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These past couple of weeks I was looking for a new show because we are nearing the end of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and finished the last episode of Abbott Elementary season 2. My family kept talking about how good Ted Lasso was, and frankly I didn’t know really anything about the show other than people talking about how good it was and that it won a lot of awards, so I thought, This show must be really good. We ended up watching the first three episodes in one evening because it was that good.

If you haven’t seen the show yet, it is about a football coach from America who has a very optimistic nature but then gets recruited to go to coach football in England and people wonder, What is this guy and his cheery disposition doing thousands of miles across the Atlantic, especially because he doesn’t know anything about football in the United Kingdom, which is soccer here in America (they call Ted a “wanker” throughout the season, and at the beginning not in a good way.) Rebecca and her assistant, Higgins, are determined to bring down Ted and the football team. Rebecca wants to do this to get back at her cheating lying ex-husband Rupert, who Higgins let sleep with other women behind Rebecca’s back and who really treasured the football team. However, Ted has a cheery optimistic nature that ends up being quite contagious even if his football team doesn’t warm up to it well in the beginning. For the team they are really sick of losing, and they have an egotistic player on the team named Jamie, who is only focused on his own success and not about the team’s success. And then we’ve got the super hot Roy Kent (played by Brett Goldstein), who harbors a lot of anger issues but is dedicated to leading the team. Ted Lasso does what he can to encourage each of the team members, including the team assistant Nathan, or “Nate,” who gets bullied and ostracized by the soccer team. Ted and Coach Beard embrace Nate, who ends up providing a lot of moral support for the team and ends up coming out of his shell to become a more confident person. Roy even gets the other boys to stop picking on Nate, without Ted intervening. Ted doesn’t want to intervene because he believes that Roy has the potential to stop the bullying. Honestly, Ted reminded me of this chapter in The Lotus Sutra called Bodhisattva Never Disparaging. In this chapter this person named Bodhisattva Never Disparaging seeks to lead people to enlightenment by telling them they have a Buddha nature, which is our inherent potential to be wise, courageous and compassionate and to overcome any challenge that comes our way. The people in his environment throw sticks and stones at him and call him names whenever he tells them they have a Buddha nature and bows in respect to them, but while making sure to keep himself at a distance he continues to tell them that he would never look down on them because they are respect-worthy Buddhas. Ted Lasso reminds me of Bodhisattva Never Disparaging because no matter how down on themselves the people on the football team are, Ted never gives up on them and encourages them to believe in themselves. Honestly, I was surprised that Jason Sudeikis was at first going to make Ted Lasso a mean guy because Ted is so nice, but then I remembered that a lot of sports dramas I see the coach is serious and often harsh to the players in order to toughen them up, but I’m so glad the writers made Ted a nice guy because the political climate was divisive and there was (and still is) already so much anger in the world that it helps to have a character who is kind and gives people hope.

I really like though how the show is addressing the importance of seeking help for mental health. Ted is far away from his family, but it’s because his wife wanted emotional space from him. He tries to brush it off with optimism, but even he finds out that when you feel sad or worried, there is no shame in addressing it and being honest about it. Ted’s wife and son travel from America to visit Ted in England, but then he finds his wife crying and she admits that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Ted, and so she leaves him. This takes a serious toll on his mental health and he tries to come into the office and stay optimistic about it, but Nate and Coach Beard understand on a deeper level that Ted is suffering because his wife divorced him, and they do their best to support him through this tough time. Ted ends up having a severe panic attack because of the emotional toll his divorce from his wife has taken on him, and Rebecca finds him suffering from a panic attack and helps him. This was really touching because it showed me that mental health is a serious thing and it’s not something you can just tough out on your own, and it really does help to have friends who support you. I have definitely been in that place where I try to tough out the depression through smiling or not talking about my pain, but then I end up harboring a lot of my own anger and resentment inside and then when it explodes I feel worse about myself because I took out my anger on people who didn’t deserve it. I think this is why seeking professional help was so crucial because my therapist gave me a new way of looking at stressful situations and I found new healthier coping mechanisms for dealing with stress. I think especially it was helpful to visit therapy because the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful and traumatic for so many people, and I remember coming out of quarantine and having to face my depression and loneliness head-on. Depression has been a huge part of my life and I have gone through so many ups and downs with it, but watching shows like Ted Lasso that address mental health reminds me that I’m not alone and that a lot of people deal with mental illness even if they don’t talk about it. There is a really cool campaign that the Ad Council has done about talking about mental health, and there is one ad where teens are bombarded by messages of toxic positivity on their phones and by their family and peers, who tell them things like, “Why are you depressed? You have a roof over your head?” or “Men don’t cry.” or “Just think positive thoughts.” And then it showed these teens’ friends sending them empathetic supportive messages like, “Do you want to talk about it?” or “I’m always here to talk” rather than brushing over their feelings. As someone who has been in that camp of “just think positive” I have learned the hard way that you can’t just brush over someone’s feelings like that and addressing mental health isn’t as simple as “just think happy thoughts.” In fact, in my junior year of college I kept a journal with a message “Think Happy Thoughts” emblazoned across the cover with sunshine and butterflies painted on it. Anything but. The journal was filled with my deepest insecurities, anxieties and darkest thoughts. It contained depression, suicide, pain, anger, resentment but also gratitude, love, and some positivity. I wasn’t about to gloss over my suffering when I wrote that journal, because journaling was one of the few ways I felt comfortable talking about my pain because I didn’t think that others around me would understand what I was going through. I worried about being a burden on others, but I think that’s why I love my Buddhist activities because I get to support other youth who struggle with not just mental health but problems in general. That’s not to say that my mental health issues are gone; I still very much learned from this experience that there is no one size fits all magic cure for depression, anxiety, PTSD and other mental illnesses, and everyone’s experience with their mental health is different. But what Ted Lasso taught me is the importance of connection and knowing you have someone to talk to even if it’s uncomfortable to be vulnerable and honest with the person about what you’re going through. Ted is vulnerable and that takes courage because we are still living in a society where people still have to overcome a lot of fear, judgment and shame around talking about mental health. And I love how he encourages his team to be vulnerable as well, especially as young men, being vulnerable is such a valuable thing. I remember when I watched Blackish and in the next to last episode Junior, Pops and Dre go on a camping trip because Junior just broke up with his girlfriend, Olivia, and is still dealing with the heartbreak. Dre and Pops tell him to “man up” but Junior is sick of them telling him to man up because he is human and doesn’t need to be strong all the time. This is especially important because Pops and Dre didn’t get to be honest about their feelings growing up so it makes them uncomfortable at first that Junior is open and honest about how much pain he is in over breaking up with Olivia. This episode showed me the value of vulnerability.

Written: May 16, 2023

I watched the movie Elvis last weekend, and I must say it was pretty good. I first saw the trailer and thought, Man, this looks incredible. And I am a huge fan of the Academy Awards, and saw that this movie got nominated for several awards, including Best Picture. To be honest, I haven’t watched too many films directed by Baz Luhrmann, and I only watched a few minutes of his remake of The Great Gatsby. But I gotta tell you, it’s definitely a unique style of filmmaking because there are just so many stunning visuals in the film and Baz really incorporates a lot of modern-day music into this film. Honestly, I usually take notes when I am watching a movie but I realized that the bright colors and the flashy montages are a huge element of the film, so I felt I missed a lot by trying to dissect or intellectualize it during the first viewing.

This movie has a lot in common with movies I have watched about the music industry, and one common theme these biographical dramas about music show is the pitfalls of fame. There is a concept in Buddhism called the eight winds, and it basically says that people shouldn’t be swayed by neither favorable circumstances nor unfavorable circumstances. The four favorable winds are prosperity, honor, praise and pleasure, and the four adverse winds are decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering. Buddhist reformer Nichiren Daishonin wrote to his disciple, Shijo Kingo, who was a samurai with a hot temper, to keep practicing Buddhism and not let his anger influence his behavior, especially because Kingo was ordered to leave his estate because of his strong conviction in the Daishonin’s teaching. I had this idea that actors and musicians were happy because they became successful, but as I studied the concept of the eight winds, it taught me that a lot of successful people are unhappy and being successful doesn’t mean you don’t struggle or go through things. In the movie, it’s like the eight winds was so applicable because Elvis wins all this praise and fame but he ends up unhappy, and he has a toxic relationship with his manager, who wants nothing more than to make money from Elvis. Tom tells Elvis that he wants him to go on an international tour, but it ends up being a scam. Tom can’t leave the country since he doesn’t have immigration papers, so the international tour ends up being a tour in the U.S. Elvis’s doctor also prescribes him a lot of medications, and his health deteriorates as the film continues. His wife, Priscila, tells him she is worried about his health and that he is taking so many pills, and he tells her he is going to take care of it, but honestly, it’s hard. It made me think of the movie A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper because Bradley’s character, Jack, is depressed and struggles with addiction, and his wife, Ally, who he inspired to make a career of music, feels he is wasting his life away and feeling sorry for himself. But as someone who has struggled with their mental health, it is a day-to-day battle against your inner darkness. It really is, and it’s not easy. I haven’t struggled with addiction, but I have struggled with depression, and it is not as easy as just switching your thinking. It’s an illness, and like anything else I need to manage it. Elvis had to keep going, going, going, and didn’t have time to stop, and I’m sure back then it was tough because there wasn’t a whole lot of space to talk about mental health and there wasn’t any social media where people could feel ok being vulnerable about the challenges they were going through. There was another movie that reminded me of Elvis, and that movie was Judy, a biopic about actress and singer Judy Garland starring Renee Zellweger as Judy. Like Elvis, Judy Garland had a successful career but struggled with addiction and health issues and faced a lot of pressures early on with fame and success.

Something I wanted to address though, and I had read this in some other reviews, was how the film depicts Elvis’s adoption of Black music traditions and his recording of music originally by Black artists. I became more aware of this because I had seen the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a few years ago, and it addresses the exploitation of Black artists by record companies that were run by white executives. The movie is a film adaptation of a play by late playwright August Wilson, and it takes place in a Chicago recording studio and Ma Rainey is going to record her music but demands respect and autonomy over her music. She knows that the white record executives only wanted to make money off of her music, leaving her with no money for herself. She knows that the record company would make millions off of her recordings and leave her nary a cent, so she was going to demand that these white executives treat her with respect. In one scene, it’s a hot day in the studio and Ma tells them to go get her a Coke, and when the executives try to plead with her she tells them she is not recording anything until she gets her Coke. Then, when they finally get it, she takes her long sweet time drinking the Coke and then finally records it. Ma doesn’t just demand respect from the executives, she demands respect from her band as well. She isn’t willing to give up her music and voice to the record company that easily because she knows her worth as a human being and knows she doesn’t deserve that kind of unfair treatment. There is a member of her band named Levee, and he is the exact opposite. He sells his music to the record executives thinking they will make him a star, but my guess is that they end up selling his music and making all the money from it because at the end, an all-white band of musicians records the song and knowing the time period they probably didn’t give him any credit whatsoever or acknowledge he even wrote the music. It was not just sad, it was infuriating to find that the executives took his music and didn’t give him credit for it, but it showed me how music wasn’t free of the discrimination that was prevalent in society and how a lot of Black artists were not given credit for their songs. Ma was also just trying to survive, though, so she had to take ownership of her work because a lot of Black musicians, no matter how successful they were and how many commercial hits they produced, didn’t get the financial compensation they deserved and many of them struggled with poverty even after being successful. I remember watching a movie called Dreamgirls, and there is a scene where the Dreamettes record a song and then later find out that a white band copied their song without permission. It wasn’t until I saw that movie that I found out that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of “Hound Dog,” not Elvis, but most people know Elvis’s version of “Hound Dog.” It got played on the radio, in stores, in the movie Lilo and Stitch. But it wasn’t until one of the characters mentioned that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of the song that I started to think more about the issue of cultural appropriation. Elvis’s musical legacy when it came to the Black community is complicated, and there is probably so much research I need to do on this, but I think the film focused more on his relationship to Tom Parker. It touched on his relationship to the Black community and influence of blues and gospel on his music but it was mainly focused on Elvis the performer and his toxic relationship with Tom. Honestly I struggled to write this review without talking about Elvis and his relationship with Black musicians and the Black community because it’s been a huge discussion for so long and Black musicians did have a huge influence on Elvis’s music, and frankly I’m not a historian so I can’t really speak on this topic in length since I haven’t done as much extensive research as the people who have written about this topic in depth, but I was reading more about this aspect of the film in reviews such as this one in USA Today and this one on Slate and it definitely made me aware that I couldn’t just gloss over the topic of race when talking about Elvis or pretend like it wasn’t important to the storyline of the movie.

Written May 3 2023

Episode 3, “Typos and Torsos”

In this episode, Abe accidentally puts a typo in his work and it really bugs him. He ends up sharing with Ethan a graphic story about a plane crash that dismembered a lot of people and Ethan is scared to death. In 1984, Midge visits her son, Ethan, who is all grown up now, in Israel, where he is working on a kibbutz, or a communal settlement in Israel. He is working in the fields with everyone else, when suddenly he hears and sees a helicopter descend down into the fields, and his mother, Midge, gets out of the helicopter and surprises him with an unexpected visit. He seems embarrassed but glad to catch up with her. She catches up with him and he tells her he is training to become a rabbi, but is also getting married and he introduces her to his fiance, Chava, who joined the Israeli army and went to school in America, but doesn’t like Midge much and seems stuck up to Midge. Midge leaves and before leaving, she tells Ethan that she wishes he told her that he was getting married. He apologizes for not telling her earlier. It’s really hard for Midge to see her kids grow up so soon, and it was hard for me, too, because in previous seasons I just saw Ethan and Esther as little kids who had these loving but also crazy parents. But the final season was a reminder that change is the only constant in life, and no matter how successful our careers and lives are, we will have to face getting older and then dying.

The episode flashes back to 1961, and Midge and Joel are setting up Ethan’s sleeping area outside in the hallway because his therapist told them he needed a designated area to sleep outside of his room, so the two of them set up specific markers to designate Ethan’s sleeping area. Early in the episode, Gordon meets in the writer’s room and gives everyone feedback about the jokes they wrote for him to deliver on the show based on whether people thought they were funny. After watching this episode, I have so much more respect for writers in the writer’s room because in recent news this has become more evident because late night TV shows are going dark because the writers for these shows are going on strike for better pay. I really didn’t pay much attention to this at first. In 2007-2008 (more specifically, from November 5, 2007 to February 12, 2008), thousands of film and television screenwriters of writers’ labor unions went on strike. My older sister, who was really into journalism at the time, was reading the news and talking about it, and how this was going to have a huge impact on film and television production. The recent strike is the first in fifteen years, according to AP News, and this strike happened because many film and TV writers failed to reach a new contract with the trade association representing Hollywood studios and production companies. The union wants higher minimum pay, more writers per show and shorter exclusive contracts, and streaming has made it hard for these demands to get met because there is so much content that the writers have to produce and they are not being fairly compensated for it.

Another part that made me reflect was when Joel tells Midge that he thinks therapy is weak, but then she sees her mother, Rose, freaking out over hearing a clatter when there wasn’t any noise and Abe is losing it because an article he published has a typo in it, and it’s driving him over the edge, and even though Midge tells him to calm down he refuses to forgive himself. Rose is also on edge because the matchmakers burned down her tea room and she asks Susie if she can get a gun to protect her from the matchmakers. Honestly, I’m glad Ethan is seeing a therapist and I am also glad Esther saw a therapist later on in life, even though therapy isn’t easy and it’s tough bringing up trauma and childhood memories that weren’t all that great. Midge is also experiencing many ups and downs at work. It’s great because when she is working in the writer’s room, one of the men asks her for her jokes to submit for the show, and she is surprised because up until then they ignored her or told her she wasn’t supposed to write new material in between the show. But the fact that they let her share what she wrote is a big step. The team types it up and asks Gordon for his approval. Gordon looks it over and approves, and Midge is surprised that her joke is actually going to make it into the show.

Until Gordon makes a mistake when sharing the joke, that is. While delivering the joke, he purposefully botches the pronunciation of the punchline. Midge lets out an audible “Are you fucking kidding me?!?” groan and everyone hears her, including Gordon. She later confronts Gordon while he is talking with someone and interrupts their conversation to apologize to Gordon. Because he is busy talking, he reluctantly forgives her but then she tells him he should apologize for telling her joke wrong, but he insists he changed it on purpose. They end up getting in a huge heated argument with each other and it makes the newspaper headlines. Susie calls Midge with the news and Midge finds out she is about to be fired. When she comes in the next day, everyone in the writer’s room is staring at her silently because of what she did, and she brings a shoebox because she doesn’t have a lot of stuff she brought with her to the office. I kind of made me think of “Game Over,” an episode on the show Broad City. In the episode Ilana Wexler gets fired from her day job at Deals Deals Deals for tweeting a graphic bestiality video just days after the investor, Elizabeth (Vanessa Williams) promotes Ilana to run Deals Deals Deals’ Twitter account because of her expertise in Internet memes. She brings a large box to put her stuff in when she gets fired. But it turns out that unlike Ilana, Midge gets to stay at her job and is in fact not getting fired. It reminded me of when I was at my first office job and honestly I was cocky and thought I knew everything, and two years into the job I made a huge mistake that nearly cost the company and almost got me terminated. I didn’t get fired but it taught me a lesson, that I needed to ask for help whenever I didn’t know what to do on an assignment and to always take responsibility for my actions.

Meanwhile, Shirley, Joel’s mother and Midge’s mother-in-law, comes to Joel’s club unannounced. She drinks a lot, she chats up the guests and dotes on Joel, handing out expired crackers to people to cure them of their hangovers. Shirley doesn’t want to go home to Moishe, her husband and Midge’s father-in-law, or stay in the house with him since they are getting a divorce and neither of them is getting along with the other, so she pretty much hangs out at his club. She almost gets in a fight with Mrs. Moskowitz after insulting her. Mrs. Moskowitz has gradually shown how tough she is throughout the show, because honestly at the beginning I thought she was just this sweet little lady with a smile but it turns out that she is no nonsense and even wielded a baseball bat for people who weren’t allowed to come into the club but who tried to anyway. Shirley and Moishe still don’t know that Mei left Joel, and that there is no longer going to be a baby because Mei got an abortion and she also left for Chicago to follow her dreams of becoming a doctor. This blows over one night when Midge checks on Joel at the club and decides to do some stand up after Moishe insults Joel’s band and they walk off the stage, fed up with Moishe’s heckling. However, Midge doesn’t get off scot-free from their heckling, either. Whenever Midge tries to speak, Shirley and Moishe consistently heckle her from the audience and fight with one another, so she ends up having to cut her act short as they kept heckling her. When Midge is in the ladies’ room, Shirley approaches her and asks her if she knows what the deal is with Mei because Joel hasn’t followed up with them about the baby and Mei and him getting married (he announced this to them in episode 1 of this season). Midge knows Shirley will freak out if she tells her that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, so she lies and tells Shirley that Mei moved to China. She tells Joel that she lied but he tells her he will tell them. When Ethan is still sleeping in the hallway, Abe decides to tell him to go back to his bed and debunks what the therapist told Ethan. He tells Ethan this horrifying story about a plane crash that killed many people and includes very vivid and graphic details about the crash, and at the end he tells Ethan that everyone is going to die someday, including him, and that he has to accept that fear is a part of his life and that he has to live with it. Honestly this sat with me because for a long time I have dealt with anxiety and depression, and I often thought about life and death a lot as I got older. Death is still an uncomfortable topic for me but I have realized that it is an inherent part of life rather than a transcendent state divorced from reality. Learning about life and death from a Buddhist perspective actually forced me to appreciate my life even more, because I had wanted to kill myself many times but after reading about what happens after death, I realized it was a better idea to just navigate through the good times and the bad times and to create meaning from them rather than just decide in the here and now that my life was meaningless. One of my close friends passed away early this month, and as difficult as it was to watch her nearing the end of her life, I had to accept that it was a reality and that the process of grief was going to be very difficult. I am very waterworks when someone close to me dies, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, which took many people’s lives, I tried to desensitize myself by reading statistics but at the end I had to understand the very traumatic scale of COVID-19 and how it impacted how I viewed life and death. Ethan ends up sleeping in his own room but has terrible nightmares after what Abe told him. At the end of the episode, they play the song “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, which is one of my favorite songs.

May 11, 2023

I found this movie at my local library and wanted to check it out because I had read a lot of reviews about it, and it got nominated for a lot of Awards at the Oscars in 2019. I haven’t seen many movies with Christian Bale, but I was curious about this movie, especially because I really love biopics/ biographical dramas and this movie is a biographical drama. I really love films from the film company Annapurna, who produced some films I saw: American Hustle, Detroit, Booksmart and If Beale Street Could Talk. This film was actually really good, and the acting was incredible. I have seen Sam Rockwell and Amy Adams in other movies, and really love their acting, and their performances in this movie were really good.

The movie opens in 1963 in Casper, Wyoming and a young man is arrested for drunk driving. Then the scene cuts to 2001 when Vice President Dick Cheney and his cabinet hurry into a room to discuss what immediate action to take following the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. Everyone is panicking, but Dick is quiet through it all and has an unsettling calm about him. The narrator, played by Jesse Plemons, tells the story about Dick’s life: what his childhood was like, his early career and his role as vice president to George W. Bush. The main theme of Vice is power and the abuse of power when people have it. When Dick was younger, people thought he didn’t have many prospects in life. He made mediocre grades and experienced a lot of failures in life, and he also drinks a lot and is kicked out of Yale for poor academic performance. His wife, Lynne, is upset and confronts him about it one day, telling him that she does not want to be with him if he is going to keep drinking because her father was an alcoholic who abused her mother, and she does not want to relive that trauma. Dick cleans up his act, and ends up finding a greater purpose in the world of politics by scoring an internship and becoming an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld. He learns the ins and outs of politics, and Donald keeps him on because he is quiet and tends to listen more than talk. In fact, that is one of the rules that Donald has for Dick, which is to be quiet and not act like he knows everything or ask questions that Donald considers stupid. One day he asks Donald what the Republican Party’s values are, and Donald just laughs and shuts the door in his face, not taking Dick’s question seriously. However, as he gains more experience in the political world, Dick ends up showing Donald that he knows his way around the ins and outs of politics and isn’t the naïve shy intern that Donald knew him as. There is a key scene when Lynne tells one of their young daughters that when you have power, people will try to take it away from you. As Dick becomes more and more involved in the political world, he starts craving more power and influence over decision making and when he becomes the vice president during George Bush’s presidency he tries to bypass a lot of the checks and balances in place. In another scene, he is at a restaurant with Donald and other cabinet members and they are ordering from a restaurant menu of laws they can pass now that they have total executive power, including Guantanamo Bay.

There is a great quote that the film shows that reads “Beware the quiet man, for while others speak he watches. While others act, he plans. And when they finally rest, he strikes.” Dick Cheney is a quiet person, but he was always forward thinking and was thinking several steps ahead. He wasn’t naive about the political world; he was very smart, and knew how power worked and used it to his advantage. In 1968, Dick meets Donald Rumsfeld at the D.C. Congressional Program and he joins the Republican Party because he is intrigued by Rumsfeld’s position on different issues. When he first meets Rumsfeld and is taken onto his team, Rumsfeld is blunt and gruff with him but he gives Dick the 411 on everything that happens in D.C. It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw a couple of years ago called The Wolf of Wall Street, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jordan Belfort. Like Vice, it is a historical drama, a biopic and a black comedy that shows in a satirical way how power is abused when it’s in the wrong hands. When he first decides to work on Wall Street, Jordan is an unassuming young man who is married and on his best behavior. But he meets an influential person in the world of Wall Street and he finds that Wall Street is a dog-eat-dog world and that he can only succeed if he tears people down and takes shortcuts through life. He is offered alcohol at his interview and at first Jordan declines, but the interviewer pushes him to have alcohol and makes fun of him for not wanting to drink, so Jordan gives into peer pressure because he is still young and doesn’t really know how working on Wall Street would change his life forever, nor could he have predicted he would lead a life with power and influence but also one of corruption, dishonesty and illegal activities.

The narrator Kurt uses a cool technique where he breaks the fourth wall in order to gain access to the audience. I have seen this technique used a lot, including a TV show I really loved called Fleabag. In the show the main character, Fleabag, talks to the audience and shares her innermost thoughts and feelings about all these awkward situations she is in. I watched one of the special features of the DVD of Vice and the director of the movie, Adam McKay, talks about how Kurt represents America. He works a regular job, he serves as a soldier in Iraq and he has a wife and a kid. But he is like the insider man for every action and thought Dick Cheney has because as mentioned earlier in the movie, because Dick was a private person they could not fully capture every aspect of Dick’s life or what was going through his mind when made certain political decisions or reacted to different situations, so they did their best to find someone else, a third party, who could give us, the audience, some insight into Dick, who remained a mystery for a lot of people. There is a part where Lynne says that the vice president job is a do-nothing job and that all he is going to do is wait around until the president dies. But for Dick, it was an opportunity to get to know more about how government operates and how to use it to his advantage. I remember when Will Ferrell played George Bush in a comedy sketch a long time ago and I found it very hilarious, but also the film shows how even though these people did a lot of crazy over the top stuff, it also led to a lot of serious consequences and the ones who paid the most for these consequences was the American people and also the people in the Middle East. There is a scene where George Bush is sitting in the Oval Office and tapping his foot up and down, and then the camera goes lower and we see a family in Iraq whose house is being bombed and the father’s foot is shaking up and down because they are scared and don’t want to get killed by the bombing. Seeing this scene from a Buddhist perspective made sense because in Buddhism we talk about dependent origination, which means that we are all interconnected and that no one’s suffering is separate from one another. While Bush is making these executive decisions, he doesn’t acknowledge that these executive decisions are putting the lives of real human beings in jeopardy, but he doesn’t care because the government of the United States is only focused on capturing Osama Bin Laden. However, as I thought about this movie from a Buddhist perspective, I came to the understanding that everyone’s suffering in this movie was deeply interconnected. Towards the end Kurt is running outside and from out of nowhere a bus strikes him and kills him, and he ends up having his heart taken out of his chest and given to save Dick Cheney’s life because Dick is suffering from several heart attacks and needs a new heart. As the surgeons operate on Kurt’s dead body, there is a montage of disturbing footage of torture, global warming, terrorism, mass shootings and other traumatic events that have happened in U.S. history. In a way it was showing that with all the suffering going on in the lives of Cheney and other people in the White House, so many people outside of the White House were suffering from war, famine and other large scale problems because the government often made decisions that jeopardized the welfare of these people. In an interview at the end of the movie, he turns to the camera and tells all the people criticizing him that he did what they wanted him to do, which was go after the people responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center, and that he won’t apologize for what he did. I think this last scene reminded me why it was so important to study history because history repeats itself and as apathetic as I was about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, I saw in the film how a lot of the rhetoric was echoed. There is footage of Ronald Reagan saying that he will help people get new skills and new jobs in a turbulent economy and that he will make America great again, which is the exact slogan Donald Trump used throughout his presidential campaign and his presidency.

It kind of reminded me of when I watched the movie Bowling for Columbine, a documentary that came out in the early 2000s after the shooting at Columbine High School. In the movie, Michael Moore explores the U.S. crisis with gun violence and interviews people from the National Rifle Association, Marilyn Manson and others about their attitudes about guns. I have been really reflecting on this film after seeing it a couple of years ago, because I have wondered if we are trying to take this action on gun laws and legislation, then why do all these mass shootings still occur at record numbers? It seems only in the span of a few months we have had a shooting in Uvalde, in Buffalo, in Nashville, in Louisville and most recently last week a shooting in Allen, Texas. It has all made my blood boil but it helped me to understand the history of guns and why our nation grew so gun-crazy over time, and why people say that they don’t really feel safe in America or even safe coming to America because of its gun violence problem. The documentary features real footage that is interconnected to the U.S. gun violence epidemic, such as the war in Iraq and the bombing of the World Trade Center, because all of these events were traumatic and involved the killing of innocent civilians.

Another important moment in the film was when Mary, Dick’s daughter, comes out to her parents. We see her leave the school upset and then she gets hit by a car and is taken to the hospital. When Dick and Lynne ask if she is okay, she tells them that her girlfriend broke up with her and that she is gay. Dick accepts her but Lynne finds it hard to accept Mary is a lesbian. Later on in the movie, Mary’s sister, Liz, runs in the congressional race and even though she said she would support gay marriage, she later changes her position and says that she does not support gay marriage and thinks marriage is between a man and a woman. Mary and her wife watch this, and Mary breaks down into tears because Liz betrayed her. When Dick meets with George Bush at his family’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, he tells George that he will support his policies, but the only policy he won’t support is George’s opposition of gay marriage because his daughter is gay. The scene where Mary is crying because her sister opposes gay marriage showed me how the decisions that politicians make can have a huge impact on the lives of ordinary people. I thought about the overturning of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court. They are a small group of judges, but they carried a lot of executive power and influence, and their decision to strike down Roe vs Wade undid a lot of protections that women and lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender, and queer people had when it was in place.

Honestly, even though the film has comedic and satirical elements, watching it gave me chills and it was frankly disturbing to see the impact that the lawmakers have on people’s daily lives, and how disturbing it was to watch people enjoy abusing power. In the film they show scenes in which prisoners are tortured, and it reminded me of this episode on Last Week Tonight where John Oliver talks about the torture system in the U.S. and some of the horrific torture methods they used on prisoners, and frankly I saw it several years ago but it was so vivid and brutal to hear that I still cannot get it out of my mind. It’s one thing to learn about what the U.S. government does and the systems it has in place in history class, but political satire such as John Oliver or Vice woke me up to how serious these issues were while presenting them in the light of comedy. Comedy has the potential to be entertaining but it can also bring light to a lot of divisive issues in politics, and of course, there is political satire in both the Democrat and Republican parties and nothing is without biases, but it presents a different way to talk about serious issues. I definitely had to keep in mind that Vice was a political satire because it does depict a living person and it was not a documentary about Dick Cheney, nor was it trying to be a documentary. The purpose of this movie was to shock and entertain but also to show how corruption and power has been an issue for centuries, not just in the present age. There is a scene that they talk about in the feature part of the movie where Lynne and Dick are in bed and they recite a soliloquy from a play by William Shakespeare and the soliloquy is about power. It resonates with the rest of the film because there is a part where Lynne tells her daughters when they are kids that people will try to take away power from you. She is angry because they are watching the results of the election and it looks like the Republican party is going to lose. She does everything in her power throughout the film to make her voice heard and make sure her husband doesn’t lose his influence in D.C. The filmmaker explained that we have all these checks and balances in the U.S. government because power and corruption have been issues throughout history and frankly people don’t exercise willpower very well. We all have innate desires and cravings, and so I think by making the movie a satire, somehow I think it showed how even though Dick Cheney held all these titles and played an influential role in the White House, at the end of the day he was a human being and he couldn’t be anything more than a human being no matter how much control and power he craved. I really like movies because even though this was a fictional movie, it gave insight into the human condition, which is that humans have unlimited desires but there is a limit to those desires and what we can have and when we give too much free reign to these desires it can lead to severe consequences. The film’s portrayal of Cheney shows that he wanted to control every aspect of the decision making process in government but it showed that even though he got the power he wanted, it led to many human rights abuses and a lot of people suffered at the hands of these abuses. Of course, I have never met Dick Cheney and I haven’t read a full biography of his life, so I’m sure the movie, like any biopic, had a lot of inaccuracies because even though it’s based on true events, it’s a fictional movie played by actors. But I am a fan of movies, and movies often provide me a way of looking at things from different perspectives.

One thing I really liked about the movie was the film score. It is heavy on the brass section and you hear these soaring lines with brass instruments just blaring this powerful loud sound, and I think it really fits with the entire tone of the movie, which is about power. Dick carries this powerful presence even as a quiet man and he controls a lot of what goes on in the White House even though he is vice president. I really love Nicholas Britell’s other work on movies such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, so I was really excited to hear the film score for this movie. I’m glad I got the DVD because there was a deleted scene where there was this incredible choreographed song by Brittany Howard and it was a musical number that took place when Donald Rumsfeld was explaining how to navigate the hierarchies and power structures of Washington, D.C. to Dick when he is first starting out in the industry. It got cut from the movie and when I found this out I was really sad but it was incredible to watch because it broke down everything so well and the dancing was amazing. For the movie score, I love the use of the piano and the key that the music is in, and I got goosebumps while listening to the score because it was so powerful and poignant. When I first put on the DVD and was on the main menu they played this incredible piece from the score called “The Lineman” and the way Britell combines the brass and the other instruments to create these sweeping lines was so genius.

It really helped watching the special features on the DVD, especially the one where they talk about the making of the movie Vice. In this feature the actors talk about what it was like making the movie, and Adam McKay talks about his inspiration for the film and his process of telling the story of Dick Cheney’s time in office. They also talk about the prosthetics that went into Christian Bale’s transformation into Dick Cheney, and how much work went into designing the outfits for the characters. It really made me appreciate how much behind-the-scenes work goes into making movies. Like, I can look at the credits and see all these names of people who worked in the visual effects department or the hair and makeup department but it’s not until I actually watched the feature at the end of the film and listened to the people in the various departments talk about how they designed the prosthetics or wrote the screenplay or designed the costumes that I could truly understand how much work goes into making a movie. And I also learned that not all the scenes made the cut, such as the musical number with Brittany Howard, even though Adam said he worked for months to try to incorporate the scene into the film. From the perspective of someone who is just watching the movie, this seemed sad, like, Wow, these people put in all this work and their work didn’t make it into the film. But I just thought, even if it didn’t make it in, it still served an incredible purpose for the movie and further added to the film’s satirical nature in how it talks about politics.

Vice. 2018. Directed by Adam McKay. Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carrell and Tyler Perry. Rated R for language and some violent images.

I am sensitive and an introvert. I first found out I was an introvert when I took a Myers Briggs assessment in high school, and somehow the term clicked with me. I mostly get my energy from spending time alone, but it doesn’t mean that I hate people. I definitely have found I get exhausted after long gatherings with people. But I do enjoy one on one gatherings with people

I have come to accept being sensitive, but it also comes with its own disadvantages. I tend to take things very personally and this can often cause me to distance myself from people. I am also a perfectionist and this means I tend to set unrealistic standards for myself and for others, and I can be very self-critical to the point where I only focus on my weaknesses and things I don’t like about myself. When I was taking cello lessons, I would often take constructive feedback personally. I had an orchestra teacher in high school who gave me very specific feedback in front of the class and I would get so upset, I would come home crying my eyes out because this teacher gave me criticism. But then I used my Buddhist practice to get better at handling her criticism. Chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helped me transform my attitude about the situation, and I started to see that my teacher was trying to help my grow and that in fact, I wasn’t the only student who was getting criticism in class for playing out of tune notes. Each person in the class received feedback for what they could improve upon. I am still working on not taking criticism personally, to be honest. These past four years I had been taking cello lessons with a new teacher and I often repeated the same pattern of getting defensive and upset when I got criticism. But I think chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helped me see my own tendency to take criticism personally, and as hard as it was to change that tendency I gradually transformed the way I viewed my teacher giving criticism. I also realized that as much as I got upset with the teacher for setting these really high standards for my playing, I reflected and came to see that I also was setting these really high standards for myself. I think reading Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart helped me, because she talks about perfectionism and says that it’s deeply tied to feelings of shame, judgment and blame. It made me understand that shame is a very consuming experience and it can often make me feel alone and that I deserve to be punished because I’m a bad person, I fucked up, etc. But after seeing therapy and talking with people, I saw a lot of that negative thinking for what it was, and even though I didn’t magically get rid of the negative thinking I have started to gradually see these past few months how unhealthy that negative thinking is. I thought it was going to be an overnight transformation and that one magical day I was going to suddenly develop a thick skin and stop taking things personally. But it’s a daily challenge that I need to overcome. I am chanting to overcome my limitations and polish my strengths so that I can embrace myself better and develop more self-compassion as a result.

I am going to be so honest with you. I am really going to miss The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It seems like just yesterday that I was watching Midge perform her first show at The Gaslight. But alas, all of the incredible cast is moving on to other projects and commitments, so long story short, the show has had a really great run and I’m so glad they got to have this show. So to get you caught up if you haven’t watched the show yet, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a show on Amazon Prime that takes place in the 1950s, and it’s about a middle-class Jewish woman named Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) living in New York City with her parents, Abe and Rose (Tony Shaloub and Marian Hinkle), and her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen) and their two kids, Ethan and Esther. Joel is an aspiring comedian but his jokes aren’t all that good and he copies them from the other male comics. Midge comes by to show him support and drop off a brisket she made. The owner of The Gaslight, Susie Meyerson (Alex Borstein), doesn’t care about Midge’s enthusiasm and tries to shrug her off. Then the night of Yom Kippur, Joel packs up and announces to Midge that he is leaving her because he is having an affair with his secretary, Penny Pan. She drinks an entire bottle of wine, and goes over to The Gaslight and does an unprompted standup routine where she talks about how her husband cheated on her with his secretary. Susie takes quick notice and is impressed by Midge’s snappy wit and fierce jokes, and the audience is also impressed by this newcomer, so Susie decides to become Midge’s manager. At first entering the business is challenging because Midge’s jokes sometimes get laughs and other times not so much, and Midge has such high expectations but also there are times when she loses her self-confidence. Meanwhile she has to keep her comedy career (and her new day job at B. Altman) a secret from her parents, especially because this was a time when there was a lot of sexism and female comics were often not seen as funny. But she learns about resilience and how to bounce back from rejection, failure and all other kinds of challenges, and she ends up having a successful career even with all its ups and downs. And her and Susie weather those ups and downs together.

In season 5, the Sherman-Palladinos wrap everything up and we see Midge’s career in retrospect. In episode one of the season, Esther Maisel in sitting in a therapist’s office in the 1980s talking about the challenging relationship she had growing up with her mother, Midge. Then Shirley and Moishe have dinner with Joel, Midge, and Midge’s parents and they share big news. Shirley and Moishe announce they are getting a divorce, and this causes friction throughout the dinner. When Joel tries to intervene, Moishe verbally hits back at him by telling him to share some of his own news. Joel reveals that he and Mei (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu) are going to get married and that Mei is pregnant. In an earlier season, Joel goes to a gambling parlor run by a family of Chinese immigrants to start his own comedy club and he meets the family’s daughter, Mei. They fall in love and become a couple, and Mei ends up pregnant with Joel’s baby. There is friction and I thought they were going to have the baby, but then Mei shows up at Joel’s apartment and tells him she got an abortion and is moving to Chicago to become a doctor, which was one of her dreams. He tries to talk her out of it, but she leaves and tells him she can’t have it all (i.e. be a mother and follow her career as a doctor.) He falls into a depression and one night at the club he drinks himself silly and his friend, Archie, tries to get him to calm down but Joel launches into a drunken tirade and hits on women at the club. He goes down to the gambling parlor downstairs and confronts Mei’s father about Mei leaving him, and the father gets some guys to beat up on Joel for disrespecting him. Joel is left curled up in fetal position with severe bruises. Meanwhile, Susie is doing all she can to get Midge connected to Gordon Ford (played by Reid Scott.) Early in the episode she wakes up sick because she was in a snowstorm and saw a bulletin board for The Gordon Ford Show. But Mike Carr, Gordon’s talent booker, hates Susie, especially because she persuaded his kids to watch a violent film called Spartacus and she insults his Christmas tree, so he refuses to book Midge for a job on the show. Midge performs standup at the strip club where she worked as a comic in season 4 and Susie sees Gordon Ford and tries to get Midge a job with him. Gordon meets her and invited her to work on his writing team, but Midge hesitates and tells Susie that she is a comedian, not a writer, but Susie tells her this opportunity will lead to better opportunities, so Midge accepts the offer. Episode 2 shows how she navigates her first few weeks on Gordon’s writing team as the only woman in the writer’s room.

In episode 2, Midge is being interviewed at a later time in her life about her long career. It was a really bittersweet moment for me to watch and it made me think of when I would watch veteran actors like Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep and Sally Field and how they had such long and prosperous careers, and I’m sure there were many ups and downs but they worked so hard in their careers and as a young woman it was inspiring to watch this part where Midge is interviewed. She recalls the good times, and the bad times, and doesn’t provide super personal details to the interviewer but at the end of the interview she shows all of the clothing that she is giving away as part of the nonprofit she started in Ethan and Esther’s name to provide services to children in need. It shows all the outfits she wore on the road as a comedian and at home, and everything she wore is in style. Joel is staying with his parents and is still recovering from his injuries, and Midge visits him to check in on him. Joel tells Midge about breaking up with Mei and that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, and Midge tries to comfort him, but Joel refuses because he is still processing the breakup. Meanwhile, Midge is taking the subway to her new job at Gordon Ford’s office, only to be followed by a guy she dated in a previous season (played by Milo Ventimiglia.) In the episode she met a dashing man in the park and they hit it off and started dating, but then she goes back to his house and sleeps with him, and the next morning his wife walks in the bedroom and finds her husband sleeping with Midge. This doesn’t age well, especially because Midge brings it up in one of her most important comedy gigs. She is given an opportunity to perform at a luncheon for Jacqueline (Jackie) Kennedy, the first lady and John F. Kennedy’s wife. As I learned from watching The Crown and the biopic Jackie, and reading some articles, JFK had a lot of extramarital affairs. So when Midge is trying to come up with new material for the gig, she talks about sleeping with a guy who is married, and Jackie breaks down crying because it reminded her of her husband’s infidelity. In episode 2 of the final season, the ex-date confronts Midge in the New York subway station and she tries to get away from him but he keeps running after her to apologize and ask for her forgiveness, but she wants nothing to do with him after that. He finally catches up to her and explains that him and his wife are getting a divorce but she is not interested in dating this guy again. He understands though and asks if they will see each other in the park again, and they say their goodbyes.

Midge enters the new workplace at Gordon Ford’s office and finds that she is the only woman on the writer’s team and that it’s a bunch of boys, a boys’ club. When she first enters, the secretaries (all female) give her a hard time but she finds Mike Carr, and he confronts her about Susie being rude to him. She tries to explain but he tells her to give Susie a message and flips her the middle finger, which is what Susie did to him when she booked Midge a gig on Gordon Ford’s show to prove Mike wrong. When Midge enters the writer’s room, they are reluctant to welcome her, seeing as how this is still the 1960s and women were still not seen as having potential as comics. None of their jokes are remotely funny, but when Midge writes new material and tries to share her own jokes, they interrupt her with singing whenever one of them uses the bathroom in the office. And they grill her about writing new material. However, they are all under fire and facing the stressful wrath of Gordon, who Midge finds out is not a nice guy. He basically rips up everyone’s writing material if it doesn’t meet their standards and everyone has to cook up fresh material within minutes of Gordon going on the show. It reminded me of the movie, Late Night, with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. Emma Thompson plays an acerbic late night host whose show is decreasing in ratings because many people don’t find her style of humor funny, but everything changes when a young optimistic comedian from Pennsylvania named Molly (Mindy Kaling) joins the writer’s room because Molly is a woman of color and she wants more diversity in the all white male writer’s room. It is a serious challenge and Molly faces a lot of discrimination from the beginning. The writer’s room is full of men, and Katherine is heading it, but she doesn’t praise Molly’s efforts and often ignores her. The men on the writer’s team think she is the office assistant rather than a new member of the writer’s room and give her administrative tasks like getting them coffee and treats, but she has to remind them over and over of her place in the writer’s room. One night, Katherine attends Molly’s stand up comedy show and overhears her talking about how mean Katherine is to her, and she begins to value Molly’s ideas and her show gets bumped up in ratings. Eventually, Katherine recruits more women and people of underrepresented groups to join the writer’s room and has Molly promoted to help lead the team.

Meanwhile, Rose is walking and talking with her friend and then finds a bunch of firetrucks outside and we see that the building where she visited her fortune teller burned down, and she calls her son Noah, who used to work for the CIA but now got new work as an analyst, and asks if they can put out a search party because she thinks that the mean clique of competitive matchmakers set the fire. In an earlier season, Rose becomes a professional matchmaker, but she is confronted by three other matchmakers who do everything in their power to stop Rose from doing her work. Rose always met with her fortune teller and she would have her predict Midge’s future with tea leaves, but then the fortune teller left and was replaced with a new lady who doesn’t do tea leaves and instead has Rose eat pizza and watch TV. Abe meets with a woman at his workplace (he works as a columnist for a newspaper after losing his job at Bell Labs a few seasons ago) and they are having a great conversation, but then the lady flirts with Abe and puts her hand on his knee in a suggestive way. He feels conflicted and asks his coworker if what that lady did was sexual, and his coworker tells him to not tell his wife, Rose, about his encounter with the lady. Abe keeps it a secret but it pains him to do so, and he brings Rose out to dinner and does the same gesture that the lady did to him: putting his hand on her knee. She is surprised but she lets him do it, and he wants to because he really loves Rose and doesn’t want an affair with that other woman.

I can’t wait to watch episode 3!

Last year I heard Brendan Fraser was going to be in a new movie and was making a comeback. I hadn’t seen his famous movie The Mummy but I saw him in George of the Jungle as a kid. I was pretty excited, but then I saw some headlines saying that the role he was playing was going to be controversial and I wondered, What’s the controversy? because I don’t have Twitter and wasn’t aware. Then I read some articles about the movie and I thought, Maybe I shouldn’t watch it because of all the backlash. If you haven’t seen The Whale yet, it’s about a morbidly obese English teacher named Charlie who is housebound and is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The movie received a lot of acclaim and Brendan Fraser won for Best Actor at the Academy Awards this year. However, before I had read about any of the acclaim the film got, I mainly heard that the film received significant pushback for being fatphobic, or for pushing this idea that fatness is a tragedy or something to be abhorred. Hollywood has a history of putting actors in fat suits or not casting actual fat actors in movies that portray fatness. I didn’t really know much about how harmful fatphobia is until I got to college. In middle and high school, fatness was often viewed as a punchline or something disgusting. But then I got to college and I joined a feminist club meeting and there was a young woman who talked about fat feminism and about the discrimination fat people face on a daily basis. It really changed my perspective. Of course, I didn’t become perfect in educating myself. I still would watch media that was fatphobic in nature. But it really took me a long time to consider whether to watch The Whale or not because I had read so much in these reviews that Hollywood often depicts fatness as a punchline rather than in an empowering way. n At first I wasn’t going to watch it because after reading up on articles around fatphobia and how the film depicts fatness, and after seeing more positive depictions of fatness in the media and listening to fat people’s experiences, I honestly wondered if I should watch the movie since a lot of people says it depicts fatness in a negative light. But at the end of the day, I am responsible for renting the movie. Honestly, I still need to educate myself on fatphobia and body positivity, but reading these articles about the controversy around the film helped me better understand when coming in to watch the movie that this was not going to be a positive or empowering portrayal of fatness. And honestly this blog post won’t do justice to more accurate voices in the discourse around fat acceptance and historically problematic portrayals of fatness in movies and TV shows, so after watching the film I read some more opinion pieces about the backlash surrounding the film to gain a deeper understanding, such as Roxane Gay’s piece on the film.

The movie opens with a shot of a lonely road and a bus pulling off to drop someone off. The movie takes place in Idaho but we don’t actually get to see much of the outside because the main character, Charlie, doesn’t get to leave his house because his health is declining and he is also grappling with the trauma of losing his partner. We see him at the beginning talking with his students about their arguments for their papers (he is an online English teacher) and then he is masturbating to gay porn on his laptop. When he reaches orgasm he has a near fatal heart attack, and a young man named Thomas comes into his house. Thomas says that he is a missionary for a church called New Life, and he has come to convert Charlie to the church. However, Charlie’s friend and doctor, Liz, comes in to check on Charlie and tells Thomas that New Life killed someone that Charlie loved. They offer to take Charlie to the hospital but he refuses, and Charlie apologizes to Liz and she gets really upset with him for saying sorry. She tells him he needs to go to the hospital because his blood pressure is 238/134 and he has congestive heart failure. He looks up about congestive heart failure and falls into deeper despair. Ellie, Charlie’s estranged daughter, arrives at his home and he asks her how she is doing and she tells him she got suspended from school. Even though Charlie tells her to go back to school, she doesn’t listen and tells him how angry she is that he left her and her mother when she was eight. Charlie promises Ellie that he will give her all the money he has if she will just let him ask her how she is, and he promises to write her essays for her.

Charlie is later sitting on the couch eating two meatball subs that Liz got for him (she keeps bringing him food and he orders a lot of pizza from Gambino’s) and he chokes on his food and Liz has to do the Heimlich maneuver on him and then shouts at him for not eating his food properly.

Wednesday, Charlie meets with his class again online and tells them to think about the arguments of their essays. He continues to keep his camera off because he is ashamed about his body and thinks his students will be disgusted when they see him. Charlie is correcting Ellie’s essay on Walt Whitman and pointing out her errors, but she tells him she doesn’t care and continues to spend time on her phone. He tells her she would actually like “Song of Myself,” the Whitman poem she is writing about, if she actually would just read the poem. Ellie then goes off on him, telling him how she really hates Whitman and calls him the f-word. She then opens up to him about how her and her mom moved to another part of town when she was eleven, and then she asks him how he gained so much weight. He tells her that someone close to him passed away, but she tells him she knows that it was his boyfriend that passed away and that when she was younger she would see Charlie cook steaks for his boyfriend when Mom was visiting family in Montana. Ellie doesn’t want to forgive Charlie because she didn’t have a good loving relationship with him growing up, and she is upset that he wants her forgiveness. Thomas, the missionary, comes back to the house and tries to convert Charlie to New Life again, but Liz comes back and she isn’t having it. She tells Thomas to come out on the porch with her to have a little talk even though Charlie doesn’t want Thomas to be called out. Liz tells Thomas the full story of the toxic relationship they have with New Life. Her dad was very involved with New Life, and so was his son, Alan. He wanted Alan to marry a woman he had arranged for him, but he ended up with Charlie, and his dad completely disowned him and kicked him out of New Life. Alan became severely depressed and took his own life, and that’s why Liz said that New Life killed her brother.

Charlie is sitting at home, and the pizza delivery guy from Gambino’s comes to deliver Charlie’s two pepperoni pizzas. Charlie can’t leave the house to give him the money, so he calls out that he left the money outside for the delivery guy. The delivery guy figures Charlie is lonely and introduces himself as Dan. He offers to help Charlie, but Charlie refuses to take his help. Charlie reads the journal entry he encouraged Ellie to write, but she wrote three lines talking about how she hated her dad’s home and her life. He laughs, but even laughing is a challenge because he ends up feeling severe pain and wheezing. The next day Charlie finds out that Ellie put an insulting photo of him on Facebook. He thinks he is the only one that she put a photo of, but when his ex-wife, Mary, arrives, she tells him Ellie wrote insulting things about her on Facebook, too. Mary calls out Ellie for saying derogatory things about Charlie, but then Charlie admits about how he gave all his savings to Ellie and none for Mary, and Mary and Liz are angry with him for doing this. Charlie recounts his experience going on the beach with Ellie when she was young and Mary is so moved that she starts crying. He admits to Mary that he is dying and doesn’t have much longer to live, and she tells him “fuck you” and leaves. He feels even worse about himself, and yells that he wants to know he has done one right thing with his life. Dan later comes that night to deliver the pizzas and checks in on Charlie even though he can’t go into the house. Finally Charlie wheels himself to the door and goes outside, and when Dan sees him he looks in disgust and storms off. Again this is really painful to watch because everyone seems to look down on Charlie because he is fat. Charlie ends up eating all the pizza in one sitting and binge eats other things in the house because he is dying and feels hopeless about his situation. He writes a furious message to his students (and I am paraphrasing) along the lines of “fuck these stupid assignments and essays. Just write something honest.” He eats himself until he is literally sick and vomits in a trashcan and breaks down and cries. Earlier on, Thomas confessed to Ellie that he smoked pot and stole money and so he got kicked out of the New Life missionary work so he thought he could do his own missionary work but now he feels hopeless. Ellie records his confession without him looking and also snaps photos of him smoking pot when he visits their home. Thomas visits Charlie again, and we actually find out that he is homophobic and think Charlie and his late boyfriend, Alan, are sinners for being gay and that he can save Charlie by converting him to New Life, the same church that disowned Alan and led to him taking his life. Thomas reads Charlie a passage from the Bible to persuade him, but Charlie is still deeply traumatized by the pain and hurt that New Life caused his boyfriend, and he opens up to Thomas about him and Alan’s love for each other. Thomas is uncomfortable and begs Charlie to stop, but Charlie continues to say negative things about himself and asks if Thomas thinks he is disgusting. Thomas blurts out that he does think Charlie is disgusting, and Charlie tells him to go home to his family and holds up the Bible that Alan used to read from when he was part of New Life Church. Alan takes the Bible with him and finally leaves. Earlier Thomas went into Charlie’s room and saw Alan’s copy of The Bible, and took it from his room, but now Charlie doesn’t want it because New Life is homophobic. When Liz and Ellie both arrive, they find out that Charlie is dying and it’s a painful moment for everyone. Charlie asks Ellie to read him the essay about Moby Dick that one of his students wrote because he is about to die, and she pushes back and tries to run away, but then he stands up and walks over to her and hugs her while she reads him the essay.

Honestly I wondered why I didn’t have such a sympathetic outlook on the movie when I was watching it, and I felt bad because it’s a drama and I found myself wondering, Should I feel pity for the main character even though I know the critiques around the film? I understand that he lived a pretty traumatic life: his partner took his own life, and his close friends call him disgusting and demean his self-worth. However, having read what I did about the film, this film can’t and shouldn’t speak for all fat people. Of course not everyone hated the film; a lot of people loved the movie and I understand Brendan Fraser probably worked really, really hard and it was an emotional moment for him as an actor considering all he went through through his career and life. But I also had to understand coming in that this wasn’t supposed to be a movie that spoke for all fat people’s experiences and that Hollywood has traditionally portrayed fatness as a punchline or a monstrosity to be feared, so I had to be careful about getting too maudlin about the movie.