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.
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.
I just finished watching The Squid and the Whale, a 2005 film written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson. I really like Noah Baumbach’s other films Frances Ha and While We’re Young because I really like independent films and these films are independent films. I also really like Wes Anderson’s movies. The only ones I’ve seen by him so far are Moonrise Kingdom and The Grant Budapest Hotel (The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou is sitting on my bookshelf, calling my name. Now that I have this time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic I can watch more movies and thus, write more reviews. I haven’t written any reviews for a month, let alone anything at all on this blog, because I was overwhelmed with everything going on in this time in society, and while it’s a lousy excuse for me to not write, I was just trying to figure out how to deal with it all. I forgot until now, when I already feel a beautiful kind of catharsis just by typing these words freely, how awesome writing makes me feel. Even if my writing isn’t worthy of The Atlantic or Rolling Stone (due to my incoherent rambling stream of consciousness), it’s my voice and I have this platform (e.g. blogging) through which I can express my frustrations and all the feelings that come with being a human being during a time of uncertainty.
Anyway. So yes, I finished watching The Squid and the Whale, and I must say it was a really good movie. It came out when I was younger but of course I was too young to see it (it’s rated R for a lot of swearing) but I know it got good reviews, so I decided to watch it since it was a good price to rent online and I was in the mood for a movie. Not going to the theaters is of course just part of what we have to do now in order to survive COVID-19, but like many people, I love a good matinee with popcorn and a Sprite every now and then. I should have used the AMC card my friend gave me three years ago, darn. Hopefully in the distant future, as we still need to socially distance to not only keep ourselves well, but most importantly keep the ushers, ticket folks and other people working at the movies healthy, too.
Honestly, watching The Squid and the Whale during the COVID-19 pandemic was really interesting. It may seem like “It’s just a movie, why bring COVID-19 into this?” But the theme of communication and language in the film is so important, especially how the novel coronavirus and mandated social distancing have forced us to depend on the Internet to work and interact with one another (of course, people still love a good old-fashioned phone call now and then, and we also have tools like FaceTime, Skype, Zoom and WebEx to see each other even when we may not be in the same room with one another.) The film takes place in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1986, a time when the only modes of communication were writing letters, calling on the landline and talking face to face. Bernard and Joan Berkman, played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney respectively, have two sons named Walt and Frank. Bernard and Joan are separating after Bernard finds out that Joan is having an affair with Ivan, Frank’s tennis instructor. They leave Walt and Frank to figure out how to cope with the divorce on their own. Frank, who is younger than Walt, doesn’t have Snapchat, Instagram or texting to entertain himself and escape from the issue of his parents’ separation, so he drinks his parents’ alcohol and masturbates in private at school. Side note, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Walt Berkman, is pretty dang cute. I found myself almost blushing throughout the film because he is so attractive. But again, I find myself digressing.
So yes, Frank doesn’t have all the apps that many of us use every day (because of course none of these were invented until later) and Walt is figuring out his relationship with Sophie, a girl with whom he bonds over Franz Kafka one day during class. He is also figuring out how to deal with his attraction to Lili, one of his dad’s students (it took me a minute to recognize that Lili is played by Anna Paquin, and I remembered that this film was made fifteen years ago, so quite a bit of time passed between this film and True Blood.) It’s complicated because Lili is also attracted to Bernard. Moreover, Walt, like Frank, is dealing with his parents’ separation. His relationship with Sophie gets worse as he takes his frustration out on her.
I’ve lately been thinking about this topic of communication as it relates to my personal experiences, and this film really made me think about the ways in which people communicated back then and how we communicate now, especially when it comes to the topic of divorce and separation. I personally don’t have expertise in this subject, but I have been reading a lot of reports lately about how the stay-at-home orders right now are impacting couples who want to file for divorce. Right now, lawyers are backlogged with requests to file divorce, but filing divorce petitions is expensive, and the process of finalizing a divorce is now being done over videoconferencing because the courthouses are closed unless their is an emergency. According to a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek by Sheridan Prasso, in China there have been a lot of domestic violence cases and divorce filings after the government mandated stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of COVID-19, even though the government expected couples to bond more and have kids since they would be stuck at home. The stay-at-home orders made it hard for the women in these marriages to seek help since they would have had to go see someone in person to file the divorce, and
“police were so busy enforcing quarantines that they were sometimes unable to respond to emergency calls from battery victims, women experiencing violence were not able to leave, and courts that normally issued orders of protection were closed.”
Feng Yuan, co-founder of Equality, Beijing NGO focused on gender-based violence. Source: “China Divorce Spike is a Warning to the Rest of Locked-Down World” by Sheridan Prasso
I’m not saying the characters were in any way privileged for going outside or meeting each other face to face to work out conflict (or in Walt’s case, running out of Mount Sinai Hospital to visit an old relic of his childhood at the Museum of Natural History.) That’s how people had to communicate during the day: you couldn’t text someone an apology, you couldn’t tweet something snarky, you couldn’t send a middle-finger emoji to your mom if she said something you didn’t like. You had to call on the phone or talk to them in person, so it was hard watching Walt insult Sophie on the street corner and ridicule her for wanting to have sex too soon. Nowadays, if he had a smartphone he probably would have found her on Tinder and if she seemed too much for him, he could just ghost her and ignore her text messages and calls. He wouldn’t have to talk out his frustration with her, and it’s not like they walked away feeling good about their relationship (they break up), but they talked about it. Face to face, tears and awkward silences galore, something that you can’t communicate in a text message or group chat. The movie would have been totally different if the characters used the methods of communication we use today. Many couples use texting to communicate, and while texting is good for communicating short non-intrusive messages when people are busy at work or dropping kids off at school, the way we communicate our words matters, and texting omits 93 percent of the cues for effective communication. I don’t care if you pepper your message with eggplant emojis, cute smiley icons or digital middle fingers. It doesn’t convey everything you are thinking, and so your partner may be keeping something from you and hiding the thing in the text message without honestly talking about it. I honestly cannot envision Joan and Bernard communicating through text. The in-person conversations between them, Walt and Frank were already filled with pain, tears and anger; why complicate it through texting? Imagine if Walt talked out his memory of his mother with his therapist and him sharing this beautiful bond before the divorce, through text with his therapist. At first, Walt doesn’t open up, but since he doesn’t have a phone to look down at during his therapy session, he has to look the therapist in the eye and be honest with both him and himself. Soon, Walt finds himself recalling a particularly beautiful moment when he and his mother go to The Natural History Museum and see a diorama of a squid and a whale and what that diorama meant for him as a child. It’s hard to be honest in person sometimes, especially when you’re going through what Walt is going through, but it frees you to a certain extent because you don’t feel you have to bottle up your pain all the time when you talk it out with someone in person or over the phone.
Also, the movie would be just boring if communication was like that. Through movies, we develop a sense of empathy for the characters and what they are going through when we see their tears, their silent steely expressions. None of that comes through in a text message. I’m not against texting and admit that I do text quite a bit, but this has been on my mind for quite some time, so what better way to address it than a long blog post rant? I wonder how this movie would have been if it took place here in 2020…
This past weekend I watched In the Heights. When I first saw the trailer I was super excited for the film because I had seen Hamilton on Disney + (which I will be eternally grateful for because I have yet to see the Broadway in person.) I was also excited because Stephanie Beatriz is in the movie, and I love her as Rosa Diaz in the sitcom Brooklyn 99.
So last night I watched it, and the dancing and singing were absolutely amazing. My friends and I found ourselves bobbing our heads and snapping to the music, and my heart warmed when I watched how Usnavi and Vanessa’s love for each other develops through the film. Even though I myself am not Latinx, I have friends with similar stories to Nina’s. In the film there is a character named Nina who went to Stanford and dropped out because she encountered racist microaggressions from people at the university and was made to feel like she didn’t belong there. When Nina is at a restaurant with her dad she tells him that at an event she attended a lady thought Nina was one of the servers and handed her a dish to take back to the kitchen. This is a common microaggression against students of color who are at predominantly white universities and in predominantly white spaces. In the film Nina performs a number called “Breathe,” and in this number she talks about how everyone in her community has big hopes for her and tells her she will go far in life, but after burning out from the racism and stress she encountered in college, she feels like she let everyone in her community down. It honestly gave me chills, but it’s an all too common experience for first-generation BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students. I also learned a lot listening to my undocumented peers and it encouraged me to read more books by authors who are undocumented immigrants and/ or authors who write about the experiences of undocumented immigrants.
I really loved the film, especially Anthony Ramos’ portrayal of Usnavi, and the beautiful choreography and rapping (I also had forgotten that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote In the Heights before he wrote Hamilton, I thought he had written Hamilton and then In the Heights. My bad.) I also love how Usnavi learns that he can create value right in the Washington Heights community where he’s at even though he has big dreams at the beginning to leave for Puerto Rico.
And at the same time, I want to acknowledge the problem of colorism in the film. Before I watched the film I heard a little bit about the backlash against the film, but it wasn’t until after I watched it that I started reading up more on it. In a Vox piece by Jasmine Haywood titled “In the Heights exemplified the ugly colorism I’ve experienced in Latinx communities”, she explains that while the film was lauded at the beginning for portraying Latinx actors in leading roles, it did a bad job of showing the actual diversity within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, particularly of the Afro-Latinx communities who reside there. In the film most of the Latinx actors who play main characters are light-skinned and white-passing, while the Afro-Latinx people who have dark skin in the film play background roles such as dancers and hair salon workers. Jasmine, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and from New York state, further explains that the film does not adequately portray the diversity of Washington Heights. In reality, Washington Heights is historically a Dominican community and nearly half of the residents of Washington Heights are Dominican. Moreover, many Dominican people identify as Black Latinx, and as Haywood adds, much of Dominican culture has its roots in the African diaspora.
Haywood then gives historical context about why a lot of Afro-Latinx folks encounter discrimination within the Latinx community, and it goes back to European colonization and slavery, which touted that phenotypic features of white European people–fair skin, straight hair, narrow nose, or light eyes–are superior and should be privileged over Afro-centric features. This has led over many years to dark-skinned people lightening their skin with skin lightening creams and using other methods to alter their bodies, and this deeply toxic systemic colorism has manifested over the years in cinema with dark-skinned BIPOC folks being passed over for crucial roles and light-skinned BIPOC folks getting those roles. A key example of this is the film West Side Story. Natalie Wood was a white actress playing the leading role, a Puerto Rican woman named Maria. Rita Moreno, who is actually Puerto Rican, plays Anita, a supporting role. Another example is when Zoe Saldana, a light-skinned Black actress, had to darken her skin to play Nina Simone in the 2016 biographical film Nina. These are just a few examples though. Haywood also points out (which I didn’t know until reading her piece) that the film omits a scene in the original stage play in which Nina’s father expresses prejudice against her boyfriend Benny because he is Black. Omitting this scene left out room for a discussion around the complicated anti-Blackness within Latino families. Haywood also points out that John M. Chu, who directed the film, did the same thing when he directed Crazy Rich Asians; Singapore is more racially diverse than the film depicts it to be, and in the movie most of the East Asian actors in leading roles are lighter-skinned. At the end of her piece, Haywood concludes that while she was glad to see the music, culture and food of Latinx communities being well represented, she was disappointed that the film did not take the opportunity it had to represent Afro-Latinx folks within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, and that more needs to be done particularly in the wake of more recent awareness of anti-Blackness. Monica Castillo, in a review of the film for NPR, recognizes that while she loved the film and resonated strongly with the characters, she is a white Latina and hasn’t experienced the same kind of erasure that Afro Latinx and Indigenous folks have faced, and recognizes that this erasure of Afro Latinx folks has been going on for far too long and should be better addressed.
Right after the backlash, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized, explaining that he wrote In the Heights because he didn’t see Latinx folks like himself being represented on screen, but he had also been listening to people and keeping up with conversations around the lack of Afro-Latinx representation in the film. He apologized to everyone on Twitter and thanked everyone for having these conversations about the film’s colorism, and promised to keep learning and doing better in his future projects to honor the diversity of the Latinx community. The full apology can be found in this NPR article.
While I can’t say much more on this topic, like Lin-Manuel Miranda I have learned a lot from the conversations around colorism in In the Heights, and I am also going to keep learning from these conversations. Lin’s sensitivity and awareness of the issue of colorism, and his willingness to do better, also encouraged me as someone who is interested in social justice conversations and is always figuring out how I can do better.
Here is the In the Heights trailer:
In the Heights. 2021. Directed by Jon M. Chu. Based on the stage musical of the same name by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes. Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.
I attended an LGBTQIA+ Buddhist meeting on Zoom and in the meeting we talked about individuality and being true to ourselves and how chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helps us tap into our own inner mission. I thought about this because I was struggling with perfectionism this morning: I needed to find the perfect apartment, the perfect job, the perfect salary, the perfect place to live. And I ended up burning out as I always do. When I wanted to publish my poetry book on Amazon, I just couldn’t do it. I just felt this voice in my head telling me, Your poetry stinks. Don’t publish it. I searched on the Internet, scouring pages for people to affirm that yes, I should publish, or no I should wait it out. Browsing the Web for people to tell me what I should and should not do was not only silly, it was also toxic because I was feeding my ego, my insecurities. I was depending on others to validate whether I was worthy or not. So I asked myself in that moment, what do I really want to do? Do I want to keep going down this rabbit hole of job searching? Do I want to sleep and beat myself up and cry about how I supposedly haven’t measured up to anyone’s expectations of me (expectations that, in retrospect, I have made up for the past twenty something odd years)? Or do I just want to write on my blog and write in my most authentic voice? So I did. I finished my review of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but felt Oh what if I write more? What if I’m not finished? Then I panicked because my cello lesson was coming up and I thought, Oh crap I haven’t worked on this piece enough, what is wrong with me, oh gosh I’m gonna bomb it. I spent the whole morning writing in what the notes were on the music because it’s a scordatura piece that requires you to tune down the A string to a G, and I panicked because I didn’t want to miss any notes when I played for my teacher. I wanted it to be a note perfect performance.
And I was running late because I kept working on the piece, kept getting frustrated with myself. So finally I did a sonorous gongyo (a morning and evening prayer that involves reading the 2nd and 16th chapters of a Mahayana Buddhist teaching called The Lotus Sutra) to have the best lesson I could. As I gathered my things, I thought about the RuPaul quote on self-love that goes: if you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? I realized that if I couldn’t love myself, then I couldn’t love the person in front of me, no matter how hard I tried. But how would I put that self-love into practice?
The clock neared 6:30 and I was running late. I stopped at the red light and panicked inside. But suddenly a voice said, “you’re not a perfectionist.” And with that I repeated that mantra in my mind as I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while driving, and it helped me calm down. It also made me realize that my teacher is a human being, too, and that they make mistakes sometimes, too, just like I do, so there was nothing to beat myself up about. So I arrived and set up, and when I played for them, I repeated this same mantra to myself: you’re not a perfectionist. A few things I learned when I did that: I let go of labeling myself as a perfectionist because I realized right then and there that perfectionism truly does not define who I am, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself of this lie. I also realized that when I dropped the perfectionist label and stopped calling myself a perfectionist, I was more okay with making mistakes, and I was also more open to feedback from my teacher on how to better express the piece. I also was less worried about playing the notes wrong, and was able to just play from my heart straight through the piece.
I also was able to treat every piece of feedback like it was a nugget of wisdom rather than as a way of throwing me off my get it perfect, my way or the highway routine of practicing. I realized the reason I got so frustrated with myself during my past cello lessons was because I was holding myself to some pretty unrealistic standards. In the July issue of the magazine Living Buddhism, there’s this excellent article about the Buddhist view of perfectionism. In the article there is a quote by Daisaku Ikeda where he encourages young people to recognize that they are not perfect, and that failures and obstacles are opportunities to grow as a person, so young people should stay true to themselves and continue to carry out their unique mission in life. Moreover, when I told myself I wasn’t a perfectionist, I lightened up and stopped worrying so much about what my teacher was thinking about me as I played. I appreciated that moment the feedback they gave me and ways I could improve the piece. Letting go of my former perfectionist identity let me ride home in peace, remembering that I did my best and played and worked with the other person in the most authentic way that I could. I also stopped thinking so much about the person I have a crush on. I had tried to create this perfect image of them, but I realized that unless I let go of being a perfectionist, of calling myself a perfectionist, I was always going to hold unrealistic expectations for the person and people I love in my life, and when I let go of that label I was able to embrace the actual person and not just the idea of them. I was also able to focus on my writing rather than just think about the perfect ideal of us together.
So first before I write this review: if you haven’t seen Me Before You (the book is After You), then make sure you read it before reading my take on it. Because like any review about a series book (like let’s say, Harry Potter) if you don’t know what’s going on with the characters’ backstories, then it’s going to be hard to catch up. Also, who likes spoilers? I don’t know many people who care for them, unless they just are absolutely certain they will not read the book or watch the movie. So I’ll leave some spaces here before you scroll any further…
Ready? Ok, let’s do this thing. So the book After You carries off after Will Traynor’s assisted suicide (Dignitas) and Louisa is trying her hardest to cope, but ends up falling from her apartment building. Her family tells her to come back home, so she does and gets a job at an airport working at a coffeeshop/ bar. Her boss, Richard, is a pain to work with, constantly micromanaging her and forcing her to wear an outfit she doesn’t like. On top of that, she is also trying to stay away from people who think of her as the girl who encouraged Will’s suicide. And big surprise: neither we nor the reader nor Louisa knows that Will has a daughter, but lo and behold Lily shows up at Louisa’s apartment one night because she found out Louisa knew Will. Louisa’s parents also send her to a grief support group, and while at first Louisa doesn’t want to be there, she meets Sam, who is a relative of one of the support group members. Louisa must make a lot of hard decisions in this book: should she accept her newfound relationship with Sam, or not go for it because Will wouldn’t have wanted it? Should she accept a new job offer in a different city or stay put at her day job? Should she let Lily stay at her apartment or risk hurting her feelings by kicking her out?
The book was great, although I am aware of the criticisms surrounding it. There was a lot of backlash from the disabled communities because Me Before You suggests that living as a disabled person is useless and disabled people should opt for ending their lives instead of living. I am honestly glad I read the criticisms because I was crying during Me Before You and After You, and I knew I was frustrated with the ending of Me Before You, but I just couldn’t put my tongue on it. I thought at the end, Did Will just have to go through with suicide? Why couldn’t he and Louisa just grow old together? Why did the key to Louisa’s happiness have to be in another able-bodied person (Sam) in the sequel? Then I read reviews about the film by disability activists and was relieved to know my growing discomfort with the novel’s ending was valid.
Also, from a Nichiren Buddhist perspective, we believe everyone has a mission in life and that mission is to give other people hope when we overcome challenges. We also believe that there is a type of happiness called absolute happiness, where, even if you are going through the worst of times, when you chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, you awaken to your own inner potential (which we all have inside of us) to overcome any obstacle and achieve your goals, so even going through challenges is itself a joy. By the end, I kind of wished Will and Louisa were real so that I could tell them about Nam-myoho-renge-kyo; I’m not saying it would have made Will’s problems go away, but it would have given him hope that he could keep going in life. I cannot speak for disabled people since I am able-bodied, but I know a lot of people who are physically disabled but they keep on living despite the challenges and discrimination they may face as disabled people. I am aware that suicide is a touchy topic and that my views do not reflect other people’s perspectives. As much as I loved Me Before You and its sequel at first, I am trying to become more aware of the ways in which a lack of accurate representation of disabled people does more harm than good.
I haven’t posted one of these in a while (or maybe it was a few days ago, I don’t even remember, I listen to too much music to even care). So here it goes, more music from my many Pandora stations.
“If You Want It”: Tuxedo
“Volcano”: Damien Rice
“Qui est cette felle?”: Yelle
“A Walk to Remember”: Vulfpeck
“Special Affair”: The Internet
“Date La Vuelva”: Luis Fonsi, Sebastian Yatra and Nicky Jam
“Mob Ties”: Drake
“Cooties”: from the musical Hairspray
“Conversation Pt. 1”: Mac Miller
“Is It Love?”: Thundercat
“my boy”: Billie Eilish
“Every Teardrop is a Waterfall”: Coldplay
“Sleep Alone”: Bat for Lashes
“Play Dead”: Bjork
“So Doggone Lonesome”: Johnny Cash
“Pioneers”: Bloc Party
“Newborn Friend”: Seal
“The Call”: Regina Spektor
“Boy with Luv (ft. Halsey)”: BTS
“Private Eyes” (orig. by Hall and Oates): The Bird and the Bee
“Zi-Zi’s Journey”: Lindsey Stirling
“Survie”: Youssou N’Dour
“Decatur, or Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!”: Sufjan Stevens
I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted all of my tear ducts. Yesterday I went and saw A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and it was truly one of the most moving films I have seen. Most movies nowadays have a lot of stimuli and frenetic action, and much of this action can desensitize us. So that’s why watching Tom Hanks develop a meaningful bond with a cynical reporter gave me the kind of warm-hearted vibes (and caused the same river of tears to form in my eyes) I felt when I watched the movie Big Fish.
If you haven’t seen Big Fish, it is about a man named Will who seems to have the perfect life: he works a full-time job, he has a beautiful wife named Josephine who is pregnant with their first child. But he has to deal with strained relations with his dad, who likes to recount tales of his life as a boy and teenager, stories that the son thinks are just a bunch of embarrassing lies. When his dad is dying, Will goes home to take care of him, and his dad recounts his entire life to him and Josephine. Will at first doesn’t want to listen to his dad tell the stories to him since he’s told them many times already, and he worries that his own child will grow up to hear these stories himself and assume they are all true events. But as his dad gets closer to death, he starts to appreciate his dad and the life he led. Albert Finney, who plays Will’s dad Edward Bloom, died in February of this year, and whenever I think about him, I think about his profoundly touching role in Big Fish. While I won’t spoil the end, one of the scenes toward the end conveys how deeply Edward Bloom touched the countless strangers and loved ones during his lifetime.
I felt this while I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I can safely assume that my friends and I were not the only ones reaching for tissues during this film. Lloyd Vogler is a magazine writer in the 1990s whose boss gives him a special assignment: to interview Fred Rogers. For those unfamiliar with Fred Rogers, he starred on a show called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that appealed to kids and adults alike because of his willingness to encourage kids to get in touch with their emotions. One of the emotions he talks about is anger and he uses an adorable puppet named Daniel, who talks to a lady about how angry he is, and she encourages him to use his anger constructively rather than take it out on others. When Lloyd asks Fred how he manages anger and stress in his personal life, Fred tells him that we all get angry, but there are ways to manage that anger rather than take it out on other people, such as banging the keys of a piano in frustration or taking time to take care of yourself. As adults, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in our own problems that we forget that our inner child calls to us each day for us to play with him/her/they even just for five minutes, and instead of pretending that inner kid doesn’t exist, we should embrace our silliness sometimes and not take ourselves too seriously. Yes, life and goals are important, and also it’s important to make time for art, walks outside, music, prayer, reading, playing with puppets, or even, as Mr. Rogers illustrated during his life, encouraging someone through a tough time. When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway, some kids recognize Fred and start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and then pretty soon, Fred, the kids and everyone on the subway sings the song together. This is one of many scenes that brought me to tears because it made me think about how Mr. Rogers touched each person’s life and made them feel like they had a reason to keep on living.
He even addresses the matter of death in one scene, and the way he addresses it reminds me so much of what educator and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda says about life and death. Even though Mr. Ikeda come from different faiths (Mr. Ikeda is a Buddhist and Mr. Rogers is a Christian), they share a healthy perspective on death that encourages us to live our lives without regret and treasure each moment we share with the person in front of us, rather than fear death. As many know, Mr. Rogers died in 2003, but more than a decade later his legacy remains unforgotten. Like Mr. Ikeda, Mr. Rogers, by living his life in service to others, has given me a deeper meaning on the importance of encouraging others and how doing so makes not only the other person feel better but also helps us feel better, too.
He also reminded me of Mr. Ikeda because he saw the wisdom, courage, and compassion in each person he encountered. Daisaku Ikeda, when meeting with the steeliest world leaders, has used dialogue as a means of forming a human-to-human connection with the person in front of him. Even when meeting with world leaders who didn’t agree with his views, he respected them as human beings and continued to engage in dialogue with them rather than close himself off. In the past he met with people such as Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks, the British academic Arnold Toynbee and Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, and discussed topics such as the importance of art and culture in fostering a more peaceful society, as well as the role of religion in today’s world. His meetings are always out of respect for the other person’s humanity. In the film Mr. Rogers sees Lloyd as a human being, not just as some journalist interviewing him. On the contrary, Lloyd at first saw Mr. Rogers as just being the interviewee who was going to help Lloyd do his job, and when Mr. Rogers doesn’t want to treat the interview as a one-sided matter, Lloyd got frustrated at first. But then there is a scene where they are sitting in a restaurant and Mr. Rogers tells Lloyd to close his eyes and think about someone in his life who helped him in some way. The entire restaurant seems to go quiet as everyone closes their eyes and reflects on someone in their life who helped them. Lloyd starts crying after thinking about his mother before she passed away because she loved him for who he was.
This movie made me appreciate the people in my life who have helped me deal with my emotions and supported me through my ups, downs and in-betweens. Tom Hanks embodied Mr. Rogers warm and sincere personality so well, and the film score is absolutely beautiful, rich with cello and piano (it makes me want to practice my cello harder so I can get an opportunity to play on a film score.) The music gave the film its sweet touch. I would love to see this film again, although I would still probably get choked up if I were to see it again. Like a lot of people, I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on TV and so watching the film made me nostalgic for those episodes of the show.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 2019. Rated PG for some strong, thematic material, a brief fight and some mild language.
A few years ago, in my philosophy course on Animal Rights, our professor had us read and discuss Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s exploration of factory farming and the ethical dilemma he found (and still finds) himself in with regards to cutting meat 100 percent out of his diet. From what I can remember (I’d probably have to go back and read the book despite reading it several times in that one course.) Eating Animals mainly talks about the ethical implications of factory farming and how factory farming puts these animals in cruel conditions. In We Are the Weather, published this very year, it goes to another level to talk about the impact of factory farming on the planet. This book attracted me because he forces us to sit back and reflect not just on factory farming and global warming, but on the deeper meanings behind our actions, like Part 2 he gives these disturbing statistics about climate change and the average carbon footprint, and the ways in which factory farming contributes to increased greenhouse gas production and, in turn, higher climate temperatures. He also talks earlier in the book about the film An Inconvenient Truth (the film that inspired me to go on a save-the-planet movement when I was in middle school.) But then in Part 3, “Only Home,” he talks about the concept of home and how it relates to the ways we treat the planet. In one of the chapters of Part 3, called “Mortgaging the Home,” he talks about how his family was just one of many American families with the “American dream” mindset, where his grandparents’ house was larger than his parents’ house, and how his house is larger than his parents’ house. The “American Dream” dictates that one’s lifestyle should be more expansive than that of one’s parents, but now that climate change is worsening and people are using more resources than the planet can provide, we have to ask ourselves: is The American Dream sustainable? What do we have to lose by sacrificing it? Foer talks about the debt that many Americans have: credit card, student loans, car debt, mortgages, but he takes it to another level by forcing us to think about the debt we owe to our only real home, Planet Earth. He says in the beginning of the chapter that we will need four planets to sustain the average American lifestyle for all 7.5 billion and counting people on the planet, while in other countries that are less affluent, we would only need one planet or so to do that.
I have lately been reading about lifestyle inflation and never thought that our planet would live long enough to still sustain the kind of lifestyles that the American Dream pressures us to pursue. I am fine living below my means, but I can’t speak for everyone since everyone has different goals and situations. But this book left me with this bittersweet feeling, of, like, I am hopeful that we will mitigate what we’ve done to the planet, and at the same time I think about all the species that have gone extinct and the communities that have to deal with the worsening effects of climate change (coastal places mainly.) I am a vegan, but I also drive a car to work, I keep my phone on every day, and I have flown a lot in the past on planes and still crave that spirit of travel. I also try to compost and not waste too much food, since I watched the documentary Wasted and realized that being vegan by itself wasn’t going to cut down on greenhouse gases if all the food I ate was being thrown away in the trash so it could go and rot in a landfill and emit even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Part of me wants to start a composting program at my workplace, but since I have composted before, I can tell you that it attracts a lot of critters and that wouldn’t necessarily be good for the firm’s business. Still, I get sad when our office manager has to throw out all this uneaten fruit at the end of the day, and no matter how much fruit I try to take home I know it won’t fit in my Pyrex container. So you can only do so much.
I guess I gelled with Foer’s book because in Buddhism, we talk about karma, and how it means that we create karma through our thoughts, actions and words each day, but from Nichiren Buddhism, yes, our karma is deep but we don’t have to be fatalistic and think it’s the end of the world. We can transform this karma not just through chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo but also through taking actions in our daily lives to transform the effects of this karma. In a way, as a collective of individuals we have created a social karma through setting up these institutions and systems that perpetuate discrimination and consumerism. And Foer recognizes that people who say we should stop eating meat and flying aren’t being super practical, and also that this perspective might as well be saying that we should become “air-a-tarians” and abstain from having fun altogether. But he also recognizes that the far end of the perspective, aka cynicism, won’t help. He writes a lot about hopelessness and suicide in the past part of his book, and suicide being one of the leading causes of death, but that we need to still have hope even at a time when we don’t know how we’ll adapt to global warming. He says that we can’t just sit back and pray for stuff to happen, but instead we can take action:
“by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, digging up messages from the future, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer.”
Foer, We Are the Weather, page 224
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Jonathan Safran Foer. 272 pp. 2019.
The Arts Are Life 