Category: Film

Lost: a Rapper from 8 Mile and some Men, Women and Children from Austin

eminem Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty  close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?

I kept thinking about it as I watched Men, Women and Children, the profoundly moving story of a different kind of alienation at least partially enabled by the Internet.  Nobody’s mom was an abusive alcoholic, but one mom fled her family so completely teens library mwcthat she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account,  one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone;  Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.

It’s a beautiful film, a survey of young people so much on their own ; life online allows so much distance from parents and any love or wisdom they might offer.  And even though they make mistakes beyond the web, the same technology seems to have trapped their parents, too.

Reitman chooses to move beyond individual dramas, however, and take us beyond his own observations as he closes the film with Carl Sagan’s  Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – with a hopeful description that connects us all to one another: enemy or friend, alive or dead, present or past, online or off:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

 

Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!

The Defenders East Side West side posterMovies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.

My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television.  For example:

There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.

* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”

GONE GIRL – I Wish She’d Kept Going

dorothy parker gone girlOK so I was all set to do some real work this morning.  I was.  Then I saw this in my friend Katherine Stone’s Facebook feed:

Gonegirl katherine

Katherine is a remarkable person whose fierce advocacy for women with post partum mood and anxiety disorders is legendary.  I listen to her.

The problem is, I really really hate Gone Girl.  Really.

First of all I figured out the ending near the beginning.  Secondly, the ending was kind of lifted from SPOILER ALERT: Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent.  Third, I’m betting the movie, soon to be released, is really good, which will just get more people saying nice things about the book.  David Fincher.  Ben Affleck.  Neil Patrick Harris.  What could go wrong?  I read they changed the ending, too.  In principal, that usually bothers me but in this case I’m really curious to see if the change makes the story more palatable.

I am far from the only person with negative feelings toward this novel.  The sample in Katherine’s feed includes comments like these:

Rachel Kaffenberger Great writing but the characters just pissed me off. I hated that book. Awful, horrible people are in that book.

Jen Neeld Bradshaw Ha! I read it two weeks ago and I still have some rage.

Asha Dornfest That book freaked me out.

Deb Rox I threw the book. You can guess which scene.

Kit Kelly I hated it.

And my own two personal favorites:

Susan Petcher I feel like “Books that Make You Hate Humanity” needs to be a new FB meme.

Doug French I wanted the last sentence of the book to be, “And then they all piled into a Greyhound Bus and drove into a volcano.”

I’m with Doug.  There were also some positive comments but these are the ones I agree with and there are already enough good comments out there in the ether and it’s my blog so….

Even so, it is true that the book evoked a ton of comments and a lot of emotion.  I guess there’s some skill required for that to happen but if that’s true, she’s squandered it.  Allegedly her other work is better but that’s no excuse – especially for a public which seems to be gaga for this one.

Right now I am reading California, a dystopian, almost too real story of a dark American future.  It’s probably only on the radar screen because Stephen Colbert used it as an example of books by young first-time authors who are most hurt by the Amazon-Hachette battle.  Since then it too has gotten a lot of attention so one makes me think of the other.

California doesn’t have as many stars on goodreads.  For me though, it’s so very much more exciting and provocative.  Her characters are more than horrible stereotypes, and it’s Edan Lepucki’s first published novel which is exciting.

This is not a contest between California and Gone Girl or between Stephen Colbert and Ben Affleck.  At least not to me.  I just didn’t want to be this mean about a book without including one that has my attention, is unpredictable, and includes some decent, interesting people.

Don’t we love that books can get us all riled up like this?  Far more fun that terrorists and the NFL!

And for a treat, here’s the Colbert Report after LePucki’s book made the New York Times Best Seller List:

OH and #boycottNFLsponsors.

 

 

I Saw It at the Movies: History and Film on #MicroblogMonday

Meryl Streep and Robert deNiro, Best Picture for 1978
Meryl Streep and Robert deNiro, Best Picture for 1978

I saw The Normal Heart, then Love is Strange — with no premeditation, both in the same week.

Each is a great document of a time in our history.  I began thinking about the power of these films and how valuable they would be as teaching tools.  With that in mind, I hereby initiate the “films to teach American history by” list.  Here are some more of mine; please add your own in the comments.

Kramer v Kramer      Hair     Do the Right Thing     The Deerhunter

Bullworth     Dead Man Walking     Valley of Decision     Gentleman’s Agreement

Good Night and Good Luck     The Green Berets     Get on the Bus     The Pawnbroker

 

 

 

 

Love IS Strange and the Film is Beautiful

Love is Strange Dinner Charlie cropped

Today’s lesson: When Rick Atkins picks a movie that ISN’T American Pie, go. Tonight we saw Love Is Strange – a warm, loving, measured story beautifully built and executed.  I am still reeling from The Normal Heart, as I wrote here  and I hadn’t wanted another sad tale in the same week.

SO when I heard what this film was about, I balked. No More Sad. I ended up agreeing to go though, and am so very glad I did.

In most cases with “small” films like this people say they’ll wait for Netflix; there are no special effects or broad vistas that require the big screen. In this case though, Manhattan was such a part of the story that it was worth seeing it in all its glory.

It wasn’t even sad.  Sad things happened but there was so much love and humor, Charlie Tahan, the young man in this photo, was so wonderful and Lithgow and Molina‘s couple was so much like any couple who’d been together a long time that there was also a deep familiarity that was a great part of the pleasure on the journey we took with them all.

No big conclusions here.  We just got home and these are my first reactions but I doubt they will change; go and see for yourself and comment here if you have thoughts to share.

 

The Normal Heart – a Kick in the Gut

HugOf course there’s no such thing as time travel.  Of course not.

The Normal Heart though, for anyone who was in New York in the 80’s, comes about as close as you can get.  We watched it after the Emmys.  I had avoided it, knowing how troubling it would no doubt be, but it felt wrong to not look.  Too many people had done that 30 years ago.  Here’s how one New Yorker described, to the New York Times,  Manhattan in May of 1987:

‘Going to funerals has become a way of life,” said George Getzel, a Hunter College social work professor who counsels AIDS patients as a volunteer. ”People in their 70’s and 80’s experience this but here people in their 20’s and 30’s are visiting the sick at homes and in hospitals and burying the dead. Some are themselves sick. It’s become a regularized aspect of the lives of gay men and others like myself who are involved.

The Normal Heart slammed me back to those days:

The day, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW, that my friend Susan Weaver did one of the first AIDS stories that included a live guest in the studio.  There was fear in the air that morning.  A couple of studio crew members asked to be replaced and people debated in advance whether to shake hands with the young man who had the courage to show up and talk about what was happening to him, to New York and, we know now, to all of us.

The day that Allison Gertz, who succumbed to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 26 (and who spoke at many high schools to very effectively remind teenagers that for her, AIDS came from a single encounter with an infected man and that heterosexual sex was anything but safe) spoke, with enormous impact, at my own son’s high school.

The day that our sweet friend Stephen left us.

The day one of my oldest friends told me that of his entire book group, he was the only survivor.

The day Elizabeth Glaser,  wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser, stricken through a blood transfusion during the birth of her daughter Ariel, who also contracted the disease, showed up at a Georgetown party lobbying and fundraising simultaneously.  Ariel’s illness drove Glaser to form the Pediatric Aids Foundation, later renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation in her honor.  She was everywhere, from Georgetown to Hollywood to endless television appearances, raising money and awareness until she died in 1994.

The day we watched Mark Harmon, the loveable, mischievous Dr. Caswell, walk away alone from the brilliant St. Elsewhere, his own AIDS diagnosis and certain death drawing him to an AIDS hospice to provide care until he died among his patients.

For everything here came days and weeks worth, years worth of deep melancholy and, for so many, pain, death and grief.    Because New Yorkers live so close together, ride mass transit, hang out in public parks, buy food from hotdog carts on the corner and, even if they’re really really rich, can’t stay clear of strangers, we all knew it, felt it and feared it.

Of course, AIDS is still with us, a terrible epidemic in the developing world, and still present in the West.  Here the reality is different today, if not entirely.

So yes, The Normal Heart was time travel; the gift of a perfect document reminding us, and portraying for those who came after, of a terrible, terrible time.

 

How Did I Miss “The Giver?”

The Giver sized upThe movie is coming.  I saw the trailer.  But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!.  Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post.  And The Giver?  I hadn’t even read it.

Yesterday I did.  I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Medal in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s!  It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.

As a veteran of the Divergent trilogy and The Hunger Games (and, ok, the Twilight Series but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear–holocaust novels and a ton of cyberfiction, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods.  Even so, the intent of The Giver is a little different.   There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain.  It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love.  Oh – and babies, too.  One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad.   We know this will not stand.  And that’s the point.

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms  Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists.  And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers.  As she told the New York Times:   “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must, join him.  Take a stand.  Change a mind.  Solve a problem.  Correct an injustice.  Fall in love.  Break our hearts or someone else’s.  Be alive.

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.

 

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

obvious child in boxMy hands were shaking as I left the theater.  Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real.  There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.”  You already know the story.  What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna.  She was careless and immature (but also  lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny.  Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long.  It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives.  A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion.  The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power.  It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as  loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

Say Anything – Anything At All

sayanything

Say Anything turned 25 last week.   My lovely older son, now a father, was sick.  Cold.  Fever.  But we had planned to go with his friend Ivan to see it in Chelsea at a funky old theater there.  Bad mother that I was, I took them, Kleenex and all.

I was rewarded with wonderful memories – I could see the wheels turning in their 14-year-old heads as this very special love story unfolded.  I could see it as we left the theater.  There is something about that particular tale and its lessons of acceptance and growth and loyalty and disappointment and joy – and music – that have impact well beyond the sum of their very substantial parts.

I’m so glad someone remembered, so I get to remember too.