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Movie Review: You Hurt My Feelings and Some Personal Thoughts about Failure, Criticism and Self-Worth

Yesterday I watched a movie called You Hurt My Feelings. I really love movies distributed by a film company called A24, and I really loved the trailer, so I was excited to watch this movie. I haven’t seen much of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s other work, to be honest, except for a sketch she did on Inside Amy Schumer called “Last Fuckable Day.” If you haven’t seen that sketch, by the way, it is absolutely hilarious and calls out a lot of ageism and sexism in Hollywood.

You Hurt My Feelings is about an author named Beth who is also a creative writing professor. Her husband, Don, is a therapist who struggles to connect with his patients, and her son, Eliot, works at a weed shop and is having a hard time moving forward in life. He is a writer like his mom but doesn’t believe in his work. Beth has a sister named Sarah who is an interior designer and volunteers with her at a local church by giving away clothing, and Sarah is married to Mark, a struggling actor. Beth is working on a novel and has written several drafts of her manuscript, and she is rightfully proud of herself, and her husband seems to think that her story is good. And on the surface, she is happy in her marriage with Don and they celebrate their anniversary on a happy note. She is encouraging to her students and celebrates their ideas for stories even if they don’t seem that great. But things go downhill when Beth meets with a publisher and the publisher tells her that her manuscript wasn’t that great, and this crushes Beth’s self-esteem. And the ultimate blow for Beth is when she and Sarah are out and about and they run into Mark and Don talking at a department store. Beth overhears Don telling Mark that he doesn’t actually like Beth’s novel, and she runs out of the store in a panic, feeling betrayed that Don lied to her face about liking her book. Sarah tries to calm Beth down, but Beth’s life and marriage is already shattered. The movie shows how Beth tries to regain her self-worth after finding out her husband, whose opinion she valued so highly, doesn’t actually like her book.

The movie shows how difficult it can be to give one’s honest opinion about something because you are worried about hurting the other person, but it can hurt worse when you lie about liking someone’s work and not give them your honest opinion from the get-go. The film explores how rejection and failure impact how the characters see themselves in relation to their work and careers. Mark is in a store with Don and someone approaches him and says he recognized Mark from this movie where he played a pumpkin. Mark is ecstatic that he got recognized for something, but when he asks the guy if he can take a selfie with him, the guy hesitates and they declines, leaving Mark feeling dejected. Mark reveals to Sarah one day that he is uncertain about why he is pursuing acting, and he realizes that he did it because he wanted to become famous. She encourages him to do it because he loves it, not because it brings him fame. I resonated with this because when I first started auditioning for professional orchestras and pursuing a music career, I had this idea that I was going to become famous and make a lot of money and that everyone was going to respect me. But I think as I dug deeper into my Buddhist practice, I saw over time how I based so much of my self-worth on having this prestigious career, so I had to take a step back and really ask myself why I wanted a career in music. I still love to play my cello, but I am realizing that whether I have a prestigious career in music or not, it doesn’t determine my worth as a human being. When I based my self-worth on my success as a musician, I think it became really hard to handle stuff like rejection and disappointment, and over time I had to understand that rejection, disappointment and failure are a part of any career, and that the important thing was to not give up on myself. I think that is why I love reading the Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda’s works because he reminds me that my life is a treasure and that I have inherent worth regardless of whether I am facing success or failure in life. It is still a daily struggle to believe in my worth, but as I continue this journey of awakening to my self-worth, I have become a much stronger person, and I am able to encourage other people who struggle with low self-worth.

The movie also reminded me of another film I saw called The Wife with Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. In the movie, they play a couple named Joan and Joe Castleman who are excited because Joe won the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, as the movie progresses, it is clear that there is a rather sinister backstory to Joe’s success as a writer, namely that his wife wrote most of his work and he didn’t give her credit for it. Joe is not a great character, and he basks in praise while his wife is just seen as, well, his wife. Their son, David, wants to become a writer, too, but when he asks his dad if he read his story, Joe hedges and doesn’t want to share his honest opinion about David’s story. It’s not until they meet at a bar that Joe shares his honest criticism about David’s story, but David wants to hear that he did a good job, not that the story was bad, and he gets angry with his father for not telling him that he did a good job. Joan encourages David because she believes that everyone needs validation, but Joe says that getting external validation won’t help David grow in his writing career, so he is hard on him. This leaves David feeling terrible about himself throughout the movie. In You Hurt My Feelings, after Beth finds out that Don didn’t like her book, she goes through each page of the manuscript saying “Shit for brains” over and over. The novel is based on her childhood and dealing with a lot of verbal abuse from her father, and in real life, Beth’s father would call her “Shit for brains” and “stupid” her whole life, so this made her feel very poorly about herself. Don told Beth for years that he loved her work, especially because she wrote about twenty drafts of the manuscript, but to hear that he actually didn’t like it, after years of lying to her and telling her that he did so that he wouldn’t hurt her feelings, took a blow to her self-worth as a writer.

This reminded me of a scene in The Wife when Joan is having a flashback to her 20s, when she was a student at Smith College in the 1950s and she fell in love with Joe, who was a married professor with kids. Joe has an affair with Joan and loses his job (and also his wife, who divorces him) and they are happy together at first. Joan is an aspiring writer and seeks advice from a famous female writer named Elaine Mozell. Joan thinks Elaine is going to tell her “Yeah, girl, go for your dreams! The sky’s the limit.” But Elaine gives her pessimistic advice on having a career as an author, telling her that her works, like Elaine’s, will end up on shelves unread because it was a male-dominated field where female authors often didn’t get their works recognized or published, so Joan is better off not pursuing a writing career so that she doesn’t have to deal with disappointment or rejection. Joan sees firsthand how rejection can really take a blow to someone’s self-esteem, in this case her husband’s. Joe has Joan read her manuscript, and even though he asks for her feedback, she tells him her honest opinion, that she doesn’t think it is that good. That is not the feedback he wants to hear. He wants her to validate that he is a good writer because he cannot handle the rejection that comes with it, and he gets angry and threatens to divorce her if she doesn’t tell him that he is a great writer. He projects so many of his deepest insecurities onto her at that moment, telling her that if he doesn’t make it as a writer, he is going to have to go back to being a professor at a “second rate college” and making brisket (at first I rolled my eyes and was like, Oh boo-hoo, but then I had to remember that this was the 1950s and women still had to follow these societal expectations that they would stay home and let the men become successful in their careers while they held onto their unfulfilled dreams.)

Honestly, as much as I loathed Joe’s character and how he treated his wife and his son and crushed every last ounce of their writing dreams so that he could fulfill his, I somehow could relate to his struggle with self-worth and this idea that your career defines your worth as a human being and that if you fail or fuck up, it means you are a failure for the rest of your life and you will never recover. I remember when I worked really hard for this one audition for a symphony orchestra, and when I got on the list of substitute cellists, I felt my ego take a boost. But then my sister and dad asked me to do chores, and I had to get off my high horse for a while, and that somehow made me mad, so I lashed out at them and threatened to kill myself (I was a real nut.) I continued to define my worth by having this prestigious career for years after that. I worked at Starbucks and thought that working there instead of playing for the symphony meant that I had failed, and so I felt really ashamed going into these classical music circles and academic circles and telling people I worked at Starbucks because I thought they would see me as less than. I would tell people at work that I was going to be this successful musician and then I auditioned for another professional orchestra, but I got rejected and I just broke down crying. I think holding onto these unrealistic ideas about success and inflated self-worth made it hard for me to do my best where I was, because I was always thinking, When I quit food service, when I get this music career, when I play with these famous musicians, then I will finally feel like I made it and I will finally feel good about myself and I will finally feel worthy. I felt like every time I faced rejection or disappointment, it took a blow to my self-worth and so I constantly vacillated about whether or not I could make it as a musician. There was one time I went to a professor’s house to audition for a spot in his advanced chamber music ensemble, and I was so nervous because I really wanted this person to like me. I wanted him to think highly of me, so I tried to avoid talking about how I was paying off my student loans and working at Starbucks. But I honestly couldn’t B.S. anything. At the end of the day, I was just me and I couldn’t meet this man’s expectations no matter how much I tried to put on airs or be someone I wasn’t. I just wasn’t at the skill level he wanted me to be at, and this really made it hard for me to feel good about myself. But after I chanted about it for a while (key word: a while. It wasn’t overnight) I realized I needed to stop worrying about being rejected by this guy and focus on my efforts to pay off my student loans and do my best work at Starbucks. I also had to appreciate that I was with a really good music teacher and he and I worked very well, and he helped me do a lot of inner transformation, or human revolution, in overcoming my arrogance. I really thought I was hot shit as a musician, but that is because my ego was so huge. I realized that I didn’t need to think less of myself, I just had to change the way I thought about this career. When I actually met with professional musicians, I began to realize that this career wasn’t just about me-me-me. I would still need to learn to work with others and acknowledge that there will always be people with more credentials than me, and that is an opportunity to learn from people. It took a really long time to get to that realization, though, because I had to do a lot of human revolution, or inner transformation, where I developed greater self-worth and started to focus on doing my best and making sincere efforts rather than solely focusing on winning the audition.

It is still a challenge for me to take criticism and feedback well, to be honest. An I think that is why You Hurt My Feelings resonated with me so much because it showed me that it can be really hard to face honest criticism from those closest to us. I still find myself getting defensive or upset when I receive negative feedback, or when I don’t get a response after sending in a job application. No matter how politely the rejection email is worded, the rejection still stings, but then it’s like I have to keep reminding myself to use the rejection as an opportunity to improve and get better. And I really resonated with Beth’s struggle with self-esteem. I grew up with supportive people in my life and I think I felt pretty comfortable in my skin, but then I went to a new school and I really struggled with low self-esteem because I struggled academically, and this was new to me because people always praised me as this smart kid. But my self-esteem took a real hit when they chose some of the smart kids for a Gifted and Talented program, and I wasn’t selected, and it really hurt. It’s silly to be thirty and still thinking about that stuff. It’s like, Get over it, that was twenty years ago! But at that point in my life I really suffered from low self-confidence. I often wrote in my notebook that I was stupid, that I was ugly, that I was worthless, that no one liked me. And the reality is, no one was calling me these things. But I often said those negative things about myself because I wanted people to tell me, No, no, that’s not true. You’re smart, you’re capable. It’s because I didn’t believe those things myself, so I was constantly wanting the people around me to affirm that I was worthy and beautiful and smart. Of course, wanting validation is totally normal and human, but when I started doing a lot of inner work on myself, I realized that it’s important to develop my own confidence. That was the hardest to do for so many years because I wanted people to affirm that I was enough because I didn’t want to believe myself that I was enough. I had really supportive family growing up, so I’m sure it was painful for them to hear me say these awful things about myself because they never called me stupid, ugly or weird. Looking back I also remember being around a lot of kids who also had low self-esteem even though they were talented and smart, but at the time it seemed that everyone else had it together on the surface. This perception of my environment carried on into middle school, high school, college and even after college, and it is still something I have to remind myself is just my perception. Because we are all human and we all struggle with something.

what makes me feel nostalgic?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you feel nostalgic?
View all responses

When I listen to music from the 1990s and early 2000s, I get really nostalgic. In fact, I have been listening to a lot of old Britney Spears and NSYNC as of late, and also a lot of Celine Dion and Seal because that is what I loved as a kid.

Movie Review: Parallel Mothers

I really wanted to watch this movie called Parallel Mothers, which was directed by Pedro Almodovar. I saw his 2007 film Volver, which stars Penelope Cruz, and I was so blown away by the acting that I wanted to watch another movie of his. I remember having a leftover ballot from the 2022 Academy Awards, and Parallel Mothers was on the list of nominations, specifically for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Penelope Cruz.) The movie is pretty intense like Volver, but the acting was incredible. Penelope Cruz is an amazing actress and I really liked Pedro Almodovar’s directing style because it is just so unique. As someone who is trying to improve my Spanish, watching this movie with English subtitles and hearing the dialogue really helped.

The movie takes place in Madrid, Spain and opens with a photo shoot. Janis is a professional photographer, and she is working closely with an archaeologist named Arturo. She is trying to dig deeper into her family history and so she enlists Arturo to help her. Many of her family members were killed during the regime of Nationalist leader Francisco Franco and she wants to uncover what happened to her relatives. Arturo agrees to help her out and they end up hooking up one day. The next scene cuts to when Janis is going into labor and she is in the same room as a young woman named Ana. They talk and find out they share a lot in common even though Janis is in her 40s and Ana is a teenager. The main thing they share is that they are both single and unmarried, but while Janis has no regrets about becoming pregnant and becoming a mom, Ana does have regrets, and we find out why when we meet her mother, Teresa, who is an accomplished actress. After they give birth and are recovering in the hospital, Janis and Ana exchange numbers and promise to stay in touch. Time passes and they are taking care of the babies and navigating the challenges of motherhood. However, when Janis meets with Arturo he tells her that he may not be the biological father of her baby, so Janis takes a paternity test and finds out that she in fact is not the biological mother of her newborn daughter, Cecilia. Meanwhile, Teresa is going on tour, and she has to leave Madrid, leaving Ana on her own for an extended period of time. Ana hears Teresa arguing over the phone about her father leaving Teresa to take care of Ana by herself, and she becomes even more resentful of her mother, which prompts her to leave home and start a new life by herself.

When Janis comes to the cafe that Ana is working at, they reconnect and agree to meet at Janis’s house. When they meet, they get to see Cecilia (Ana still doesn’t know about the paternity test results) and when Janis asks about Ana’s daughter, Anita, Ana tells her that Anita died from crib death and the two of them grieve the loss of Anita. Janis and Ana start to spend more time together as Janis and Arturo start to get farther apart, and they end up sleeping together after getting drunk to Janis Joplin, but Janis still carries a heavy burden from not telling Ana about how she (Janis) isn’t Cecilia’s biological mother. Janis starts to meet up more often with Arturo to talk about the excavation project and Arturo confesses that he separated from his wife after she recovered from cancer so he can be with Janis, but now Janis is not sure where she stands with Arturo and she’s not sure if she’s romantically interested in Ana, either. After asking Janis why she is becoming so distant from her, Janis finally lets Ana see the results of the maternity test and Ana finds out that she is Cecilia’s real mother and Janis’s daughter, Anita, died of crib death. (Long story short, their babies were switched at birth.) Ana walks out on Janis because she feels betrayed that Janis had her daughter and that she had to deal with this painful grief when in reality, her actual daughter was alive and well. However, they somehow end up patching things up and Arturo helps Janis excavate the remains of her family members and everyone has a memorial for them. The movie in a lot of ways reminded me of Volver because both films deal with grief and the consequences of keeping secrets from people. In Volver, two women, Raimunda and Sole, are grieving the loss of their parents in a fire that happened in a village a few years ago. But their neighbor, Agustina, suspects that their mother might actually be alive, and not only that but Agustina’s mom had an affair with Raimunda’s father. Sure enough, when Sole is driving her car home, she finds her mother, Irene, hiding in the trunk, alive and well. Sole, however, decides to not tell Raimunda that her daughter that Irene is still alive, so it’s not surprising that when Raimunda finds out that Irene is alive, she feels really hurt that her mother lied about her death and that Sole kept her mother’s real story from her for years, leaving Raimunda to carry a lot of unprocessed hurt and resentment towards her family for years. It’s not until Irene tells Raimunda everything about what happened to her and her father that Raimunda is able to heal from a lot of deep wounds and trauma that she carried for so many years. It was painful to learn that Raimunda’s father sexually abused her and got her pregnant with Isabella, it really showed me how deeply rooted a lot of this sexual abuse and trauma was in Raimunda and Sole’s family. Not only that, but it was painful for Raimunda at first to learn that her father was having an affair with Agustina’s mother, prompting Irene to set fire to the hut that they were sleeping in. Irene also carried a lot of emotional luggage and she also had not processed it, and the sad part is that she didn’t find out about Raimunda’s father’s sexual abuse until Aunt Paula told her, so Irene carried this guilt and shame for not doing something to stop the abuse and at the same time Raimunda was carrying around a lot of pain and shame in silence, so she wasn’t communicating with her family. Like Raimunda, Janis suffers in silence by keeping it a secret from Ana about their babies being switched, and Ana feels betrayed that Janis kept it a secret from her for so long. At the beginning, it seemed that Ana and Janis were becoming fast friends because they shared so much in common, especially because they were giving birth in the same room together, but they end up having a very complicated relationship later on the more they open up to each other and it really hurts Ana that Janis didn’t tell her that she wasn’t Cecilia’s biological mother and that Ana actually was. Ana doesn’t really have anyone she can lean on or trust. Her mother is away on tour, her father won’t communicate with her, and she opens up to Janis that at a high school party, a guy and her had sex and her classmates filmed in, and two of her male classmates raped her and she got pregnant by one of the guys at the party. Janis seems to empathize with what Ana is going through and especially when they are giving birth, it’s a lonely and painful experience so Ana feels like she doesn’t have to go through her painful labor alone because there is another woman going through it with her. But Janis still hadn’t resolved her situation with Arturo so she wasn’t able to commit to Ana in the way Ana wanted her to. There is a flashback to where Janis is telling Arturo that she is pregnant and Arturo is telling her she doesn’t have to have the baby and reveals that it wouldn’t be the best time to tell his wife that he was having an affair with Janis and got her pregnant, especially because his wife had cancer. However, Janis is in her 40s and has wanted to be a mom for a really long time, so she decides to have the baby and cut off contact with Arturo. But Arturo keeps popping back into Janis’s life, and even though he is her colleague and they are working on a project together, they still were interested in each other and Arturo decides to tell his wife about his affair and separate from her so that he can be with Janis, but by this point Janis and Ana have fallen in love, so Janis really isn’t sure who she truly loves and she doesn’t really want to commit. I think that is where the movie left me hanging, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to be neatly tied up. The ending of Almodovar’s movie Julieta didn’t end neatly, and neither did Volver. I was still left with a lot of burning questions after each film. But I think that is what I love about watching all these different films and getting to read more about them, is because each director has their own unique directing style. I think getting to watch Pedro Almodovar’s films has helped me appreciate his unique approach to making movies. I remember I wasn’t used to Yorgos Lanthimos’s directing style at first; the opening scene of The Lobster features a woman randomly shooting a donkey and killing it, and at first, I found this upsetting and found myself thinking, What the actual fuck?!? That poor donkey wasn’t hurting anybody. But then I got to know the struggles of each character in the film, and I started to feel connected to Colin Farrell’s character in the movie, who struggles to fit in in a society that doesn’t accept being single or unmarried. Seeing how single people were being poorly treated and discriminated against throughout the movie was pretty disturbing, but in real life single people do face a lot of stigma and often feel pressured to get married or have children. Probably not to the extent that there is an actual dystopian society where singles get turned into animals if they don’t find a life partner, but definitely enough to make single people feel like they are broken or incomplete for being themselves. Then I saw Yorgos’ other film, The Favourite, and I started to get slightly more familiar with his directing style, and watching the featurette at the end of the film helped me understand how the director worked with actors, what it was like directing different scenes, how the costume department made all the different clothes, and so many other elements of the movie that I wouldn’t have known based on my own interpretation of the movie alone. The Favourite was a bold film that, like Parallel Mothers, made it a point to explore sexual fluidity and love. At first it seems that Rachel Weisz’s character, Sarah, is the favorite of Queen Anne, and they are in love with each other. But then Emma Stone’s character, Abigail, who is Sarah’s cousin, comes to work as a servant for Queen Anne and she ends up being Queen Anne’s confidant and lover, pushing Sarah to the side. However, the movie shows how Queen Anne is really playing both of these ladies and pitting them against each other, making them compete for her approval and love. Olivia Coleman won an Academy Award for her role as Queen Anne and seriously, she deserved it because her acting was fierce and just so…incredible. Parallel Mothers also challenged my ideas about love and relationships, because Janis wasn’t committed to being with one person, and she was able to explore her feelings for Ana that went deeper than their first meeting in the hospital room. Even after they fight and Janis breaks her heart, Ana continues to be with her. This challenged this idea that I had about relationships, because as someone with very limited romantic relationship experience, it seemed that love and romance was very black and white. You fall in love at first sight, you commit to someone, you get married and you grow old and die together. And when you break up with someone, you just get over the person and find someone new. But watching this movie showed me that relationships are pretty complicated and messy and you never fully disentangle yourself from the person even after separating with them. Arturo continued to come back into Janis’ life even after she told him they needed to stop communicating, and even after Ana left Janis’s house, they still stayed close. Honestly it was really interesting seeing how these relationships were so deeply connected to one another.

One scene I found it hard to get through was the scene where Janis and Ana were giving birth. As someone who has never delivered babies or given birth, it was pretty painful to watch Janis and Ana deliver the babies because they were in so much pain. It reminded me of the episode in this show I am watching called Lessons in Chemistry because at the beginning, Elizabeth Zott gives birth to her daughter, Mad, and she is in so much pain even when they give her an epidural. She imagines her late husband, Calvin, encouraging her through the labor, but when she is actually giving birth, I had to remember that she is still pushing a full-sized human out of her body, and it is painful. I am not ruling out having children, but watching the scenes made me appreciate the women (and also people of other genders who conceive and have children) who go through the process of labor and childbirth, because it doesn’t look easy. I remember as a kid watching this series on Oxygen called Birth Stories, and it showed women going through labor and childbirth. It was fascinating to watch but also as a kid it was pretty intense to witness. I think that is what I appreciate about this movie, Parallel Mothers, because it challenged a lot of my perspective on motherhood. Like, how would I feel if I gave birth in the same room as a woman who I felt an emotional connection with, but it turned out that our babies got switched and I was raising her baby as my own? I am sure it has happened in real life, but it made for a very intriguing and emotionally charged film.

Parallel Mothers. 2021. Thriller/ Drama. Runtime: 2 hours. Rated R for some sexuality.

TV Show Review: Lessons in Chemistry, season 1, episodes 1 and 2

Discretion: In this review I briefly mention a scene of sexual assault that takes place in one of the episodes, so please take care while reading.

Yesterday evening I watched a new show on Apple TV called Lessons in Chemistry, which is the TV adaptation of the novel Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. And honestly, I think the actress Brie Larson was perfect for this role. She just embodied Elizabeth Zott’s mannerisms so well.

The show takes place in 1950s California, and at the beginning of the show Elizabeth Zott is seen hosting a cooking show. She doesn’t smile, but instead works with a serious expression on the show while women in the audience are furiously taking notes. The catchphrase she often uses to end the show are “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.” Elizabeth is intent on shaking up social norms and outmoded ideas about how women should think, act and behave. But we haven’t gotten to that part yet. We find out how she got to the cooking show in the first place. Elizabeth Zott is a lab tech working at a prestigious science institution and she has to put up with sexism and also condescending remarks and gossip from the other women on her team, namely a secretary at the university named Miss Frask. Miss Frask constantly pesters Elizabeth to join the beauty pageant, but she is not interested. Still, Miss Frask has her participate in the pageant anyway. While doing her own research, Elizabeth deals with condescending comments from her male colleagues, who always ask her to make them coffee and clean up after them simply because she is a woman and they see her as nothing more than that. Calvin Evans is an introverted and socially awkward scientist at the university who works by himself, and one day Elizabeth goes into his lab to get the chemical ribose for one of her experiments. Miss Frask sees her through the door when everyone is gone, and the next day she rats out Elizabeth for going into Calvin’s lab and taking the ribose without his permission. He accuses Elizabeth of being arrogant and full of herself, and she retorts by telling him to check himself. At first, they don’t really get that close and remain colleagues.

But one evening during the pageant, that all changes. Miss Frask wants Elizabeth to smile and look pretty for everyone (she names her “Miss Aminos” for the competition) but Elizabeth doesn’t care about hanging with the other girls and instead goes over to one of the scientists who is being teased by his colleagues, and she tells him that he shouldn’t let them pick on him. He laughs and acts like it is no big deal that the other chemists make fun of him and his research, but she takes it seriously, I think because she herself faces being bullied and ostracized all the time. Calvin sees Elizabeth across the room, and he gradually becomes more interested in her because like him, she doesn’t care about being at the pageant. Elizabeth walks out in the middle of the pageant because she is tired of being humiliated by everyone, and Calvin walks out because he has a severe allergic reaction to the perfume that the woman at his table is wearing, and he leaves the pageant. When he bumps into Elizabeth, he accidentally vomits because he is so sick from smelling that perfume, and she takes him home. He apologizes to her for getting upset with her about taking his ribose, but she forgives him and makes him a cup of tea and gets him settled back at home before going home.

One part of this episode I actually really love is seeing Elizabeth cooking herself meals to bring to work during lunchtime. She prepares them with so much care and attention to detail that it looks like a five-star restaurant made the meal, and instead of simply using cups and basic measurements she takes notes on the chemical composition of each ingredient. As I was reading the book and how she describes how she combines her education in chemistry with cooking, I honestly developed a deeper appreciation for cooking and food. And even though I am vegan, I watched how she made the lasagna and it looked delicious. Calvin thinks so, too. When Calvin comes to sit with her (she is sitting by herself), she offers him some lasagna and he declines, saying he has almonds and saltines handy for snacking. But he changes his mind and has a bite of her lasagna, and he is in heaven. Over the course of the next several weeks, she prepares delicious meals and brings them to lunch so Calvin can eat them with her. Meanwhile, Miss Frask gets angry with Elizabeth for walking out of the pageant without telling anyone, and she also digs at Elizabeth for agreeing to work with Calvin in his lab.

Episode 2 opens with a warning that the episode contains a scene of sexual assault. In the book, one of the professors at the university approaches Elizabeth and closes the door of her office and sexually assaults her. Honestly, even though I know what happened because I read the book, it was still incredibly scary and painful to watch. Elizabeth ends up stabbing the professor with her pencil to defend herself. He lives but she gets accused of wrongdoing while he gets off scot-free for what he did, and when she is asked if she regretted stabbing the professor with the pencil, she answers that she only regrets not having more pencils on supply to defend herself. The sexual assault scene is important because before that Calvin closes the door to his office so he and Elizabeth can work in private, and because he is used to keeping the door closed while he is working (his door has several “Do Not Disturb” and “Do Not Enter” signs) and she panics when he closes the door and starts having flashbacks to the professor closing the door and then raping her. She runs out of his office and says that they can’t work together anymore and that doing so was a bad idea. When she gets home at one point, she finds a very fluffy and cute dog eating the vegetable scraps from her trash can, and she takes him in. She calls him Six Thirty because that is the time he wakes her up in the morning (I looked up what breed Six Thirty was and it looks like he is a Goldendoodle.) Elizabeth goes over to Calvin, and she finds him practicing his rowing technique in his garage (like Elizabeth, Calvin lives by himself) and she apologizes for running off when he closed the door but doesn’t tell him the reason why it triggered her because what happened was deeply traumatic and she doesn’t know how he is going to handle knowing what happened to her. But instead of pressuring her to tell him, he doesn’t ask why she ran off and instead promises to respect her boundaries. In the male-dominated environment she worked in, it was really rare to hear a male colleague of hers respect her space and privacy, probably because he himself is a private person who values his own space and boundaries. He then offers to teach Elizabeth some rowing lessons, but she declines because she doesn’t know how to swim, but he insists on teaching her. She tries to row but she is terrified of the water and not having control over the oars and the boat, and they capsize into the lake. They are sitting with Six Thirty on the dock and Calvin confesses to having romantic feelings for Elizabeth but says he understands if she wants to keep their relationship professional. Elizabeth kisses him and they share a sweet kiss. Honestly, I loved seeing the chemistry between these two. They just found love in the purest, most authentic way, and they respect each other as individuals. I am not sure when I will be ready to be in a relationship with someone, but if I find someone I want to be in a relationship with respectful boundaries and where I and the other person are secure in who we are. It will take time, but I need to work on myself first in order to attract someone like that.

Meanwhile, Harriet, Calvin’s neighbor, is at a town hall meeting because the city is going to build a highway through her neighborhood. However, Harriet is Black and she lives at a time when, even with a friendly white neighbor like Calvin, she and the other Black residents of her neighborhood face racial discrimination. She asks him if he can come to support because Calvin is white and she wants him to be there so the court can at least see a white person who is advocating for her and the other residents. However, Calvin doesn’t show up at the town hall meeting, and not just that but he also doesn’t show up to a board meeting with members on the university board, prompting them to cancel the meeting. Instead, Calvin is hanging out with Elizabeth, and they eventually decide to move in together. During Christmas, everyone at the university is going home to spend time with their families, but neither Calvin nor Elizabeth have family they can spend the holidays with, so they decide to work in the lab over the holiday break together. While on the steps in the lobby, they talk about their family history and why neither of them is going home for the holidays. Most of Calvin’s family is dead. Elizabeth’s brother is dead, and she doesn’t speak with her parents (they explain later in the book why she doesn’t speak to her parents much) Calvin has Elizabeth meet him in the cafeteria in a couple hours, and she comes in and finds a table and candles and a delicious turkey that Calvin prepared for her and him. Elizabeth gives Calvin a leash as a present because she knows he loves jogging outside and so he can take Six Thirty on his morning run. Honestly, because I read the book and remembered this part about the leash, I kind of groaned because it was a pretty foreboding moment for the series. When Calvin approaches Harriet, she ignores him and declines to let her help him. She doesn’t have to explain why she is angry and disappointed with him, but he knows that he skipped the meeting and so he apologizes, but she doesn’t forgive him because she really trusted him to be there to support her. Calvin is one of the few white people at the point in the show who Harriet is able to trust to supervise her kids. He doesn’t disrespect her or her family, and listens when she talks with him, so the fact that he missed the meeting really made her lose trust in him because it sent the message that he didn’t care about what she was fighting for.

Elizabeth and Calvin are in bed together, and Calvin proposes that they get married one day, but Elizabeth is very firm about not wanting to get married. Calvin is sad but he decides to respect her decision because he wants her to be happy. Elizabeth’s life changes forever though one day when Calvin and Six Thirty go on their morning run. Calvin has Six Thirty by the leash and they are going outside, running like normal, but then when Calvin is about to cross the street, Six Thirty whimpers and pulls at the leash because he sees a big truck is coming and he warns Calvin to stop, but when Calvin tugs at the leash, it breaks and the minute Calvin crosses the street, a big truck zooms through and hits him, killing him in an instant while Six Thirty is trying to process the sudden shock and how to tell Elizabeth what happened. I almost teared up, even though I had read the book and knew what happened. Honestly this scene is why I had a hard time getting through the first part of the book. The minute I read about Calvin’s sudden death, I cried and thought, I need to stop reading because this is so painful and shocking. But my parents told me to keep reading because the plot gets better even though it was indeed a sad and shocking part. And I really appreciate they did, because once I got through that horrific scene, which I was still reeling from because I wanted Calvin to live, I couldn’t put the rest of the book down and devoured it.

I am really looking forward to watching the next episode. It will be emotionally difficult to get through, but I want to know what happens so I am determined to finish the show. Also, Brie Larson is an amazing actress. I saw her in this drama film called Room, which was adapted from a novel by Irish author Emma Donoghue. I don’t know if I can see the movie again because it was pretty rough and like the book, it is pretty much engrained in my memory because it was so harrowing to read about and witness the hell that the two characters went through, but Brie Larson played the mom in the film so well and along with actor Jacob Tremblay, who played her son, I was emotionally dehydrated after watching the movie. I was a mess of tears and snot and the film shook me to my core.

Movie Review: Being the Ricardos

Yesterday I watched a really good movie that is on Amazon Prime called Being the Ricardos. It stars Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, who was Lucy’s husband and co-star of the hit show I Love Lucy. The movie takes place during a specific point in Lucy’s life in the 1950s, when Lucy faced allegations of being a member of the Communist Party, and the week leading up to the allegations. The film’s dialogue is incredibly smart and quick, and so watching this movie a second time helped me better understand points in the dialogue I didn’t get at first. Like so many people, I really loved I Love Lucy as a kid and watched it on TV Land a lot. One of my favorites is the “Vitameatavegamin” episode where Lucy gets drunk from tasting several spoonfuls of Vitameatavegamin while filming a commercial for the product. I really didn’t know much about Lucy and Desi’s personal life, though, to be honest. I only remembered them as Lucy and Ricky, but this movie, whose executive producers are Lucy and Ricky’s two children, Desi and Lucy, really showed me a side of their life that was really interesting.

The movie also shows the thought and detail that went into even writing the script for each episode, and as someone who doesn’t work in television or screenwriting seeing this process gave me a deeper appreciation for a lot of the work that goes into writing a show. During a table read, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, the writers of the show, go over the script with Lucy and Desi. However, Lucy interrupts to find weaknesses in the script and what could be better about certain scenes. In one particular scene, Lucy is supposed to be setting the dinner table while Ricky Ricardo (Desi) is supposed to walk in and put his hand over her eyes, and she is supposed to guess who he is. She lists off eight different names of men before finding out that the person behind her is Ricky, but Lucy questions during the table read why Lucy even needs to guess eight different men when she clearly knows it is Desi. She also wants to add in a bit where she arranges and cuts flowers for a vase, but Jess Oppenheimer, the producer, doesn’t think they will have time for that part so he insists that they cut it and move on. When meeting with the executives at CBS, Desi and Lucy also made a decision that the executives thought was too controversial: letting Lucy be pregnant on the show. The reactions that Madelyn, Jess and Bob give Lucy and Desi when they announce they are expecting their second child are not super joyful, because they think that if viewers watch Lucy’s pregnancy it will be too controversial and they won’t want to watch the show anymore. Jess also informs Lucy and Desi that they can’t even use the word “pregnant” on the show, so Desi writes a telegram to the head of Phillip Morris, a tobacco company that sponsors the show, to allow Lucy’s pregnancy to be written into the show. I remember watching the show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel one time and on one of the episodes in season 2 she is pulled off stage for using the word “pregnancy” in one of her acts. I think I still see a lot of this today, where if an actress is pregnant, the showrunners will have to cover up her pregnancy especially if the character they play isn’t pregnant. In season 3 of the show Brooklyn 99, Amy Santiago has to play a pregnant prison inmate and honestly, I thought she was wearing a prosthetic belly, but in reality, Melissa Fumero was actually pregnant. I remember Gina Linetti, another character on the show, was also pregnant in one of the episodes, and Chelsea Peretti, who plays Gina, was pregnant in real life. This is a topic I would love to look into more though, because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me that the character would be pregnant, but to the people running the show and the actors, it requires making a lot of decisions about how to write the pregnancy into the show or hide it.

Another important point they talk about in Being the Ricardos is the character of Ethel Mertz. Vivian Vance, the actress who plays Ethel, is very physically attractive, but her character is supposed to be frumpy and unappealing compared to Lucy’s curvy attractive character. Towards the beginning, Vivian is seen wearing a beautiful cocktail dress to wear during the dinner party scene of the show, and Lucy confronts her about it, telling her that Ethel isn’t supposed to look attractive in the show, implying that she should wear something less flattering. Vivian is also on a diet and is trying to lose weight, and Madelyn brings her French toast, sausages and orange juice, but Vivian politely turns breakfast down because she is on a diet, prompting Madelyn to make a comment about her weight loss. When Vivian asks Madelyn who sent her to brin her breakfast, Madelyn lies and tells her it was Tino, the waiter, but Vivian doesn’t believe her. Lucy comes to Vivian’s dressing room and apologizes for the way she has been treating her on the show, and Vivian asks her if it was really her who sent Madelyn to get her breakfast (the show writers don’t normally bring breakfast to the actors) and send the message that she needs to put on weight for Ethel’s character. Lucy tries to reason with Vivian that the diet she is on is unhealthy, but Vivian tells her that she needs to basically back off because this is my diet and my life and just because the writers made the character look a certain way doesn’t mean I need to do that. This puts a strain on Vivian and Lucy’s friendship, especially when Lucy tells Vivian that they need to make Ethel overweight and frumpy because most American women look like Ethel, not like Lucy, who is thin and attractive, so most women will see themselves in Ethel. Lucy later apologizes after Vivian tells Lucy that the comment she made about Vivian’s body was hurtful, but this scene still stuck with me because it showed how there was still a lot of stigma when it came to talking about body image and weight loss. It also showed how frustrating it must have been for Vivian to play Ethel because jokes are constantly being made at the expense of Ethel and that really hurts Vivian.

This movie made me think a lot about the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which was also produced by Amazon. Throughout the show, Miriam “Midge” Maisel, challenges a lot of deeply rooted ideas about womanhood, and she faces a lot of discrimination for being a female comic. At first she was going to see her ex-husband, Joel, do stand-up comedy and stay in the background while she brought the homemade brisket. However, after he cheats on her, she goes to the Gaslight club and drunkenly does her own standup about how her husband cheated on her and how she stayed in this marriage and realized how deeply unhappy and unfulfilled she was. Comedy provides her an outlet to express her authentic self at a time when comedy was dominated by white men, and with the help of her manager, Susie, she makes serious breakthroughs in the world of comedy and learns so much about the profession along the way. She faces a lot of challenges, including sexual harassment, erratic scheduling, bad relationships, divorce, and disapproval from her family for wanting to go after her dreams. But seeing how she grows and develops so much confidence even with all the rejection and criticism she faces really encouraged me. There is one episode in season 1, where she meets a famous female comedian named Sophie Lennon, who plays a character called “Sophie from Queens.” Sophie from Queens is from a low-income background and is overweight and boisterous, and Midge thinks that Sophie is really the character she is playing and starts to think this woman could be her mentor because she is so down-to-earth. But when Sophie has Midge come to her house, Midge is surprised to find that Sophie lives an affluent life of luxury and is also not the very warm and kind-hearted person that she plays onstage. Instead, Sophie is incredibly condescending to Midge, and even makes fun of her for wanting to see the kitchen of her house, which Sophie hadn’t set foot in because Sophie has lots of butlers to bring her food and things. Sophie also admits that she wears a fat suit to play Sophie From Queens. When Sophie asks Midge what her gimmick is, Midge is confused because she just shows up as herself when performing and seems okay with it. However, Sophie, being of a different generation, tells her that men want to fuck her, they don’t want to laugh with her, and that she needs to put on a gimmick just as she had done as Sophie from Queens in order to make it in the comedy world. I thought Sophie was going to be a mentor and role model to Midge because they were both female comedians trying to survive in a cutthroat male-dominated industry, but instead Sophie crushes Midge’s dreams and tells her to give up on comedy. Instead of letting that discourage her, Midge decides to still be true to herself and even calls out Sophie in one of her acts for being a fraud. Throughout the show, Sophie does everything she can to bring Midge down as revenge for Midge telling everyone that Sophie was a phony and wore a fat suit to play her role, but Midge refuses to back down and she ends up following her own path as a comic.

Being the Ricardos also kind of reminded me of a movie I saw called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Throughout Being the Ricardos, Lucy is adamant about putting in scenes that the producer doesn’t want and even at 2:00 AM calls Vivian and Bill, who play Ethel and Fred in the show, to redo one of the scenes. They think she is being ridiculous for doing this, but Lucy insists that they put her changes in the script and that Vivian and Bill redo the dinner scene. She tells them that she wanted to do this show so that it would help bring her and her husband closer because he was always performing at the club (Desi was a bandleader) or playing cards on the boat, and he was secretly cheating on her with other women. Bill tells her that Desi is acting this way because he feels threatened that Lucy is making so many of the creative decisions. It was really groundbreaking for Lucy to make so many creative decisions and run the show because this was during the 1950s, where ideas of womanhood still weren’t progressive. Lucy tells Bill that she has to deal with male egos constantly, and that she is still committed to her marriage to Desi even though deep down she was really unhappy with her marriage. Lucy’s desire to make a lot of the creative decisions on the show reminded me of Ma Rainey (played by Viola Davis.) In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Ma Rainey insists on having full and complete control of her creative process and fights the white executives of the recording studio to death when they attempt to exploit her voice for profit. She knows that as a Black woman, the white recording executives wouldn’t give her credit and would make her produce her music without her or her band getting any royalties or pay. She knows her worth and she insists on getting the respect she deserves. She comes in late to recording sessions, and it’s a summer day in Chicago, so the recording studio was hot with no A/C, so she demands that someone get her a Coca-Cola from the store. When she gets what she wants, she records the music for them. I think because she had the confidence to believe in herself, she could also stand up for her nephew when Levy, one of the bandmembers, picked on him for having a speech impediment. They have to record her nephew’s introduction several times, and the executives nearly give up, but Ma insists they re-record it several times until he gets the introduction right. When he finally does, they are blown away and her nephew also regains his confidence that he was able to confidently record the introduction. This reminded me of in Being the Ricardos when Lucy insisted they do the scenes over and over even when the producer and crew wanted to move on and even when her writing staff was sick and tired of her and Desi making so many changes to the scripts. Lucy knew that if she didn’t speak up, that she was going to lose her power and was going to let Jess, the producer, control all of the creative decisions for the show, and she wanted to have a say in the script. She also faced a really difficult time in her career, when RKO dropped her acting contract and refused to give her movie work, and instead gave her gigs in radio. She felt that radio was not where she was supposed to be, and it wasn’t until some producers from television came and asked her to be in a TV show because they liked her distinct voice and style of humor that she was able to chart that new path for herself. Even still, she knew that she was dealing with a bunch of men who wanted to exploit her talent for profit, so she insisted on having artistic control. When meeting with the TV executives, Lucy agrees to do the show but insists on her real-life husband, Desi, playing her husband in the show. The executives are extremely reluctant to let Lucy, a white American woman, let her husband, who is Cuban, to play her husband on screen. I had to remember that this movie took place before the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia court decision, which struck down laws that prohibited interracial marriage (if you haven’t seen the movie Loving, which shows how this case went to the court, it is incredible), and so these white male executives thought that they would get in trouble for showing an interracial couple on the air. However, Lucy pushes back, reminding them that yes, Desi is from Cuba, but he fought in the U.S. Army and has strong ties to America. This reminded me of how the music executives tried to tell Ma Rainey what to do, but she refused to let them exploit her music or her in any way, shape or form. If she hadn’t pushed back, she would have suffered the same fate as one of the members of her band, Levy. Levy wrote his own music and thought that these white recording executives were going to pay him fairly for his music, but the white executives ended up stealing his music without giving him credit even when they lied and told him it wasn’t the music they were looking for. This reminded me how Black musicians faced a serious uphill battle in the music industry to be fairly compensated and respected as human beings.

Movie Review: Luca

Yesterday I watched another really good movie called Luca. I had heard of Turning Red because there were billboards everywhere, and I also saw a lot of publicity for Elemental, both of which, like Luca, are Pixar movies. However, I had not heard a lot about Luca. Like Elemental, this movie managed to make me tear up because the story is really sweet and heartfelt. It takes place in Portorosso, a seaside town on the Italian Riviera, and it’s about a young sea monster named Luca, who is tending to his herd of fish and also trying to make his parents happy. That all changes when he finds a mysterious alarm clock in the water and starts to wonder who left it there. Luca lives with his parents and grandmother and they want to make sure that he is safe and doesn’t go above water because it is dangerous for sea monsters. Another sea monster named Alberto convinces Luca to go above water with him, and when they do they turn into human beings so that no one knows they are really sea monsters. At first Luca is not sure because his parents told him to not go anywhere above water because it is dangerous, but Alberto, who is extremely overconfident, tells him it’s fine and Luca ends up spending a lot of time in Alberto’s treehouse. Alberto shares that one of his dreams is to get a Vespa, which is a very fancy and expensive motorbike. He invents a bicycle for them to ride but as they roll down the hills and roads the bicycle breaks and they fly off the bicycle into the sea. Luca is very nervous about riding the bicycle down a hill, but Alberto tells him to repeat this saying in his head every time he doubts himself, “Silenzio, Bruno!”, so that he can silence the negative voices and self-doubt in his head.

He decides to have he and Luca go to the town of Portorosso and be amongst the human residents there, and they end up meeting a young girl named Guilia, who lives with her father, Massimo, who is a fisherman, and their cat, Machiavelli. However, they face stiff competition from Ercole Visconti, who is the town bully who rides a Vespa bike and makes fun of Guilia and her friends. Alberto tells Giulia that they want to train for the competition so they can get the Vespa, and Giulia reluctantly agrees. Alberto and Luca face a very sticky situation, and when Luca goes home late one evening after spending the day with Luca, his mom tells him to not go above water ever again. However, Luca breaks the rules and his mom and dad have to go above water to run around the town looking all over for him. Even though Alberto and Luca pass as human beings, if they get water on them, then they turn back into sea monsters, so they do their best to avoid getting into any pools or getting splashed by water. Also, Massimo is a fisherman and when Luca and Alberto arrive at Giulia’s house, they find Massimo chopping fish heads and throwing them in a bucket, so this makes them extra on-edge about revealing that they are sea monsters. Giulia lets them stay with her in her tree house and Giulia trains Alberto to eat lots of pasta and the three of them train by riding their bicycle down and up hilly terrain. Ercole brags about how he is going to win the competition and makes fun of Giulia because she got sick last time during the competition, and it was humiliating for her. But Alberto doesn’t back down and challenges Ercole to a bet on him, Giulia and Luca winning the competition.

Alberto and Luca find their friendship tested when Luca starts to become closer to Giulia. Giulia is an avid reader who goes to school, and Luca, who wants to know more about the world, asks her questions about her classes and asks to read her textbooks. They have very deep discussions about astronomy, and Luca decides he wants to go to school with Giulia but when he shares his dream with Alberto, Alberto gets angry at him and tells him that sea monsters aren’t allowed to go to school with people and that he is risking his life by wanting to go to school. One day, Luca and Alberto get in a fight about this, and Giulia asks them why they aren’t talking to each other, and Alberto decides to get in the water and show Giulia that he is really a sea monster. Giulia is scared and Luca, who is still in human form, decides to rat Alberto out when Ercole is looking for them, and Ercole throws spears at Alberto. Alberto leaves, feeling that Luca betrayed him. When they get home, Giulia also finds out that Luca is also a sea monster, and she tells him he needs to leave even though she doesn’t want him to leave because she knows her dad would kill him for being a sea monster. Luca and Alberto did their best to hide the fact that they were sea monsters, but this was really challenging because they were on Massimo’s boat and they were right on the water so they risked getting splashed and revealing they were sea monsters. However, Massimo gains trust in them because they help him catch a huge load of fish and so he trusts them to help him with catching fish frequently. This trust could easily be broken, though, if they accidentally gave away that they were sea monsters, so that’s why Giulia has to turn him away. When Luca tries to apologize to Alberto for ratting him out, Alberto tells him to go away. Alberto feels like he can no longer trust anyone, and this is especially hard for him because his father left him and Alberto was counting the days when he would come back to him, but he hasn’t come back. Luca, however, is determined to still compete in the bicycle race even though Alberto doesn’t think they have a chance anymore now that people know they are sea monsters.

When Giulia is about to start the race, she finds Luca in a bulky underwater suit. She tells him that he can’t compete in the race because she is worried he would turn into a sea monster when he gets in the water, but he is determined to do this. They eat a lot of pasta after swimming in the water, then they have to ride their bicycles up and down several roads through Portorosso. Luca’s parents are still looking for him, and when they find him riding on his bicycle they try to get him back, but he is riding so fast that they cannot catch up with him. Unfortunately, it is a rainy day and there is no way that Luca can dodge the rain. At first he pauses because he doesn’t want to become a sea monster, but he realizes he needs to finish the race in order to win, so he braves the rain and turns back into a sea monster. Everyone is scared and runs away from him, and Ercole tries to kill him with spears, but Giulia throws Ercole off of his bike and they end up making it to the finish line. Everyone at first backs away from Luca and Alberto because they are sea monsters, and Ercole is determined to have them disqualified, but the judge sees that Alberto, Giulia and Luca made it to the finish line, so they end up winning the race. Ercole is angry and tries to get his friends to gang up on Luca and his friends, but his friends decide to not do that, and instead the town celebrates Luca, Alberto and Giulia for winning. Luca ends up going to school with Giulia and Alberto ends up staying behind with Massimo to help him out because Massimo has become a father to him when his own dad left him. Luca’s parents see that he has a bright future ahead of him and so they let him go to school and assure him that he can still visit them and that they will always love him no matter if he is a sea monster or a human.

This movie has a really good message about not giving up when accomplishing your dreams and not letting fear prevent you from going for what you want. Luca doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle or walk like a human being at first, and learning how to do these things is frustrating at times, but when he finally learns how to do them, he gains confidence in himself. Learning something new takes patience and perseverance, and it’s not something that one can accomplish overnight. Alberto’s confidence inspired Luca to believe in himself, and when Alberto didn’t think he could enter the race or get the Vespa, Luca helped him regain his confidence again and decides not to give up. That was really encouraging because a lot of times when I encounter failure, rejection or disappointment, I tend to feel resigned and think, Maybe I should give up. But keeping at it one day at a time has kept me from becoming burned out or giving up too quickly, and over time I have learned that success takes a lot of perseverance and effort rather than just talent or luck. I remember having an orchestra audition several years ago, and I was extremely nervous about auditioning even after practicing for hours and hours. The day of the competition I wanted to give up because I was so burned out and was doubting myself, but I chanted about it and even when I was crying and scared, I did my best when playing my cello for the judges. I was happy to get on the list of substitute cellists, but I think looking back, it was about so much more than just getting the section cello position. In order to even enter the competition, I had to win over this voice in my head that was telling me I wasn’t good enough to audition, to not even bother trying. This journey I have been on in my creative work is teaching me that winning always begins with winning over my negativity, which often manifests as self-doubt. I also read this really good chapter in The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by Daisaku Ikeda, and in one of the chapters he talks about appreciating one’s uniqueness, and he shares in the chapter that no one has perfect confidence at the beginning and that we should appreciate ourselves for who we are and not worry too much about how we measure up to others. I tend to forget this a lot, but it is something I need to remind myself any time I face a challenge or don’t think I can accomplish a goal I am working towards. I have also found that when I win over my doubts and insecurities, I can encourage others who may be dealing with similar challenges.

The animation in Luca was absolutely beautiful, and I definitely found myself crying a little towards the end. And the music was very fun to listen to. Watching this movie made me want to travel to Italy one day, and seeing all the pasta dishes that the characters were eating in the movie made me very hungry haha. 🙂

Luca. 2021. 1 hr 35 min. Directed by Enrico Casarosa. Rated PG for rude humor, language, some thematic elements and brief violence.

Movie Review: Mid 90s

I just finished watching a really excellent movie called mid 90s. I really love A24’s movies so this one caught my eye and the trailer looked really good. The movie takes place in 1990s Los Angeles, and it was directed and written by actor Jonah Hill. While not all of it is based in her personal experience, one of his experiences growing up was listening to ’90s hip hop, which is heavily featured on the film soundtrack for each of the scenes. It was really interesting to watch this movie because nowadays it is so hard to imagine a time before we had smartphones. In the movie, people talk face-to-face, not a single person is looking down at a cell phone, of course because this was the 1990s, way before smartphones came out. But it just made me think how social interactions have changed so much since the introduction of smartphones. That was just a little detail I thought of while watching this movie.

The movie opens with Stevie (Sunny Suljic) being beaten up by his older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges) and then going into his brother’s bedroom and looking at his albums and taking notes. The scene cuts to him eating at a restaurant with Ian and their mom, Dabney. Stevie gives Ian a CD as a gift, but Ian puts it down without thanking him or looking at the gift. They have a very complicated relationship because Ian is older and constantly beats up Stevie. Stevie doesn’t have many friends, but all that changes when he looks across the street and finds a group of guys skateboarding and cussing out a storeowner. Intrigued, Stevie goes to the local skateboard shop where they hang out. At first, they aren’t keen on him since he is so young and shy, and one of the guys in the group, Ruben, gives Stevie hate, making him feel bad for saying thank you and just being himself. A lot of Ruben’s bullying gets to Stevie, and he starts to develop a hard shell, and starts drinking and smoking. He sneaks out to hang with the guys and skateboard and this worries his mom and his brother, Ian, who is trying to protect him. Ian, though, isn’t all that much of a role model himself. When he tries to get a new skateboard, Ian has Stevie sneak into his mom’s bedroom and steal $80 from her drawer, and Stevie refuses to take accountability for what he did, putting the blame on Ian and prompting Ian to beat him up. Stevie starts to give into peer pressure, and there is one scene where he goes to a party and hooks up with a woman who is much older than him and brags to his friends afterwards about losing his virginity. Stevie also starts to become aggressive towards his mom and Ian, and after he gets drunk and stoned at the party Ian yells at him and Stevie beats him up. When his mother takes him to his friends to say goodbye because she is not coming back after all the shenanigans he got up to, they get in the car, and he screams “Fuck you” over and over again to her. Ray, who is the level-headed one in the group, starts to notice that Stevie’s behavior has changed, and tries to protect Stevie and remind him that he doesn’t have to be anyone other than himself to be in the group.

This movie shows how important it is to be true to yourself and to follow your dreams even when your circumstances or people make you feel like you can’t accomplish them. One of the people in the skateboarding group, Fourth Grade, wants to be a filmmaker. However, Fuckshit and Ruben, the other guys in the group, make him feel bad and make fun of his dreams of making movies. This really affects Fourth Grade’s self-esteem and he gives into everyone’s negativity and says that he should give up on his dream. However, he continues to make films, and in one scene where everyone is skating in the park, Fourth Grade films Ray and Fuckshit talking to a guy about their skateboarding and their dreams and it’s three people just talking heart-to-heart about life. Fourth Grade puts together a really cool film that features footage of everyone skateboarding, going to parties and hanging out together. It serves as a reminder of how important it is to not give into other people telling you that your dreams aren’t worth working towards. This scene also showed how these four guys really treasured each other’s friendships with one another. Even though they didn’t always get along with one another, they continued to have each other’s backs through both the good times and the bad times. Of course, at the end, they all had to take accountability for nearly getting Stevie killed in the accident, but Stevie still wanted to be friends with them because they made him feel like he belonged and that is what Stevie really wanted because he didn’t have many friends at the beginning of the movie and he wanted to get away from his problems at home. I don’t know much about skateboarding culture, to be honest, but I think it’s a human need to want to belong somewhere so it makes sense that Stevie would find the crowd that he did. The movie also showed me though that even in a group of people, you need to be yourself and know yourself so that you don’t get influenced too much by what everyone else is doing.

Stevie has this quiet strength that I actually admired while watching the movie. When he thanks Ruben for giving him a cigarette, Ruben makes fun of him for saying “thank you” and tells him not to say “thank you” because it will somehow make him less than. However, when Ray gives Stevie a new skateboard and Stevie asks if he can thank him, Ray is confused why Stevie is asking to say “thank you,” and Stevie tells him what Ruben told him. Ray tells him that saying thank you is common manners and that he shouldn’t feel bad about saying thank you. Ray is the only one in the group who seems to stand up for Stevie and appreciate his uniqueness rather than tearing him down. This part reminded me of when I was in fifth grade, and I would always say hello to people and say thank you and sorry all the time, and people would often joke, “Stop being so polite,” and my guidance counselor even pulled me into her office to explain to me that I shouldn’t be too polite. I understand where she was coming from in retrospect, because she didn’t want me to become a pushover, which is what happened at some point in school unfortunately. I think after a while I started to become very self-conscious about it and thought, Maybe these kids are right. Maybe something is wrong with me and I need to stop being polite all the time. But there were some adults though who reminded me to keep being true to myself and I still appreciate these people to this day. I really appreciate that Ray told Stevie that it’s okay to say thank you and be himself rather than trying to fit in with anyone else or make himself look cool, because it reminded me that I can be true to myself and that while I am naturally going to grow and learn from life and change, I don’t have to change to seek anyone else’s approval. It’s still a work in progress to develop my sense of self and become more confident in who I am, but it helps to know that a lot of people are going through that same journey in their own unique way.

Stevie, Ray, Fourth Grade, Fuckshit and Ruben realize at a crucial moment just how precious their friendship really is when Fuckshit, who is drunk, drives around with everyone in the car and gets in a near fatal car accident. The car flips over and everyone is injured, but Stevie actually has to go to the emergency room and no one knows if he is going to live or not. His brother, Ian, doesn’t give him a hard time but just sits in silence at Stevie’s bedside. Stevie’s mom goes to the hospital and finds all of Stevie’s friends in the waiting room. She had assumed they didn’t care about Stevie and were just going to abandon him after the accident, but the fact that they showed up for him probably changed the way she felt about Stevie’s friends at that moment, and so she lets them go into the hospital room to see Stevie because she realizes that these people really are genuine friends to Stevie, even when they got him in a lot of trouble. I think this is a crucial moment for Stevie and his friends because they realize that they really do care about their lives and that they need to look out for each other.

I also loved the scene where Ray talks with Stevie after Stevie has a fight with his mom. Ray opens up and tells him that even though he thinks he is the only one dealing with a difficult home life, he isn’t the only one because everyone in their friend group is dealing with something. Ruben’s mom beats up on him and his sister when he gets home, Ray’s brother died after getting hit by a car, Fourth Grade struggles with money and couldn’t even afford socks, and Fuckshit is continuing to party and drink recklessly. I think this was really courageous of Ray to open up like this to Stevie because at the beginning when Stevie meets everyone, they make fun of him for being shy and not knowing how to smoke or fit in with them, but when Ray tells Stevie that everyone in the group has their own personal challenges, it helps him establish that trust with Stevie so that Stevie doesn’t need to feel like he is the only one who is dealing with challenges and insecurities. I remember in high school and college I would often compare myself to my peers, thinking how much fun they were having with each other and how everyone’s lives seemed to be more perfect. It seemed I was the only one dealing with low self-esteem and insecurities while everyone else on the outside seemed perfectly confident. However, I remember seeing a counselor during my first year of college and she told me that it seems like everyone on the outside is cool as a cucumber and everyone is confident, but in reality, everyone during that first year of college was also dealing with insecurities and a lack of self-confidence, and they, too, were also wondering, How am I going to make friends? How am I going to do it all? Even though it wasn’t overnight, I have gradually come to develop more confidence in myself and have realized that everyone has problems, many people struggle with feeling good about themselves, and that I’m not the only one with issues. I thin especially in this age of social media and the Internet it can be easy to pretend to seem confident and perfectly put together, but in reality, as I have learned over the years, life really isn’t that simple and even though someone may be successful, they still are human beings and deal with different struggles. I may not have the same struggle as someone else, but I can develop the compassion to understand what they are going through. It is much easier for me to envy other people’s lives and compare my life to others, but as I have learned over the years, that only led me to harbor feelings of bitterness and jealousy at not having achieved what others had, so it made it hard for me to genuinely be happy for others since I couldn’t be happy for myself. I think reading Daisaku Ikeda’s writings really encouraged me to keep growing and studying, and to also strive towards my own goals.

Overall, this was a really excellent film. I also really love the score. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross collaborated on the score; I really loved the work they did on the score for another movie I love called Soul. And I love the songs they chose for the movie because I have been getting into 1990s hip-hop in recent years, so I have been listening to the Notorious B.I.G. and A Tribe Called Quest. I looked at the credits and saw that “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal was featured in the movie, and I was like, What? When!?! So I re-winded the movie and sure enough, if you listen closely, the song is playing in the restaurant that Stevie, Dabney and Ian are eating at. It’s one of my favorite songs and growing up in the 1990s it was something I would listen to on the radio a lot, so I was pretty excited that it was featured in the movie. I also really love the way the movie is filmed. At the beginning it was really cool when the skateboards spell out A24. I thought that was very fitting because it served as an introduction to one of the key themes of the movie, which is skateboarding. Of course, looking back, the movie was so much more than just about skateboarding. It was a coming-of-age movie that shows the ups and downs of being a teenager and growing up and trying to fit in.

Mid 90s. 2018. 1 hr 25 min. Written and directed by Jonah Hill. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, some violent behavior/ disturbing images-all involving minors.

Book Review: The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

I just finished this really excellent book by Michelle Obama called The Light We Carry. A friend gave me this book as a gift and I really loved reading it. I had not yet read Becoming, her other book, but it had been on my list for a while of books to read. The Light We Carry has a lot of really good messages about life and how to navigate it, and some parts resonated with me personally. I really like the chapter where she talks about relationships and how she and Barack navigated the ups and downs of being in the White House. In one part she writes about how she wanted her daughters, Sasha and Malia, to not view marriage or relationships as the end all be all, but to develop independence and learn what works for them in relationships and what does not. She also affirms that it’s okay to not have a partner if that’s not what you want in life. I think this was really affirming for me because I am unsure whether I want to be in a relationship or get married yet, but it can feel like a lot of pressure since many of my friends are getting married and having families. Michelle Obama debunks this myth I had in my head that simply getting married and having children will make all my problems go away and explains that relationships take effort and patience and that at the end of the day, you still need to face yourself and all your strengths and weaknesses. I had this naive idea that getting married and having a family would fix all my problems and bring me total bliss, but I am realizing that’s not a very healthy way to look at relationships. Reading Discussions on Youth by Daisaku Ikeda also really helped because in the “What is Love?” chapter he talks about how it’s important to not lose sight of one’s personal growth when falling in love with someone and that even in a relationship or marriage it’s important to be independent and secure in who you are. I am still figuring out who I am, to be honest, and I think that’s why I was so worried about getting in a relationship because I thought I had to change who I was for the other person. I had a boyfriend back in 2016 but we broke up after a year of doing long-distance, and it was really painful. When we were together it felt exhilarating and like I had just won a prize, especially because the guy I was crushing on before I found my boyfriend was already in a relationship, so I couldn’t be with him. Falling in love with this boy felt magical, but then when we went our separate ways I had to navigate a lot of emotions and pain, while also dealing with my work, friendships, and other things in life. I really appreciate that I have this time to myself to figure out what I really want. I want to be truly happy for my friends when they date, get engaged, married and start families, but I think being truly happy for them means being happy for myself, too and celebrating the growth I have achieved in just these past few years.

Another thing I really love in the book is how she talks about “when they go low, we go high.” I just remembered it as a phrase, but Michelle Obama says that going high doesn’t mean ignoring injustice or inequalities in society, or acting like things will work out without taking action. It requires a lot of effort and patience and also self-compassion because doing the work of dismantling oppression or injustice takes a lot of planning and action. She differentiates between responding and reacting. The former is more reflective, like figuring out how to react in a constructive way. There is a lot to be angry about, of course. But as Mrs. Obama explains, simply reacting out of emotion is not always going to help address decades of injustice. It’s the easiest thing to do, but the hardest thing to do is channeling that anger into constructive action. I remember when George Floyd was killed, and like many people I was furious and upset and confused and scared for what the future held for so many Black people like myself. It was also during the pandemic, so I pretty much stayed inside, but I wanted to make some sort of cause for the racial justice movement in my own way, so I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo a lot about it, and I wrote a poem in memory of Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman who was killed by police in early March of 2020. I couldn’t get rid of my anger, but I didn’t want to let it keep stewing silently until it ate me alive, so writing the poem and sharing it with others helped me feel that my writing could be a medium to bring up social injustices and express my hurt, pain and frustration.

Mrs. Obama also talks about the importance of setting boundaries. Even when being in the White House was busy and she had a lot of engagements, Mrs. Obama talks about how she made sure to take time to exercise, eat well, and take care of herself so that she could continue to have the energy to show up for people as her most authentic self. This really resonated with me because these last few years I have realized the hard way that self-care isn’t something you only practice when you have free time or when your schedule is totally clear. It is a daily weekly thing you should make time for. In college, I rolled my eyes every time one of the seniors told me to make time for myself because I thought being busy was a virtue and self-compassion and self-care was just laziness. However, by junior year I was exhausted and my body literally could no longer get by on four hours of sleep every day. I was sleeping in class, my emotions were out of whack, I was calling in sick to work, I was stress-eating, and I became very lonely because I would often say “no” to meeting with people, even for something as casual as ice cream. This leads to another good part of the book where Michelle Obama talks about the importance of friendship. Even though I’m an introvert, having close friends has been one of the things to get me through those ups and downs of life. My friends were constantly checking in with me and inviting me to eat with them and hang out with them, and they would come to my room and remind me to take a break and go out for some good food and drinks instead of staying holed up in my room studying. I am forever thankful to them for that because I loved studying and loved my classes, and I studied a lot, but in retrospect, so did everyone else. Looking back, those relationships in college helped me grow leaps and bounds, and these friends helped me get through so much stuff even when I wasn’t always open to talking about what I was going through and wanted to just pretend everything was okay. I really appreciate Mrs. Obama talking about the importance of cultivating friendships and reaching out to people because these past few years I have learned that a lot of times, I need to reach out to people in order to overcome my feelings of isolation and loneliness. And friendships take a lot of work and patience, and as someone who isn’t very patient, I am learning to be a better listener and grow from my friendships.

I have so many more thoughts about this book that are just running and bubbling through my mind, but I am getting sleepy, so I will talk about it more at a later time. Overall, though, I recommend you read The Light We Carry if you haven’t already. It is really good.

Movie Review: To Leslie

I just finished watching the movie To Leslie, a movie directed by Michael Morris and starring English actress Andrea Riseborough as Leslie, a divorced alcoholic woman who lives in rural Texas and is estranged from her son, James. She is living through poverty and homelessness and struggling to make her way through the struggles of life. I didn’t know much about the film before I saw it, I just kept reading the news that its nomination for the Oscars last year created a serious stir of controversy because there was a grassroots campaign for the film that it seems violated the rules for Oscar nominations, and also that it wasn’t fair that Andrea Riseborough, who is white, got nominated while Black actresses like Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler didn’t get nominated for their performances. I am not going to pretend like this part of the controversy isn’t important because Hollywood has a very long history of racism and even with a greater diversity of stories from directors who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian, Hollywood and the Academy I am sure still have a long way to go in addressing issues of diversity. I haven’t read enough about the controversy to form an articulate, well-formed opinion about it, but that was how I first heard about the movie was because of the news surrounding its nomination.

The movie, To Leslie, takes place in rural west Texas. At the beginning they show pictures of Leslie, from her childhood to her teenage years to the birth of her son James, to that moment when she won the lottery. One significant moment in that montage shows her bruised eye up close, and it implies that her marriage was an abusive marriage and that her husband was abusive towards her. The song “Here I Am” by Dolly Parton is playing during the montage of photos. There is footage of Leslie on television when she won the lottery and she is screaming and cheering in excitement while her son, James, looks quiet and subdued and uncomfortable to be on national television. Six years later, Leslie is curled up in a motel by herself and a man pounds on the door, telling her she needs to leave. She gathers her belongings and cusses out the manager and everyone at the motel, and leaves. She contacts her son, James, who she hasn’t spoken to in years, and he reluctantly allows her to stay with him. He gives her a condition though: no drinking. He lets her stay long enough so she can figure out a plan for what to do with her life. Leslie promises to not drink like she used to, but when James is at work, she goes through his drawers to look for cash so she can get alcohol. At first, things seem to be okay, and one night Leslie is smoking a joint with James and his coworker at the construction site, Darren. Darren informs James that something happened to Leslie, and James comes home to find empty liquor bottles under his mattress. When James finds out that his neighbor allowed Leslie to come over to his apartment and get alcohol from him, he beats the guy up and then screams at his mom for breaking the rules and drinking when he told her not to.

He threatens to contact Dutch and Nancy, two people in their Texas town who don’t like Leslie, and he has Leslie stay with them. Dutch and Nancy let Leslie stay with them, but they aren’t happy about it because Leslie left her son and wasted her lottery money. Dutch tells her she needs to stay and help with painting and household chores and needs to stop drinking. Leslie promises to work, but then she goes out to bars and drinks heavily. She is lonely and feels ostracized by the people in her life, and there is one scene where Dutch and Nancy are drinking around a campfire and everyone is talking trash about Leslie, but Leslie is cooped up alone in the house because everyone is gossiping loudly about her drinking and her past. She overhears Dutch and Nancy loudly fighting about Leslie’s alcoholism and her fraught relationship with her son. When she goes to a bar, she flirts with a man at the bar who is talking with a buddy of his. She is trying to get a conversation going and asks him to dance, but he is uncomfortable with her being drunk and rejects her advances, leaving her to dance alone. She also finds out from the bar owner that the picture they had of her winning the lottery was taken down, and so she leaves and gives the guy the finger. When she comes back to Dutch and Nancy’s place, they have locked the front door so that she cannot get in and they left her suitcase on the porch. She leaves and has to go find another place to stay. Pete, Dutch and Nancy’s friend, offers her a ride and buys her dinner. While she is eating in the car, he makes a crack about her drinking and tries to make sexual advances towards her, and she runs out of the car and leaves. She happens upon a motel and sleeps outside the motel. Sweeney, the motel manager (Marc Maron) kicks her off the premises, and Leslie goes. However, she leaves her suitcase behind, and Sweeney and his coworker, Royal (Andre Royo) go through the suitcase and figure out whether they should even bother giving it back to her now that she is gone. However, she comes back looking for the suitcase and Sweeney offers her a job at the motel. At first, Leslie doesn’t seem to show much promise. She sleeps in and shows up late, and she smokes and drinks frequently while working. Royal and Sweeney are frustrated with her, but they don’t give up on her. In fact, they are literally the only people who have not given up on her. All of Leslie’s friends have deserted her and her son kicked her out, so she doesn’t have a lot of people to talk with. Leslie goes to the bar and reflects on how she is living her life, and she also visits the old house that she and James used to live in. It is inhabited by a new family, and when she comes in, the husband who lives in the house is uncomfortable with her being there and she reminisces about the days when she would cook and clean in the house and how comfortable and nice her life was in it.

Sweeney finds Leslie and picks her up and takes her back to the motel, and Leslie resolves to quit drinking cold-turkey. This is incredibly difficult and she suffers from withdrawal. She vomits frequently and while eating dinner with Sweeney, her hands and body shake and she cannot keep her food down. However, she is determined to go through with her recovery. Sweeney opens up about his personal life to Leslie and doesn’t prod her about her alcoholism, and he tells her that he has a daughter and a granddaughter, and that he left his wife because she was an alcoholic. He apologizes for wanting to know personal details about her drinking and invites her to a party that the whole Texas town is going to be at. When Leslie hears that everyone in the town is going to be there, she declines but Sweeney insists on her going. She goes and at first she is having fun, and she gets to play carnival games with Sweeney’s daughter and his granddaughter, Bernice and Betsy. However, while Leslie and Royal are sitting and watching everyone dancing, Pete’s kids run up to her and asks her if it’s true that she really won the lottery. This brings up bad memories for Leslie, and Royal shoos them away when he finds out that they are Pete’s kids and that Pete and Nancy has been gossiping to them about Leslie. Leslie confronts Nancy and Pete when Pete gets atop the table and announces in glee that he won the lottery. Leslie tells him that he isn’t special just because he won the lottery and that he’s going to waste all the money anyway, and Nancy takes several nasty jabs at Leslie’s drinking and her leaving her son. Sweeney tries to break up the fight but Leslie decides to leave the gathering. Sweeney begs her to not go by herself, but Leslie refuses to stay and leaves.

Sweeney finds Leslie in her room and tells her he got a tape of old footage of her winning the lottery. He expects her to feel good about it and to regain her confidence, as a way to remind her that she is not the low life that Pete and Nancy made her out to be. However, watching the video makes Leslie feel ashamed, and she tells Sweeney to leave and cusses him out. She quits her job at the motel and leaves. She goes to a bar and a guy who finds her attractive goes up and starts talking to her, and she is suspicious about his motives and asks him if she really finds something in her or if he just sees her as a one stop shop. He backs off and tells her that she doesn’t have to be interested in him, and she leaves the bar. Nancy and Pete come into the bar, and Sweeney is looking for Leslie, and Nancy and Pete make some snide comment about Leslie and Sweeney punches Pete, prompting the owner to break up the fight. The bartender threatens to throw out Pete and Nancy and the guy who fell in love with Leslie offers to beat them up. Leslie sleeps in a run down ice cream shop that Royal’s dad used to own, and she peers through the window and finds Royal dancing and howling at the night sky and Sweeney comes over and they hug after not being able to find Leslie. The next day, Sweeney finds her and Leslie tells him that she wants to renovate the ice cream shop and make it a diner, but Sweeney thinks that it will be impossible because they don’t have the finances to open up a diner. But Leslie is determined and then when she asks why Sweeney was so kind to her, Sweeney reveals it’s because he has a crush on Leslie and they share a sweet kiss. Ten months later, Royal, Sweeney and Leslie have finished building Lee’s Diner out of the ice cream shop, and they are anticipating many customers coming on opening day. However, as night falls, no one has come to the diner and Leslie gives up hope. However, she hears a knock at the door and finds Nancy arriving to dine at the restaurant. Leslie gets angry and pretends to serve Nancy, and Nancy tells her to cut the bullshit and angrily opens up about how Leslie fucked up when she left her son and made bad life choices and didn’t take responsibility for them. Leslie is pained that Nancy is bringing up her past, but she ends up thanking her and Nancy brings in James to the restaurant. Leslie breaks down in tears and serves her son dinner, and when he expresses appreciation for the meal, she breaks down and gives him a hug because she has so many regrets about what she did and she just really wants to be a good mom.

This movie’s themes reminded me of some other movies I have seen in the past. A couple of years ago, I watched a movie by A24 called The Florida Project, a film directed by Sean Baker, and it’s about a single mom named Halley who is raising her six year old daughter, Moonee, in a motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which many tourists visit because Disney World is located close by. Moonee and her friends Jancey and Scooty seem to be enjoying their lives running around and getting ice cream and playing in parks with other kids whose parents live in the motel complex. But while watching the movie, I also saw how Halley and the other adults have to face the reality of poverty and struggling to get by, and how even though the tourists have this glamorous view of Disney World, it’s not super glamorous because a lot of people in the local community struggle with poverty and other challenges. Halley also has strained relationship with her friend, who is Scooty’s mom. Scooty’s mom works at a diner, while Halley struggles to make ends meet after losing her job as a stripper. Halley’s financal situation only gets worse as the film goes on, and she has to take up sex work again to make ends meet. Ashley is unhappy with what Halley is doing and Halley beats her up. The movie showed how no magical person was ever going to save the people from poverty and that everyone was a human being who was just trying to do their best to make ends meet and take care of their kids. Bobby, the motel manager (played by Willem Dafoe) is doing his best, too, to especially keep the kids at the motel from confronting the harsh realities that the adults have to face every day. There was one particular scene in the film that shows this, and it also stuck with me because it’s a pretty hard scene to watch. The kids in the motel are playing in the park and a middle aged pedophile starts to approach the children. Bobby approaches the guy and gets him a soda and then kicks him off the premises so he doesn’t mess with the kids again. It showed me how Bobby really cared about the residents at the motel and that he is willing to do anything to help them. However, he could only really do his best. He couldn’t protect or shelter Moonee from the harsh realities of day to day life, and this is evident when agents from the Florida Department of Children and Families comes to take Moonee away from her mom after finding out that Halley was doing sex work, and Moonee goes with one of the other kids and escapes from the DCF agents. The film pulls no punches when it portrays the reality of poverty and trying to survive in a harsh world, but it also shows how the kids in the movie create value and meaning from these harsh realities. Leslie in To Leslie has big dreams of starting an ice cream shop but Sweeney wants her to be realistic about her expectations. But after the lottery winning thing fell flat and her relationships didn’t work out, Leslie wants another shot at life and to do better, and opening the diner helped her start fresh.

To Leslie also shows the challenges of living with mental illness and addiction. In a pivotal scene towards the end of the film, Leslie takes a flask of alcohol from Royal’s coat, and she sniffs the alcohol and is tempted to drink again, but she remembers the promise she made to herself and closes the bottle without drinking it. It was pretty painful watching the physical impact that withdrawal had on Leslie, but as someone who has listened to experiences of people who recover from addiction, I have learned that the process of recovery is not easy at all and when someone gets sober, it’s a very major milestone for a lot of people. I haven’t struggled with addiction, but I have struggled with mental illness and loneliness, and it can feel painful when you feel that you have to battle your suffering alone, and it can bring up a lot of feelings of guilt and shame. You know you should reach out for help, but that guilt and shame holds you back so you tell people you don’t need help and suffer alone. I think that is why I had to see a mental health professional at some point because I could not face my anxiety and depression alone. Being in that dark place where you fight your inner negativity can be scary, and it can honestly feel like you are alone and don’t have anyone around to help you even when people offer to help. I also didn’t feel comfortable telling a lot of people about my mental health because I felt ashamed, so it helped to find someone who was licensed to deal with these issues and encourage me to do the inner work needed to look honestly at myself and realize that my anxiety and depression doesn’t define me and that I can overcome it with little baby steps each day. Seeing how Leslie pulled through and was able to reconcile with Nancy and her son actually gave me hope after seeing how she struggled throughout the movie. Sweeney and Royal don’t initially warm up to Leslie after seeing her struggles with addiction and how she treats her job at the motel but they also deal with their own stuff, too, and when they open up to Leslie about what they go through, it gives Leslie the courage to keep going because she has a couple of friends who she can trust to come back to even when it seems that she can’t pull through.

I also thought of the movie, Moonlight. In Moonlight, a young Black man named Chiron lives with a mother who struggles with addiction (Naomie Harris played her so well) and she depends emotionally and financially on her son, while also ostracizing him for being gay. The emotional abuse and homophobia Chiron suffered as a child and teenager follows him into adulthood, and he puts on this emotional armor and makes himself look like this tough person. He dons a grill, works out and deals drugs, and it seems like he has moved on from his past. However, his mother reaches out to him and she is recovering from addiction, and they meet up and she breaks down in tears and apologizes for the abuse she inflicted on her son and tells him that she really does love him even when she never really showed it. This brings Chiron to tears because he loves his mother, too, and forgives her but that forgiveness isn’t easy because it pains him that for so many years she neglected him and made him feel less than. At the beginning it seemed Leslie was going to live a blissful comfortable life with her son after she won the lottery, but this doesn’t end up happening and she becomes estranged from him for many years. She comes back but it’s only really to ask him for money so she can keep drinking, and at some point he gets sick of seeing her drink and not take care of herself that he kicks her out. However, when she sees him again it brings back a lot of shame and guilt for her and she feels like she was a bad mom for what she did, and like any mom, she wants to feel like she was doing the best for her kid.

This was a really powerful movie, and I also really love the acting. Andrea Riseborough was fierce in her role as Leslie and her acting captivated me even well after the end of the movie.

To Leslie. 2022. 1 hr 59 m. Directed by Michael Morris and written by Ryan Binaco. Starring Andrea Riseborough, Owen Teague, Allison Janney and Marc Maron. Rated R for language throughout and some drug use.