Tag: movies

May 6, 2019

I first saw the trailer for The Edge of Seventeen a while back, and thought, Eh, this is okay, but I don’t know if I’m pressed to see it. I am glad I finally watched it because it is a great movie. It is about an unpopular introverted 17-year-old named Nadine whose best friend since second grade, Krista, falls in love with Nadine’s popular older brother Darian. Nadine has been ostracized since she was young, but Krista was her best and only friend during that time, so the fact that Krista begins to prioritize time with Darian over time with Nadine is hurtful to Nadine. Nadine then shuts herself off from the world, and the only person she feels she can trust is her history teacher, Mr. Bruner, who cannot stand her excuses for not turning in homework but still lets her come into his homeroom during lunch and hang out with him since she doesn’t have friends. A guy next to her in class, Erwin, falls in love with Nadine, but Nadine shrugs him off and tries to stay friends with him because she is so busy chasing Nick, a cute guy who works at a pet store called Petland.

This movie taught me a lot of valuable life lessons. Now, my high school years were nowhere as stressful as those of Nadine, but I remember being ostracized as a really young kid, and never fitting in. Like Nadine, I was an “old soul,” meaning I had a hard time relating to my peers because I loved environmental science, reading huge books, and classical music, but I never got ostracized for it. I, like Nadine, do remember closing myself off from people and feeling like I couldn’t relate to my peers. I even remember not wanting to go on an orchestra trip because last time I roomed with a group of girls on a trip the previous year, and I sensed that one of the girls didn’t like me, and thus the entire group of girls didn’t like me. Turns out that they were actually pretty cool, and when I decided to stay in the hotel room and work on my precalculus homework instead of skiing because I assumed they didn’t want me around, they were kind of sad (my orchestra teacher later called me and told me that there were some other participants on the trip who weren’t going skiing and suggested I could hang out with them. I ended up having a blast with these people.) That experience taught me to never assume people didn’t like me, especially in an age where a lot of people communicate through social media and text. I think a lot of people want more real in-person conversations nowadays because we are so overwhelmed with all these modes of communication (e.g. apps, Facebook, smartphones in general.) It reminded me of the film Boyhood, when Mason is talking to his girlfriend before he goes to college and says he wants to quit Facebook because he doesn’t want to live his life behind a screen. I remember not having any social media in high school and feeling like such a weirdo, but then also being too busy with schoolwork and orchestra to care about it much. And most kids even told me that I was smart for not being on Facebook, citing that it was a huge waste of time. I also knew that my real friends respected my choice to not use Facebook and would just call me or tell me in person if they wanted to hang out.

If anything, this film taught me the importance of self-love. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot truly love other people, and Nadine struggles with this throughout the film. When Nadine hits puberty she freaks out and gets jealous of Darian just because he seems to be zit-free (and worry-free, too.) When she goes to a party with Krista and Darian she ends up not meeting anyone while Krista floats off with people she knows and leaves Nadine hanging. Nadine goes into the restroom and beats herself up for being too awkward for her peers, and ends up calling her mom to pick her up and take her home. In one of the most pivotal scenes in the film, Nadine confronts her brother and tells him that she is afraid that she will never get rid of the things she hates about herself, and that when she looks in the mirror she hates everything about herself. However, there are a couple of people who actually support Nadine: Mr. Bruner and Erwin. Erwin, like Nadine, is awkward, but when he tries to kiss her, and Nadine says “no,” he immediately feels bad about what he did and doesn’t do it again. He, like Nadine, isn’t a super popular person, but he is the only guy who actually likes her for who she is and isn’t just interested in her for sex. And yet because Nadine cannot see how beautiful she really is, outside and inside, she thinks Erwin isn’t the right guy for her and keeps chasing Nick. Nick, however, isn’t interested in her and Nadine feels she has to go out of her way to pursue him, so she sends a sexually explicit Facebook message. He sees it and asks her out, but then when they are in the car, all he cares about is having sex with her. She expects him to just get to know her as a person first, but he isn’t interested in that. This scene taught me that it’s important to not go chasing after love just because you have this ideal vision that you and your crush are going to fall in love immediately.

It also taught me to not compare myself to others. When Nadine and her mom are in the car and Nadine doesn’t want to go to school, her mom tells her to take a deep breath and tell herself the truth behind everyone’s facade of composure and success: everyone is just faking it until they make it, and everyone is just as miserable as Nadine is, and that they are just better at hiding it. This is so true though because even though Darian is ripped and popular, he admits to Nadine that he doesn’t care about her even though he pretended to for their entire life. He, Nadine and their mom are still trying to survive the death of Nadine and Darian’s father. I am sure that Nick, the seemingly perfect crush of Nadine, was going through a ton of stuff himself. I remember in high school and college feeling so insecure, thinking everyone has more friends than me and has an easier time with their classes than I did. However, what I failed to realize until much later is that these kids’ lives weren’t perfect either and that they were just as ready to walk across the graduation stage as I was because everyone was just about done with school by their senior year. In college, I studied hard but still compared myself to my peers. A lot of the older students had to tell me multiple times that no one had their stuff together and that everyone was just trying to make it in college, but I wouldn’t listen. These constant comparisons I made between me and my peers led me to feel depressed, and when I got depressed I shut myself away from my peers, thinking it would be pointless to even say “hi” to them because I was too busy thinking about how cool and put-together everyone seemed. After college, part of me wishes I didn’t have to go through such a self-pity party, but another part of me understands that this constant battle with my self-esteem was crucial to my personal development, because it taught me that in the end, I just need to keep killin’ it at whatever I am doing, and to not worry about what others are doing.

This movie reminds me of a book I read called The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins. In the book, Robbins conducts research on high school bullying and proposes a theory called “quirk theory,” which means that the things and characteristics that get kids ostracized when they are in school are the same things that help them achieve success later in life. Nadine reminds me a lot of the kids in the book because she has a hard time relating to her peers and considers herself an “old soul,” but these qualities could help her a lot later in life (although she probably wouldn’t have needed to wait long because she actually found a friend in Erwin.)

Hailee Steinfeld’s performance was incredible. The last film I saw her in was Pitch Perfect 2 (still haven’t seen her in True Grit yet) but her role was kind of on the side. Seeing her play the lead was awesome because she just brings so much depth to Nadine’s character. This film reminded me of Juno and Lady Bird because the lead characters are so quick-witted and relatable.

The Edge of Seventeen. 2016. Rated R for sexual content, language and some drinking–all involving teens.

May 3, 2019

Categories: uncategorized

A few months ago I watched Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of the choreopoem and play for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf by the late dancer and writer Ntozake Shange. I have been meaning to write a blog post after seeing the movie because it just possessed so much raw energy for me, and also Ntozake Shange passed away this past October (this is the New York Times obituary), so I wanted to dedicate this very belated post to her legacy. Disclaimer: the jumbled words on this page will never do justice to her life and her writing.

The film version is about a group of Black women living in New York who each have a different story, and they support each other through their shared struggles. The film, I must say, is a lot easier to appreciate if you read the choreopoem beforehand, and while I thought the film was incredibly moving, I read the poem after and definitely appreciate it more. The film is not an easy watch; the struggles these women endure are domestic violence, date rape, PTSD, depression, abortion and drug addiction, struggles that make them spiral deep into depression. Through it all, though, they support one another through and through, and it was enough to have me sniffling like a whiny little crybaby afterwards (I swear, I was a snotty-faced cry-baby toward the end of this film. I couldn’t stop crying after I went to bed.) This film is deeply engrained in my memory, not just because of the incredible cast, but because of their intense battles to survive in a world where their husbands, boyfriends and society treats them like they are worthless and cannot see their beauty. Historically, mental health has a stigma in American culture, particularly in communities of color, and Black women have often been portrayed as possessing this superhuman strength and not giving in to crying because people often see crying as a form of weakness. However, tears are human, and this film and play shows that the Black female experience doesn’t exist in a monolith, and to pigeonhole all Black women’s struggles would mean obscuring all the complex human emotions these Black women feel when they have to endure so much pain in their lives. And this film shows that yes, if you’ve gone through a lot of stuff, you’d better be okay with crying it out and not feeling like you have to be silent about your pain, because crying is what makes us human.

The movie was excellent, and it made me wish I had read the play before seeing it in order to better appreciate the legacy Shange left behind, especially because it gave background information about Shange’s inspiration for her choreopoem. During the 1970s, Shange collaborated with various other women in California who were musicians, publishers, writers and academics. Shange said that her exposure to female writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and taking courses in the Women’s Studies program at Sonoma State College provided her inspiration for her writings about women. She then moved back to San Francisco to study dance, and discovered that dance was an outlet for her to freely express herself as a Black woman.

Knowing a woman’s mind & spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs & backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman & as a poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat a perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body & mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life…I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being in a colored woman’s body to my known everydayness.

Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, p. xi

Shange joined a troop of Black female dancers called The Spirit of Dance and also worked in the public schools as an adjunct professor in the Ethnic Studies program, and after several performances with the troupe, she left the company to begin production of for colored girls. She began the play as a series of seven poems. The seven Black women who would each tell their stories in these poems did not have names because Shange wanted the viewer to focus on the narratives rather than the names of the characters (the colors of their dresses represent their characters.) Shange and her choreography partner Paula Moss staged the play in various spaces in the San Francisco area: the Women’s Studies’ departments, bars, cafes, and poetry centers. Many people came to see their play in its early performances, but when Moss and Shange moved to New York to take for colored girls to the stage there, only their friends and family came for the showings. One of these friends was Oz Scott, who helped Shange and Moss stage the production for a New York audience, and as time went on, Shange also recruited more poets and dancers who were interested in the production. In December of 1975, when they put for colored girls on at a bar called DeMonte’s, Shange had let Scott take over the directing of the play, and when she did this, she let her creation grow on its own, and said that “as opposed to viewing the pieces as poems, I came to understand these twenty-odd poems as a single statement, a choreopoem.” (Shange xiv) She also learned the importance of putting those poems on a stage instead of just writing it in a book (“those institutions I had shunned as a poet–producers, theaters, actresses, & sets now were essential to us,” Shange xiv.)

Honestly, reading this entire foreword to the play has not just helped me appreciate Shange’s for colored girls, but also the performing arts as a whole. Dance is such an important avenue for our bodies to express themselves, and works well with other mediums of performing art, such as music and theatre. For Black women, dance is especially powerful because it allows for that freedom of expression that American society didn’t always allow for Black women. Misty Copeland, for instance, made history as a Black ballerina in predominantly-white spaces, but she had to struggle hard to access these spaces since she grew up without racial or class privilege that her fellow ballerinas benefited from. Even when she struggled with body image issues, she learned to accept her curves and not try to fit mainstream stereotypes of ballerinas. The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is another prominent example: a few years ago, I was doing a paper on dance for a philosophy course, and I used this performance that the theater put on for Ailey’s work “Revelations.” The performance is not only incredibly lovely, but it also conveys the importance of dance for Black artists like Shange. The dancers in “Revelations” own the entire space onstage, so they have the freedom to move however much they want. The video goes back to African-American music traditions, namely gospel and blues, using traditional songs such as “Wade in the Water.” Seriously, even though I have watched this video more than once, it still moves me to see these beautiful artists carve out this space for their own, where they can celebrate the beauty of being African-American.

If you haven’t seen for colored girls yet, I recommend it, but I also recommend you read the choreopoem first if you can score a copy of it. (you can find it on Amazon here) I was better able to contextualize the movie when I read the play afterwards. And here is the trailer for for colored girls. I still get chills every time I watch it. Rest in Peace, Ntozake Shange and may your powerful legacy live on in the lives of young women and young Black women everywhere.

for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange. 64 pp.

For Colored Girls. 2010. Rated R for some disturbing violence including a rape, sexual content and language.

January 26, 2020

Categories: movies

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

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

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

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

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

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