Tag: movies

4 Books That Hit Me So Hard (That I Won’t Be Able to Stomach Their Movie Adaptations)

January 30, 2019

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I probably mentioned in an earlier post that I usually watch film adaptations after reading the books they are based off of. However, there are some books that were so graphic and intense that I’m too faint-hearted to watch them on screen. Maybe someday I will watch these films but as of now, these four books were sufficient enough to stay forever lodged in my memory.

  1. The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden. This novel is narrated from the perspective of a Scottish doctor who is employed by Idi Amin, who in real life was the president of Uganda in the 1970s. I read this book in high school in world geography class because I wanted to learn more about Uganda’s history during our unit on Africa. We had a list of movies we needed to see as part of our grade for the class, and I overheard a classmate ask my teacher if he could see The Last King of Scotland for his film grade (it wasn’t on the list because it was school district policy that the teacher couldn’t recommend any R-rated features). She approved but warned him to be prepared because “Idi Amin was a really nasty dictator.” Reading how the doctor, Nicholas, has to witness individuals endure incredibly brutal torture under Amin’s regime, and after seeing Forest Whitaker play Amin so accurately in this trailer, I decided that the book was enough to sit through. I love both Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy’s acting (Whitaker took home the Best Actor Award at the Oscars in 2007 for his depiction of Amin in the film), but this is a movie I’ll have to sit out until I can officially muster the guts to stomach it.
  2. Schindler’s List (the Australian version is called Schindler’s Ark) by Thomas Keneally. A poignant novel based on the true account of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazis who saved 1,200 Jews from concentration camps during the Holocaust. Like all works about the senseless killing of millions of human beings, expect graphic scenes of torture, murder and abuse. The book was enough to keep me up at night and honestly I wish I had finished it in the daytime because it was enough to bring me to tears. After reading it, I was too emotionally exhausted to think about seeing the film.
  3. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. A black comedy that doesn’t adhere to the traditional linear narrative format, Welsh’s various characters share how they are either directly or indirectly influenced by heroin abuse and other forms of addiction. I know that black comedy is technically supposed to be funny, but weirdly enough I couldn’t remember laughing at any point during this book (except for the scene where one of the female characters, Kelly, gets back at a bunch of slimy dudes who harass her during her waitressing shift by putting gross stuff in their food). One scene that will never leave my memory is when Mark Renton, one of the main characters, goes to see a drug dealer who explains how he lost his leg from abusing heroin. I was already having a hard time dealing with the male characters’ poor treatment of women and their abuse of heroin, but this particular scene had me breaking down in tears so badly I didn’t think I would ever get to finish the book. Reading this one scene was worse than any anti-drug PSA I ever saw, and believe me, I’ve seen some pretty intense ones. Sounds melodramatic, I know but the novel had an impact on me and I can’t ever forget it, so I don’t think I will be able to handle the movie that well. I am now in my long hiatus from Irvine Welsh novels, but I want to read more of them because he’s a really good writer. Next time I read one of his works I will read it during the daytime when I can better process it.
  4. Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr. I know trailers don’t always say a lot about a film, but the trailer for the movie adaptation of this novel was haunting. Even the poster gave me chills, with that big blue eye staring out at you like those of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. But that’s the point. Like Trainspotting, this novel scared me out of my wits because of how its characters’ lives spiral out of control when they abuse heroin. It’s supposed to scare readers and raise awareness of how abusing these drugs can make people feel a false sense of security with themselves, when in reality they miss out on life because they are dealing with the severe psychological, physical and emotional effects of heroin (and the effects of withdrawal). I read a synopsis of the film adaptation because I knew I’d be too chicken to actually sit down and watch it, although it would have probably scared everyone if they had shown it as part of our health class’s unit on drugs and alcohol. Like a lot of kids, I grew up with D.A.R.E. programs, drug-free pledges and D.A.R.E. bracelets in school, but Hubert Selby’s work is essentially the whole D.A.R.E. program in just 200-300 pages. Phenomenal book; however, until I can manage to get my stomach muscles in order, I remain too shooketh to see Darren Aronofsky’s film.

Got any more film adaptations to add to the list? Let me know in the comments.

Review: Bad Moms

January 29, 2019

First off, this film was HILARIOUS! 🙂 The gorgeous Mila Kunis plays Amy, a stressed out mom living in an affluent suburb who tries to please everyone. She works for a start-up coffee company where she is the oldest hard-working employee and her younger coworkers are just goofing off. She runs to PTA meetings. She also does her kids’ homework, makes their lunches, drops them off at school and makes dinner. She is juggling so many things but never has time to herself. Even when her husband doesn’t value her or his kids, she takes his crap because she feels that’s what her duty is: to be the perfect mom.

She also has to deal with a clique of snooty PTA moms (played by Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith and Annie Mumolo) who runs the meetings. When I first saw Annie Mumolo in this film, I thought, Wait, where do I know this lady from? And then I remembered she played an uptight mom in The Boss. 🙂

The movie has a lot of great social commentary about society’s expectations for mothers and generally how people perceive women to be the multitaskers and the ones to do everything. In my senior year of high school, I saw a documentary called Race to Nowhere, which talks about how kids today are more stressed more than ever because of standardized tests and expectations for them to beef up their college resumes and essays with extracurriculars and other things. But Bad Moms shows how this school-related stress can have a toll on parents just as much as it does on their kids.

There’s also a great book called How To Get Sh*t Done by Erin Falconer that would be a great tie-in to this film. In the book Erin talks about her own experiences with trying to please her partner, parents, friends and coworkers by taking on extracurriculars, lots of projects, and tasks at home. She says that women are not making enough time for themselves because society tells them they should be caretakers and that if you make any time for yourself, you’re not doing your job. She gives really good tips for time management and explains that the art of saying “no” is hard but important in helping women prioritizing their time. In Bad Moms, Amy and the other moms feel like “bad moms” because they don’t always please their kids and partners. However, Amy eventually wakes up and realizes that unless she takes charge of her own time and learn to say “no” to being over-committed, other people will keep demanding her time and she will keep going through the vicious cycle of guilt, shame, resentment and passive-aggressiveness that comes with saying “yes” to everything.

She also comes to understand that she pampered her kids by doing everything for them and they grew up with a lack of appreciation for everything she did. One of the film’s best scenes is when she tells her son to start doing his homework by himself. When he gets upset with her and tells her he is a “slow learner” she tells him straight-up that he is not a slow learner. Instead, she tells him, he grew up with a sense of entitlement and that if he keeps expecting her to do everything for him, he will carry that entitlement mentality with him as an adult and it won’t be good. There are a lot of kids whose parents can’t always be there for them. There’s a lot of kids whose parents die or divorce when they are young, so these kids have to learn how to take care of themselves. In a lot of families, kids have to hold down a job or two in high school so they can support their parents, and at the end of the day they still have school work to do, so they don’t have time to complain like Amy’s son did. This film in retrospect really taught me how to appreciate my parents more because they worked so hard to get me through school and encouraged me to study hard. I never had to hold a job in high school but if I have kids, I want to encourage them after seeing this movie to make their own bed, laundry and meals, get a part-time job and yes, do their own homework. Whether or not they carry those habits with them to college is not for me to decide, but at least they will have learned independence early on.

In a way, the film raises an implied discussion on class and classism without explicitly talking about it. Gwendolyn, who chairs the PTA board, forbids the moms from making any treat with sugar or other refined ingredients. Amy goes out and buys donut holes for the bake sale anyway. However, it should be noted that her main reason for baking treats was mainly because she didn’t want to. Food insecurity is still a reality in many places in this country, and moms living on low incomes can’t always afford to buy expensive ingredients and make treats for their kids’ bake sale. Amy also chooses to not go to her firm’s meeting because she is done with the people who work there. Many moms work jobs where they can’t afford to take off whenever they feel like it. While I understand it’s supposed to be a funny film, it also raised some interesting questions about the correlation between class, privilege and self-care. Not all moms can afford to eat out, go to spas, or go drinking with friends.

Overall, the film was lots of fun, rich with thoughtful themes, and very touching too. Shout out to all the moms out there; thank you for being you! 🙂

Bad Moms. 1 hr 41 m. Rated R for sexual material, full-frontal nudity, language throughout, and drug and alcohol content.

Review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

January 28, 2019

Like many theaters, before I entered the theater there was a sign warning about the strobe lights in the film, and I’m glad that warning was there. (I can’t remember there being one for any other action movie I saw, not even The Incredibles 2 and that had a lot of flashing images in it) It was actually the first film I saw where the theater had a warning about strobe lights (to understand the significance of strobe lights in the film, The Mighty has a piece about it here).

The film definitely does have a lot of strobe lights from the very beginning. Even as someone who does not have chronic illness or autism, I had to close my eyes at some points due to the flashing lights. The illustration of the characters, as well as that of the Spider-verse, however, was incredible and the characters really came to life on the screen. I also loved the soundtrack of the film (I found myself bobbing my head while “Hypnotize” by The Notorious B.I.G. played in one of the scenes). And similar to many action movies, the film’s beautiful score truly conveyed the intensity of the scenes.

The cast was also excellent. One of the villains, Doctor Octopus, is a female in this version of Spider-Man (in Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock is male), which is pretty epic in my opinion considering many villains tend to be men. For some reason Doc Ock looks like a combo of Professor Trelawney in Harry Potter and Shego in Kim Possible. At the end credits, there were several actors I didn’t even know were voicing the characters, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, and Nicholas Cage to name a few. The late Stan Lee also makes a cameo in the film (not telling when he appears if you haven’t seen it yet) and receives a touching tribute in the credits.

The film has a very encouraging message, too. The main character, Miles, is so inspired by Spider-Man, but he gets discouraged when he realizes how hard being a superhero actually is. However, like other Marvel and DC films, he learns that in order to truly defeat evil, he must conquer his self-doubt and confront the villains head-on in order to save his friends, family and society.

And also, let’s just say how thrilled I was to have a person of color playing Spider-Man! 🙂 Miles is half African-American and half-Puerto Rican. The last film I saw by DC or Marvel that has a Black superhero was Black Panther.

Overall, I highly recommend this film. It deserves to win for Best Animated Picture at the Oscars.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. 1 hr 56 min. PG for frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements and mild language.

10 Movies With LGBTQ+ Protagonists

I kept a lot of my old blog posts and was wondering what to do with them, so I decided to publish them now. I originally wrote this post back in January 26, 2019:

Although there are hundreds of well-known movies featuring characters identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer +, these characters don’t often play major roles. Here are some major films I have seen that have LGBTQ+ people as the main characters. Have a box of Kleenexes handy next to that bowl of popcorn.

  1. A Fantastic Woman (2017): A beautiful drama set in Chile about a trans woman named Marina who navigates the death of her partner, gender discrimination at the hands of his family, and her dream of becoming a famous singer. In real life, the actress who plays Marina, Daniela Vega, changed Oscars history by becoming the first transgender person to present at the awards ceremony. In Spanish with English subtitles.
  2. Moonlight (2016): I don’t have many movies in my Amazon collection, but this movie is one of the few that made it in there. Truly compelling narrative about a young Black man growing up in Miami and coming to terms with his sexuality. It tackles subjects such as abuse, race, poverty, and masculinity in nuanced ways that we don’t always see in mainstream movies with Black male protagonists. There isn’t a lot of dialogue or flashy camera-work, and that is what makes the film so beautiful. I have seen it twice and still cry every time I see it. It deserved its Oscar (and also won for the Best Kiss Scene at the MTV Movie Awards) 🙂
  3. Milk (2008): Riveting biopic about the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, this takes place during the beginnings of Harvey Milk’s campaign and progresses until his assassination in 1978. Now, of course, since it’s a biopic and not a documentary, there’s probably at least one historian who would say there were facts about Milk’s life that the film could have done a better job of portraying. However, if you have never studied or heard of Harvey Milk, watching this film will at least give you a brief glimpse of his political campaign and his life. The movie has had an especially big impact on LGBTQ+ activists because it came out the same year as Proposition 8, an anti-gay amendment that would have outlawed same-sex marriage. If you Google “Milk movie and prop 8,” you’ll find countless articles about the topic.
  4. Rent (2005): I watched this movie for the first time during a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting in high school and still to this day remember most, if not all, of the musical’s numbers by heart. Jonathan Larsen, who directed the original Broadway, died at a young age shortly after its production, but he goes down in history as a playwright who addressed real-life issues, such as poverty, sexuality, and AIDS, in his productions. While I am sad I will never get to see the actual show (it’s no longer on Broadway), I always know I can watch the movie on a rainy day.
  5. Call Me By Your Name (2017): Directed by Luca Guadagnino, this adaptation of the novel by Andre Aciman (I haven’t yet read it but want to) tells the story of a teenager named Elio who meets a 20-something graduate student who living with his parents in ’80s Italy. At first their personalities clash; Elio is an introvert, and Oliver, a graduate student, is more outgoing. However, the two soon fall in love with one another, and both men find themselves conflicted about their relationship. I have heard many criticisms of the film, mainly about the ethics of Elio and Oliver’s age-gap relationship. (Slate has a great piece about it here) However, while watching the film, I found their relationship to be more complex than just an older man dating a younger man. Overall, the film was beautiful and made me fall in love with Timothee Chalamet.
  6. The Misadventures of Cameron Post (2018): Excellently directed film about a lesbian teen (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) whose aunt forces her to attend a gay conversion therapy program in an attempt to force her to become straight. During her time at the program, she meets a host of characters who, like her, are just trying to make it through the program and its haunting leader, played by Jennifer Ehle. I haven’t read the book yet, but I now really want to after seeing the film. It’s also the first LGBTQ+ film I have seen that features a queer-identifying Native American character. It’s a really good movie, and I can’t wait to read the book it’s based on.
  7. Pariah (2011): A young Black lesbian named Alike alternates between her social life, where she is free to be her cool queer self with her close friends, and her everyday life at home and at school, where she is forced to conform to everyone’s ideas about how she should dress and behave. When she meets the daughter of her mom’s friend, everything changes and Alike begins to come into her identity as a young queer Black woman.
  8. The Kids Are All Right (2010): A moving comedy-drama about a lesbian couple, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, who meet the father of their teenage children. It was my second LGBTQ+ film after Rent and I absolutely wouldn’t mind seeing it again.
  9. Love, Simon (2018): A sweet coming-of-age film about a teen named Simon who has a great life and great parents but is secretly in love with another boy at school. One of his classmates, Martin, threatens to publicly announce that Simon is gay if he doesn’t get his friend, Abbie, to go out with Martin. It is overall a beautiful film and the novel by Becky Albertalli was also beautifully written.
  10. Carol (2015): A 1950s love story about a married older woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who falls in love with a younger woman who works as a sales clerk, played by Rooney Mara. Their relationship is a secret, but the two find themselves conflicted as they try to make time to see each other without letting their male partners know. Powerful complex film, especially if you love historical movies.

I am obviously leaving out a lot of films with LGBTQ+ protagonists, so this list is not at all comprehensive. But these ten recommendations are a good start to watching more LGBTQ+ themed cinema.

Got any rainbow-friendly movies to recommend? Let me know!

Movie Review: It Comes at Night

I first heard about this movie when I saw the film Get Out a few years ago. The trailer gave me nightmares. And normally I don’t watch many horror movies, but this movie and Get Out were the few exceptions because they are scary in more of a social commentary sense. I wimp out like a baby when I see possessed dolls/children, flesh-eating zombies, or shape-shifting clowns holding red balloons, but for this movie there weren’t too many jump scares, and the score did a pretty excellent job of letting me know if there was anything scary in the next scene. While Get Out was scary because racism is a real thing that happens in society, It Comes At Night was scary because it depicts a real-life horror that we’ve been living through this past year: a pandemic. Even though it has suspenseful scenes, it’s not your typical horror film because it’s more realism than it is supernatural horror.

It also made me want to take COVID precautions more seriously. I remember one time I wanted to get some fresh air during the pandemic, so I would take off my face mask, but this movie made me want to take the mask rule more seriously. Throughout the film, the main characters Paul, Sarah and Travis wear gas masks whenever they go outside the house, and Paul constantly tells Sarah and Travis to take strict precautions and not invite anyone into their home. However, another family who is also trying to survive the pandemic begs him to let them stay over in exchange for food (the husband is Will, the wife is Kim, and the son is Andrew).While I will try to not give away spoilers, you could probably imply from the trailer that letting the family stay probably wasn’t a good idea.

I love A24 films because they make you sit long after the credits are rolling and think. This film made me think about the pandemic and how it has forced everyone into survival mode. The families in the film try to build trust with one another as they share space, but one of the members contracts the virus, and that trust is broken in a heartbeat. It reminded me of the pods that people have formed during this time, and while I’m not discouraging people from forming pods, the film makes a great commentary that if I were to invite people over, even if they were my neighbors or my family, I could potentially contract COVID if I don’t practice social distancing or wearing a face mask around them. In one scene that really stuck in my memory, Travis brings Andrew to his parents when he finds him sleeping on the floor in the room of his (Travis’) late grandfather, who dies at the beginning of the film of the virus. But after finding out Andrew has the virus, Paul asks Travis if he was wearing a mask and gloves when he picked up Andrew and brought him to his parents. Travis not taking these precautions puts him at greater risk for contracting the virus.

Sometimes I would scroll past articles about Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health professionals advising people to double mask, or articles talking about what precautions to take. In 2020 some states took mask mandates seriously, while others did not, and many of us saw the consequences of making masks a political and personal issue rather than as a thing you have to do to protect you and others against coronavirus. Even though It Comes at Night came out a few years before the pandemic, it is more than timely, and serves as a stark reminder to wash hands, socially distance, and wear a mask and gloves when interacting with others. It also makes a sort of commentary about asymptomatic people because the grandfather at the beginning clearly has the virus, but Will, Sarah and Andrew, it’s not obvious that they have contracted the virus from somewhere else. I saw this as a parallel to people who are asymptomatic because Will, Sarah and Andrew don’t display visible symptoms of the virus. They look perfectly healthy, but as Paul warns Sarah and Travis, they can’t be too sure about that.

Also, the film felt very real because Travis keeps having nightmares about getting the virus. Because a lot of people are under stress during this pandemic (I am no exception) they have been having disturbing dreams related to COVID-19. I don’t blame them though, because this pandemic has been a nightmare for many: people from all around the world have lost their jobs, their loved ones, and their sense of control and order around their circumstances. I myself have had dreams as of late where I would walk in a store and no one was wearing a mask or I was in a college cafeteria one time and students were trying to enter the cafeteria without a mask on, and my mask kept falling off of my face every time I tried to put it on. So it makes sense that Travis in the film kept having nightmares about getting symptoms of the virus or contracting it from others. These repeated nightmares signaled to him that he and his family needed to take precautions and not get too friendly with the family they invited, no matter how nice these people were.

This film also made me appreciate that I have Internet access and a reliable mail service to send letters to people. The family in It Comes At Night had none of that. They are literally in the middle of nowhere not out of choice, but out of survival, because the place they once lived in, the city, is not a safe place anymore to live due to the spread of the virus. I can text, call, and send letters to people to check in on them even if I cannot see them physically.

If anything, this film taught me the value of social distancing. Even though we have a lot of hope because the vaccine is being carried out and distributed, this doesn’t mean I get to just take it easy and hop a plane to see my friends in other states. Had I watched the movie before the pandemic I don’t know if I would have understood it on as deep a level as I do now. Now that I and many have been socially distancing for an entire year, the film was more relatable. I also think if I saw it before the pandemic I probably would have felt more disturbed because it would have felt like something that could only happen in dystopian fiction. But after living through this public health crisis alongside everyone else for a year now, the film was still disturbing but it didn’t feel unreal, surreal or post-apocalyptic because we are dealing with an apocalyptic unpredictable event. And it’s not like there were never pandemics or epidemics, but this one hit so hard that I was forced to reckon with a truth spoken in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin: that no place in the “threefold world” is truly safe. (WND-1, 891)

It Comes At Night. 2017. 1 hr 37 min. Rated R for violence, disturbing images and language.