biopics – The Arts Are Life

Movie Blog Post: Capote (2005)

Trigger warning: I go into some pretty gruesome descriptions of true crime, the death penalty and the history of lynchings in this movie post, so if you need to skip reading this movie review for the sake of your mental health, I totally understand. I promise. It’s also long as fuck, so you might be better off playing pickleball or making yourself a delicious cheese sandwich than reading this long-ass movie post.

Oh. My. Gosh. I just finished watching the movie, Capote, with Philip Seymour Hoffman. It blew me away. I had been wanting to see this movie for a really long time. When I was around 11 or 12, I watched the Academy Awards Ceremony, and Hilary Swank was reading the nominees for Best Actor. Hoffman was nominated for his role as the author Truman Capote in the film Capote, and even though they showed just a little clip of his performance, it was pretty powerful. He ended up winning the award for Best Actor that evening, and I actually rewatched the speech on YouTube because it was so moving and it made me miss Hoffman. If you don’t know Philip Seymour Hoffman, he was an American actor who starred in drama films such as Doubt, Moneyball and Capote. I don’t have an extensive knowledge of his filmography, and there are many movies that he was in that I still want to watch, like Synecdoche, New York and Moneyball. but I absolutely loved his performance as a priest in the film Doubt with Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Like his performance in that movie, his performance in Capote gave me chills. Like, long after the movie was over, I was just stunned into silence. I could not believe what I had just watched, and while as a kid I wasn’t old enough to see Capote (it was rated R and as a 12-year-old who didn’t watch any true crime shows or movies, the subject matter would have gone over my head) seeing it now as a grown adult was still a deeply haunting but powerful experience. Honestly, I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman. Watching Capote reminded me of the incredible legacy that he left for the world of cinema, years after his death.

The film focuses on Truman Capote’s journey writing his famous book, In Cold Blood, which investigates the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. (I haven’t read In Cold Blood yet, but when I was at an orchestra rehearsal in high school, one of the orchestra members I was talking to had brought a copy of the book with her because she was reading it for English class.) The movie opens with a young woman going into a house and finding the dead body of a girl in bed, with blood splattered on her wall. Shocked, she leaves the room. The scene switches to New York City, where famed American author Truman Capote is entertaining a crowd of writers and intellectuals and recounting a conversation he had with fellow author James Baldwin, who was writing a book about a Black man and a Jewish man having a relationship with each other, and how he worried about it being too controversial for readers. The next day, Truman reads the papers and finds out that a family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas and police are investigating who murdered the family. Truman has a large following of people who love his books, but instead of writing within his comfort zone of fiction, he decides to write a non-fiction book covering the Holcomb family murders. His childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee, writer of To Kill a Mockingbird, assists him in his research for the book, which involves not just talking to the witnesses in Kansas but to the very men who murdered the Clutter family, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Of course, the movie is a biographical drama, and usually when you direct a movie you take artistic or creative liberties with the script and the characters, so I had to understand that there were probably going to be some inaccuracies in the film. Then again, I am not a scholar in American history and didn’t know anything about the Clutter family murders, so all I knew about In Cold Blood was from watching this film.

The movie shows the psychological and emotional toll that writing the book and investigating the murders took on Truman Capote, especially because the court denies Perry and Richard’s appeal and sentences them to execution. I honestly thought about stopping the movie just four minutes shy of its end because the execution scene looked like it was going to be unbearable to watch. Of course, what Perry and Richard did was inexcusable. They should not have murdered the Clutter family. But when Truman visits Perry in jail, he gets to connect with Perry’s humanity even after this awful crime that he and Richard committed. Perry’s sister even warns Truman that he needs to be careful around Perry, because Perry can come off as being this innocent nice person, but he would have killed Truman in a heartbeat if he had the chance. Truman also has to be careful about divulging too much about his personal life, such as his mother’s suicide, because he is starting to become close to Perry, which blurs the boundaries between them. It also puts a strain on Truman’s relationship with his partner, Jack, because Truman is so focused on his research and his visits to Perry’s jail cell that he doesn’t have much time to spend with Jack, who is also a writer. This reminded me of another movie I watched called Trumbo, which is about an American screenwriter named Dalton Trumbo who is blacklisted as a Communist by the U.S. government and struggles to maintain his reputation and keep working while under government surveillance. Trumbo is so busy with his work that he writes his screenplay in a bathtub, much to the frustration of his family. He doesn’t have time to celebrate his daughter’s 16th birthday because he is busy working on his screenplay, and the family can’t do normal daily stuff because Trumbo has to always deal with the press invading his personal life and interrogating his involvement in the Communist party. It is frustrating for his children and his wife because they just want to spend time with him, but he is under so much scrutiny that they can’t just kick back and relax and enjoy private life as a family.

I think the hardest scene to watch was the minutes leading up to the execution of Perry Smith. Truman is devastated when he finds out that the court rejected Perry and Richard’s appeal and is sentencing them to death, so devastated that he cannot get out of bed. He feels ashamed that he didn’t do more to help their case, to prevent them from getting executed, and he tells Perry and Richard this in the holding room before the execution. But Perry and Richard understand that he did what he could, and they confront their last moments with (literal) gallows humor. I tried to get through the execution scene, but it was way too hard. Watching Truman’s pained expression as he watches Perry get hanged before his very eyes sent chills through my spine and my stomach felt queasy as I watched Perry’s dead body hanging from the ceiling. It reminded me of when I watched this movie called Just Mercy, which is based on the true story of a Black lawyer named Bryan Stevenson who fought against racial injustice in the criminal system and to overturn wrongful convictions of people of color, namely the wrongful conviction of a man named Walter McMillian, who was accused of a murder he didn’t commit and was sentenced to death. Fortunately, McMillian was released from death row, but there is one particular scene in the movie that still haunts me to this day. In the movie, Bryan tries to overturn the conviction of another death row inmate named Herbert Lee Richardson, but his appeal to release Herbert is denied, and Herbert is sentenced to death through electric chair. Bryan witnesses the execution of Herbert, which is a traumatic experience. However, as a passive viewer of the movie, I closed my eyes instead of watching the actual execution because I knew it was going to be too emotionally difficult to watch. It was painful because in the scene, Herbert, while in the execution chamber, requests that they play music so that his fellow inmates wouldn’t have to hear him being electrocuted to death. Honestly, watching movies like Capote and Just Mercy made me wonder about the ethics of the death penalty. I remember when I was in ninth grade, and I wore an Amnesty International T-shirt that said, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” and below it “Rope, Chair, Needle,” with a caption below that reading “the death penalty is not something to play with.” I hadn’t done much extensive reading on the topic of the death penalty, but all I know is that it can be a very contested issue and everyone is going to have their own perspectives on whether the death penalty is justified punishment for those who have committed a crime. Some argue that the death penalty is justified because it brings justice and closure for the families and victims of murder. In the film, there is a chilling scene (then again, the whole movie is bone-chilling) where Truman walks into the room where the Clutter family’s coffins are placed, and he sees four coffins lined up next to each other. It is a heartbreaking scene, and he also looks through some grisly photos of the murder victims lying in pools of blood with graphic gunshot wounds. When Perry finally decides to describe the night that he and Richard murdered the Clutter family, it is very hard to sit through, and they show the murders happening in a flashback. Because I am a weakling and squeamish, I also ended up closing my eyes during this scene.

However, one of the arguments against the death penalty is that it doesn’t do much to deter crime and that it is much more expensive than lifelong imprisonment as the other option for punishment. Another is that the death penalty also tends to discriminate against poor people and people of color, who often cannot afford to hire an effective lawyer. I was reading a Brittanica article about the death penalty, and it quotes that Bryan Stevenson said that the death penalty is “the stepchild of lynching.” If you read the history of lynchings in American history, I must warn you it is very disturbing. When I was in my sophomore year of college, we had to read an excerpt from an academic book that described lynchings of Black people in graphic detail, and to this day, while I don’t remember the name of the book, the excerpt we read still haunts me to this day. White American families loved enjoying picnics where they watched Black men, women and children get hung from trees. During my fall semester of college, junior year, the professor set up a little museum in the library with racist artifacts on display so that we could learn how pervasive racism against Black people was not just in the U.S. but also around the world. These artifacts included old postcards of white families enjoying their lemonade, chicken salad sandwiches and whatever the fuck else white people ate at that horrible time in history, while watching with sadistic glee as an innocent Black man, woman or child got swung from a tree and had his/ her flesh burned off. As a young Black person, I was angered, hurt and heartbroken reading about this history and encountering these artifacts, and I nearly threw up when I saw that these postcards actually existed at some point in history, but as much as I wanted to remain blissfully ignorant of this history, I simply could not. Sure, reading about it made me hate being Black during that whole junior year, but since then I have come to realize that no amount of racism can take away my inherent dignity as a Black person in this country.

Another argument of the death penalty is that it is a form of torture that is immoral. Religious figures like rabbi and former public defender Benjamin Zober argue that regardless of whether it brings justice to the family or the victims, the death penalty still involves the taking of another human life. As a Buddhist, I grew up with the philosophy that each person’s life has inherent dignity, and reflecting on a lot of the violence I witness in society, I have realized that it stems from a lack of respect for the inherent dignity of human life. The death penalty involves brutal methods of torture and inflicts pain and suffering on inmates. In Capote, when Truman visits Perry in jail, he has starved himself for a month because he cannot go on living and he is emaciated. Truman, not wanting to see him starve to death, goes to the grocery store and buys a can of baby food and feeds a spoonful to Perry so that he can get even just a little food in his system. He gets to know Perry as a human being even though he and Richard committed a horrendous murder of an innocent family. The actor who played Perry Smith, Clifton Collins Jr., is a phenomenal actor in this movie. He shows the pain and shame that Perry experiences while in his jail cell, reflecting on that grim moment when he and Richard murdered the family, and the isolation he experiences in jail. Early in the film, he is held in a jail cell within a lady’s house and Truman gives him aspirin, hoping that Perry will trust him enough to open up about that night that he and Richard murdered the Clutter family. Truman opens up about himself so that he can find common ground with Perry, so that Perry will trust him enough to give him permission to talk about the murder in the book. As he continues to visit Perry in jail, Truman realizes that Perry is a real human being who is grappling with a traumatic past. It makes me think that people who commit murder don’t usually just go out and kill people for funsies. Like I said, I avoid true crime podcasts, movies and TV shows like the plague. I was in group therapy one time, and we were talking about what we do for self-care after a stressful day. Someone in the group said their form of self-care was watching a TV series that aired on Netflix called Dahmer- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. I wouldn’t honestly have the stomach to watch that show. Hell, I couldn’t even read a Wikipedia article on Dahmer without wanting to run in a corner, crawl up in fetal position and cry “Mommy! I’m scared!” And as much as I love Zac Efron as Troy in High School Musical and Link in Hairspray, I can’t watch him play Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, even though I respect his willingness to expand his range as an actor by playing darker, more mature roles like Ted Bundy.

Many, if not all, of the cases of serial killers and mass murderers involve the killers having some sort of traumatic childhood in which they faced abuse, emotional neglect and abandonment by their parents, mental illness, or the death of a parent or family member. Of course, not everyone with a traumatic childhood or a mental illness goes on a rampant shooting spree at a high school or Walmart, or dismembers other people for consumption (sorry, I had to include Jeffrey Dahmer in this. We are talking about true crime, after all!) There are plenty of people who manage to go to therapy and talk to someone so they can process difficult traumatic events from their past. They even use their traumatic experiences to help someone else going through harrowing experiences that are difficult to cope with. But of course, Capote was set during a time when someone couldn’t just cough up $100 to sit on a therapist’s couch and talk about their fucked-up childhood. Perry kept a lot of his trauma to himself and it is hard to discuss trauma, so at first he didn’t want to open up to Truman because all these events from his past–his mother’s alcoholism and death from drinking, the suicides of two of his family members, his sister’s estrangement from him, not to mention living as a Native American man in a world that still hadn’t grappled with centuries of the genocide and intergenerational trauma of Native American communities–were painful and he had no one to talk with about them who he felt he could trust. Truman was the only person that Perry felt he could trust to tell his side of the story, and as the epilogue of the movie concludes, In Cold Blood was a best-selling book and paved the way for other true crime stories to be told.

It took a LOT out of Truman, though. He couldn’t even celebrate the success of Harper Lee’s best-selling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, being made into a movie. Even when Jack tells him to focus on celebrating Harper’s success and not on his own personal problems, Truman sits alone, ruminating about the case and his book, unable to find the time to celebrate Harper’s accomplishments. When Harper politely approaches him about it, asking him how he liked the movie, he blows her off, leaving her feeling sad and unrecognized by her friend. Even though she helped him with the research of In Cold Blood, she also accomplished something of her own worth celebrating, but because the research and visits with Perry had taken such a toll on Capote, he doesn’t have the energy to be present with Harper and celebrate her achievement with her. You could probably argue, Wow, Truman was a total asshole for dismissing his fellow writer friend’s success, but at the same time, as much as it sucked for me to watch that scene of the movie where Truman blows off Harper and doesn’t give her credit for her success in getting her own book published, I can’t imagine the stress that Truman went through, writing a book about a true crime and being unable to get two men off of death row. I haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird (sadly), but I remember seeing the black-and-white movie when I was younger and being blown away by the acting and the storyline. I understand the movie was supposed to focus on Truman Capote’s writing of In Cold Blood, but I kind of wish that the movie had also taken more time to celebrate Harper Lee’s work as an author. She did Truman a huge favor by helping him do the research for the book, so she should at least get some recognition for working on her own manuscript while helping her friend write his. Then again, they only had a little under two hours of history to cram into the movie, so they probably didn’t have time to focus on Harper Lee’s friendship with Truman. They only had screen time to focus only the process of writing In Cold Blood. I loved Catherine Keener’s role as Harper Lee, though. I loved her in the film Get Out. Her role in that movie scared the shit out of me, and frankly I can’t watch that movie again because it was terrifying (also, because racism is real, not a fictional supernatural possessed killer doll who wears overalls and runs around with a knife).

Overall, though, the movie Capote was phenomenal, and even with its bleak subject matter, I think it was worth a watch. I am glad I decided to not stay up late and watch the movie, though, because I don’t think I could have fallen asleep after watching a movie about something so harrowing and disturbing. It reminds me of when I watched Killers of the Flower Moon. I had to pause the movie multiple times not for its 3-hour-runtime, but because it was incredibly disturbing and horrifying to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro team up as Ernest and Bill Burkhart to poison, maim and butcher countless Native American people and steal their fortunes. But I had to watch it because I didn’t know about the Osage murders growing up, and you can’t learn about American history without learning about the genocide of Native Americans and the intergenerational trauma that Indigenous communities have had to grapple with for centuries. I didn’t know much about Truman Capote other than his book, Breakfast Tiffany’s, so this was a really intriguing movie. It was also timely that I watched this movie this month because it is LGBTQIA+ Pride Month and while they don’t dive deep into Truman’s life growing up as a gay man in the movie, the film does show his relationship with his partner, Jack, and how they navigate challenges in their relationship as Truman buries himself in work. The music score was fitting with the movie’s bleak and grave subject matter. It was somber piano music, and it gave me goosebumps. Even though I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman, I am so glad that he won the Oscar for Capote.

Capote. Year Released: 2005. Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes. Directed by Bennett Miller. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr. and Chris Cooper. Rated R for some violent images and brief strong language.

Movie Review: Priscilla

Last year I saw the movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. I haven’t seen many of Baz’s other movies, like his remake of The Great Gatsby or Moulin Rouge!, so I wasn’t as familiar with his directing style as I was with someone like Yorgos Lanthimos or Greta Gerwig. Elvis is a movie full of flashy cinematography that brings to life Elvis as the superstar that he was. In the film, there are a few scenes where we see his wife, Priscilla Presley, observing him as he flirts with screaming horny women at his shows while he gyrates to the music. We see him slap her ass affectionately before they head to bed. And we see him crying on the steps in their mansion in Graceland as she grabs her suitcase and leaves him (and their marriage) because she won’t put up with him anymore. But the film mainly shows Elvis’s toxic and tumultuous relationship with his manager, Tom Parker, and it presents a very extroverted version that brings the King of Rock n Roll to life. The focus was on Elvis’s life and not the woman who he was married to.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely loved Elvis. It was a very well-directed movie, and I loved Austin Butler’s acting. The music was incredible. But I was glad when they came out with a biopic about Priscilla Presley because up until then I really didn’t know much about her life and most of the musical biopics that I have watched about famous male musicians are focused on the men and their wives (and oftentimes mistresses) are supporting characters. (Also, it was an A24 distributed film, and I just couldn’t refuse.) The film Priscilla delved more into the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis, and how he actually treated her behind closed doors. This film is about how she meets Elvis and how she ends up finding her freedom and leaving a marriage that left her unhappy and disillusioned. I haven’t seen many of Cailee Spaeny’s previous films, but she was an incredible actress in this movie. Priscilla doesn’t speak much but even with her eyes she communicates so much about what she is feeling. Jacob Elordi also did an incredible job as Elvis Presley, and the film shows him in those private moments when he is with Priscilla. It doesn’t focus on his shows and his tour like Elvis did; instead, it focuses on how Elvis’s constant touring impacted his relationship with Priscilla and how she navigated being married to a famous person. It’s based on a memoir that Priscilla Presley published called Elvis and Me, and I haven’t read it yet but now I want to.

The movie begins in 1959 at the US Air Force Base in West Germany, where Priscilla Beaulieu, who is fourteen years old, is sitting at a bar doing her homework. Priscilla is from Austin, Texas, but she goes to Germany because her father is stationed there. She meets a young man named Terry West, who has a connection with Elvis Presley. He offers to take her to meet him because he, too, is in Germany, and she agrees to meet with him. When she meets Elvis at a party, she is taken in by his charm and his good looks. He is ten years older than her, but she catches his eye, and he starts to ask to see her more often. At first, Priscilla has to tell him that she has to ask her parents’ permission first, and her parents aren’t keen on Elvis because he is much older than Priscilla. However, Elvis is lonely, and his mom passed away, so he wants a woman to keep him company. Priscilla starts to feel bad for him, and she start to hang out with him more. Priscilla becomes Elvis’s girlfriend, and she starts hanging out with him more, and he becomes the sole focus of her life. She daydreams about Elvis in class, she goes through the halls of school feeling lovesick. And then, as their relationship deepens, Elvis has Priscilla gradually change the way she dresses and the way she looks. She starts wearing mascara, she does her hair a different style and she starts to dress in more stylish clothes. He enrolls her in a Catholic school and makes sure that she does her homework and passes her classes while they are in a relationship. The girls at school start to notice that she is in a relationship with Elvis, and they start gossiping about Priscilla. He also gives her drugs and sleeping pills, which end up knocking her out for two days at one point. She wants to have sex with him, but he constantly tells her to hold off on it. He controls every aspect of Priscilla’s life and doesn’t seem to care about what she wants or needs from the relationship. Priscilla graduates from high school and with her parents’ permission, she marries Elvis. However, she soon realizes that her marriage is far from the fairytale she expected it to be, because while Elvis is on tour, she stays at home and waits for him to come back. Meanwhile, she reads that he is having affairs with numerous women, and when she is pregnant with their first child, she finds out that he is having an affair with Nancy Sinatra. Even though she confronts him about his affairs, he tries to beat around the bush and tell her that he loves her. Eventually, she gets fed up and she decides to take taekwondo and find her own friend group, and she starts a new relationship. Even though it is tough to leave him, she realizes that she is not being treated with the respect that she deserves in her marriage to Elvis, and she leaves Graceland.

Honestly, this movie reminded me of season 3 and 4 of The Crown. Prince Charles falls in love with Diana Spencer, even though he is in a relationship with her sister Sarah. Diana is 16 at the time and Charles is older than her, but he is smitten by her when they first meet. They start to want to see each other more often and eventually they get married. However, Diana soon realizes that her marriage to Charles isn’t the fairytale marriage she imagined, as he is emotionally abusive and cheats on her with another woman. In one of the episodes, “Fairytale” Diana is seen rollerblading around Buckingham Palace by herself while everyone else has left the palace and she becomes increasingly lonely. She develops bulimia and is basically living a nightmare where no one respects or values her, including the man she is married to. This reminded me of the scenes in Priscilla where Priscilla has to be in the house all day while her husband is on his tour sleeping with other women. Elvis, like Charles, is controlling and wants control of his wife’s life. When Priscilla asks him about his affairs, he tells her “Oh, it’s nothing. I love you” even when it’s splashed across the papers that he’s sleeping with various women. I think that’s why the last few scenes were a relief, because I was like, Girl, this man does not love you. You need to get out and she finally left Graceland because she realized she wanted to be happy, and she wasn’t happy being with this man. I also thought about the movie Spencer with Kristen Stewart because that film shows how Charles’ affair with Camila affects Diana psychologically and emotionally, and how she finds her freedom and leaves the confines of Buckingham Palace to become her own person. Spencer shows how Diana struggles with bulimia and being confined in the walls of the palace, having to follow all these rules and restrictions and then finally realizing she deserves to be free (sadly, in real life, Diana died in a car crash, which is why it was so emotionally hard for me to watch this last season of The Crown because it shows the events leading up to the car crash and it just made me think, Wow, I really wish I could have met Diana. I was only four when she died, and as a kid I didn’t know much about her, but after watching Spencer and The Crown, I felt sad that I never got to meet her.)

There was one scene in the movie that reminded me of another movie I saw a while ago. In Priscilla, Elvis is listening to his records, and he is frustrated with the quality of the records, and Priscilla is just standing there quietly in this room with Elvis and these record executives, and Elvis asks her what she thinks about the records. When she shyly shares her honest opinion about one song and how it’s not that great, he throws a chair at her, narrowly missing her. He then proceeds to hug her and tell her “Baby, sorry I lost my temper. I love you so much.” He wanted to be told that he was a great musician, and when his wife didn’t tell him that, he took out his anger on her. It reminded me of this movie I saw called The Wife, which is about a man named Joe who receives the Nobel Prize and his wife, Joan, is excited for him, but as the movie progresses, it becomes more apparent that Joan was the one writing the stories for him and he was taking credit for all of her work. There is a flashback to when Joan and Joe are first married, and he is trying to become a writer so that he doesn’t have to keep his job as a college professor. When she reads his story manuscript, he wants her honest opinion, and she tells him that it’s not that good. When she gives her honest opinion, he gets upset with her and tells her that if she doesn’t provide him reassurance that he is a good writer, that he will leave her and their marriage. Joan doesn’t want him to leave, so she puts herself down by saying that she will never be as good a writer as he is. Throughout the movie, Joan, like Priscilla, navigates life as a quiet and private person, while her husband Joe, is more extroverted and networks at parties while putting down his son, David’s, dreams of becoming a writer. However, it’s clear that Joan is the one who should be getting all the credit, not her husband, who didn’t write the books himself but forced her to spend hours and hours a day away from their kid so that she could write the books for him and have them published under his name. Even though a biographer named Nathaniel wants to publish all these private details about her marriage to Joe, Joan refuses because she is a private person and wants to remain confidential about her life. Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t harbor a lot of hurt and anger towards her husband; she totally does. But she just doesn’t want all the publicity and she is also aware that Nathaniel could get so many details of her personal life incorrect and provide an inaccurate portrayal of her marriage to Joe.

The dynamic between Priscilla and Elvis sort of reminded me of another movie called Lovelace. Lovelace is about Linda Lovelace, who fell in love with a man named Chuck Traynor and was coerced into the pornography industry. The film doesn’t focus on Linda’s films; it focuses on the sexual abuse and trauma she suffered in her marriage to Chuck. When Linda first meets Chuck, she is trying to escape her home life. She got pregnant in her early 20s and she has to live at home with her parents, who she doesn’t have a good relationship with. When she and her friend are out at a party, Linda finds people watching a pornographic movie and a much older man named Chuck finds her attractive and leads her into the pornography business, where she becomes a celebrity and films a movie called Deep Throat. Chuck starts off being charming, and even though he is older than Linda, Linda sees Chuck as the only way out of her unhappy home life, so she starts spending time with him. As she becomes more involved in the pornography business, her parents start to become concerned. In one scene, she excitedly tells her parents that she got to meet Sammy Davis, Jr., but her parents realize that their daughter has changed and even though she achieved this fame, it’s in an industry that doesn’t have a great reputation. However, as Linda and Chuck continue their marriage, he becomes abusive and hits her several times and forces her to have sex with him. Even though she achieved star status, it came at a huge cost where she was disrespected and abused. She finally has to get the help of someone who gets a bunch of guys to beat up Chuck, and she leaves the pornography industry. She ends up in a loving marriage with a child, and became a born-again Christian, speaking out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Chuck.

Watching Priscilla and seeing how Priscilla transformed through the course of her marriage to Elvis reminded me of this part in the book Discussions on Youth that I read. There is a chapter called “What is Love?” and in the chapter, Daisaku Ikeda talks about how it’s important to find happiness within our own lives and that happiness is not something that someone, like a lover, can hand to us. I have little experience being in relationships to be honest, but a few years ago I fell in love with someone who was quite charming, and I had kindled a crush on this person in the distant past, but I found myself escaping into fantasies and daydreams of me and this person being together, raising a family and growing old together. This crush pretty much took over my life, and I thought, One day, we are going to marry and be happy together. It’s why when I was watching Priscilla, I really resonated with the scenes where Priscilla is daydreaming about Elvis in class and how her relationship with Elvis starts to impact her performance in school because her love for Elvis starts to consume her daily life. I let my crush on this person consume me to the point where even hearing his voice was enough to make me melt into a puddle. I remember in junior year of college filling my journal with entries about his looks, his charm, the way he flirted with me. I was so lovesick after we fell in love that I couldn’t even eat breakfast and would leave many a plate of perfectly good, scrambled tofu unfinished as I daydreamed about him in the dining hall, during class, during my summer break.

However, I wasn’t willing to accept the fact that he had a girlfriend already and continued to live in a fantasy world with me and my dream husband being happy together. It took him proposing to his girlfriend for me to snap out of my fantasy and realize that this person was happy in his current relationship and that I needed to move on and not idealize our relationship just because we had feelings for each other in the past. I fell into a pit of despair, and honestly it took a lot of therapy and Buddhist chanting for me to ease my way out of the hellhole of emotional pain I was in. I think what helped during this time was reading a passage from Daisaku Ikeda’s book Discussions on Youth, because in this chapter he says “happiness is not something that someone else, like a lover, can give to us. We have to achieve it for ourselves. And the only way to do so is by developing our character and capacity as human beings–by fully maximizing our potential.” (Discussions on Youth, page 64) After reading this and chanting about it, I have gradually begun to see that I was seeking happiness outside myself. I was depending on this young man to give me happiness, and I finally understood after three years of really digging into my Buddhist practice and seeking therapy that I had to become happy whether I ended up with him or not. My self-worth had become so tied up in wanting to be with this person that I lost sight of myself, my goals and my dreams. It was painful to confront the fact that I had been crushing on someone who was with someone else, and that love would forever go unrequited. But I am also realizing that there are other great people out there and that I have the potential to attract someone great in my life. I also realize I deserve a relationship filled with love and mutual respect. It’s not easy to believe this every day but it’s something I want to keep telling myself more often.

Anyway, I need to wrap this review up because it’s gotten really long, and I am starting to ramble at this point. Thank you for reading and to close, I recommend Priscilla because it is a really good movie. Also, the soundtrack for the movie is incredible. I went on YouTube and listened to many of the songs because I love old hits.

Priscilla. 2023. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Rated R For drug use and some language.

Movie Review: The Iron Lady

In season 4 of The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II (played by Olivia Colman) gets a new prime minister. At first she is excited because the new prime minister is a woman, but the new PM, Margaret Thatcher (played by Gillian Anderson) ends up being one of the toughest PMs Elizabeth has had to work with. She starts a war in the Falkland Islands and doesn’t do much to address the high unemployment rates around England. She also fires her entire cabinet of men even after she told Elizabeth she preferred men in Parliament because she thought women were weak. In one episode of the season, an unemployed man breaks into Buckingham Palace because he tries to contact Queen Elizabeth about badly people are suffering from joblessness during the costly war that Margaret had everyone enter into, but with little success. Queen Elizabeth is terrified when he breaks in, but he tells her he just wants to tell her how fucked up the situation is under Margaret Thatcher. Earlier in the episode, he is standing in a long line of unemployed citizens and is struggling to pay his bills, and not only that but his wife leaves him for another man and takes the kids with her. He has a lot to be pissed off about, and he tries to contact the government to see if they can do anything about it, but with little success. When Queen Elizabeth gets to know him more, she realizes that the unemployment situation really is bad but because she spends a lot of time in Buckingham Palace she isn’t really out with the public and so she can’t really know what goes on unless she reads the newspaper or watches the news on TV. Before the police take him out of Buckingham Palace, he tells Elizabeth that Margaret Thatcher is coming for her job next if she isn’t careful. As the season goes on, it is clear that Queen Elizabeth and Margaret don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, namely the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom and sanctions against South Africa during apartheid. However, when Margaret resigns, Queen Elizabeth, after much thought, gives her a medal for her long years of service as prime minister. I studied about Margaret Thatcher in world history class but of course, after a while I forgot all my history knowledge, so it was helpful to watch The Crown because even though it’s a fictionalized account of the monarchy it still gives some good insight.

I had been meaning to see The Iron Lady for a while, mainly because I loved Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (if you haven’t seen it she plays a demanding fashion magazine editor named Miranda Priestly who makes the life of her assistant a living hell). The Crown episodes with Margaret Thatcher mainly cover her work with the Queen, but not so much about her childhood or her past experiences. In The Iron Lady, we see Margaret Thatcher before she became prime minister. Before she married Denis Thatcher, she was Margaret Roberts, a young woman who was bullied in school for not being wealthy like the other girls but falls in love with conservatism. She meets Denis, an intellectual young man with and and they fall in love. The film mainly shows how she grapples with Denis’s death after she is no longer prime minister. One thing that interested me about this movie was that they show how Margaret Thatcher’s inflection changed when she became prime minister. Her representatives practiced with her how she was supposed to speak to the public, and she had to learn how to enunciate things more aggressively. They also show how she got her hairstyle. In the movie, she is reflecting on her past time as prime minister and what she learned along the way. She experiences hallucinations in which Denis appears to her as the voice of conscience. It’s interesting because in The Crown, Olivia Colman plays the Queen but in The Iron Lady she played Thatcher’s daughter Carol. Also Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in the movie as well (she is from a show I love called Fleabag.)

Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street (content warning: descriptions of sex and drug use)

November 20, 2021

I admit, I was on the fence a lot before seeing this film. I tend to be squeamish about violence and sex, so I looked at the Kids in Mind review for any explicit content that the movie showed (in terms of sex, violence, and language, Kids in Mind rated it a 10.4.10, meaning that this film contained a lot of graphic sex and enough language to warrant any parent to cover their child’s ears.) But I think it helped learning about the explicit content beforehand, because then I felt a little more prepared for what to expect. I was still pretty dizzy after the film because it was definitely a wild ride, but reading the Kids in Mind review helped me get through the movie.

And that’s not to say this is a film for everybody. I thought it wasn’t going to be a film for me, so I thought, “I’m not going to have the stomach to see this.” But then I remembered how much I love dark comedies, and The Wolf of Wall Street is a dark comedy. After watching dark comedies like I, Tonya; Parasite; and Zola, I have more appreciation for the genre. Even though dark comedies are called comedies, I think like any movie they give some pretty serious insight into the human condition and show us in a bare-bones way just as we are, in all our imperfections and fallibility. Also, I’ve been on a biopics kick lately, so I’ve been watching a lot of biographical films. The last one I saw was The Runaways, which is based on musician Cherie Currie’s memoir about her time in Joan Jett’s band The Runaways.

As much as I want to re-watch the film (in college, I treated films as texts so I ended up watching movies for my classes at least 4-5 times no matter how intense the film was. Probably not the wisest strategy since I’m sensitive about content and thus ended up being consumed emotionally by these films, but that’s beside the point.) I need a bit of a break from it because it packed a lot of content into three hours. I didn’t realize this until halfway through the film, but the first 3 hour Leonardo DiCaprio film I saw was Titanic (not the first Leonardo film, though; before that, I saw Inception), and that was 3 hr 17 min long. I made the mistake of watching that at night and at 1 am I was a mess of snot and tissues and tears. The Wolf of Wall Street is almost 3 hours long, too. I thought I would be better off watching this movie in small parts throughout the week because of its length, and because I had other things to do on my schedule, but once I watched it I was so enthralled with the acting, in particular the way Leonardo DiCaprio embodies the character of Jordan Belfort, and the storyline, that I just couldn’t stop watching. Watching this movie made me realize how much I missed watching Leonardo’s acting. He was of course, as anyone who saw Titanic knows, ah-mazing, and in this one he seriously brings his acting chops, too. So I ended up staying up late watching the film until about 11 pm. I had work the next day and was pretty tired, but then I still had thirty minutes left of the movie to watch the next morning, so I finished it before work, and dang I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie for the rest of the day.

So honestly, when I first saw the film I was pretty much duped. At the beginning they play a commercial for a brokerage house in New York City called Stratton-Oakmont, and because I didn’t really read much about the movie before watching it, I was confused because I bought the film on Google Play, and they usually don’t play commercials or trailers before the movie. They only played commercials and trailers for other movies on the DVD version of films I watched, or if I watch the movie in the theater. So I thought it was a brokerage firm advertising for the movie, but then the next scene immediately cut to Leonardo’s character Jordan Belfort and the other people at the firm throwing a short person for target practice at a dart board and yelling and cheering, and then I realized, Oh wow, I thought that was an actual commercial (I’m sure it was though, because this is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort and Stratton-Oakmont was an actual brokerage house in Long Island, New York). The film starts off with him telling how he ended up becoming so rich and powerful, and shows him snorting cocaine from a woman’s backside. He started off with a pretty humble childhood, and then in his early 20s he worked for a brokerage firm. In his meeting with Matthew McConaughey’s character Mark Hanna, meets with him for lunch and Mark talks him through the business of working on Wall Street. He essentially tells him that it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of environment, and in order to survive he needs to push aside any kind of empathy or compassion, and not care about clients and just focus on making money from other people. Unfortunately, the stocks fail on Jordan’s first day at the firm, LF Rothschild, on a day called Black Monday, and he loses his job. He and his wife Teresa look through the ads in the newspaper, and at first he thinks of taking a job in an entry-level position at a department store and just work his way up, but Teresa tells him it won’t make ends meet and has him apply for something else. She points to an ad for working on Wall Street, and he ends up going to apply for another firm. At first, he is surprised by the more laid-back attitude of the employees, not to mention the smaller size of the firm, which was a total contrast to the LF Rothschild environment, which was more fast-paced and less relaxed. Also, the shares and stocks they sell are way less than what they sold at LF Rothschild. On the first day of him working there, Jordan shows them that he can outsell any of them on the phone calls, and everyone is impressed, so they raise his paycheck. While eating at a diner, a guy named Donnie Azoff (the last movie I saw Jonah Hill in was Megamind. He was the voice of Hal, who becomes Megamind’s archnemesis. So up til then I hadn’t seen him in any other movies, but in his role as Donnie, oh my gosh he was such a good actor. It really gave me more respect for his acting.) approaches Jordan and asks him how much he makes working at the brokerage firm. When Jordan tells him he makes $70,000 in one day, Donnie’s eyes light up and he asks if Jordan can find him a job because he’s working at a furniture store and barely making ends meet. So he and Donnie team up and gather a few more guys and they establish a brokerage house called Stratton-Oakmont. Pretty soon the firm grows in success, and with it Jordan’s ego. He ends up spending lots of money and upgrades his humble lifestyle to a lavish lifestyle of booze, yachts, drugs, and sex with various women outside his marriage to his new wife, Naomi, who he meets at one of Stratton-Oakmont’s lavish parties (Theresa stands outside after she finds out Jordan cheated on her with Naomi, and calls off their marriage.) Jordan thinks he will find bliss in marrying Naomi and buys her an expensive wedding ring and has a nice wedding ceremony. However, eighteen months later, we see her splashing him with water and cussing him out because he brought home a prostitute and slept with her, even though he is married and has kids. However, she stays in their marriage even when he does all these horrible things. Jordan’s activities get more and more corrupt, and we see the Federal Bureau Investigation agency tracking his activities. Eventually, he gets caught, and has to announce to his firm that he is ending the company. Again, I was duped, but not totally because I still was only halfway through this 3 hour film, and I thought to myself, is it over? and then realized, no there’s still another storyline to this. And sure enough, Jordan basically tells everyone, “Nah, I was just messing with you, I’m staying, I’m not leaving.” His dad, who warned him that he was not only spending extravagantly, but also that the FBI was going to be on his case for a long time until he turned himself in and stopped his criminal activities for good, warns him that he can’t simply change his mind like that and that there will be consequences for what he did. However, no one can hear his warning because Jordan is beating his chest and humming just like Mark Hanna taught him to do when they had that lunch together early in the film, and everyone, because they think Jordan is God, follows his lead and starts beating their chest and humming, too.

We then see them on a yacht partying to “Hip Hip Hooray” by Naughty by Nature. However, Jordan is also seen with a Swiss broker trying to get them to smuggle all the money he illegally obtained there so he and the people at his firm don’t get caught. It’s sad because on the yacht in Italy, where they aren’t going to get caught, Naomi comes up to the yacht with her friend crying because her Aunt Emma died. Even though they have to go to the funeral in London, Jordan refuses and insists on taking the money to Geneva and sticking with his plan to go there, totally forgetting that he has a family member that just died. To him, it doesn’t matter that Aunt Emma died, but rather than her money is in the bank and he needs to get it out so that the FBI doesn’t catch him. The FBI finally tracks him down, and he is under house arrest for all the crimes he committed while Stratton-Oakmont was in business. He can’t drink, he can’t do drugs, he is undergoing withdrawal for his addiction to drugs and it’s painful for him. However, Donny visits him and tells him he’s got Jordan’s back no matter what. Then, while Jordan is telling Naomi his plan for the money he’s smuggled illegally, Naomi says she wants to file for divorce. He then gets angry and she slaps him and he slaps her back, and he rips up the sofa and gets out his stash of cocaine and breaks his sobriety from drugs by snorting the cocaine furiously. He gets angry when Naomi tells him she is keeping custody of their kids, and he refuses to let her take custody, and he grabs his daughter and takes her in his car and drives off. Naomi and her housekeeper retrieve his daughter from the car and Jordan, high behind the wheel, is bleeding on his forehead from the force of the crash after he backs into a brick.

Jordan and the people at Stratton-Oakmont end up getting arrested and Jordan ends up teaching a class on sales. He tests people on their knowledge of sales by having them pretend to sell him a pen, and when they’re not quick enough, he cuts them off and goes to the next person to see if they can do what he asked. When the movie ended, I had no words.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to write the review for this movie because there was a lot to digest while watching the movie. However, I think studying more about Buddhist philosophy and reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin has given me insight into the human condition just as movies give insight into the human condition. One reason I love philosophy is because it gets to the root of why people do the things they do, and after chanting daimoku about how to best approach this review, I found some things to write about with regards to this movie. I think the early part of the movie, where Jordan is just starting out at the firm, gives context for why he did what he did. I was watching the movie 42 and there’s a young white boy who watches his dad call Jackie Robinson the n-word and at first he doesn’t know how to react but then because he sees his dad do it, he thinks it’s ok and ends up calling Jackie the n-word, too. I told my professor allowed that I was horrified when that scene happened, and he woke me up to the fact that kids are not born racist, they are taught to be racist. Similarly, Jordan wasn’t born a corrupt person who engaged in debauchery of all kinds. He encountered Mark Hanna, who taught him the philosophy of competitiveness. No one gave Jordan an alternative to that philosophy. During the meeting, even little things in Mark’s behavior indicate how Jordan was influenced for the rest of the film. Mark asks for alcohol and offers Jordan some, but instead Jordan asks the waiter for water. Instead of respecting Jordan’s wish, Mark jokingly tells the waiter that Jordan is just starting out in the business and that he’ll “catch up” and learn how to act like everyone on Wall Street. When Jordan asks him about how to care for the clients, Mark tells him that he doesn’t care about the clients, and that the only thing that matters is making money off of them. He also tells him that if he gets stressed he needs to find time to “jerk off”, even though Jordan is married and happy with his marriage. This broker tells him that to work his way up the ladder, he needs to tear people down and make them feel small, and he sees this in his first day working on Wall Street. He sees people shouting over the phone and swearing, and he internalizes this. The work environment is based on the life condition of animality, which is one of the ten life states, or Ten Worlds, that we can manifest any time in our daily lives. Animality is a life condition wherethe strong prey on the weak and take advantage of them. Jordan was young and didn’t know much about working on Wall Street; he just wanted to be reasonably happy. But Mark Hanna instilled in him this idea that he wouldn’t make it in Wall Street unless he succumbed to that life state of animality.

At first it was easy for me to conclude from The Wolf of Wall Street that money is the root of all evil. But I thought about it from a Buddhist perspective, and we have a concept called value creation, which means that even in the most stressful situations, everything has meaning. The philosophy of value creation reminded me time and again that humans create institutions, and just as we use them for evil, we can also use them to create good. In real life, Leonardo is a philanthropist. He has all this money but even though he is rich he donates a lot of his money to environmental causes and has a foundation dedicated to environmental issues. Just as human beings established slavery, they established investing, Wall Street, money in general. As the film progressed, I reflected on the purpose of money: what does it serve? what determines our use of money? what is its fundamental purpose? And it’s interesting because there’s a scene early in the film where Jordan is talking with his friends about starting the brokerage house, and they’re talking about how everyone wants money and one person in the group says that Buddhists are an exception because they don’t care about money. I was kind of happy they mentioned Buddhists, like “yo shoutout to my religion!” haha. But it’s actually interesting they mentioned that, because this week I was reading this article in the April 2021 issue of the publication I read called Living Buddhism, and there’s an article called “Becoming People of True Wealth.” According to the article, “Buddhism teaches that money is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take on good or bad qualities depending on how we use it…Conventional wisdom holds that praying for something like having a better job or a bigger house runs counter to religious values, but Buddhism views life from a deeper dimension. The Buddhist principle “earthly desires are enlightenment” explains that the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom can be found in the lives of ordinary people who are driven by their earthly desires, or deluded impulses. We can chant to the Gohonzon and express our desires just as they are. And as we do so, we tap into our inherent Buddha nature, which manifests as compassion, wisdom and courage that gradually transform all our desires into the fuel for developing a richer, happier and more fulfilling life.” (p. 16-19, “Becoming People of True Wealth,” April 2021 Living Buddhism)

It’s interesting that I chose to watch this movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, because a couple of weeks ago I applied to a job on Wall Street because I wasn’t really sure what else to do with my life and didn’t think I could find a job in my creative field. I got rejected and felt sad about it, but moved on. The Wolf of Wall Street made me reflect on my 20s and my attitudes towards money: is money a tool to help people or a way to validate my worth? I have been studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, and there’s a letter called “On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime,” and in the letter Nichiren Daishonin tells his follower Nanjo Tokimitsu that while everything and everyone has Buddhahood, he needs to summon up faith that “Nam myoho renge kyo” is his life itself, and that he must not seek enlightenment outside himself. I chanted about this and thought about it more the more I studied this letter, and then I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, and it reminded me that no matter how successful I get, I need to win over my own self in order to feel like I’ve truly won in life. In his book Discussions on Youth, the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda has this incredibly beautiful quote where he says that winning isn’t necessarily about becoming rich or becoming important, and that a lot of people who became rich or important ended up leading corrupt lives and didn’t actually win over themselves. He also said we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others because each of us is unique in our own way based on the Buddhist principle of “cherry, plum, peach, damson.” While of course I may be reading too deeply into the movie (after all, it is a comedy, albeit a dark comedy), from a Buddhist perspective, I just feel that Jordan in the film ended up doing the things he did because no one taught him that success lies within himself, and that he could lead a successful life just as he was. Someone else told him that to be successful, all he had to care about was money. Jordan felt that he had to look outside himself for respect, for validation, and couldn’t tap into that respect in his own life.

One scene that really stuck with me was when Jordan and Donny get high on lemon quaaludes, which the most potent quaalude they have. At first nothing is working and they’re not getting high, so they pop more of those quaaludes. Later on, when Jordan is on the phone, he suddenly experiences paralysis of his body and loses all consciousness when the effects of taking so many quaaludes at once hits him. He struggles down the stairs, and honestly, this was the hardest scene to watch because he is literally fighting for his life against the effects of this drug. He slurs his words on the phone and no one can understand him. He gets in his car and his wife calls him and he can’t communicate coherently, and gets in the car and just starts breaking down. When he gets to the house, Donny is also slurring his words high on the quaaludes and also cannot function, and ends up choking on his food. Naomi, who is very pregnant, has to call for help and even though she tells Jordan to help him he can’t understand her because he’s high on the quaaludes. He manages to resuscitate Donny, but ends up feeling miserable on the couch after taking these drugs. It reminded me of a scene from Uncut Gems, when Howard is struggling to pay off his debts from gambling. His girlfriend tries to cheer him up, but he breaks down and cries and tells her that he can’t do anything right and that everyone is after him. Howard was in a life state of hell, which is a life state where everything feels hopeless and you’re swayed by everything in your environment and feel like you can’t do anything about what’s happening to you. Similarly, Jordan feels like he can’t do anything about his situation, and even though he keeps running away from the FBI he still owes a lot of money to the people he and Stratton-Oakmont scammed.

After watching this movie, I reflected on this chapter I read in Discussions on Youth called “What is Freedom?” and even though at times I thought to myself if the point of life and success was to live a lavish lifestyle (not that there’s anything wrong with wanting nice things, of course), reading this chapter made me understand that true freedom doesn’t necessarily depend on our circumstances or how well things go in our lives, but rather on our inner state of life, or what we call in Buddhism our “life condition.” Even though Jordan did as he pleased, he was always at the mercy of his environment. He struggled with what we call in Buddhism fundamental ignorance, or fundamental darkness, which is this inability to see our inner potential, the courage, wisdom, and compassion we each inherently possess in our lives. He did these corrupt things because he couldn’t see his own innate Buddhahood. We have a principle in Buddhism called respect for the inherent dignity of life, and while watching Jordan and his friends tear down people at the firm and degrade their humanity, I thought that because they didn’t respect the inherent dignity of their lives they couldn’t respect the inherent dignity of other people’s lives. It reminded me that my success, no matter how much money I make, I need to respect my life, and while I love money like everyone else, and appreciate nice things, if I don’t keep growing as a person I get complacent with my success and stop appreciating the people around me, and eventually I get stagnant and stop truly winning in my life because of this reluctance to keep growing and maintain a sense of appreciation for my life and others’ lives.

Here is the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street:

The Wolf of Wall Street. 2013. Rated R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.

Movie Review: The Runaways

I had been meaning to see this movie for a while, and I had read some movie reviews about it, and the trailer looked so good. I watched it last night, and I was stuck making a decision whether to watch this or Good Boys. Good Boys is funny and this movie, The Runaways, was pretty serious. I will watch Good Boys another time though because I’ve really been craving biopics.

This film is based on Cheri Currie’s memoir about being a member of Joan Jett’s music group The Runaways. Honestly, I haven’t listened to much of Joan Jett’s music but this film made me appreciate her music even more. I’ve heard one of her more famous songs, “Bad Reputation,” in just about every movie known to man, every grocery store, on the radio, everywhere. It’s been in Shrek, Baby Mama, and so many other movies. And I’ve heard “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “I Love Rock n’ Roll” so many times. And maybe “Cherry Bomb” in Guardians of the Galaxy. But I actually first heard of the song “Cherry Bomb” from watching the trailer for The Runaways, and then I recognized it when I watched Guardians of the Galaxy later on. But it wasn’t until this film that hearing Kristen Stewart sing her songs while playing Joan Jett that I actually became familiar with more of her music. Like, in the end credits, the song “Love Is Pain” but Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I hadn’t heard that one before. In the near to final scene of the film, Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, is lying in the bathtub and singing lyrics to what would become her song “Love Is Pain.” It’s a beautiful song and I love it, too, because it’s in D major and I love that key.

Honestly, I saw Kristen Stewart in mainly the Twilight franchise and while I liked her in those movies, she really played Joan Jett well. I don’t know much about Joan Jett’s story, but Kristen embodied the musical energy that Joan Jett put in her performances. The chemistry and complex relationship between her and Cherie Currie (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) was played so well, and by the end of the film I wanted to listen to the song “Cherry Bomb” on repeat. Honestly I can’t really put Kristen Stewart’s performance of Joan Jett into coherent words. You know when you watch biopics you know that that one actor was meant to play that person? Like Chadwick Boseman, he was made to play James Brown. Or Jennifer Hudson was meant to play Aretha Franklin (I still have yet to see Respect, but one of my friends said Jennifer was really good in it.) I just felt like I was watching Joan Jett when watching Kristen Stewart perform. I also didn’t realize that Alia Shakwat played one of the members in the band; I vaguely recognized her face, but the last thing I saw her in was Broad City.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching this film again. Maybe it’s because I saw Lovelace and really liked that film. Lovelace and The Runaways both take place during the 1970s and Linda Lovelace is briefly mentioned in The Runaways in passing. Of course, the storylines of these films are different, despite them both being biopics. The former is about Linda Lovelace and the abuse she dealt with when she was coerced into filming a pornographic film called Deep Throat. The latter is about a group of female rock musicians who defy gender stereotypes. However, both films deal with young women who don’t know much about sexuality, but then come into their sexuality. In Lovelace, Linda is in her early 20s and lives with her very religious family, who don’t want her seeing boys and value marriage over dating. However, she meets Chuck and he introduces her to pornography, and at first their relationship is strictly friendship but then he coerces her into the business without her knowing what really goes down in the pornography industry. It completes changes her, and while she did awaken to her sexuality, she also dealt with a lot of trauma and abuse at the hands of Chuck and the men involved in the filming of Deep Throat. The film also put tension on her relationship with her parents because no matter how many parties she was telling them she went to, at the end of the day, she was still working in an industry that went against their family-friendly religious morals and they were worried about her (until later on in the film, when they find out that she didn’t choose to go into the industry and that instead, Chuck forced her into doing pornography.) The film made lots of money and Linda became a star but Chuck still maintained full control of her success and her whereabouts, dictating where she could go and not valuing her independence. In The Runaways, Cherie Currie is 15 years old and lives with her parents and twin sister, Marie. She doesn’t get to spend much time with her family and her parents divorced. When she meets Kim Fowley and Joan Jett, her life changes and she becomes more confident in her sexuality. When they first meet Cherie, she doesn’t feel comfortable saying the lyrics to the song that Kim comes up with called “Cherry Bomb” because they are sexually suggestive. When she expresses her discomfort, Kim laughs at her and kicks her out, but then Joan tells her that it’s just a song and to just sing it just as she is.

However, this sours when Kim sets up a photo shoot where some photographers shoot sexualized photos of Cherie posing in sexually suggestive positions for The Runaways’ upcoming tour in Japan. Joan and the other band members get upset with Cherie for selling out and selling her body, and this is partly what drives the band apart. While Kim is definitely different from Chuck in Lovelace, he also is quite manipulative. Even though it seems like at the beginning he is empowering Joan, Cherie and the other band members he is actually driving them apart, calling them names and condescending to them. Towards the end, he calls them a bunch of dog c**ts (not gonna print the actual word but I’m sure you’ll find out eventually.) and Joan throws stuff at him. But he just cheers it on like it’s normal rock and roll behavior. It takes Joan herself realizing that Kim is driving them apart and preventing them from just being true to themselves and making music as friends.

Overall, this was an excellent movie.

The Runaways. 2010. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content- all involving teens.

Movie Review: Get On Up

9/24/21

Wow. All I can say is wow. Honestly I can say that this film really deepened my appreciation for Chadwick Boseman’s work as an actor. For those who don’t know Chadwick Boseman was an incredible actor who starred as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, as well as the character Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. He passed away from colon cancer last year, and I remember feeling disbelief, not knowing how to react to his death, and then crying for about a week, just long sobs. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through most of my days at work that week without crying. On television shortly after his death Black Panther was on, and afterwards there was a tribute to Chadwick, and seriously I was convulsing with tears and didn’t think I would sleep that night. I didn’t understand how life was going to be the same without Chadwick alive because in every movie I saw with him, he just put his heart and soul and feeling into the roles he played. And in the biopic Get On Up, it was like he was the only actor who could actually play James Brown, was meant to play James Brown.

This is also the first film I’ve watched starring Nelsan Ellis. Nelsan Ellis is an actor who was famous for his role in True Blood. I haven’t seen True Blood, but when I saw him in Get On Up, I was like, Damn, this guy could act. He plays Bobby Byrd, a member of James Brown’s band The Famous Flames. The movie shows how their rapport changes over time, and even when the other band members quit because James won’t pay them on time, Bobby stays behind and is the only member of the band to stick with James. That is, until he tells James that he wants to release his own record someday. In one powerful scene of the film, he and James are performing together, and James lets Bobby have some of his spotlight, giving him some credit when before he treated Bobby like any other member of the band. But when they’re sitting and talking together, Bobby tells James that he wants to release his own solo record, and James goes off on him and accuses him of stealing his spotlight and going around telling everyone he’s going to become the next big thing rather than stay in James’s shadow as he’s been doing the past something odd years they were performing together. Bobby quits because he can no longer take this anymore, and when he leaves Brown asks him why he’s leaving him alone, and Bobby tells him that from the very beginning James has always been on his own and wanted to do his own thing. This shows that he can see right through James, that even if James wants him to stay, Bobby knows that he worked behind the scenes with James for years, bolstering his career, hoping to one day launch his own career, but James isn’t going to return the favor or help him because he’s focused on his own career and his own success. Earlier, Maceo Parker, asks Bobby why he is sticking with James even though he treats the band poorly, and Bobby says it’s because he wasn’t meant to have the spotlight on him, and that James is the one meant to be in the spotlight. Maceo questions this logic, and we can see Bobby reflecting on whether he should stick with James or not. Even many years later in 1993, James thinks Bobby should perform with him again, even though Bobby has moved on and started a new life with his wife and family. The film shows how complex their relationship was, and Ellis and Boseman both did incredibly embodying the roles of both these people.

The biopic is also important to watch because of the theme of Black masculinity. We see several flashbacks to James’s childhood, when his father threatens to shoot and kill his mother and beats her severely. Another scene is when his mother is seen drunk and playing around with another man, and the young James calls out to her but she pretends to not remember who he is. Another scene is when James is talking with Little Richard during Richard’s shift at a burger joint, and Richard opens up to him about his past trauma and then asks James about his past trauma. James recalls a moment when he and several other Black boys were blindfolded and had numbers painted on their chests, and they had to fight in a boxing ring against each other in front of a crowd of white people. All the members in the band playing during the fight are Black men, and the camera flashes to their pained expressions as they look at the fighting. It shows the injustice of it all, because these Black men not only have to play music for white people but also have to witness young Black men learn aggression against each other for the sake of entertainment. They understand that these Black boys are being treated like chattel for the white audience. When James is knocked down, he looks at the band from where he is lying and they break out into a funk song and start getting into playing the music, and seeing this in his mind’s eye, even though it may not be actually happening in real life, inspires James to get back up and fight even harder against the other boy in the ring.

These flashbacks not only give a glimpse into what James’s life was like growing up, but it shows how he had to hide being vulnerable under all his success so that he wouldn’t seem weak. In one powerful scene of the film, his mother Susie comes by and tries to engage James in casual conversation, but James says he doesn’t want to talk to her because he doesn’t need her help anymore. His mother cries and explains that she did her best to raise him, and he gives her a $100 bill and shows her out the door, telling her to stop crying and getting sentimental because he is James Brown and he can make it on his own without anyone else’s help. When she leaves she says he is beautiful but he still gives her a hard cold expression. When Bobby appears, James appears to be crying, but he quickly wipes the tears away, suggesting that he doesn’t want to appear less than a man by crying. The scene made me think of the film Moonlight, and its depiction of Black male pain was told from a different lens because Chiron, unlike James, had homophobia to deal with on top of the struggles of being a poor Black youth. Towards the end of the film Chiron is sitting with his mother, who abused him when he was younger, and she is reflecting on her past behavior towards him and starts breaking down in tears because she feels she could have been more supportive of him when he was going through such tough times. When he sees his mother crying, Chiron breaks down and cries. This is a total contrast from the beginning of the scene where we first meet Chiron as a grown adult because at the beginning he is muscular, he works out, he’s no longer the skinny kid who got beat up by his crush in high school for being gay. He seems to be the prototype of the straight Black man, but the scene where he meets his mom shows that even as a grown man, he is a human being with feelings and that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of crying. We cry so we can heal from past trauma, and Chiron cries because he remembers his past and realizes he can’t keep it buried away no matter how much he tries to distance himself from his past. Him crying and sharing this moment with his mother of reconciling grief and trauma when he was younger allows him to truly heal and to express his humanity, his manhood, in a way that is true to himself, that doesn’t depend on societal expectations that say that men, particularly Black men, should keep their emotions to themselves and not share them with anyone.

James Brown actually had a song called “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)” where he talks about not needing people’s charity or anyone’s help (“open up the door/ huh/ I’ll get it myself” is one of the lyrics). As groovy as that song was, it reminded me that asking for help, especially as a Black person living in a racist society, is perfectly okay, but also how historically Black people have been conditioned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be successful. However, this mentality has only caused further pain and trauma because talking about mental health has historically carried a stigma in Black communities because of the idea that Black people, and Black men in particular, should just buck up and keep their feelings to themselves. It’s getting better and more people in the Black community are realizing that we need to talk about our mental health in order to go through the process of healing from trauma.

Also, side note: it was so interesting that Viola played the character she did, because in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s totally different and this time, instead of being a supporting character like she was in Get On Up, Viola Davis actually plays a musician famous during the 1920s called Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Boseman, in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays Levee, who is a member of Ma’s band. Unlike Ma, who just wants to make her records and do her own thing, Levee caters to the white record executives and seeks validation from them for his work. He is constantly asking them to take his songs, and when they refuse he pretends to be okay with it, and then takes his anger out on his bandmates because as a young Black man living in a white supremacist society he doesn’t have many other outlets through which to express his frustration. He also challenges Ma a lot, underestimating her authority as a musician. Ma constantly puts him in his place though and reminds him that he needs to keep his ego at the door and just play the music how she wants it. It was interesting to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and then Get On Up because I think Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom gave me some key context for watching Get On Up, particularly in regards to how Levee and James both handle their past trauma. In one scene Levee recalls how a white man assaulted his mother, and how witnessing her assault led to him feeling angry and disillusioned about life, especially life as a young Black man. Remembering that trauma with his mother also challenges Levee’s faith in God, and he points up to the ceiling cursing God and telling him to turn his back on him. I think that’s why, when I think about the last scene of the film, where a white band is seen recording Levee’s song, which the record executives at first rejected but then stole and sold to a white audience, because in that song there is a lot of pain and trauma underneath the joviality and upbeat nature of the song. Levee put his life into that song, and while writing it wrestled with his past trauma, his tense arguments with Ma and the other band members, so to the record executives, it’s just a song to be sold and distributed to the public, but within music there is the narrative of someone’s life, and Levee’s life, his suffering and brief moments of joy, went into that song.

In one scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the white record executives are about to do a recording session with Ma, but she tells them that she won’t record the song until they bring her a Coca-Cola. This is just one of many demands that Ma makes, and it frustrates the record executives. But Ma tells one of the members of her backing band, Cutler (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo), that she knows that the white record executives only want her voice. They only want her voice, not her humanity, and they will do what they can to control her image to appeal to white audiences, giving her little to no artistic freedom or room to express her authentic self. This was common though at the time, and another example of someone who had to assert herself in the industry was Aretha Franklin. In a tribute to Aretha Franklin, Daily Show host Trevor Noah said that Aretha demanded to get paid before she performed instead of after she performed. She did this because she knew how white executives treated Black musicians, and in general because she was living in a racist society where Black people were treated as second-class citizens even in a prominent industry like the music industry, so she had to demand her pay and be assertive so that she wouldn’t be walked all over. In the film Ma didn’t care what other people thought of her, and she wasn’t trying to curry favor with the record label. She had a certain way she wanted to sing and express herself, and she came in with that self-knowledge, so she wasn’t duped into thinking that she had to do what the record labels said for her to do. Similarly, in Get On Up, James Brown makes several demands to his manger, Ben Bart, because he knows that if he signs with the record labels, these white executives are going to just make all the money they can off of him and not pay him well or treat him with respect, or even genuinely respect his artistry. Earlier in the film he has a conversation with Little Richard, who warns him of the “white devil” and to not let himself get easily duped by white people in the music industry. He remembers this advice and when he meets with Ben Bart, he tells him that he knows the “white devil” (aka the white record executives) just want to make money off of him, and he commands respect and makes demands of what he needs from them so he can launch his career and have complete ownership of his image. James suffered from mistreatment as a young Black man all his life, so he isn’t going to let white people profit from and take away the one thing he holds dear, his musical talent.

Overall, I really loved this movie. And Boseman’s dance moves were out of this world.

Get On Up. 2014. 2hr 19 min. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use, some strong language and violent situations.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: