The Arts Are Life

Movie Review: The Color Purple (2023)

Content warning: brief descriptions of sexual violence.

Wow… I just finished the recent remake of The Color Purple, and my tear ducts did quite a workout during the course of this movie. I hadn’t seen the Broadway musical The Color Purple, and I had also not seen the older version with Whoopi Goldberg, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remember reading the novel by Alice Walker for an African American Studies course in my sophomore year of college, and I remember it being just such a powerful book and so incredibly well-written. I decided to watch the 2023 movie last week, but I didn’t finish it until tonight because I was busy with some work stuff and some other stuff, so I didn’t finish the film until now. I think I just needed to have a good cry, and honestly, I hadn’t ugly cried during a movie since Elemental. I was sad that The Color Purple didn’t win an Oscar for anything, but now that I think about it, I think I put too much stock in what the Academy Award committee thinks about movies. I was excited to watch these awards shows this year, like the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the Screen Actors Guild Awards (I missed the Emmys. Darn!) and the Academy Awards. But while writing this, I had to remind myself that even if the film didn’t get an Oscar, it can still be a really good movie. I keep forgetting that there are plenty of good movies that didn’t get nominated or win Oscars or big-name awards. Art is a subjective experience, and everyone has different tastes with regards to music, literature, and movies, so I need to view the art through my own lens.

The Color Purple is a film that addresses a lot of serious issues, in particular the issue of sexual violence against Black women. Celie lives with her abusive stepfather, Alfonso, who rapes and impregnates Celie. Nettie supports Celie during the course of her pregnancy, and during her time of grief, when Alfonso takes away Celie’s children. A sleazy man named Mister takes interest in Celie, but Alfonso tells him that he can’t have her and that he should have Nettie instead, but Mister insists that he marry Celie and Alfonso lets him marry her. However, Mister is also abusive to Celie and drives Nettie away when she tries to defend Celie against Mister’s abuse. Nettie and Celie lose touch, and it seems that their friendship is over. Nettie has been writing letters to Celie, but Celie isn’t able to read them because Mister steals the letters from her and hides them so that she doesn’t find them. Celie’s life changes when a sexy performer named Shug Avery comes into town, and she is immediately smitten with her. Shug Avery represents freedom, sexuality, empowerment and independence, and she, too, develops feelings for Celie. However, Mister also loves Shug and while he treats Celie like dirt, he treats Shug like royalty, but Shug sees through Mister’s deceiving looks and understands that Mister abuses Celie and finds out that he is hiding Nettie’s letters from Celie, so she digs them up so she can read them. The film shows the power of friendship and sisterhood, especially in the face of trauma and grief, and I broke down in tears during the number where Celie gets to run her own clothing shop because I was just so happy for her after the hell that Mister and Alfonso put her through for so many years.

I really loved Sofia’s character in the film. When we first meet her, she is married to Harpo, Mister’s son, and is expecting a baby. However, she doesn’t let her husband talk down to her or treat her like a servant and has him do the domestic duties around the house. She and Celie become good friends, and she instills confidence in Celie when Celie is so broken-down by Mister’s abuse and doesn’t have anyone else that she can trust or confide in. She sings a song called “Hell No,” which basically tells Celie that she shouldn’t let any man talk down to her or treat her terribly because she deserves so much better. Later in the film, Sofia and Celie are out with her and Sofia’s kids, and this white woman named Miss Millie pulls up in her car and delivers a condescending remark to Sofia about her kids’ skin color (I wouldn’t even call what she said a compliment) and tells Sofia to come work for her as her maid. Sofia tells her to back off and a bunch of white policemen beat her and arrest her. Celie visits Sofia in prison and finds Sofia is no longer her extroverted confident self and that she has been beaten very badly. It was painful to watch this because it reminds me that when Black people have tried to assert their dignity to white authority, they are unfairly punished. It reminded me of this film I saw called Twelve Years a Slave; in the film, Solomon Northup is a free Black man who lives in New York. He has a comfortable life as a violinist and has a wife and two children, and a group of mysterious white men persuade him to join them for dinner. However, they end up drugging his wine, causing him to pass out, and they kidnap him and sell him into slavery. It was painful to watch, but it showed how brutal slavery actually was. When he was in prison, he tried to tell the white guard that he was a free man, but the guard tells him that he isn’t a free man and proceeds to call him a “runaway [n-word]” from Georgia. During the twelve years he is held captive, Solomon endures brutal treatment and the white slaveowners get rid of his legal name and refer to him as “Platt.” The white slaveowners demean and dehumanize the slaves on the plantation, and while they are all cruel people, Master Epps was one of the cruelest. After he gets out of slavery, Solomon comes back to his family, but it’s with a deep and painful heaviness because he went through these really painful experiences, and it really shook his confidence in himself and his life because he went from this environment in New York where he could live confidently as a Black man and feel good about himself to an environment in South where white people made him feel that he didn’t deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

I love the scene where Celie leaves Mister’s house. It was a powerful scene because up until that point, Celie had put up with so many years of abuse from Mister and her father that she didn’t know what it was like to live freely. I really appreciate the characters of Shug and Sofia because they showed Celie that she didn’t have to take poor treatment from these men in her life and that she had to love and respect herself. Shug also encouraged Celie to embrace her sexuality, and I really loved the number “Push Da Button.” When I read the novel The Color Purple in college, I remember at the time I was struggling with my identity and in particular, my sexual orientation. I started looking up about asexuality, which is a sexual orientation in which one feels little to no sexual attraction towards others, and I started learning more about my reproductive health at the time, too. It was a challenge to embrace my asexuality for many years and it still is, but I’ve learned that it’s just another sexual orientation, it’s an intrinsic part of who I am, and it doesn’t define whether I am capable of a loving relationship or not. My sophomore year of college was, looking back, a time of discovery. I learned so much about myself and I learned to love my body and sexuality, too. There is a scene in the book where Celie masturbates and explores her sexuality after falling in love with Shug, and I remember that part precisely because it resonated with me at the time. Reading the part made me uncomfortable at first, but that’s because I had grown up with the people around me believing that it was taboo or a joke to explore one’s sexuality and body. But I realized at some point that many people go through their own journey of exploration, whether it’s their sexuality, their body or some other part of their life, and over time I learned to not feel ashamed for it. Exploring my body helped me appreciate it because I take it for granted a lot, and I need to become aware of its beauty and its practical functions so that I can take care of it every day. Loving my body is still a work in progress, to be honest, but I am getting better at embracing it.

Shug Avery also reminded me of Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is one of my favorite movies. Like Shug, Ma Rainey is unapologetic and celebrates her sexuality and independence. At the beginning, she is with her girlfriend, and she comes in late to the music studio, leaving the white record executives and her back-up band wondering where she is. When she arrives, she comes with a no-nonsense attitude, and there is one pivotal scene where she demands for the record executives to get her a Coca-Cola since the recording studio is extremely hot. The executives are upset that they have to cater to this Black woman’s needs, but to be honest, I don’t think Ma could have afforded to back down and be a pushover because of the times she was living in. There is a scene where she tells one of her band members that the record executives don’t care about her as a person, and that they just want to make a profit off of her voice. She knew that these white record executives weren’t going to compensate her fairly for her work, so she had to stick up for herself, or else they were going to steal her music, which is what they did to Levy, one of her band members, in the end because he was too eager to impress the white executives with his music. Levy’s fellow bandmates kept telling him that the white record executives didn’t care about him; to them, he was just a Black person and thus not worthy of being treated with respect. But he wanted these white people to respect him, and they ended up ripping off his music by having a white band record the song that he wrote without him getting any credit. During the behind-the-scenes feature after the movie, there is a part where Viola Davis is talking about the characters of Ma Rainey and Levy, and she says that Levy was more impatient and he wanted to become a quick success, and his ego was shaky. But Ma Rainey knew her worth as an artist, and she had spent time working hard at her career. She was focused on doing her job and producing the music that she wanted. She didn’t care about catering to other people’s taste; she tells her bandmate that she loves performing blues music because it makes you feel something deep. I think as a musician, I always have to remind myself why I love music, and I think it’s because music makes me feel things. It conveys human emotions and experiences, both the good ones and the bad ones. Viola Davis says that it is important to know your worth, and I resonated with that. People can rip you off and profit off of your stuff, and not everyone is going to respect you, so it’s important to first and foremost respect yourself. I feel like when you respect and value yourself, it helps you go through the process of creating art in a more authentic way, because you’re doing your best and you’re not focusing all the time on whether people like your music or not. I think this is what I need to do more of. Like Ma Rainey, Shug has a strong sense of self, and so she is able to encourage Celie to love herself and live in an authentic way.

I really love the choreography in The Color Purple. It was so powerful, and the minute the film began I found myself jamming to the music. I can’t imagine how many hours of practice these people had to put into dance. And I love the scene where Celie is reading Nettie’s letter and Nettie is telling her that she went to Africa and they raised Celie’s kids there, and as Nettie is speaking, there is a choreography of dancers from Africa, and the movements and the syncing of these movements was just really beautiful. It reminded me of when I watched this clip of Black dancers performing to “Wade in the Water,” and while watching it I got goosebumps because it was such a moving performance. I felt the dancer’s heart resonate deep within me, and I could feel her passion with every movement of her body, every rhythm and flow. I think that is why watching The Color Purple was such a moving experience because I could feel the heart and soul that the dancers put into this choreography. I had a similar experience watching Beyonce’s video album, Black is King. It was the year many of us were in quarantine, and that summer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and other Black people were killed at the hands of police. I was confused, pained and frustrated, and I didn’t know how to express my pain at ongoing systemic racism and police brutality. When I watched Black is King, I cried through most of it, and watching it was a sort of healing for me. It reminded me that my people are beautiful, my people are awesome, and like many marginalized groups we have fought so hard to get our humanity recognized. When Beyonce was dancing and singing to “Find Your Way Back,” I just couldn’t stop crying because it was so empowering to see Beyonce and all these Black artists create this art as a way to help people like me, who were grieving the death of George Floyd, a safe space to experience joy, hope, frustration, and beauty. The video album also features a lot of collaborations with African artists, such as Burna Boy. It was a beautiful experience where I saw Black people reclaim and celebrate their heritage and tradition, and after having to watch the killing of George Floyd’s murder on my social media feed so many times, I needed to watch something that sent the message that Blackness was something to be celebrated and embraced rather than feared and hated. It also helped me understand my connections to the African Diaspora because it’s easy for me to only focus on my experience of being Black in America, but Black is King reminded me that Black music in America has deep roots in African musical traditions and those traditions need recognition and celebration. I took an African Popular music class in college, and it was so cool to listen to a variety of different artists from countries such as South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. I had not listened to many musicians from Africa, other than Angelique Kidjo when she sang “Gimme Shelter” with British artist Joss Stone, so it was an enlightening experience to be in that class listening to and analyzing music by African artists.

The acting in The Color Purple was also phenomenal. Colman Domingo, man, what a talented actor. I have seen him in a few films, and he has such a wide range of acting chops. He was in If Beale Street Could Talk and plays Tish’s dad. He was also in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and plays one of the people in Ma Rainey’s band. He was also in this movie I saw called Zola, where he plays a brutal pimp. I didn’t recognize the actor who played Alfonso at first, but then I looked it up and saw Deon Cole was playing him. His role in this film was a huge contrast to other stuff I have seen him in. He was in the Old Spice commercials, and he was in a show I love called black-ish, where he plays this loveable but also goofy character named Charlie. It was different to see him go from playing this sweet and funny character in blackish to playing this really cruel character. But this reminds me why I love movies and actors so much, because they play a variety of roles and bring a sort of versatility to each role they play. I also really love Taraji P. Henson’s performance, and I hadn’t heard a lot of Fantasia’s music, but I loved her as the older version of Celie. Overall, this is a beautiful and moving film, and I recommend it.

The Color Purple. 2023. Directed by Blitz Bazawule. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language.

Daily prompt

Daily writing prompt

What book could you read over and over again?

View all responses

Any book by Sarah Knight, especially the book Get Your Sh*t Together. It provides a lot of serious, no-nonsense advice but Knight delivers it in a brilliant way, with a lot of swear words.

Movie Review: The Humans

I just finished watching a movie called The Humans. I love films from the distribution company A24, and The Humans is an A24 film. I didn’t know much about the movie, but I saw the trailer a while ago and it looked interesting. I read some reviews saying it was a horror movie but without jump scares. I’m not a big fan of horror, and as a child I was always stressed going into movie theaters and Blockbuster during Halloween because they always had these big advertisements for scary movies, and I got nightmares. And not just Halloween, but summer as well. I was around eight or ten years old and there was a poster for a film in the Chucky franchise, and the minute I turned to look at it, I almost screamed. So, I thought it was really interesting when I looked at the genre for The Humans and saw that people were calling it a horror film. I remember seeing a movie called Lamb (another A24) film and it was categorized as horror, but it didn’t have any jump-scares. It just had a lot of disturbing scenes. There are some jump scares in The Humans, but it’s not like anything supernatural is jumping out at you. It’s just the sounds and the overall atmosphere of the movie that makes it extremely unsettling.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it takes place in New York City, and the family is meeting together for Thanksgiving. Erik and Deidre have two daughters, Aimee and Brigid, and their mom, Momo, has dementia. They all go to visit Brigid and her boyfriend, Richard, for the Thanksgiving holiday, and at first things start off really chill, but as the film goes on, the interactions get more stressful and there is a lot of tension in the family. The apartment Brigid and Richard live in is pretty creepy, and they always hear suspenseful noises coming from upstairs or stuff is coming out of the walls. I think the most stressful part of this film was the conversation that Brigid has with Erik and Deidre. Brigid is a musician, but she keeps getting rejected for opportunities. She has her parents and sister listen to a piece of music she composed, and they like it, but she said she didn’t get the grant for the music, and she feels dejected. Erik doesn’t provide any consoling advice, and instead tells her that she should find a real job instead of chasing her passion. Brigid is upset that her dad doesn’t support her dreams, and Richard tries to reason with her, but Brigid is sick of feeling like no one supports her dreams. Erik is in a lot of hot water himself; he tells his daughters that he and Deidre had to sell their lake house because Erik lost his job at the school that he worked at for having an affair with one of the teachers, so he is working at Walmart to pay the bills. Even though he assures Brigid and Aimee that he and Deidre are working it out, Brigid and Aimee wonder why he did what he did and whether he has anything saved up, and they start to worry about his financial situation. Aimee is also dealing with a lot of stuff; her partner, Carol, broke up with her and is seeing someone else, she lost her job, and she has health issues. In between these stressful moments, Erik is hearing strange noises from the house and honestly, the ending of the film gave me the creeps. I really thought some ghost was going to pop out, but it was just more of a suspenseful moment, the feeling of being in this dark room when everyone else has gone. Honestly, I felt for Erik at that moment because as a kid I remember hating dark spaces. We went on a tour to this big cavern when I was younger, and it was pitch black and I’m pretty sure I almost got a panic attack. There was another time when I was in fifth grade and we had to learn about slavery and the conditions on the slave ships, and the teachers had us go in this classroom and we had to lay down next to each other and they turned off the lights. We had to imagine that we were slaves on these ships with no ventilation, no lighting, all cramped together in chains. The minute they turned off the lights, my heart started racing, my breathing shortened, and I started to hyperventilate. I did not want to be in the pitch-black room anymore, and I almost screamed and started crying. The kids around me had to convince that it wasn’t real, that I was going to be ok, but honestly that did very little to assuage the intense panic I felt at that moment in that pitch dark room. I remember my parents saying I used to not be afraid of the dark as a kid, but honestly, I can’t remember that time anymore because as I got older, I started hating being in rooms where it was pitch black and I couldn’t see anything. Maybe this is why I fear death because it’s going to feel so weird losing my consciousness, losing my breath, losing my hearing, my taste, my tactile senses. While Erik was in the dark by himself, I felt like I was in that dark room, wondering how you are ever going to get out. Erik starts panicking and he rushes downstairs and recites a Biblical verse over and over again while crying. Brigid tells him his cab is ready to take him and Deidre home, but it takes him a while to recover from the scare he had until he finally musters the courage and strength to leave the house.

I also related to the theme of family tension, especially when Brigid was talking to her family about her dreams as a musician, because there were many times I would talk to my family about wanting to move to a big city like New York or Los Angeles to follow my dreams as a musician, and they would tell me, “It’s too expensive to live there” and I would always get so defensive and upset, to the point where I would be passive-aggressive during meal times or throw tantrums because my dreams weren’t working out the way that I wanted them to. It’s something I still struggle with, to be honest, and sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me, because there will be times during family meals where I will be totally quiet and thinking about some stressful event, and I will just be reluctant to talk about it with my family because I worry about them judging me. I also related to Richard’s past struggles with depression, because I have struggled with depression. It’s not easy to talk about one’s mental health, especially because there is a lot of stigma attached to talking about it. There is a scene where Richard talks about how he was depressed, and Brigid tells him he doesn’t have to bring it up with her family because she doesn’t want him to feel pressured to talk about it, but he tells them he was depressed at one point. Erik then tells him that in their family, they don’t believe in depression or taking medications and going to therapy. Instead, Erik believes that religion is the best antidepressant, and he wonders why his daughters aren’t religious anymore. I’m a religious person, too, but I realized after a certain point that the purpose of my prayer was to give me the wisdom to seek proper treatment for my depression. I was just praying for it to go away, but I realized that it was neither realistic nor safe to wish a serious medical condition like depression away, and that I needed to get help for it right away. As much as I loved my friends and family and people in my religious community, I found seeing someone who is trained in dealing with mental health issues to be immensely helpful and therapy gave me tools so that I could continue to do the work on myself to manage my depression. I also realized that a lot of people struggle with depression, so I could use my experiences with mental illness to encourage someone going through it. It’s easy to think there is something inherently flawed about you when you go through a depressive episode, but getting the right treatment helped me learn how to manage it better and that instead of beating myself up for being depressed, I needed to have more self-compassion and understand that recovering from depression takes patience and effort, and that I needed to take it one day at a time. It definitely wasn’t an overnight one-time event, and for many years I struggled with moments where I felt ok and where I felt like, I’m not feeling great, I need to go see someone about this.

One part of this film that I really loved was the dialogue. It was just incredibly brilliant. When I first saw the trailer, I thought it was going to have supernatural creatures because the characters at one point talk about these scary stories and scary dreams that they have, but there are no supernatural entities that jump out during the film. It’s just the overall suspense that leaves your heart racing during this film. It’s not a fast-paced movie at all; in fact, it reminded me of my experience watching this film called The Zone of Interest (which is another A24 movie. Like seriously, A24 is killing it with these incredible dramas. I don’t know how they do it.) At the beginning, it was slow and starts off with a pitch-black screen and ominous choral music at the beginning, but as the film builds it just gets more and more disturbing and by the end I was like, Wow, that was…something. I like films that don’t feature a lot of frenetic action or stylized violence. Sometimes the films that get me are movies that start off slow but build with suspense until my skin is crawling. Also, I saw June Squibb (the actress who plays Mo-Mo) in another movie called Nebraska. I haven’t finished the film yet, but she was a really great actress in the movie. I also really love Beanie Feldstein, who plays Brigid, in Booksmart, which is a funny movie about two high school straight-A students who decide to party and not take themselves seriously during their senior year. I also love Amy Schumer, who plays Aimee, in her sketch show Inside Amy Schumer. I watched that show a lot when I was in college and going through a rough time. I haven’t seen a lot of work by Steven Yeun but I saw a movie he was in called Sorry to Bother You. It was about a Black man named Cassius living in an alternate reality who becomes successful as a telemarketer when he starts to sound like a white person, and the film shows the dark side of capitalism. Steven Yeun plays one of Cassius’s friends who rejects capitalism and ends up dating Cassius’s girlfriend, Detroit, when Cassius becomes a sellout. Another Steven Yeun movie I love is Minari (another A24 film), which is about a family from Korea who moves to the American countryside and learns to adjust to their new life in America. I really want to see his Netflix series with Ali Wong called Beef because I watched a lot of awards shows this year, and Beef won quite a few awards. I saw Richard Jenkins in this movie a long time ago called The Visitor. It’s about a middle-aged man living in New York who meets a couple who is undocumented, and he lets them stay with him. It was a very moving film, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Richard Jenkins was also in another film I love called Kajillionaire, which is about a family of con artists living in Los Angeles who encounter a mysterious woman who goes on a heist with them and falls in love with the couple’s daughter, Old Dolio. Richard plays Old Dolio’s dad, who doesn’t have any real love for his daughter and is just stringing her along so that they can scam people out of their money. Even though it was a depressing film, I loved the acting in that movie.

I didn’t know this movie was based on a play until I saw the opening credits. I’ve seen a few films that were originally plays, and it’s interesting to see how they bring the play to the big screen. There was a film I saw called The Whale that was originally a play. The movies Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom were originally plays by August Wilson, and the movie Doubt was a stage play. Watching these movies makes me want to see the original stage plays.

The Humans. 2021. Rated R.

TV Show Review: Shrinking, season 1, episodes 3-10

I seriously cannot wait for season 2 of Shrinking. I watched the rest of the season with my family today, and I thought I was just going to watch one episode and ration out my TV time, but we ended up watching the rest of the season. And there were quite a few surprises. I had to close my eyes during episode 6, “Imposter Syndrome,” because I have an irrational fear of vomit scenes in movies and TV shows, and in this episode, Jimmy gets drunk at his friend Brian’s engagement party, and he ends up vomiting all over the piano. But I understand why Jimmy got drunk, because so many people at the engagement party kept bringing up memories of him and his late wife, Tia, who died in a car accident. He tells his co-worker and friend, Gaby, that everyone thinks that him and Tia had this beautiful life together, but when Tia was alive, their marriage was far from perfect, and we see flashbacks of them arguing.

I really kind of feel for Liz’s character, though. She really goes above and beyond for people, even when they don’t appreciate what she is doing for them. She really misses her sons, and when she takes Alice under her wing, she really looks after her, so of course it was hurtful when Liz made a big taco dinner for her and Alice to enjoy together, only to have Alice not come to the dinner. There have definitely been times in my life when someone has gone above and beyond to do a favor for me, but I don’t reciprocate, or they make plans and I bail out. I have learned that this isn’t exactly cool and I’m trying to do better. I remember my mom bought me these expensive pants because I needed more work slacks, but I didn’t want her to go out of her way to get them for me, and I remember telling her, “Oh, you didn’t have to buy these for me.” And she had also picked out a dress for me to try on at a department store, and she had gone shopping for a really long time, and yet I told her when I got to the department store that I didn’t want the dress. Looking back, I could tell she was trying to help, and to be honest, if I spent hours looking for a dress to wear to someone’s bridal shower while she was at work, only to have the person I was trying to help not want the dress, I would feel kind of crushed. There is another scene where Sean is going to start his own catering business, and Liz wants to be as involved as she possibly can, to the point where she runs everything about the business, so it hurts her when Sean tells her that he is going to handle everything because she really wants to help. However, he ends up accepting her help and lets her go with him to find a food truck, which he needs for the business.

There was one scene that was really touching, and that is when Alice and Jimmy are going through Tia’s old belongings and making memories of her. It was sad when Jimmy decided to let go of his wife’s belongings, and it was painful when Alice found out that Jimmy decided to get rid of Tia’s belongings in an attempt to move forward. To Alice, Tia’s belongings hold memories of her and her mom, and to throw them away would be throwing away the memories Alice had of her mom, so Jimmy, with the help of Sean, brings them back, and Alice is able to wear her mom’s heels to Brian’s wedding. Brian’s wedding was also a really sweet moment, and I wasn’t sure how Jimmy was going to be able to make his speech while officiating their wedding, because while rehearsing it he cried because he thought about him and Tia. Brian was also not sure about Jimmy officiating the wedding after Jimmy vomited at his engagement party, but he ends up letting Jimmy officiate at their wedding and Jimmy gives a very beautiful and emotional speech.

I really appreciate how this movie grapples with illness and death. Paul is struggling to tell his daughter, Meg, about his Parkinson’s diagnosis, but he finally tells her, and she decides to get him on a strict health regimen. She is a vegan and she plans to make him all these healthy meals, and he is reluctant, but the thing that really sets him off is when Meg tells him he should move in with her and their family. Paul doesn’t want to go, however, because he has a lot of patients to see. Meg is upset because her dad was always putting work first and never made time for her, so she leaves. Paul tries to call the house and Meg’s son, Mason, picks up. Paul tries to get Meg on the phone, but Meg’s husband tells him that Meg isn’t available. However, they make up and when Paul goes over to Meg’s to visit Mason, Mason asks Paul why his hands are shaking, and Paul finally tells Mason that he has Parkinson’s. He is worried about telling Mason since he is so young, but it’s important that Mason knew, even though it is hard to talk about illness. Paul tried to keep it a secret from his daughter because he thought that she would treat him like he had no more autonomy and couldn’t take care of himself because of his illness. He wanted to be able to live in his own home and still go to work, and he doesn’t want to depend on Meg all the time. Growing up, facing death and illness was a scary prospect, but as I got older, it became a very serious reality when many of my close friends and family members passed away. Whenever someone I loved passed away, I wanted to deny my grief or escape it, but the more I tried to push it down, the worse my grief got, so I finally had to just let myself go through the grief process, even though it was physically, mentally and emotionally painful. However, at some point, I am going to have to grapple with my own mortality.

I really appreciate for some reason Paul suggesting to Alice that she set aside time each day to grieve. Paul sets aside time each day to feel his sadness while listening to music that makes him sad, and he sets a timer on his phone, so he knows when to start and stop. He inspires Alice to do this, and I think it helps her navigate the process of grief. I think I should do this because I am still learning how to navigate the process of grief, and so I think doing this will help. Celine Dion songs always bring me to tears, so I might need to put together a grief playlist. And find a grief therapist.

TV Show Review: Shrinking, episodes 1-2

I just started watching the Apple TV show Shrinking, and it is really good so far. I think one of my relatives recommended it to me, and I was excited that Brett Goldstein, who starred as Roy Kent in Ted Lasso, was a writer on Shrinking, so I partly wanted to watch the show because of that.

The show is about a therapist named Jimmy (played by Jason Segel) who is grieving the death of his wife and a strained relationship with his daughter, Alice. He is trying his best as a therapist, but he is experiencing serious burnout, and it seems like his advice doesn’t get through to them, so he decides to tell them honestly what he thinks they should do. He himself is struggling with his mental health, and in the first episode we see him drinking and his neighbor has to check on him to make sure he is alright. Alice doesn’t want to talk to him, and Jimmy doesn’t know how to have a better relationship with her. His colleagues, Paul and Gaby, are doing their best to support him but also, they are tired of him bringing his personal problems to his professional life, and Paul tells him he needs to stop bringing up his own problems because that is not what he is supposed to do as a therapist. Jimmy often gives out advice that seems promising at first but gets him in a lot of trouble. One of his patients, Grace, constantly talks about how her boyfriend talks down to her but thinks her breasts are great, and Jimmy finally gets fed up and tells Grace that her boyfriend is emotionally abusive, and she needs to leave him. Grace is taken aback but she accepts his advice, and she leaves her boyfriend and moves in with her sister. At first, I thought that was the end of it, but then when at Alice’s soccer game, Grace’s ex-boyfriend approaches Jimmy and attempts to beat him up for telling his girlfriend to leave him. Sean, who is one of Jimmy’s patients, ends up beating the shit out of Grace’s ex-boyfriend, but then the police arrest him, and he ends up in jail.

I thought Sean and Jimmy’s patient-therapist relationship was interesting. Sean has gotten in a lot of trouble over many years for getting into fights and beating people up badly. The first few visits don’t go well. Jimmy has to take a phone call during the session, and Sean ends up leaving. But then Jimmy takes Sean to a boxing club so that Sean can work out his anger there, and Sean ends up being pummeled badly by the other boxers. However, Sean had a moment where he did overcome his anger. While walking down the street, someone bumped into him and threatened him, and Sean didn’t actually beat him up. He just imagined beating him up and then he walked away from the guy. However, he ends up beating up Grace’s ex-boyfriend to defend Jimmy. This reminded me that therapy isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s a process and it requires a lot of honest self-reflection. I remember going to therapy for the first time in my junior year of college, and it wasn’t a great experience, so I gave up on going to therapy. What that experience taught me, though, is that you can’t give up. Even if the therapist isn’t a good fit, keep searching. When I got back to my second semester of that year, I really thought I could tough it out and just keep the depression and anxiety to myself, but it was really, really hard and I ended up suffering in silence. I’m glad I had chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo during that time because man, I was about to lose it. After moving back home, I finally got therapy after dealing with a pretty awful depressive episode, and it really helped. It wasn’t an overnight thing where I changed my behavior and thinking patterns in one go; it has taken a long time, and it is still an ongoing process. Seeing therapy helped me learn how to deal with stressful situations at work. When I left my job in June 2022, seeing a therapist helped me deal with the stress of finding a new job. Seeing a therapist now is really helping. Again, it’s not an overnight magic cure, but I have found therapy a helpful tool to help me work through these personal issues that I had been dealing with. It’s easy for me to walk around and pretend like I’m okay, and to keep my problems to myself, but it’s helpful to have a professional to talk to so that I don’t just have to keep these problems to myself. There were periods where I felt, Oh, I’m better, I don’t need therapy, but then some stressful thing would happen, and I would find myself not being able to navigate it, so contacting a therapist has been helpful.

I really appreciate the scene where Alice goes over to Paul’s instead of going out drinking with the girls at school. During gym class, Alice’s classmate invites her over for drinks under the bridge, where a bunch of teenage girls get drunk under a bridge. Alice doesn’t want to go, but she doesn’t know what else to do, especially because she can’t really relate to the girls at school. At first, Jimmy wants to eat dinner with Alice, but she says she has plans that evening, and he feels hurt. But then his friend asks him out to pickleball that evening and so Jimmy accepts his invitation. Alice picks up chicken sandwiches and goes home to eat dinner with Jimmy, but Jimmy tells her he is going out to play pickleball. At first, I thought Alice was going to decide to go to drinks under the bridge because she wasn’t going to get to spend time with her dad, but then she ends up going to Paul’s and they eat the sandwiches and watch TV together. This scene reminded me this movie I saw called The Edge of Seventeen because in the movie, Nadine doesn’t relate to kids her age and like Alice, she is grieving the death of a parent (Nadine’s father died of a heart attack when she was 13) and also doesn’t have any true genuine friends, so she often eats lunch with her history teacher, Mr. Bruner. Nadine has depression and often feels alone, but Mr. Bruner ends up being someone she can trust. He doesn’t tell her to cheer up or get over her depression, but instead gives her a space where she can talk about what she is going through. He also refuses to bullshit her and often gives her honest advice, even if it’s not the advice she wants to hear. Like when she is telling him she is an “old soul” and doesn’t relate to her peers, who seem to be focused on social media and acting silly, Mr. Bruner tells her that maybe no one likes her. Growing up I found myself relating to Nadine a lot because I usually gravitated towards older people because I struggled to relate to my peers, but I also began to realize that I wasn’t the only 20-something dealing with insecurities. Once I opened up to people about what I was going through, I found a lot of other young people who were struggling with depression, anxiety, insecurities, loneliness and other issues. It is so easy for me to think I’m the only one going through problems and to be honest, it’s still hard for me to open up about what I am going through with people because I feel a lot of shame and guilt and worry people are going to judge me, but I’ve learned that problems are just a part of life and that sometimes talking them out with a trusted friend helps. It may not take lots and lots of friends to form a genuine connection with someone. Sometimes you just need that one person in your life who you can trust and lean on.

What makes me laugh?

Daily writing prompt

What makes you laugh?

View all responses

A lot of things make me laugh. Stand-up comedy, comedy shows, satire, but also sometimes when I make stupid life choices or decisions, I look back and sometimes have to laugh at myself after crying and beating myself up over my supposed failures, because most times it’s not that deep. Of course, I have to take responsibility for doing said stupid thing, but I always end up growing from the experience. I love The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and sometimes when I need a laugh I will watch it. I also love old clips from Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer.

Movie Review: Perfect Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Review: The Zone of Interest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

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

Written on Friday, March 22, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Review: American Fiction

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

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

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

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

American Fiction. 2023.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: