’ most fascinating subtext, and its most bloated primary text. Take for instance, our substantive introduction to the Basterds themselves, in which multiple reputations are discussed before three acts of Basterd-on-Nazi violence occur. One Basterd gets his own awkward origin story flashback, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, before we get to the point of the scene, which is defining which rumor will carry the day. The story of what happened that day will be told in three different forms. There’s what the Basterds tell the sole Nazi survivor of their massacre to tell Hitler; there’s what Hitler tells the sole survivor to tell everyone else, and then there’s what really happened.

Stories are propaganda, and propaganda is a weapon. This is not a film about how the war was fought on the ground (or in concentration/death camps, which are never mentioned), but a film about how both sides fought the battle on screen. In the single Basterds scene that I think is nowhere near long enough, Fassbender’s film critic-turned-British spy describes Goebbels as a warrior in the guise of a studio mogul, fighting for the dominance of the German film industry as a strike against both Weimar silent film and the Hollywood, both the provinces of successful Jews. Shoshanna uses celluloid as a weapon in a more literal sense. Her two-part revenge gambit involves film as an expolosive, and an explosive film in which she proclaims to be “the face of Jewish vengeance” (“in English,” Marcel insists when directing the scene — the language of the passive Jewish vengeance coming from Hollywood). Marcel’s goodbye to Shoshanna, delivered to her face on a movie screen after her actual body has already expired, is the closest thing to moment of genuine romance that Tarantino has ever filmed.

Ironically, though the film relies on the audience’s knowledge Nazi atrocities for its effects, it has little interest in actually depicting them. Tarantino reduces the Nazi high command to Hitler, chief propagandist Goebbels, and Martin Bormann (essentially Hitler’s press secretary). The public face and architect of Nazi supremacy and his right-hand men in its promotion are represented, but not Mengele or Höss, none of the real-life figures involved in the nitty gritty of designing and implementing genocide. Inglouirous Basterds not only avoids the depiction of the real figures responsible for the Final Solution, but it only presents the Nazi mass killing techniques as they’re appropriated as punishment onto Nazis by the Basterds.  If you don’t walk in knowing that Nazis branded Jews, shot them en masse, locked them in buildings which they then burnt to the ground, Tarantino isn’t going to tell you, but the Basterds would lose all justification for their brutality if such events hadn’t happened.

What does this all mean? It depends, I think, on how much credit you’re willing to give Quentin Tarantino as a political provocateur. Is he really talking about the world we live in today? If so, what are we to make of a film that plays like apolitical fantasy, but nevertheless devotes its final images to broadcasting the idea that even when we win, Jews will remain an angry people who will neither forgive nor forget the wrongs done to us? If you want to see Inglorious Basterds as a contemporary allegory, you don’t have to strain — in fact, Tarantino makes it easy by presenting American soldiers who treat torture as entertainment (“watching Germans getting beat to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” says Pitt), in a setting 60 years removed from Abu Ghraib, within a fight that, like our current excursions in the Middle East, is in part about the right of Jews to simply exist. And then, by giving us multiple (if ambiguously intentional) Jewish suicide bombers, Tarantino makes sure that the heroes of Basterds not only do onto their 20th century oppressors what has been done to them, but they also give their key 21st century foes a taste of their own medicine. You could make the argument that Inglourious Basterds is a palpably anti-Semitic film as easily as you could argue that it’s a rah-rah work of pro-Imperialism, propaganda for US/Israeli collaborative war against those who threaten either’s global interests.

Either reading, I think, probably gives Tarantino too much credit — when has he ever been a filmmaker who ached to make a statement about contemporary events? Plus, the film’s best source cue tempers either extreme. A key, glorious sequence is set to David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting out Fire)” — borrowed, fittingly, from the soundtrack of the Paul Schrader remake of a Val Lewton horror number that allegorized the struggle of European immigrants in WWII America. It’s one of those musical-montage-as-mission-statement moments: you can’t put out a fire with gasoline without adding to the flames. Every act of war has fallout, and extreme acts burn for decades. Maybe this, too, is giving Tarantino too much credit, to assume that he’d take an active step to undercut his promotion of revenge, particularly when he’s talked at length about wanting to overturn the typical Holocaust film power dynamics to show “Germans that are scared of Jews.” But let’s just say he has a pretty strong track record of speaking through his soundtracks.

I’m still struggling with Basterds, as a statement of ideology (or lack thereof), and as a work of art. There are still things that bother me in terms of the way it flows, and I still think Tarantino sometimes over-exerts himself with the telling at the expense of the showing. But still  — mea culpa. My initial assessment of the film was wrong. Maybe what I saw this week in New York really is a complete revitalization, so completely different from what I saw in Cannes as to excuse me from blame for not fully engaging with it in the couple of hours I had to form a correct opinion before the film was rendered old news by the maw of the festival cycle. But probably not. Probably, it is a couple of things. The film is now unquestionably a little bit tighter than the first version I saw; my complaints about the flow and movement of the action sequences is no longer valid, and as far as my complaint about the lack of “rock n’ roll efficiency”, well, that is idiotic now and probably was then, as well. But I honestly don’t know what has changed more since May: the cut of Inglouirous Basterds, or me.

Maybe this is unfair to you, the reader — maybe film critics shouldn’t change. Maybe we should go out of our way to lead extraordinarily stabile lives, to avoid financial stress and familial trauma, to not get depressed or even date for fear of swinging too far towards any emotional extreme in the hopes of maintaining absolute objectivity. If that’s the case, I didn’t do what I should’ve done — I’ve been sent through the wringer by all the above over the last three months, and come out a different person. But the world changes, whether or not I stay the same, and at the rate this one is changing, it’s unrealistic to expect something as trifling as a movie opinion to stay fixed indefinitely. In May, I was visiting France from a country just barely emerged from the glowing spell of Obama’s first hundred days. Today, I am currently living in an America where — apparently — it’s okay to compare the President to Hitler because he is trying to make it easier for poor people to go to hospitals and for old people to draw up living wills, and the only person doing anything substantial to combat that theory is a gay Jew who uses “dining room table” as an epithet. The question of what it means to act like a Nazi is suddenly relevant to our everyday lives. It’s possible that we need Inglourious Basterds now more than ever.

“It’s like an Antonioni film without the ennui,” I said to a friend after seeing Lucretia Martel’s impeccably opaque The Headless Woman, which opens at Film Forum today. This, he said, was what he liked about it — that Martel one-ups her forebears in the Cinema of Disorientation by refusing to seduce the audience with a mirror to their own emotional dissatisfaction. And that is great, and skillful, and interesting … but I miss the ennui.

It’s likely that this is the point of The Headless Woman – Martel rips Antonioniennui off its foundations by refusing to throw the audience a bone of indentification via the disorienting effects of lust/love. The Headless Woman deals with sex twice, in two separate encounters both coded as inappropriate; the film seemingly has no use for desire beyond its ability to show up depravity and mental disability. ‘

But on further contemplation, I think Martel does, in fact, ask the viewer to find ways to relate to the post-traumatic stress/psychosis of Vero, a middle-aged woman who returns physically but not mentally to her bourgeois life after a car accident. Wandering through social and professional committments in a daze, Vero becomes convinced that she hit and killed a boy with her vehicle. Using swift cuts and temporal ellipses to toss us into Vero’s point of view, allowing us no frame of reference as to how she “normally” behaves or what the natural circumstances of her life even look like, Martel forces the viewer to engage by tapping into their own deeply-rooted anxieties about the nature of consciousness.
But the thing about existential despair is that it has nowhere to go (except for, possibly, Zabriskie Point); only in science fiction can characters go down the rabbit role of consciousness-questioning and come out with an answer. In Antonioni films, romance is a sham escape option — there is no way out, but in the films as in life, sometimes we can turn to another person to make us forget that — and a glimmer of hope, if only temporarily. Martel withholds hope. Antonioni’s films revolve around questions like, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so will sex make that better?” Martel’s film asks, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so can I live with not being able to do much about that?” Martel’s film does offer the darker, more realistic vision of Our Existential Trap, but for the viewer this cuts both ways. There is no false out, but there is also no pleasure.

“Another depressing movie for the depression,” Abel Ferrara cracked, after a screening of his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday night. The screening was held to raise money for Cinema Nolita, an indie video store on the verge of having to shut down for lack of funds (they’re having another benefit tonight, a concert featuring The Virgins and a DJ set by Animal Collective). Ferrara, who lives in the neighborhood and is a regular patron of the store, turned the the post-movie Q & A into an angry but resigned meditation on the ways in which New York, indie film and the world have changed in nearly two decades, to get us from the point where someone like Ferrara could make a film on the streets of New York, to the point where someone like Ferarra may soon be unable to rent a film on the streets of New York.

“Watching this film, it’s kind of sad,” Ferrara said. “At that time, there was some kind of indie film scene going on, and we could make a film and get it distributed. Why that indie film industry isn’t there [now] is caught up in the changing times.”

Several times during the evening Ferrara grumbled over the compromises involved in getting his upcoming 50 Cent-starring Jekyl & Hyde adaptation off the ground. “We’re just trying to get the movie made, and now every movie’s being made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if it’s set in Liberia. I’ve never been to Grand Rapids, but they’re bending over to give movies cash [via tax incentives].”

“I don’t know if we could have made [Bad Lieutenant] in Grand Rapids,” Ferrara said, pausing to laugh to himself. “But in this day and age, if you get money to do a movie, you’re gonna go to Mars.”

For Ferrara, his difficulties financing and distributing films in North America - his last feature, 2007’s wonderful Go Go Tales, remains unreleased here due to legal issues — are tied into the demise of places like Cinema Nolita. Several times, he asked the audience things like, “How do you guys watch movies? Is everyone shaking down the internet?” It quickly became apparent that, in Ferrara’s world, “internet” is a dirty word.
“When I made [Bad Lieutenant], they were trying to sell the internet to me as the best thing to come along,” he said. “At this point, I feel like it’s another knife in the back of the filmmaker’s spirit. Somehow, having direct access to your audience is not turning out to get movies made.”

Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim, was in the audience. At one point, Abel asked him to talk about how his brother continues to get his films financed and distributed. He didn’t — the obvious answer is “casting BIll Murray” — but he seemed to agree with Ferrara’s stance on the paradox of technological change. “It seems like all these opportunities are opening [doors], but they’re really shutting,” Jarmusch said. Ferrara responded, “It’s open, but it’s a rip off,” and then ranted a bit on piracy via YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube: at one point, Ferrara announced, “We got a special attraction.” He motioned to the projectionist, and soon we were watching the trailer for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the project that famously provoked Ferrara to comment that he hoped Herzog and his production team “die in Hell.” Ferrara’s post-trailer comments were still bitter, but more restrained.

“Unfortunately, anyone involved in our film wasn’t invited for that film, but I was told I should be really happy that such great people are ripping off our ideas.” A voice in the crowd called out, “You didn’t see a dime off that?” Ferrara: “Well … I might have saw A DIME.” Another voice asked if Ferrara planned to see the remake when it comes out. He shook his head vigorously and gestured to the screen where the trailer had played. “That’s enough of that.”

Let’s play that game where we compare quotes from two seemingly unrelated stories that happened to come out on the same day and thus seem to say something about the zeitgeist.

First, from an interview with District 9 producer Peter Jackson (via Scott Kirsner):

Peter Jackson: You know, in the old days it was very difficult to make movies ’cause you had to have 35 millimeter cameras, which were phenomenally expensive. Or you had to have rich parents that could send you to film school. Nowadays, anybody, any kid or young person with a desire to make films … (has) access to this equipment. You have great video cameras and the quality’s fantastic. You can make soundtracks and do visual effects. You can do very competent computer effects quite easily.”

Q: What impact do you see this having on Hollywood?

Jackson: “There are no excuses anymore. If people really want to make movies, they can go out and do it. And I think we’re going see in the next 20 or 30 years a real influx of creativity to the world of entertainment because I believe a lot in the young generation coming along … the pop culture generation who now can grab these cameras and go make films with them.

Then, from a story in the NYT by Michael Cieply, titled Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own:

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.

Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

Cieply’s key example of sucessful self-distribution is Anvil!:

“I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house,” said Sacha Gervasi, the film’s director.

Mr. Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include “The Terminal,” directed by Steven Spielberg, nearly three years ago, began filming “Anvil!” with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Mr. Gervasi put up more money — his total cost was in “the upper hundred thousands,” he said — to distribute the film…

So! You can make a movie! All by yourself! As long as you’re okay with not ever shooting on film! And then you can release it yourself! Because no one’s going to do it for you! And if they do, they won’t pay for TV advertising, so no one who doesn’t follow you on Facebook will ever hear about it! And so after you’ve put up your own small fortune and invested years of your life making the movie on your own, you can then devote at least another year to Twittering about it! And you can spend eve more money flying yourself to film festivals so you can hang out in luxury hotels talking to anyone who will listen to you ramble on about it! And in short, it’s a good thing you made money writing a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, so that you have ample money and time to devote to this endeavor, because without that, your self-distribution gambit might not have been feasible! It’s so great that we live in this time of opportunities for all humans!!!!!!! Are you inspired yet?!?!