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Movie Review: Volver

When I was in middle school, a movie called Volver came out. I was really intrigued by the poster of Penelope Cruz surrounded by these very colorful red flowers, with this troubled expression on her face as she looks to the side of her. It just seemed like such a mature movie to me, but I don’t think I would have been able to appreciate the film if I had seen it back then because it does have a lot of mature themes. I am glad I finally saw it now after so many years of wanting to see it because it really was an excellent film. I had seen Pedro Almodóvar’s other movie Julieta, which came out a decade after Volver did. That movie was really good, too.

The movie Volver takes place in Spain, and it opens with several women cleaning off the caskets of deceased loved ones. Penelope Cruz plays Raimunda, a woman who is grappling with the loss of her parents. Her sister is named Sole (Lola Duenas) and Raimunda also has a daughter named Paula (Yohana Cobo). They go over to their aunt Paula’s house, where Aunt Paula takes care of herself. Sole finds her mother’s old bicycle in Paula’s attic and starts to wonder more about her mother. Meanwhile, Raimunda has to deal with another issue: her husband, Paco, lost his job. We also find out Paco is a shady dude because Raimunda’s daughter is sitting on the couch, Paco looks at her crotch. He also walks past her room and finds her naked and starts looking at her in a creepy way. Raimunda is stressed because Paco isn’t doing anything to find a new job; he is just sitting and drinking beer and watching sports, while she has to take on several jobs to make ends meet. When Paco wants to have sex, Raimunda refuses and he masturbates instead. When Raimunda gets off the bus to walk home, she finds her daughter waiting for her at the bus stop. When she asks where Dad is, Paula says he is at home and she also looks very shaken. They arrive home to find Paco dead with a knife in his body and blood pooling around him. Paula tells her mom that Paco tried to rape her and so she stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. Raimunda, shaken that Paco would do such a thing, cleans up the blood and plans to dispose of Paco’s body. She also takes the blame for what Paula did and decides to not tell anyone about what happened to Paco. Emilio comes to the house and tells Raimunda that he is going out of town and needs someone to run his restaurant in his absence, and he gives her the keys to the restaurant. The next day, Raimunda takes Paco’s body and puts it in the freezer in the back storage room. The person in charge of a film crew comes to the restaurant and tells her they want to eat at the restaurant while they are shooting a movie. At first, Raimunda is reluctant to do so, but he offers to pay her well, so she lets him and the crew eat at the restaurant. Aunt Paula passes away and Sole and Agustina are grieving her death. Raimunda continues to run the restaurant and asks some women around the neighborhood, including Regina and Ines, if they could lend her some food (pork and cookies) to the restaurant for her to prepare for the film crew. They help her out and honestly seeing the menu of what she was serving in that restaurant sounded delicious even though I’m a vegan. I have never tried meat from Spain but I bet it’s delicious. Meanwhile, Soledad is driving and she parks her car outside her house, and she hears a woman whisper her name. When she opens the trunk she finds the woman is none other than her mother, Irene, the lady she thought was dead for years. Sole lets her mother stay with her, and her mother reveals that her husband cheated on her when they were married. Sole is divorced and doesn’t live with anyone, so her mother says they can live together. However, Sole decides to hide her mother from Raimunda so that Raimunda doesn’t know that her mother is alive, and Sole has a bunch of women come to her home so she can do their hair, and she has Irene pretend to be from Russia and not understand Spanish so they don’t know it’s her. When she is at the restaurant, Paula (Raimunda’s daughter) goes into the freezer and gets suspicious about what Raimunda is hiding in there, and when she asks about it, Raimunda tells her that no one is to look in that freezer, not even Paula. When Paula asks if Paco is her real dad, Raimunda tells her that Paco is not her biological dad and that her biological dad passed away a long time ago. The film crew has their final celebration at the restaurant and Raimunda finds a group of guitarists playing, and she decides to go out and sing for everyone. Soledad pulls up to outside the restaurant with Irene hiding in the car and Irene overhears Raimunda singing this beautiful song that her grandmother sung to her a long time ago called “Volver” by Carlos Gardel (which I finally realized is the significance of the movie’s title), and she is moved to tears. The next day Raimunda calls to rent a van to put Paco’s corpse in, and Emilio calls her to asks about how the restaurant is going and Raimunda confesses that she has taken over the restaurant. Emilio is disappointed because no one told him about this, but Raimunda has another big problem to deal with, not only how to get rid of her ex-husband’s dead body in a very discreet way but also her neighbor, Agustina, has cancer and is dying, so Raimunda has to go to the hospital to see her. Agustina has a request for Raimunda before she dies: that Raimunda inform her whether her mother is dead or alive. She also says that there is a friend who requested her to be on a TV show and wants to interview them about their mother’s death and the fire that she died in, and Raimunda, who already has a lot on her plate, refuses to do so. Her daughter, Paula, ends up staying with Sole many times because Raimunda is trying to visit Agustina and also take care of getting rid of her husband’s body. Raimunda gets her friends, Ines and Regina, to help her get the fridge with Paco’s corpse into the van and then they dig a ditch and throw his body in there. While Raimunda is working at the restaurant, Agustina comes to see her and reminds her that she promised to tell her whether her mother is dead or alive. Apparently Raimunda got the story about her mother all wrong because Agustina tells her that the death of Raimunda’s parents in the fire in the village and her mother’s disappearance may be connected in some way, and tells Raimunda that it’s possible that Agustina’s mom was having a secret affair with Raimunda’s dad, and that is why Agustina went to live with her grandmother. Raimunda didn’t know that part of the story, and she thinks Agustina’s lying, but Agustina insists that the death of Raimunda’s parents and her mother’s disappearance are deeply connected. Back at Sole’s house, Irene is hiding under the bed and Paula is there with her, and she overhears the TV playing in the room. The women who are having their hair done by Irene are wondering why she disappeared when she was supposed to be doing their hair, but Sole can’t tell them what is really going on. Sole, Raimunda and the woman getting her hair done go into the room to watch this show called Donde Quiera Que Estes (Wherever You Are). Agustina appears on the show, and the interviewer asks her to divulge details about her mother’s disappearance and if there was another woman involved in the fire in Agustina’s village. Agustina feels uncomfortable and refuses to talk about the details of the fire, and her sister expresses anger and disappointment when she does. It gets even more awkward when the interviewer announces Agustina has cancer, and so Agustina walks off the show. While preparing flan, Raimunda tells Sole that Agustina approached her asking for details about her mother’s appearance and that Agustina said that her mother was having an affair with Raimunda and Sole’s dad. It also turns out that there was more to this story than Raimunda thought, because Sole tells her that Irene has been around all this time, and that she stayed with Aunt Paula and took care of her and even helped out with Aunt Paula’s funeral, so she was very much alive and contrary to what Raimunda and Sole thought, Aunt Paula was never alone because Irene was taking care of her. Sole takes her to her bedroom and Raimunda finds Irene very much alive and well, and she leaves with her daughter, Paula, shocked and in tears to find that no one told her that her mother was alive and that she didn’t die in that fire in the village. Paula encourages Raimunda to go back to the house to talk with Irene and Irene later that evening while they are on a walk tells Raimunda everything that happened. She explains that she left Raimunda’s father because he cheated on her with Agustina’s mother. Not only that but Raimunda’s father sexually abused Raimunda and she got pregnant and then had her daughter, Paula. He moved to Venezuela because he felt ashamed of what he did, and Irene felt angry that she didn’t know that her husband was not only cheating on her with Agustina’s mom but was also raping her daughter. And that is why she understood why Raimunda didn’t talk to her for many years because she was still grappling with this painful trauma. Irene found her husband and Agustina’s mother having sex in a hut and she set fire to it, killing them both. Before she went into hiding, she went to visit Aunt Paula, who lived alone, and decided to take care of her until her death. She went into hiding after setting fire to the hut and killing her husband and Agustina’s mother because she didn’t want to get caught, but even while in hiding, she suffered a lot and felt a lot of shame and pain for what happened. Irene visits Agustina when she is unwell and promises to take care of her because she feels bad about what she did to Agustina’s mom, and Raimunda is about to tell her what happened to Paco but Irene insists she can tell her later. I thought the end credits were very interesting, because they are very colorful and flowery and yet this was such a dark movie. I did love how they made the designs, though, and also the music throughout the movie was really beautiful.

Honestly I think the part about this movie I loved the most was the acting and the dialogue. Penelope brought so much to her role as Raimunda and shows the psychological and emotional toll that grief took on her, and how she is was grappling with a lot of shame and trauma in her marriage to Paco and when her mother reveals what happened to her as a young woman. Grief is a central theme in this movie, but the movie also shows how it is also messy and complicated, especially when you find out that the person you thought was dead was actually alive the whole time. When Raimunda finds out her mother is actually alive, she feels pained because everyone kept this a secret from her and Sole and Paula didn’t tell her that they had been hiding Irene in Sole’s house while Raimunda continued to think that Irene was dead. I haven’t seen any other films by the actresses who played the other characters, to be honest, and I haven’t watched many other movies with Penelope Cruz. But after watching this and his 2016 drama, Julieta, I definitely want to check out more of Pedro Almodóvar’s movies, especially his 2013 film I’m So Excited! and his most recent one, Parallel Mothers, which also stars Penelope Cruz and is on my watchlist.

Volver. 2006. 2 h 1 m. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Rated R for some sexual content and language.

Movie Review: Barbie

So I heard this movie was all the rage, and I knew about the phenomenon called “Barbie-heimer,” during which Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day. And I saw the trailer. So I thought, Ok, I need to see what all the talk is about this movie. Especially because I really loved Greta Gerwig’s movie Little Women, and also loved her in the movie Frances Ha. I didn’t know how I was going to like the movie, to be honest, but after watching it I was left with a lot to think about. It’s actually a pretty philosophical film if you think about it.

To give a brief summary, the movie takes place in Barbieland, where Stereotypical Barbie (played brilliantly by the very talented Margot Robbie) seems to be enjoying her life and being happy every day. It seems her life is so perfect on the outside. She wakes up to Lizzo singing her theme song and Helen Mirren narrating Barbie’s seemingly perfect life. Her waffle comes out perfectly out of the toaster, she wakes up without bags under her eyes, she always manages to fit perfectly into heels and stay on her tip-toes, and all the Barbies, Kens and Allan (there is only one Allan, and he is played by Michael Cera) knows her and says hi and she knows everyone and says hi, too. She also has a lot of Kens competing with her (the main Kens are played by Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir), but Ryan Gosling’s Ken just can’t seem to get her to be with him. One evening, while everyone is dancing and having fun, Barbie asks out loud, “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?” And everyone immediately freezes, and when Barbie realizes what she said, she covers it up by saying “I’m dying to dance!” And then things seem to go back to normal. However, Barbie can’t seem to sleep because she really is thinking about death.

The next morning, Stereotypical Barbie’s life starts to seem a lot less perfect: she wakes up and feels tired instead of perky, her waffle comes out burnt and the milk in the carton is spoiled, and worse of all: her feet are flat and she can no longer walk perfectly in heels. All the Barbies think something is deeply wrong with her or that she is malfunctioning, so they take her to Weird Barbie (played by Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon), who everyone ostracizes and gossips about. Stereotypical Barbie goes to Weird Barbie and asks what is wrong, and Weird Barbie tells her that she needs to go to the Real World to repair her relationship with the girl who used to play with her because there is something off in their relationship that is causing Barbie’s life to feel off-kilter. So Barbie goes on a mission and goes to find the girl who used to play with her. She intends to go by herself, but then she finds that Ken (Ryan Gosling) snuck into her car and now he is going with her. I seriously thought this was going to be them in the car just having a long road trip and getting on each others’ nerves and then falling in love when they realize they have a crush on each other.

But that’s not how it works out. They get to the Real World, and they end up dressing in these roller blading outfits and Barbie gets catcalled by men and she finds that the Real World is very different from Barbie World (especially because in Barbie World all the Barbies ran the show: there’s a Barbie who is president, there is a Barbie who is a doctor, there is a Barbie who is a lawyer, and other intelligent confident Barbies in positions of power). Ken, however, ends up soaking up all this male energy and when he walks around he sees men in positions of power, and he starts to read books about the patriarchy. Meanwhile, Barbie is trying to figure out which girl she belonged to. She closes her eyes when she stops at the bus stop and sees a young woman named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mom, Gloria (America Ferrera) playing with Barbie and then when the girl becomes a teenager, she becomes moody and stops playing with Barbie, which hurts her mother because her mom loves Barbie. She goes on a quest to find Sasha, and she finds her sitting at a cafeteria table outside with her friends. She walks up and introduces herself to Sasha and her friends, but Sasha dismisses her, telling her that Barbie is the reason why these girls hate themselves because she seems so perfect and these girls think Barbie sets this unattainable standard for beauty. Her and her friends call Barbie a “fascist” and tell her to go away, and Barbie is hurt and pained that this girl no longer wants her. At the Mattel Corporation, everyone gets word that Ken and Barbie are in the Real World and not in Barbie Land where they are supposed to be. Gloria (played by America Ferrera) works at Barbie and draws the designs for Barbies. The drawings are of an ordinary Barbie, a Barbie with every day human problems. When Gloria is picking up Sasha from school, she finds that Barbie and Ken are being escorted into a black van to take them back to Barbie Land, but then Gloria gets Barbie to come with her and Sasha and hide from the vans. Sasha isn’t receptive, of course, but then Barbie explains why she is in the Real World, and she ends up taking Gloria and Sasha to Barbie Land. Gloria is so excited to be in Barbie Land, but Sasha is not. However, they arrive in Barbie Land only to find out that all the Kens have taken it over, and not only is Ryan Gosling’s Ken now in charge, but all of the Barbies, who once held positions of power, are serving them beers and wearing maid uniforms and being the Kens’ casual girlfriends. The new theme song for the Kens is “Push” by Matchbox Twenty, and after watching this movie hearing this song when I am out and about is going to remind me of the Kens.

Barbie is (rightfully) angry at Ken for doing this, but he tells her she made him feel bad for rejecting him, so this is his payback to her for rejecting him, otherwise he wouldn’t have done all of this. Barbie loses her self-confidence and gives up and starts saying negative things about herself, and Gloria and Sasha try to cheer her up, but Barbie tells them to leave her alone because there is nothing they can do to stop the Kens from taking over. However, on their way back to the Real World, they find that Allan is going with them because he can’t deal with the stress of being with all these men who are treating these women like crap. They find a bunch of Kens trying to stop them from going to the Real World, and Allan fights them off. Meanwhile, the Mattel CEO (played by Will Ferrell) and his fellow board members are still chasing Barbie and Ken down, so they go to what is now Ken-Land to track them down (earlier when Barbie is at a board meeting the CEO tries to get her to go back into the box she came packaged in, and Barbie escapes and goes into another room and meets Ruth, played by Rhea Perlman from the movie Matilda) who gives her sage advice about life and getting older.)

Gloria and Sasha team up with Weird Barbie and Allan to encourage Barbie to regain her self-esteem and not let those Kens make her feel worthless. They end up hatching a plan to reprogram the Barbies to be independent and confident again and for the Kens to all fight amongst one another. Seeing how they execute this plan was brilliant. They pretend to be interested in watching The Godfather with their noncommittal Ken boyfriend or asking them to teach them how to play certain sports, while they bring each other back in secret to Weird Barbie’s place so they can be reprogrammed again. The Kens no longer have control over these women’s lives, and so they fight amongst each other in a very fun and also very well-choreographed dance to the song “Just Ken.” Ken is upset because he feels that Barbie has taken away his power from him, and when Barbie takes over again he cries, and when she comforts him he thinks that she wants to be his girlfriend, but she lets him know that just because she is nice to him doesn’t mean that they need to be a couple, and she lets him know that she needs time to figure her life out and that he himself needs to take a moment for himself and not depend on her for his happiness. Barbie realizes that she wants to live life as a human being even if it’s not perfect.

This movie reminded me of this Disney movie I saw a long time ago called Life Size, with Lindsay Lohan and Tyra Banks. It’s about a teenager named Casey who plays football and hates dolls. She is struggling with grief after losing her mom, and has stopped hanging out with her friends. She finds a book at a bookstore called “The Book of Awakenings” and she recites a spell to try and bring her mom back to life. However, the next day after reciting the spell she finds out the spell brought Eve to life, not her mom. Casey is of course freaked out that this small plastic doll is now a full-grown human being, and she sets out to change Eve back to being a doll. However, things change when Eve saves Casey from getting hit by a truck after the owner of the bookstore chases Casey down for stealing “The Book of Awakenings,” and Casey’s dad lets Eve stay with him and Casey. Eve gets a job working at an office, and thinks she needs to handle everything and know everything but she ends up needing her coworkers to help her. In return, she helps them learn to love themselves and become more confident in who they are. However, Eve learns that she isn’t perfect and doesn’t have to be perfect. In one scene, Eve is making a cake and Casey comes home only to find the kitchen is smoky and the cake is on fire and Eve doesn’t know how to put it out, and after wrestling with the fire extinguisher, Eve gets fire extinguisher foam all over herself, and she beats herself up and calls herself stupid. Casey laughs and Eve is upset at first, but Casey gets Eve to look in the mirror at her face, and Eve ends up laughing it off. As Casey and Eve get to know each other, they become good friends, and that is why it is so painful for Casey when Eve goes back to her world of being a doll because they created such a beautiful friendship. It reminded me of Sasha and Barbie’s relationship. Barbie learned from Sasha that girls want someone who they can relate to, not someone who has everything figured out. And Sasha realized that just because she is a teenager it doesn’t mean she needs to throw away Barbie or pretend like she didn’t care about Barbie, because that connection with Barbie was always going to be in her heart no matter what stages of life Sasha went through.

And I loved when Gloria breaks down all of the double standards that women are expected to adhere to (e.g. have money but don’t ask for a raise, be thin but not too thin, be a boss but don’t be mean).

It reminded me of this book I read by Reshma Saujani who wrote a book called Brave, Not Perfect, and she breaks down all of these double standards in the book as well. Girls and women are often held up to these unrealistic expectations and while they are told to “lean in” and ask for raises and be bold and confident, they still don’t get the respect they deserve and society still has a long ways to go in challenging all of these traditional ideas of how women and men should think, act and behave. It reminded me of this Amy Schumer sketch I saw a while ago in which three women are on a panel and a man is facilitating the discussion and each time they introduce themselves they apologize for taking up space, making a mistake and even correcting the facilitator when he incorrectly says their names or what they do for a living. The women also apologize to each other when they interrupt each other, or when they express their viewpoints, and at the end when one of the women asks for a coffee, the person bringing her the coffee spills it on her, and the woman cries and apologizes for being alive. The male facilitator at the end doesn’t apologize, but instead says “whoops.” This was very real for me as someone who tends to apologize a LOT. I have been saying sorry to people for the longest time, and many people have told me that I don’t need to apologize all the time. Even still I continue to do it, but I think that is why I love Buddhist practice because it gets me to look within myself for what I need to change in my life, and as I started to see my behavior more clearly, I really am seeing that I do tend to say sorry a lot and that I need to work on saying sorry less. Gloria’s speech showed me that even though Barbie was telling women they can be anything they want and to have self-confidence, Ken destroying Barbie Land really wrecked her self-confidence and made her feel powerless and worthless, so Gloria was letting Barbie know that she needed to look within herself to find that self-worth because no man can really take that self-worth away even if he tried. Not even Ken, who ended up being a really insecure man who needed to find his own self-worth outside of being with Barbie and running the patriarchy.

This movie also reminded me of a concept in Buddhism called relative versus absolute happiness. Relative happiness is when all of your desires are fulfilled. You get a nice car, you get a nice house, you get the partner of your dreams. Those things do bring a sense of joy when you get them, but over time, the joy you feel when having those things doesn’t last long and we can’t hold onto them when we die. Plus, even with those things, you’re still going to go through problems in life. However, absolute happiness is something you experience when you can view life itself as a joy, no matter what your circumstances are. As I have continued to practice and study Buddhism, I am realizing that while it’s okay for me to want things, I am still responsible for my own happiness and no one can hand it to me. I felt like my life was a living hell when I was in the depths of suffering, and I felt like there was no meaning in life. But as I chanted and studied about the Buddhist view on life and death, I began to understand that life had much deeper meaning and purpose than I thought, and I started to just appreciate being alive on this Earth. Barbie realized that she needed to seek a much deeper sense of fulfillment within herself rather than always seeking it outside of herself. Even though her life seemed perfect on the outside, she was really figuring out what her purpose in life was and no one around her could tell her what the answer was because everyone was busy running around running Barbie Land and trying to fulfill these prescribed roles that they were given. No one had time to think about death because it seemed in Barbie Land everyone was just going to live forever and not ever experience dying. Ken didn’t really understand who he was until he had that moment of reflection, but it took Barbie time to reflect on herself, as well as her relationship with Gloria and Sasha, to figure out that she didn’t need to continue to fulfill this prescribed role that she was given by someone else just because that is the way things have always been. Because she had that journey of self-actualization, she was able to encourage Ken to go through his own journey of self-actualization, and so he could encourage the other Kens to figure themselves out. I really love the song in the film “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish because it illustrates Barbie’s journey of figuring out what her purpose in life is and what happiness means to her.

Overall, it is a really good movie and I am really happy Greta Gerwig got to get the movie made. I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

Barbie. 2023. 1 hr 54 min. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.

Movie Review: Elemental

To be honest, this is another movie that I had not looked up much about nor watched the trailer for. I had seen so many billboards around when driving and would see this movie being advertised, but I wouldn’t think much of it. I guess I had been on a too steady diet of R-rated films with swearing and violence, and I think I just realized after a while, I need to go back to my roots and watch some Pixar movies. Pixar always manages to produce movies with powerful and universal messages and most, if not all, of them bring me to tears. When I saw Encanto, I was already having a rough day at work and so the minute I sat down and saw all the beautiful animation, I full-on broke down like a baby. And this wasn’t even five minutes into the film. I was just so blown away by all of the beautiful singing, the colors, everything. And I think after a day of loneliness and stress, I just needed to unwind and watch a good Pixar movie.

Elemental was one of those movies. And honestly, my eyes are exhausted from the serious water works workout it did during this film. Seriously, even just thinking of the movie’s main song by Lauv is almost bringing me to tears. The movie takes place in a bustling and diverse city which is made up of the four elements: fire, water, air and land. A fire couple immigrates from their community of fire people to Element City and like many immigrants, they face challenges when they first arrive. They face housing discrimination because they are fire, and fire burns wood, so the wood people won’t rent to them. And they can’t room with water because they are fire and fire and water aren’t supposed to go together. They also speak Fire-ish, which the customs officer doesn’t understand, so when the couple gives their names the officer, who I think is a tree, says “How about we put Bernie and Cinder as your names on your passport?” Bernie and Cinder finally settle in, and they give birth to their child, Ember. Bernie has big dreams of Ember running the shop when he retires, but on one condition: she needs to overcome her fiery temper. However, this is extremely difficult and it doesn’t come without a lot of training and practice, and Ember finds herself blowing up at customers who take things without paying or when she finds herself working the counter alone and she is dealing with several customers at once. One day, she tries to hold her temper in, and she is dealing with a lot of stressful customers, so she goes into the basement and gets angry and bursts into flames. The water pipes bust and the basement floods, and Ember now has another problem to fix. A water inspector named Wade emerges from the flooding in the basement and tells Ember that she violated a serious inspection code and also finds out that her dad’s shop violates a lot of other health inspection codes, and so Wade tells Ember that her dad’s shop is going to need to shut down. Ember begs him to not get her dad’s shop closed down because it was his dream to have that shop and shutting it down would take away everything he worked so hard for. Wade does his best to let it slide because Ember is furious with him, and water doesn’t want to mess with fire. He also has a serious crush on her and asks her out, but she isn’t interested in being with him. However, as they get to know each other they develop a very beautiful relationship. Cinder and Bernie don’t approve of Wade and Ember’s relationship because he is water and she is fire. When Ember meets Wade’s mom, she is sweet and accepts Ember for who she is, and when one of the glasses breaks, Ember uses her powers to weld the glass together into a beautiful sculpture. Wade’s mom tells her she has an incredible talent and recommends her for a glass making internship but Ember has a hard time believing it because she is focused on fulfilling her dad’s dream of her owning the shop when he retires. However, she ultimately decides to pursue the internship and eventually her parents respect her relationship with Wade and her wanting to pursue her dreams.

One scene I really appreciate and that also moved me to tears was when Wade and Ember are at a sports game and one of the players is losing the shots and everyone is booing him, but Wade feels so much compassion for this player because he knows the guy’s mom is sick, so he literally makes a water wave (doing the wave) and everyone begins to follow him in cheering on the player. I don’t know why that scene moved me so much, but it just did. I also just got really emotional during the song “Steal the Show” by Lauv, which plays during the scenes where Wade and Ember fall in love. Honestly, I am actually tearing up remembering how beautiful the song is. And just how beautiful the movie was. After watching so many movies with violence and heavy themes, I think I just needed a movie that was heartwarming and touching and for kids and family. This movie really hit all of my emotional spots, and oh my gosh I am not kidding I am literally tearing up as I write this blog post because I am remembering how incredibly sweet this movie was. I think it was just really emotional because I am dealing with a crush on someone right now, and seeing Wade crush on Ember and fall in love with her really hit me hard because it reminded me of how I thought of my crush and I being together. I think this is why I love movies because they make me feel less alone in my experiences.

There is also a beautiful and touching feature after the movie where the film’s creator, Peter Sohn, talks about how the film is inspired by his personal experiences. His parents were immigrants from Korea and they faced a lot of challenges: financial, emotional, social. They ran two shops while providing their sons with a living, and Peter also felt conflicted because he wanted to be an artist but that was unheard of in his family. He also dealt with challenges from his parents when he married a white American woman because his grandmother before she passed away told him he needed to marry a Korean woman. Watching this feature after the movie was pretty emotional because it just reminded me that everyone has a story to tell, and movies are an incredible avenue to tell our unique stories so people like me, who don’t know what it’s like to have immigrant parents or immigrate to another country, can understand and learn about these experiences.

Overall, I really loved Elemental. I think if I see it again I might be like Wade and his family because they cry so much (after all, they are water).

Daily writing prompt

Daily writing prompt
Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.
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I think there are a few men who have positively impacted my life. One of them is my dad because he is really nice and cool. He really encourages me to believe in myself, and I always appreciate everything he does. Another is a friend of mine from college. He and I have known each other for a while, and he is a really cool person and I really enjoy talking with him. I really appreciate getting to know him over the years. And another is the Buddhist teacher and writer Daisaku Ikeda, who passed away last month. I really appreciate that he wrote so many books on Buddhism and also he published several dialogues with people such as the English historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee and jazz musicians Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. I always really love reading his book Discussions on Youth because he encourages me to take on challenges in my youth and to always continue growing and improving myself each day, and he encourages me to always do my best no matter what. Every time I felt stuck or fell in love and was experiencing heartbreak, or when I had a hard time at work, or when I was figuring out deeper issues such as life and death, I would read Discussions on Youth and Mr. Ikeda always gives such good encouragement about those topics. I had really started studying Ikeda’s writings on life and death from a Buddhist perspective a lot more these past few years, because I was grappling with the deaths of some of my loved ones as well as the deaths of so many people around the world during the pandemic. I think reading Daisaku Ikeda’s book Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death was also really helpful in developing a deeper understanding of birth and death, which are one of the four sufferings in Buddhism. Studying about life and death has helped me appreciate my life on a deeper level because before I was really suffering and just thought I wasn’t going to want to live, but after deepening my Buddhist study I have a deeper appreciation for my life. Daisaku Ikeda taught me what it means to live a fulfilling life and how to overcome challenges through my Buddhist practice.

Movie Review: Cruella

Last week I watched the movie Cruella with my family. I had been wanting to see it for a while because every time I went on YouTube, I would see a Disney+ commercial showing a clip from the movie. I am so glad I finally saw it because I really loved it! Emma Stone is such a great actress, and Emma Thompson (the two Emma’s!) is also a really good actress in this one. I really loved her in The Favourite, and I really loved seeing her in the trailer for Poor Things. I also really loved Emma Thompson in a movie she starred in with Mindy Kaling called Late Night.

If you haven’t seen Cruella, it takes place in England in 1964, and Cruella (Emma Stone) is narrating her early childhood, when she was Estella. She describes how she was bullied as a child in school for her hair, which was part black and part blonde, and how she found a friend in a schoolmate named Anita, but soon gets expelled for her behavior. She also finds an adorable dog when bullies throw her in the dumpster and she finds a dog in the dumpster, and she names the dog Buddy. Her mom wants her to feel like she belongs in school, but it just gets too tough to deal with the bullying and also all the trips Cruella has to make to the principal’s office. Cruella is just trying to defend herself because she is always being picked on, but the school wants her to adhere to their strict rules, so she gets expelled. A pivotal moment comes when her mother goes to talk to the Baroness (Emma Thompson) and tells Cruella to wait in the car. However, Cruella doesn’t listen and instead gets curious and goes to the party that the Baroness is at. She becomes immediately enthralled by the dresses and suits that people are wearing at the party, but Buddy causes trouble when he runs under one of the partygoer’s dresses and Estella has to run and fetch him, causing more mayhem to ensue. Cruella runs around the place and there are three vicious Dalmatians who chase after her. She gets ahold of this heirloom that belongs to her mother. Cruella’s mom and the Baroness are talking outside on the balcony, but then the Baroness prompts the Dalmatians to run, and they knock Cruella’s mom over the balcony and she falls to her death into the ocean. Cruella is shocked but she doesn’t have time to register her grief because she and Buddy need to run away from these Dalmatians who are chasing them. The next day, Cruella realizes that she really has no mother and that the heirloom is gone, and she goes to Regent’s Park and cries. She feels ashamed and responsible for the death of her mother, but then she meets two orphans named Jasper and Horace, who get her to join them in pickpocketing and stealing. Cruella dyes her hair red in her 20s and continues to be roommates with Jasper and Horace, and they continue to steal stuff on the bus, when going out, and other places. Cruella’s life changes when Jasper gets her a gig at a high end fashion boutique, and Cruella immediately takes the gig because she is studying fashion design and wants to have a career as a fashion designer. However, her dream in crushed when the head person of the department store has her working as the custodian who cleans toilets and takes out trash. She is mistreated, and one time when she goes out to take a break and get some lunch she is locked out of the building. She tries to tell the manager that she has expertise in fashion and can help in the fashion department, but he dismisses her and tells her to go back to cleaning. One night she explores the department with all of the fancy clothes and then ends up repositioning one of the mannequins in the store window who is wearing an incredibly beautiful dress. The next morning, Cruella, who is hung over, finds many people looking in the shop window at her disheveled appearance and the displaced mannequin. Her boss finds out and chastises her and is about to fire her, when all of a sudden the Baroness (played by Emma Stone) comes into the store. Immediately everyone starts to kiss up to her and they also try to arrest Cruella, Jasper and Horace. The Baroness ends up approving of Cruella’s placement of the mannequin in the shop window, thinking what she did was a work of art, and she gives her her business card and offer Cruella a job to come work for her. The store manager is appalled but Cruella ends up going to work for the Baroness.

Cruella’s life changes and she ends up working as an assistant to the Baroness, sketching fashion designs and also delivering lunch to the Baroness while the Baroness takes her nine-minute naps with cucumber slices over her eyes. Cruella finds out that the Baroness has stolen her mother’s heirloom, and she is appalled but she also doesn’t want to lose her job by out-rightly telling the Baroness, so she devises a plan with Jasper and Horace to get back the heirloom. When at work, she is Estella, with her red hair and glasses. But after work, she is Cruella, with her black and white hair and exquisite fashions. She wants to outdo anything that the Baroness did, and she makes these grand appearances at the Baroness’s parties. The Baroness, unsurprisingly, becomes jealous and tries to take credit for Cruella’s work. Cruella, disguised as Estella, pretends to be just a regular assistant, but when she is at these parties and social functions, she wears these extravagant dresses and tries to outdo the Baroness. However, all of this planning she is doing to get revenge on the Baroness is taking a toll on her friendships with Jasper and Horace, and they begin to feel taken advantage of. She seeks friendship early on in Artie, a gay man who runs a boutique and resembles David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and Artie helps her out with her plans to get back at the Baroness. Jasper gets angry with Cruella for becoming full of herself and taking advantage of their friendship. Things really take a turn when Cruella finds out that the Baroness is her biological mother who actually did not want to have anything to do with Cruella and gave her away to this lady who worked for the Baroness. The Baroness burns down Cruella, Jasper and Horace’s apartment and arrests Jasper and Horace. Everyone thinks Cruella died in the fire, but she doesn’t and instead has a funeral for her old identity as Estella, marking her embracing her true identity as Cruella De Vil.

Honestly, one of the reasons I watched this movie was because it won for Best Costume Design at the Oscars in 2022. I can see why it won because every piece of fashion in that movie was STUNNINGLY beautiful, and it must have taken so many hours, so much research and so much work to put together all of the clothing. I always focus on the actors, but I forget that there is so much work that goes on behind the scenes of every movie, and these people who work behind the scenes on the costume design and makeup deserve just as much praise as the actors do. Cruella put so much work and detail into the dresses she designed, and one of them was a beautiful dress that used a lot of tulle, and it looked like trash from a sanitation truck, but when the truck drove off slowly, the dress trailed behind and left this very beautiful train of colorful fabrics for people to admire. I also really love the soundtrack for this movie. It includes some of my favorite songs, like Supertramp’s “Bloody Well Right” and “Time of the Season” by The Zombies. I also just really love the acting and the dialogue, and I didn’t realize this, but the guy who plays Cruella’s boss was a character in the show Fleabag, which is a British TV show that I really loved. I think this movie gave me a good backstory as to how Cruella De Vil turned out to be the person who she was in 101 Dalmatians. I really loved Glenn Close in that movie as the character of Cruella De Vil, but it has been such a long time since I had watched them, so it was refreshing to watch a movie where I get to understand the motives and backstory of one of cinema’s most famous villains.

Cruella. 2 h 14 m. Rated PG-13 for some violence and thematic elements.

In Memory of Andre Braugher

Today while browsing the news at work I found some really sad news: Andre Braugher, who played Captain Holt in Brooklyn 99, passed away this week at 61. When I read the news, I was really shocked and saddened because Captain Holt was one of my favorite characters on TV. If you haven’t seen Brooklyn 99 yet it is about a department of police officers in the 99th precinct of Brooklyn, New York, who fight crime while also managing to have a sense of humor. Jake Peralta, played by Andy Samberg, loves to engage in pranks and other shenanigans but also loves his job in the 99th precinct. He works closely with Captain Raymond Holt, who is the commanding officer of the precinct and has a wonderful husband named Kevin and a cute dog named Cheddar. Andre Braugher played Captain Raymond Holt throughout the show and he brought me so much joy. Even though Andre Braugher is no longer here, and even though I never got to meet him, I really appreciate him and the work he did as an actor. He will be very much missed.

Movie Review: Nyad

I didn’t know much about the movie Nyad, although I had seen it as one of the suggested movies on my Netflix feed. But man, what a FORCE. I didn’t know anything about Diana Nyad before watching this movie, but after watching this movie I was just so blown away by her perseverance, her fighting spirit, her endurance in the face of so many obstacles. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I totally recommend it.

This movie really showed me the importance of not giving up even when it seems you have exhausted all of your strength to keep going. The footage shown at the beginning shows Diana when she was a younger swimmer, and the movie shows her in her 60s figuring out what to do with her life during her retirement. Her trusty friend Bonnie always sticks by her side through thick and thin, even when Diana sets out to complete her record of swimming from Cuba to Key West, Florida. Diana learns the importance of not giving up. She is stung by jellyfish, has hallucinations and vomits after swimming for 24 hours. But she continues to persevere even when she faces these really life-threatening situations while going towards her goal. She also learns that she couldn’t do the journey alone; she needed a team of people to help her pull through, especially Bonnie.

The movie also shows Diana grappling with sexual trauma she faced as a child. When she was younger, she had a male coach named Jack who seemed to believe in her and the other female swimmers’ potential. However, as the film continues, it shows flashbacks to when Jack leads Diana into his bedroom and sexually assaults her. Unfortunately, Diana’s assault is not an isolated incident because there were other young women who Jack assaulted when they went into his office. It reminded me of Larry Nasser, who was the doctor for the US women’s gymnastics team and assaulted many young female athletes. It showed me the dark side of power and how Jack used his authority as a coach to abuse the young women he was coaching. This experience continues to haunt Diana and in one pivotal scene while she is continuing to swim from Cuba to Florida, she recalls Jack assaulting her as a girl and has a serious panic attack and has to be pulled out of the water. Later, Jack dies and Diana still is (rightfully) furious with him for abusing her for many years, and she beats herself up about it and Bonnie has to remind her that what Jack did to her wasn’t her fault.

After watching this movie, I was just blown away because in the face of such life-threatening situations, Diana pulled through and she never gave up in the face of adversity. It reminds me of this saying I have on a shirt of mine called “Never Give Up.” I also love both Annette Bening and Jodie Foster’s acting. To be honest, this is the first film I have seen with Jodie Foster in it. I haven’t watched her other movies but she is an incredible actor and this was a really good role for her. I have seen Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, and she was also in another movie called 20th Century Women but I didn’t finish that movie yet. I really loved her in The Kids Are All Right though. Her and Julianne Moore played their roles really well.

Nyad. 2023. Available on Netflix. Starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity.

My Job as a Barista

In 2016 after graduating college, I started searching for jobs. It was really challenging because I had this idea that because I had a bachelor’s degree I was going to magically get any job that I wanted. But I was pretty dead wrong. I searched and searched, applying for jobs in just about every field you could imagine. But nothing came up. I also had put on my applications that I could not work on weekends because I had other commitments, and when I went to the manager of the bookstore I applied to, she told me that they didn’t hire me because I couldn’t work on weekends, and to get that job I had to be available on the weekends. I was pretty frustrated, and the six month grace period I had until I had to start paying off my student debt was fast approaching its end. After coming back from a conference for Buddhists in Florida, I finally found a job at a local hotel as a front desk agent. I was pretty excited after a frustrating job search to finally have a job so I could pay off my student debt. The first few days I did a lot of online training and I was fine with it, but my perfectionist tendencies from college kicked in and I found myself wanting to do everything perfectly. I jotted down copious notes for the quizzes I would take during the online training because I was worried I would forget the material and fail the tests. I was so deeply afraid of messing up at this job, but the general manager popped in when I was still working on the training and told me, “Hey, you might want to finish up the training.” He reminded me I didn’t need to be perfect, but I was so stuck in that cycle of I-need-to-be-100-percent-perfect mindset that I just could not stand the thought of making a mistake.

Of course, this attitude didn’t exactly help me when it came to my hands-on training. The girl who was training me was a very laid back kind of gal and she was nice, but I think I came off as a little too uptight and she sensed that. Every time I answered the phones I would freeze up and get nervous, not knowing what to say, afraid to make even the tiniest mistake in my interaction with the person (I had this job about seven years ago, so I am probably exaggerating how much of a perfectionist I actually was, but I’m sure you get the point.) Finally it got to the point where I was so tongue-tied on these calls that the girl finally just said, “Forget it,” and ended up taking over the calls for me. I remember feeling very embarrassed with myself for messing up the phone calls, and I finally went into the bathroom and chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo under my breath to calm down. However, I remember getting frustrated one more time and I just lost my shit after that. I screamed, cried, broke down in the bathroom. I was a huge mess. And looking back, I take full responsibility for my behavior during that time. I didn’t handle my emotions well, and I’m glad I started to see a therapist during this time because I was pretty much a nervous wreck who didn’t know how to cope with failure and mistakes. I had these really unrealistic expectations that I was going to be perfect at work, that I was going to do everything right on the first try, but when that didn’t happen, I got really disappointed that my reality didn’t meet my super high expectations. The next day I got a phone call from the manager telling me that I was going to be let go. She didn’t specify what happened, but I’m pretty sure my attitude and behavior was one of the reasons, so I turned in my badge and my shirt and thanked the people for training me and letting me work in the brief time that I did. I also got to get a head start on the loans, so it wasn’t like my time at that job ever went to waste. Looking back, I also learned that I could have viewed my mistakes at the job as an opportunity to grow rather than beat myself up and throw a tantrum in the bathroom.

A few weeks later after continuing to search for jobs (because let’s face it, those loans were still not going to pay themselves off) I found a job at a local Starbucks. I was pretty excited to work for the shop, but again, I found myself struggling to bounce back from mistakes. The first few days I got pretty nervous and was pretty nervous about talking to the customer. And in the morning I had to do a variety of tasks: unstack and reassemble the chairs in the café and dining areas (the coffee shop was a kiosk in a supermarket so I had to work with both departments), brew both the supermarket iced tea and the coffee shop tea, and assemble the pastry display case. One thing I learned about this job was the value of efficiency and time management. I thought I could just stand around and wait for the iced tea in the dining room to brew, but then my manager came over and snapped me out of my daydreaming.

“What are you doing?” they asked, eyes narrowed.

I stammered.

“I’m, uhhh…waiting for the tea to brew.”

“You still have a bunch of other tasks to do before six.”

“Sorry,” I said and rushed back to the kiosk.

“You need to learn to multitask,” they said.

There were a few times I was the only barista behind the counter and I was pretty nervous the first few weeks whenever I had shifts in the morning and had to do the first couple of hours alone. One time, the nozzle for the iced tea in the kitchen broke and I tried and tried to fix it, but the iced tea just kept flowing. I freaked out and thought, Fuck it, I will clean up the mess later, and went back to the kiosk to finish all the other tasks I needed to do. The guest services department came over and told me I had to clean up the mess I had made with the iced tea in the kitchen. Thankfully, when my manager for the coffee shop arrived, she helped me twist the nozzle tight and I’m pretty sure they got a new one after that. When I was alone one time, there was a guy who always ordered a tuxedo mocha and he and I would often begin to chit-chat. He was nice, and I remember he would often tip me $20. I am forever thankful to this guy because those tips often went towards paying off my student debt. I was alone another time and I had to make all these coffee travelers while there was a huge line of people waiting for their drinks to be made. I was totally freaking out because I didn’t know how to do everything at once. I had also spilled a bunch of caramel sauce while trying to refill the bottles (someone had ordered a caramel macchiato). I left quite a few angry customers fuming off with their drinks, even with my apology for making them wait. I later learned how to make the travelers in a more time-efficient way, and the other baristas learned to help each other out by making them ahead of time so that in the morning when the customer came for their coffee traveler the barista could focus on getting the six am folks out the door with their lattes, Dark Roasts and tall blondes, happy and fully caffeinated, not scrambling for ten minutes to find packets of sugar, stirrers, lids, cups and who knows what else (oh, yeah, of course I was missing the key ingredient of the traveler: the coffee.)

To be continued.

My Love of Seal

When I was a child, one of my fondest memories was listening to the radio. The radio station would always play adult contemporary music. These artists included Celine Dion, Elton John, and George Michael. There was just something so beautiful about listening to their music. As a child, I was very sensitive and listening to music helped me tap into that sensitivity, and I remember going to ice skating lessons at our local mall when I was younger, and every time they played “My Heart Will Go On,” I would start tearing up because it was just so beautiful. Even though I had not seen Titanic yet it was still an emotional song. Side note: I could make the excuse that I was too young to see this movie, but I knew kids who had gone to see The Mummy when they were six, so that’s not really a great excuse. Okay, on second thought, yes, it was a valid excuse. I probably would not have appreciated the movie had I seen it that young, and seeing people die on open water as a gigantic iceberg sank would have given me nightmares for life. When I finally saw it in 2016 I cried my eyes out. And from there I developed a very late crush on Leonardo DiCaprio (I was too late in my crush, I missed the gaggle of girls who screamed at this teen heart-throb of an actor but I still enjoyed fantasizing about meeting him when I was 22.)

Okay, back to the topic. I still love these artists to this day. And one of these artists is named Seal. I love the animal, but I am talking about the British singer who is known for so many wonderful songs, the number one song being “Kiss From A Rose.” I used to listen to this song so many times and each time I never got tired of it. Seal’s voice took me to another dimension, another world, another paradise. When I was in college, one of the teachers I worked with always played Seal and Steely Dan, and I pretty much loved her forever after that. I remember there was one song called “My Vision” that I just fell in love with in college. I remember in sophomore year listening to that song and it just took me out of my every day challenges and allowed me to just enjoy some beautiful music. I remember going to the campus library and the third floor room, the periodicals, was always super crowded and it was hard to find a seat anywhere, especially during finals week (good luck with finding any kind of study space during that time.) But I remember sitting at one of the crowded long tables with other students who were plugged in or whispering study guide notes to each other to prepare for midterms, and Seal was just singing about if I could see his vision of a red-hot summer in white, when love was the feeling. There was something so powerful about the song that just drove me to listen to it more and more, and I still love Seal’s music to this day. There is one song from his album Human Beings called “Colour” and the first time I listened to it I fell in love. It is hard to describe how beautiful this song was but I think the first time I listened to it I got goosebumps because it was just so riveting and moving and deep. The way Seal’s voice soars during the chorus and I also love the instrumentals. The strings, the voice, everything about this song just takes me away.