Author: The Arts Are Life

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

Movie Review: 20th Century Women

Content warning: I do briefly discuss menstruation at one point in the review, so if you get easily grossed out, it’s totally okay to skip this review. Also, it’s a long post, so thank you for reading it.

A few years ago, on Halloween night, I was staying indoors instead of going out trick-or-treating. I didn’t really feel like going out, and the way I tend to wind down after a long day is to watch a movie, so I decided to rent a film called 20th Century Women, a film directed by Mike Mills that stars Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning and Billy Crudup. When I first watched the film a few years ago, I unfortunately didn’t get past the first ten minutes because something else came up and I decided to do that instead of finishing the movie. I decided to pick it up again this time because I wanted to know what happened later in the film, and I’m glad I finished the movie because it was really good. I saw another film directed by Mike Mills last year called C’Mon C’Mon, a film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who involves his nephew in a film project he is doing. It was a really touching film, and it was really cool how it was shot in black and white even though it takes place in the modern day. Somehow, I am attracted to films that were directed in the 21st century that use black and white coloring during the film, such as Frances Ha, Roma, Mank and Belfast. There is just something aesthetically interesting about using black and white. Even though Frances Ha takes place in the modern day, when I saw that the film was black and white, it gave it this sort of mellowed down feel. I also love seeing Elle Fanning all grown up; I remember seeing her in this one movie called Phoebe in Wonderland several years ago, and she was so young, so it’s really awesome to see how she and her sister, Dakota Fanning, have grown in their acting careers. I also loved Billy Crudup in Big Fish.

If you haven’t seen 20th Century Women, it is a coming-of-age movie that takes place in Santa Barbara, California in 1979, and Dorothea is a divorced single mother in her 50s raising her 15-year-old son, Jamie, while also living with tenants Abbie Porter and Julie Hamlin. The film opens with Dorothea and Jamie shopping at a grocery store and then finding their old car, the one that Dorothea’s ex-husband owned, up in flames. Abbie is a photographer recovering from cervical cancer and Julie is friends with Jamie. Abbie is in love with William, who works on the house that they live in, and they have a sexual encounter. Even though Jamie and Julie sleep in the same bed, Julie wants them to stay friends so that it doesn’t ruin their friendship, but Jamie wants to be with her. Also, she is sleeping with other guys, so he doesn’t have much of a chance with her. Dorothea is worried about her son, especially because he hangs around a lot of kids who are bad influences. He hangs out with a lot of kids who skateboard, and they invite him to Los Angeles to go to a party. He comes home drunk, and Dorothea becomes worried. She enlists Abbie and Julie to support him as he navigates adolescence, and Abbie has Jamie read a bunch of books on feminism and introduces him to the punk rock scene. Through his friendship with Abbie and Julie, Jamie learns a lot about himself and gets educated on a topic that most guys his age probably wouldn’t bother exploring.

One key theme throughout the movie is feminism. Abbie has Jamie read several works by feminist authors and these works fascinate him, such as The Politics of Orgasm by Susan Lydon. However, the other guys he hangs around think he is less of a man for wanting to learn about feminism. While hanging out at the skateboarding park in one scene, a teenage guy is talking about his sexual encounter with a young woman and how he penetrated her, but then Jamie talks about female orgasms. The guy calls him a homophobic slur for being interested in learning more about the female body and beats him up. I didn’t know this, but apparently the punk rock world was pretty divisive, so in the film there is a clash between bands like Black Flag and The Talking Heads. After Jamie gets beaten up, Dorothea goes out to find her car spray painted with “Art [homophobic slur]” and the other side with “Black Flag.” (I don’t listen to much punk rock, to be honest, but I guess the clash between punk rock groups was the 1970s version of modern-day feuds between hip-hop artists such as Drake and Kendrick Lamar.) In another scene, Jamie reads aloud a passage from a feminist book to Dorothea, and she turns around and asks him why he read it to her. Jamie is confused as to why she doesn’t encourage him to read it, and he says he is interested in the topic, but Dorothea tells him that he doesn’t need to explain feminism or the female body to her because she knows about it already. Dorothea confronts Abbie about teaching Jamie about feminism and tells her that learning about feminism is too much for Jamie and to stop teaching him about feminism. Later, when they are at the dinner table with friends, Dorothea finds Abbie sleeping at the table. He has Jamie wake her up, but Abbie says she is tired because she is menstruating. Dorothea is embarrassed and tells Abbie to not mention that at the table, but Abbie continues to explain that talking about periods shouldn’t be taboo, and even has everyone at the table say the word “menstruation” so that it becomes less taboo. Dorothea tries to end the topic, but then Julie brings up that she had sex with a guy while on her period and goes into graphic detail about the encounter. Dorothea is upset and has everyone go home after seeing how uncomfortable everyone is talking about menstruation and sex.

Honestly, though, I appreciate Jamie for making the effort to educate himself on feminism and female sexuality. It reminds me of this sketch I watched from Key and Peele called “Menstruation Orientation,” in which Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are two men named Shaboots Michaels and T-Ray Tombstone speaking to an audience of men during a Ted Talk (it’s called FAS- For All Species- as a parody of the TED Talks logo) about what to do when their female partners are on their periods. They emphasize to the men in the audience that even if they are uncomfortable with learning about menstruation and don’t want to attend the lecture, they aren’t the ones that have to deal with having a period every month, so they need to learn and get educated on what their wives and girlfriends have to go through. (Note: I am continuing to learn about and get educated on gender and sexuality, and I understand that the experience of menstruation is not limited to cisgendered women like me, but also encompasses people who are trans and nonbinary.)

Warning: contains strong language

When I first saw it, I busted up laughing but as I thought more about it, I really appreciated that Key and Peele did this sketch because growing up, I didn’t know many guys who were comfortable talking about menstruation or willing to educate themselves about it. During health class it was a topic that elicited giggles and inappropriate comments from 8th grade boys (to be fair, I did giggle when my health teacher started talking about the reproductive system, so I was part of that group of immature kids who laughed.) Menstruation always felt like this thing I felt embarrassed about or that I could only talk about with other women, but watching this sketch gave me hope that if I was with a guy I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about mentioning whenever I was on my period or had mood swings. Even still, I sometimes feel embarrassed to talk about my menstrual cycle around people and even feel awkward when getting sanitary pads from the pharmacy and self-conscious while wearing them. But watching how Abbie in 20th Century Women felt openly comfortable talking about her period around men and women, especially during the 1970s, was, well, I don’t have the right word to describe it, but “empowering” sounds about right. I do appreciate how we are working to take the stigma out of talking about menstruation more often. There is a sweet commercial that Hello Flo where a girl called The Camp Gyno goes around giving her fellow campers tampons and giving them “menstruation demonstrations” with a Dora the Explorer doll (spoiler: her program fails miserably because all the girls are getting Hello Flo period starter kits in the mail, so they don’t need her to be Camp Gyno anymore.)

Somehow this movie reminded me of other movies I have seen. Julie and Jamie’s friendship reminded me of When Harry Met Sally, because there is one scene in the movie where Harry tells Sally she is attractive even though he is dating her friend, Amanda, and Sally is offended. Harry thinks it’s ridiculous that he can’t tell her she is attractive without it sounding like he is coming onto her, and when she firmly tells him that they are just going to be friends, he tells her that they could never become friends as a straight male and a straight woman because “the sex part always gets in the way.” Harry argues that a man can’t be friends with a woman he is attracted to because he will always want to have sex with her. Even though Sally remains firm about remaining friends, Harry continues to find her attractive. Even though Julie wants to remain friends with Jamie, he has romantic and sexual feelings for her. Jamie educates himself on female orgasm because he wants to know how to pleasure a woman, but Dorothea is uncomfortable that Jamie is learning so much about the female body at a young age. It’s interesting how their relationship has unfolded over the years, because when he was younger, Dorothea advocated for him to have his own bank account, and even let him skip school when he didn’t feel like going (she even was impressed that he forged her signature when signing absence permission slips.) However, as he gets older, they struggle to have a good relationship together because he is becoming a teenager and is becoming more distant from him. Dorothea loves keeping track of stocks, and has Jamie calculate the stocks with her, but he isn’t interested in doing that anymore. Even though Dorothea asked Abbie and Julie to help her have a deeper relationship with Jamie, Dorothea still wanted to keep Jamie sheltered from a culture of drugs, parties and punk rock.

Also, it’s wild to say this, but it boggled my mind while watching 20th Century Women that there was a time period when people lived without smartphones. They had to entertain themselves and be bored, they couldn’t just watch YouTube or TikTok. There is a scene where Jamie has Julie take a pregnancy test, and they have to wait two hours for the results, so they go outside and learn how to smoke. They didn’t have cell phones at the time, so they had to be bored and find creative ways to have fun. Julie tries to teach Jamie how to smoke like a cool guy, and not look unsure of himself while he does it. But then Jamie decides to stop because he learned that smoking wouldn’t be good for his health. I can only speak for myself, but whenever I feel bored now or stressed or anxious, I want to distract myself from those uncomfortable emotions that are coming up. I distract myself nowadays by going on my phone and scrolling through YouTube. Even though deep down I know my brain is overloaded by all the data and information it is taking in as I spend time scrolling on my smartphone, I still do it because my brain gets a temporary rush of dopamine every time that I check my phone. However, that’s why I have to keep checking my phone so I can have those repeated rushes of this pleasure chemical, dopamine. But before I know it, I have passed time and haven’t done much other than scrolled through YouTube videos on my video feed. I scroll through my phone to avoid being bored, but I end up not feeling great after my phone use. When I finally got bored of YouTube, I decided to pick up a book and read. After I dove into a few pages of the book, I remembered how much fun reading was. While my phone is helpful in many ways, I have also noticed that I tend to be on it a lot, and that I could benefit from cutting back on the time I spend on it. Jamie and Julie would probably live a very different life if they had smartphones in 1979.

Annette Bening is amazing (she is the actress who plays Dorothea, Jamie’s mother). She was in a movie I saw several years ago called The Kids Are All Right, which stars her and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple who meet the man who was their sperm donor when they conceived their two kids. She was also in a really good movie called Nyad, which is a true story about a swimmer named Diana Nyad who came out of retirement and swam from Florida to Cuba in her 60s. That movie was truly about never giving up, because she had to overcome serious obstacles: panic attacks, killer jellyfish, and saltwater. Not to mention she had to start over several times. But she never gave up, even when her team told her that she could potentially die if she continued chasing this risky dream. It was a great film, and Annette Bening and Jodie Foster made a really good on-screen duo. I also love seeing Greta Gerwig with red hair; for some reason, her character, Abbie, looked like someone I knew in college. Also, I love Greta Gerwig’s other films, which she directed: Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie. Each of these films spoke to me personally in some way, and the stories for each of them were really touching. In 20th Century Women, I really love how it spans from past, present and future. We get to know each character’s backstory and how their lives unfolded in the future. In all, I’m glad I finally got around to watching the entire movie because it ended up being a really touching and powerful movie.

20th Century Women. Directed by Mike Mills. 2016. Rated R for sexual material, language, some nudity and brief drug use. 118 minutes.

Movie Review: 50/50

I watched a movie a couple of days ago called 50/50. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Bryce Dallas Howard, Angelica Huston and Anna Kendrick. I really love these actors; I have seen their other movies, and they are all really good in their movies. I really loved Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer. This movie was pretty serious; it’s categorized as a comedy-drama, but it’s about a 27-year-old man named Adam who finds out he has cancer. It is based on the director’s own experience with finding out he had a rare form of spinal cancer in his 20s. (I also looked up Will Reiser, the director, on Wikipedia and I found out he attended Hampshire College, which is really cool because I took a couple of courses at Hampshire during my time in college and the people there are pretty cool.)

Even though he is a healthy person, Adam receives the cancer diagnosis, and it shatters his world. When he first tells his friend, Kyle (played by Seth Rogen), Kyle acts as if he is going to be okay and that the cancer is no big deal, but as the movie went on, I saw how Adam’s cancer diagnosis took a hit to his self-esteem and made him question his existence in life. It was also hard for his parents to find out about the cancer, especially because Adam was so young and his mom was already taking care of his dad, who has Alzheimer’s. When they are at the dinner table, Adam tries to prepare his mom for the news, and she laughs it off at first, saying “How bad can this really be?” But when he finally tells her he has cancer, she goes silent and then she cries when she finds out because she doesn’t want to lose her son. Adam also sees a therapist named Katherine, who tries to help him process all of the intense emotions that have come with hearing about his diagnosis and going through chemotherapy. At first, Adam doesn’t want to open up and he thinks that Katherine is only trying to make him feel better and cheer him up, but that what she is doing isn’t effective. However, Adam begins to reflect on what is important to him in life after going through chemotherapy. He is still friends with Kyle, and Kyle has his back the whole time, but it’s really hard for Kyle to see his friend going through this intense battle with illness. The scene where Kyle finds out that Adam’s girlfriend, Rachael, cheated on him was pretty sad, but it also showed me how hard it was for both Adam and Rachael when he found out he had cancer. They hadn’t had sex in several weeks and she felt like they were growing apart. She is late picking him up from the hospital one evening and she apologizes, but at this point he is too worn out to hear about her apologies. Kyle goes on a date and finds Rachael making out with another guy, and when Rachael comes home to Adam and pretends like nothing happened, Kyle comes in and tells Adam that Rachael is cheating on him. Rachael is at a loss of words, and Kyle kicks her out of the house. Rachael tries to come back, but Kyle tells Adam that she needs to leave and that they put her box of stuff outside the house. Rachael tries to reason with Adam that it’s been really hard for her lately and that no one picked up her art at her exhibition. At first, I thought Adam was going to feel sorry for her and want to get back together with her, but then Rachael starts kissing Adam and then he realizes that she cheated on him and he tells her to leave. Kyle then starts taking Adam to parties, celebrating his newly single status, and he tells Adam to use his cancer diagnosis as a tool to pick up girls, but it ends up not working out well. They go out with two girls, and one of them is curious about Adam’s cancer and asks if she could touch his bald head. He lets her, and they go home, but while Adam and the girl are having sex, Adam feels a lot of pain and is too tired from the chemotherapy to have sex, so the girl ends up leaving.

Adam’s cancer diagnosis gets him to start thinking seriously about what he wants out of life. In one hard-hitting scene, Kyle is drunk and wants to drive Adam home, but Adam insists on driving Kyle even though he neither knows how to drive nor has a driver’s license. Kyle at first doubts him, but then he lets him drive since Adam doesn’t have long to live. Adam almost gets them killed and almost hits other cars. Kyle finally has him pull over and shouts at him for his erratic driving and Adam has him get out of the car. Then Adam screams and then breaks down crying because he doesn’t have long to live, and nothing in his life is going as planned. He feels hopeless, but what helps is him calling Katherine to let her know that he is really not feeling okay. This was a total contrast to when he first met her because at first, when she tried to get him to open up, he didn’t want to talk about how he was feeling and insisted he was fine, even when he was going through a very intense chemotherapy process that made him feel like hell. But he realizes that it’s okay to reach out to people and admit that you aren’t okay. Katherine and Adam develop feelings for each other, and Adam begins to feel like he can trust her because she gives him space to feel what he is feeling. Adam also realizes that Kyle is also trying his best to support him because he goes back home and sees that Kyle has been reading a book called Facing Cancer Together, which shows that even though Adam thought Kyle was only focused on sleeping with women and getting high on weed with Adam, he really was doing his best to try and understand what Adam was going through and was willing to do the work needed to support Adam. I thought about this movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is about a young man in high school named Greg who doesn’t have a lot of close friends but ends up befriending a young woman named Rachel, who has leukemia. At first, she doesn’t want him around, but as the movie goes on, they develop a strong bond and he and his friend, Earl, support Rachel through her battle with leukemia. It was a pretty sad movie, but it reminded me that facing illness is a battle that you can’t fight alone. I thought about this chapter I read in a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. The chapter “Facing Illness” talks about illness and death from a Buddhist perspective, and Ikeda says that “illness teaches us many things. It makes us look death in the face and think about the meaning of life. It makes us realize just how precious life is.” (p. 255) I haven’t battled cancer, but I have battled mental illness, specifically clinical depression, and honestly, depression really forced me to look at how I was living my life and got me to examine honestly how I wanted to live my life moving forward. I had thought that I was so useless, that my life had no value or meaning, but through getting professional treatment and engaging in my spiritual practice of Buddhism, I have learned that my life has so much profound meaning and that I can encourage others who are battling depression that it’s okay to ask for help. For so many years I was reluctant to see therapy, to get on medication, but I am realizing that those things are important to taking care of my mental health. In the book I highlighted this one quote in the chapter that really encouraged me: “Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity and beauty of one’s life. Everyone, without exception, is an infinitely precious and noble treasure.” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 1, revised edition, page 254) I had to read this quote often because having depression made me feel like my life was worthless, that I wasn’t going to be able to live my life because I have depression, but I learned that I’m not the only one struggling and that it’s okay to ask for help. I realized after a certain point that it wasn’t safe for me to continue tackling depression without seeking professional help, and that getting professional help or treatment didn’t make me weak. I love reading the “Facing Illness” chapter in the book because it reminds me that my life is still worthy of respect and valuable even though I have this depression that is telling me that my life doesn’t mean anything. It’s still a battle, but I am hoping to encourage more people through sharing about my mental health challenges more often.

Another part of 50/50 I liked was when Adam made friends in the hospital who were also battling cancer. The first time he meets Mitch and Alan, Alan offers Adam cannabis-laced macaroons and Adam eats a few, and he finds himself going down a hallway with this dazed look on his face and it seems like he is heaven, even as he passes all these people on stretchers and the nurses and doctors running through the halls on these stretchers. Adam looks back and then starts laughing, but then he snaps back to reality, and he is back at home throwing up in a toilet. He develops a great friendship with Mitch and Adam, but then when he finds Mitch is not with him and Alan, Alan tells him that Mitch died. It’s during this scene that Adam has to grapple with the reality that he is dealing with a life-threatening illness, and it makes him feel depressed and wondering why he is still living. Even though Kyle at the beginning was telling Adam, “Oh you’re young, you’ll be fine,” Adam realizes that he can’t take life for granted anymore because he only has a 50/50 chance of living. The pivotal scene comes when Adam and his parents are at the doctor after Adam has gone through chemotherapy, and they are hearing the news of whether the tumor has gotten less or worse. The doctor tells him that the cancer has gotten bad and that they need to do a surgery on Adam to get the tumor out, but that it’s a life-threatening surgery. Adam gets the surgery, and right before he goes in, his mom hugs him and doesn’t want to let him go, but the doctors pull her away and lead Adam into the surgery room. It was pretty painful to see Adam’s parents being unable to spend more time with their son before the surgery because they didn’t know whether he was going to come out alive after the life-threatening surgery. Thankfully, he survives, but that scene was pretty intense. It was easy for me to think that because I was young, I didn’t have to worry about illness and dying, and I thought very much like Kyle, this attitude of “Oh, you’re young, you’ll beat cancer.” But many of my close friends who were older passed away, and it really made me face my own mortality, the inevitable reality that someday I, too, was going to die, so I started to study more about the Buddhist perspective on life and death. Reading this philosophy made me want to take my life more seriously, and I started to get more serious about what goals and dreams I wanted to accomplish. I have started to appreciate my life on a much deeper level, too.

Summertime

I love summer. I don’t enjoy the weather, necessarily, because down South it gets really hot, and I’m talking, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk kind of hot. I love the prevalence of things to do during the summer. There are a lot of things for kids to do, and I remember going to summer programs was a great investment of time and money for my parents. I remember going to summer school when I was in elementary school and taking a class where we learned about multimedia. I also remember taking a Spanish class where we had a cool teacher named Ms. Basdeo, and she would sing songs with us in Spanish. One of them was “Willaby Wallaby we, a elefante setse do en mi. Willaby Wallaby,” and then we had to go around and sing “[insert name] got sat on by the elephant” in Spanish. I think one of my favorite parts of the summer programs was going to the vending machine and getting those Cookies n Cream ice cream cones. My least favorite was riding the bus to the program because I was shy and quiet, and had difficulty being comfortable around the other kids because they seemed to be more outgoing than me. I really enjoyed art class, though, because I love creating things. It was nice to sit in the class and draw and paint and sculpt things. I remember sitting with some pretty nice people and would often give them my soy nuts and other snacks to munch on during class. They actually really liked the soy nuts; I didn’t think they would, but one of the girls at the table kept putting her hand out every time and so I would give her some of my soy nuts. I also loved the snacks they served at these enrichment programs; Cosmic Brownies was my jam, as were Little Debbie Zebra snack cakes. The sugary filling in the middle, and the softness and puffed-upness of these snack cakes was like being on Cloud Nine, I’m not kidding you. Even though I am vegan, I can still taste how good those Zebra Cakes were. Art class was one of my favorite things to do during the summer, because it gave me an outlet to express myself and it gave me something to do over those hot long months. I really liked one of the classes that I took because we got to have little indoor picnics where we had pieces of fruit with this creamy cheese that we spread on crackers. We were pretending like we were eating French food. I fell in love with that creamy cheese, and even though I can’t eat it anymore due to my lactose-intolerance, I can still imagine the creaminess of the cheese as I spread it on those crackers and ate it with those pieces of fruit. There was another art studio that was above the college preparatory summer school I ended up going to a few years later, and it was called The Artist Within. I sat with a small group of kids, and we just drew and ate snacks and listened to music. The kids were really nice, and they somehow embraced my quiet and sensitive personality. There was one girl named Rose who had a short blonde haircut and wore all black, and she was pretty cool. The art teacher was really sweet, too. She and I had some pretty good conversations. I vaguely remember one of the songs we listened to on that little radio was “Any Other Girl” by an artist named Nu. I didn’t know who the artist was at the time, but I just looked up based on the few song lyrics I remembered, and I got lucky because most times I hear a song, but I don’t know who the artist is.

As I got older, I started participating in more music programs. I still loved drawing, but by this point I had started playing the cello the summer before sixth grade and I fell in love with it. So, I attended a summer program at a university that was about an hour from where I lived that was for cello students in middle and high school. It was really fun getting to play with the other students. They offered a masterclass, which is a class where a faculty member has some students play for them and gives them feedback on what they did well and how they can do better. I didn’t know what to expect from a masterclass at first, and frankly it sounded intimidating. The word “masterclass” made me wonder if I needed to be an advanced student to be in the class. I don’t think I ended up participating in the master class, but I remember watching the older students perform and thinking, Wow, they’re so cool and mature! I want to play like them! Some of the tunes I remember playing was this piece called “Evening Prayer” and we had two really cool instructors named Louann and Andrew. Andrew was part of an ensemble of cellists called the 440 Alliance, and my parents and I went to see them play. They were really, really good and they played cello in this really cool way. They were rocking out together, and it was just a blast to watch!

One class I took over one of my summers (it was either fifth or sixth grade) was an improv class at a local university. As a quiet kid, it was really hard for me to fit in at first. I was so used to reading my book and not talking with other kids, and I was more accustomed to talking with adults than with the other kids. But looking back, I am glad I took that improv class because it helped me go outside my comfort zone. That’s not to say that right after taking the improv class, I stopped being introverted. But it helped to learn something new, something that I wasn’t used to doing. I remember being in that summer class and the kids were all super outgoing and talkative and I just wanted to crawl into a corner and read, but I couldn’t so I did my best, but I suffered from so much social embarrassment. I remember one time I had to get up with a couple of other students in the class, and we had to pick one or two other students to join us in an improv game. I was freaking out because everyone kept getting up when it came my turn to choose, and yelling, “PICK ME! NO, NO, PICK ME!” I desperately just wanted to hide in a corner, but I ended up making a decision and we played this game called The Party Game. I forgot what it entailed, but I somehow survived standing up there in front of a bunch of kids, worrying about how people were going to judge me. Like I said, I definitely needed to get out of my comfort zone.

Summers were also a really fun time to visit family. Summers in Chicago were a lot of fun because my family loved going to the movie theater. I would excitedly mark in my calendar the movies that were coming out and we would go as a family to see them. We were too young to watch any PG-13 or R-rated films, but we would see movies like Shrek or The Rugrats Go Wild, and we loved them. Fast forward, and in the summer of 2016, I am walking down the streets of Chicago to go to the Chicago Culture Center. However, at that moment I was no longer the carefree seven-year-old but now a 22-year-old college graduate with major depressive disorder and no plans for the future. I rode the L train to the center, determined to battle whatever inner turmoil was going on within me. I went to the center and furiously chanted the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo over and over again. I wasn’t trying to work miracles at that moment. I was battling this fundamental inability to believe that my life was worth living, that I had a future full of possibilities and opportunities that I couldn’t even imagine. I was in a state of suffering, and I was determined more than ever that summer to claw myself out. After chanting, I felt so empowered to make efforts to transform my suffering and my state of life expanded. A few months later, I finally got the help that I needed, and was able to finally address that inner turmoil with a mental health professional. That moment during that summer of 2016 was a profound cause for me to transform my life on a deep, deep level.

Movie Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

To be honest, it took me a really long time to write this blog post. I watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On a few months ago but didn’t get around to writing the post. I mean, how can you convey how this incredible film made you feel? Seriously. It was that good. It was a really cute film, and for some reason I found Marcel’s voice very soothing. Before I saw the movie, I saw the trailer for it. Normally the films I see from A24 are R-rated features like Midsommar, Hereditary and X, all films that I don’t have the stomach to watch unfortunately because I am not a big fan of scary movies with a lot of blood. To be fair, I have seen quite a few A24 features, like Lady Bird, Uncut Gems and Minari, and those weren’t super bloody features. But I was really excited when they said they were coming out with a PG-rated feature about a shell who goes on an adventure to find his family. I had not seen the original “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” clip when it came out (or maybe I did, but it was a long time ago, so my memory is fuzzy) When I saw the trailer, the song they played during the trailer was “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins, and that has been one of my favorite songs since I was a kid. I remember on the way to school in the car with the radio on, my mom and I listening to those powerful drums and the moving vocals of Phil Collins. There was something so beautiful about this song, and it still gives me goosebumps when I listen to it. I ended up watching the trailer for Marcel the Shell with Shoes On three times, and each time I watched the trailer I started crying because it looked like a very touching story.

From what I can remember about the movie, it is about Marcel, a small shell who goes on a big adventure with his Nana Connie and his trusty friend, Dean Fleischer Camp. They have to go on a journey to find Marcel’s family because the family lived in the house of a couple who got into an argument and the boyfriend walked off with Marcel’s family of fellow shells in a drawer. Marcel learns the spirit of not giving up on himself, even when he faces challenges along the way when trying to find his family. The movie also shows how Marcel’s journey goes public on YouTube and how Marcel deals with being famous on the Internet. I thought the most touching part of the movie (then again, the entire movie was quite touching) was when Marcel reunited with his family, and he sings “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles. For some reason, I couldn’t stop tearing up during this scene because it was really adorable and also just really poignant considering Marcel lost his Nana Connie while on his journey. Nana Connie has so much wisdom and she was really supportive of Marcel throughout his journey. For some reason, this movie made me think of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie or really any SpongeBob episode where they featured real people because in the movie David Hasselhoff makes a cameo appearance as a live action human being (not a cartoon) and takes them back to Bikini Bottom (I saw the movie back in 2004 so it’s been more than a minute, so my plot details are pretty fuzzy.) I really love the song “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles, so I think that is why the scene where Marcel sings it is really touching. I thought it was cool how Marcel got to appear on 60 Minutes because that was his dream.

The movie also made me want to appreciate the little things in life. Marcel lives a very simple and beautiful life, and his Nana Connie tends the garden, and he has his living space set up in a certain way. And his voice was also really soothing and sweet. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t watch Marcel the Shell with Shoes On when it first came out, because it would have cheered me up when I was in high school. This is the original video. It really warms my heart each time I watch it.

TV Show Episode Review: The Crown, season 6, episode 5 (“Willsmania”)

I took a break from watching The Crown for a while. I had finished part 1 of the last season and was just really saddened when Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) dies in a car crash with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) while they are in Paris. I just didn’t think I would be able to continue to go on with the show after that part. But I decided I wanted to finish the series because it has been incredible to watch, and I wanted to know what happened next. I totally forgot that I had watched this episode, “Willsmania” before, but it was helpful to watch since it has been a few months since I finished part 1 of the final season. In this episode, Diana’s sons, William and Harry, are grappling with the death of their mother and the grief process. This episode mainly focuses on the grief that William is dealing with. Harry appears in a few scenes, but mostly this episode was focused on William. William finds himself studying extra hard and also missing the extracurricular activities he once did, and the headmaster checks in on him often. There was a scene in the episode where William finds two bags of letters in his dorm room. One bag has letters from fellow students at William’s school, and the other bag is full of letters from young people around the world, many of them teenage girls who have a crush on him. When William comes out of the car and the Royal Family is walking past the crowds, Queen Elizabeth is miffed when she finds that the crowds aren’t focused on her, but instead are focused on William. When William comes out, a bunch of girls scream and fangirl as he is walking. They are shaking and leaning over the fence and also crying, holding signs expressing their romantic feelings for Will. It was kind of a stressful scene to watch. To be honest, I probably would have been like those girls in the crowd, freaking out when I see a famous person walk by. But now that I am older, I realize that celebrities might not always want that public attention and that they just want to live life like normal human beings. William ends up throwing the letters from the girls because it is really overwhelming, and honestly, that is fair because he going through a lot of grief. He also harbors a lot of anger and resentment towards his father, Charles, because Charles had an affair with Camila while in his marriage to Diana. In one scene, Charles meets with William to patch things up, but while Charles walks on eggshells, William calls him out for not taking accountability for Diana’s death. Charles explains to him that he is going through his own grief and that he, too, is still grappling with Diana’s death. Philip, who is Charles’s dad, meets with William over chess and tells him that William isn’t actually angry at his dad, but that he is actually angry at his mom because she was comfortable in the public eye, and he is not comfortable with all the publicity around him. William ends up hugging his dad later on.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about William or Harry before watching The Crown, other than watching a clip from the royal wedding between Harry and Meghan Markle. I’m sure I learned about them in history class, but that was so long ago, and I haven’t kept up much with news about the royal family. However, I watched a documentary last year (I think it was last year) called Harry and Meghan, and it was pretty good. I know it left a lot of people divided and people had a variety of opinions about it, but I don’t know enough intimate details about Harry and Meghan other than what they covered in the documentary to give an in-depth critique about it.

Movie Review: The Miracle Club

Content warning: I briefly talk about abortion in this review since the movie touches on abortion.

I was browsing on Netflix what movie to watch, and I came across this movie called The Miracle Club. A few months ago I heard Dame Maggie Smith was in another movie, and I was like, What?!? Fuck yes!!! The woman has had a very long career as an actress: she was Professor McGonagall, she was the Dowager Countess, and so many other roles. So, I was very pumped she would be starring in a movie with Kathy Bates, another great actress. (I loved her as Molly Brown in Titanic) I had not known much about the movie before watching it, but it was such a great film overall. The acting was great, and it made me want to visit Ireland again.

The film also talks about some heavy subjects as well. It takes place in the 1960s and it’s about a woman named Chrissie who returns to Ireland after her mother’s death. Chrissie travels with two older women, Eileen and Lily, and a younger woman named Dolly, who formed a group called The Miracles as part of a talent show. They get the opportunity to go to Lourdes, France, because they believe that a pilgrimage to this place will help them heal from their problems. Eileen has a lump in her breast, Dolly’s son, Daniel, cannot speak, so she hopes that he will talk on the pilgrimage, and Lily wants to go because she has always wanted to go. However, Eileen and Lily bear a grudge against Chrissie for not coming back to Ireland until after her mother died. While on their trip to Lourdes, Chrissie tries to patch things up with Eileen and Lily, but it is difficult at first. However, the relationship between these four women is tested when they finally get into the baths at Lourdes. Dolly tries to get her son to get into the baths to try to cure him of his inability to speak, but he refuses to get in. I appreciate that they didn’t just magically cure him because it showed me that Daniel was going to talk when he was ready, and that Dolly didn’t need to feel like a failure just because her son wasn’t able to talk. Dolly feels like she failed as a mother, and she beats herself up. She also confesses to Eileen, Lily and Chrissie that she tried to abort Daniel when he was in the womb. Chrissie ends up being able to relate to Dolly because she tried to abort her child when she was pregnant. It is such a deep and profound moment between these two women, especially because Lily and Eileen made a lot of assumptions about Chrissie and were angry that she didn’t come back to Ireland. Lily has a moment when she is about to go into the baths and is sitting with Chrissie, and she says she won’t ever forgive herself for the grudge she bore against Chrissie, but Chrissie forgives her. Even though the four women found that the pilgrimage to Lourdes didn’t work these miracles they had wanted (Eileen still had to go to a doctor for her lump, it wasn’t magically cured by getting in the water) the priest who goes with them, Father Dermot, tells them that the real purpose of the trip was to have faith even if there weren’t miracles. This kind of reminds me of Buddhism because there is no magic; we bring out our Buddhahood as we are. Buddhahood isn’t a far-off destination we need to escape to; it is present in our immediate realities. It’s why I have to chant every day, because I have to understand that my enlightenment, my absolute happiness, is within my life, not outside of me.

I love the part where Dolly, Lily and Eileen leave their husbands to fend for themselves when they leave for Lourdes. The men are so used to letting the wives take after the kids and clean, so of course they are resistant to them going off to Lourdes. It kind of made me think of this movie I saw called Bad Moms, but of course this movie was set in 1967 and they were going on a trip with a priest, so they couldn’t get too wild like the women in Bad Moms. But it’s kind of similar to the movie Bad Moms because when Amy decides she is not doing anyone’s dirty work, she has her son and daughter figure things out on their own rather than doing their homework and making them breakfast. Kiki also learns to set boundaries with her husband and lets him take care of the kids for a while (of course, because he made her take care of the kids all the time, it is stressful for him at first and he is always calling her for help) In The Miracle Club, there is a scene where Eileen’s husband, Frank, go gets the groceries and he accidentally drops them everywhere and is having trouble picking them up. A woman in the neighborhood comes along and helps him and makes some comment about how now he knows what it’s like when his wife has to go out and get groceries and cook all day. When Dolly is away, her husband tries to change their kid’s nappy with disastrous results. And Lily’s husband sits in bed drinking tea and eating crumpets alone in bed. Through their pilgrimage, these four women become closer than ever.

Overall, I really liked this movie. For some reason, I totally forgot that it was set in the 1960s. I somehow thought it was set in the modern day. A couple of other great movies that take place in Ireland are The Banshees of Inisherin and Belfast. The former is a dark comedy that was pretty hard to watch at times, but it resonated with me because the main character experiences depression and loneliness, although I am grateful that today I can go to therapy and talk about my anxiety and depression with someone. Back then they called it “despair” and there probably wasn’t therapy or medication one could take to manage their depression (the film is set in the 1920s on a remote island, and this of course was way before cell phones and computers were around) Belfast was intense but a really touching film about a boy growing up during the 1969 riots in Northern Ireland. It also has Van Morrison’s music in it, which I love. I also really love Laura Linney’s acting in The Miracle Club. Several years ago, I watched a movie called The Nanny Diaries, and she played a really mean character named Mrs. X. Mrs. X treats Scarlett Johansson’s character, Nanny, like total dirt and Mr. X is a scumbag who makes inappropriate advances towards Nanny. I guess that is what I love about watching movies, though, because actors are so versatile and can play a variety of roles. Also, this is a tangent, but for some reason Dolly’s character (the very beautiful young one with the brown hair in an updo) kind of looked to me like the American singer Lana del Rey for some reason. Every time she was on screen, I just thought, “Wait, is that Lana del Rey?” and then I realized “Oh wait no, that’s a different person who just looks very similar to Lana del Rey.”

The Miracle Club. Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan. Rated PG-13.

On Burnout, part 1 (content warning: mental illness, self-harm)

I am no stranger to burnout. In fact, this year I made a determination to take better care of my physical and mental health, and in Buddhism whenever we make a big determination, we face obstacles. One thing I’ve been noticing about me is that I tend to burn out very quickly. In my first year of college, I wanted to take on as much as possible, and I’m glad I took on the challenge, but I remember I wasn’t taking care of my health much during that time. I decided to work two work-study jobs, one in the dining hall as a dishwasher and the other as a pre-K teaching assistant at a daycare. I had a heavy courseload and also was burning the midnight oil well past my bedtime. My roommate would turn off her light around 9 pm, and I was determined to stay up until 12 or 1 in the morning poring through my philosophy textbooks, studying each book several times and perfecting every draft of every essay I wrote. It’s no surprise that I would come into class feeling tired and sleepy, and I would nod off during class. I would at first start off enthusiastic and alert, but as the class went on, I found my notes started to get a little less legible and my eyelids were feeling rather heavy. Before I knew it, I was dozing off at my desk in just about every class that I took. It wasn’t that the lessons were boring; they were very interesting topics. However, when you’re running on four hours of sleep each day, your body soon starts indicating that this is not a sustainable habit in the long run. And by junior year, I realized that it certainly wasn’t. During my first and sophomore year, I found myself gradually becoming more tired, more irritable and more withdrawn. And by junior year, I had hit rock bottom with my mental health. That fall semester there were several unarmed Black people that got killed at the hands of police, such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and reading the news about police brutality made me feel disillusioned, frustrated, and depressed. I became a lot more hyper-aware of my Blackness, and going down the streets of the predominantly white town that I was in made me feel very self-conscious and unsure of whether people were looking at me because I was Black or whether they were thinking about what to grab for dinner or what time to pick up their kids from school (a.k.a not looking at me because I was Black). All I knew was that I was in a life state of pure Hell during that fall semester of junior year, and frankly I’m not sure how I even made it out alive, because I had lost so much hope in life. When I came back to school in my spring semester that year, I lost steam and was just running on fumes at this point. I had very little energy, I went to class feeling like a numb zombie, thinking everyone around me hated me and wanted me to disappear. I would go to bed a lot earlier than normal, which was great because my body needed to compensate for all the hours of sleep it lost due to my poor sleep hygiene those first two years.

I remember during my first year, I would hear gentle reminders from folks to take care of myself, to schedule fun time, to hang out with friends. The seniors often saw me running around during my first year juggling all these commitments, and they always reminded me to get sleep when they saw me staying up late in the hallway, click-clacking an essay on my laptop. I didn’t even go to senior banquet because I thought all I had time to do was study. However, the next day the seniors let me know, “Hey, we really missed you.” One of them gifted me a planner so that I could schedule time for myself, reminding me that college wasn’t just about the classes. At first, I got upset and offended when anyone told me to take care of myself and schedule time for self-care, but now that my body is recovering from years of being on all the time, I’m learning the tough way that self-care is a daily practice. I’ve also learned self-care doesn’t always need to be expensive. Sometimes self-care for me was taking walks in nature (as hard as it was to not have my own vehicle on campus, I did a lot of walking and I think that helped with my health to some degree), reading a book that wasn’t for class, or hanging out with my housemates. During my senior year I decided to try twerking for fun, so during study breaks I would twerk in my room to Iggy Azalea and other hip-hop artists’ music. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was fun, and it relieved some of my stress.

After college, I still had to learn that self-care is something I have to do every day, not just when I feel like it. And I learned that taking care of my body is important as a musician. In 2016, I auditioned for a local professional orchestra. I had this idea in my head that I would get the audition and be able to pay off my student loans just like that. Little did I know that it was a lot more challenging than I had envisioned in my idealistic mind. I remember shredding away at the audition excerpts for hours on end, without taking a single break to get up and drink a glass of water or exercise. I did go to the gym, but only sometimes, when I felt like it. I remember feeling really exhausted after practicing for three straight hours, and unfortunately, I still felt horrible about how I was going to do at my audition the next day. At around 2 am, I started harming myself, which is something I struggled with in my junior year of college. I didn’t want to be alive at that moment. Life felt too painful. The next morning, I lay in bed, feeling like life was over for me and that I should just give up. I didn’t have the energy to leave the bed, I didn’t have the energy to go to my orchestra audition later in the evening. I felt like a complete and utter failure. A relative who lived out-of-state called to check up on me, and at first, I missed his call because I didn’t have the motivation to answer the phone, but this time I answered and thanked him for calling me. He told me to take care of myself, and honestly, I think his phone call saved my life at that moment, because before he called, I had no hope and had lost the will to live. I made sure to rest my body before the audition, and in fact, that was all I had energy to do at that moment. About fifteen minutes before I had to go to the audition, I decided to chant to my Gohonzon (it’s the scroll I chant to morning and evening as part of my Buddhist practice) to have a good audition. I was terrified at this point about auditioning, and as I chanted the words “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo”, I started crying. I realized that I didn’t want to take my own life, I wanted to live, and I was tired of feeling numb. I cried on the way to my audition, and my dad gave me a hug. I got to the audition space (it was in a church) and the person helped me sign in. She was really nice. I went into a small practice room and warmed up with scales. It was an unrealistic expectation that I would play perfectly at this point. I just needed to focus on doing my best and getting through the audition. When it was time for me to go in (I saw only one other person going into the church to audition) I saw two people: the conductor of the orchestra and the principal cellist. They sat at a small table. I was nervous, but somehow because I chanted, I was able to be myself at that moment. I played “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saens for my solo piece, and then did my best on the excerpts. Sure, I fumbled quite a few notes, but looking back, I did my best. I think because I chanted, too, I was able to have a very natural down-to-earth interaction with the conductor and the principal cellist. After the audition, my dad and I celebrated by getting Taco Bueno.

To be continued…

Movie Review: Mudbound

I just finished watching this excellent film on Netflix called Mudbound. I was going to purchase a rental on YouTube or Google like I usually do, but I had been wanting to see Mudbound for a while. I read it several years ago, I can’t remember exactly when, but I think it was around the time that the movie had come out and I wanted to read the book before watching the movie. The writing by Hillary Jordan, the author of the novel, was incredible and the story was also powerful. I can see why the movie got critical acclaim, because the film was excellent, and it gave me chills by the end credits. It wasn’t an easy film to sit through, but that is because watching racial trauma and also war trauma is never easy to watch. I remember watching Mary J. Blige perform a song on the movie’s soundtrack called “Mighty River” at the Academy Awards in 2018, and it gave me so many goosebumps. It was so uplifting and powerful. I honestly love Mary J. Blige and all that she has done during her career. I remember watching a performance she did at the Grammys last year for her song “Good Morning Gorgeous.” I had not heard the song yet, but the performance was so beautiful and man, I just got chills all up and down my spine watching her belt out and sing. I also loved the square-shaped cellos that the musicians were playing for the accompaniment because I am a cello player and always get so excited when I see classical musicians play at these hot events like the Grammys or the Golden Globes when the pianist Chloe Flower played.

The movie takes place in rural Mississippi during the 1940s, and it opens with two white men lowering a casket in a ditch. One of the white men, Henry, asks a Black family riding past if they can help him with digging the casket into the ditch. The movie shows the events leading up to this. Laura McAllan meets Henry McAllan when he comes to dine with her family. Henry has a brother named Jamie, who is also keen on Laura but is also kind of a player, so Henry warns her about Jamie flirting with her. Henry and Laura marry, and they have two daughters together. However, everything changes when Henry decides to move the family into a new house so that he can take care of his grandpa, Pappy. Laura is upset because Henry didn’t tell her that he signed the lease on the house, but she goes with him, and they pack up their things and head over to their new home. However, when they get there, it turns out that they got conned out of the arrangement and another man lives there, so the family is forced to live in a dilapidated shack outside of Marietta, Mississippi, near a Black sharecropping family, the Jacksons. Hap Jackson and his wife, Florence Jackson, are eating with their family one day, when Henry loudly bangs on the door and asks Henry if he can help his family get their stuff into their new place. Pappy is racist and make a lot of derogatory remarks towards Hap, and even though Henry and Laura try to ignore it, Pappy’s racism evolves into something much worse over the course of the movie. Laura has Florence come to work for her, and at first when Florence tells Hap about this, he tells her that she doesn’t have to work for this white woman and that they are fine doing their work sharecropping. However, Florence ends up working for Laura and even helping her when Laura has a miscarriage.

Meanwhile, Henry’s brother, Jamie, is fighting in the Air Corps during World War II. Ronsel, who is Hap and Florence’s son, also enlists in the U.S. Army. Even though both of them work in separate units, they experience the same trauma and disillusionment with their time fighting overseas, especially when they come back home. When he comes back home, Jamie struggles with alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder, and wakes up frequently from nightmares about the horrors he experienced while fighting in the war. One evening, Jamie is sitting with Pappy and Henry drinking and talking about his time in the war, and Pappy asks him how many German soldiers he killed. Jamie doesn’t want to talk about that, and Pappy thinks he is weak for not admitting how many he killed. This leaves Jamie feeling ashamed. In one scene, Jamie is helping out in the shed with his brother, Henry, but he is intoxicated and knocks over Henry’s pail of milk. Henry accuses Jamie of being careless, and tells him Jamie has no self-worth because he came home from the war acting like he was too good for farmwork, but he isn’t better than any of his family members. Jamie insults him and his family and Henry beats him up and tells him he needs to leave and get out of town. Similarly, Ronsel really enjoyed not facing a lot of racism in Europe, and when he comes back to life as a sharecropper, he finds the work degrading and is disillusioned that he doesn’t receive the same respect when he comes back home, even after serving in the war.

While in Europe, Ronsel falls in love with a white German woman and doesn’t experience the same kind of racism that he experienced in the United States. However, in one scene, when he returns home to get some groceries from the store, he tries to leave through the front entrance. However, Pappy and Henry confront him and tell him he can’t go through the front entrance because he is Black, and Ronsel informs them that in Europe, Black men were treated with respect, and they got to exit through the front doors. He leaves them stunned, and Henry confronts Hap and Florence about Ronsel speaking to his grandpa in a way that made it seem like he was talking back to white people. One day, Jamie is coming back from the same store and when he hears a car engine go past him, he drops his groceries and ducks because he thinks it is a fighter jet. He is recalling the traumatic event of when his fellow pilot was killed in the air while they were flying the plane. Ronsel sees him and helps him up, and the white men on the porch outside the store give him hostile looks. However, Jamie introduces himself to Ronsel and gives him a ride in his truck, and they ride back home and talk about the war and their experiences. They build a deep friendship, which is rare considering the time and the place that they live in. Ronsel develops so much trust in Jamie that he shows him a picture of the white woman he married in Germany and the child she bore after he left to go home. However, it comes at a huge price when Pappy finds out that Jamie has been talking to Ronsel and giving him rides, and Pappy rouses Jamie from sleep and leads him to a shed where members of the Ku Klux Klan have brutally beaten and tied up Ronsel after finding out that he fathered a child with the white woman in Germany, and they also beat Jamie for defending Ronsel. Jamie tries to shoot Pappy, but Pappy has the Klan members beat Jamie and then Pappy has Jamie choose whether Ronsel gets one of his body parts mutilated or is put to death. It was a horrific scene, and it reminded me once again of the degradation and dehumanization of Black people during this time of Jim Crow segregation. It reminded me of this movie I saw called Till, which is a biopic about the murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Mississippi for speaking to a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. The thing that really shook me about the movie (and which will remain in my psyche for quite some time) was the scene where Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, mourns over her son’s mutilated corpse during an autopsy and when she has his casket left open so that everyone who attended his funeral can see how badly these men beat and mutilated Emmett’s body. Growing up, I always saw the photo of Emmett Till while he was alive, but I had never seen the photo of his corpse. And I was afraid to at the time, to be quite frank, but growing up my parents and ancestors lived through the time of Emmett Till, so they didn’t have a choice to look away because I’m sure it was all over the news. Even though the biopic Till is a historical drama, the makeup and prosthetics team made the body of Emmett Till very realistic looking, so when I finally saw Emmett’s body onscreen, it was disturbing to watch but also necessary for me to watch because otherwise I would have spent my whole life not knowing the extent to how brutal the murder of Emmett Till was and why Mamie had every right to keep speaking out against the injustice done to her son. I could feel Mamie Till’s grief and pain at the brutal and gross injustice done to her son, and even though it was extremely hard to sit through the wake scene and the autopsy scene, seeing those scenes reminded me how brutal racism against African Americans was during that time. Seeing Ronsel’s brutally beaten and mutilated body during this disturbing scene in Mudbound reminded me of how white people didn’t see Black people as human beings and went to great lengths to police their bodies and disenfranchise them. It was hard to watch, but it also showed me how virulent Pappy’s racism was. He was willing to go to great lengths to tear apart Ronsel and Jamie’s friendship, and it was painful to watch. It also showed me how much courage it took for Jamie and Ronsel to even be friends at the time and have these vulnerable conversations with each other, because through getting to know each other they realized that even during a time when white people and Black people used separate fountains and couldn’t integrate with one another without being punished, Jamie and Ronsel found similarities in each other’s shared experiences with fighting in the war, and through this shared experience they create a powerful bond with one another.

Another intense scene was when Hap falls off the roof of a house he is repairing and breaks his leg. This is interspersed with scenes where his son, Ronsel, is in the war and has to exit a tank that is going to explode, and one of his fellow soldiers gets severely injured and he is trying to find help, but no one comes. This is a suspenseful scene, especially with the church hymn playing in the background. Earlier, Hap is giving a sermon to a Black congregation in a shed, and then he injures his leg. It is painful, but because Florence helped out Laura when her daughters had whooping cough, Laura wants to return the favor, so she goes into Henry’s money stash and gets out money to pay for a doctor to treat Hap’s leg wound. Earlier, Henry expects Hap to get back to work even after Hap’s leg hasn’t healed yet, but when Hap tries to get up, he falls down again, further injuring his leg. But when Laura gets him the help he needs, he is able to work again and provide for his family. When he in bed, injured, he feels a sense of shame that he can’t be in a position to help out his family, especially because his wife is also juggling work for the McAllan family and sharecropping. Also, sharecropping is another huge theme in this movie. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to free Black people from slavery, Black people continued to deal with disenfranchisement in other forms, one of them being sharecropping. Many Black people in the Deep South had few financial resources, so they had to continue working to provide for their families. So even after the Emancipation Proclamation, systemic racism still remained as an institution to continue to disempower Black people. Not only does the Jackson family work as sharecroppers but they also have to deal with racial trauma and also the brutal beating of their son, Ronsel.

Although in the movie they do show a white family who were sharecroppers working for Henry. In one scene Carl is about to lose his job after Henry loses one of his mules, and his wife, Vera, has to ask Laura that she and her husband can keep their jobs. Laura says that is out of her power and only Henry can make that decision. Later on, Vera appears pregnant, and at this time, Laura is also pregnant. Laura is excited when she finds out she is pregnant, but then when Vera approaches her, she finds Vera is distraught and has a knife. She asks Laura to drive her into town, but Laura tells her she can’t drive her into town because she got in trouble with her husband last time for driving (I assume it’s because she drove the doctor into town to help Hap with his leg and Henry is angry with her, so he got back at her by letting her not drive anymore.) But Vera fires back at her, telling her she has seen Laura driving. Vera then breaks down crying, and Laura reveals to the audience that Vera stabbed Carl to death. Vera’s situation reminded me how difficult the circumstances must have been for sharecropping families, both white and black, during this time.

Overall, this was an excellent film. Also, Carey Mulligan is an incredible actress. I love her movies, and she was really good in this one. I also didn’t realize this until later, but I remember reading a Buzzfeed review from 2021 by Nicholas Braun, who starred in this movie called Zola, and he mentioned working with one of the actors in Zola, Jason Mitchell, who plays a character in the film named Dion. Jason Mitchell is the actor who plays Ronsel in Mudbound. I also checked Wikipedia and realized I recognized him in this movie called Detroit, which is another excellent film. Also, the music in Mudbound is absolutely brilliant. I loved the film score.

Mudbound. 2017. Directed by Dee Rees. Rated R for some disturbing violence, brief language and nudity.

Movie Review: Amour

A few days ago, I watched a movie with my family called Amour. I had checked it out at the library a few months ago, but never got around to watching it. I finally decided I wanted to watch the movie. The movie took a while to get into, to be honest, and I had to get up and take multiple bathroom breaks (mostly because I woke up at an early hour and didn’t get much sleep) but I think by the end it became pretty suspenseful and I got more into it. If you haven’t seen the movie, it is about an elderly music teacher named Anne who suffers from a stroke and her husband, Georges, has to take care of her. Over the course of the time Georges is taking care of her, Anne’s declining health takes a toll on both her and Georges, to the point where Anne doesn’t have the will to go on living and Georges doesn’t want her to suffer anymore. It’s easy for me to think that I’m young and that illness and death are far away, but watching this film reminded me that illness and death is a reality for everyone, and it is painful to watch loved ones go through suffering. I think studying about life and death from a Buddhist perspective helped me have a deeper appreciation for life than I did before. At first, I just thought life was a waste and wondered what the point of my existence was, especially because at the time I had fallen in love with someone, and they were with someone else. I remember falling into deep despair at that time and wondering if I could go on with life if I could never be in a relationship with this person. But I remember reading a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by the late Buddhist philosopher and author, Daisaku Ikeda, and he has a chapter called “Facing Illness.” He talks about the four sufferings in Buddhism: birth, aging, sickness and death, and how, through Buddhist practice, we can create meaning from these sufferings. He says that we should take practical measures to take care of our health, but he also says that health is not solely limited to the absence of illness. It’s really about how we can create value in our lives. He also says that even if someone has illness, their life is still worthy of respect. In a society that tends to shy away from talking about illness and death, this for me was a new perspective through which I could examine illness and death, because while we celebrate life and youth, illness and death are seen as things to be feared. Of course, it is incredibly painful when a loved one gets ill and dies, and going through the process of grief feels like a living hell most times. But as a young person, I think studying about life and death has been a huge benefit of my Buddhist practice because I have started to reflect on how I want to live my life. I was very jaded and cynical about life after experiencing heartbreak these past few years, but after practicing Buddhism I think that my perspective on life has changed. I want to appreciate every moment that I am alive, because I realize that life is precious, and I shouldn’t take it for granted.

Seeing Anne suffer from illness was pretty painful, and it was also painful for Georges. Him smothering her to death with a pillow was incredibly disturbing, but it just showed me that he also was starting to experience a lot of despair because his wife was in so much pain that she didn’t want to go on living. She had spent so much of her life as a pianist, but now that she is paralyzed on one side of her body, she can’t play it much anymore. So, when her student visits the house and leaves her a note expressing his sympathy to her, she feels sad because he gets to continue his art while she cannot continue to play. It reminded me of this movie I saw called Me Before You, because it’s about a young man named Will who becomes a quadriplegic after a seriously traumatic accident. When he becomes paralyzed, he loses his joy for life and starts to think about ending his life. He remembers that before he was quadriplegic, he could do all sorts of fun things with his life, especially traveling around the world. But he can’t do those things anymore, so he loses hope. And it’s painful for the young woman who is taking care of him, because she has this zest for life and to see this young man feeling hopeless and losing the will to live is painful for her. It is also hard for their grown-up daughter to see her mother suffering. When their daughter, Eva, tries to see her mom, Georges closes the door and prevents her from seeing Anne. When Eva finally sees Anne’s condition, she is in a lot of emotional pain. She tries to convince Georges to send Anne to a hospital, but Georges refuses because Anne doesn’t want to go to a hospital. This reminded me of this book I read called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. My mother had recommended the book to me a couple of years ago. I read it and it was quite eye-opening to read about how we treat aging and death in American society. I had been learning about illness and death from a religious perspective, but I didn’t know much about how the elderly are actually treated in society. It addresses end-of-life care and how doctors can provide more support for patients approaching death. At first, it was an emotional challenge to read the book, because I have tried to avoid the topic of death for so long. But after so many of my close acquaintances and loved ones passed away from aging and illness, I began to want to learn more about illness and death and how to prepare for them. I don’t know if anything will ever fully prepare me for losing a loved one. I will still go through those stages of grief just like everyone else, but by having a deeper understanding of death, I have learned to embrace the process of grieving and understand that grief is not just something I cry about one day and get over the next. After my mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, passed away at 95, I was very, very sad and so was the rest of my Buddhist community. I still miss him so much, but I still read his writings because they give me courage, especially his book Discussions on Youth. I remember last year when a dear friend of mine passed away, I experienced tremendous grief. She was elderly, but she had such a vibrant spirit, and she always encouraged me to never give up. Experiencing grief reminds me of my own mortality and how I can better spend my time on this earth. Watching Amour presented an honest and real look at aging and dying and how challenging it can be for people to navigate these stages of life. It took me patience to get into the film, but I am still glad that I saw the film because it helped me understand that even though I am young, I need to appreciate the elderly people in my life before they pass away.

Amour. 2012. 127 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Movie Review: Close and a General Discussion Around Boyhood and Manhood

Disclaimer: This movie review does talk about suicide. If you or someone is in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

A few months ago, I watched the trailer for a Belgian film called Close. It was so touching and powerful that I wanted to watch the movie, so I decided to watch it last night. As you know, I love movies distributed by the film distribution company, A24, and honestly, after watching this movie, all I could think was, Man A24 you got me with these tearjerker movies! It was a very powerful story, and the acting was incredible. It is a powerful story about friendship, grief and love. The film score was also breathtaking, and by the end credits, my tear-ducts were exhausted, and I had a huge wad of tissues at my side.

If you haven’t seen the film yet, it takes place in rural Belgium and it’s about two thirteen-year-old boys named Leo and Remi who have a close friendship with each other. They ride their bicycles through the countryside on the way to school, they have inside jokes that they share with each other, and their bond is just so pure and authentic. There was one scene where they are eating together, and Leo jokingly slurps up his spaghetti noodle while placing his hands behind his ears, and Remi follows suit, prompting them and their parents to crack up. Remi is also an oboist in the school music group, and Leo and him crack jokes while Remi rehearses for his oboe recital. Leo also comes to Remi’s recital, which means a lot to Remi because he and Leo have such a special friendship. When Remi played his oboe solo, I broke down crying. It was just such a beautiful piece, and seeing the special connection that Leo and Remi share during that moment Remi is playing showed me how incredibly deep and beautiful their friendship is.

Seeing Leo and Remi share these incredibly natural moments together was so beautiful, which made the rest of the movie very devastating to watch. Leo and Remi’s friendship changes over time as the bullying at school continues and people start to make homophobic and unkind comments about Leo and Remi’s friendship. In one scene, a group of girls ask Leo and Remi if they are a couple, and Leo tells them that they are not. Remi wonders why Leo finds it so problematic that they have this kind of close platonic bond, and he tries to not let it affect his friendship with Leo. But Leo has changed. He has started letting the bullying get to him, so he tries to distance himself from Remi so that people will stop teasing them. However, Remi becomes hurt when he sees Leo is purposely trying to ignore him and distance himself from him, and he attempts to make new friends, but he has such a close bond of trust with Leo that it’s hard for him to feel comfortable making new friends. He even goes to visit Leo when he is playing ice hockey, and Leo tries to ignore him, but Remi wants to continue to support his friend. However, as Leo continues to distance himself, Remi becomes lonely and soon he stops coming to school. One day, on a field trip, the teacher is doing rolecall, and he finds Remi isn’t on the bus. While on the field trip everyone seems to be having a smooth and fun time, but then the chaperones have to get everyone back to the school since there has been an emergency. They head back to the school, and several parents are lined up to meet with their kids. Everyone gets off the bus, but Leo stays on. His mom comes to pick him up, and when Leo asks her to tell him what is going on, she tells him she will tell him when he is off the bus. But Leo insists on knowing what happened, so his mom hesitates then tells him that Remi died. Leo then has to navigate the intense painful grieving process that comes after finding out about Remi’s death.

The scene where Leo meets with Remi’s mother, Sophie, was powerful. Sophie works at a hospital in the neonatal unit, and one day Leo goes to work to visit her because he is carrying a huge feeling of guilt. He feels that he was responsible for Remi’s death, and he wants to let Sophie know that he feels that way. When she approaches him, he tries to tell her this, but he hesitates because he doesn’t know how she will react to his apology. Sophie tells him that she is at work and that he needs to come back another time, but she ends up giving him a ride home after finding out he took the bus to see her. While she is driving him, Leo confesses that he feels responsible for Remi’s suicide. Sophie gets quiet and then starts crying, and then she tells Leo to get out of the car. Leo gets out and runs through the forest. Sophie realizes that Leo might endanger himself because he feels so horrible about what happened, so she runs into the forest to get him back, and she finds him standing in the forest, holding up a large stick to defend himself. He is sobbing and is racked with so much grief and pain, because he regrets ostracizing himself from Remi and he realizes that no amount of guilt is going to get Remi back. Sophie understands this because she is also racked with grief at losing her son, and she embraces Leo in a huge hug.

There was another really sad scene where Sophie and Peter are eating dinner with Leo and his family, and Leo’s brother, Charlie, is talking about his plans to travel with his girlfriend. Peter suddenly starts crying because he is remembering his son, Remi, and Sophie gets up and goes outside because she is grieving, too. It just reminded me that suicide has an impact on loved ones, and even when you think no one will need you when you are around, it’s not true at all and when someone takes their own life, it really hurts their family, friends and people who knew them. It’s why, when Leo is in a group of his classmates and they are remembering Remi, he realizes that these people didn’t really know Remi like he (Leo) did because they were never that close with him. One of them talks about how Remi seemed like a happy person all of the time, but Leo knows about how Remi being ostracized was impacting his mental health, and so he questions the student, like “How do you know Remi was always happy?” And he finally leaves when the other students are sharing their thoughts on Remi because they all feel to Leo like very shallow remembrances. It reminded me of this book I read called The Reading List, and the protagonist has a brother who takes his own life. When she looks on social media, she finds people have written all of these shallow comments about her brother’s mental health and she realizes that these people aren’t offering genuine condolences because they rarely knew how deep his depression was or how hard it was for him to ask for help.

This movie also reminded me of the harm that homophobia has on kids, because I just feel like if the kids were more accepting of Leo and Remi’s friendship, then Leo wouldn’t have felt the need to ostracize himself from Remi. It would easy for me to tell Leo, Oh, haters are gonna hate. Just do you. But kids are still growing and forming their identities in a very cruel world that tells them that they can’t be themselves unless they hide who they are. Also, being ostracized hurts like hell, so it was understandable that Remi was feeling incredibly isolated because his one true friend no longer wants to hang out with him. It was painful to see Leo and Remi being called homophobic slurs and being disrespected. It also showed me though how ideas of manhood can influence kids and have a huge impact on how they view themselves. I used to use the term “toxic masculinity” but as I am learning more about it, I am coming to understand that masculinity isn’t in and of itself toxic. It’s cultural standards about how men should express their masculinity that can be a real problem. Gillette called this out in a commercial that featured boys bullying another boy, boys fighting and their fathers shaking their heads, laughing and joking “Boys will be boys,” and then these grown men catcalling women and engaging in sexual harassment. It then shows what happens when we have these tough conversations around outdated gender norms, and help these boys develop healthy self-esteem. They show these young men intervening when their fellow men try to catcall women and remind them how uncool that is, they show a father encouraging his daughter to affirm she is strong, and one of the dads at the barbeque breaking up a fight between two boys. I understand that the ad got a lot of mixed responses, and Saturday Night Live even parodied the commercial.

However, the first time I saw it, I got goosebumps and thought that Gillette did send a pretty important message about how, when men are forced to conform to stereotypes about what it means to be a man, they face a lot of stress to keep up with these unrealistic expectations, and it can lead to increased physical and mental health issues. It’s why I appreciate shows like Ted Lasso because they allow men to be vulnerable and also show what happens when men have spent years of their life not being allowed to be vulnerable, and how being vulnerable takes courage. Ted is trying to help these young men be the best versions of themselves, and he even starts a group where he and a few other men on the AFC Richmond team talk about their feelings with each other in an honest, judgement-free way. Ted also learns how it’s okay for him to ask for help, too, and that he doesn’t have to handle his panic attacks on his own. At first, Ted thinks it’s no big deal and that he doesn’t need therapy, unlike the young men he coaches on the team. However, when he has a severe panic attack, he realizes that he can’t deal with his panic attacks on his own and that he needs Dr. Fieldstone’s help. At first, it is hard for Ted to open up about his mental health, but when he goes through the intense process and opens up about his childhood and his life, he develops a close bond with Dr. Fieldstone and learns to trust her. Ted struggled to be vulnerable because he didn’t want to seem like he was letting anyone down, but what this show taught me is that it takes courage to admit you are struggling and need help.

The film Close reminded me of the power of friendship, but also of close male friendships. As a woman, I don’t have much insight into male friendships, but seeing these kinds of movies has helped me understand that male friendships can be just as complex and intimate as female friendships. Remi and Leo sleep in the same bed, they ride their bikes together, and they enjoy each other’s company. They just let themselves exist in each other’s company without a hidden agenda. Which is why it was painful to see Leo pushing Remi away. Leo starts doing stuff to distance himself from Remi, like kicking Remi out of his bed and forcing Remi to sleep in his own bed. It’s like the kids at school weren’t allowing Leo and Remi to define friendship in their own unique way. To fit in, Leo had to adhere to a certain idea of what it means to create friendships as a man, and Remi felt like he was losing Leo when Leo started acting differently towards him. It reminded me of this movie I saw called Moonlight, because there are two young men, Chiron and Kevin, who form a close bond with each other. Both of them admit to liking each other, and they kiss on the beach under the moonlight. Kevin is tight with Chiron and stands up for him, but then the school bully is picking on Chiron, and he wants Kevin to participate in the bullying. Kevin doesn’t want to betray Chiron’s trust, but he also doesn’t want the bully to beat him up, so he decides to participate in a cruel game where he has to pick out a young man in a circle to beat up, and he picks Chiron and beats him bloody. The bully gets off scot-free (I think) and Chiron ends up going into class and hitting him over the head with a desk, and Chiron gets arrested. Later on, when he is an adult, Chiron has adopted a tough-guy persona and is buff and has a set of grills, and he deals drugs. He has put on emotional armor so that he doesn’t get bullied like he did when he was younger. However, what breaks him emotionally is when he finally goes to visit his mother at a rehabilitation center where she is recovering from addiction. She admits she treated him poorly and loves him a lot, and they both break down in tears. When Chiron meets up with Kevin, they share a beautiful embrace and a really tender moment. This movie illuminated the beauty of men just being authentic and vulnerable with each other.

Close. Directed by Lukas Dhont. 104 minutes. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide, and brief language.