July 10, 2007

Martin Luther King Jr. focused on civil disobedience and racial injustice, while your focus is on personal empowerment. Why the different focus and message?

It is 11:30 a.m. on a clear, sunny Sunday morning in southern Dallas, and traffic is heavy on Highway 480 near West Kiest Boulevard. Just off the exit ramp, a lot of Range Rovers and Cadillac Escalades are navigating a maze of orange cones in vast parking lots that could belong to the Cowboys’ Texas Stadium. But this largely buppie crowd (young black urban professionals) has come not to see a football game, but to hear “Bishop” T. D. Jakes, pastor of the nondenominational megachurch The Potter’s House.

A friend of mine has an idea for teaching youth about sex: have them view one of those graphic birthing videos that the hospital has for first-time parents, the kind that shows the crowning and the afterbirth, the agony and the joy. The kids will get the idea.

Knocked Up shows it all too. And like Judd Apatow’s previous smash hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the film winds through all manner of profane humor on the way to endorsing a surprisingly traditional vision of family. Baby-having is presented as a rigorous, life-altering and unabashedly good thing to do.

The city of lights would seem the perfect setting for a compilation of 18 short films, each five to eight minutes long, about love and passion. But what makes Paris, Je T’Aime intriguing, beyond its role as a travelogue of Parisian neighborhoods, is that it offers a rare chance to observe in one sitting how numerous writers, directors and cinematographers—some famous, some not—employ different cinematic tools. Think flashback and flash-forward, fantasy and dreams, jerky hand-held camera work and all sorts of camera and editing gimmicks.