I wasn’t sure how I would like this movie, but I knew many people who saw it and enjoyed it, so I finally got around to watching it, and I must say, it is one of the best movies I have seen. It’s about four friends (played by Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall and Tiffany Haddish) who reunite at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. For those who don’t know about the festival (I haven’t been yet), it is held to celebrate the publication of Essence magazine, which is geared towards empowering young Black women. After watching this movie, I now really want to go to this festival.
The movie also has some really good life lessons about friendship, telling the truth and challenges the idea that women, particularly Black women, are these superheroes who can do everything and fix everything for people. The problem with this stereotype is that it hasn’t allowed for women (in this context I am talking about Black women) to take care of their own needs since they are so busy taking care of other people’s needs. To be honest, I haven’t seen many friendship films where Black women are the protagonists; usually they are the side friend or the comic relief with, like, two lines. Girls Trip is one of the few movies I have seen (and as far as I can remember, the only, with the exception of the film adaptation of For Colored Girls) where the focus is on friendships between Black women. It wouldn’t even do justice to compare this movie to Bridesmaids; it was an initial thought, but as I think about it, Maya Rudolph was the only Black woman in the friend group in Bridesmaids (of course, that’s not taking a dig at the film as a whole, I loved Bridesmaids. It was just a little detail that I didn’t pay much attention to while watching the film, but now notice after watching a film like Girls Trip, where all of the friends are Black women.)
Girls Trip. 2017. Rated R for crude and sexual content, brief graphic nudity, drug material and pervasive language.
I just finished watching The Squid and the Whale, a 2005 film written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson. I really like Noah Baumbach’s other films Frances Ha and While We’re Young because I really like independent films and these films are independent films. I also really like Wes Anderson’s movies. The only ones I’ve seen by him so far are Moonrise Kingdom and The Grant Budapest Hotel (The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou is sitting on my bookshelf, calling my name. Now that I have this time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic I can watch more movies and thus, write more reviews. I haven’t written any reviews for a month, let alone anything at all on this blog, because I was overwhelmed with everything going on in this time in society, and while it’s a lousy excuse for me to not write, I was just trying to figure out how to deal with it all. I forgot until now, when I already feel a beautiful kind of catharsis just by typing these words freely, how awesome writing makes me feel. Even if my writing isn’t worthy of The Atlantic or Rolling Stone (due to my incoherent rambling stream of consciousness), it’s my voice and I have this platform (e.g. blogging) through which I can express my frustrations and all the feelings that come with being a human being during a time of uncertainty.
Anyway. So yes, I finished watching The Squid and the Whale, and I must say it was a really good movie. It came out when I was younger but of course I was too young to see it (it’s rated R for a lot of swearing) but I know it got good reviews, so I decided to watch it since it was a good price to rent online and I was in the mood for a movie. Not going to the theaters is of course just part of what we have to do now in order to survive COVID-19, but like many people, I love a good matinee with popcorn and a Sprite every now and then. I should have used the AMC card my friend gave me three years ago, darn. Hopefully in the distant future, as we still need to socially distance to not only keep ourselves well, but most importantly keep the ushers, ticket folks and other people working at the movies healthy, too.
Honestly, watching The Squid and the Whale during the COVID-19 pandemic was really interesting. It may seem like “It’s just a movie, why bring COVID-19 into this?” But the theme of communication and language in the film is so important, especially how the novel coronavirus and mandated social distancing have forced us to depend on the Internet to work and interact with one another (of course, people still love a good old-fashioned phone call now and then, and we also have tools like FaceTime, Skype, Zoom and WebEx to see each other even when we may not be in the same room with one another.) The film takes place in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1986, a time when the only modes of communication were writing letters, calling on the landline and talking face to face. Bernard and Joan Berkman, played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney respectively, have two sons named Walt and Frank. Bernard and Joan are separating after Bernard finds out that Joan is having an affair with Ivan, Frank’s tennis instructor. They leave Walt and Frank to figure out how to cope with the divorce on their own. Frank, who is younger than Walt, doesn’t have Snapchat, Instagram or texting to entertain himself and escape from the issue of his parents’ separation, so he drinks his parents’ alcohol and masturbates in private at school. Side note, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Walt Berkman, is pretty dang cute. I found myself almost blushing throughout the film because he is so attractive. But again, I find myself digressing.
So yes, Frank doesn’t have all the apps that many of us use every day (because of course none of these were invented until later) and Walt is figuring out his relationship with Sophie, a girl with whom he bonds over Franz Kafka one day during class. He is also figuring out how to deal with his attraction to Lili, one of his dad’s students (it took me a minute to recognize that Lili is played by Anna Paquin, and I remembered that this film was made fifteen years ago, so quite a bit of time passed between this film and True Blood.) It’s complicated because Lili is also attracted to Bernard. Moreover, Walt, like Frank, is dealing with his parents’ separation. His relationship with Sophie gets worse as he takes his frustration out on her.
I’ve lately been thinking about this topic of communication as it relates to my personal experiences, and this film really made me think about the ways in which people communicated back then and how we communicate now, especially when it comes to the topic of divorce and separation. I personally don’t have expertise in this subject, but I have been reading a lot of reports lately about how the stay-at-home orders right now are impacting couples who want to file for divorce. Right now, lawyers are backlogged with requests to file divorce, but filing divorce petitions is expensive, and the process of finalizing a divorce is now being done over videoconferencing because the courthouses are closed unless their is an emergency. According to a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek by Sheridan Prasso, in China there have been a lot of domestic violence cases and divorce filings after the government mandated stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of COVID-19, even though the government expected couples to bond more and have kids since they would be stuck at home. The stay-at-home orders made it hard for the women in these marriages to seek help since they would have had to go see someone in person to file the divorce, and
“police were so busy enforcing quarantines that they were sometimes unable to respond to emergency calls from battery victims, women experiencing violence were not able to leave, and courts that normally issued orders of protection were closed.”
Feng Yuan, co-founder of Equality, Beijing NGO focused on gender-based violence. Source: “China Divorce Spike is a Warning to the Rest of Locked-Down World” by Sheridan Prasso
I’m not saying the characters were in any way privileged for going outside or meeting each other face to face to work out conflict (or in Walt’s case, running out of Mount Sinai Hospital to visit an old relic of his childhood at the Museum of Natural History.) That’s how people had to communicate during the day: you couldn’t text someone an apology, you couldn’t tweet something snarky, you couldn’t send a middle-finger emoji to your mom if she said something you didn’t like. You had to call on the phone or talk to them in person, so it was hard watching Walt insult Sophie on the street corner and ridicule her for wanting to have sex too soon. Nowadays, if he had a smartphone he probably would have found her on Tinder and if she seemed too much for him, he could just ghost her and ignore her text messages and calls. He wouldn’t have to talk out his frustration with her, and it’s not like they walked away feeling good about their relationship (they break up), but they talked about it. Face to face, tears and awkward silences galore, something that you can’t communicate in a text message or group chat. The movie would have been totally different if the characters used the methods of communication we use today. Many couples use texting to communicate, and while texting is good for communicating short non-intrusive messages when people are busy at work or dropping kids off at school, the way we communicate our words matters, and texting omits 93 percent of the cues for effective communication. I don’t care if you pepper your message with eggplant emojis, cute smiley icons or digital middle fingers. It doesn’t convey everything you are thinking, and so your partner may be keeping something from you and hiding the thing in the text message without honestly talking about it. I honestly cannot envision Joan and Bernard communicating through text. The in-person conversations between them, Walt and Frank were already filled with pain, tears and anger; why complicate it through texting? Imagine if Walt talked out his memory of his mother with his therapist and him sharing this beautiful bond before the divorce, through text with his therapist. At first, Walt doesn’t open up, but since he doesn’t have a phone to look down at during his therapy session, he has to look the therapist in the eye and be honest with both him and himself. Soon, Walt finds himself recalling a particularly beautiful moment when he and his mother go to The Natural History Museum and see a diorama of a squid and a whale and what that diorama meant for him as a child. It’s hard to be honest in person sometimes, especially when you’re going through what Walt is going through, but it frees you to a certain extent because you don’t feel you have to bottle up your pain all the time when you talk it out with someone in person or over the phone.
Also, the movie would be just boring if communication was like that. Through movies, we develop a sense of empathy for the characters and what they are going through when we see their tears, their silent steely expressions. None of that comes through in a text message. I’m not against texting and admit that I do text quite a bit, but this has been on my mind for quite some time, so what better way to address it than a long blog post rant? I wonder how this movie would have been if it took place here in 2020…
This past weekend I watched In the Heights. When I first saw the trailer I was super excited for the film because I had seen Hamilton on Disney + (which I will be eternally grateful for because I have yet to see the Broadway in person.) I was also excited because Stephanie Beatriz is in the movie, and I love her as Rosa Diaz in the sitcom Brooklyn 99.
So last night I watched it, and the dancing and singing were absolutely amazing. My friends and I found ourselves bobbing our heads and snapping to the music, and my heart warmed when I watched how Usnavi and Vanessa’s love for each other develops through the film. Even though I myself am not Latinx, I have friends with similar stories to Nina’s. In the film there is a character named Nina who went to Stanford and dropped out because she encountered racist microaggressions from people at the university and was made to feel like she didn’t belong there. When Nina is at a restaurant with her dad she tells him that at an event she attended a lady thought Nina was one of the servers and handed her a dish to take back to the kitchen. This is a common microaggression against students of color who are at predominantly white universities and in predominantly white spaces. In the film Nina performs a number called “Breathe,” and in this number she talks about how everyone in her community has big hopes for her and tells her she will go far in life, but after burning out from the racism and stress she encountered in college, she feels like she let everyone in her community down. It honestly gave me chills, but it’s an all too common experience for first-generation BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students. I also learned a lot listening to my undocumented peers and it encouraged me to read more books by authors who are undocumented immigrants and/ or authors who write about the experiences of undocumented immigrants.
I really loved the film, especially Anthony Ramos’ portrayal of Usnavi, and the beautiful choreography and rapping (I also had forgotten that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote In the Heights before he wrote Hamilton, I thought he had written Hamilton and then In the Heights. My bad.) I also love how Usnavi learns that he can create value right in the Washington Heights community where he’s at even though he has big dreams at the beginning to leave for Puerto Rico.
And at the same time, I want to acknowledge the problem of colorism in the film. Before I watched the film I heard a little bit about the backlash against the film, but it wasn’t until after I watched it that I started reading up more on it. In a Vox piece by Jasmine Haywood titled “In the Heights exemplified the ugly colorism I’ve experienced in Latinx communities”, she explains that while the film was lauded at the beginning for portraying Latinx actors in leading roles, it did a bad job of showing the actual diversity within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, particularly of the Afro-Latinx communities who reside there. In the film most of the Latinx actors who play main characters are light-skinned and white-passing, while the Afro-Latinx people who have dark skin in the film play background roles such as dancers and hair salon workers. Jasmine, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and from New York state, further explains that the film does not adequately portray the diversity of Washington Heights. In reality, Washington Heights is historically a Dominican community and nearly half of the residents of Washington Heights are Dominican. Moreover, many Dominican people identify as Black Latinx, and as Haywood adds, much of Dominican culture has its roots in the African diaspora.
Haywood then gives historical context about why a lot of Afro-Latinx folks encounter discrimination within the Latinx community, and it goes back to European colonization and slavery, which touted that phenotypic features of white European people–fair skin, straight hair, narrow nose, or light eyes–are superior and should be privileged over Afro-centric features. This has led over many years to dark-skinned people lightening their skin with skin lightening creams and using other methods to alter their bodies, and this deeply toxic systemic colorism has manifested over the years in cinema with dark-skinned BIPOC folks being passed over for crucial roles and light-skinned BIPOC folks getting those roles. A key example of this is the film West Side Story. Natalie Wood was a white actress playing the leading role, a Puerto Rican woman named Maria. Rita Moreno, who is actually Puerto Rican, plays Anita, a supporting role. Another example is when Zoe Saldana, a light-skinned Black actress, had to darken her skin to play Nina Simone in the 2016 biographical film Nina. These are just a few examples though. Haywood also points out (which I didn’t know until reading her piece) that the film omits a scene in the original stage play in which Nina’s father expresses prejudice against her boyfriend Benny because he is Black. Omitting this scene left out room for a discussion around the complicated anti-Blackness within Latino families. Haywood also points out that John M. Chu, who directed the film, did the same thing when he directed Crazy Rich Asians; Singapore is more racially diverse than the film depicts it to be, and in the movie most of the East Asian actors in leading roles are lighter-skinned. At the end of her piece, Haywood concludes that while she was glad to see the music, culture and food of Latinx communities being well represented, she was disappointed that the film did not take the opportunity it had to represent Afro-Latinx folks within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, and that more needs to be done particularly in the wake of more recent awareness of anti-Blackness. Monica Castillo, in a review of the film for NPR, recognizes that while she loved the film and resonated strongly with the characters, she is a white Latina and hasn’t experienced the same kind of erasure that Afro Latinx and Indigenous folks have faced, and recognizes that this erasure of Afro Latinx folks has been going on for far too long and should be better addressed.
Right after the backlash, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized, explaining that he wrote In the Heights because he didn’t see Latinx folks like himself being represented on screen, but he had also been listening to people and keeping up with conversations around the lack of Afro-Latinx representation in the film. He apologized to everyone on Twitter and thanked everyone for having these conversations about the film’s colorism, and promised to keep learning and doing better in his future projects to honor the diversity of the Latinx community. The full apology can be found in this NPR article.
While I can’t say much more on this topic, like Lin-Manuel Miranda I have learned a lot from the conversations around colorism in In the Heights, and I am also going to keep learning from these conversations. Lin’s sensitivity and awareness of the issue of colorism, and his willingness to do better, also encouraged me as someone who is interested in social justice conversations and is always figuring out how I can do better.
Here is the In the Heights trailer:
In the Heights. 2021. Directed by Jon M. Chu. Based on the stage musical of the same name by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes. Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.
I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted all of my tear ducts. Yesterday I went and saw A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and it was truly one of the most moving films I have seen. Most movies nowadays have a lot of stimuli and frenetic action, and much of this action can desensitize us. So that’s why watching Tom Hanks develop a meaningful bond with a cynical reporter gave me the kind of warm-hearted vibes (and caused the same river of tears to form in my eyes) I felt when I watched the movie Big Fish.
If you haven’t seen Big Fish, it is about a man named Will who seems to have the perfect life: he works a full-time job, he has a beautiful wife named Josephine who is pregnant with their first child. But he has to deal with strained relations with his dad, who likes to recount tales of his life as a boy and teenager, stories that the son thinks are just a bunch of embarrassing lies. When his dad is dying, Will goes home to take care of him, and his dad recounts his entire life to him and Josephine. Will at first doesn’t want to listen to his dad tell the stories to him since he’s told them many times already, and he worries that his own child will grow up to hear these stories himself and assume they are all true events. But as his dad gets closer to death, he starts to appreciate his dad and the life he led. Albert Finney, who plays Will’s dad Edward Bloom, died in February of this year, and whenever I think about him, I think about his profoundly touching role in Big Fish. While I won’t spoil the end, one of the scenes toward the end conveys how deeply Edward Bloom touched the countless strangers and loved ones during his lifetime.
I felt this while I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I can safely assume that my friends and I were not the only ones reaching for tissues during this film. Lloyd Vogler is a magazine writer in the 1990s whose boss gives him a special assignment: to interview Fred Rogers. For those unfamiliar with Fred Rogers, he starred on a show called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that appealed to kids and adults alike because of his willingness to encourage kids to get in touch with their emotions. One of the emotions he talks about is anger and he uses an adorable puppet named Daniel, who talks to a lady about how angry he is, and she encourages him to use his anger constructively rather than take it out on others. When Lloyd asks Fred how he manages anger and stress in his personal life, Fred tells him that we all get angry, but there are ways to manage that anger rather than take it out on other people, such as banging the keys of a piano in frustration or taking time to take care of yourself. As adults, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in our own problems that we forget that our inner child calls to us each day for us to play with him/her/they even just for five minutes, and instead of pretending that inner kid doesn’t exist, we should embrace our silliness sometimes and not take ourselves too seriously. Yes, life and goals are important, and also it’s important to make time for art, walks outside, music, prayer, reading, playing with puppets, or even, as Mr. Rogers illustrated during his life, encouraging someone through a tough time. When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway, some kids recognize Fred and start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and then pretty soon, Fred, the kids and everyone on the subway sings the song together. This is one of many scenes that brought me to tears because it made me think about how Mr. Rogers touched each person’s life and made them feel like they had a reason to keep on living.
He even addresses the matter of death in one scene, and the way he addresses it reminds me so much of what educator and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda says about life and death. Even though Mr. Ikeda come from different faiths (Mr. Ikeda is a Buddhist and Mr. Rogers is a Christian), they share a healthy perspective on death that encourages us to live our lives without regret and treasure each moment we share with the person in front of us, rather than fear death. As many know, Mr. Rogers died in 2003, but more than a decade later his legacy remains unforgotten. Like Mr. Ikeda, Mr. Rogers, by living his life in service to others, has given me a deeper meaning on the importance of encouraging others and how doing so makes not only the other person feel better but also helps us feel better, too.
He also reminded me of Mr. Ikeda because he saw the wisdom, courage, and compassion in each person he encountered. Daisaku Ikeda, when meeting with the steeliest world leaders, has used dialogue as a means of forming a human-to-human connection with the person in front of him. Even when meeting with world leaders who didn’t agree with his views, he respected them as human beings and continued to engage in dialogue with them rather than close himself off. In the past he met with people such as Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks, the British academic Arnold Toynbee and Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, and discussed topics such as the importance of art and culture in fostering a more peaceful society, as well as the role of religion in today’s world. His meetings are always out of respect for the other person’s humanity. In the film Mr. Rogers sees Lloyd as a human being, not just as some journalist interviewing him. On the contrary, Lloyd at first saw Mr. Rogers as just being the interviewee who was going to help Lloyd do his job, and when Mr. Rogers doesn’t want to treat the interview as a one-sided matter, Lloyd got frustrated at first. But then there is a scene where they are sitting in a restaurant and Mr. Rogers tells Lloyd to close his eyes and think about someone in his life who helped him in some way. The entire restaurant seems to go quiet as everyone closes their eyes and reflects on someone in their life who helped them. Lloyd starts crying after thinking about his mother before she passed away because she loved him for who he was.
This movie made me appreciate the people in my life who have helped me deal with my emotions and supported me through my ups, downs and in-betweens. Tom Hanks embodied Mr. Rogers warm and sincere personality so well, and the film score is absolutely beautiful, rich with cello and piano (it makes me want to practice my cello harder so I can get an opportunity to play on a film score.) The music gave the film its sweet touch. I would love to see this film again, although I would still probably get choked up if I were to see it again. Like a lot of people, I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on TV and so watching the film made me nostalgic for those episodes of the show.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 2019. Rated PG for some strong, thematic material, a brief fight and some mild language.
If you have not seen Booksmart yet, I recommend it. It is an incredibly fun and brilliant movie, and two of the ladies behind it are Olivia Wilde (the director) and Sarah Haskins. I haven’t seen Olivia Wilde’s other films, but I was just happy that she was directing this movie, and I know Sarah Haskins because she did these really funny parodies of products directed at women called Target Women, in which she gives fun and informative commentaries about things like yogurt commercials marketed towards middle-aged women and the portrayal of women in movies with Disney princesses. I haven’t seen any new videos from Sarah in a long time since I watched Target Women ages ago, but I was so glad to see her in action with this movie!
So basically, Booksmart is about these two high school seniors named Molly and Amy. Both of them are friends and are really smart, and they are about to graduate with the rest of their class (Molly is valedictorian.) However, Molly’s world comes crashing down when, contrary to what Maya Rudolph’s motivational voice tells her at the beginning about how she is better than everyone at school because she studied instead of partied like them, even the students who spent their school year partying are, like her, going to top universities. She and Amy realize that unless they spend the night before graduation living a little, they won’t get to end their senior year with a bang. So they go to the party of Nick, who is Molly’s crush. At first Amy doesn’t want to go because she thinks it is pointless, but Molly tells her not just that they need to end their senior year with a bang (especially since Amy is leaving for Botswana that summer) but also because Amy’s crush, Ryan, is going to be there, and it would be Amy’s only chance to sleep with a girl before she leaves for Botswana. So they go to the party and it turns out to be a night they will never forget (pardon the cliché.)
Although I couldn’t 100 percent relate to Amy and Molly, I felt for them so much when it came to their social consciousness and their nerdiness (and their love of the library.) Like Amy and Molly, I was a feminist and studied a lot, but Molly also worried about her class rank and where other people were going to college. I didn’t even bother getting in line with all the other students during that lunch period to check my class rank, and when a fellow student came up to me and asked what my class rank was, all I told him was “I don’t know” because I didn’t care enough to check it. Even in my high school orchestra class, where most of the kids were gunning for the top ten percent of their class, my teacher gave a ten-minute speech on why looking at your class rank was pointless. The teacher’s idea, which I completely agreed with and still agree with, is that no one cares about your class rank when you leave school (of course, this might depend on which people you happen to be around, because there are grown adults who care about class rank and GPA. And of course, if you go to grad school, you definitely need your GPA from undergrad. But again, depends on what the situation is) and, moreover, your class rank says nothing about who you are as a person. And frankly, the teacher was right. Not once in college did anyone ask me about my class rank. No one at work has asked me about my class rank. Not my friends. Not my family. Most, if not all, people could care less what your class rank is.
To add to his point, I was more interested in learning for the sake of learning, not so I could beat everyone else in my school year. Which is why after all these standardized exams I got burned out and tired. There’s this film called Race to Nowhere, and I saw it during my last year of high school because I was fed up with everyone’s focus on class rank and GPA and standardized exams. It is a documentary about how messed up the U.S. education system was (and still kind of is) and at the beginning of the film a song by The Weepies called “Nobody Knows Me At All” plays as we see kids going to their classes and the visible stress they feel about their work and their extracurricular activities. The students interviewed say that they have to cram in all this information before they take their exams but after it’s done they can’t remember any of it. This is because the teachers, having to follow a set curriculum and deadlines, don’t have time to teach their students more than just what’s in the textbook. In my environmental science class, I was so frustrated because I wanted to delve more into the ethics part of environmental science, ask the hard questions that one couldn’t find by just looking at the textbook. Working on a project about invasive species brought me peace as I listened to Seal’s “Dreaming in Metaphors.” But of course, the teacher, being already stressed out enough as it was, told me each time, “It’s in your textbook.” “It’s in your textbook.” “It’s in your textbook.” I almost gave up on asking so many questions because I didn’t want to bother the teacher, but I couldn’t, because I have loved environmental activism since middle school, so it made no sense for me to back down just because it seemed as if the other students didn’t care about the material.
Although I definitely see the point of a movie like Booksmart, because the film’s message was that while it’s important to take your work seriously, it’s important to not take yourself too seriously. In other words, it’s ok to let loose a little, although in my opinion, everyone has their own definition of letting loose. And the film isn’t the stereotypical high school party movie because the film gives the studious characters more dimension and personality. Molly and Amy aren’t side characters who go to the party and get laid; they are the central protagonists of the film who prove that they can have some fun even though they study a lot. I remember carrying the same study habits I had in high school to college (aka study hard and don’t party. The only high school party I went to was my senior year prom, but there wasn’t any alcohol there and I went with a few friends who were also studious like me) and I got burned out. So burned out that one of the seniors had to remind me at least a million times (more like the entire school year to be more accurate) to make time for myself to have fun. After the student’s senior banquet (which I didn’t go to, well, because #studies) they dropped a gift by my door (they called them “wills” since it was their last year of college.) It was a planner/calendar for me to balance my commitments and schedule some time for self-care, because, in their words, “it’s not just about the classes.” That whole year I poo-poohed her advice, and this carried on into senior year (although I did go to a few parties that year.) It wasn’t until after college that I learned to take care of myself, and my definition of self-care has evolved to include doing my laundry, taking a shower, eating right, and blogging about movies like Booksmart without caring about my bad grammar skills or trying to sound like Roger Ebert or Peter Travers (because let’s face it, they have their own unique style of writing and, well, I have mine.)
Other awesome things about this film? The frequent references to influential women figures. At the beginning of the film, we see, as Molly meditates to the motivational voice of Maya Rudolph, posters with slogans such as “We Should All Be Feminists” (I’m sure it’s a reference to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book), photos of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Michelle Obama, and a pro-choice poster with the words “My Body, My Choice.” Molly and Amy use a code word before they go to the party because Amy is thinking of backing out of the party, and Molly just says “Malala” to remind her that they are friends and stick together at all times (they are referring to Malala Yousafzai, a young woman in Pakistan who is an activist for women’s education.) Like Molly and Amy, I was a hard core feminist and I told people in school I was going to a women’s college because I was a feminist (there were of course other reasons for going to the school but that’s for another time.) However, I lacked the knowledge that Molly and Amy did about feminism, because the feminists I idolized happened to be a white women named Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who as Adam Grant explains in great detail in his book Originals, didn’t care about all women, and by that I mean Black women. It wasn’t until I got to college that I had the opportunity to expand my knowledge of women’s rights and the history of the feminist movement to include women of color. Amy and Molly were advocating for Malala before I even heard about this young woman getting shot in 2012 ( I was in college in then.) They had more posters about feminism and reproductive rights than I ever did (in high school, me, a single poster? Nope.)
The movie also sends a positive message about how it’s okay to be yourself. Even though Jared, one of Molly’s classmates, seems to have slept with his supposed girlfriend, Gigi, and even though he rolls up in a fancy car, and, on the night of Nick’s party, had a yacht where there are giftbags with his name on it and fancy hors d’ouevres (sad truth: no one attends his party other than Gigi, Molly and Amy.) However, he later tells Molly, when they’re at Nick’s party together, that he is a nerd like her and contrary to popular belief, hasn’t slept with Gigi or anyone. He also tells her that he likes airplanes and theatre and wants to do that after college. Earlier in the film, there is a group of popular kids who talk poorly about Molly while she is in the bathroom stall, and Molly tells them that she worked harder than them and is going to a good college because she worked hard. But each of them tells her that they are going to pursue higher education like her, and one of them says that he’s going to work at Google over the summer. The film showed me that while hard work is fine, it’s also okay to spend time with people and not just bury your face your textbooks (also I am incredibly appreciative of my K-12 education and college education and that I had time in college to study and learn about philosophy and social activism.) There are also two students who are passionate about theater, but the film, unlike a lot of films, doesn’t portray them as outcasts. They are embraced, too, in the film, and really everyone in the high school (the movie takes place in Los Angeles and was filmed in Los Angeles) is a nerd in some way.
The film reminded me of the film Dope. Although, of course, there were differences in the storylines (Dope was about three nerdy Black and Latino students who sell cocaine on the black market after someone they meet at a party puts it in one of the kids’ backpacks. Booksmart is about two young white women who spend their last night before graduation partying instead of hitting the books so they can make a good impression on their peers), the films have one main similarity, and that is that both of them transcend the traditional white male nerd archetype. Historically in Hollywood, nerds were often straight, cis-gendered white men who were standoffish and incredibly misogynistic. It’s why The Big Bang Theory rubbed me the wrong way during the first few episodes (no shade, but I couldn’t finish it.) All except one of the main characters was a straight white man, and the one person of color in their friend group didn’t speak much during these few episodes I watched. I don’t know, maybe I am completely wrong and that I should have finished the show. But after reading and watching some many films and TV shows with LGBTQ+, POC and female protagonists who tell their own stories without following society’s standards on what viewpoint they should have, I didn’t want to watch The Big Bang Theory anymore.
Other characters make the story unique: the principal, Jordan Brown, played by SNL’s Jason Sudeikis (I just found out that he’s the spouse of the actress who directed the film, Olivia Wilde), turns out to be a Lyft driver because he has to supplement his income (the movie makes a brief but brilliant commentary about teacher’s salaries in U.S. schools) and is writing a novel about a pregnant female detective who fetus kicks every time she finds a clue (I have no idea why these writers are so creative. In no movie have I heard a school principal writing a novel with such a random storyline.) The teacher Miss Fine (played by Jessica James), an African-American woman who doesn’t play a major role in the film but relates to Amy and Molly very well because she used to study a lot in school and not party and she tried to make it up by being wild in her 20s (she mentions she is not allowed in Jamba Juice anymore because of her behavior.) The tall girl in Amy’s class who makes snarky comments and hangs out in the bathroom alone and smokes during Nick’s party (she plays a key role later in the film.) And Mike O’Brien, also from Saturday Night Live, who plays a pizza delivery driver. Overall, the film was amazing, and absolutely hilarious! The first time I saw Beanie Feldstein was in her film with Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird, another, albeit more serious, coming-of-age story. The two actors play friends, but Lady Bird’s story is at the center, while her friend Julie is there to provide support for Lady Bird. The main characters of Lady Bird are Lady Bird and her mother (played brilliantly by Laurie Metcalf.) In Booksmart, however, the friendship between Molly and Amy is at the core of the film. Julie is a good polite student like Molly, but any other development of her character stops there. In Booksmart, Molly curses, talks about masturbation and drinks Heineken (the only other out-there thing Julie does is eat the communion wafers and chat with Lady Bird after school. The nun calls them out on it soon after.)
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching Booksmart again. And like I said, if you haven’t seen it, it is a great film. It got more than 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and I believe it deserved that rating. I felt like I wanted these characters in the film to be real. I wanted Molly and Amy to be my friends so we could talk about feminism together. I also felt for Amy because she is a lesbian, and as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I felt for her. Also, Amy isn’t an outcast because she is gay; there are a lot of films that make the characters outcasts because they are gay. But Amy is an outcast because she studies a lot and doesn’t engage in the silly games her classmates do. This is the thing that makes her stand out, not her sexual orientation. The film embraces Amy’s sexual orientation and that’s what keeps Amy and Molly’s friendship so tight.
Anyway, I have to go to sleep, but watch this movie when you have time. I wish I had seen it in theaters when it came out, but I’m glad I got to watch it period. Also, like the soundtrack for the film Dope, the soundtrack for this movie had me grooving, especially at Lizzo’s “Boys” and Leikeli47’s “Money.”
Booksmart. 2019. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, drug use and drinking–all involving teens.
Last night I watched an incredibly harrowing film called Elephant. Although the film came out in 2003 (aka more than a decade ago) it is still very much relevant today, especially in the wake of the recent mass shootings across the U.S. Elephant takes place at a high school in Oregon on a typical day, showing the events leading up to a brutal school shooting on campus. What is interesting about this film is that it is not just from one perspective but from the perspectives of both the survivors and the shooters. There also isn’t much dialogue in the film, so the silences give the film its unsettling quality, and also force the audience to deeply reflect on the meaning of the film. It reminded me of this PSA that Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about gun violence and the toll it can take on people (in 2012, a gunman named Adam Lanza murdered several children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut.) The PSA features several students showing off their back-to-school supplies and using the supplies to protect themselves from an active shooter in the school. At the end there is a chilling scene where a girl is hiding in a bathroom stall and texts her mom “I love you” before the shooter enters. Honestly I have seen some scary PSAs but this one seemed to say “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. Our kids shouldn’t have to fear going back to school.”
I wish I could write a more coherent review of the film, but I am honestly still processing it. At the beginning I wasn’t sure how I would like it, but by the end I had to stop and think and reflect, and this is what the film wants you to do. If I gave away a lot of plot summary it would ruin the film, to be honest. All I can say is, it is a moving film even if it doesn’t have a lot of gratuitous violence. The violence is hard to watch toward the end of the film (if you need a warning, it’s the last 15 minutes). I think the fact that Gus Van Sant had the film be from multiple perspectives makes it a scary film. Ironically I can’t watch slasher films like Chucky and Saw, and yet I can sit through harrowing films like this and 12 Years a Slave and not be scathed. It is scary because it happens in real life, and after hearing about the El Paso shooting, the Odessa shooting, and a number of other mass shootings, I had to go to my keyboard and write how I felt about this issue. Because it had been an elephant in the room for the longest time, this senseless violence, and it was time for me to speak up about it through my writing.
I had a talk about world peace and nonviolence in a philosophy group yesterday, and I brought up one scene in the movie that stuck with me for a while. One of the two shooters in the school is threatening to kill one of the teachers, and the teacher asks why he decided to do such a thing (aka kill innocent people) and the student told the teacher that he didn’t feel like him or any of his teachers listened to him or supported him in any way. This shows how violence isn’t random; it is caused by a series of events leading up over time to one huge brutal event (aka the violence.) At the beginning we see some kids in class throw spitballs at one of the kids who becomes a shooter at the school, and we see this kid go through the cafeteria and plot something on a pad of paper (which we later find out is his plan to blow up and shoot everyone at the school.) There is also a scene where the two shooters are at one of their houses, and one is a playing a Beethoven piece on piano (which would have been beautiful, except for the fact that while the kid was playing Beethoven, the other kid was playing a computer game where he shot various people and plotted their plan to kill everyone at the school) and then we see them watching a movie about Hitler and looking for guns online (there was actually a shooting that happened a couple of years after the movie came out and people blamed it on the fact that the shooter watched Elephant. So of course, some people might be prone to watching this movie and imitating what the characters did. But there were probably other factors in the shooting, too, so it probably wasn’t just the fact that they saw this movie and suddenly wanted to kill people. I saw this film because I wanted to contribute to the conversation on nonviolence.) This film also makes a commentary in a way that most of the shooters who have committed these murders are young white men who feel like no one respects them in society. In The New York Times yesterday, there was an article on the front page that talked about the mass shootings that happened this summer and mentioned that young white men committed most of these shootings. The film avoids coddling the young men, while a lot of real life reports tend to say things like “This guy was just an innocent kid, really nice, really sweet,” but it still doesn’t forgive the fact that these guys who kill people in these shootings are dealing with an anger that goes much deeper than surface-level early childhood memories. Like I said, violence isn’t something random; it builds up over time, and it’s why, during the discussion, I mentioned the scene where the shooter says he didn’t feel listened to, and everybody said they agreed that schools and homes should be places where youth feel like they can communicate honestly with their families and teachers.
Elephant. 2003. 81 minutes. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Rated R for disturbing violent content, language, brief sexuality and drug use–all involving teens.
The Imitation Game is a period drama film based on the real life of Alan Turing, British mathematician who cracked the code of the Enigma, a machine that was so unbreakable that no one during World War II could solve it. German forces made the Enigma so difficult to solve, but that didn’t stop Alan Turing from working long hours to solve it.
At first, Alan doesn’t want to work with his teammates, and they find it hard to work with him because he is closed off from them. He fires most of the people on the team, but then recruits new people by putting out a difficult crossword puzzle in the local newspaper (sort of like fliers for talent show auditions) to recruit anyone to join the Enigma-cracking team. Joan Clarke, played brilliantly by Keira Knightley, is the only woman in a room full of men, taking the test for recruitment. When she first walks in, a gentleman at the door tells her she should join the other women in another room (women at the time were secretaries) and that she shouldn’t be here. But then Alan tells her to stay so that he can go on with the test without interruptions. At first, Joan looks at the test while everyone has their heads down and is lost, but then she works hard at it and finishes under the six minute mark. She is the first to turn in her test, and the only woman to make the team.
When I first saw Joan, I was like “Yesss! Women are killing it in tech!” But then, soon after, Alan goes to Joan’s house, where she lives with her parents and doesn’t have a husband, and she tells him she doesn’t think she can be around so many men when she is the only woman on the team. However, he tells her that he doesn’t care if she is breaking social norms. What he cares about is that she helps him Enigma code because he is short of team members. Joan’s role as one of the code breakers really showed me how important it is to have women on a team, and moreover, how important it is to encourage women to pursue tech. Before watching the film, I was skeptical about whether I would ever pursue JavaScript again, but then I just decided to resume my Codecademy learning and just pace myself. I found that not being hard on myself and not giving up was what got me through the first lesson of JavaScript, because before that I said I would continue coding, but then thought about how it seemed everyone was more qualified than me. In a later scene, Alan gets frustrated because he is being spied on and pursued (homophobia was prevalent at the time, and Alan Turing, as a gay man, faced serious discrimination and married Joan just so they could continue working on the team together and so that her parents wouldn’t make her come back home to them and quit the project.) He comes out to Joan and tells her that she doesn’t have to be on the team anymore because in his mind, he’s thinking she doesn’t want to work with him because he’s gay. She then slaps him and tells him that it is preposterous he would try to get her off the team, telling him that she worked incredibly hard with him and the rest of the team to break the Enigma code, and that she was not ever going to leave the team.
While of course Joan’s story isn’t the same as Katherine Johnson’s story in Hidden Figures, her determination reminded me of when Katherine has to run back and forth between classes because the science buildings at NASA are separated by gender. Even when dealing with the worst kind of sexism and racism, Katherine and her fellow Black female programmers never gave up on themselves and continued to persevere, paving the way for so many young women of color in tech. Of course, sexism and racism are still a reality in the tech world, and women and people of color in these programming industries still endure a lot of prejudice and often feel like they don’t belong. But that’s why we need movies such as Hidden Figures and The Imitation Game to remind us of how women’s involvement in computer programming shaped the course of history. In several scenes of The Imitation Game we see women in naval computer offices punching out code like it’s nobody’s business; seeing this was so cool 🙂 It reminded me of the incredible legacy of Grace Hopper and her service to the Navy as well as her service to computers. Joan’s legacy isn’t often talked about much but I wish our history teachers in school included her in the textbooks (this brief but fascinating bio gives some background about her role as an Enigma code-breaker.)
This film is also important when we think about the legacy of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the field of technology. This film is unique from other films about men in tech because Alan, while he was a white male, was gay. Hollywood movies about men in tech often feature straight white men who treated women like props and spent all day doing computer and video games. Alan’s sexuality plays a huge role in the film because LGBTQIA+ people faced severe discrimination during the 20th century and often faced severe punishment at the hands of homophobic government officials. We flash back to Alan’s childhood, him being severely bullied by his straight male classmates, and Alan making friends with a guy who rescues him from being trapped under the floorboard. Alan falls in love with the guy, but he is called to the principal’s office and told that his lover died of a serious illness (bovine tuberculosis.) We then flash forward, and Alan’s fellow team member, John Cairncross, threatens to tell everyone Alan is gay if he tells everyone that Cairncross was a spy for the USSR. He also tells Alan that he can’t come out to Joan because it is illegal for him to be openly gay. When Alan comes out, the government forces him to shut down the project and gave him two equally brutal options: time in prison or chemical castration. At just 41 years old, Alan committed suicide after enduring an entire tortuous year of government-mandated hormonal therapy. The movie also reveals that from 1885 to 1967, gay men were convicted of “gross indecency” under British law. I literally had to stop the film and just sit and cry for five minutes. p 215
Even though Silicon Valley is known for perpetuating a straight white male “bro” culture that often excludes LGBTQIA+ people, there are several resources and programs for individuals in tech who identify as LGBTQIA+, such as Lesbians Who Tech, and several prominent LGBTQIA+ people working in tech, such as Apple’s Tim Cook. The chairman of Linux Professional Institute, Jon “maddog” Hall, for instance, came out as gay in 2012 in honor of what would have been Alan Turing’s 100th birthday, saying that
“most of the people in my world of electronics and computers were like the mathematicians of Alan Turing’s time, highly educated and not really caring whether their compatriots were homosexual or not, or at least looking beyond the sexuality and seeing the rest of the person.” (“The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech”, Business Insider)
Indeed, in the film, Alan’s fellow coders remain with him until the end of his life even when he faced anti-gay discrimination because he showed them how hard work and perseverance really pay off in the end and helped them crack the Enigma code and thus save many lives during the war. Overall, this film taught me about perseverance and to find creative ways to express myself when working in tech, such as finding ways to incorporate my tech learning with my musical learning.
Overall, incredible film that I highly recommend seeing.
The Imitation Game. 2014. 1 hr 54 mins. Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking.
I just finished the film Big Eyes and it left me with a lot of questions to consider: what is the purpose of creating art? If you are not a big self-promotional person, does that make you any less of an artist if you enjoy staying out of the spotlight? What are the emotional costs to succeed in the creative world, and how can you establish boundaries when people try to push you to give up that authentic little spark that goes into your art?
Big Eyes is based on the true story of Margaret Keane, an American painter based in San Francisco whose husband, Walter, sold her paintings and gave himself credit even though he promised her that the two of them were going to work as a team. In the film, we see Margaret Ulbrich furiously rushing to shove her paintings and her daughter, Jane, in her car because she needs to leave an incredibly abusive husband. They leave Northern California for San Francisco, where she meets up with her friend Dee-Ann. Back in the 1950s, social norms frowned upon women who left their husbands without jobs lined up, so Margaret lands a job painting on furniture at a furniture company while also selling her work at local art fairs. Margaret’s art features children with big sad eyes staring at the viewer, and as the real Margaret Keane reveals in the bonus DVD feature “The Making of Big Eyes” she painted sad children because she herself was sad. She had just left an abusive marriage and didn’t have many friends other than her daughter and Dee-Ann.
At one of the art fairs, she struggles to sell her paintings, and when she negotiates $2 to paint a little boy, the boy’s dad says he’ll give her $1 instead for painting him (at the time, American society traditionally viewed women as caretakers, and often didn’t take female artists seriously). But then she notices this painter named Walter Keane selling paintings like hotcakes. He comes over to her and tells her she’s not being promotional enough, and tries to convince Jane to let Margaret paint her (Jane soon tells him she is Margaret’s daughter.) When Margaret reveals she separated from her husband, the two immediately start a relationship and within a short time they are married. Dee-Ann tells Margaret she thinks something is fishy with them marrying in a short time, but Margaret says she thinks Walter is sweet and will take care of her.
Walter then brings his scenic paintings to Ruben, an art dealer, and he immediately rejects them because, according to Ruben, no one wants landscape paintings anymore. They want abstract paintings and not literal street scenes. When he shows him Margaret’s paintings, he gives her credit but Ruben still rejects them. So then Walter takes them to a jazz club and the owner at first rejects them, but then because Walter is a pushy outgoing person, he convinces Banducci, the owner, to buy them, and one night while waiting outside the restrooms for people to ask about the paintings, a couple comes up to him and asks him who painted the children with large eyes, and Walter takes credit (and pay) for it because he is desperate and knows Margaret isn’t a self-promotional person and wouldn’t feel comfortable telling people she did it. Honestly, all Margaret wants to do is paint and spend time with her daughter, but Walter has a completely different idea of success, one that involves about 99.9 percent promotion and about maybe .01 percent actually doing the work. Unlike Margaret, Walter waits for inspiration instead of actually doing his own work (we later see this clearly in a much later scene.) Margaret actually has a reason for painting the children and she puts her energy into her work rather than just talking about and pitching ideas like Walter does.
I cannot fully relate to Margaret, but I totally understand why she didn’t speak up at the beginning. She had just left an abusive marriage and just wanted someone who wouldn’t beat her. However, as we see throughout the film, Walter is a fraud and was just as toxic as Margaret’s ex-husband was, and even more so because he promised her all these nice things (money, a nice home, fame) and they did get those things like he promised. He also promised her she would be living the dream of just making art and not having a day job. However, Margaret knows her limits even though she doesn’t listen to them, and to essentially make Walter more famous (and to keep her marriage with him) she sits in the room all day painting for hours children with sad eyes. Because she is producing so many paintings, she doesn’t take breaks and thus doesn’t have room to just think about how to most authentically express her own self through these paintings. In one key scene she tells him that art is personal. The children with sad big eyes come from her own feelings of sadness, and to give this not sad (in fact, overly zealous) man credit for her work means giving up a key part of herself to an impersonal world of mass production, fancy parties, and small talk. Margaret only wanted a happy marriage, and did eventually end up in a happy marriage after leaving Walter, but in a way, she went through this experience so she could help inspire other artists (in particular, female artists) who felt threatened in any way into lying about their work or letting someone else take credit for it.
Nowadays, we can take it for granted that we can promote ourselves through social media and sell our work online. However, there were no computers at the time, and so Margaret couldn’t just put up a Skillshare video showing people how to paint children with big eyes on the Internet. Also, this made me wonder how I, as an introverted musician, should promote myself even though I don’t really enjoy self-promotion. Does not playing in gigs all the time not make me a musician? What if I just love music for its own sake? What if I just want to play for others because I love it? In one scene Margaret is walking in a grocery store and finds a grand display of her work in commercialized style. There are postcards, posters, all sorts of inexpensive paraphernalia with her art on it. And the display is labeled is big bold letters “Walter Keane,” showing how the situation has gotten out of hand and that although Walter promised her work would get famous, it became mass produced and lost a lot of its quality. And let’s face it; not everyone liked Margaret’s paintings, and everyone was pretty divided on whether one could consider her work to be “real art” (whatever the hell that means.) But after seeing this display, Margaret actually sees customers in the store as having big eyes like the children in her paintings. I saw the trailer and thought, after seeing the woman in the grocery store with big eyes, thought, “Ehhh…I don’t know if this is going to give me nightmares.” But after seeing this film, I really did feel for Margaret because in this moment, we see how this entire scheme messed her life up. It not only ruined her friendship with Dee-Ann and her relationship with her daughter (she forbids her daughter Jane from going into her studio and lies, telling her it’s Walter’s studio and those are his paintings.) It also ruined her self-esteem. I know she had this silent strength for ten years, but Walter was incredibly toxic and Margaret thought how many women at the time did: that their husbands were going to take care of them and they should just stay quiet and stay at home. This scene, along with the incredible score by Danny Elfman, conveys all the complicated feelings Margaret has about her relationship with Walter, and moreover, her relationship with her art.
There was a wonderful composer named Melanie Bonis. She was one of the crucial composers to bridge the gap between Romantic and Impressionistic music, and from a young age she taught herself to play piano. However, because of gender norms at the time, her parents frowned on her passion and wanted her to just live with a husband. Even though she produced several works throughout her life, Melanie Bonis, like Margaret, really didn’t want to become famous, but really just wanted to produce art. At the time, you had to be extremely self-promotional to get anywhere as an artist, but Mel B wasn’t super self-promotional (she named herself Mel because women weren’t taken seriously as composers, so she had to shorten her name so she could gain access to the male-dominated world of composers. The only other Mel B I know of is Mel B from The Spice Girls.) Because she wasn’t all about promoting herself, no one really knows about her, not even me. I wanted to play more female composers because I was done just playing pieces written by men (not that there’s anything wrong with Bach or Debussy; it’s just that times are changing and people are becoming more aware that the classical world has often put up barriers against composers who are often underrepresented in the field.) So that’s how I came across Mel Bonis; I just googled “female composers” and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) had a long list of them (thank goodness for IMSLP.) Just because Mel didn’t promote herself a lot doesn’t mean her work stunk. I love playing her Cello Sonata because it just has this richness to it, and a lot of people haven’t heard of Mel Bonis, so I wanted to dig her out from the trenches and play her music since I haven’t played it before. Same goes for other less well-known composers such as Florence Price and Dora Pejacevic; their music is beautiful and I honestly wish I had encountered them sooner.
Now, of course, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce Big Eyes to a movie about a woman letting a man walk all over her. In “The Making of Big Eyes” feature the screenwriters said that they kept asking, ” Why did Margaret let Walter take credit for her work for so long?” and from that there were so many other questions that the movie addresses: what is love? what is art? what is criticism? Interestingly, Walter is very bad at taking criticism because he hasn’t produced his own art to show to the public. When you just rely on charisma, you don’t really prove anything. Margaret, however, tells him straight up after finding he painted over the name of the actual artist for those street scene paintings he sold, that “the more he lies, the smaller he seems.” Of course, I was snapping my fingers every time she spoke out against his nonsense because she let him do it for ten years and it really hurt her. But unlike Walter, Margaret handles criticism by continuing to paint. I think what has helped me as a musician is not saying “Ah, I can’t play Tchaikovsky; I give up.” I work on what needs to be improved and keep playing different kinds of music. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how this movie really drilled it into my head this very key lesson: you must always do your own work. Never try to copy someone else. Yes, you can see inspiration, but in the end you need to produce your own ideas so you don’t end up plagiarizing someone else’s. And yes, you need to know your worth and yes, it’s okay to want to sell your art and get paid for your work. However, if people poo-pooh your work, it’s very important to not let other people’s criticism make you feel like any less of an artist. And having a day job doesn’t make you any less of an artist, either. Elizabeth Gilbert said that artists should work at their day jobs so that they don’t have to just support themselves with their art. Because as the film shows, if you support yourself with your art, you need to also take care of yourself and not become so immersed in the business aspect that you forget the sheer reason why you wanted to make art in the first place.
Big Eyes. 2014. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language.
I just finished watching the film Burnt and at first I didn’t know what to expect. At first I didn’t think I would want to watch it because it got a 29 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of people didn’t like it. But I liked Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, Silver Linings Playbook and Guardians of the Galaxy, so I thought I would have no problem seeing it. Honestly, even though people said the plot Burnt was too slow and I honestly was thinking, “This movie is so stressful. I feel too much for all of these restaurant employees, I should just stop,” I am still glad I watched it anyway. Sometimes you learn lessons from watching films that don’t get high Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
The film takes place in London. Adam Jones is an arrogant chef who moved to Paris when he was younger after working a minimum-wage job and saving up money, and met his mentor Jean Luc, when he traveled to Paris to become a chef. He then lost his dream after his struggles with drug abuse and anger issues and moved to New Orleans to try and get his life together, shucking hundreds of oysters a day and keeping a notebook of how many oysters he shucked. He then quits the job when he finally shucked 1 million oysters and heads to London for better opportunities. When he gets there he runs into his old colleagues and persuades them to work for him, but after he recruits them, the real issue comes when they actually work for him. He turns out to be the same arrogant micromanager he is in daily life, and one night he throws all the dishes his employees make around the kitchen and yells at everyone, even threatening to hurt one of the few female employees at his restaurant (Helene, a single mother who is just trying to make ends meet as a sous-chef until she meets Adam.) Eventually, Adam comes to terms with his ego and Helene tells him the importance of teamwork and that he shouldn’t feel he has to run the restaurant on his own.
My thoughts on the film
I didn’t think it was bad because it taught a lot of valuable life lessons and proposed some really deep questions. Does perfectionism add to or kill artistry? Are there alternatives to a micromanaging style of leadership? How can people practice better self-care when working in a stressful environment such as the restaurant industry? What does it mean to be a mentor? In the film Adam sees Helene’s potential and has her get up early every morning so he can coach her; however, it is not easy, especially because she has a young daughter and can’t get off work to just stay home and celebrate her daughter’s birthday (I would be interested to find out how the daughter is going to grow up remembering how her mom went through such rough training.) Adam calls her over to his restaurant every morning to coach her, and throws away several of the things she makes in the beginning because they do not live up to his standards. But eventually, she practices enough so that the one dish she makes perfectly he doesn’t throw away. However, this led me to wonder: is the pursuit of excellence worth making someone work long hours with no breaks in between? Honestly, for this very reason, it has made me respect employees who work with difficult bosses in the restaurant industry. While I did work in food service, the drinks and food weren’t expensive and I was more expected to get things done than to do everything perfectly. Helene also becomes just like Adam, throwing dishes when they don’t taste perfect and screaming cuss words at her coworkers when she becomes the lead chef who tastes the dishes before serving them. Michel tells Adam he liked Helene better before Adam trained her to be a micromanager like him, and I agree that Helene could have led the crew in her own way, not just to impress Adam or emulate him.
However, in the culinary industry, it sounds as if you have to be perfect to do your job. However, I would argue that there really isn’t a perfect because everyone has different tastes, and who’s to say whether Adam can judge how something tastes simply based on how the Michelin critic is going to judge the dish? While of course you need to make sure that the food is cooked at safe temperatures and that it looks nice, to say it has to be perfect is relative. Taste is subjective, and what may taste like garbage to someone may taste like heaven to someone else. In one scene, Tony tells a very stressed-out Adam to make Helene’s daughter, Lily, a birthday cake because Adam forced Helene to work instead of take the day off to celebrate Lily’s birthday, and Tony has to keep Lily company while Helene is in the kitchen. In a scene that at first fooled me into getting choked up, because when Adam brought out the cake, it was super sweet looking and said “Happy Birthday Lily” on it (the music score also made it seem like a touching moment), Adam asks how Lily how the cake tastes and she says that she has tasted better. Adam tries to challenge her by eating the cake himself, but then realizes that it probably could have been better. However, Lily knows that Adam treats Helene like garbage, so she already feels a sense of distrust with him, and this affects how she judges his cooking (of course, I don’t forgive how Adam treated Helene, though. Women already have it hard enough in the food service industry.)
Also, the film brings up a good point about consistency. In the film Adam has Helene meet him at Burger King and she tells him that Burger King is the last place she wants to meet him. She refuses to eat fast food and opts instead to wait until she prepares something better prepared for herself. Adam questions her rejection of fast food and says that, contrary to Helene’s argument that fast food is fattening compared to culinary arts food, the exquisite French food that her and other culinary chefs strive to perfect are made of the same ingredients that fast food is: dairy, meat and a lot of fat. She then tells him that she wants to stick to anything but fast food so she can stay “consistent,” but then Adam tells her that chefs should strive for consistent hard work but they shouldn’t strive for the same tastes every time, and that it’s okay to enjoy a burger and fries even if you work at an upscale restaurant because you’re exposing your palette to other tastes. Adam also points out that it’s not fair for her to turn her nose up at fast food, and accuses her of being classist and not wanting to eat food prepared by people making minimum wage. Helene points out that she worked on minimum wage as a sous chef, and Adam continues to say that people with upscale tastes often view fast food as “for the working class,” and asks why it’s more expensive to eat at the place he and other chefs like Helene work at than it is at fast food joints like Burger King. Even though I didn’t like Adam condescending to Helene, I do think that as someone who used to work in fast food, I think he made some valid points. Now of course the minimum wage for fast food workers is supposed to (hopefully) go up, so Adam’s argument might be slightly outdated in years to come.
But still, he has a point: does making fast food so accessible and inexpensive cheapen our appreciation of the food? As a kid I ate out all the time because it was convenient to just go after sports lessons to get something from McDonald’s upstairs, but after going vegan and eating most of my meals in and bringing my own meals to lunch, I definitely felt a lot more appreciative when I do have the spare time moment to eat out. Even when I went to eat at Panera, I hadn’t had it that often since I started eating in, but when I ate the chocolate chip bagel I literally felt all the sweet and savory pop in my mouth and I relished it, even though I ate it rather quickly. Even a $2 bagel was an aesthetic experience simply because I learned to not take eating fast food for granted. Even eating Taco Bell became a special occasion, and I actually enjoyed it a lot more when I didn’t eat it every day. Honestly, as someone who would have to save up serious money to afford to eat the kind of Michelin star foods being prepared in Adam’s kitchen (they looked positively delicious and made me wonder if I should start binge-watching Food Network like I did when I was a kid), savoring a $2 bean burrito with guacamole and chips is no less a beautiful experience than if I were to eat a $100 vegan zucchini souffle covered in truffle sauce and sprinkled with 5 karat gold dust (or some other kind of elegant-sounding dish).
The film also teaches the importance of teamwork, very similar to The Imitation Game. Alan Turing recruits people for his team to crack the Enigma code, but then ends up shutting himself off from his colleagues and not accepting their lunch invitations or ideas. But Joan teaches him the importance of teamwork, and so the team is able to crack the Enigma code together. Burnt teaches that especially in a competitive industry like food service, people need to work together. When you work in fast food, you can’t worry about whether you made a better latte than someone else. The only thing you have to really worry about is getting someone’s order exactly how they tell you to make it. There is no ambiguity really; you have someone working at the register, and you’re making the drinks according to the recipe cards and warming up the food. If there’s any bad blood between you two when there’s twenty people in line waiting for their orders, you’re toast. It doesn’t matter if something is perfect; in food service, you just work with your teammates to get the customers out the door with their beverages and food, whether or not the customer gives you a pat on the back for it. We all had to work together without letting our egos get in the way, and, this is just me, but from the film’s portrayal of the restaurant business, teamwork is a no-brainer. When someone’s ego gets in the way, it messes up the flow of all the kitchen employees because now no one can focus on their work. Adam’s ego gets in the way of his successful management of his team and it takes him a long time to sincerely change his outlook on success. Basically, the message of the film is that success can be lonely and consuming, especially if you struggle with mental health issues, but you can’t let your personal problems ruin the flow of your workspace, and while it is easier said than done, your employees will get their jobs done better when there is no drama. Also, Helene’s use of the sous vide method was genius, and honestly I would have loved to see her open up her own restaurant during the movie because she held her own throughout the film even when Adam didn’t want to accept her help (he at first joked that the sous vide bags looked like condoms, but then after it worked he swallowed just a dash of his pride.) Her and Michel would have the most amazing restaurant, with women and people of color running the show. That should be a movie in and of itself.
While I think hard work and criticism are necessary for success in a tough career, I think Adam did too much of a Fletcher (the demonic coach of a jazz band in the film Whiplash who throws chairs and screams at his students) and this prevented him from having any meaningful relationships with his coworkers at the beginning. But as I mentioned earlier, he realizes that knowing how to work together with people is just as important as knowing how to manage people. A mentor should encourage their employees, not necessarily by always coddling them, but also not out-rightly abusing them. The film taught me especially as a performing artist who has played with ensembles that you cannot let your rigid ideas about a piece get in the way of the teamwork efforts you and the other ensemble members put into creating beautiful music. Also, you need to take care of your mental health. Read a book, watch a movie, paint a sunset, anything that will get you back in the swing of things and help you destress from your professional creative life.
Overall, the movie provided great lessons on overcoming perfectionism, teamwork and the importance of never giving up.
Burnt. 1 hr 41 minutes. 2015. Rated R for language throughout.
A few weeks ago I watched an interview that composer Germaine Franco did for the YouTube channel Orchestral Tools, and in the video she talks about getting into the business and the importance of producing a lot of work while working as a film composer. I was interested to learn more about film composing so I watched another video that Orchestral Tools did in which they interviewed Jeff Russo, who composed the score for the films Fargo and Star Trek and the TV show The Umbrella Academy (all of which I have yet to see).
In the interview, Russo talks about the importance of developing your own sound as a film composer. He said that composer John Powell called on aspiring film composers to stop listening to film scores so that they could produce their own work instead of copying someone else’s style. While Russo partly agreed with this, he also said that it really does help to have a broad knowledge of different film scores and other genres of music because you get a sense of what someone’s melodies are and that helps provide inspiration for you to develop your own melodies. Also, speaking from a common sense standpoint, we’re all going to copy each other’s work anyway in one way or another. It’s especially important to listen to other film scores because you learn from the people who have more experience in film scoring and have done it for longer than you. It’s just like anything else in life; if you want to be a good employee, you need a mentor who will show you how the job is done and encourage you with their own past experiences of failures and how they bounced back from those failures. For me, I seek encouragement from musicians who are actually in the music industry and have been for quite some time. Because they have gone through the many highs and lows of the music industry, they have so much rich experience I can learn from. The last thing I want to do is walk into a professional orchestra or any music setting and just wing it without knowing what to expect. Plus, seeking out advice from more experienced musicians has helped me become more gracious over time about my progress through life as a musician and has helped me challenge my longtime battle with arrogance and thinking I was cool without accepting criticism from others.
Russo further explains that it helps to listen to a wide range of music because while music theory is important, listening to more than one genre of music helps you create a broader sound palette from which you can work off of, similar to painters getting to experiment with all these different colors and shades of colors. You also can’t predetermine where your music background is going to specifically take you; Russo says in the interview that for the first twenty years of his music career, he wrote songs for the rock band he was a part of. In addition to writing songs, he also played piano, guitar and drums, and while rehearsing with the band he would bang out chords or experiment with new sounds, and this experimenting led him to develop his own sound over time and think about the larger picture first (aka the overall melody) and then focus on the nitty-gritty details of the score.
Russo also says that when working on film scores for other people, it’s important to be yourself and that you don’t have to be a different composer for each score you write. It helps to be yourself because the whole point of film composing is to produce this music for someone else so that they can see what kind of groove you have in composing, or what kind of patterns you tend to lean towards when writing the music. When other people look at your work, they get an overall sense of your sound. The classical composers Gustav Mahler and Mozart, for instance, have different patterns from each other. Even though Mahler, like many Romantic composers, sought heavy influence from Mozart, his style is still distinct to him and the time period during which these composers wrote their music. Mahler’s music is often very cathartic and emotive; his Symphony No.5 “Adagietto” is a clear example. Unlike, let’s say, Mozart’s “Flute Quartet in D Major,” which is very sprightly and pointed, Mahler’s “Adagietto” is incredibly dramatic and will make you cry. It is a meditative piece, and even if Mahler’s pieces were the same tempo as Mozart’s there is just all this emotional complexity to Mahler’s pieces that are distinct to Mahler and other Romantic-era composers, even though they did seek influence from Mozart.
When asked about the importance of sound design for film scoring, Russo says that it really depends on the kind of work that the client wants you to do. The overall main thing to really focus on, according to Russo, is creating a sound, not just notes on a page, because some people really like just hearing the music but some want to feel the sound and not just hear it. So it’s important to think about the entire context of the score as it relates to the film so that you can develop the overall version the client wants instead of just focusing on your own ideas about the music, because the whole point of scoring for movies is so that moviegoers and producers can feel that the score relates to the characters and settings and plot. When Russo scored the music for Star Trek, he used a very definitive range of sounds, and gave the brass section loud passages, and also incorporated strings, glockenspiel and percussion into the score. He thought about the overall picture, and while he didn’t intend to change Star Trek, he still wrote from his own perspective so that he still had his own unique sound or idea of how the score would sound. This really helped encourage me to develop my own sound as a musician and be very purposeful in how I want a piece to sound, but to also bring my own interpretation and expression to the piece. Robert Schumann, for instance, is a Romantic composer like Mahler, and suffered from severe depression. His Cello Concerto in A Minor uses a wide variety of dynamics, many very sudden bursts of loud and then soft, and also doesn’t pause between movements. As someone who struggled with mental health issues, though not to the extent Schumann did, I really felt it was important to bring my own personal narrative to my performance of the piece. The constantly changing dynamics and overall flow of the piece in terms of tempo and feeling convey the tumultuous struggle that Schumann had with mental illness and life in general, and while I’m not advocating for his issues or saying that they helped his music in any way, music is a very personal means of expression, so to play the piece without keeping in mind Schumann’s dark battles with his inner demons (as well as my own inner demon battles) wouldn’t do justice to the piece.
Russo also says that you may look back at your past work and think it’s terrible, but you only develop your own sound through creating more music scores. He often looks back at his old music and thinks it’s terrible, but then he understands that he only developed his own sound by allowing himself to experiment with different styles, even though from his own perspective they weren’t that good. As artists we can be super self-critical sometimes, and I think what’s really helped me surpass my ego and really go beyond what the inner critic is telling me is just creating more music and writing not just for myself, but for other people to enjoy and feel inspired by. You only really learn to grow through hard work, and it’s very much what radio host Ira Glass told people, that creative people have high expectations for their art and get upset when they think their art is mediocre, but the key to overcoming creative block or this feeling of inferiority is to produce as much work as we consume. Like, I can listen all day to Ariana Grande, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Keane and many other musicians (and music groups), and I recommend you totally should listen to other artists, too, to help develop as a musician and get a sense of other musicians’ flows. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to do something with your own talent and just create something that only you can freely slap a patent label on. I still need to play my instrument every day, or else I’m going to wallow in this pity where I think, “Oh, Christina Aguilera is a better musician than me. I should just not bother” when I could be more productive and support other artists while producing my own personal projects. As Germaine Franco said, you have to do a lot of work even when you think your scores belong in the trash, because to someone else they may sound genius and it may be the thing that fits perfectly with the movie. This is especially crucial when you cannot find any paid media work, so it helps, as Franco points out, to produce your own personal library, so that when someone wants to see your work, you can show them.
Overall, I’m really glad I watched this video. If you’re interested in learning more about film composing, check it out below.
The Arts Are Life 