Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature.

Movie Review: Hustle and Flow

The first time I heard about Hustle and Flow was when I was watching the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 and one of the songs in the film, “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” won an Oscar for Best Original Song. After that, I didn’t think about the film again, especially because I was too young at the time to see it. But fast forward to 2021 and I’m older and have seen enough R rated dramas to not mind seeing another one. Also, the movie received positive reviews from critics, so I wanted to see it.

It was definitely different from watching Zola. For those who haven’t seen Zola, it’s a dark comedy based on a true Twitter thread by a young Black woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King, who meets a fellow stripper while waitressing in Detroit and embarks with her on a wild road trip to Florida. The pimp in Hustle and Flow, played by Terrence Howard, ends up being a good guy who just wants to follow his dream of being a musician. Even though he doesn’t respect the women in his life, they still help him follow his musician dreams. The pimp in Zola, however, is anything but a good guy and doesn’t even become a good guy at any point during the film. In one scene of Hustle and Flow, D’Jay has Nola accompany him to a pawn shop where he is buying equipment for his recording studio, but the old white guy working there is unwilling to give him a discount for the expensive equipment. But then the guy ogles Nola and DJay arranges for her to have sex with him in exchange for the music equipment (this scene creeped me the fuck out, not gonna lie.) Nola then leaves the store and DJay threatens her with abusive language and she tells him she doesn’t want to hustle anymore, and wants something different in life even if she doesn’t know what that is. DJay then has Nola help him out in recording his rap album, and later on in the film when he is arrested for shooting up a bar he gives her his cassette tape and has her say aloud that she is in charge, meaning that she needs to take over his career while he is in prison. She is later scene getting out of a car wearing a business suit (which early on in the movie she told DJay she wanted to wear) and heels and walking to a radio station, and she seduces the DJ at the station to play DJay’s song “Whoop That Trick,” which he recorded at his home with Shug, Nola, Shelly, and Clyde. The song ends up being a hit and everyone rejoices.

Zola, however, paints a much grimmer picture. There are many scenes where Stefani, the white woman who coerces Zola to go on the trip with them, faces brutal treatment from her pimp, X (Colman Domingo acted the hell out of that role, and I’m glad I watched interviews of him talking about his character before watching the film, so I wouldn’t be scared shitless by his character.) When Zola first gets in the car, it seems they are all having a fun time, with X driving and all of them–X, Zola, Derek, and Stefani—rapping loudly to Migos’ “Hannah Montana.” However, within the first fifteen minutes of the film things go dark real quick, and we find out that X is actually more sinister than he appears. In one scene of the film (that has stayed stuck in my memory in the months after watching the movie) Stefani has sex with a client and ends up making less than she is worth, and Zola is furious with that, telling Stefani that “pussy is worth thousands.” Stefani tells her with false confidence that she doesn’t set the price for her services, and Zola has her update her profile and set a rate for her services. Stefani ends up making a ton of money that evening with multiple clients, but the next morning, when Stefani gives the money to X, he gets angry and tells Stefani to not let Zola get it in her head that her services are worth a lot of money, and that he is in charge when it comes to negotiating the rate of Stefani’s services. Stefani taps him quietly on the shoulder, and whispers in his ear if she can have some of the money (that she, not X, made through her own work), X tells her no and to be grateful that she has “food in her belly” and that he is providing her with these places to stay. Stefani lives in fear of X because he is absolutely an unpredictable character, and even though she projects this air of confidence around Zola, that X is just doing his job as her pimp and that she has no problems with him, it’s obvious that he uses fear and pumps himself up to intimidate Stefani and make her feel like she doesn’t have control over her life. In another scene, Stefani is forced into a client’s room and locked in a closet, and X, Zola and Derek run over to the room to get her. X shoots the guy who held her captive and they end up getting Stefani out of there, but in all honesty he’s not doing it because he like Stefani. He’s doing it because she makes him money, and if he loses her he will lose his cash flow, especially because Zola refuses to follow through with anything he does because she is a good bullshit detector and knows X is trying to intimidate her and make her lose her sense of self-worth. X doesn’t care about Stefani’s hopes and dreams, or even really about her career, unless it makes him money.

I am actually glad I watched Zola before watching Hustle and Flow. And I admit, I cannot compare the two movies to one another. While both movies are crime films, Hustle and Flow is a serious drama, and even though it has its tender moments and some funny moments of joy, it is at the end of the day a drama. Zola, however, is a dark comedy that has its funny moments, and it was an enjoyable film to watch (I think had I not read the Twitter thread before seeing the movie, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the film as much.) The film doesn’t of course poke fun at sex trafficking or dancers themselves. The comedy lies in the absurdity of Stefanie, Derek and X, and knowing that Zola already knows how trippy and wild these people are as she quietly observes their ridiculous behavior. In Hustle and Flow, DJay is the main character and the women he pimps (Shug, Nola, and Lexus) are supporting characters who help bolster his music career so that he can address his midlife crisis (not that that isn’t important or that DJay’s dreams didn’t matter. They certainly did, and as a musician myself the film was quite inspiring in that sense) while in Zola, the pimp is a supporting character and Zola’s narrative is front and center and she gets to tell it just as it happened. Zola actually gives the lived account of a woman who was coerced into this trip. Honestly, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce it to just a wild trip to Florida. It was human trafficking and Zola, a Black woman and dancer, was actually in real life coerced by a young white woman into the human trafficking business and she actually shared the trauma she dealt with on that trip on Twitter in 2015. In one scene, Zola is sitting by herself at the poolside of the hotel X has them stay at, and she is just trying to have some alone time to herself but then X interrupts her and forces her to come back inside so that she can accompany Stefanie to meet with clients. Zola then says that she came on the trip to dance (at the beginning, when she and Stefanie first meet they dance together at a strip club, make a ton of money and have a good time just being themselves and doing their work) but then X tells her that “they’re done with that” and that she is here so that she and Stefanie can make him money. In Hustle and Flow, we briefly see Lexus and other women working at the strip club, and DJay sending Nola off to meet with clients, but that’s pretty much it. We don’t actually see what the men do to these women, how they treat them. It’s pretty much focused on DJay, his old high school friend Clyde, and a white guy named Shelly who all work together to create an album and help launch DJay’s career. Nola, Lexus and Shug are there for support, and even though Shug sings the chorus on the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” she is still at the end of the day a supporting character who helped the main character succeed in his career.

And of course, that’s not a bad thing in itself. The movie is really about people making music together and enjoying the process of it. It actually reminded me of Begin Again in that sense, because in Begin Again Keira Knightley’s character, Gretta, and Mark Ruffalo’s character, Dan, create their own band from scratch, recruiting random musicians who aren’t signed to a record label and just want to make music together and have fun. It is an enriching process of music making for all of them. Of course, the way Gretta and Dan see the music making is different from how DJay views it. Dan and Gretta just want to enjoy life and making music together, and even when Gretta sells the music online for a small price, Dan doesn’t mind because they had fun on the album together. DJay, however, puts a lot of pressure on Shug when she is singing the vocals for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” because he really wants his album to get noticed by big producers and in particular, a famous musician he looks up to called Skinny Black (played by real-life rapper Ludacris). They are not making the album for fun; they are having fun in the process, but they are not just making the album for laughs. DJay wants worldly success and acclaim because he came from nothing and is going through a point in his life where he doesn’t know what to do. Dan, however, is also going through a midlife crisis like DJay, but he was already working for a renowned record company for years so he had access to the resources in the music industry and all the connections. He has won many awards, while DJay is just getting started and has to start from scratch and has to work extremely hard to get noticed by the big record labels and radio stations, and of course, his idol Skinny Black, who ends up putting his career down and not supporting DJay in his dreams. Even though these two movies about music are totally different in their subject matter, they are about people following their dreams from scratch even when the going goes rough for them.

Here is the trailer for Hustle and Flow:

Hustle and Flow. 2005. Rated R for sex and drug content, pervasive language and some violence.

Movie Review: Dolemite is My Name

I didn’t know much about this movie before watching it on Netflix, but I’m glad I finally got a chance to see it. I also didn’t know too much about Rudy Ray Moore before watching the movie, but I’m really glad I saw it because the acting was incredible, and the screenplay was amazing.

The film starts off with the song “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye playing at a radio station in the 1970s. Rudy goes to Roj, the DJ of the radio station (played by Snoop Dogg) and asks him if his records are going to get some air time. The DJ tells him that his records aren’t going to sell well, and Rudy finds himself at a deadlock. His comedy shows bomb and the owner of the comedy club doesn’t like his shows. In short, Rudy is struggling to make it in his career, and every time he tries to do something, he falls short. This prompts Rudy to meet with a guy who he kicked out of his record store, and he has the guy and other friends tell some jokes. Rudy then imitates the jokes they made later on at home and records himself improvising on those jokes. He ends up creating an alter ego for himself called Dolemite, and his catchphrase becomes “Dolemite is my name, and f*cking up motherf*ckers is my game!” He releases a series of albums and sells out a lot of his shows, and he recruits Lady Reed, a woman whose man just cheated on her. She doesn’t believe in herself, but Dolemite sees potential in her, and he asks her what she did for a living. She tells him she used to be a backup singer in New Orleans, and he recruits her for his comedy show. When she is reluctant, he tells her that she just needs to create a character for people, like he did. In real life, he is Rudy Ray Moore, but onstage he is the character, the alter ego, Dolemite, who tells raunchy jokes and curses a lot. She ends up joining him and they make a really hilarious duo, singing goofy raunchy songs and making audiences laugh (it kind of reminded me of the time my then-partner and I were sitting together one time, and he had me listen to “Hand Job, Blandjob, I Don’t Understand Job” by the folk duo Garfunkel and Oates. I think I almost peed my pants laughing so hard when I heard the song.)

Then, Dolemite meets Jerry Jones, a playwright (played brilliantly by Keegan-Michael Key of another hilarious duo, Key and Peele) and approaches him for a movie he wants to make. At first, the guy he works with at the record store, Theodore (played by Titus Burgess of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) says that he can’t just up and make a movie, but Rudy won’t take no for an answer, and he approaches Jerry and asks if he can work with him. After giving into Rudy’s persuasion, Jerry meets back at Rudy’s place to write the screenplay with him. Rudy comes up with all kinds of wild outlandish ideas, and Jerry tells him to be practical and “write what you know.” Rudy gets sad for a moment and then thinks up all these different characters in the film because he thinks that his average everyday life won’t be interesting enough to put on the big screen. Jerry hears these ideas that Rudy says and then thinks it’s brilliant, and him and Rudy churn out the screenplay. Then Rudy finds an old beat up hotel to film the movie in, and recruits Nick and some other white film students to direct the film.

Before doing that, he meets with D’Urville Martin (played brilliantly by Wesley Snipes), a distinguished director who has done countless well-renowned movies. When Rudy pitches his idea to him, D’Urville is offended that Rudy would approach him to work on such an outlandish movie, but he does it anyway because Rudy keeps persuading him to work on the movie with him. D’Urville directs it and is absolutely frustrated, trying to impose his own ideas about how the movie should be onto Rudy and the crew members. But they still end up making the movie, even with all the twists and turns. Rudy tells them on the way to the midnight premiere of Dolemite that even if the movie gets booed, they still won because they had fun during the filmmaking process.

It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw called Be Kind Rewind. If you haven’t seen Be Kind Rewind, it’s starring Jack Black and Yasiin Bey (he is listed in the credits by his stage name, Mos Def) who work at a movie store that is about to be closed down. Jerry, played by Jack Black, gets the idea of remaking movies that people don’t like and making these movies with him and Mike (Yasiin Bey) playing the characters in the movies. They charge the movies for high rental fees, and when someone angrily comes in saying the movie they gave them was a ripoff Jerry tells him that the film is “sweded,” and that it is expensive because the tapes came from Sweden. Then they recruit a young woman, played by Melonie Diaz, to star in their movies, and in the process they end up having a brilliantly fun goofy time. Danny Glover’s character reminded me of D’Urville because at one point while making the remake of Rush Hour, Danny’s character quits because he thinks that the two of them are just silly amateurs for making these movies. However, many people end up coming back to the movie store to watch the films. As someone who wants to make a movie myself, I needed to watch both Be Kind Rewind and Dolemite is My Name to remind myself to be serious about my creative work, but to not take myself so seriously and to appreciate the moments when I do have fun.

Here is the trailer for Dolemite is My Name:

Dolemite is My Name. 2019. Rated R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity.

Book Review: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

I cannot tell you how long I waited to read this book. It was just sitting on my shelf collecting dust, and finally I just decided I was going to read it. I sat on the floor and thought, Oh maybe I’ll read a couple pages since I’m reading some other books right now. But more than a few minutes passed by, and I still hadn’t let go of the book. I found myself reading the book as I stood up, reading the book as I walked down the hall without trying to bump into anything, reading the book while sitting in bed. I took a break during one of my cello practice sessions, and I devoured this book the rest of the evening.

In this collection of essays Roxane Gay covers a myriad of topics related to feminism, race and media: the misogyny of “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, the lack of racial diversity in Girls, how The Help reinforces stereotypes, and many other topics. Her essay on The Help stuck with me especially since I both read the book and saw the film adaptation and honestly wasn’t sure what to think about either. The essay, whose full title is “The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help” talks about Gay’s experience of seeing the movie in a theater where she was the only Black person watching the film while everyone else was an older white women. While everyone else loved the movie and cried because they thought it was touching, Gay cried because the film reinforced so many problematic long-held racist tropes. According to Gay, “every transgression, injustice and tragedy was exploited so that by the end of the movie it was like the director had ripped into my chest, torn my heart out, and jumped up and down on it until it became a flattened piece of worn-out muscle, cardiac jerky, if you will.” (Gay 214) Gay points out several problems with the film, particularly one scene where Minnie teaches a white character named Celia Foote to make fried chicken, and tells Celia that “frying chicken tend to make me feel better about life.” Gay explains that this is a problem especially because this movie was produced in this decade, so it’s easy to think that these racist tropes were so Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniels-era and that we’re long past that, but that scene showed that Hollywood is still perpetuating these racist tropes in movies.

Gay concludes her essay by explaining the deeper reason behind her frustration with The Help, that Kathryn Stockett, who is white, didn’t truly make a genuine effort when writing about her Black characters and instead just reinforced stereotypes and caricatures them. Honestly, I would need to read the book again to gain a deeper insight into Gay’s analysis of the book, but there’s definitely a lot of truth to be said about her essay. When watching the movie and reading the book, I wasn’t moved to tears or even really angry, partly because before reading the book and watching the movie I had read up on and talked with people about the controversy surrounding The Help, so I knew coming in reading it that it wasn’t going to be a super progressive book.

I actually wanted to know more about the controversy surrounding the film, so I looked up on Google “the help racist” and it came up with a really interesting article from June 2020 in Entertainment Weekly. In the article, Maureen Lee Lenker reports that Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays a racist white character in The Help named Hilly Holbrook, recommended anti-racist TV and film to watch besides The Help in response to the news that The Help was the most viewed movie on Netflix in the U.S. She said on social media that although she is appreciative to have worked with her cast members on this film, the film, at the end of the day, was written by a white woman and told from the perspective of white storytellers, and that there are much more accurate sources out there to educate ourselves about America’s history of racism. At the time of anti-racism protests last year, I didn’t know this, but apparently many people looked to The Help as a resource for educating themselves about racism and anti-Blackness. Many Black writers and activists spoke out against this on social media, alerting people to the fact that The Help is about a white woman who essentially speaks for the experiences of Black women who are perfectly capable of telling their own stories without relying on the aid of a white person to tell their stories for them. Yes, The Help takes place during a time of Jim Crow and anti-Blackness but at the end of the day, no matter how many accounts Skeeter writes down about the Black women’s experiences, she will never know what it’s like to deal with racism because she benefits from white privilege and moves around the world and sees the world from the perspective of a white woman. Howard recommended movies like I Am Not Your Negro, Selma and Malcolm X, and Just Mercy (all of which are really excellent films I highly recommend you watch.) The article also points out that Howard wasn’t the only cast member to make people aware of the drawbacks of The Help. In 2018, Viola Davis told The New York Times that she regretted acting in The Help, not because of the cast and crew, who she loved working with, but the storyline gave more voice to the white characters than it did to the Black characters. According to Davis:

“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”

“Viola Davis on What ‘The Help’ Got Wrong and How She Proves Herself”, Mekado Murphy, The New York Times, Sept. 11 2018

Overall, I really loved Gay’s book and the essays in it. I can’t wait to read more of her writing!

Bad Feminist: Essays. 2014. Roxane Gay. 320 pp.

Movie Review: Get On Up

9/24/21

Wow. All I can say is wow. Honestly I can say that this film really deepened my appreciation for Chadwick Boseman’s work as an actor. For those who don’t know Chadwick Boseman was an incredible actor who starred as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, as well as the character Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. He passed away from colon cancer last year, and I remember feeling disbelief, not knowing how to react to his death, and then crying for about a week, just long sobs. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through most of my days at work that week without crying. On television shortly after his death Black Panther was on, and afterwards there was a tribute to Chadwick, and seriously I was convulsing with tears and didn’t think I would sleep that night. I didn’t understand how life was going to be the same without Chadwick alive because in every movie I saw with him, he just put his heart and soul and feeling into the roles he played. And in the biopic Get On Up, it was like he was the only actor who could actually play James Brown, was meant to play James Brown.

This is also the first film I’ve watched starring Nelsan Ellis. Nelsan Ellis is an actor who was famous for his role in True Blood. I haven’t seen True Blood, but when I saw him in Get On Up, I was like, Damn, this guy could act. He plays Bobby Byrd, a member of James Brown’s band The Famous Flames. The movie shows how their rapport changes over time, and even when the other band members quit because James won’t pay them on time, Bobby stays behind and is the only member of the band to stick with James. That is, until he tells James that he wants to release his own record someday. In one powerful scene of the film, he and James are performing together, and James lets Bobby have some of his spotlight, giving him some credit when before he treated Bobby like any other member of the band. But when they’re sitting and talking together, Bobby tells James that he wants to release his own solo record, and James goes off on him and accuses him of stealing his spotlight and going around telling everyone he’s going to become the next big thing rather than stay in James’s shadow as he’s been doing the past something odd years they were performing together. Bobby quits because he can no longer take this anymore, and when he leaves Brown asks him why he’s leaving him alone, and Bobby tells him that from the very beginning James has always been on his own and wanted to do his own thing. This shows that he can see right through James, that even if James wants him to stay, Bobby knows that he worked behind the scenes with James for years, bolstering his career, hoping to one day launch his own career, but James isn’t going to return the favor or help him because he’s focused on his own career and his own success. Earlier, Maceo Parker, asks Bobby why he is sticking with James even though he treats the band poorly, and Bobby says it’s because he wasn’t meant to have the spotlight on him, and that James is the one meant to be in the spotlight. Maceo questions this logic, and we can see Bobby reflecting on whether he should stick with James or not. Even many years later in 1993, James thinks Bobby should perform with him again, even though Bobby has moved on and started a new life with his wife and family. The film shows how complex their relationship was, and Ellis and Boseman both did incredibly embodying the roles of both these people.

The biopic is also important to watch because of the theme of Black masculinity. We see several flashbacks to James’s childhood, when his father threatens to shoot and kill his mother and beats her severely. Another scene is when his mother is seen drunk and playing around with another man, and the young James calls out to her but she pretends to not remember who he is. Another scene is when James is talking with Little Richard during Richard’s shift at a burger joint, and Richard opens up to him about his past trauma and then asks James about his past trauma. James recalls a moment when he and several other Black boys were blindfolded and had numbers painted on their chests, and they had to fight in a boxing ring against each other in front of a crowd of white people. All the members in the band playing during the fight are Black men, and the camera flashes to their pained expressions as they look at the fighting. It shows the injustice of it all, because these Black men not only have to play music for white people but also have to witness young Black men learn aggression against each other for the sake of entertainment. They understand that these Black boys are being treated like chattel for the white audience. When James is knocked down, he looks at the band from where he is lying and they break out into a funk song and start getting into playing the music, and seeing this in his mind’s eye, even though it may not be actually happening in real life, inspires James to get back up and fight even harder against the other boy in the ring.

These flashbacks not only give a glimpse into what James’s life was like growing up, but it shows how he had to hide being vulnerable under all his success so that he wouldn’t seem weak. In one powerful scene of the film, his mother Susie comes by and tries to engage James in casual conversation, but James says he doesn’t want to talk to her because he doesn’t need her help anymore. His mother cries and explains that she did her best to raise him, and he gives her a $100 bill and shows her out the door, telling her to stop crying and getting sentimental because he is James Brown and he can make it on his own without anyone else’s help. When she leaves she says he is beautiful but he still gives her a hard cold expression. When Bobby appears, James appears to be crying, but he quickly wipes the tears away, suggesting that he doesn’t want to appear less than a man by crying. The scene made me think of the film Moonlight, and its depiction of Black male pain was told from a different lens because Chiron, unlike James, had homophobia to deal with on top of the struggles of being a poor Black youth. Towards the end of the film Chiron is sitting with his mother, who abused him when he was younger, and she is reflecting on her past behavior towards him and starts breaking down in tears because she feels she could have been more supportive of him when he was going through such tough times. When he sees his mother crying, Chiron breaks down and cries. This is a total contrast from the beginning of the scene where we first meet Chiron as a grown adult because at the beginning he is muscular, he works out, he’s no longer the skinny kid who got beat up by his crush in high school for being gay. He seems to be the prototype of the straight Black man, but the scene where he meets his mom shows that even as a grown man, he is a human being with feelings and that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of crying. We cry so we can heal from past trauma, and Chiron cries because he remembers his past and realizes he can’t keep it buried away no matter how much he tries to distance himself from his past. Him crying and sharing this moment with his mother of reconciling grief and trauma when he was younger allows him to truly heal and to express his humanity, his manhood, in a way that is true to himself, that doesn’t depend on societal expectations that say that men, particularly Black men, should keep their emotions to themselves and not share them with anyone.

James Brown actually had a song called “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)” where he talks about not needing people’s charity or anyone’s help (“open up the door/ huh/ I’ll get it myself” is one of the lyrics). As groovy as that song was, it reminded me that asking for help, especially as a Black person living in a racist society, is perfectly okay, but also how historically Black people have been conditioned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be successful. However, this mentality has only caused further pain and trauma because talking about mental health has historically carried a stigma in Black communities because of the idea that Black people, and Black men in particular, should just buck up and keep their feelings to themselves. It’s getting better and more people in the Black community are realizing that we need to talk about our mental health in order to go through the process of healing from trauma.

Also, side note: it was so interesting that Viola played the character she did, because in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s totally different and this time, instead of being a supporting character like she was in Get On Up, Viola Davis actually plays a musician famous during the 1920s called Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Boseman, in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays Levee, who is a member of Ma’s band. Unlike Ma, who just wants to make her records and do her own thing, Levee caters to the white record executives and seeks validation from them for his work. He is constantly asking them to take his songs, and when they refuse he pretends to be okay with it, and then takes his anger out on his bandmates because as a young Black man living in a white supremacist society he doesn’t have many other outlets through which to express his frustration. He also challenges Ma a lot, underestimating her authority as a musician. Ma constantly puts him in his place though and reminds him that he needs to keep his ego at the door and just play the music how she wants it. It was interesting to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and then Get On Up because I think Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom gave me some key context for watching Get On Up, particularly in regards to how Levee and James both handle their past trauma. In one scene Levee recalls how a white man assaulted his mother, and how witnessing her assault led to him feeling angry and disillusioned about life, especially life as a young Black man. Remembering that trauma with his mother also challenges Levee’s faith in God, and he points up to the ceiling cursing God and telling him to turn his back on him. I think that’s why, when I think about the last scene of the film, where a white band is seen recording Levee’s song, which the record executives at first rejected but then stole and sold to a white audience, because in that song there is a lot of pain and trauma underneath the joviality and upbeat nature of the song. Levee put his life into that song, and while writing it wrestled with his past trauma, his tense arguments with Ma and the other band members, so to the record executives, it’s just a song to be sold and distributed to the public, but within music there is the narrative of someone’s life, and Levee’s life, his suffering and brief moments of joy, went into that song.

In one scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the white record executives are about to do a recording session with Ma, but she tells them that she won’t record the song until they bring her a Coca-Cola. This is just one of many demands that Ma makes, and it frustrates the record executives. But Ma tells one of the members of her backing band, Cutler (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo), that she knows that the white record executives only want her voice. They only want her voice, not her humanity, and they will do what they can to control her image to appeal to white audiences, giving her little to no artistic freedom or room to express her authentic self. This was common though at the time, and another example of someone who had to assert herself in the industry was Aretha Franklin. In a tribute to Aretha Franklin, Daily Show host Trevor Noah said that Aretha demanded to get paid before she performed instead of after she performed. She did this because she knew how white executives treated Black musicians, and in general because she was living in a racist society where Black people were treated as second-class citizens even in a prominent industry like the music industry, so she had to demand her pay and be assertive so that she wouldn’t be walked all over. In the film Ma didn’t care what other people thought of her, and she wasn’t trying to curry favor with the record label. She had a certain way she wanted to sing and express herself, and she came in with that self-knowledge, so she wasn’t duped into thinking that she had to do what the record labels said for her to do. Similarly, in Get On Up, James Brown makes several demands to his manger, Ben Bart, because he knows that if he signs with the record labels, these white executives are going to just make all the money they can off of him and not pay him well or treat him with respect, or even genuinely respect his artistry. Earlier in the film he has a conversation with Little Richard, who warns him of the “white devil” and to not let himself get easily duped by white people in the music industry. He remembers this advice and when he meets with Ben Bart, he tells him that he knows the “white devil” (aka the white record executives) just want to make money off of him, and he commands respect and makes demands of what he needs from them so he can launch his career and have complete ownership of his image. James suffered from mistreatment as a young Black man all his life, so he isn’t going to let white people profit from and take away the one thing he holds dear, his musical talent.

Overall, I really loved this movie. And Boseman’s dance moves were out of this world.

Get On Up. 2014. 2hr 19 min. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use, some strong language and violent situations.

The article that changed how I think about the world

I was emailing a friend this week and they told me they were observing Yom Kippur. I remembered I had read a book on Judaism recently and I was interested to know more about Yom Kippur, and in particular what to say to people who observe Yom Kippur. This Friday I came across this excellent piece by Matthew Rozsa called “Yom Kippur is a reminder to Americans that humility is good for your health.”

In the piece Rozsa talks about cultural humility and how Americans can learn a lot about humility from Yom Kippur. According to Rozsa, Yom Kippur involves fasting, praying and focusing entirely on religious observance, and “for the spiritually vigilant, this process requires authentic humility, a quality described by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides as the middle path between pride and shiflut, or “self-abasement.” He says that this process is profoundly spiritual for many Jews observing the religious holiday, but researchers show that being humble has many psychological and mental health benefits. He cites Joshua Hook, author of “Cultural Humility,” who says that when someone is culturally humble, they are more aware of their limitations when it comes to their own cultural perspective and worldview. People who are culturally humble understand that their perspective is just one way of viewing the world, and that it may not be the only right way and that there are many other ways of viewing the world. People who lack cultural humility, however, tend to be rigid in their perspectives and any info that doesn’t work with those perspectives, they tune out.

He also cites Noelany Pelc, who wrote an academic article on psychology and cultural humility, and according to Pelc, “people who embody humility feel more at peace and satisfied with their own sense of self and identity, and are not as motivated to look for approval or admiration from others around them. In other words, humility allows people to remove themselves from harmful social competition and a fragile sense of self-worth or esteem.” When people are humble, they admit that they’re not always right, and in so doing they tend to focus less on themselves and listen to others, and when the situation calls for them to speak up they have the confidence to do so. According to Pelc, “in general, acknowledging that there is much in the world that we simply don’t know, allows us to be open to experiences that are different from our own.”

He also says that, according to David Reiss, the best way to distinguish between confidence and lacking humility is that if you’re confident, you know you’ve obtained the right information and that you’ve examined the situation as objectively as possible. However, humility takes that to another level because the humble person knows that all information is subject to biased viewpoints and that new information may come out that challenges their previously held perspective. Rozsa also recognizes that in some situations, being humble may not be the best thing to be, especially if someone is a situation where they are being abused or disrespected in any way, particularly if they are women or people of color being assertive and standing up for themselves, not being humble, might be the best action to take. Rozsa concludes by saying that humility is particularly helpful in today’s contexts because many people are divided about COVID-19 vaccines, climate change and racial justice, and can’t seem to find anything to agree about. The late John McCain said that “Among its other virtues, humility makes for more productive politics. If it vanishes entirely, we will tear our society apart.” People who are humble care about others even if there’s no immediate benefit to us or even if others aren’t telling us to care about others.

Rozsa concludes that “true humility requires both self-respect, so you can be healthy and happy, and self-awareness, so you will remember your obligations to society and to defer when necessary to people more knowledgeable or skilled. Judaism teaches that every person is collectively responsible for all of humanity’s sins, that the most virtuous person and the most vile share some level of responsibility for one another. While science does not offer moral arguments of any kind, the existing body of knowledge strongly suggests that this attitude toward humility is actually the healthiest one for everyone.” (Rozsa)

Honestly, I needed to read this article because for the past year I had not been the most culturally humble person. I thought my perspectives were the only valid ones, and I remember in particular one time made me realize, Wow, I need to be more humble. I was sitting with my music instructor and I really wanted them to chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo, but they were not comfortable with chanting and wanted to stick with their faith in Christianity. I got so upset because all I wanted them to do was convert to my religion rather than respect their wishes. So I arrogantly asked them, ” well do you think your prayer has any power?” And they paused and told me “yes.” I spent the rest of the lesson sulking because they preferred to not chant. Up to this point I had been reading this Nichiren Buddhist text called The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin and in the book Nichiren is remonstrating against the government because people and the government were propagating Buddhist sutras other than the Lotus Sutra, which taught that everyone has a Buddha nature inside of them and can bring it out just as they are, and that each person is respectworthy because they have the Buddha nature. However, I took this to mean that Buddhist sutras meant other religions instead of remembering the historical context in which Nichiren wrote it.

A year has passed and I can honestly say I appreciate my teacher for having that conversation with me, because I really had to reflect on my own faith. It became a teaching moment where I realized that this person is a Buddha and in the Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, slandering a Buddha is slandering the Lotus Sutra, so by disrespecting this person’s wish to not chant and questioning whether their religion had any power, even when they were respectful to me whenever I talked about Buddhism, I was slandering their Buddha nature. It became an opportunity where the law of cause and effect turned around and asked me, “You asked them if their prayer has power, but you need to actually ask yourself that question. Do you think your own prayer has power? You might need to self-reflect.” So I chanted and I studied the writings of philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, and I found reading his dialogues helpful in understanding how to have better dialogues about religion with people, dialogues in which I could respect the other person’s Buddhahood and embrace their viewpoints on religion and have a heart to heart dialogue rather than try to win them over to my side. Whenever Ikeda has conducted dialogues with people from various religious backgrounds, he talks with them in a respectful way, he comes into the dialogue with an open mind and a willingness to listen and learn. His goal is to foster friendships and have heart-to-heart human dialogues with other people. Ikeda has taught me that I just need to be myself when I have interfaith dialogues with other people, and that everyone, regardless of their religious background, has a role to play in fostering a more peaceful society, one based on the vow for kosen-rufu, or world peace.

Reflecting on this essay made me want to be more culturally humble, and it made me ask myself, What kind of Buddhist do I want to be? I want to be a more open minded Buddhist, someone who can be their most authentic self and feel comfortable having honest dialogues about life and philosophy with others. It also helped me in terms of my audition preparation because I was able to tell myself to stop assuming what the judges want to hear because well, I can’t read minds and so I don’t know what the judges want. It also reminded me that I don’t have to pretend like I know everything, which I sometimes put pressure on myself to do a lot of times. I really want to read the book Cultural Humility because I really want to be a more humble person. I thought being humble meant putting myself down, but it actually means learning from different perspectives while also reflecting on myself and just doing my best as my most authentic self.

Movie Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Woah. Ok. This film. I saw this last night and gosh, it kept me up. It got nominated for quite a few Academy Awards when it came out, and I saw Frances McDormand’s speech when she won for Best Actress for the movie, and I thought, I should probably see this movie. I’m not super familiar with a lot of Frances’ work, to be honest, but the last movie I saw with her was Nomadland, and her acting was absolutely incredible. There’s just something about her facial expressions when she acts that make you reflect deeply about the film. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she does the same thing, entrancing you with her incredible acting chops.

The film opens up with “Andante” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C (Maria Joao Pires sings the andante) and we see beautiful rolling green hills (even though the film takes place in Ebbing, Missouri, the movie was filmed in North Carolina) and fields of flowers. We also see three torn-up billboards advertising various things. Mildred, played by Frances McDormand, goes into the office of this man named Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones, who played Jeremy Armitage in the horror film Get Out) and has him rent out those three billboards she passes by. Mildred’s daughter, Angela, was raped and murdered, and Mildred is on a mission to find which guy was responsible for raping and murdering her. At first, Red is skeptical about renting the billboards out to Mildred, but she refuses to back down and so he finally rents them out to her. Later, a police officer named Jason Dixon is riding through town when he passes by the billboards, the third one which reads “How come, Chief Willoughby?”, the second one which reads, “And still no arrests” and the first one which gives the main reason why the billboards are being painted in the first place: “raped while dying.”

In the process of seeking vengeance for her daughter’s murderer and rapist, Mildred faces a lot of backlash from the town’s people, and in particular, from the Ebbing Police Department. They think she is too obsessed with this matter, and she tells them they’re more focused on racial profiling than they are on this matter. This movie reminded me a lot of Promising Young Woman. In Promising Young Woman, Cassie puts together a plan for getting revenge on Al, her classmate in med school who raped her best friend and classmate, Nina. However, as Cassie continues her plan she feels self-doubt creep up on her, and feels like no matter what she does to avenge her friend, she is going nowhere and her plan is going nowhere. She meets with Nina’s mom, who tells Cassie that everyone felt like they wanted to do more to help Nina, to not feel like a bystander who just let her get raped and didn’t do anything, there’s nothing much they can do, so they just need to let it go. I felt this was similar to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, because Mildred has the billboards put up and does what she can to speak out against the injustice of Angela’s murder, and meets with the police department to persuade them to give even just a tiny ounce of care about Angela’s murder and finding the guy who raped and killed her. However, there’s a particularly chilling scene where she feels like no matter what she has done, no matter how long those billboards stay up, there’s no way she can get over the grief at having lost her daughter. The scene flashes back to the kitchen and Mildred is arguing with Angela, and before Angela goes out she says that she hopes that someone rapes her and kills her, and Mildred shouts back that she wishes the same. The scene flashes back to the present, and Mildred is standing in the darkened hall of her home, reflecting on that day with guilt, like “Why did I even agree with her that she should get raped and killed? I should have told her to not say that.” There’s another particularly poignant scene (and it was in the trailer at the very beginning. It’s actually the scene that convinced me to see this film because it’s a deeply powerful scene.), and in this scene Mildred is sitting in a field, and a deer comes up and eats peacefully across from her. The deer looks Mildred in the eyes, and Mildred asks the deer, “You’re not trying to make me believe in reincarnation, are you? Because you’re pretty, but you ain’t her.” Mildred wants nothing more than to get Angela back, and not even this rare moment of seeing a beautiful creature can surpass the moments she spent with her daughter.

Overall, this movie gave me a lot to think about, and the acting was really good, and the music was excellent too.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 2017. Rated R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references.

Films I Watched a Few Weekends Ago

  • What About Adolf?: Honestly I didn’t know what to expect before seeing this film. But honestly it kept me on my toes. It’s about a couple named Elisabeth and Stephen, and Elisabeth invites her brother Thomas, her friend Rene and Thomas’s pregnant girlfriend to dinner one evening. When Elisabeth, Thomas, and Rene get to talking about what names Thomas and his girlfriend Anna have picked for their baby, Thomas leads them in a nearly 5 minute guessing game to see if they can correctly guess what the baby’s name will be. Finally, after they give up, Thomas tells them they will name the baby Adolf. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth, Rene and Stephen are not happy because of Germany’s history with Adolf Hitler and how you can’t really separate the brutal legacy of that man from his name. All of them get into a heated argument about Thomas and Anna naming their baby after a dictator, and when Anna arrives it gets even more heated. Stephen is actually the one who is the most heated out of him, Elisabeth and Rene and gives Thomas all kinds of reasons why he shouldn’t name the baby after a dictator. The movie had all kinds of plot twists in it and sparked a serious and also darkly comic philosophical discussion on namesakes and whether some namesakes are more appropriate than others.
  • The Class: I saw one other French language film before this one called The Intouchables, and it was an incredible movie. I also really loved this one. I saw the movie Freedom Writers and it kind of reminded me of it. However, the way the education system is depicted in France is different from the way the education system is depicted in Freedom Writers, which took place in the United States. It’s based on a semiautobiographical novel and it’s about a white teacher in an inner-city school (apparently the guy who wrote the novel plays the main character in the film) who navigates how to inspire his students in their learning.
  • The Lunchbox: This is a really touching film. Seeing as how most of the movies I watch contain a lot of intense violence (ok, maybe not Quentin Tarantino violence, but I’m guessing you know what I mean) I needed this film to balance out my film repertoire. This movie is a beautiful story about how a woman who makes lunch as part of a lunchbox system in Mumbai where people deliver lunchboxes to employees at an office. The lunch the woman makes ends up going to to a guy who is almost retiring from work and has lost his wife and is feeling rather lonely and depressed. The food he makes for her is delicious and he writes little notes to her to express his appreciation for her food. Their exchange via notes develops into a powerful friendship over the course of the film. Honestly, watching the movie made me hungry for Indian food and it made me want to go back to India because I really loved the food there.
  • The Women’s Balcony: I haven’t seen too many movies set in Israel, and the movies and shows that I do watch about Judaism are usually set in America (Uncut Gems, A Serious Man, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). This movie is about a synagogue in Israel that has a balcony for the women who attend the synagogue, but when the balcony collapses, the women try to raise money to get a new balcony, only to get pushback from their husbands and the young rabbi who keeps trying to put down their plans. Nevertheless, these women persevere even if the men keep telling them that their plan won’t work, and eventually they win some of the men over to their side to support their plan to build a new balcony. It truly was a beautiful film. I read a book a while ago called Being Jewish by Ari Goldman, and reading it gave me some pretty good insight that was helpful when watching this movie, especially because there are differences between the denominations of Judaism that I didn’t really know about before reading the book and watching The Women’s Balcony.

Movie Review: Good Time

Ok, to be perfectly honest, after watching Uncut Gems I had to watch Good Time. Seriously. The filmmaking of Uncut Gems made me want to watch Good Time. Like a lot of people, I saw Robert Pattison in the Twilight movie franchise and thought he was good in it, but I hadn’t seen his other films like Cosmopolis, The Lighthouse or Good Time. I finally watched it and honestly it was amazing.

The movie is about a guy named Connie (played by Robert Pattinson) whose brother, Nick (Benny Safdie), ends up at Rikers Island after the two guys attempt to rob a bank, only to have their plans to rob the bank backfire and Nick ends up going to jail (my one thought though was why the choice of bank robbery masks? It kind of looked like they were wearing blackface, but maybe I’m being paranoid, I don’t know.) Connie needs bail money to get Nick out Connie does what he can to get his brother out of jail, and when he finds the guy he thinks is Nick at the hospital and wheels him out, he stays with a Black woman named Annie and her granddaughter, Crystal (Taliah Webster). Connie involves the daughter in his plan to get Nick away from the hospital, but what ends up happening is that Connie finds out that the guy he thought was Nick isn’t really Nick but some other guy named Ray (Buddy Duress) who, like Nick, looked beaten up badly. Connie thinks of leaving the guy but can’t because the guy opens up to him this story about this bottle of LSD he bought from his friends that’s worth more than a pretty penny, and how it got left in an amusement park and the guy never retrieved it because he took a cab and then told the cab driver what happened and then the cab driver wanted to take him to jail and so the guy jumped out of the cab and injured his face badly while doing so. In the end, the guy jumps out the window in a suicide attempt and Connie ends up going to jail. The movie ends with Nick in a facility where they have a mental health group therapy session for everyone, and in the session they play a game where they have to step across to the other side of the room if some event happened to them. The end credits roll as Nick ponders as to why this game is even relevant and why he even has to play it.

Honestly, while watching this film, I had the same bodily reaction that I did while watching Uncut Gems. It was so packed with action, and the movie pretty much just jumps into the plot without stopping or building up suspense. The music by Daniel Lopatin is the same kind of music that Uncut Gems had, and it gave the scenes their intensity.

9/18/21: So it’s September 18, and it’s been a couple weeks since I started writing this review. I was really chanting and pondering about what kind of review I wanted to write about the film, and I was also wrestling with why Connie did the things that he did. And so I chanted and reflected this morning, and I think seeing the film from a Buddhist perspective helped me process it a little better. In Buddhism, there’s this concept called The Ten Worlds, which are ten states of life that any one of us can experience at any given moment. The first four of these ten life states are hell, hunger, animality and anger. I think Connie did the things he did because he was constantly in the life state of animality. I read this really helpful book called An Introduction to Buddhism that the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) published, and it talks about each of the ten worlds. According to the book, “when in the state of animality, one acts based on instinct or impulse, unable to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil…In the world of animality, people lack reason and conscience, seeing life as a struggle for survival in which they are willing to harm others to protect themselves. Unable to look beyond the immediate, they cannot plan for the future. Such a state of ignorance ultimately leads to suffering and self-destruction.” (An Introduction to Buddhism, p. 19) As I write this, it makes sense why the film moved so quickly the more I reflect on this probable reason for why Connie did the things he did. All Connie wanted to do was get his brother out of Rikers and get him home, but he didn’t really have a way out because the police are still tracking him down and the news keeps reporting about the failed bank robbery he and Nick set up. When he’s on the couch with Crystal and they’re watching television, the news suddenly comes on and his mugshot appears. Crystal looks at him and is trying to figure out if he’s that same guy that robbed the bank, but then Connie panics when he realizes she might turn him in to the cops, and so he forcefully kisses her. It’s hard to tell whether or not this kiss was consensual, but it showed me just one example of how Connie is in the world of animality. Because all he can think about is getting away from the cops, he’s willing to take advantage of Crystal to make his plot work. Even when Connie realizes that the guy he thought was Nick is actually somebody else, he still has Crystal drive him and the guy to White Castle to get them food with the little money that he has left. When Connie and the guy go to the amusement park to retrive the bottle of acid, a Black security guard stops them and Connie beats him up and steals his uniform while Ray pours the LSD down the guard’s throat. Connie by this point is not thinking about Crystal and when she gets arrested even though she’s obviously not the one who robbed a bank or beat up a security guard and poured acid down his throat, all he can do is just look silently as she is taken away. I was wondering why, while watching this film, it just seemed Connie was just going and going and couldn’t stop for anything, and I read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film after watching it and reading it gave me more insight into why the film moved so quickly. I know you’re thinking, Well, duh, silly, it’s a crime thriller, of course it’s gonna be fast-paced. But I think on a deeper level, seeing this movie from the perspective of the 10 Worlds concept helped me understand what might have psychologically or emotionally driven Robert Pattinson’s character to commit the actions he did. I mean, I can definitely see why the film got critical acclaim though, because Robert’s performance was really good.

I’m definitely still reflecting on the movie, and I’d probably have to watch it a second time just to maybe dive a little deeper into the film (and also, because the music was excellent.) I wasn’t even really thinking about what grade to give the film, I was just enthralled with the acting and the visual effects because the acting and visual effects of the Safdie brothers’ last film, Uncut Gems was excellent. My feeling about the movie at this point is pretty neutral; I just was more enthralled by the acting than anything else. Uncut Gems was really good, and I think after watching a lot of A24 films (Good Time is an A24 film) I think I just love the acting in them.

Good Time. 2017. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexual content and violence.

Movie Review: Uncut Gems

I had been meaning to see this film for a while. It’s an A24 film, and I am a huge fan of A24 movies, so I was definitely glad to see this one. I watched it a week ago with subtitles, and while at first I was able to keep up with the dialogue, I decided to watch it a second time without the subtitles. There is a lot of dialogue in the film, and pretty fast moving dialogue, and while normally I watch movies and TV shows with subtitles so I can hear the characters better and not have to turn up the volume, I missed out on a lot of key elements in the film because I was trying to keep up with every word the characters were saying. When I watched it without subtitles, I was able to fully take in the characters’ expressions and the dialogue flowed smoothly. The first time I watched it, I didn’t fully get into the film until toward the end when I turned the subtitles off. I’ll probably keep watching movies with subtitles, but this time I decided to keep them off the second time I watched the movie.

I also watched it a second time because in college I had to watch a lot of movies, and I found that movies are like literary texts. I would study literary texts over and over and would find something new each time, and would also be able to make connections between different things I read and saw and listened to. And after getting more into studying the Buddhist philosophy I practice, I found a lot of concepts in Buddhism that could be applied to Uncut Gems.

But just to give a brief plot summary: The movie opens in the Welo Mine in Ethiopia in 2010, and a group of Ethiopian Jewish miners are trying to help one of the miners whose leg is badly damaged, to no avail as their supervisors just stand by while the man is dying. A couple of miners go underground and find this rare black opal that is scintillating and is full of all these iridescent colors. Then the film fasts forward to New York City, where Howard Ratner, a Jewish American jeweler, is getting a colonoscopy (for those squeamish about medical procedures, maybe close your eyes around where the title of the film comes on because that’s where the movie leads into the scene with the colonoscopy.) Most of the movies I see, the suspense doesn’t happen until later in the film, and gradually builds up to it, but for this film, the intensity is evident the minute Howard leaves that office after his colonoscopy and heads out into the streets of NYC. Why is it so intense? Because Howard owes so many people money. He is in a lot of debt and is figuring out how to pay everyone back. On top of that, he has to figure out his crumbling marriage with his soon to be ex wife, Dinah (played by the lovely Idina Menzel. I first saw her as Maureen Johnson in Rent and have loved her ever since.) and his relationship with Julia, his girlfriend who works with him at KMH, Howard’s jewelry store. The guy who brings him clients to his store, Damany (played by LaKeith Stanfield, whose acting I also really love in Sorry to Bother You and Get Out) brings in Kevin Garnett. Howard shows Kevin the black opal and tells him about how he saw on the History Channel a documentary about Ethiopian Jewish miners mining the black opal, and so he bought it for a bonkers amount of money. Kevin’s eyes immediately flash and he becomes so engrossed with the opal that he ends up smashing the jewelry display case he is leaning on in order to look at the opal. He wants it, but Howard tells him it’s not for sale, and to come to an auction later on to bid on it. His deal with Kevin about the black opal gets him into even further trouble, though, because Howard is addicted to gambling, and so he stakes basically his whole life and his money on Kevin winning so that he can pay back the debts he owes everyone.

Honestly, I’m glad I watched this a second time, because when I watched it the first time I didn’t really understand why Howard acted the way he did towards everyone he met, but after watching it a second time, it made more sense from a Buddhist perspective. In The Lotus Sutra and its Opening and Closing Sutras, there’s a chapter called “Five Hundred Disciples,” and in this chapter there’s this beautiful parable. In this parable a man goes to his friend’s house and gets drunk and falls asleep, and while he’s asleep his friend sews a priceless jewel into the lining of the man’s robe, and leaves it with him when he goes out. The man travels to other countries the next day, searching for food and clothing and struggling to get by on what little he has, and because he was asleep he didn’t see his friend sewed the robe in the lining of his robe. When he meets up with his friend, his friend finally tells him that he sewed a jewel into his robe so he could live in ease. (LSOC, 190) This parable symbolizes the jewel of the Buddha nature within each of us, and this Buddha nature–our wisdom, courage, compassion and life force–already exists within our lives. While it’s of course ok to want nice things, I’ve found when I make external validation the center of my life, when I make external validation define my identity for me, I’m going to crave that validation, and in the long run that has made me suffer. When I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo though, I’m able to remind myself of the jewel that is within my life: my innate Buddhahood, which has existed in me and in the universe from what we call in Buddhism “time without beginning.”

While watching Uncut Gems, I almost wished that Howard was real so that I could share Buddhism with him. Howard already had the jewel of Buddhahood in his life, but his fundamental darkness made it hard for him to see that Buddhahood. Him and Kevin both placed prime importance on the jewel as the key to their success; for Howard, the jewel was his ticket to paying off his debts, and for Kevin, it was the key to winning his basketball games and winning him recognition and success. However, as I watched this movie, I thought about a quote by Daisaku Ikeda, a Buddhist philosopher and educator, about what true winning is:

“Any goal is fine. The important thing is to strive toward it, triumphing in each challenge along the way. Winning doesn’t mean getting rich or becoming important. There are many rich and important people who succumb to negative influences and grow corrupt. Such people cannot be said to have won in life. True victory is winning over your own mind. Others’ opinions don’t matter. Nor is there any need for you to compare yourself with others. A genuine victor in life is one who can declare: “I lived true to myself, and I have won! I am a spiritual victor! Please remember that.” (Discussions on Youth, p. 422-423)

The film’s ending is actually sad because Howard won the bet, but it’s like he never got a chance to win over himself or change his karma with money in the end. Also, I kept thinking long after the movie was over: how is Howard’s death going to affect his family? Did Howard have a will? Julia is seen getting in the car so she can give the bags of $1 million in cash to Howard, but when she finds he is dying in the jewelry store, she is obviously going to be distraught and also how is she going to settle the money with Dinah, who was Howard’s wife?

I also thought about the concept of the Ten Worlds in Buddhism, particularly the worlds of hell, hunger, animality and anger. Howard goes through these four worlds throughout the film, and the other characters reflect his negative life states (a concept called esho funi, or oneness of life and its environment.) In one particular scene I felt for Howard even though he hadn’t paid off all these debts to the people in his life, because he was in a state of suffering even though he tried to put everything on the backburner. He has so many people who remind him of the debts he owes to them, and finally, after Phil, one of Arno’s henchmen, punches Howard in the nose and throws him in the fountain, Howard goes back to his office and tells Julia to send everyone working at the store home. When she comes up, he lets himself break down and cry, telling her through his tears that he doesn’t know how to handle all the debt he owes people and that he screws up every time he tries to do something. He is deeply hard on himself, and doesn’t feel like there is any way out. Even when Julia shows the tattoo of his name she got on her butt, he cries even harder and tells her he doesn’t deserve even that. The first time I watched it I didn’t have much sympathy for Howard, but the second time, after thinking about the Buddhist concept of the Ten Worlds, I actually realized that he’s not just this arrogant guy who only thinks about himself and his own problems, but someone who is deeply suffering. Howard suffers because he can’t see the potential he has to pay off the debt he owes to people and he also can’t see the jewel of his Buddhahood within his own life.

The fundamental darkness in his life makes it also hard for him to see the interconnectedness of himself with everyone else and other events. The movie reminded me of the music video for “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” by Kanye West because you see these young kids working in these mines and in one scene one of the kids holds up the diamond he mined and then we see above him a white jeweler taking the diamond from the kid and showing clients the diamond. Howard was so enthralled with this black opal that he couldn’t recognize that the opal not just had years of history, as he says, because it was mined by Black Ethiopian Jewish people, but also because of the dark history of European imperialism that can’t be separated from the sale of these jewels, no matter how much Howard doesn’t want to think about that.

Here is an interview where Josh and Benny Safdie talk more about the film. Honestly reading it helped because both of them are Jewish, and Jewish identity and culture is a central theme throughout the film, and I don’t have much knowledge about Judaism other than what I have read in some books and watched on TV shows, so reading this interview gave me more context when thinking about the movie.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/uncut-gems-director-interview-jewish-stereotypes-adam-sandler.html

Uncut Gems. 2019. 2 hr 15 min. Rated R for pervasive strong language, violence, some sexual content and brief drug use.

Book Review Bundle: Books I Read on Vacation

January 26, 2020

Categories: books, poetry

I was on a cruise ship library (yes, girl, they had a library on a cruise and I was ALL.FOR.IT) and wasn’t able to check out my target book: Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Instead, the only section was the book exchange section, so I checked out a book from there called Girl in Translation.

At first I was disappointed to not be able to check out Michael Chabon’s book, but I’m glad I got to read this book instead. It’s about a young woman named Kimberly who immigrates from Hong Kong with her mother to New York City, where they find work in a sweatshop. Kimberly has a hard time fitting in because she doesn’t speak English and the other kids tease her. Her teacher also treats her poorly because she doesn’t speak English. However, she befriends one girl in her class named Annette, and they continue to be friends through thick and thin even when Annette, who is white and upper middle class, can’t fully understand Kimberly’s life, or why Kimberly has to work while the other kids get to go to academic programs and do other things over summer. Kimberly also meets a guy at the sweatshop named Matt, and later on as she grows older, he changes her life, and not exactly in a good way (no spoilers here, you’ll need to read the book to find out what I mean by this.) This book is a fast read and not just because it is accessible in terms of language, but because Kwon’s writing is so on point and as the reader, even if I couldn’t directly relate with Kimberly and her mother’s situation, I felt for her throughout the novel. It also made me want to educate myself more about classism (the discrimination of someone based on their socioeconomic status) because Kimberly not only encounters racism but also classism. She cannot afford nice things, and Annette is constantly asking her why she can’t come over to her house to hang out, and feels upset when Kimberly won’t tell her the truth. Reading this novel made me want to think more carefully about what I say, since I have said things before that could be considered classist.

The Poet X: Another excellent novel. I took back Girl in Translation, and wanted to check out another book from the cruise library (also because I’m nerdy and was still so hyped about the fact that there was a library on the cruise. I brought three books with me, but feared somehow–totally irrational fear, come to think about it, since I didn’t even finish the books I brought with me on the trip–that I would finish them.) I saw The Hate U Give, but I already read that book, then I found another book next to it, and it had a beautiful cover, so I decided to check it out. I understand it’s bad to judge books by their covers, but this cover was just so amazing I couldn’t pass it up. I didn’t know if I’d be able to finish it, since it’s a pretty long book, but I finished it in one evening. Not only was the writing spellbinding and raw, but also it was in the form of poetry, so the lines just flowed so well. The book is about this young Dominican woman named Xiomara, and she struggles in school with students teasing her about her body, and also feeling her mother instilled a sense of guilt in her. She is also conflicted about her faith in God. However, one of her teachers shows her a video of a young Black woman reciting spoken word at a slam poetry event, and immediately Xiomara is hooked. So she writes poetry like it’s nobody’s business and joins the poetry club that the teacher sponsors, but she also has to keep it a secret from her mom because her mom wants her to focus on school and faith, and writing poetry in her spare time would go against that. It’s an incredible novel and I felt inspired to write more after reading how Xiomara uses writing as a medium for expressing all of the human emotions she feels every day: frustration, angst, depression, guilt, love, the list of emotions goes on, but when she writes about how free she feels writing poetry, I could relate. Writing for me has allowed me to express myself in ways I normally wouldn’t, especially as someone who tends to be introverted even though I like talking to people, too.

Solo: I found this at the time that I found The Poet X. I saw that both books were in the format of poetry and I thought, “This is epic,” so I checked them both out. This is a really good book about a guy named Blade whose dad, Rutherford, is a famous musician fresh out of rehab who is trying to get his life back together but is failing in the process. Blade feels embarrassed when his dad tries to come back into his life, and on top of that, his girlfriend cheated on him for some big-name rapper. He goes to Ghana because he wants to find his birth mother, and through his journey in Ghana he finds out stuff about himself and his relationship with his family roots that he never thought he would find out. He also develops a deeper bond with his dad because at first, he is embarrassed that his dad followed him to Ghana (even when Blade’s sister, Storm, tried to talk him out of it) but he learns that his dad is more than just what the media portrays him as, and he learns to appreciate his time with his dad more. It’s a really heartfelt book and the music recommendations are pretty sweet.

Dog-Man and Cat-Kid: There was no way I was going to pass this book up. Honestly I saw it was Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey and I knew I needed a knee-slapper. Like most, if not all kids, I loved Captain Underpants as a child: Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space, Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, you name it. So of course, it was no surprise that after watching dramas and reading dramas, I would want to check out a lighter read. If you haven’t read Captain Underpants, it’s about these two little boys named George and Harold who do goofy pranks to try and bug their teachers and principal, Mr. Krupp, who becomes Captain Underpants and gains superpowers when he drinks alien juice. This time, George and Harold sought inspiration from a book they read in school called East of Eden (honestly, I think they just skipped seven grades because I didn’t get to read East of Eden until senior year of high school. I would never have grasped the language or content of that book at George and Harold’s age. Also it has some pretty raunchy scenes in it, as well as racism) and this book influenced their newest comic Dog-Man and Cat-Kid. I won’t give away spoilers, but as a grown adult, I needed to read this book. Life as an adult can be pretty stressful sometimes, but reading this book taught me that it’s ok to laugh at potty humor sometimes even if it seems immature to do so at my age.