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Movie Review: Silent Voice; The Movie (content warning: mental health, bullying, ableism, suicide)

July 10, 2019

Categories: movies

This past week I watched the film A Silent Voice, a Japanese language film that came out in 2016. And I must say, I don’t remember crying at a movie like this since Babel (although I am by nature a cryer, so I’ve cried at a lot of films.) The film opens with a young man named Shoya who is about to commit suicide, but then it flashes back to how he became depressed. Shoya is popular in school, but then a new student named Shoko Nishiyima arrives to the school and she tells her classmates she is hearing impaired and communicates through writing in a notebook. However, because kids are mean, Shoya and some of the other kids bully Shoko, stealing her notebook and ripping her hearing aids out of her ears and throwing them out the window. Shoko later transfers to another school and the teacher calls out Shoya for being behind the bullying. When Shoya tries to divert the blame from himself by calling out the other students who bullied Shoko, his classmates all turn on him and Shoya finds himself with no friends.

Fast forward to high school, and Shoya is depressed and suicidal. He blocks out people’s faces, not looking people in the eye because he thinks no one wants to be his friend anymore, except for another outcast whose bicycle is almost stolen had it not been for Shoya unintentionally sticking up for him. Shoya runs into Shoko and tries to apologize to her, but she finds it hard to be around him or anyone after dealing with so much bullying early on. Shoya meets Shoko’s sister and mother, and of course because he bullied Shoko, they are less than happy to see him show up at their house to hang out with Shoko. However, as the two loners realize they are outcasts to their classmates, Shoya and Shoko become closer, and Shoya, like a few of his other classmates, even has learned sign language to communicate with Shoko. However, the film gets darker when one of Shoya’s classmates, Naoka, continues to bully Shoko, telling her on a Ferris wheel ride that she hates her and even hits Shoko. Shoko always apologizes even though her tormentors should be the ones apologizing, and at first I wondered why this young woman was apologizing when all she did was be her normal self (and even going out of her way to do nice things for her classmates, such as erasing hateful messages that Shoya’s classmates wrote on his desk.) But then later in the film I found out that Shoko thinks she is the cause of everyone’s problems, that if she weren’t hearing impaired or even alive, then everyone would be better off without her (in reality, I think this is some B.S. because her classmates’ insecurities were the real reason they bullied her in the first place. What a bunch of cowards.)

I didn’t know how I was going to like this film. A friend of mine insisted we watch it, and so I did, and by the end I had to watch yet another episode of Brooklyn 99 because my eyes were puffy from a little over two hours of crying. This film hits a lot of topics: bullying, suicide, depression, loneliness and what it means to be a good friend. It takes place in the modern era where we have cell phones and social media, and examines how technology can connect us and yet make us feel lonely. When Shoya truly connects to Shoko and apologizes for bullying her, when he actually looks into her face and sees her crying, he realizes that Shoko’s compassion is what truly helps him keep living. This part is what brought me to tears (also seeing Shoya’s friend cry and hug him when he comes back to school after being injured from the fall.) I also cried because Shoya, after meeting with Shoko and sharing this beautiful heart-to-heart dialogue with her, breaks down into tears when the X’s on his classmates’ faces (because his depression is so deep, he can’t look them in the eye) disappear and he finally experiences life and sees its beauty.

This film also shows the severe impact that bullying can have on people. Shoko tries to commit suicide while at a festival, and Shoya saves her, nearly falling to his death himself. Shoko tries to kill herself because her classmates have made her feel, for the longest time, like she was worthless. It serves as a reminder of all the youth lost to suicide from bullying, such as Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University who committed suicide after his roommate recorded Clementi kissing another man and posted it online, or Brandy Vela, who killed herself after her peers tormented her online. These are not the only suicides that have happened, which really shows that while yes, these suicides are sad, they can be prevented by having more effective anti-bullying legislation in place. More people are talking about how to prevent bullying and suicides, but we need to keep talking about it, because if we don’t, the problem’s not actually going to get fixed.

The Japanese humanist educator, Daisaku Ikeda, once said that differences among people are a given. This is what makes each person unique and our world such a richly diverse place, resembling a garden in which many kinds of flowers bloom in profusion. That is why we must not only recognize that people are different, but also respect and learn from one another. That should be our basic perspective. Accordingly, regardless of creed, we must always respect others as human beings first.” (The New Human Revolution: Volume 21, page 99, Daisaku Ikeda) Just because Shoko had a disability didn’t mean something was wrong with her, but because her classmates hadn’t met anyone else who was hearing impaired and were so used to conforming with each other, they viewed Shoko’s disability as a flaw rather than as something that was simply just different from their able-bodied selves. However, Shoko has boundless compassion for her classmates even when they are mean to her, and as Shoya grows older and has come to terms with his own experiences of being an outcast, Shoya starts to appreciate what he didn’t appreciate before: Shoko’s compassion. Because she was bullied, Shoko made it her mission to feel for Shoya’s pain, and later on, he makes it up to her by saving her from committing suicide and having the guts to apologize (because his other classmates couldn’t muster the courage to do so.) Embracing differences, not necessarily pretending they don’t exist, is key to being a good ally, and sometimes all a good ally needs to do is just show up for someone and listen to them. Shoya wasn’t an ally before because he made fun of Shoko’s disability, but he later becomes an ally and fosters a bond of trust with her.

I definitely would watch this movie. Even though it was stressful to watch because I myself went through painful mental health issues, and watching this film triggered memories of my worst depressive episodes, I had to watch it so I could understand what my mission was as someone who had gone through that. I needed to understand that I’m not alone in my experiences with depression, and that seeking help is so important.

Speaking of which… 1-800-273-8255 is the Suicide Prevention Hotline. Not doing this to be cheesy or because every article I read about mental health has it at the end, seriously. If you or a loved one is considering suicide, call this number. Seriously, there’s a reason Logic has a song about it.

Book Review: Freedom

June 25, 2019

Categories: books

Last night I finished the book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Even though the novel is almost ten years old (it was published in 2010), it is relevant now more than ever and I highly recommend you read it. I’m glad I found it at the library because I found it at Half Price Books and was about to buy it, but some inkling of intuition told me that I could easily score a free copy of it at the library, so I waited patiently and went to the library to find it. At first I couldn’t find it and was a little sad, but then a librarian helped me out and I found it on a display shelf for books of the month (or some kind of other theme, I forgot.) Bingo! I though, and I immediately started reading it.

What I love about this book is how very similar it is to the writing styles of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer, two of my favorite authors. Normally I prefer first-person narratives to third-person narratives. I don’t know why, that’s just what I’ve always preferred. But so far, I’ve read Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, and this novel, and I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m not as biased toward first-person narratives as I thought I was. Franzen, like Chabon and Foer, uses the third person to allow the reader insight into the characters that we might not have gotten if were read it in the first-person. I’m not saying first-person isn’t insightful, but we only get to read about the situation from the main character’s point of view (or whoever’s point of view it is, if it’s a novel with more than one character, such as The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.) In Freedom, Patty and Walter Berglund are an American couple living in Minnesota. They seem to have the perfect life on the outside: they have two children, they live in a neighborhood that is becoming more and more gentrified, Walter has a great job and Patty seems to be the talk of the town, albeit not always in a good way. But as the book goes on, we find out that Walter and Patty aren’t the perfect couple, and are in fact quite imperfect in so many ways.

The book is genius not just because of its eloquent writing, but also because there’s an autobiographer who writes Patty’s biography so we gain extensive backstory into how she became who she is. Patty’s mom, Joyce, grew up poor, but her father, Ray, grew up rich, and so Patty and her sisters Veronica and Abigail grew up living this privileged life. However, Patty gets raped and her parents don’t handle it very well, and so this sours the relationship between her and her parents. Patty befriends this girl named Eliza, who seems shy but turns out to be quite controlling of Patty, criticizing her and even refusing to let Patty see her singing and playing her guitar. Eliza is friends with a guy named Richard Katz, who goes to Macalester College with Walter. Patty and Walter meet at one of Richard’s gigs, and when Eliza ditches her, Walter keeps her company and soon they become a couple.

Flash forward more than a few years, and Patty and Walter are doing better than they ever did. Patty gets to stay at home with the kids Jessica and Joey, and Walter goes to his cushy job at 3M. But Richard Katz comes back home having still not succeeded much in his career, still sleeping with women and mooching off of Patty and Walter’s good will. Then Walter gets a job at a coal company, and the guy who runs it wants to clear off land for a private sanctuary for cerulean mountain warblers because they are the guy’s favorite bird. Even though Walter grew up as an environmentalist, the fact that he would allow for mountain top removal in West Virginia just so the cerulean mountain warbler can have its own space, especially since they guy said they were dwindling in number, is beyond ironic. It gets even more twisted when Walter has an affair with his assistant for the Cerulean Mountain Trust, Lalitha, a young woman in her late 20s who is working with Walter to raise awareness of overpopulation and how it is killing the planet. What’s more twisted for the family is that their son, Joey, becomes a Republican and starts living with his girlfriend Connie because he can’t stand living with Patty anymore (it’s shocking for them because they are liberal.)

If this novel taught me anything, it’s this: we can talk all we want to about freedom of speech, freedom from financial stress, and our free country (and, most recently, freedom gas.) But no one is free of suffering. In Nichiren Buddhism, the only thing that truly sets us free is realizing that suffering is a part of life and that even if we’re suffering, we can turn that suffering into something positive. There are two kinds of happiness: relative and absolute. Relative is short-lived happiness: you get the dream job, the perfect spouse, the GPA that lands you into a top-tier grad school. But those things only make you happy for a short time because they require a lot of hard work and you may not even like every part of the dream job, or you might end up burning out during grad school, or after a few years of your relationship, you might end up sick of your partner. You’ll find things to escape from your pain and misery, but those end up being temporary solutions to a larger problem. Then there’s absolute happiness, where even if you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, you got a divorce or any other kind of thing that makes you suffer, you can turn those sufferings into impetus to to keep going no matter what. It seems that even though Walter and Patty have the perfect life, they don’t, because all this other stuff comes up in their lives and they aren’t prepared to deal with it. Walter is unhappy in his marriage, and even though he seeks escape from his problems through his involvement with environmental work, he still can’t shake the fact that he’s sick of being married to Patty and is lovesick for Lalitha. Lalitha also suffers because Walter is still married to Patty but still, in the end, loves Patty deep down, and Walter’s personal life is starting to affect his work rapport with Lalitha. Lalitha is pretty much the only person of color in the book, and even though the book doesn’t directly say it, it’s almost like she’s a prop for Walter. Walter doesn’t treat women very well, and neither does his friend Richard, but Lalitha is both a woman and a person of color. In one scene, a white man confronts Walter at a store and makes a derogatory comment about Lalitha’s race towards him, showing how even though Walter and Lalitha love each other, they still have to deal with bigots, people who live in the prison of racial bias and prejudice. The racist who confronts Walter about his relationship with Lalitha can’t free himself of his own ignorance, and deep down, even though the book doesn’t talk about it, this ignorance causes him, too, to suffer. Every character in the book goes through some sort of pain, which serves as a reminder of why literature is so important. Literature lets us know that we aren’t alone in our suffering, and that other people have problems, sometimes greater than our own.

There’s an archetype I studied in my English class: man vs. nature, and this book works a lot with this archetype. Walter seems to live a very Walden-esque life. For those who haven’t yet read Walden, it’s by the philosopher Henry David Thoreau and in the book he talks about how he dropped everything, went into the woods, built himself a shack and journaled about nature and politics. Even though Walter seeks an escape through nature, he can’t escape his own ego. He sees nature as a way to get away from the people he held most dear in life, and this causes him to just suffer more. Walter leaves his cushy job at 3M so he can do conservation work, but it’s not a totally selfless pursuit because he’s really doing it to escape his relatives and his family, who never seemed to understand him or take him seriously. However, he is still not free because he must deal with the environmental consequences of his project. The Cerulean Mountain Trust isn’t in the end sustainable at all even though it proposes a conservation sanctuary for a species of birds and thus helping it from going extinct, it still degrades the environment because it proposes clearing land for this sanctuary, thus putting people’s livelihood at risk and endangering other species. Freedom isn’t really freedom if it causes another being suffering, and the novel says that clearly through the actions and thoughts of its characters. Even though Walter and Patty are liberals, and seem to be free of biases and open minded, they are not free because they still have biases and are tethered to their pasts, and this affects their view of the world and their political views.

Overall, I really liked this book.

Freedom. Jonathan Franzen. 562 pp. 2010.

Movie Review: If Beale Street Could Talk

June 26, 2019

Categories: movies

I didn’t think I was going to cry when I saw this film. But alas, by the end I found my shoulders quaking as I erupted in tears. And while I was of course super ecstatic when Regina King won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this film. I didn’t truly understand at the time why she won the award because I hadn’t yet seen the film. It wasn’t until I saw the film that my appreciation for Regina King’s acting deepened.

The film, based on the novel of the same name by James Baldwin, is about a young Black couple, Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt and Tish Rivers, living in Harlem. Tish announces to her family that she is pregnant with Fonny’s child and while her mom, dad and sister, Ernestine (played brilliantly by Dear White People’s Teyonah Parris) celebrate her pregnancy, Fonny’s family does not. Tish not only has to deal with Fonny’s family’s disapproval of her, but also Fonny’s incarceration. Victoria Rogers, a young Puerto Rican woman, accused Fonny of raping her when she has to point out her rapist in a line of Black men. Sharon, Tish’s mom, goes to Puerto Rico to tell Victoria that Fonny didn’t rape her, but it doesn’t end up working too well. Even when they are young, Tish and Fonny still live in a brutal world where police will still accuse them of doing things just because they are Black.

This film is important because racial injustice is still a messy reality even though social media has allowed people to spread awareness of incidents of this injustice. In Fruitvale Station, for instance, the white lady Oscar Grant meets earlier at the grocery store records the moment where the white police officer holds Oscar and his friends hostage and accuses them of starting the fight on the train, when in reality the white inmate of Oscar’s started the fight. However, at the time James Baldwin wrote If Beale Street Could Talk, there was no social media or smart phones. Barry Jenkins, the film’s director, illustrates this point by putting historical photos of white police officers beating Black men and arresting them. I know the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is overused, but in this case, it’s more relevant than ever. Even without physical words, seeing these brutal images of police brutality in the 1960s reminds us how important it is to talk about the intersectionality of criminal justice and racial injustice, even if it is hard to discuss.

I was sad I never got to see it on the big screen, but the benefits of seeing a movie like this on a DVD player is that you get to watch extras, such as deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Also, like, let’s be real. If Annapurna Productions can give us gut-wrenching films like Detroit, they can certainly deliver a gem like Beale Street. The deleted scenes, while they didn’t make their way into the film, are key to the storyline and left me trying to catch my breath because the acting is just so brilliant. Also, watching the feature about the making of If Beale Street Could Talk was pretty awesome because I learned about why Barry Jenkins made the film, the inspiration behind the costume design and makeup, and why the cast was perfect for this film. I got to hear what the actors had to say about their characters and hear about what Barry Jenkins loved about working with these actors. In one powerful scene, Fonny’s family confronts the Rivers family about Tish’s pregnancy, and I swear, I was snapping my fingers the whole time and my mouth stayed in an “O” shape for as long as I can remember because there were so many disses that Ernestine, Sharon and Fonny’s mom dished out to each other.

Barry Jenkins was the perfect director for this film. If you haven’t yet seen his film Moonlight, I recommend you watch it. While you don’t of course have to watch it before watching If Beale Street Could Talk, watching Moonlight and then watching If Beale Street Could Talk gave me a greater understanding of why Jenkins chose a certain lighting or way of zooming in on the characters. The cinematography of Moonlight (courtesy of James Laxton) was incredible, and I don’t think I will ever get tired of this film for that reason. I honestly wouldn’t know how to describe the beauty of Jenkins’s filmmaking, because it has its own unique style. The lighting, the focus on the characters’ facial expressions, and the brilliant beautiful music score made Moonlight a kind of beautiful that’s just super hard to describe unless you see the film for yourself. It’s the same with Beale Street; you just need to watch it to know why it’s so incredible.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t also recommend you read the novel If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. I first heard about it when I heard they were making a movie based on the book. Before that I had read Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and I also saw the documentary on James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro (if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do so. Powerful film.) But I didn’t know about If Beale Street Could Talk; maybe I had passed by it in the library and ruffled through its pages, but I didn’t read it until I saw the trailer for the film adaptation. When I heard Barry Jenkins was directing it, I immediately grabbed a copy and started reading. I devoured that book like it was a delicious meal; it grabbed me and didn’t let me go. Baldwin’s raw depictions of sexuality, Black womanhood, Black masculinity, love, pain and racial injustice got deep down into the pits of my soul and tugged so hard at my heartstrings I thought I would pass out. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The cast of Beale Street wanted to pay tribute to a legend (aka James Baldwin) and they certainly delivered that tribute through their hard work and dedication during the production of this film. Incredible novel and film. This review doesn’t do justice to how moving both of them are.

If Beale Street Could Talk. 2018. Rated R for language and some sexual content.

Book Review: China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan

June 26, 2019

Categories: books

First of all, I have to say that Kevin Kwan never fails to amaze me with his incredible writing. I first saw Crazy Rich Asians while browsing the bookstore one time, but I had other books to read, so I put it back on the shelf. Then I finally read it and enjoyed it. For those who haven’t read it, it’s about this economics professor named Nicholas (“Nick”) Young. Nick takes her to Singapore to meet his family, and Rachel discovers that they are super wealthy. Turns out that Nick’s mom, Eleanor, hates Rachel and thinks that if Nick marries her, it will cause the family to go into financial misfortune since Rachel doesn’t come from means. The trip ends up being stressful for Rachel because she has to deal with everyone’s criticisms about her marrying Nick. Rachel moves back to New York, telling Nick to not come see her because she thinks that it will cause further pain for his mother and the rest of his family.

In China Rich Girlfriend, the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, Nick and Rachel are back in New York and are planning to get married soon. However, Eleanor disrupts the wedding and tells Rachel about her long-lost father, who she hasn’t seen in years. Eleanor tracked down Rachel’s father and tells her to come see him. Rachel meets him and finds out that she has family in China that is richer than even Nick’s family in Singapore. She even meets her brother, Carlton, who she hasn’t met before. His friend Collette is a super-wealthy model who spoils Rachel during her visit while also dealing with her parents’ disapproval of her love for Carlton and not Richie, the super-rich guy they were trying to get her to marry. Meanwhile, Astrid Leong, Nick’s cousin, is dealing with a terrible marriage to Michael, who didn’t come from wealth but is now a tech billionaire, and her love for Charlie Wu, another tech billionaire who was Astrid’s first love before Michael. Kitty Pong is trying to go undercover after her breakup with Alastair Cheng lands her in hot water, and seeks the advice of Corinna, who tells her to dress down and behave in ways that won’t give her away as Kitty (this ends up backfiring badly.) At the core of all this nonsense is Rachel, who just wants to have a nice marriage to Nick and not have to deal with all the drama that comes with being married to one of the richest guys on the planet.

If anything, this novel taught me that while money itself isn’t the root of all evil, it’s what people do with money that can really mess someone up. We’ve all heard the phrase “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” and while it’s good to have money to pay your bills, rent, and occasional luxuries, spending lots of money just because you have a huge inheritance doesn’t ultimately lead to satisfaction. Colette and her friends spend a lot of money shopping and going out to eat, but Colette lashes out at her parents and even towards the end lashes out at Rachel, calling her ungrateful and a bad friend even when Rachel didn’t do anything to upset her. Colette wants more and more stuff, but she always ends up feeling unfulfilled. Even though Nick comes from wealth, he still wants to live a more down-to-earth life with Rachel without worrying about his inheritance. Even though Rachel’s brother and parents have lots of money, Rachel still holds strong to her roots because her single mother, Kerry, raised her to persevere even when they struggled financially living in a pricey place like New York. When Carlton sees Richie embarrass Colette by proposing to her and then throwing a tantrum when she tells him no, he bets all the money he has on drag-racing Richie, unaware that he already got in a very bad car accident and nearly died. When he fumes about it, Rachel goes to comfort him and convince him that it’s not worth it to fight back with Richie. Carlton tells her in fury that she needs to get out of his life and that he wishes he never met her, but then realizes what he said and breaks down into tears. Rachel doesn’t let anyone’s pretentiousness get to her because she dealt with it with Nick’s family, and this makes her one of the few down-to-earth characters in the novel.

All I can say is, I can’t wait to read the last novel in the trilogy, Rich People Problems. And I hope they make movies for the second and third novels of the trilogy. 🙂

China Rich Girlfriend: A Novel by Kevin Kwan. 481 pp.

Book Review: The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon

July 8, 2019

I just finished this incredible novel, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. It’s a powerful novel about this woman named Heather Reilly who studied conflict resolution in college and ends up working at the Pentagon because of an academic fellowship opportunity that came up there. At first, she is assigned to develop a peace plan for Afghanistan, but due to budget cuts the peace plan gets put on the back burner and she is reassigned to a stressful job in another department, one having to do with military coalitions. Not only that, but Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (aka her boss) Ariane Fletcher, is tough on her and the rest of the team, and not even the toughest generals can out-tough her. Moreover Heather is struggling with the loss of her brother, Jon, in combat, and her sister-in-law, Amanda, is also dealing with the pain of losing Jon, who is her husband. Oh, and one more thing: Ryan, Heather’s fiance, isn’t interesting anymore to her and he can’t afford to pay off his student loans (she, too, has student loans she is struggling to pay off.) However, even though Heather deals with issues on a personal and work level, she remains tenacious and eventually gains the approval of her colleagues (and even her boss) through her persistent hard work.

This book was a combination of movies: Late Night, Legally Blonde, and The Devil Wears Prada. It reminded me of these three films because all of them, like The Heart of War, feature young female protagonists who lack experience in the fields they pursue but nevertheless conquer this knowledge and surpass their peers in their work. In Late Night, Molly Patel has little experience writing for late night TV even with her experience in stand-up comedy. But when her boss, Katherine, finds out she’s actually really funny, she starts to see Molly’s stand-up talent as an asset rather than as a lack of expertise. Also, Molly puts in the work of writing the jokes because if she kept criticizing Katherine’s way of running the show, then Katherine was going to fire her. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs thinks all the hype around fashion at Runway magazine is overrated, but Miranda Priestly, her boss, tells her she can accept the culture at Runway or leave for good. When Andy cries, Nigel, Miranda’s art director, tells Andy to snap out of it and just do her job because Miranda is doing hers. When Andy changes her outlook on her job, she dresses like everyone at the magazine and even takes on the behaviors of the people at Runway. Now, of course, while Andy did change her attitude, her job as Miranda’s assistant still consumed her life and she lost that work-life balance that was so essential to helping her be her best self. She ended up losing her friends and touch with herself. However, the film taught me that while you shouldn’t let people talk down to you, it’s also important to be willing to learn new things, even if they’re things you don’t care much about. And in the end, Andy’s time as Miranda’s assistant landed her a new and better job, and the guy who interviews her says that working for Miranda Priestly is tough and that he would be “an idiot” if he didn’t hire Andy because of the hell she endured working as, in Miranda’s words, “her worst assistant.”

In Legally Blonde, there is a similar theme. Elle Woods is this cheerful fashionable woman from Los Angeles whose jerk boyfriend, Warner, breaks up with her before he leaves for Harvard. Warner tells her she’s not smart enough for Harvard Law School and she proves him wrong. At the beginning when she is first in class, the professor doesn’t take Elle’s ambition seriously just because she writes with a fluffy pink pen and wears cheery attire, but when Elle meets Warren at a party and he once again tells her she’s never going to be good enough for Harvard and that he’s gotten back with his ex-girlfriend, Vivian, she realizes that Warner is a waste of her time and studies hard so she can excel in her classes, and proves to her professors and peers that she belongs at Harvard and that wearing pink and smiling doesn’t mean anything is wrong with her.

In The Heart of War, Heather wonders for the longest time why Fletcher is so hard on her. Fletcher in the book later explains to her that she was so tough on Heather because she herself had that tough kind of training and wouldn’t have been so good at her job if her bosses hadn’t been so hard on her, but that because women are held to different standards than men are, and while her being a female boss was seen as overbearing, male bosses would never be told that being aggressive was bad or intimidating. Like Fletcher’s colleagues, Miranda Priestly’s colleagues (and the general public) saw her as this evil ice queen because she was tough to her employees and had no time for shenanigans. Like Fletcher, Katherine in Late Night was a hard boss to work with, but she was hard on her team because she wanted them to do great work, and she was hard on Molly because she herself struggled as one of the few women working in the comedy profession, and wanted to let Molly know that she had to have a thick skin to deal with her male colleagues’ attempts to make her feel like she’d be better off bringing them coffee and cupcakes and not sitting at the writer’s table doing the work she set out to do in the first place. Heather grew from her experiences dealing with Fletcher and realizes that she is actually interested in the kind of policy work she is doing. When her old fiance, Ryan, tries to win her back, Heather reveals she’s been promoted, and Ryan, like Warner in Legally Blonde, tries to talk her out of doing such work because he thinks it’s a waste of her time to try and go for something challenging. But like Elle Woods, Heather understands that if she were to go back to her life with Ryan, she would probably not have the chance to do this kind of interesting work again. Also, her (Heather’s) brother, Jon, died, and Heather’s mission is to serve her country because of the impending likelihood of war between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

The book also reminded me of the film Arrival because of the theme of diplomacy and international relations. Communication and language is a central theme in Arrival; Louise Banks is a linguistics professor who actually goes to communicate with aliens after a series of mysterious spacecrafts are seen hovering in different places on Earth. At first the communication is shaky and the extraterrestrials’ message doesn’t get across to Louise and her party, prompting nations around the world to cut off communication with the aliens. Louise then goes by herself and the aliens finally communicate that they didn’t arrive on Earth to start a war, but instead to foster a mutual friendship with human beings. Instead of using weapons that can kill people, they want to use the weapon of communication to restore peace to Earth. Louise’s willingness to meet people face to face with the heptapods shows how, although dialogue isn’t the only method for effective diplomacy and, in the end, world peace, it should serve as the foundation for the process of establishing bonds of trust between countries.

Similarly, communication is at the heart of The Heart of War. It’s not just a story about a woman who gets any old job working for the government and falls in love along the way. It gets knee deep in foreign policy matters, and for good reason (otherwise, why would they put such a genius spin on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War?) Heather, despite not having much military experience, uses her studies in conflict resolution to come up with a military strategy that is more nuanced and more thought-out than simply invading someone’s country and blowing up their citizens. When the peace plan for Afghanistan gets cuts at the beginning of the book, Heather asks Voight, one of her colleagues, why they would do that, and he tells her that it’s because the war in Afghanistan is over and the U.S. is withdrawing most, if not all, of its troops, so they don’t need many people in that department. Even when Heather tells him there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan, which is all the more reason for the U.S. to take up the peace plan again, Voight tells her to drop the issue if she wants to get on even just an inch of good footing with Ariane. When Ariane assigns her team to Moldova and drops the Afghanistan peace plan, Heather asks why she’s not focusing on Afghanistan. Ariane tells her that the Islamic State doesn’t present any threats to the U.S. or its allies, but Russia does, and, moreover, the Moldovan Minister of Defense wanted Ariane to protect Moldova from Russian influence since they were so close and Russia so powerful. Heather tries to reason with Ariane that she can use her experience studying about conflict resolution in Afghanistan to help the team, but Ariane simply doesn’t care.

However, after Heather writes out a thorough, well-thought-out memo detailing the strategy that the team should use for dealing with Moldova, the senior leaders (aka the guys at the main table, the guys who make the big decisions and do all the big talking, the guys that Ariane doesn’t want Heather sitting with and talking about these issues with because she doesn’t think Heather has the experience necessary to do so) begin to rely on Heather for information about the strategies they should use for drafting out the strategy, and eventually she ends up sitting with the guys at the big table, hashing out the most complex strategies with them. Even when Ariane tries to make it seem like Heather did something wrong by speaking up about the issue and not just sitting at her desk and carrying out Ariane’s orders, Heather refused to back down and that is what earned her respect later from Ariane and her later promotion to the peace plan for Afghanistan. Because the team had been so focused on Maldova, they let the issue with Afghanistan drop, but the impending threat of terrorism didn’t go away and the Islamic State of Khorasan in Afghanistian claimed responsibility for the attacks they made on several American schools around the world. When Amanda and Heather watch this news, Amanda tells her that even though Fletcher chewed her out for wanting to focus on the peace plan for Afghanistan, it’s all on Heather to bring this to the generals’ attention because of her prior knowledge of negotiating peace with Afghanistan. When Heather meets with the top leaders, she voices her disagreements with their opinions and instead calls for an approach that involves being aware of what’s going on in the region and also communicating directly with the Islamic State. Because the U.S. government left civilians in Afghanistan to fend for themselves and got distracted with the Moldova-Russia situation, the terrorists in the country took over and dismantled all of the efforts that the U.S. put in before to establish peace in the country.

Heather finds herself conflicted when the generals talk about letting Afghanistan deal with the war on its own because she remembers how Jon died fighting to end the mess that terrorists were causing in Afghanistan, and how, even if the U.S. were to pull out of the country and not risk anymore of its soldiers losing their lives, it would just further strengthen the threat of terrorism in the Middle East, which, as the attacks showed, isn’t just Afghanistan’s problem but the entire world’s problem, showing how we are interconnected even though we live in different parts of the world, and that one place’s actions can have a severe impact on other places. Heather calls for the U.S. government to rebuild the Afghans’ trust so that we wouldn’t repeat how we dealt with the Middle East after 9/11, which brought about several negative consequences. Her strategy for Afghanistan requires thinking long-term rather than focusing on short-term wins for the U.S. When a general at the table asks her if this means she doesn’t want the U.S. to go to war, she answers that it’s more complex than just a yes or no matter, and involves working with Afghanistan’s government. He thinks she is ridiculous for wanting to talk to terrorists, but she tells him that they can’t assume they are all terrorists and that stabilizing the region means working together with the people in that region. Similar to Heather, Louise in Arrival takes the initiative to go by herself to communicate with the heptapods even when other people think her doing so is too risky. Her desire to communicate with them openly allows the heptapods to establish trust with her even when the rest of the world sees them as a threat. Both Arrival and The Heart of War taught me that when talking about peace or diplomacy, careful consideration and the desire to communicate without pretense or assumptions is crucial if we want to get anywhere putting our peace proposals in action.

Excellent novel that I highly recommend you read.

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. 371 pp.

Book Review: Up in the Air by Walter Kirn

July 1, 2019

Categories: books, movies

This morning I woke up bright and early and finished Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. It at first moved kind of slowly but it gradually picked up pace.

The book is about a successful businessman named Ryan Bingham who works as a career transition counselor (CTC), which involves, at its core, assisting companies in downsizing their staff. He racks up all these frequent flier miles, gets first class on all the flights, and sleeps with all these beautiful women he meets (okay, I might be exaggerating, but he doesn’t want to get married or settle because he loves living the high life.) He meets this woman named Alex on a flight and they hit it off, but he’s wondering if she’s the one. Meanwhile, his family is worried for him because he’s rarely at home since he’s traveling all the time. However, Ryan still seems justified in keeping up his lifestyle.

This novel is a work of psychological fiction, so we only get to really witness what happens in the book from Ryan’s point of view, no matter how pessimistic it is. I didn’t hate the book of course, I thought it was well written. I just wish I read it before seeing the movie, then I would have noticed what was different from the novel. For one thing, while George Clooney plays Ryan just as he was in the novel, the book seems to focus more on Ryan’s relationship to his sisters than it does in the movie. In the novel, Julie, Ryan’s sister, goes with him to the airport and we see how she worries about his constant traveling and how it exhausts her when for him, it’s just a part of his job. The film adaptation, from what I can remember (I saw it more than a year ago), focuses on Ryan’s business relationship with Natalie, his new hire, and how she is trying to digitize the career transition process.

The film will stick with me for the longest time because it made me understand that even though I have a great job, I need to save money in case something happens. Layoffs are a reality; I don’t care how good of an employee one is. The economy now is getting shakier even though people are divided on whether we’re going into a recession or not, and not everyone can afford to save money for emergencies because they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. But in those situations, it really does help to have money saved up. The film also showed how the job market is different and it’s rare nowadays for one person to hold the same job for 20-30 years like it was in the past. You have people job-hopping, you have people getting fired, and more people are turning to freelancing and working from home so that they don’t have to go into an office every day. Skills are becoming more technologized, and just having a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough anymore; one has to major in something lucrative nowadays in order to make a six figure income (although it does help to be good in your craft if you want to become successful, even if that craft doesn’t always get a good rap in the job market. Speaking as a musician here.)

The novel reminded me that job hunting is no fun and games. It can be a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and rejection after rejection. In the novel, Ryan explains CTC to Julie, and after his long explanation she tells him he is trying to paint this job description as some sunshine-and-rainbows gig when it’s, at its core, talking idealistic nonsense to people who got fired. According to Ryan, CTC folks don’t do the actual firing and they don’t find them new jobs. Instead, CTC means “coaching” them through the process of unemployment because, as Ryan describes, job hunting is a job in and of itself. I agree with that, because I got rejected by seventy different jobs while searching for one after college, and not having a job took the life and self-esteem out of me (of course, had I been smarter, I would have driven up to that pancake house right after I graduated to see if they were hiring. Darn it.) Job searching requires patience, it truly does, Ryan isn’t lying about that. Doing self-assessments about your skill set and qualifications can be draining, too, because you are constantly having to look at yourself, at both your strengths and weaknesses.

However, in the film we don’t get to see how these people go through that process, only that they are depressed when they find out they are being let go. One lady tells Ryan and Natalie that she will jump off a cliff because she no longer has a job, and it’s revealed that she ended up doing so. I found the film dark, but the book was actually a lot darker. It’s almost like a corporate version of Catcher in the Rye; the protagonist sees life in a dark way, and it consumes him, affecting his relationships with everyone around him.

This book also made me think about what home and rootedness really means. Ryan thinks that everyone else doesn’t have a strong sense of themselves when they travel, but that he has a strong sense of who he is even when he doesn’t have a home of his own. A guy in the book tells him he should own a home, and Ryan doesn’t take much interest in having a home or being settled because he’s used to the life that he has traveling and flying in first class. He doesn’t want to be rooted because to Ryan, that means he has lost his freedom. But like the characters in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, who have all this success but have these unhappy lives, Ryan still suffers because he is chained to his ego. He won’t let go of this idea that somehow he has to rack up the most miles to feel the most important, he’s holding onto this idea that he is the best at everything and pities everyone else. In the film, he tries to get Alex back, but finds out she is married with kids.

I’m too tired to finish this review, but the book was good. And the movie was great.

Up in the Air: A Novel by Walter Kirn. 2001. 303 pp.

Movie Review: Jackie

January 26, 2020

Categories: movies

Jackie was truly an excellent film. At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it, but it definitely was intense and left me holding my breath for a really long time (seeing as how it was produced by Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky, this isn’t surprising in the least.) It takes place in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and is centered on the trauma that his wife, Jacqueline (“Jackie”), dealt with. The movie opens up with her talking to a journalist (played by Billy Crudup of Big Fish) who is writing about her perspective on JFK’s assassination. The movie is so brilliant because it focuses on Jackie telling her side of the story and how she is actually quite knowledgeable about the field of journalism, having once been a reporter. She tells the journalist that as someone with experience as a reporter, she knows that the press expects someone like her to try and tell a story that the public wants to eat up. However, as a private person, Jackie was caught in a bind because these people wanted her to share these intimate details of the assassination with them. As she is recounting the details of the assassination, however, you can only feel her pain at having to remember these details, just as anyone who has ever experienced any kind of trauma will feel when people who never went through what they did expect them to simply just tell their side of the story without feeling any kind of emotional exhaustion or pain whatsoever. Not only did she have to figure out how to maintain her confidentiality, but she also had to prepare for her husband’s funeral, she had to tell her children about the assassination, and she had to leave so that Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson could move in as the new President and First Lady.

If Jackie taught me anything, it’s this: the events in history themselves often get warped when people put their own interpretations on them. Bias in telling history is inevitable. As Jackie says toward the end of the film, people love to believe in fairy tales. However, Jackie and John’s marriage wasn’t some perfect fairy tale. They had relationship issues and problems just like everyone else (not to mention the numerous extramarital affairs JFK apparently had behind Jackie’s back. No one taught me this in history class.) They were human beings who just happened to be the President and First Lady of the United States. And Jackie knew that JFK wasn’t perfect and that he slept with these women behind her back. However, that didn’t change the fact that his assassination was going to traumatize her for a very long time. Just a few hours after JFK’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife are sworn in as President and First Lady. While we don’t get as much detail into the rapport between Lyndon and John, or Lady Bird and Jackie, the movie focuses on how stressful the rapid transition was for Jackie. Probably one of the scariest scenes of all (besides the scene where JFK gets assassinated) is when Jackie is walking in the Oval Office with her clothes bloodied. She walks around with this numbness that gave me goosebumps. When she describes to the reporter the assassination in great detail I literally felt my heart go heavy. After seeing the film, looking at the poster for Jackie gave me chills in the same way that looking at the poster for Black Swan gave me chills after seeing the film.

Another thing I loved about the film was the score (courtesy of Micachu, or Mica Levi, who I had little knowledge of before seeing the film.) It has these slides in the strings at the beginning that gives the film its unsettling character, and there is one scene in particular that will stick with me for a while, and that is when Pablo Casals is performing at the White House, and as he is performing, the camera cuts to Jackie sitting in the center seat and front row of the audience, staring in awe and contemplation as Pablo performs. It is a deeply chilling moment because it is one of the memories she shared with her husband before his assassination. The music is rich with strings, and while I’m sad it didn’t win for Best Original Score at the Oscars (La La Land won) it is still an amazing score.

Another lesson that Jackie taught me was that you need to see history from more than one perspective. When I was in AP US History we went so quickly through out 1960s unit that some of the historical events covered in Jackie I didn’t know until I saw the movie. In one scene (this article articulates the scene better than I ever would), Jackie is coping with her husband’s death by drinking several bottles of alcohol and taking medications while the song “Camelot” is playing in the background (she tells the journalist that she and John would listen to the Broadway musical Camelot before bed.) This scene gave me the chills because it’s this super upbeat song but then later in the film Jackie keeps saying that while she and her husband lived a Camelot-like life when he was alive, there is no longer a Camelot now that John is dead. The upbeat song, juxtaposed with her trying on various dresses and sitting at the Oval desk and replaying the trauma over and over again in her mind, forced me to sit back and really think about how deeply the assassination of her husband messed up this young woman’s life.

Before watching Jackie, I would always pass by the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza and never paid much mind to it, and I thought for a second “Hmmmm this is kind of morbid. Everyone’s snapping pictures at the place where JFK got shot.” But after seeing this film I don’t think I’ll ever look at this grassy knoll the same way again. In fact, thinking about that knoll reminds me of the emotional, psychological and spiritual toll that JFK’s assassination had on Jackie. But of course, the history books, especially in a place like Texas, won’t tell you all that. That’s why I recommend they show this film in high school history classes during the 1960s unit, and yes, the shooting of JFK is shown in pretty vivid detail, but the film is so important because I don’t even remember my history teachers even giving us Jackie’s perspective on the assassination. Kids need to know the perspective of Jacqueline Kennedy on her husband’s death because it will show them how important it is to look at history from different perspectives, especially if the figure, such as Jackie herself, was a private person who wanted to maintain control of the narrative that other people wanted to impose on her. Critical thinking is so important, and when you watch films like Jackie, it teaches you how to digest history in a way that encourages students to ask questions and have discussions about the material. Overall, I think this film is important to watch, and Natalie Portman’s haunting and poignant portrayal of Jackie Kennedy will stay in my brain for quite a long time.

Jackie. 2016. Directed by Pablo Larrain. 1 hr 40 min. Rated R for brief strong violence and some language.

Eclectic Playlist of the Week

November 28, 2019

  • “Spontaneous”- Lindsey Stirling
  • “Deed I Do”- Lena Horne
  • “Just Like You”- Three Days Grace
  • “Maybe Not”- Cat Power
  • “Besame Mucho”-Chantal Chamberland
  • “Turn It On Again”- Genesis
  • “This Head I Hold”- Electric Guest
  • “Staralfur”- Sigur Ros
  • Enigma Variations– Edward Elgar
  • “I’m Not Afraid”- Jill Scott
  • “Comatose”- Skillet
  • “I Will Not Bow”- Breaking Benjamin
  • “Help”- Papa Roach
  • “lovely”- Billie Eilish and Khalid
  • “Down”-Marian Hill
  • “Like That”- Bea Miller
  • “everything i wanted”- Billie Eilish

Movie Review: Girls Trip

November 28, 2019

I wasn’t sure how I would like this movie, but I knew many people who saw it and enjoyed it, so I finally got around to watching it, and I must say, it is one of the best movies I have seen. It’s about four friends (played by Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall and Tiffany Haddish) who reunite at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. For those who don’t know about the festival (I haven’t been yet), it is held to celebrate the publication of Essence magazine, which is geared towards empowering young Black women. After watching this movie, I now really want to go to this festival.

The movie also has some really good life lessons about friendship, telling the truth and challenges the idea that women, particularly Black women, are these superheroes who can do everything and fix everything for people. The problem with this stereotype is that it hasn’t allowed for women (in this context I am talking about Black women) to take care of their own needs since they are so busy taking care of other people’s needs. To be honest, I haven’t seen many friendship films where Black women are the protagonists; usually they are the side friend or the comic relief with, like, two lines. Girls Trip is one of the few movies I have seen (and as far as I can remember, the only, with the exception of the film adaptation of For Colored Girls) where the focus is on friendships between Black women. It wouldn’t even do justice to compare this movie to Bridesmaids; it was an initial thought, but as I think about it, Maya Rudolph was the only Black woman in the friend group in Bridesmaids (of course, that’s not taking a dig at the film as a whole, I loved Bridesmaids. It was just a little detail that I didn’t pay much attention to while watching the film, but now notice after watching a film like Girls Trip, where all of the friends are Black women.)

Girls Trip. 2017. Rated R for crude and sexual content, brief graphic nudity, drug material and pervasive language.

The movie I want to see as soon as I can stream it (or if I’m willing to go to a theater to see it after a year of not going to one)

I saw the trailer for Zola a few months ago, and as a fan of A24 films I was pretty excited because this is an A24 film. Also I really loved Taylour Paige in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom so I was excited to see her in this. To be honest I haven’t seen many of Riley Keough’s movies but am excited to see her acting in this one.

CW: contains strong language