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Movie Review: Perfect Days

Last week, I watched a really good movie called Perfect Days. I didn’t know much about it, but my mom told me about it and so we watched it as a family. It’s a really touching film, and after watching a very intense film like Killers of the Flower Moon (great film, just couldn’t sleep for a few days after watching it) I needed a film that could let me go to sleep at night without getting nightmares. This film is about Hirayama, a man in Japan who cleans public toilets and gets great satisfaction from his work, even though few people are praising him for it. The film shows Hirayama waking up and spraying his plants with water, looking up at the sky with appreciation, getting his can of cold coffee from the vending machine, and driving to his job as a public toilet cleaner. We don’t know a lot about his personal life, like his past relationships, but seeing him go about his daily life reminded me why I need to continue having a morning routine. I loved Hirayama’s choice of music. Throughout the film, he puts on cassettes and listens to old hits like “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone and “Redondo Beach” by Patti Smith (I am not too familiar with Patti Smith’s music so listening to “Redondo Beach” was my first Patti Smith song.) He finds peace in his daily routine, and he takes his work seriously, regardless of whether people thank him or not. This film reminded me that there is intrinsic satisfaction in doing your best at work, even though it may not get a lot of praise, and it made me want to appreciate people who do these kinds of unseen jobs, such as in maintenance, retail and food service. Hirayama works with Takashi, a young man who doesn’t take his job seriously and is always goofing off with his friend or opening up about his girl problems to Hirayama. But Hirayama continues to take his work seriously. Honestly, I love the way that these public toilets operate, because the doors changed colors to show whether they were vacant or occupied. It was just kind of retro, speaking as someone who hasn’t been into a bathroom stall that changes colors.

I was really worried that Hirayama was going to have to sell his cassettes. As a 90s kid I remember listening to cassettes while my mom drove me to school, but ever since getting an iPod in middle school and then streaming music on YouTube, I had forgotten the lost art of listening to cassettes. And that there is a very specific way you have to take care of them so that the tape in the cassette doesn’t get tangled. Hirayama has a very specific way that he organizes his tapes, and he makes sure they are wound properly. He is also a voracious reader, and he is seen reading a book by William Faulkner. For some reason, I thought about Haruki Murakami’s writings because he sometimes references a lot of American literature and music in his books. I really like the scene where Aya, Takashi’s girlfriend, takes interest in one of Hirayama’s cassettes, a recording of Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach.” One day, Takashi ends up driving Hirayama’s van to drop off Aya somewhere because his motorcycle is not working, and they listen to “Redondo Beach.” Aya falls in love with the song, and when Hirayama isn’t looking, takes the cassette with her. Later on, she returns it, but she doesn’t want to let it go because she really resonates with the song, so Hirayama lets her listen to it one last time. She probably didn’t grow up with cassettes and the kind of music that Hirayama listens to, and the song probably resonated with something personal in her life. I still listen to old hits from when I was a child because it brings back memories for me. There is just something about music that I cannot express in words to people; it allows me to express and feel emotions that I otherwise wouldn’t express in daily life.

This movie for some reason made me think of a movie I watched called Paterson. Paterson is a movie starring Adam Driver as a bus driver named Paterson, who lives in a city called Paterson in New Jersey. He works as a bus driver and is content with the work that he does, and in his spare time he writes poetry and spends time with his wife. Paterson doesn’t have a cell phone because he doesn’t feel he needs one, but there is a scene where his bus breaks down and he has to call for help, but he doesn’t have a cell phone, so he has to borrow someone’s cell phone to make the call. I remember throughout middle and high school I didn’t have a cell phone, so I would always call my parents using my teachers’ landline phones. One time in high school (this was ninth grade. I finally got a flip phone in sophomore year) there was inclement weather, and everyone had to go home, but I didn’t have a cell phone so that I could call my dad and have him pick me up, so I used my friend’s phone to call him. At the time I didn’t think I needed a cell phone, but nowadays it would be hard to not have a cell phone because I am in contact with so many people 24/7. I do look back on my flip phone days with fond memories, and now that I have used my smartphone for the past seven years I think I would need to go back to having more patience when using a flip phone because on a flip phone I had to take my time pushing the buttons while texting, because unlike a smartphone, where I can let my fingers fly across the keyboard and send a text message within six seconds, with the flip phone the numbers and letters would appear on the screen at a more leisurely pace, so I had to be patient and it would take a little longer to send that text message. Perfect Days reminded me of Paterson because both Hirayama and Paterson enjoy the seemingly ordinary and boring aspects of life and they have gratitude for each day. They are both introverted people who do jobs that the public takes for granted; for Hirayama, it is cleaning toilets, and for Paterson it is driving a bus. Both of them also love spending time in nature. Hirayama frequents a park where he eats his lunch; he doesn’t look at his cell phone, but instead enjoys the present moment. He uses an old-fashioned camera to take photos of the trees and he organizes the photos when he gets home. Paterson also likes to spend time in nature, and I think because he isn’t constantly checking his phone, he gets to be fully present in his interactions with people and while spending time in nature. While I appreciate having a smartphone, I am taking steps to be more mindful about how I use it. Anytime I face a stressful situation, the first thing I reach for is my phone and I end up scrolling on YouTube and the news because I want to distract myself from the stress that I feel. I don’t want to sit with my feelings; I want to run away from them, but the more I run away from them, the worse I feel. I think I need to be more like Hirayama and Paterson and live in the present moment.

Perfect Days also reminded me of another movie I saw called The Intern, which stars Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway. Robert de Niro plays Ben, a widower who has hobbies but is looking for greater purpose in life after his wife’s death. While walking down the street, he finds an advertisement from a fashion company calling for applicants ages 60 and older to join their internship program. Ben is hired, but even though people are excited to see him the first day, when he meets his boss, Jules, she doesn’t give him any work to do. Jules isn’t great at working with older people, and most of the people working at the company are Millennials. However, rather than waiting for Jules to give him work, Ben decides to take initiative and starts finding creative ways to help around the office, like helping employees with carrying things or cleaning off a really cluttered area of the office that no one had time to clean. People at the office recognize Ben’s hard work and praise him, and he appreciates the praise, but he is also humble about it because he has been in the workforce for many years, so he knows it’s important to work hard whether you get recognition or not. At a crucial moment, Jules realizes that Ben is indispensable at the company. Ben looks out the window and finds that Jules’ driver is drinking, and so he approaches the driver and encourages him to call in sick. The driver takes Ben’s advice and tells Jules he can’t drive, which means Ben ends up driving her. Jules develops trust in Ben because he has shown that he can take initiative at work with minimal supervision, and he genuinely cares about creating value at the company, especially because several years ago, he started working in the same office that Jules is running her business in. The work he did was different, but he still has a fondness for the office. After watching The Intern and Perfect Days, it made me reflect on my attitude at work. When I first started working at my current company, I was training under a supervisor and I didn’t have any work coming in after finishing my assignments quickly, so I would often read my book. Some of the managers approached me and asked if I needed something to do, and finally after a few weeks, one of them gently told me, “You might not want to be reading, because it looks bad around here” and then she gave me work to do. However, at some point, I had to realize that I needed to learn to take responsibility on my own and not always wait for them to give me stuff to do, especially because they were busy with their own tasks and assignments. Sometimes I would think, Does this work matter even if I’m not receiving recognition for it all the time? But I think that is why chanting and studying the writings of my mentor, the late philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, helped because his writings encourage me to do my best every day. His mentor, Josei Toda, always used to say, “In faith[ our Buddhist practice] do the work of one. At your job, do the work of three.” There is also a quote from a letter in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin where Nichiren, a Buddhist reformer, is telling a follower “Regard your service to your lord as the practice of Lotus Sutra,” (“Reply to a Believer,” The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p. 905), which means that we express actual proof of our Buddhist practice through working hard at our jobs. It can be hard to gain a sense of intrinsic motivation for doing something, especially since most of my life has revolved around receiving external praise, but over time I gained an intrinsic satisfaction whenever I did something at work and realized that my workplace is a place where I can do my absolute best. Of course, I still have challenges and there are definitely days when I lose motivation or don’t know what to do, but I chant the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo every day to do my best. And I am becoming more serious about my writing and my cello playing, because that is what I love to do in my spare time, so even when the work I do seems tedious, I appreciate that I have a stable day job so that I can do what I love in my spare time.

Honestly, this film reminded me to have appreciation for each day. It’s easy for me to be impatient and think, Gosh, why don’t I have the apartment I want? Why don’t I have a boyfriend yet? Why am I so miserable? I tend to be really impatient, and it’s often easy for me to think I will be sad and miserable forever when things don’t go my way. But it’s easy to forget that I am still alive, and that life goes fast, and that I need to enjoy each moment of it so that I don’t lie on my death bed wondering, Geez LOUISE. Where did the time go? It is easy to forget sometimes because I get so caught up in the stress of daily life that I often forget to have gratitude, but I’ve been lately writing down on Post It notes small things that I am grateful for, even if it just being alive. I want to know when I die that I lived the best life possible. Watching a film like Perfect Days reminded me that it’s important to enjoy the ordinary things in life that I often take for granted.

Perfect Days. 2023. Directed by Wim Wenders. Running time: 2 hours and 4 minutes. Rated PG for some language, partial nudity and smoking.

Movie Review: The Zone of Interest

I just finished watching The Zone of Interest. It made my skin crawl by the end. I saw the trailer for the film a few months ago, and because I love A24 films (this one is from A24) I wanted to see it. It also won for Best International Feature and Best Sound at the Academy Awards and so I thought, Wow, this must have been a really powerful film. And it was. I have not read the book by Martin Amis but after watching this movie I want to.

I streamed the film on my laptop, and the first three minutes of the film, I didn’t know if my screen was black on purpose or if there was a technical glitch but then I realized it was on purpose. The film opens with very ominous somber music, and I guess it was to prepare me for the disturbing horrors that I was going to sit through and watch for the next hour and a half. Honestly, I can see why this movie won for Best Sound at the Academy Awards. It’s not like other films I have seen. Most of the films I watch have big loud scores or lots of soundtrack music and are also heavy on dialogue. I got pretty distracted at the beginning, to be honest, but I think when I could sit with the silence throughout this movie, I was able to appreciate the unique way it was filmed. It required patience because there wasn’t a lot going on at first, but as the film gradually went on, my blood started to curdle as it became more evident that this was not going to be a comfortable film to watch. Because the film is focused on the Hoss family’s life and them going about the day-to-day, it was easy for me to forget that these people didn’t actually live normal lives. The seemingly calm blissful shots of Hedwig tending to her garden or her children playing in the pool are unsettling, because against the backdrop of these fun and games is the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The film does not show the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz being killed or gassed on-screen; however, the atrocities and the genocide of these prisoners is very much on-screen in a way. They just show the atrocities through sound. You may not see the atrocities, but you can hear the screaming, the beatings and the other atrocities that the Nazis put the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz through. Even in the seemingly quiet moments, it feels disturbing when you consider the overall theme (aka that this family is raising their kids right next to a concentration camp.) The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is always in the background, and I think that is gave me goosebumps throughout the film. The coldness and apathy with which the Hoss family regards the genocide of the people in Auschwitz haunted me. The film does show Rudolf, who is this Nazi officer, as an everyday human being who, like a lot of people, had a wife and kids who he loved, but also, the film shows that at the end of the day, he and the other Nazis were still responsible for the horrors they committed at Auschwitz, and no amount of seeing him put his kids to bed or eating dinner with his family was going to take away this disturbing fact.

It was also interesting because in many of the films I have watched about the Holocaust, they focus on the men who perpetrated these crimes. However, Hedwig is just as accountable for these atrocities as her husband. In one scene, she is telling her mother that people are now calling her the “queen of Auschwitz.” It reminded me of the film 12 Years a Slave, because Master Epps’s wife inflicted cruelty on the slaves and especially an enslaved woman named Patsy. Epps frequently rapes Patsy, and Mistress Epps frequently makes Patsy a target of her violence. While studying about U.S. slavery, it seemed that the perpetrators of this cruelty were all men, but after watching 12 Years a Slave it showed me that the wives of these slaveowners were just as bad as their husbands in inflicting cruelty on the slaves. In The Zone of Interest, Hedwig finds out that her husband has to move to Germany because he has been promoted to deputy inspector of the concentration camps, and she tells him she can’t move the family because they have such a comfortable life there. Honestly, it was disturbing that this woman wanted to still let her kids live next to a place where fellow humans being were being murdered. Jewish people aren’t the main characters in the film, but they appear whenever they are bringing things to the house and Hedwig and her family act like these people don’t exist. There is one scene that I won’t forget, and it’s when one of the prisoners at Auschwitz brings a bag of clothes that the Jewish people in Auschwitz once wore. Hedwig tries on a fur coat that belonged to a Jewish woman, and she is looking in the mirror at herself and then she finds lipstick in the woman’s coat and tries it on. It seems so banal, so ordinary, seeing this woman trying on clothing, until I remembered that this coat once belonged to another human being who, unlike Hedwig, didn’t get to live and enjoy her life because she was murdered in Auschwitz. The movie showed the horrors of the Holocaust through silence and a lack of dialogue. I watched The Pianist a couple of years ago, and it shows onscreen the violence that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people. The Zone of Interest showed the violence of the Holocaust, but in a different way. I saw silent shots of Auschwitz in the background, while Hedwig and Rudolf act like it’s perfectly normal to live next to a site where people were being gassed and tortured in the cruelest ways. But as the viewer, I know that it’s not normal. In fact, it’s horrific. This film showed me that silence in the case of human rights abuses only perpetuates more violence. It was also disturbing to know that their kids grew up thinking this kind of life was normal (later on, one of the children joins the Hitler Youth.) Children’s brains aren’t fully formed, and so they grow up believing this propaganda and misinformation is the truth. The adults indoctrinate them and in the long run, dehumanize and desensitize these children to this violence, and throughout the film Hedwig and Rudolf go to great lengths to shield their children from these horrors that are happening behind-the-scenes. In one scene, Rudolf goes swimming with his kids, and they are playing in the water, but then Rudolf finds the human remains and ash (I’m guessing they are remains of prisoners at Auschwitz) in the water, and he tells his kids to get out. The women who work for Hedwig and Rudolf have to wash the kids’ bodies of this ash, showing how they didn’t want the kids to learn about the horrors that were happening right next door to them while they continued to play and enjoy their childhood. Over the fence, right next door, there were children in Auschwitz who once lived normal happy lives like Hedwig’s kids but unlike Hedwig’s kids, they never got another chance to experience their childhood because of the horrors they went through in Auschwitz.

I think that is why Jojo Rabbit’s message was hopeful because Jojo overcame his ignorance when he actually got to know Elsa, and he learned that his ideas about Jewish people were misguided. When he saw Elsa’s humanity, he realized he didn’t need to follow Hitler anymore. However, as much as I loved watching Jojo Rabbit, I had to understand that it was a fictional movie that intended to incorporate humor even with its serious subject matter (Taika Waititi plays a cartoonish version of Adolf Hitler), and that a film like The Zone of Interest wasn’t meant to be charming or funny. The Zone of Interest showed the coldness and apathy with which people treated the Holocaust, and there was no happy ending, as the final shot of the film showed. However, there was a moment of hope later on in the film. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but there are several shots of a Polish girl leaving food at the work sites of the Jewish prisoners, which is the rare moment in the film that shows that there were people who cared and wanted to help the prisoners. I remember the director, Jonathan Glazer, mentioned this woman in his acceptance speech, but I didn’t know much about her until I looked her up. The Polish girl was inspired by a real woman who left apples for the prisoners at Auschwitz (this Wikipedia article talks more about her story.) They used a different camera to shoot these scenes with the girl so that it looked like she was glowing in the dark during the film, and during his speech, Glazer mentioned the woman who inspired the girl in the film, Aleksandra Bystron-Kolodziejczyk, “glows in the film as she did in real life.” I think shooting the scenes with girl with a thermographic camera gave her an angelic quality to kind of show that her scenes were the rare moments of humanity and hope in an otherwise matter-of-fact bleak movie about how people dehumanize other people.

And this film reminded me why education about genocide, slavery and other human rights abuses is so important, and that is why during the last scene, which takes place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, my skin crawled with goosebumps. They didn’t even have to say anything at the end for me to know what this film was trying to communicate to me. It communicated to me that we need to study history and have these museums so that people like me can be aware and learn about these horrific crimes, because history repeats itself far too often. My blood ran cold when Rudolf and the other Nazi officers are talking about their plans to build gas chambers and crematoriums, and the cold distance with which they talk about these horrors is beyond horrific. They treat it like it’s their normal everyday job to commit mass genocide. It reminded me of when I watched Killers of the Flower Moon. As someone with only a textbook understanding about Indigenous history, watching the film was chilling and dark in how it showed the cold and calculating nature with which these white people carried out the mass murders of the Osage people. There is a scene in which Ernest tells his uncle, William “Bill” Hale, that he is going to testify against him, and Hale tells him that people are going to forget about the Osage murders and in another scene, he referred to what he was doing to the Osage people as a “death business.” The word “business” sounds transactional, and it reminded me of the dehumanization and desensitization that went into committing these murders. Ernest kept telling Mollie he loved her and that he wanted to be with her and their kids, but he poisoned her and also killed her family members, so it was no surprise that she had to get away from him, no matter how much he wanted to stay married to her. I didn’t know much about the Osage murders before watching the movie, but seeing onscreen the brutal ways these white men carried out the murders made my stomach churn, and it also made me angry, sad and deeply pained. At the end of The Zone of Interest, seeing the display windows with the mass piles of shoes and other remains of the Jewish prisoners chilled my blood and reminded me that studying history in the present is of the utmost importance because forgetting the past only perpetuates this kind of inhumane violence.

The Zone of Interest. 2023. 1 hour and 45 min. Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking.

Movie Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

Disclaimer: The film features a lot of grisly racial violence, and I decided not to shy away from describing it in this review, so I will talk about it at length.

Written on Friday, March 22, 2024

I finally finished watching Killers of the Flower Moon. I definitely had to watch it over a span of weeks, not even because it’s a three-hour-long movie but because it was a really intense and also unsettling movie. I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to watch it, but I saw the trailer and it looked incredible, so I really wanted to see it. Also, it was really empowering to see so many Indigenous actors and actresses on the big screen, especially Lily Gladstone, who won a Golden Globe for her performance as Mollie Burkhart in the film. To be honest, I hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon before seeing this film, so even though I watched the trailer I didn’t know what to expect. And honestly, by the one hour and a half mark of the movie I had to step back and take a break because I was pretty emotionally shaken. But I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and reflected on my reaction, and I realized that I was supposed to feel uncomfortable while watching this movie, because the Osage murders were brutal and horrific in real life, so it would be a huge shame if the movie watered down or sugarcoated the lived horror and trauma that the members of the Osage Nation faced during that time period.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it takes place in the 1920s and William Hale is a wealthy white businessman who has several connections to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. His nephew, Ernest Burkhart, comes down to Oklahoma and works as a chauffeur, and he ends up driving an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle and he falls in love with her. Things seem to be going well, but within the first nine minutes of the film I saw several bodies of murdered Osage people with Mollie listing off the names of those murdered along with the listed cause of death. It was pretty sudden, and I remember nearly crying at the scene where the Osage woman is holding a baby, and a white man suddenly shoots the woman to death. It turns out that Hale is responsible for these murders, and he has Ernest work with him to plan and carry out the murders of several Osage people. Some of the people murdered are Mollie’s own family members, one of them being her sister, Anna. It was pretty hard to watch the scene where everyone is gathered around Anna’s body as the investigators do an autopsy because the autopsy was grisly. It reminded me of this movie I watched called Till, which is a biographical film about the lynching of Emmett Till and how his mother, Mamie, had his body put on full display for people so that they could witness how brutal Emmett’s lynching was. I knew that looking at Emmett’s body was going to be pretty hard to watch, but whenever they showed the body in historical movies about the Civil Rights movement, I would always look away. This movie doesn’t flinch at showing Emmett’s badly mutilated corpse, though. I had to see that though to know why what these men did to Emmett’s body was so horrific. And I think that is why I had to break up watching Killers of the Flower Moon in parts because it was hard to watch the racial violence done to the bodies of the Osage people.

I also was just really broken up about the trauma and pain Mollie went through in her marriage to Ernest. There is a particularly painful scene where he injects an entire bottle of insulin in her body, and she almost dies so she has to be rushed to the hospital. I broke down during that scene, and I was watching the film right before heading to work, so while I was in the office, that image of Mollie being poisoned just sat with me and it was painful. I looked up a photo of Mollie Burkhart, and honestly, I can witness the pain and trauma on her face because she lived through a really horrific time. There is a scene that really shook me, and it’s when Bill and Reta’s house is blown up and the investigators are going through the wreckage and they find their dead bodies (I watched a parent’s guide before seeing the film, so I knew it was going to be a pretty difficult scene to stomach, so I had to close my eyes.) When Ernest comes home and Mollie finds out about Bill and Reta’s murder in the explosion, she lets out a blood-curdling cry of grief and collapses on the stairs. And man, I was shaken and just wanted to cry with her. Grief is such a huge part of this movie because the Osage Nation lost so many people in these brutal murders, and it reminds me that’s why I need to study Indigenous history and be more aware because intergenerational trauma is very real. I am not a scholar in Indigenous Studies but I’m trying to read more books by Native America authors such as Tommy Orange, who wrote a really chilling and beautifully written novel called There, There, and the poetry of Joy Harjo, who wrote She Had Some Horses and Crazy Brave (many of these I didn’t find on my own, so I have to thank the people who recommended these works to me.) For the book club I was in we read a novel by a Cree Canadian author named Michelle Good called Five Little Indians. In the novel the characters are all survivors of the Canadian Indian residential schools, which were boarding schools in Canada that Native Canadian children were forced to attend in the government’s attempt to take them away from the ways and traditions of Indigenous Nations and assimilate them into the dominant white Canadian culture. I wanted to learn more about the residential schools, and so I watched an interview with survivors of these horrific schools, and it was very hard to watch and listen to them discuss these horrors that they went through because I don’t even remember learning about the Canadian residential schools in my history class, but I had to learn about it.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle Killers of the Flower Moon, but then I thought about my junior year of college, when I took a class on African American history. The summer before that, I had read a bunch of movie reviews about Twelve Years a Slave, and everyone talked about how horrific and harrowing the film was, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to stomach this movie. And then we had to watch the film for the class, and I had to go to my professor’s office hours and talk to him about my reservations about watching the movie. He gave me a very matter-of-fact, brutally honest (as it should be) talk about how yes, the film was going to show whippings and beatings of slaves and it was going to be brutal, but at the end of the day, Lupita Nyong’o and Chiwetel Ejiofor weren’t actually getting whipped. At the end of the day, they were actors telling a story. He also told me there was worse stuff to fear than watching a brutal movie about slavery. So, I took his word even though I was still pretty nervous to watch the movie, and it was hard to watch, but somehow, I ended up removing myself emotionally from the film and viewing it from an academic perspective. I watched the film four times, and frankly I don’t think it was great for my mental health, but I ended up writing a few papers on it for the class and hey, the acting was excellent, and everyone’s performance (and the film score) gave me goosebumps. Although I was pretty shook up after watching the baby-faced actor Paul Dano sing a racist song to a bunch of slaves and then proceed to have Chiwetel’s Solomon Northup hung from a tree and left to hang for hours until Benedict Cumberbatch’s “good slaveowner” character comes and rescues him (right before calling him an “exceptional [n-word]” and having him sent off to an even more brutal slaveowner named Master Epps, who Michael Fassbender played ruthlessly.)

I have to hand it to the cast and crew of Killers of the Flower Moon, and Martin Scorsese. This was a really powerful film, and by the end I was pretty emotional and shook, especially with the powwow dancing circle. It kind of symbolized to me that, of course, we’re not going to ever forget or move on from this kind of racial trauma because systemic racism is very much alive and well, but it was a reminder to me that Indigenous people and Indigenous traditions are still alive and well, and so I need to remember and not forget. In one part of the movie, when Ernest and Mollie are gathering up the children from the house explosion, Mollie yells that this is just “like Tulsa,” and I think she was talking about the Tulsa massacre, during which white supremacists murdered several well-off Black people and burned down businesses and homes in the Greenwood district in just a span of two days in 1921. Like I said, once I took the AP US History exam and left my textbook on the desk, all this history I studied flew out my brain. And that is really painful because I can’t just act like this kind of history isn’t important or that I can somehow forget it. Because what I learned from watching a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon is that history is never just a thing of the past. It affects multiple generations of people, and as a writer named Claudine Rankine said in her book Citizen, “the body has memory.” The body keeps score of all these distressing events, and it’s hard to just shake it off and call it a day. Trauma is real for a lot of marginalized BIPOC communities, and it takes years to heal from these wounds. But the fact that we have a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon shows that Hollywood is making progress in listening to the voices of Indigenous peoples and letting them voice their stories for a larger audience so that people can be more aware. And I need to give props to Martin Scorsese and the entire crew because clearly, they must have had to do extensive research, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro had to learn the Osage language as part of the dialogue in the film, which in my humble opinion is pretty incredible.

Movie Review: American Fiction

I heard so many reviews about this movie, and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Even though I saw the trailer several times every time they advertised it, I still hadn’t read much about the movie, so I didn’t know what to expect. I saw it last week a day before the Oscars came on, and man, it was pure brilliance. I think this is why I love satire, because it brings humor to serious subject matter. I remember when I was in college, I took an Introduction to Black Culture class, and we had to watch the Spike Lee movie Bamboozled as part of the class. To be honest, up until then I hadn’t watched many black comedy films so the idea of using humor to approach a very sensitive topics like minstrelsy and racism was pretty foreign to me. If you haven’t seen Bamboozled, it’s about a Black man named Pierre Delacroix who works for a media company and has to deal with a racist white boss who rejects his TV show proposals as not being mainstream enough. Pierre is frustrated that the public doesn’t want to see Black people defy stereotypes in television, and so he decides to hire two homeless Black men off the street to star in a racist minstrel show called Mantan where they don blackface and portray extremely offensive caricatures of Black people that were prevalent during the Jim Crow era. At first the audience is uncomfortable, but then they end up liking the show and it becomes a commercial success, and people in the audience start coming to the show in blackface themselves. There is a scene where one of the actors in the show, Honeycut, goes around the audience asking them if they are “n-words” (I’m using the euphemism because I’m not comfortable using the actual word) and the audience members call themselves the n-word. Mantan ends up quitting the show because he realizes that Delacroix is exploiting him, and he appears one evening not wearing blackface and tells the audience he is sick of being used to portray these offensive stereotypes, and the executives fire him from the show. Honestly, this film blew me away, and it got me to reflect on racism and racist stereotypes and how Spike Lee uses satire to illustrate how this dark part of American history still holds an important legacy. Racism isn’t over, even though people are more aware of it, and history repeats itself, so that’s why I need to keep remembering history so that we don’t repeat the past.

But on to American Fiction. American Fiction is about a Black author named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison who is struggling to get his works published to the masses. Like Pierre Delacroix in Bamboozled, he is highly educated and he publishes works that portray positive representations of Blackness. However, his books, while they receive praise from academics, don’t sell to the public well because the publishers think they aren’t “Black enough,” which is similar to when Pierre’s racist white boss, Dunwitty, dismisses Pierre’s ideas for TV shows as being “too white bread” or “too Cosby Show” because Dunwitty wants Pierre to cater to the public, who doesn’t want positive representations of Black people on TV. Thelonius is determined to stick with his writing style, but when he meets an educated fellow Black author named Sintara Golden, his life changes. He encounters Sintara at a talk she is giving on a bestseller she published, but when he actually hears her reading the book excerpt allowed, he finds out she wrote the book in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and he is appalled because the book portrays Black people in a stereotypical way. However, everyone loved the book. Meanwhile, Thelonius has to deal with problems at home. He goes to visit his sister, Lisa, who is a physician, and while they are eating lunch together, Lisa has a heart attack and dies. While she was alive, Lisa always looked after their mother but now that she is dead, Thelonius has to take care of their mother, who has dementia. Cliff, Thelonius and Lisa’s brother, lives in Arizona and is trying to live his life as a gay man, away from his mom, who didn’t support him being gay. But Thelonius has him come back to help their mom and it puts a strain on their relationship, not to mention that their sister just died, so they have to deal with a lot of grief. Thelonius goes to a bookstore and finds copies of his books haven’t been selling, but he finds that Sintara Golden’s books have been bestsellers. Everywhere he goes, he can’t avoid Sintara, whether her works are in a bookstore or whether she is featured in a magazine. Thelonius meets a Black woman named Coraline, who lives across the street, and they start dating.

He decides that he needs to pay the bills, so he decides one evening to write a satirical novel filled with racial tropes about Black people. Even though Thelonius wrote the book to make fun of American literature’s stereotyping of Black characters, agents and publishers take his book seriously, and he gets a very large cash offer for the book.However, Arthur has Thelonius pose as a convict so that they don’t know his true identity, and he meets a white movie producer who eats up Thelonius’s made-up story about being a convict, having spent a month in jail himself. Throughout the film, Thelonius wrestles with whether he should tell everyone that he wrote the novel or if he should continue going under the pseudoynm “Stagg R. Leigh.” Even when Thelonius changes the book’s name to Fuck so that they don’t go through with the book deal, the agents allow it to go through anyway because the book has gained so much popularity (also, I think the changed title aptly shows how done Thelonius is with these fools, like “Oh my gosh, FUCK. These people drive me nuts.”) Thelonius keeping his identity a secret from people puts a strain on his relationships, especially his relationship with his girlfriend, Coraline. I think it’s interesting that Coraline liked Thelonius’s writing even before his book Fuck. It showed that she was one of the few people who genuinely thought his writing was good. However, Thelonius finds himself in hot water, and so when Coraline gets a copy of Fuck he gets angry with her and insults his own book (she still doesn’t know it’s he who wrote the book) and he also insults her, prompting her to kick him out of her house. Thelonius reflects on himself and realizes that he really loves Coraline and is really sorry he took out his frustration on her. He and his brother, Cliff, reflect on the death of their father, and Cliff says that his dad never knew about him being gay and that was painful. There is an earlier scene where Cliff and Thelonius’s mom enters a facility for patients with dementia, and she is dancing with Cliff and makes a comment about how she is happy that he isn’t gay, and he leaves. Cliff encourages Thelonius to live in a way that is true to himself, and Thelonius decides whether he is going to tell everyone his real identity, but the movie leaves that ending up to interpretation. The white producer, Wiley Valdespino, wants the ending where Thelonius goes up and before he can confess that he was the writer of Fuck, the police come and riddle his body with bullets, and he dies a tragic death. Wiley doesn’t want the ending where Thelonius is honest with the people at the gala or that he apologizes to Coraline for insulting her earlier and they fall back in love. Wiley wants the typical ending where the Black person dies and doesn’t have a happy ending, because tragic endings for Black characters are what make the movie producers big bucks in the studios (and the movie theaters.)

Honestly, this was a really good movie. I really liked Jeffrey Wright in the movie Cadillac Records, and I love Tracee Ellis Ross in the show blackish. Sterling K. Brown is also a good actor; he was in season 3 of a show I love called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I was pretty sad when Lisa dies; losing a loved one is painful, and also Thelonius’s mom was struggling with dementia, so he had to take care of that, and he had to deal with this problem surrounding his book being published. It sounds really challenging to deal with all of that at once. I appreciate that Lorraine accepted Cliff for who he was because for a minute I didn’t think anyone was going to accept Cliff’s sexuality, especially after Cliff’s mom made a not-great remark about his sexuality. This book taught me that authenticity is important and it’s important to have your own voice rather than try to cater to what other people want. But the film also showed me that being authentic and not pandering to mainstream tastes can be challenging because Thelonius was behind on his bills and needed to take care of his mom, so he didn’t really have a choice to turn down the big advance that his publishers offered him for his book. His previous books weren’t selling, and he saw Sintara Golden’s books were selling and so he decided to write a book that would be popular with mainstream audiences, even though he was writing in a way that didn’t feel authentic to him. The film shows how he wrestles with his identity as a writer and being a Black man in a competitive industry.

American Fiction. 2023.

Movie Review: The Holdovers

A couple of days ago, I watched one of the Oscar nominated films with my family. There is a movie directed by Alexander Payne called The Holdovers, and if you haven’t seen it yet I really recommend you see it because it is a really touching and moving story. I had seen Alexander Payne’s other movie, The Descendants, a long time ago. It’s about a father living in Hawaii who is doing his best to raise his two daughters and cope with his wife being in a coma. It was a very moving film. I heard about The Holdovers from watching all of the awards shows this year, and I saw one of the actors in the movie, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, win several awards for her performance in the movie. I saw Da’Vine in one movie called My Name is Dolemite, which stars Eddie Murphy, and she was really good in that role. I can see why she won so many awards this year for her role in The Holdovers, though, because she was really good in the movie. Update since last writing this post: I nearly teared up when Da’Vine won for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars this year. Her speech was also very moving; she said that she thought she had to be someone else, but she realized she just needed to be herself. This was a good reminder for me because I tend to be critical about myself and think, Maybe I should be someone different or change who I am. I still want to grow and develop, but I am learning that I can grow and develop in a way that is true to myself. It made me think of the concept of cherry, plum, peach and damson in Buddhism; each tree has its own unique qualities, and one cannot be like the other. I also love Paul Giamatti, and he was really good in his role in this movie (I remember watching him as a kid when he starred in this funny movie called Big Fat Liar with Frankie Muniz and Amanda Bynes.)

If you haven’t seen The Holdovers, it’s about Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly history teacher at Barton Academy, an all-male boarding school in New England who stays during the school’s winter break to look after five young men who won’t be able to come home during the holidays to see their families. Paul runs a pretty tight ship, and this is evident even before the kids go on vacation. Many of his students got bad grades in his class and are close to failing. However, one of the students, Angus Tully, is the only one who got a B+ in the class. Five kids end up staying behind at the school, and even though Angus is planning to go to St. Kitts with his mom, his mom cancels the plans for him to go with her and he has to end up staying at the school over winter break. I seriously thought that the five kids were going to all stay with Mr. Hunham, but Alexander Payne got me with a plot twist (and your girl here loves a plot twist.) One of the holdovers has a wealthy father, and the father ends up picking up the kids to go on a ski trip with him, which leaves Angus as the only one to stay with Mr. Hunham. Over the course of the film, Paul, Angus and Mary, the chef at the school, get to know each other and find out they have a lot in common with each other even though they have gone through different things in life.

I really loved the scene where Mary, Paul and Angus are at a restaurant and Paul orders cherries jubilee because he sees someone at the other table ordered one, but the waitress tells him they can’t bring cherry jubilee because Angus is under the legal drinking age and cherries jubilee has alcohol in it. Paul tries to argue with her, and Angus is upset at being treated like a little kid, but I love Mary because she just calmly asks the waitress if they have cherries and ice cream, and the waitress gladly brings them cherries and ice cream. They go outside the restaurant and enjoy their own cherries jubilee by pouring alcohol over the cherries and ice cream and lighting it on fire to mimic the flambee style they saw at the restaurant. It was also really touching when Angus got to visit his father. Angus and Paul end up having a lot in common, one being that they both take the same medication.

I really loved Mary’s part in the movie. Mary’s only son, Curtis, was killed in the Vietnam War and she is grieving his death. There is a part in the movie where Paul, Angus and Mary go to a Christmas party held at Lydia’s house (Lydia is on the staff at the school.) They are having fun, and Angus even falls in love with and kisses Lydia’s niece. However, Mary ends up thinking about her son, Curtis, and gets really drunk, and Paul finds out that even though he was in love with Lydia, he finds out at the party that she has a boyfriend already, so Paul suggests that he, Mary and Angus leave the party. Outside of the house, Paul argues with Angus and tells him he thought he was going to go home on break to see his father, and Angus tells him that his father is dead. Mary calls out Paul on his behavior towards Angus, and Paul self-reflects. When Paul changes his relationship with Angus, Angus begins to open up to him and trust him more. Even though Paul got in trouble for taking Angus off campus, I still appreciate that he did that for Angus. While the three of them (Paul, Mary and Angus) are eating Christmas dinner, Paul has them list off any requests or wishes they have, and Angus’s wish is to go off campus to explore the city of Boston. However, Paul knows he will get Angus and himself in trouble if he does that, so he says no, leaving Angus feeling angry and hurt. However, Mary is very straightforward and honest, and so she says Paul should take Angus to the city because that is what he wanted. Angus didn’t get to leave the campus all winter break unlike the other students, so it wouldn’t be fair for him to have to stay while everyone else had fun. However, after they get back from the city, Angus’s mom and stepfather come to the school and let Paul know it wasn’t okay to bring Angus to see his dad. Angus’s dad struggled with mental illness and became very abusive towards Angus’s mom, and so she didn’t want her or Angus to see him again. They threaten to take Angus out of the school, but Paul admits he was the one to propose the trip to Boston and so he gets fired. I was kind of sad that Paul got fired from his teaching position at the school, but I also admire that he was honest and wanted to stick up for Angus.

This movie really taught me that sometimes you find friendships in the most unlikely connections and it’s not always about having a lot of friends but making a few close connections with others where you empathize with the other person’s suffering and genuinely want to help them. You may not always know how those bonds develop, but they do in the most interesting ways. Many people felt sympathy for Mary after she lost her son in the Vietnam War, but through her friendship with Paul and Angus, she found people who could genuinely show up for her and sit with her pain rather than run from it. I have learned through my own experiences losing loved ones that grief is an uncomfortable process, one that brings up a lot of emotions, and it can be uncomfortable to sit with yourself and process that emotional pain. But it really helps to have people around who can show up and just sit or listen without judgment, whether they have experienced your exact situation or not. Angus and Paul can also relate to Mary’s experience with grief because they themselves have experienced loneliness and loss. Angus wasn’t allowed to see his dad for many years and that was a painful experience, and he can’t go home to see his mom. Paul also deals with loneliness, and he is able to sit with Mary’s grief and show up for her, even if it’s just to watch TV together. The three of these people laugh, cry and survive the winter break together, and they develop an incredible bond with one another.

It was pretty painful watching the scene where Angus gets injured while messing around in the gym. He runs down the hall and Paul has to run after him to catch up, and when Paul finally reaches the gym, Angus jumps over some gym equipment when he isn’t supposed to, and it’s not until Angus lets out a severe cry that Paul realizes Angus is badly hurt. The doctors have to fix Angus’s shoulder because it got dislocated when he jumped over the equipment and injured himself. It was pretty painful to watch this scene, to be honest, because I saw Angus in so much pain.

Honestly, if you haven’t seen this movie, I recommend you see it. It is really good. And the trailer is excellent; it’s what got me to watch the movie in the first place.

The Holdovers. 2023. 133 minutes. Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material.

Abbott Elementary, season 3, episode 8 (“Panel”)

Last evening I watched the eighth episode of season 3 of Abbott Elementary. It was pretty good. In this episode, Melissa, Barbara and Jacob have to complete CPR training, but their personal lives get in the way of them focusing on the training. Janine has to get a library program approved and she works with Manny to get it approved, but they end up going through a lot of challenges to get it approved. Gregory and Ava have to sit on an education panel and talk about public schools, and Ava’s sorority sister/ rival, Crystal, is trying to outdo her.

I’m really glad they came back with a season 3 for Abbott Elementary. It’s a good show. It also reminds me that teachers have to do a lot and they work really hard, and so I need to appreciate teachers.

Movie Review: Past Lives

This weekend I tried to cram in more Oscar nominated movies. One of these nominees was the film Past Lives. I love A24 movies so when I saw the trailer I was really excited to see this. At first, I didn’t think I recognized Greta Lee from anything, but then I remembered she was in a sketch on Inside Amy Schumer I watched a long time ago called “Compliments.” In the sketch, a bunch of women have a hard time taking compliments from each other and when one of their friends actually can take a compliment, it makes them feel bad about themselves. I just remember resonating so much with this sketch because whenever people would give me compliments, I didn’t think I deserved them. I’m developing more confidence in myself so I think I am getting better, but I used to be terrible at it. I would say things like, “Oh, no, I’m not that smart” and then people would have to assure me, “No, no, you are smart.” I think eventually they got tired of me putting myself down, and eventually I realized I needed to seek that affirmation from within rather than always relying on it from outside. I really loved Greta in that sketch; she was hilarious.

Anyway, back to the movie Past Lives. It’s about a young woman named Nora and a young man named Hae Sung who reconnect after years spent apart. Nora and Hae Sung grew up in South Korea together and they became very close, but then Nora and her family moved to Canada and her and Hae Sung lost touch. Nora and Hae Sung reconnect over Skype later on in life and they remember the times they shared and catch up, and they fall in love all over again. However, the distance puts a strain on their relationship and Nora says they should stop talking to each other. Nora goes to a writer’s workshop and falls in love with a white guy named Arthur, who is also a writer, and they get married and move to New York City. Hae Sung is dating someone else, but he still loves Nora and thinks about her a lot, so he comes to America to visit her. They reconnect over their past lives together.

Honestly, watching this movie was kind of an emotional experience for me. I didn’t cry, but I still felt this huge emotional pull throughout the film. It kind of resonated with me because I fell in love with one of my friends during my time in college and I think he liked me, too. But we never became a couple, and he ended up with someone else. I reconnected with him again a few years ago, and thought he wasn’t seeing anyone but then he told me he was seeing someone and was getting married. It was a pretty tough time because I wanted to respect him being in a relationship already, but I was still holding onto this idea that he and I were going to be a couple together. I think chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helped because it reminded me to not feel worthless just because I didn’t end up with this person. I didn’t move on right away, but over time I realized that I had goals and dreams I was putting on the backburner for love and that wasn’t okay, so I decided to take my writing dreams more seriously and I think over time I started to just respect that we were friends and nothing more.

My first love

I remember the first time I got in a relationship. We were both in Sarnath, a city in India. To be honest, I wasn’t even going to India to find love. I was going there to study about Buddhism. It was a college program where we took courses in Buddhist studies and learned about Tibetan and Indian history and culture. We had an academic exchange with students from Tasmania and Australia. It wasn’t my first time meeting people from Australia. There was a young woman in my high school who was born and raised in Australia. However, I have never been to Australia or Tasmania, so it was a new experience getting to spend three weeks with people from Australia and Tasmania. The guy I fell in love with was named Tom (I withheld his real name because I still love and respect this man even though he is my ex, and I don’t want him to slap a big fat lawsuit on my behind when he finds out I am writing about him. Thanks for the sunglasses, by the way, Tom.) Tom was a tall, blonde man with scraggly hair and a very relaxed demeanor about him. As someone who is asexual, meaning I don’t experience sexual attraction, it was hard for me to pick up on the kinds of cues he was sending me. But honestly, it wasn’t love at first sight for me. Tom and I just started hanging out in a group and would often participate in group conversations, with very little indication that we were going to one day become a romantic couple. Honestly, I wasn’t even looking for a boyfriend at the time, but it was a sort of inconspicuous benefit that I wasn’t expecting to happen. I had fallen in love with a guy who was in my cello class in college. Over the summer, I agonized over whether he would text me back and often fantasized about us getting together, marrying and having children. However, when we came back from the summer break and talked about our summers, he told me he had spent time with his girlfriend. I was a little taken aback and a little heartbroken, but I moved on with no hard feelings and figured it was for the best that he already had a girlfriend because I wasn’t really ready for a relationship yet and needed to focus on my senior thesis research that year. I’m glad I was chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo at the time because it helped me keep a high life condition even when I was experiencing all this agony and heartbreak over unrequited love.

Anyway, back to Tom. Tom and I had a lot of great conversations during those three weeks in India, and I didn’t start getting closer to him until the last week of the program. We had gotten back from a weekend trip to Raj Gir, Nalanda and Bodh Gaya to visit Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and the night we were leaving to go back to the campus in Sarnath, our bus got stuck in traffic and we ended up hanging out on the bus for two hours. In between chatting it up with the other participants in the program, I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo that we would get home safely. Finally, after two hours, the traffic let up and we were able to go on our merry way back to campus. We didn’t get back until midnight, but the chef at the campus had made us this delicious vegan tortellini soup and bread. Let me tell you, I chowed down on some Tibetan bread during my time on the program, and it was one of the best things I have ever eaten. We hada jar of peanut butter for the American students and a jar of Vegemite for the Australian students. I had made this general assumption that all of the Australian and Tasmanian students loved the Vegemite, but Tom surprisingly said he was never really a fan of Vegemite. Anyway, we inhaled the soup and the bread and then went to bed to get ready for classes the next day. The next day, I found Tom and I spending more time together than usual. We had gone from being acquaintances to being friends, and I’m glad it worked out gradually the way it did because I wasn’t ready to rush into anything, so I’m glad Tom and I got to know each other first before getting into anything serious. Soon, we were getting to be closer than friends. I didn’t know if anyone could feel the palpable romantic chemistry, the rush of oxytocin through both of our bodies, but that chemistry was there, and it was very much alive and well. Tuesday evening, we gushed over our favorite artists, and he led me to the steps outside and we listened to tunes on his iPod. He introduced me to artists I didn’t know, even for a music lover like me, such as The Cops, Buddy Guy and Hilltop Hoods. I didn’t know many Australian musicians before the trip, to be honest. In middle school I discovered Sia’s music, and in college I discovered Iggy Azalea’s music, but that was about it. Tom had me listen to a song by The Cops called “Out of the Fridge/ Into the Fire” and a song by Hilltop Hoods and Sia called “I Love It.” I pretty much fell in love with his playlist. We bopped our bodies and heads together as we jammed to “Super Freak” by Rick James and had a quiet contemplative moment as we listened to “Done Got Old” by Buddy Guy.

Wednesday things started to heat up a little more, and pretty soon the tension was palpable. We had gone into the city with a friend to get henna tattoos, and we were very innocently enjoying each other’s company, and then by Wednesday evening, Tom and I were feeling that chemistry crackle! It was midnight and everyone had gone to bed, but we stayed up and kept talking until the wee hours (how the professors didn’t bust our asses, I have no idea. They kept a pretty tight ship.) We crept downstairs to the lobby area and hid under the desk at the entrance, and then we talked and talked about our childhoods and I just was so vulnerable with him about my life, and he just listened so well. Tom and I peered into each other’s eyes, and then we pressed our henna’d palms against one another. He led me up from the desk and we danced in slow motion in the center of the lobby. Just two individuals in love. Then at approximately 1:00 AM, he took off my glasses, put them in his breast pocket with a small smile, and kissed me. A million electric currents surged through my body at that moment, and I kissed him with even greater intensity. Our lips danced in sync with one another, and I could feel the warmth of his body against mine. Even though I had nary a drop of alcohol in my system, I was so drunk and giddy from all this love and excitement. It really did feel like I was in a fairytale and this man was my knight in shining armor, here to save a hopeless romantic, a damsel in distress. As Barbra Streisand once sang, I was a woman in love, and I was going to do anything to get this man into my world. I remember one evening lying on Tom’s lap. The mosquitoes were buzzing around in the night sky, and one of them hummed in my ear. It was loud and it startled me, so instead of spending quiet time lying in my boo’s lap, I was instead flailing around, swatting this mosquito away. I really do miss the scent of his Bushman bug spray on his tanned beefcake Australian body. I remember his fingers exploring my curly black hair and the kisses we stole from each other’s lips.

I was so drunk on love and excitement that it made our last day together that much more painful. I felt like I was wallowing in grief; I could not stop crying. I didn’t want him out of my embrace for one second. The girls on the trip sang “I’ll Fly Away” as the Australian and Tasmanian students boarded the bus for the rest of their trip. We Americans would leave the next day to go back home. Tom blew me kisses from the bus and I cried even harder. My fellow American participant, Ramy, rubbed my shoulder and gave me a sympathetic smile, like, “It’s ok to feel sad about this.” All I wanted to do that evening was curl into a ball and cry and heave and break down from not being with Tom anymore. I’m glad the girls had me hang out with them the rest of the evening because I was in so much despair at that moment. They asked me about the time Tom and I met, and honestly telling them about Tom and I was healing. Over the course of our final week, I wanted to keep private about my relationship with Tom, but this being my first relationship, I was experiencing so many things at once that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about it. My friend, Grace, at the time, shouted from the rooftops that I was in love with Tom. I should have told her to not tell anyone, but I didn’t. Everyone knew Tom and I were a couple, and they were eating it up. I remember some of my close friends were a little taken aback though that I had gotten in a relationship, and I felt bad because I felt like they weren’t happy that I was with someone. But maybe that were just my own insecurities.

I think at some point in the course of our long-distance relationship, though, Tom and I had to call it quits. After several exchanges through Facebook Messenger (the cheaper option) and international phone calls (the much more expensive option) he stopped responding to my messages around 2018. I was confused and wondered what was going on. This went on for a whole year, and I was stressed but I also didn’t have time to be too stressed because I already had a lot on my plate. I was doing a lot of SGI Buddhist activities, working full-time and taking cello lessons, so agonizing over Tom had become less and less of a priority as time went on. In 2019, I deleted my Facebook. I think this was around the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and also the killings of two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. I was just overwhelmed and needed some time away from the site, so for the second time I deleted my account. I continued to chant about the situation and Tom’s absolute happiness, and after a year he reached out to me via email, noticing I wasn’t on Facebook anymore. He figured I had deleted it due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which I had, among other reasons) and he wanted to check in. By this point I had pretty much moved on and was willing to keep in touch as a friend. However, after a couple more email exchanges, we lost touch for good this time. It was closure. And it ended in the most painless, most respectful way possible, and I have every reason to appreciate that.

Movies I Have Watched So Far

I am gearing up for the Academy Awards, which is coming up this Sunday, so I am trying my best to cram in as many movies as I can before the awards ceremony. To be honest, I haven’t made time to watch all of the movies. I’m still trying to finish up Killers of the Flower Moon, but to be honest, it is really intense and during the first hour and a half I found my stomach getting pretty queasy. But I had to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about how I was feeling after the movie, and I realized that it wasn’t the director’s job to make me feel comfortable. This was a very disturbing movie about the Osage murders, and the murders weren’t pretty, so it would be a pretty big “fuck you” to the Indigenous community if someone watered down the history of the Osage murders. I haven’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon yet unfortunately, but after watching the first half of the movie it reminded me that is why I need to study history, especially Native American history. I remember we studied about it in history class, but that was several years ago and that class flew by pretty quickly, so by the time I graduated I had forgotten most of what I studied. Also, it’s one thing to read a classroom textbook about white settlers’ exploitation of Indigenous peoples, but the thing about movies is that those images stay with you for a pretty long time. My experience watching Killers of the Flower Moon made me think of when I was in my junior year of college, and the summer before school started, I was reading a lot of reviews about the film 12 Years a Slave. Many people said it was harrowing to watch, and so when my professor put the film on the curriculum for the class to watch, my stomach dropped a little, and during office hours I expressed my reservations about watching the film. I ended up watching the movie after he gave me a very no-nonsense reality check about the movie, and I ended up watching it four times because I wanted to study and analyze the movie. Looking back, I think watching it one time would have sufficed considering my sensitivity threshold when it comes to violence in movies, but as distressing as it was to watch Solomon Northrup’s trauma unfold within the first ten minutes of the movie, from the minute those white men got him drunk and had him shackled in chains to the moment he left the plantation after twelve years of being whipped, prodded, beat, strung up in a tree and called the N-word, the acting was very spot-on and the film score was brilliant, beautiful and gave me chills.

A couple of weeks ago, I did watch Maestro, a Netflix movie that actor Bradley Cooper starred in, directed and produced. Honestly, I cried after watching it. At first, I was ambivalent about watching it because it received a lot of push back from people. Bradley Cooper had to put on prosthetics to look like the Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein, and considering the history of Hollywood casting non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters or real-life people in biographical dramas and other movies, I can see why it received some pushback. However, I read somewhere that Leonard Bernstein’s children didn’t mind that Bradley Cooper, who isn’t Jewish, was playing Leonard Bernstein. As someone who loves listening to classical music as much as I love playing it, I really appreciate that they made this movie. I don’t know a lot of movies where classical musicians, conductors or composers are the main characters on the big screen. I haven’t seen Amadeus, but I remember watching TAR with Cate Blanchett and thinking, Oh, man, this is the year for classical music! We’re not just playing on the film score; we’re actually acting! The girl who played Lydia Tar’s love interest in the movie is a real-life cellist named Sophie Kauer, and in general I was just happy to see a film about classical music. During the film Maestro, I remember getting goosebumps when Leonard conducts the orchestra in a performance of “Adagietto” from the composer Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. It was a beautiful performance and it really tugged at my heartstrings. I really loved that scene because it reminded me of when I was in my senior year of high school, and my orchestra played the “Adagietto.” It was honestly the highlight of my senior year because it is such a beautiful piece, and it challenged me as a musician, especially because it is a long piece and requires a lot of control when playing it. The cello part has a lot of whole notes, and the piece has a wide variety of sounds and colors, from the soft to the deeply intense. It is also hard to play in tune, and intonation has always been a pitfall of mine when playing the cello, so it really forced me to have a keener ear when working on the piece. As someone who feels intense physical reactions when I hear music, I remember while playing the piece during rehearsals I would often get teary-eyed because it was such a moving piece. The movie Maestro also reminded me of TAR because both of these conductors were members of the LGBTQ community. Of course, Leonard Bernstein was a real person and Lydia Tar was a fictional character, but it was encouraging to see not just representation of classical musicians on screen, but also classical musicians who identified as LGBTQ. I also saw the actor Gideon Glick from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in Maestro; he plays Tommy, a young man who Leonard has an affair with. In TAR, Lydia finds herself falling in love with a cellist named Olga, which puts a strain on Lydia’s marriage to her wife, Sharon.

I am currently watching The Holdovers with my family. I really wanted to see this movie because Da’Vine Joy Randolph won several awards for her performance in the movie, and I also really loved the trailer. So far it is a really good movie, and it has some heartfelt moments. Over the weekend I watched an animated feature called Nimona, which stars Eugene Lee Yang of Buzzfeed and The Try Guys, actress Chloe Grace Moretz, and Riz Ahmed. It was a really excellent film about a shapeshifter named Nimona who becomes a sidekick to a knight who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Nimona has a sharp wit and also kicks butt. I don’t have the stomach to see Chloe Grace Moretz in her earlier film Kick Ass, but I was at least able to see her kick ass in a PG-rated setting when I watched Nimona. I really resonated with Nimona’s struggle of being different and not feeling like you belong anywhere, and how it can put you in that dark place of despair sometimes because you don’t fit in anywhere and want to be accepted for who you are. I really appreciate the LGBTQ representation in this movie, too.

The Screen Actors Guild Awards 2024

On Saturday, I watched the Screen Actors Guild Awards. I saw it a couple of years ago, and I really loved it, and I didn’t want to miss out this time, especially because I was bummed about missing the Emmys. Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t miss it, because after a historic writers strike last year that lasted from July to November, it was time for me to pay my respects to all the writers, producers and actors that work hard every day to produce the shows I love. Of course, I also watched it because I love seeing the people getting dressed up. And because I love movies and TV. Honestly, it made me wonder what it was like actually being at the awards ceremony. It seems so glamorous to me as an outsider, but I guess this reminds me of when I went to Los Angeles and had this glamorous idea of how it was going to be. I thought I was going to see celebrities just walking around, but I didn’t end up seeing celebrities and that was probably the best thing, because I would have tried to disrupt their day to get an autograph and they probably wouldn’t be too thrilled about that. I remember talking to the Uber driver while we were going through Sunset Boulevard to get to the place I was staying, and I was feeling so intimidated that we were going past all of these famous people’s homes, and he told me that at the end of the day, celebrities are just human beings. And I’m glad he said that, because I didn’t want to keep walking around thinking that Hollywood was this glamorous thing and that actors just came out of the womb reciting lines from memory. I think watching interviews and Variety series like Actors on Actors helped me see that the people who recite these brilliant lines of dialogue and get inside the minds and bodies of these characters are people with families and bills to pay. Of course, I love entertaining my little fantasies about being at these glamorous awards ceremonies now and then, because I enjoy daydreaming.

There were some really powerful moments during the ceremony. Barbra Streisand received the Lifetime Achievement Award and delivered a speech about her love of movies and acting and how important the work of actors is. I haven’t seen many of Barbra Streisand’s movies, and I have only heard a few of her songs, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but hearing her speech reminded me why film is such an important medium. I’ve learned from watching these movies and television shows that film is a really powerful way not just to entertain, but also to gain more insight into the human experience. The human experience is complex and full of emotions: joy, sadness, grief, anger, fear, love, gratitude, the list goes on. I really admire that there are people out there who can convey various human emotions, play different characters, and share stories that resonate with people from all walks of life. I remember doing theater briefly in middle school, but I ended up sticking with orchestra. I wasn’t all that great at it, but I still loved going to plays, musicals, and the cinema and watching other people do it. I think that is why I loved The Fabelmans, because it gets into the mind of a young filmmaker who is trying to chart his own unique path in life amid societal pressures and the pressures of growing up. I was curious about how these people got into filmmaking and how they became so good at what they did, and I feel like the secret to Sammy charting his own path in the movie was that he just kept making and directing films. He didn’t start with a big budget; he was making movies with his high school classmates. He spent hours making the movies and editing the movies, even when things got tough in his life. He managed to create something profound out of his painful experiences.

There were other great parts about the SAG awards. I was really excited when Da’Vine Joy Randolph won for her role in The Holdovers. I haven’t seen it yet, but I really liked the trailer and I love Paul Giamatti’s acting. I was also really happy when Ayo Edebiri, Lily Gladstone and Elizabeth Debicki won awards. Elizabeth Debicki is an incredible actress; she played Princess Diana in a series called The Crown. I also really loved her in the film Widows, where she plays one of the women who has to go on a heist mission after her husband gets killed. I thought Pedro Pascal’s speech was really heartfelt; I don’t think I have the stomach to watch The Last of Us (I’m squeamish about zombies and blood, unfortunately) but it was nice seeing him have a heartfelt conversation with Tan France, who interviewed the winners backstage. I was really happy when Succession won because I just finished watching the show, and it was really good. I didn’t really get into the buzz about Succession until after the show had wrapped up. The only reason I started watching it was because it won several awards and received lots of nominations at the Golden Globes, so I was like, Dang, this show must be really good. For some reason, I got emotional after Succession was over. Maybe it has to do with it being close to my period, or I’m just an emotional mess, but I just got teary-eyed. I keep forgetting that even though it’s a comedy-drama, a satire, a black comedy, it was still in the drama category for a reason. I think because I had my own personal experiences with grief this year that season 4 really knocked me out of the emotional ballpark. I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, but it won quite a few awards, and Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey, Jr. won for Best Actor and Best Supporting Male Actor in the Motion Picture categories. I’m curious about Beef. I don’t know much about it, but Ali Wong and Steven Yeun both got awards last night for the series and it got good reviews.

Honestly, this was a really good ceremony. I loved the conversations between Tan France and the winners of the awards. They were just so delightful and sweet. And the best part is, the actors got to make their speeches without the swear words being bleeped out because it was technically on Netflix and not live TV. If they swore on NBC or ABC, they would be bleeped out. Also, I really love the part where Billie Eilish signed Melissa McCarthy’s face. And Idris Elba. 🙂