Loving the @jonstewart show today.

Check out this great episode of @planetmoney.

@bout how long has it been since I composed an e-thought of more than 140 characters?

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to re-establish my presence on Twitter. The reasons for this are twofold: first, I wanted to re-establish contact with some of the great people I started meeting in my first phase of tweeting, a few years go; secondly, I’m trying to promote a Kickstarter campaign for my film, Transnationals, and word on the street is, Twittville is the place to be.

Now, there are certainly great things about Twitter. It is definitely a “community” space where people can share their thoughts, give and get advice, promote their stuff — all without that creepy chat-room feel. (Why no creepy chat-room feel? I’m still not sure.) But it’s also a massive time-waster that fosters this “keep up with the Joneses” mentality that almost necessitates that you keep checking, keep tweeting, keep responding — keep on keeping on in the spotlight. That’s probably why there are nearly as many “how to get more Twitter followers” tweets as there are Twitter users!  That’s the part of Twitter that just makes it feel like one big giant narcissistic PR campaign.

Oh, and the fact that most of your thoughts must be truncated, oddly spelled (to save characters, of course) and re-purposed into catchy soundbites  with mass marketing appeal. I really don’t dig that.

So why do I persist with Twitter? Can I persist beyond the threshhold of 3 or 4 months? Will I continue to tweet once I don’t “need” Twitter’s much-touted marketing help? Only time will tell. But, as with too much of ANY good thing, right now I just feel like it’s bad. Really, really bad. Poor Twitter. You once held such promise….

I love the city.

I love the city of Los Angeles, specifically, but I also just really love cities. On Sunday in church, the message was about cities, and how they are the “cultural and economic crossroads of the world,” which causes the most creative, industrious and cunning creatures to flock to them. And that number keeps growing and growing: In 1800, 3% of the world lived in cities. In 1900, it was 14%. Today, over 50% of the world lives in cities.

Do we really have that many culture-makers out there? Or do we just seek connection with those that are at the same time just like us, and utterly different from us?

And, because of the experience of alike-but-different, we create culture. We create technology. We create industry. We create. Or we participate in someone else’s creation. Or, ultimately, we follow and consume, when something that celebrates diversity and connects universally is created. After all, we are people, and it’s this alike-but-different that moves us and causes us to do what we do. Maybe I shouldn’t speak for all of “us” though.

My one-time landlord in San Francisco told me an interesting thing about America’s three greatest culture-making cities: “Smart people go to San Francisco. Ambitious people go to New York. But smart and ambitious people flock to Los Angeles.”

Hmmmm…

This week, I’m unveiling some of the social media stuff I’ve been working on for my film, Transnationals. It seems a bit backwards that I have to start marketing a film before I’ve even made it, but I guess that’s how the world works today. I have to shut off my inner luddite and start websites, twitter and facebook pages, a kickstarter site, a trailer, a photo album and a whole cult of personality around a script and (let’s be real, here) myself! I’m not comfortable with that — at all!!

But I’m trudging along. Today, I launched Transnationals on Facebook. I’m on Twitter too, despite not having any followers. It’s Kickstarter tomorrow (link to follow) and any day now, you can go to www.transnationals-movie.com and the website will be up and about! There is something very unclean about this. It seems untoward and selfish to seek out all of this attention, yet this is the culture we’ve created. “He who screams the loudest is heard.” The web can be a cruel place for those not aggressive enough to preach their own gospel. That’s always been my problem, whether I’m launching a short film, a story, a blog or anything else I’ve worked on. I’m too afraid to ask for a pat on the back, and I squeeze my eyes shut, tense my muscles and wait for the storm to pass when I put my work out there (once and for all) for all of my friends. Then I’m back to hiding in my own little corner, working on the next thing, while I hope and pray that the world has forgotten all about me.

Except that I don’t want it to. I want them to come back. I want to produce more and more, so they don’t have to be told to come back.

Such is the artist’s paradox: we do our art for no one, but in order to keep doing it, we must appeal to someone – anyone, or even everyone. Even though we are all just social caterpillars.

This week, I’ve been talking with a casting director about casting my film, Transnationals. It could be a casting director’s dream because it’s a small story that’s an ideal vehicle for new talent. There aren’t a lot of established talents that really fit my roles — at least, not here in the US. In Asia, there are some huge actors that I’d like to target, like Lee Min Ho or Rain from Korea, and Aishwarya Rai, one of the biggest stars of Bollywood. But here at home, my movie doesn’t call for anyone of that sort of celebrity status, which is kind of a blessing in disguise (no big names = no divas!). All that to say, as I’ve been thinking so much about casting, it prompted me to compile this list of a few of my favorite actors of the moment…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Once a creepy long-haired alien kid posing as the son of even-weirder John Lithgow in Third Rock From the Sun, I think this perpetual man-child has finally come into his own. I just saw 50/50, which was just another opportunity for him to surprise me with his subtle, natural, slightly awkward way of making “cute white guy who’s down on his luck” actually seem real, believable and poignant. He even did this in the less-stellar Zooey Deschanel vehicle, (500) Days of Summer. I was not a huge fan of that movie, but his performance didn’t disappoint. But let’s talk about his choice of roles in the past, which is infinitely more interesting (see photo). Rian Johnson’s 2005 film Brick is one of my favorite films of the past decade: the script was amazing, the dialogue so pitch-perfect it’s uncanny, and the execution was brilliant. Every detail was just right. It was a little-film-that-could, gone absolutely, concretely, unabashedly right. Go a bit further back in the actor’s history when he played David Collins in a 1990 re-make of one of my all-time-favorite TV shows, Dark Shadows. I loved the original 60s version, which lasted much longer than the 90s remake, but the casting of the 90s version was absolutely spot-on. Gordon-Levitt was great as the bratty misfit, David. All and all, I think he’s THE great actor of my generation. Oh – and then there’s stuff like this out there: Check out Morgan M. Morganson\’s Date with Destiny

Rebecca Hazelwood: Sure, I’ve only started following her recently, as a result of my new obsession with the television show Outsourced, but already I know there is something magical about Hazelwood, beyond the obvious “exotic beauty” calling card. She, like a number of other western-born Indian actresses out there, is trying to distinguish herself  by playing provocative characters in provocative dramas (Kissing Cousins, The Ode) but I think her true success will come when she embraces her potential and starts playing strong women characters. Perhaps she’s gotta fight past the “repressed Indian woman” stereotype before she can do that, but I think she’ll manage. She’s got such obvious star power.

Audrey Tautou: In spite of a filmography with just as many massive hits as supreme misses, I still think Tautou is brilliant. She’s one of the non-English-speaking-world’s most recognizable female faces in America (although Marion Cotillard is hot on her heels these days) and somehow, no matter how many times she loses her head and makes a movie like Priceless or The Da Vinci Code, she’ll always run back to a great director and do something amazing. I’m satisfied that she’s spent her career hopping back and forth from celebrity status in the small French film industry to “supporting player” English language films. I was one of a few people who loved Dirty Pretty Things, but I understand that she can’t make films like that all the time: she’s a comedienne, and she needs roles worthy of quirky leading lady. It’s true, she’s no new, undiscovered talent, but she remains one of my favorites of the moment, so here she belongs, on my list of love.

Cillian Murphy: I’ve been following this young Irish actor since the days of Disco Pigs,

which led him to a short, beautiful string of indie performances (Intermission, Girl with the Pearl Earring, 28 Days Later) before Hollywood snapped him up as an evil bad guy with an accent (see the awful Red Eye, or better films, like Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception) but I think there’s still more out there for him in terms of festival shorts, heart-wrenching dramas and small, Irish stories. If you ask me, Ireland is one of the most under-valued film centers in Europe; and with that under-utilized potential, there are probably dozens of actors of Murphy’s caliber going totally to waste. Murphy is obviously torn between Indie-wood and Hollywood; personally, I hope he returns to his roots and makes a few more Danny Boyle-style films across the pond to restore his street cred as an indie lead. I have Ewan McGregor-like dreams for this one, I do.

Earlier this year, I shot five films in Bangladesh. It was my third time to the country, but never does it fail to captivate my imagination – each time for a different reason. This time, I got to thinking back about the first time I was in Bangladesh, and the story that had been marinating in my mind ever since. In May, I visited Cambodia to work on my shorts with my editor. And after those four intense weeks I had not only finished 5 short films, I had also written the first draft of what was to become “Transnationals,” my fourth feature screenplay.

Except there was a difference between this screenplay and the others: people actually liked it! My friends liked it, my colleagues liked it – people started to get excited! So, a few drafts, many notes and some increased confidence later, I decided in August that I was going to make the film: I AM going to make the film! It’s about three Asian-American adoptees who each return to their birth country to seek out the culture, family and identity they never knew.

People have been asking me why I’d choose to write a story like this. It wasn’t in Cambodia, playing ultimate frisbee with the national team called “Angelina’s Orphans” that I chose to write about adoptees. And it wasn’t even necessarily because I grew up with two adopted cousins from Korea. No, it was a certain experience in Bangladesh in 2006, some five years ago, that first sparked my interest in the subject. Below is an essay I wrote on the subject…

“I  have always had a soft spot for the exotic, colorful, magical land of singing and dancing that is India. So in the beginning of 2006, I was thrilled to be offered a job in Bangladesh to work on a documentary short. A sign in the airport read, “Get here before all the tourists do!” It didn’t take long to see why tourists bypass India’s eastern neighbor and former annex: crushing poverty, lack of infrastructure, narrowly-defined social norms and a government-led disdain for outside influence.

A few weeks later, I met a 23 year old French-Canadian woman who had been adopted from Bangladesh as a baby. If I found the reality of Bangladesh a harsh contrast to the colorful Bollywood movie I’d had playing in my head, I could hardly imagine her feeligns of displacement in her own homeland. It seems her expectations were similar to mine. But for all of the strange and sometimes-traumatic stories I had about the country, what she was experiencing as a “foreigner” was altogether different.

I remember walking into a high-end retail store with her and another white foreigner. The white foreigner and I walked right in while two armed guards stopped her outside and forced her to turn in her backpack before she entered. I was confused until my white foreign fright told me it was because she looked Bengali. It was then that I first thought about what it must be like to be a transnational adoptee: halfway between the white, middle-class Western families they grew up with and the homogenous Asian cultures with whom they only have a skin color in common. It’s a strange island of misfits that make up a large part of the 6 million adopted children in the U.S.

Through the landscape of transnational Asian adoption, which started after the Korean War when many babies were orphaned, or born to American soldiers and Korean mothers who later abandoned them, three cultures stood out to me and piqued my interest in the people who are now adult adoptees. Japan, for its traditionalism and homogeneity, which seems to reject any sense of multi-culturalism; Korea, the homeland of more international adoptees than any country in the world; and Bangladesh, because it is the home of at least one French-Canadian whose image is forever burned in my memory.”