movies – Page 2 – The Arts Are Life

Thoughts on the movie Whiplash

Several years ago, I watched a College Humor parody that Weird Al Yankovic did of the movie Whiplash to promote his Mandatory World Tour. In the parody, Al makes it so that it actually looks like he is starring in the movie, and that Terence Fletcher is his instructor. Except that Al is playing the accordion, and not the drums like the main character in the movie. It’s a funny parody because Fletcher is this huge perfectionist who keeps pointing out Al’s mistakes, and at first Al is fine with it because he tells Fletcher at the beginning that he wants to be perfect, but he keeps playing the piece at the tempo he wants, not at the tempo Fletcher wants him to play at. The sketch was hilarious, and I saw it years before I finally watched the movie, Whiplash. I’m glad I watched the parody first, though, because watching the actual movie was a very intense experience that made me think of my own struggles with perfectionism and ambition as a musician, and remembering those experiences isn’t always fun because I look back at the kind of person I was back then, and I was super self-critical and hard on myself about everything (I’m still working on taming my inner critic, but I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m talking negatively about myself) and I don’t want to be overly critical of myself anymore.

If you haven’t seen Whiplash, it takes place at a fictional music conservatory in New York City, where an ambitious but shy young jazz drummer named Andrew Neiman enters his freshman year. The movie opens with him practicing for hours in a practice room, and Terence Fletcher, who runs a world-class jazz ensemble, comes in and sees Andrew’s potential. Andrew is starstruck to have met Fletcher because of his reputation, and he expresses interest in wanting to join Fletcher’s ensemble. Andrew starts off in an ensemble where he is not known for being the best player, but then Fletcher visits the class, and everyone is super intimidated by him. Fletcher ends up recruiting Andrew for his jazz ensemble because he can tell that Andrew wants it so badly, and Andrew is so elated to join the group. However, he is in for a really harsh and rude awakening when he realizes that Fletcher is not there to stroke Neiman’s ego or make him feel good about himself. He is there to tear Neiman down until Neiman has a breakdown. Fletcher hears someone playing an out of tune note during rehearsal, and he blames it on one of the horn players. When the kid starts crying, Fletcher shouts at him. Over the course of the movie, Fletcher screams at his students, throws chairs at them, calls them nasty names, humiliates individual students in front of the class and pits the drummers against each other. Andrew ends up taking things to extremes, such as breaking up with his girlfriend, Nicole, so he can pursue his career as a successful jazz drummer. At first, Nicole and Andrew are hitting it off, and Nicole likes Andrew because he seems nice, but then Andrew breaks up with her later on in the movie because he thinks that their relationship is going to hinder him from going after his music dreams. Nicole is deeply hurt and later in the film, when Andrew calls to invite her to a performance of his, she tells him that she would need to ask her boyfriend first. Andrew is hurt because he thought that Nicole would easily forgive him and leave the breakup in the past, but he realizes that Nicole moved on and ended up with someone else.

There is one scene in the movie where Andrew is sitting at the dinner table with his family, and his parents are excitedly talking about his brothers’ achievements in sports and extracurricular activities, but when Andrew tells them excitedly that he got into Terence Fletcher’s jazz ensemble, they kind of go “So what?” or “Who cares?” Andrew tells them that it’s the top jazz ensemble in the nation, and his family asks him where that is going to lead him in the future. Andrew tells them about all these famous musicians who worked really hard at their music to be successful and tells his family he wants to be this huge success as a musician, but the family still doesn’t care about his accomplishments, and Andrew takes this personally and starts to put down his brothers’ achievements, thinking he is better than them because he got into Fletcher’s orchestra. Honestly, this movie resonated with me because I remember in 2016, when I auditioned for this professional orchestra in my hometown, auditioning for this one orchestra became my sole focus, and anything else that didn’t have to do with getting into a professional symphony orchestra took a backseat. I practiced and shredded at my cello for hours upon hours weeks before the audition, cramping my muscles and berating myself over and over for missing notes and not being able to play the piece perfectly. Looking back, I would have probably had a lot more compassion for myself because Don Juan by Richard Strauss, which is a common audition excerpt for symphony orchestra auditions, is a very challenging piece to play and it requires you to play all these notes very fast. It is a beautiful piece to listen to, but it requires a lot of practice to master, and also, if 30-year-old me were talking to 22-year-old me, she would have told her to prepare well in advance instead of trying to cram in hours of practice mere weeks before the audition. 30-year-old me now looks back and while I am grateful for the intensive musical training I underwent and all the hours I have practiced, now when I play my instrument, I try to think long-term about my goals rather than only focusing on getting one audition perfectly, because I realize now how unrealistic it is to expect myself to win an audition perfectly on the first try. Of course, maybe people saw the movie differently, and saw Andrew’s perfectionism as healthy and inspiring, but as someone who went through berating myself and putting myself down, I realized looking back at how I thought about success in my 20s wasn’t very realistic or healthy. I know people say that there is healthy perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism, but I think it’s best to say that there is a difference between healthy striving and perfectionism. Because everyone is going to have their own different version of what “perfect” is, and at the end of the day, it just wasn’t healthy for me to continue pushing myself the way that I was. I still love music and love to play my instrument, but I also have learned to have a life outside of just professional orchestra auditions. I remember when I started working after college at Starbucks, and all I could think about was, “Why am I not playing at Carnegie Hall in New York City right now?” I really wanted to move to New York City to pursue my dream of playing a Carnegie Hall, but back then when I was in my early 20s, I had a very narrow, two-dimensional perspective on success that was just focused on satisfying my own ego. Even though I didn’t win the audition for section cellist, I got on the list of substitute players. I felt kind of crushed, but I asked my orchestra director from college about it, and he encouraged me to not get discouraged about it, which I appreciate looking back because I really wanted to be in that orchestra and beat myself up about it, and I remember while working at Starbucks, I was so impatient to get an opportunity to sub for one of the cellists and I didn’t get any opportunities to sub that year, and I felt rather disappointed. I think in retrospect, dealing with that disappointment and not being able to get what I wanted was probably the best outcome, because I realized that I tied so much of my self-worth and greatness to getting into that symphony orchestra, and I noticed that when I auditioned for other orchestras, I got rejected and would feel so crushed about it. Of course, it’s perfectly normal and healthy to feel disappointment when you don’t ace a test or win a position in an orchestra, but it’s about how you cope with that disappointment. Are you going to throw in the towel and say, fuck it, I am a terrible musician, and I’m not cut out for this career? Or are you going to say, Hey, this really stinks, but it’s not the end of the world and I still know my worth isn’t impacted by whether or not I got into the orchestra.

I think that is why I really loved watching the movie Soul, which I saw a few years ago. If you haven’t seen Soul, it’s about a middle school music teacher named Joe Gardner, who wants to get his big break as a famous jazz musician. He isn’t really happy with his teaching job, or his life in general. He wants to become something great, not lead an ordinary life. However, everything changes when he falls down a manhole while walking down the street, and he falls into a coma. The movie shows how he learns to appreciate his life and not take it for granted after he comes out of his coma, and through his journey as a soul, he realizes the value of his own life and how his worth isn’t based only on how good of a musician he is. Early in the film, Joe wants to impress this legendary saxophonist named Dorothea Williams (played by the beautiful Angela Bassett), but she doesn’t really care about boosting his ego. In fact, she scoffs when he tells her he is a part-time music teacher at a middle school because she doesn’t think that’s a reputable career, so she assumes that he doesn’t have what it takes to be in her jazz band. However, he is so hell-bent on impressing her and while he is performing in the jazz quartet one evening with her, he is dazzling the audience, and Dorothea lets him play quite a few solos. However, after the show is over, even though he got all this applause and recognition, Joe asks her what happens after they played what he thought was his ultimate debut as a jazz musician. Dorothea gives him a huge reality check, though, and tells him that they come back to the club and do the same thing over and over again, play for the same audience every night. Joe realizes that he was so focused on getting his one “big break” as a jazz musician that he ignored so much of what was going on in his daily life. He often took the people and little things in his life for granted, all because he wanted this glamorous career and thought that playing in Dorothea’s quartet was his one shot at being a great musician, but he reflects on what he missed out on in his daily life by focusing only on getting into this lady’s jazz quartet. Honestly, that’s why I really resonated with this movie, because through practicing Nichiren Buddhism, I have learned to appreciate and value my life, whether I play at Carnegie Hall or not. Early on when I was playing music, I was just playing because I loved the music. I wasn’t thinking about conservatory or anything. But as I got older, my teachers started to become more demanding and because I had such a big ego, I would chafe every time my orchestra teacher in senior high school pointed out my mistakes in class. I think all of these music instructors were trying to show me how overly critical I was of myself when I would make mistakes and how arrogant I was at times. I was very fortunate to be able to continue my cello lessons after graduating from college, and I was able to find a wonderful cello instructor and start lessons with him in December of 2016. However, I came into the cello lessons with a sort of cockiness, and I thought, I’ve become an advanced player, so all this guy needs to do is make me a great orchestra musician. I want him to make me the best cellist in the world. He is going to help me make it big as a musician. However, looking back, taking those lessons with him helped me do an incredible amount of human revolution, or inner transformation, because I really did think I was hot shit at the time because I had achieved what I thought was an enviable level of musicianship, but whenever he pointed out my mistakes or got frustrated with me over me repeating these mistakes, it bruised my ego and I would get defensive with him and frustrated with him. As I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and participated in my SGI Buddhist activities, though, I started to really see how arrogant I was becoming and realized that I didn’t need to be arrogant in order to be a great musician. We’re encouraged to chant about our goals and dreams in the Buddhist community I am a part of, and it’s cool because as you continue to practice Buddhism, other parts of your life open up and you begin to see the opportunity in challenging circumstances to create meaning and value. I was so focused on becoming a great musician and playing at Carnegie Hall, and honestly at the time, I thought that Carnegie Hall was the only time I could prove to people that I had “made it” as a classical musician. But I also realized through chanting that I have other skills and interests that I love and enjoy, such as writing and watching movies. I have learned that having a life outside of music is really important, because it helps you gain perspective and realize that the entire planet Earth doesn’t revolve around your success and your ego. I would often feel ashamed to tell people in classical music circles that I had a day job at Starbucks (and later on, a law firm) but after gaining more confidence in myself, I know now that I needed those jobs to gain basic work experience. I remember going to a classical music symposium that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra had for women and people of color who worked in the classical music field, and we had a concert one night where I got to meet the musicians after the concert. I got to talk with one of the cellists in the orchestra, and I thought that she was going to give me this super glamorous insider advice about how to win an orchestra audition and was going to tell me how wonderful being a member of the orchestra was. While she said some great things about working in the orchestra, she said that you also have to deal with a variety of personalities and attend frequent rehearsals. She also encouraged me to not focus only on winning the audition, too, and gave me a realistic perspective on having an orchestra career and auditioning. After we talked, it felt like I been brought down to Earth. Also, talking with my cello teachers helped me because they had been in the professional field for years and had played with orchestras and as soloists, so they were able to give me a realistic picture of what life as a professional musician is really like. I was in my early 20s when I listened to their experiences, and frankly, I wanted them to make a career in a symphony orchestra seem glamorous and effortless. But it’s not like that. Reading the book Reaching Beyond with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Daisaku Ikeda also gave me a more hopeful outlook on being a musician. They said that one’s behavior offstage is just as important as their behavior onstage, so when Wayne was alive, he would treat people with respect even though he was this renowned musician. His Buddhist practice helped him also tap into these endless reserves of creativity and he also used his music to inspire and encourage others, not just for his own personal glory. Herbie Hancock is also the same way. He, too, is a renowned legend in the jazz world, but he always goes back to his Buddhist practice and talks about how it not only helped him tap into those reserves of creativity, but it also helped him value and respect the dignity of all people regardless of their social standing or how much money they made. When I first read the book, I didn’t know if it would apply to me, since I’m trained in classical music and not jazz. But it applied to me very much, because reading the book helped me understand that being a musician is so much more than playing your instrument and it’s definitely not about dazzling people or becoming famous. Music is an expression of people’s humanity, and music has the potential to give people hope and possibility when it doesn’t seem like there is any. I was so focused on stroking my own ego while pursuing this music career, but reading this book encouraged me to go back and chant about my fundamental purpose in life, not just as a musician. Because even if I got my big break at Carnegie Hall, that by itself wouldn’t make me a better (or happier) person. I would still have to show up and go to work like everyone else, and I would have still had to deal with disappointment and failure just like a lot of musicians have to deal with in their careers. But I now play music because I love it and because I want to share it with others.

Movie Review: Hustlers

A few weeks ago, I watched the film, Hustlers. I rented a bunch of movies from the library, and I had wanted to see Hustlers for a while, but I was kind of nervous about seeing it at first because I don’t like vomit scenes in movies (I have emetophobia, which is a fear of vomit) and I read that the film had a few vomit scenes in them (there is a character in the movie named Annabelle, played by Lili Reinhart, who vomits every time she gets nervous. It’s not projectile vomiting thankfully, but it was still kind of gross.) But then I watched an interview that was part of a series that Variety magazine does called Actors on Actors. In this interview series, actors interview each other about their work and their approaches to acting. As someone who knows nothing about acting, it is a really interesting series and it’s also informative because these famous actors, who have taken years to perfect their craft, are talking about what it’s like being an actor. Before watching the series, I had this idea that acting was this glamorous effortless job that was all about fame and fortune, but after watching the series, I realized I had a very shallow, two-dimensional perspective on what goes into acting and making movies. Even though these people love what they do, at the end of the day, it is still a job, and they still have to show up and practice their lines and get in character. There was one episode of Actors on Actors featuring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lopez. They talked with each other about the movies they were in; Robert was in a film called The Lighthouse and Jennifer Lopez was in the movie Hustlers. Even though I hadn’t seen either of the movies yet, I really love how down-to-earth Jennifer and Robert were in their conversation with each other. You can tell they really, really love acting because they talk about it with such passion, and they loved watching each other’s movies. I think it helped for me to watch both The Lighthouse and Hustlers after seeing the interview, though, because after watching the movies, I was able to appreciate on a deeper level than before the work they did for both of their films. As a high schooler, I remember seeing Robert Pattinson playing Edward Cullen in Twilight and hearing my fellow classmates gush about Edward’s hotness and how he sparkled. I’m glad, though, that he went on to do other work like The Lighthouse and another movie called Good Time, because it shows another side of his acting that I hadn’t seen. Don’t get me wrong; Twilight was great and I admit, I was a bit of a Twilight fanatic back in the day. But then I saw Robert Pattinson in Good Time and then The Lighthouse, and he really takes the acting to another level in these films. In The Lighthouse, he and Willem Dafoe lose their sanity while living on an isolated island in the 19th century, and as the film progresses it gets darker and darker. But the acting was really good. I hadn’t seen Jennifer Lopez’s other films like Selena and Monster-In-Law, but like a lot of people I grew up jamming out to “Jenny from the Block” and “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.” When I saw her in Hustlers I was blown away. I’m not going to lie; Hustlers was an INTENSE movie. Then again, it is about a pretty intense true story. But I’m glad I watched it because I had never heard of it before, and I loved the acting and also the soundtrack for the movie. I love hip-hop, so I loved hearing “I Get Money” by 50 Cent and other songs. The soundtrack features a wide variety of artists, including Fiona Apple, Bob Seger, and a 19th century classical music composer named Frederic Chopin, and honestly each song went so well with each scene. I really love how they used “Night Moves” by Bob Seger for one of the scenes because it’s one of my favorite songs. And I think the song “Royals” by Lorde fits the ending pretty well because of how the film’s events led up to the ending.

If you haven’t seen the film, Hustlers is based on a true story about a group of strippers in New York who got male clients drunk and conned them out of their money. I haven’t read the story yet, but I want to so I can understand what happened in real life and how it compares to how the director depicted it in the movie. The movie is about a stripper named Destiny (played by Constance Wu) living in New York City who is struggling to take care of her grandmother, who is struggling to pay off her debts. She isn’t able to make much money from the male clients who frequent the strip club, but then she sees one of the strippers, Ramona, performing a dance to “Criminal” by Fiona Apple and making it rain with money as male clients shower her with dollar bills. Destiny approaches Ramona about her techniques and skills and wants to learn from her so she can earn more money, and Ramona shows her how to do certain moves and attract more clients. I really love the scene in which Ramona dances to “Criminal” not just because I am a huge Fiona Apple fan, but because I just loved how Ramona got really into it while dancing. Destiny makes more money, and she is able to go back to school and help her grandmother get out of debt. Destiny also meets a really cute guy at a party and they start dating and have a daughter together (I didn’t know that Destiny’s boyfriend was played by the rapper G-Eazy until I saw the end credits. He looked really familiar.)

However, things take a turn when the Wall Street financial crisis happens, and the dancers who work at these clubs find themselves losing male clients who can’t afford to keep going out to the clubs. Destiny also has a fight with her boyfriend, and they break up, leaving her to raise her daughter alone. Ramona is also struggling to pay her rent and take care of her daughter. Ramona ends up hatching a plan for her and Destiny to get together with some other dancers and put drugs in the male clients’ drinks and take all the money off of their credit cards while these men were unconscious from drinking drugged alcohol. For some reason, I thought about this movie I watched a few months ago called The Big Short, which is about the 2008 Wall Street crash. There is a scene that takes place shortly before the crash and it takes place at a strip club, and one of the people working in Wall Street who is warning people about the upcoming housing market crisis is telling a young woman working as a dancer at the strip club about how the housing market bubble is going to burst and people are going to lose everything in the financial crisis, and she refuses to believe that anything bad is going to happen by people inflating their lifestyles. She says in the scene that since things seem so great with the housing market, she owns four or five of these big homes and dealing with these properties (I forgot exactly what she said she did with the houses since I saw the movie a while ago) is another way she can invest in the market. However, as the movie progresses, the prospect of people holding onto that wealth looks really, really bleak. The movie shows how people are getting evicted from their homes, losing their jobs and being unable to make ends meet. During the financial crisis, with less men going to the strip clubs, Ramona and the other dancers have to take on extra hours at their day jobs to make ends meet. The plan to drug the male clients seems to work out at first, and there is a scene where Ramona and the other strip club dancers are celebrating in this big, luxurious apartment over the Christmas holidays with the expensive gifts that Ramona bought them with the money she and the other strippers took from the male clients’ bank accounts. Eventually, Ramona and Destiny get caught and Destiny has to speak to a reporter named Elizabeth (played by Julia Stiles) about everything that went down.

Another thing I loved about the film was the acting. It was incredible. I hadn’t seen much of Constance Wu’s other works other than Crazy Rich Asians, which she was also really good in. She acted the heck out of Destiny in Hustlers: the emotions, the facial expressions, the dancing. She and Jennifer Lopez both gave really powerful performances, and they put their all into expressing the dynamics between Ramona and Destiny in their friendship. Even when they call off the friendship after what transpires, they still share a struggle as these single moms who are trying to survive and make ends meet and also deal with disrespect and discrimination from society as women of color who are also strippers. The friendship dynamic between Ramona and Destiny kind of reminded me of this movie I saw called Zola, which is also about stripping and tensions in female friendship. If you haven’t seen Zola, it is based on a true Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” Wells (last name formerly King) who worked as a stripper in Detroit and went on a trip to Florida with a white girl named Jessica Jessica’s boyfriend, Jared, and Jessica’s pimp. The trip ended up being a sex trafficking operation and Jessica ended up putting Zola’s life in jeopardy. In the movie, Zola (played by Taylour Paige) is working at a Hooter’s in Detroit, Michigan, and one day while serving she encounters a white girl named Stefani (played by Riley Keough). Stefani and Zola bond over being strippers, and they follow each other on social media and become fast friends. Stefanie texts her one evening telling her that a friend of hers told her about some opportunities in Florida to make extra money dancing. At first Zola is skeptical, and so is her fiancé, but Zola ends up taking the trip because her and Stefani are becoming such great friends, and so Zola packs her bags and goes with Stefani, Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and Stefani’s pimp named X (Colman Domingo). At first, they are all bonding over their time together in the car on the way to Florida and rapping, twerking and jamming to “Hannah Montana” by Migos. But as the trip wears on, Zola starts to notice some red flags in her friendship with Stefani, and as the movie progresses, she realizes that Stefani lied to her about this being just a fun trip for them to make extra money as dancers. Zola had to advocate for Stefani to charge more for clients she was having sex with because X wasn’t letting her charge more for her services. It’s also exhausting for Zola to have to watch Stefani have sex with all these clients, and also hard for Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek because he loves her and seeing her get involved in what turns out to be a sex trafficking operation is painful for him because he doesn’t want her to get hurt. Thankfully they make it out alive, but Zola is still traumatized and scarred by what Stefani put her through, and she feels (rightfully) betrayed that this girl she thought was her friend lied to her and put her in a dangerous situation. Zola realizes that Stefani was just taking advantage of her and wasn’t actually a true friend who cared about Zola’s safety. Sure, they both had in common that they were dancers, but at the end of the day, Stefani was only going to look out for her own interests and Zola even shouts at Stefani that her “brain is broke” for putting her through this crazy situation. There is a scene where Stefani briefly tells the story of how her and Zola fell out, but her side of the story is so ridiculous and makes Zola look like the bad guy instead of Stefani. She portrays herself as this good white Christian woman wearing a suit and wearing her hair in this neat bun, while Zola is shown with straw in her hair and later wearing a large trash bag. It is so absurd because I knew that Stefani’s version of the story was inaccurate while Zola was telling the truth about what happened. The film also showed the racial dynamics in their friendship. There is a scene in the film where Stefani is telling this offensive story about a Black woman and she says a lot of disrespectful things, like describing the woman as having a “nappy-ass head” and Zola is realizing, Yikes this white girl is real racist. It’s clear by the time the film is over that Zola and Stefani never actually had a genuine friendship, and even after all the shit that Stefani put Zola through during the course of the movie, she expects Zola to still love her and be her friend, but Zola ignores her as they continue the trip back home. The movie showed me that friendships can be messy even if you share a common experience with the person, and that’s why I thought about Zola when I was writing this review about Hustlers because it’s about female friendship and the complicated parts of that friendship, including how hard it is to leave toxic friendships. Zola couldn’t just go home and forget what happened; Stefani, Derrek and X put her through a LOT of shit, and Zola didn’t have her own car to just get away when shit hit the fan. She put up with a lot of nonsense, and was in a dangerous situation where X was threatening to kill her if she didn’t go with him and Stefani’s plans. Similarly, Destiny couldn’t just walk away from her friendship with Ramona and forget that Ramona had her participate in doing something illegal and was also getting her to involve other strippers in drugging the male clients. What Ramona put Destiny through was pretty intense, and so when Elizabeth (the journalist) asks Destiny about her friendship with Ramona and how they ended up falling out, Destiny is reluctant to talk about it because their friendship was so complicated.

I need to head to bed, but overall, I recommend watching Hustlers. It is an excellent movie.

Movie Review: My Old Ass

A few weeks ago, I came home from work craving a movie. I hadn’t been to a movie theater since the start of the pandemic, and I was wondering when I would ever feel comfortable enough to go back into a crowded theater. Normally I wait until the movie is streaming and no longer in theaters to watch it, but for some reason I was just really wanting to go to see a movie in the theaters. because I hadn’t gone in a long time and really missed going. Of course, I wanted to be safe and wear an N95 mask to the theater since I assumed it was going to be crowded. I figured I would go by myself, but then I told my parents, and we ended up seeing a film together. It was a huge benefit because we went to the 4:20 showing of this movie called My Old Ass, and the theater wasn’t crowded at all. There were only two other people who showed up for My Old Ass, so we pretty much had the theater to ourselves. I was kind of nervous since my family is still observing COVID-19 protocols, but it worked out fine and we still made sure to wear our face masks.

The minute I walked into the theater, I realized I had forgotten my earplugs, which was a bummer because I forgot how loud the surround sound is in the movie theater. The Gladiator II trailer was playing, and it was LOUD. I had to cover my ears during the trailer. But at the same time, I forgot how happy I was going to a theater to see a movie. It took a few years before I was comfortable enough to go back into a movie theater because I wasn’t sure about the transmission of COVID-19, but again, it was a huge benefit that there was almost no one in the theater except for a few other people. Some other trailers that showed were Conclave, which stars Stanley Tucci and Ralph Fiennes, Wicked with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and A Real Pain which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin (I love comedy-drama movies, so I really want to see it. Also, I love Jesse and Kieran’s acting, and I loved Kieran’s acting in the show Succession. The trailer also looked really good.)

If you haven’t seen My Old Ass, it’s a science-fiction comedy drama starring Canadian actress Maisy Stella as Elliott, an 18-year-old girl who plans to move out of her boring hometown and go to university in Toronto. At the beginning, we see her celebrating her 18th birthday with her friends Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks). They ride a boat on water, with Elliott steering the boat wrong and bumping into stuff most of the time. Elliott gets off the boat and goes into a bakery where this cute girl named Chelsea works, and even though Elliott is nervous to talk to Chelsea, Ruthie and Ro encourage her to do so since Elliott might not see this girl again when she goes to college. Also, it’s her 18th birthday, so hooking up with this cute girl is the best present ever. Meanwhile, Elliott’s parents and two brothers are sitting at the kitchen table while the birthday cake they made for Elliott sits lonely at the center of the table with an 18th birthday candle in the middle. Elliott continues to hang out with her friends, and in the evening, they go on a camping trip and try a mixture of psychedelic mushrooms. Ruthie and Ro start tripping out and dancing around the forest, and Elliott thinks she is tripping out, too, when a 39-year-old version of future Elliott (played by Aubrey Plaza) appears. However, the older version of Elliott (known henceforth by Elliott as My Old Ass) is really there. Elliott has all sorts of questions for My Old Ass, and even asks the hilarious question, “Can I touch My Old Ass? What does it feel like?” However, My Old Ass has gone through some serious life experiences, and she isn’t about to bullshit Elliott about what to do with her life. Elliott thinks that in her 30s, she’ll still be partying and having fun, but My Old Ass looks back with regret at a lot of things she did in her youth, and she’s come back to Elliott in hopes that Elliott will get to change and not make decisions or do things she regrets.

A couple of things My Old Ass tells Elliott to do is 1. to spend more time with her family before she leaves for Toronto and 2. to avoid a guy named Chad. When I first saw the trailer, I didn’t know what to expect. Who was Chad? Was he a bad guy? I came in cold not knowing who Chad was. Elliott promises to obey My Old Ass, and she doesn’t think she will fall in love with anyone else because she successfully asked Chelsea out and they are in a relationship with each other. However, Elliott goes to swim in the lake one day and encounters a young guy named Chad. Chad seems friendly enough, but Elliott remembers that My Old Ass told her to avoid Chad. Elliott tries to dodge Chad, but she can’t seem to avoid him, and she finds herself falling in love with him. Elliott remains conflicted: should she avoid Chad or disobey My Old Ass and have sex with him? Chad is a nice and respectful young man, and honestly, at first, I wondered why My Old Ass told Elliott to not fall in love with him. Was he a cheater? Was he a jerk? These were all questions I asked myself as the film went on. Elliott gradually falls more and more in love with Chad, and even though she is in love at first with Chelsea, she starts hanging out with Chad more often. Elliott also starts to spend more time with her family even though she doesn’t want to at first. Elliott gets a rude awakening when she finds out that her family’s farm is being sold and no one told her about it. Elliott asks her parents and siblings why no one told her, and they tell her that they didn’t think she would care about the farm getting sold because she was always talking about how she wanted to leave her hometown. However, Elliott has many childhood memories of the farm and doesn’t want it to be sold. She starts to confide her problems and worries to Chad, and he listens and supports her. Elliott later tells him that she is bisexual, but Chad accepts her for who she is, and they end up having sex. Elliott tries to contact My Old Ass for a while, but My Old Ass doesn’t reappear much during the middle of the movie. Elliott isn’t able to get ahold of her, but then later on My Old Ass finds out that Elliott had sex with Chad, and she is very upset. Elliott asks her why she didn’t want her to sleep with Chad, but My Old Ass doesn’t want to tell her why. But Elliott persists in knowing what happened to Chad, and finally My Old Ass tells her that she didn’t want Elliott to fall in love with Chad because Chad in the future ended up getting killed in a car crash. My Old Ass is still recovering from the grief of losing Chad, and she doesn’t want 18-year-old Elliott to go through the same thing. Chad is able to see My Old Ass and meets her, and instead of continuing to tell Elliott to avoid Chad so that she wouldn’t risk losing him, My Old Ass tells Elliott to do what she wants and to enjoy her time with Chad because she sees that Elliott is truly happy to be with Chad. By the time the movie was over, I was crying and blowing my nose in several tissuesI think I resonated with this movie so much because I saw myself in Elliott in some ways. I resonated with her wanting to leave her hometown to go to college somewhere else because when I was in high school, I was so determined to leave my hometown and go out of state for college. I thought I was going to be happier leaving the South for the East Coast, and whenever someone at school or at home annoyed me, I just smugly said, “Well, in [x] months, I’ll be out of here!” But during my first year, I realized how hard it was to live so far away from home without the constant presence of my family. I took my parents’ presence for granted, and when I left for college, I cried pretty much every day because I missed them. At the end of the school year, I was so relieved to come back home for the summer because I was going to spend it with my family. I know this sounds corny, but it’s true: you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Also, after reflecting on the movie, I realized that it was teaching me an important lesson: you cannot change the past, but you can focus on the present and the future. Even though future Elliott wanted to change her past, she couldn’t. 18-year-old Elliott was going to make mistakes and do stuff that 39-year-old Elliott was going to regret, and she had to accept that. Even though 39-year-old Elliott told 18-year-old Elliott to avoid Chad, she could not. She wanted to try and shield 18-year-old Elliott from the pain of losing a loved one, but she couldn’t undo what she did in the past or make Chad live forever. She had to let 18-year-old Elliott be 18-year-old Elliott. However, through the course of the movie, 18-year-old Elliott learns that she can’t take her family or the people in her life for granted. As I’ve been reading a lot about life and death in Buddhism, it’s made me appreciate the fact that my parents gave me life. Without my parents, I would not be here, and that’s just a fact that I eventually had to come to. And it’s scary to realize, but the reality is that I want to enjoy being with them now because at some point, like me and everyone else, they will pass away. Going through grief is going to hurt like a motherfucker, but I am going to have to go through it like everyone else, so I want to cherish these people in my life while I have them.

Movie Review: Fancy Dance

Last week, I finished a movie called Fancy Dance. I really loved the Indigenous actress, Lily Gladstone, in the film Killers of the Flower Moon, so when I saw the trailer for this movie, which you can find on Apple TV, I was so excited. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily plays a woman named Mollie Burkhart, who in real life was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Ernest and his uncle plotted the murders of several wealthy Indigenous people who live in Osage County in Oklahoma. Ernest is a chauffeur for Mollie, and he falls in love with her. They marry and have a child together. But Mollie finds out that members of her family and members of the Osage Nation are being murdered at alarming rates in the most gruesome disturbing ways, and Ernest also poisons her under the guise that she needs insulin shots for her diabetes. I had to pause the film a few times because I didn’t know about the Osage Murders and hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon beforehand, so the film was really harrowing to watch, and each time I saw an Indigenous person get brutally murdered in the film, I would start crying. I finally was able to finish the film, but it stuck with me for a very long time, and thinking about the movie still gives me goosebumps, as it was intended to do because watching intergenerational racial trauma on screen depicted in the most realistic way is never easy to stomach, especially if your high school history textbooks never went into depth about this dark part of American history.

On Tuesday of last week, it was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I wanted to watch a movie that had Indigenous actors in it. Even though Killers of the Flower Moon blew me away, I don’t have the stomach to watch it again unfortunately, so that’s why I was really glad to have heard about Fancy Dance. The trailer was amazing, and thankfully I was able to watch it on Apple TV. Honestly, after watching the movie, it reminds me that we need more Indigenous voices in Hollywood. Lily Gladstone is going to pave the way for many more Indigenous actors and actresses to produce and star in movies where Indigenous people’s experiences are represented authentically and accurately. I haven’t seen a lot of movies with representation of LGBTQ+ Indigenous people, so it was actually really cool that Jax (Lily Gladstone’s character) was able to be her queer self in Fancy Dance. There is a scene where she goes to a strip club and meets with one of the strippers who works there named Sapphire, and Sapphire and her make love with each other. Lily Gladstone in real life identifies as queer and goes by she/ they pronouns. She explained in an article on Salon that in a lot of Native languages they don’t have gendered pronouns, and while growing up on a Blackfeet reservation people were more accepting of gender fluidity than outside of the community. I don’t know a lot about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people of Indigenous tribes, but as someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community and loves anything LGBTQIA+, reading this article about Lily’s pronouns was very affirming. Growing up, I didn’t know a lot of other queer people of color until I got to college, and I also didn’t know much about the LGBTQIA+ terminology and diverse sexual orientations and genders until I got to college, which was, for the most part, an affirming environment for LGBTQIA+ people (I only say “most part” because I only know my own experience. I can’t speak for the experiences of other queer students of color who attended the college.)

It was an incredible film, and Lily Gladstone was also one of the producers of the film. She plays the protagonist in the movie, named Jax. Jax is searching for her missing sister, Tawi, and because her sister is missing, Jax is letting her niece, Roki, stay with her until they find Tawi. Roki wants to participate in the upcoming powwow to honor her mother, who participated in the powwow. However, child protective services barges into Jax’s house and takes Roki away because Tawi is gone and did drugs when Roki was staying with her, and they don’t think Jax is a suitable guardian for Roki. Roki ends up staying with her grandfather, Frank, and her step-grandmother, and she doesn’t enjoy it. One night at dinner, Jax asks if she can take Roki to the powwow in Oklahoma City, but Frank and his wife don’t want her to do that because they don’t want to get in trouble with child protective services. However, Jax sneaks out and has Roki come with her so they can travel to the powwow together. JJ, who is Jax’s brother, is trying to help Jax find her missing sister, but Frank and his wife have issued a search warrant to find Roki. When Roki goes into a gas station to get some snacks, she sees on the TV screen her and Jax’s face, and the reporters accusing Jax of kidnapping Roki. Roki and Jax continue to travel to the powwow, doing their best to stay undercover.

I think one of the most painful scenes of the film was when Roki overhears Jax telling JJ that Roki’s mom isn’t going to be at the powwow. Roki thinks that her mother is going to be at the powwow, but JJ ends up searching for Tawi and one evening finds Tawi’s corpse in a lake. While they are traveling to the powwow, Roki stops to go into the gas station, and the cashier recognizes her from the photos on the TV showing Roki and Jax. Earlier in the movie, Roki takes a lady’s purse, which has a gun in it, and in the scene where the cashier recognizes her and is about to call the cops, she aims the gun at the cashier, threatening to shoot him if he calls the police on her and Jax. Jax is outside, wondering why Roki is taking so long, when suddenly she hears a loud gunshot from inside the gas station store. She rushes into the store and finds Roki holding the shotgun and shaking with the impact after she fired the gun, and the cashier face down in a pool of blood. Jax calls 911 to send the paramedics over (Roki had shot the man in the shoulder) and Jax and Roki both run through the cornfields to escape the police. When Jax tells Roki to come with her, Roki stays behind. When Jax asks her why she doesn’t want to come with her, Roki tells her that she overheard Jax telling JJ that Tawi (Roki’s mom) wasn’t going to be at the powwow, and it really hurt that Jax lied to her because up until then, Roki placed all of her trust in Jax. Now that she knows the truth, she feels she cannot trust Jax anymore and runs away towards the oncoming police sirens.

There are some rare moments of shared tender joy between Roki and Jax in the film. Roki gets her first period (she calls it her first moon) and not having any menstrual products, Jax cuts up one of the diapers in the lady’s bag and has Roki use it as a sanitary pad. They celebrate by going to a diner, and Jax lets Roki order whatever she wants. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, crepes, waffles and other breakfast dishes, and enjoys them. When Roki and Jax are leaving, a cop interrogates them about their whereabouts and has Roki come into his police car to ask her a few questions. I seriously thought that they were going to get caught, but Roki gives an anonymous name, and the police looks her up in the system and says that Roki and Jax are cleared and can go. While they are driving, Roki admits to Jax that her menstrual blood accidentally stained the seat of the policeman’s car, and they both laugh about it.

**This is a total digression, but I remember when I got my period at 13; I wasn’t super excited. Instead, I was pretty moody. I don’t even know how I could have vegan chocolate cake on my period that day, because normally if I eat desserts or consume sugar on my period, I get terrible menstrual cramps. It’s a bummer but until I go see a gynecologist about any underlying causes of period pain, I need to be mindful of how much sugar I eat on my period. I often take it for granted that I have a period now that I’m much older, but after reflecting on the scene where Roki gets her period, I remember how significant my first period was, not just for me but for my family. I was becoming a young woman, and my body was going through these new changes. I wasn’t just throwing up when I got the flu. I was throwing up whenever I was on my period because my cramps were so bad, and I would often need to miss school, work or my SGI Buddhist activities because I was in such terrible pain. I remember when I watched this ad from Hello Flo, and this teen girl is jealous because all her friends were getting their periods and she hadn’t yet. The girl puts ruby-red nail polish on a sanitary pad and shows it to her friends to prove she got her period. The mom finds the pad and even though she knows that the daughter is lying about being on her period, she plays along with it and tells the daughter she is throwing her a “first moon party” that celebrates her first period. The daughter is embarrassed when her grandpa and other people start to arrive to the first moon party, and the mom invents games for people like “Pin the Pad on the Period” and has period themed foods, like a period-red fondue fountain where people can dip their marshmallows in period-red fondue. The daughter tells her mom to stop it, but the mom shows her daughter that she got her a period starter kit and lets her daughter know that she knew about her putting nail polish on the sanitary pad. It’s a cute commercial, and it actually made me appreciate having a period. Even though it’s not fun and it’s painful, as I learn more about periods and reproductive health, I think it’s pretty cool that my body has this interesting function. Whether I’m going to have babies or not, I don’t know, but I’m just going to let my body do its thing for the time being until I hit menopause. **

Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine

When I was 13, I took a spring break trip to Washington, D.C. for a extracurricular program. While eating lunch with these two boys, I heard them talking about this movie called Little Miss Sunshine. I hadn’t seen the movie, and frankly my parents weren’t going to take me, a 12-year-old, to see any R-rated movies anytime soon (then again, I’m sure there were plenty of 12-year-olds watching R-rated movies at the school I went to.) But I decided to rent it from the library because I had always been curious about it. The late Alan Arkin, who plays one of the characters in Little Miss Sunshine, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the movie. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from the movie since I only saw the trailer a while ago, but it was really good. It also has Paul Dano in it, and Paul is one of my favorite actors. He plays a character in Little Miss Sunshine named Dwayne, who has jet-black hair and has taken a vow of silence until he is admitted into pilot school. He loves philosophy and reads works by a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. He also is very cynical in his outlook on life and hates being around his family (although he does love his little sister, Olive, who is played by Abigail Breslin). Olive is a spunky girl who wants to participate in a beauty pageant for Little Miss Sunshine. However, her dad is a super-ambitious guy with really high standards who can’t tolerate failure, so he tells her that they will only take her to the pageant if she is positive that she will win the pageant. Her dad, Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker trying to promote this class about becoming successful, yet the irony is that he is not successful in getting the class to sell well and he falls short of his expectations. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is just doing her best to keep the family together while also making sure that her brother, Frank (Steve Carrell) doesn’t try to commit suicide again after a serious attempt on his life. Frank is gay and a scholar of the French author Marcel Proust, and he attempted suicide because his ex-boyfriend fell in love with someone else who was also a scholar of Proust, and this left Frank feeling like shit. I kind of resonated with what Frank went through because I fell in love with someone who was in a relationship with someone else, and when this person got engaged, I felt my life had no meaning left, so I had to really rebuild my self-esteem after experiencing that painful heartbreak over not being with someone who I thought I really loved.

The family also lives with their foul-mouthed grandfather, Erwin (Alan Arkin), who got evicted from a retirement home after snorting heroin. When I was sitting with those two boys (one of them was named Seth and he was from New Mexico) and they were laughing about the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, at first, I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about, but then after watching the movie, I was like, “Ohhhh I can see why people really loved the grandfather’s part (and why Alan Arkin won an Oscar for his role).” The grandfather says what he wants and does what he wants and doesn’t care about the consequences. He encourages Olive to enter the pageant because he sees it’s something she really wants to do, and unlike Olive’s dad, he doesn’t care whether she wins or loses, he just wants her to try and have fun, so he prepares her for the pageant. He is pretty homophobic, though, and constantly makes digs at Frank’s sexuality. Edwin also loves reading pornographic magazines, and has Frank go into a convenience store to get pornographic magazines.

One key theme of the movie is failure and being true to oneself. Early on in the movie, there is a scene in which Olive and her family go to a diner on the way to the beauty pageant, and Olive orders ice cream and is super excited to have the ice cream. But her dad explains to her that ice cream will make her gain weight and that if she were a true winner, she would work on losing weight. I was pretty hurt when he made this comment about her, especially since she’s a young girl and is forming her self-image. But I love the part when Olive’s ice cream arrives, and Edwin, Frank and Dwayne joke that if Olive won’t eat the ice cream, they will, and as they start eating the ice cream, Edwin looks at Olive as if to say, Ignore your dad. Eat your ice cream. Finally, Olive can’t take it anymore, and she tells them to not eat all of it. She finally eats her ice cream with delight, and her dad looks disappointed and frustrated that Olive didn’t want to do as he said. I also really love the scene when Edwin (Olive’s grandfather) is helping Olive with her dance routine, and she admits to him that she is worried about winning the pageant and whether she is pretty enough. Edwin tells her to just focus on doing her best, and that the worst she can do is not try. I really like this message because from the limited knowledge I have about children’s beauty pageants, it seems like parents can put a lot of pressure on young girls to fit a certain weight and image. Little Miss Sunshine came out in 2006, waaaay before Instagram and TikTok were around, so I can’t imagine how Olive would feel about herself if she was on social media. I read this book a long time ago called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and in the book, he talks about the impacts of social media and excessive phone use on girls’ mental health and self-esteem. There is one part in the book where he shares a story about an 11-year-old girl who saw all her peers getting Instagram, and even though she was under the minimum age to sign up for an account, she did so anyway, and as she continued to use the site, Instagram’s algorithm bombarded her with all these images of thin women and misleading information about these unhealthy diets, and she began to feel really terrible about herself and her body. Haidt reprinted a drawing she did of her being on her phone and word bubbles with all these nasty things she said about herself and had people say to her encircling her. The girl in the picture is crying as she is absorbing all of these harmful messages that tell her she is ugly, fat, and worthless. I think that’s why I appreciate watching Little Miss Sunshine because the movie shows how, even though Olive struggled with her self-confidence after seeing the other girls perform at the pageant, she ended up doing her own thing and staying true to herself.

The talent show scene was the best part of the movie because there is a pivotal moment where Frank and Dwayne tell Sheryl that Olive shouldn’t go onstage to do her act because everyone will laugh at her, and they don’t want Olive to feel bad about herself. When he first arrives at the competition, Dwayne sees the young contestants walk by with their makeup and dresses and he and Frank have to leave to get some fresh air because they think that the pageant is fake and superficial. Sheryl, however, says that they need to let Olive be herself while on stage, especially because her grandfather, who died on the way to the pageant, would have wanted Olive to have fun and do her best rather than drop out at the last minute because she was worried about not winning. When she gets on stage, Olive dances to “Super Freak,” by Rick James, which unnerves the audience. Parents start to leave the auditorium, offended by Olive’s dance routine, which involves a lot of gyrating (I’m pretty sure her grandfather made up the routine) and the lady who runs the pageant tries to kick Olive off the stage, but then Olive’s dad joins her on stage, and then Dwayne, Frank and Sheryl join her in dancing, too. Most of the audience members leave because they are taken aback, but I found it kind of ironic that they found her performance too suggestive because for most of the pageant, these adults are having these little girls wear suggestive costumes and put on a lot of makeup so that they look older than they are. I honestly wonder if the girls who competed against Olive actually had healthy self-esteem, because it’s not easy to be yourself when it seems everyone else around you act more confident than they actually are. I know as a young girl I would often compare myself to my peers and it really took a hit to my self-worth. I think that’s why chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist mantra I chant every day) helped me when I was growing up because instead of comparing myself too much to my peers, I needed to build confidence from within myself. Even as a 30-year-old I still struggle with self-confidence, but I am getting better at recognizing when I struggle with self-doubt or imposter syndrome.

Movie Review: School Daze

This past weekend I watched the movie School Daze, which was directed by filmmaker Spike Lee. I was curious about it because a few years ago, at the Academy Awards, Lil’ Rel Howery picked certain actors to guess film music trivia, and he asked Glenn Close if she recognized a tune from Spike Lee’s movie, School Daze. She knew what tune it was, and the minute “Da Butt” by EU played, she got up there and shook that fine behind of hers and looked like she was having the time of her life. It was really funny and also just really cool that she got up there and danced to “Da Butt.” So, I was curious about the movie. My dad had seen a lot of Spike Lee joints (movies that Spike Lee directed), and we were talking about School Daze. School Daze came out before I was born, so I didn’t get a chance to see it early on, but I finally decided that I want to catch up on all the movies I didn’t see as a kid.

One part of the film I really love is the scenes with step dancing. The film takes place at a historically Black college between different Greek fraternities and sororities. I remember seeing a step team perform at my high school one time, and the dancers on the team were on FIRE. It was so epic to watch, and each time they stepped and hollered, I really wanted to get up and dance. There is also an episode on the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae where J and CeCe attend a Halloween party at the office they work at, and instead they find that the new boss (and J’s nemesis) Nina is planning to hold them hostage, and Nina leads a team of Black female step dancers called Gamma Ray. I didn’t know if it was supposed to be funny at first, but I saw the scenes in School Daze where the fraternities are dancing and chanting “Gamma” over and over again, and so I figured there was a connection between Awkward Black Girl and this scene in the movie, and sure enough, the Halloween episode of ABG was adapted from the movie School Daze.

The movie also addresses the issue of colorism. Colorism is a huge issue in African American communities, and I didn’t know much about it until I started taking African American Studies classes in college. Colorism is “discrimination based on skin color within the same racial or ethnic group” and it dates back to slavery, where lighter-skinned Black people were treated differently than darker-skinned Black people were. There is a belief that lighter skin enables people to gain greater access than darker skin. I don’t really know how I fit into the colorism debate, because I am Black, but people have also told me I look like different ethnicities. In the movie, the female sororities are divided by skin color, and in a musical number they argue over whether lighter skinned Black girls’ hair is more socially acceptable than darker-skinned Black girls’ hair. I remember watching this documentary by the actor Chris Rock several years ago called Good Hair, and in the movie, Rock explores the significance of hairstyles in the Black community and what is considered to be socially acceptable or attractive hair both within the Black community and outside the Black community. There have been many instances where Black people have had to cut off their dreadlocks or have faced discrimination in the workplace due to their natural hairstyles. I remember growing up and sometimes my teachers (most of them white) would ask if they could touch my hair, which I would either keep in an Afro or style in braids. I understand they were curious, but after learning more about racial discrimination and microaggressions in college, I don’t look back on those moments with much fondness. It’s interesting, though, because some of the other Black girls in my school would comment “You should straighten your hair.” In sixth grade, another Black girl in my gym class looked at my braids, which often got fuzzy, and said, “Hmmm…you should straighten your hair.” Another young Black girl in my sophomore year of high school told me, “I think if you straighten your hair, it will look pretty.” I’m not against straightening my hair, but to be honest, I like my curls.

The film was directed in the 1980s and attitudes towards women, especially Black women, were more outdated (not saying sexism doesn’t exist anymore, because it totally does.) There is one scene where the fraternity members make fun of Spike Lee’s character, Half Pint, for being a virgin, and the leader of the fraternity tells Half Pint that he needs to lose his virginity to a girl in order to be accepted into the fraternity. Even though he doesn’t want to, Half Pint goes along with it because he would become an outcast if he said no, and he really wants to pledge with this fraternity. The frat brothers end up hooking him up with one of the popular girls, and she doesn’t want to have sex with Half Pint, but the men coerce her into doing it. (At this point, I wasn’t sure if it was right to even call this scene consensual sex because the girl didn’t want to have sex, and she felt humiliated afterwards.) We have more discussions about date rape and consent, I think because we have more communication channels through which people can share this information about these very important topics. I didn’t understand the difference between sex and rape until I got on Facebook in 2017 during the #MeToo movement on social media, and I saw a post that said that “Rape is not sex. It’s rape.” I at times would conflate the two, not understanding that rape isn’t consensual. But after reading this post, I decided to educate myself and become more aware.

Movie Review: Red Rocket

A few weeks ago, I watched a movie called Red Rocket. I watched the trailer, and it looked interesting, especially because it played one of my favorite songs, “Bye, Bye, Bye” by NSYNC. I really love Sean Baker’s movies. I loved The Florida Project and Tangerine, so I was looking forward to seeing this one. It’s a black or dark comedy, so it will make you pretty uncomfortable watching it, but I tend to gravitate towards dark comedies a lot of the time. I don’t consider myself a cynic or anything, but somehow, I gravitate towards dark comedy probably because it gives insight into human nature and the less favorable aspects of human nature. Not everyone is a nice person and not everyone is going to change for the better. I really love Sean Baker’s films, too, because they shed light on marginalized communities that don’t get a lot of great representation, such as trans sex workers in Tangerine and low-income communities that live near Walt Disney World in The Florida Project. I haven’t seen a lot of movies that have empowering representations of female sex workers other than Zola (directed by Janizca Bravo), and I didn’t grow up watching a lot of movies that presented an empowering portrayal of trans people, or even a lot of movies that had trans actresses playing the main characters. The only other movie I saw that shows any empathy or compassion for trans characters is A Fantastic Woman, which came out in 2017 and stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress and singer from Chile.

I also haven’t seen many films that shed light on the lives of sex workers in general, or ones that feature them as the protagonists, other than Zola and Tangerine. Red Rocket was really intriguing to watch, because the main character is a retired adult film actor whose wife also worked in the adult film industry. Mikey Saber, who worked in the adult film industry for two decades, comes back to his hometown of Texas City, Texas to try and make a comeback in his career. I don’t know why he left Los Angeles, which is where he worked in the adult film industry, but it was apparently something really not great that motivated him to leave the city and go back home. When he comes back home, he expects everyone to celebrate him coming back, saying “I’ve missed you!” He wants people to think he is still a glamorous actor, but instead he gets the total opposite. His neighbors and friends ask him, “What are you doing back in Texas?” and aren’t glad to see him, and his estranged wife, Lexi, and his mother-in-law, Lil, are especially not happy to see him come back. Mikey asks if he can move back in with them, but Lil and Lexi don’t want to put up with him anymore. He continues to beg Lexi to let him move back in with them, and finally she gives in, under the condition that he contribute to the rent and help around the house. For some reason, I resonated with Mikey’s story a bit, mainly the fact that he came back to his hometown expecting everyone to treat him like he was famous, but instead it was the opposite. I’ve never worked as a sex worker or in the adult entertainment industry, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I could kind of relate to him coming back with this huge ego. After graduating from this elite liberal arts college on the East Coast, I thought I was entitled to have any job I wanted because of my degree. But honestly, it was so hard to find a job, and it was a total blow to my ego. I wanted a job where I could directly use my philosophy degree, but the only other option was to go to graduate school and as much as I wanted to go, I was super burned out after undergrad and needed time to recuperate, especially because I had some really bad mental health issues. That, too, was really hard because I couldn’t deal with having depression. Every day I struggled to get out of bed and feel motivated to do anything. I auditioned for an orchestra in my hometown and when I got called for the substitute cellist list, I was pretty elated and thought that I should be treated like royalty because I got on the substitute list. But then my dad asked me to vacuum the living room, and I threw a huge bratty tantrum because I thought, They should be celebrating me right now! Why the hell are they asking me, of all people, to do chores? Looking back, I didn’t have a very healthy sense of self, and so much of my self-worth was wrapped up in these past achievements and this music career. I thought about my past experiences with overcoming my ego when I saw how Mikey would go up to people in his hometown and expect them to recognize him and his work, but only a few people liked what he did. Most of the people he runs into don’t know about his work, and so he has to keep shoving it in their faces that he was an adult film star for several years and that he has a very famous account with all the videos and movies he starred in. I wanted to be a successful cellist, but looking back I placed so much of my self-esteem on whether or not I won auditions or whether or not people liked me. At some point, though, I realized that doing that wasn’t healthy and that I needed to develop more self-worth so that I wouldn’t think that I was a loser just because I didn’t play with a famous orchestra.

I think that’s why he falls in love with this 17-year-old girl named Strawberry. Honestly, I really didn’t know how to feel about her and Mikey’s relationship. I know that technically she was of consenting age according to Texas law, but I feel like he was partly using his relationship with Strawberry as an escape from his problems with the people around him. Mikey constantly disrespects the people around him, and he talks down to Lexi and Lil, even walking around naked and grossing Lil out. Strawberry and Lonnie (who knows about Mikey’s work) are the only two people who put up with Mikey’s bullshit throughout the movie. Mikey has Lonnie take an exit at the last minute while driving, and Lonnie swerves and causes a serious pileup accident. Even though Mikey and Lonnie escape, Mikey has Lonnie accept the blame even though Mikey was responsible for telling him to take the exit. Lonnie accepts it, but Mikey doesn’t tell anyone that he was also responsible for causing the accident. Mikey is only focused on running away with Strawberry and having her become an adult film star like him. The ending of the film creeped me out a lot. Overall, it was a really interesting film.

Red Rocket. 2021. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and pervasive language.

Movie Review: American Honey

Some time ago (I cannot remember when) I watched the trailer for a movie called American Honey. I really love A24 distributed films, so I immediately gravitated towards this one because it was an A24 film. And not just because it was an A24 film, but because the trailer was just really good, so I wanted to watch it. And honestly, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. This was a really good movie. It definitely wasn’t an easy film to sit through, but as I watch these heavy-hitting drama movies and independent films, I have come to appreciate that movies can stir a whole range of emotional experiences in us, and they should. This film was a really moving and raw portrayal of young people trying to survive in a harsh world.

The movie starts out with a young woman named Star dumpster-diving with two kids whose stepmother, Misty, doesn’t want custody of them, and she fishes out a chicken breast from the dumpster and gives it to the boy so they can bring it home. Star has a really rough life at home. Her stepfather is sexually abusive, and her mother died when she was really young of an overdose. She goes to a bar where the kids’ mother is dancing, and she tries to give the kids to her, but the mom wants nothing to do with the kids. Star goes to K Mart one day to run some errands, and she sees a group of teenagers running around and dancing to “We Found Love” by Rihanna. One of the young people in the group, named Jake, looks at Star and is attracted to her, and they share a mutual chemistry. The employees kick the kids out of the store, and Jake approaches her and tells her that she should come join them in their mag crew, where they go door-to-door selling magazines and other stuff. Star at first isn’t sure about Jake, but he comes off as this charming guy, so they fall in love. However, Star has to deal with the leader of the mag crew, Krystal, who hates Star for falling in love with Jake. Krystal does whatever she can to keep Jake away from Star, and things get tense when Jake tells Star that they can’t have a romantic relationship because Krystal thinks it’s “bad for business.”

Star has this interesting insight into life that kind of sets her apart from the other teens in the group. While she does play around with them and go along with them, she also retains a lot of her sensitivity, especially when she is around animals. Even though the film is pretty deep, it has its tender moments. While whooping and dancing around the campfire with everyone else, Jake gives Star a small turtle, and Star gently puts the turtle in the water and watches it swim away. There is also a scene where Star is sitting in an open field and a grizzly bear just casually comes up to her and says hi before going on its merry way. In another scene, Star sees a bee in the house that everyone is staying at and instead of killing it, she catches it in a glass jar and releases it outside so it can be among the flowers. It was these little scenes that I needed to take time to appreciate, because for most of the movie Star is just out here trying to survive.

I thought one scene in the film was particularly powerful and shows Star’s sensitivity. As they go door to door, the teens in the mag crew have to make up stories about their lives so that people who answer the door will have pity on them and buy the magazines from them. They start off going into wealthy neighborhoods, but then later on in the film Krystal drives them into a poor neighborhood and has them try to get the people in the neighborhood to buy magazines. Star knocks on the door of one house, and instead of an adult answering the door, a little boy wearing a Pikachu costume opens the door and a little girl wearing an Iron Maiden shirt invite her in. A third kid is holding a cat. Star looks around and finds that the TV is blaring Wendy Williams’s show, but the parents are nowhere to be found. When Star asks where their mom is, the boy says she is sleeping, and when Star asks where their dad is, he says that their dad is in Omaha, Nebraska, so he can’t take care of the kids. Star has this moment where she’s like, Wait, Krystal drove me here to get money from these people? These kids are struggling, I don’t think I can do this. The mom comes out of her room and lays down on the couch in front of the TV, not even looking at Star or any of the kids. Star sees a meth pipe on the table and realizes that the mom is a meth addict. Star asks for something to drink, and the kids open the fridge. There is almost nothing to eat or drink in the fridge, other than a liter of Mountain Dew. Star ends up going to the grocery store and buying the family a bunch of groceries. Even though she was struggling herself, Star was able to have that compassion for the kids because her own mother died of a meth overdose. It just reminded me of how in Buddhism, we go through challenges so that we can encourage others who might be going through similar challenges. I haven’t grown up in poverty or with parents who have struggled with addiction, but the film really showed me how poverty is very real, and people are really out here in America trying to get by paycheck to paycheck. To be honest, as I was watching the film, all I could think was, Wow, I really can’t fathom what these people in the film have to go through to survive.

Another thing the movie made me think about was the importance of having big dreams and aspirations. Star and the other teens are dropped off at a gas station where they find a bunch of men driving these big 18-wheeler trucks, and they promote the magazine subscriptions to them. The first guy Star asks isn’t interested and walks away, but the second guy actually gives her a ride in his 18-wheeler and they have a genuine conversation about their lives. The driver tells Star about his wife and that his daughter got married recently, and then he asks Star what her dreams are. Star tells him that no one has asked her what her dreams are before, and she tells the man that she wants her own place to live and to have a family. She later asks Jake the same question, and he tells her the exact same thing: no one has asked him what his dreams are. He tells her in private that he wants his own place in the woods and shows her all the money and treasures he has stolen from the houses of the people they sell magazines to. Star asks him how stealing these things is a dream of his, and he tells her that he is going to use these treasures to buy the thing that he wants eventually (i.e. his own place.) I just reflected on this scene where the man asks Star about her dreams, because in this book I’m reading called Discussions on Youth by the late educator and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, Mr. Ikeda talks about how young people should have big dreams and can use the practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to bring out their unlimited inherent potential to achieve those dreams. Growing up, a lot of adults in my SGI Buddhist community would encourage me to have big dreams, so when at thirteen I told people at my Buddhist meetings that I wanted to play at Carnegie Hall in New York City one day, many people encouraged me to go for the dream and not give up. I often take it for granted that I have this Buddhist community where people encourage each other to not give up when achieving their dreams and that they can chant about what dreams and goals they want to accomplish. Watching this movie showed me that many young people are told that their dreams are impossible to achieve, and they aren’t around people who encourage them to have dreams and goals for the future. I really want to share more about the Buddhism I practice with other young people so that they can feel encouraged to bring forth the confidence to go for their dreams. I also want to recommend people read Discussions on Youth, whether you’re Buddhist or practice another religion/ no religion. It has given me a lot of hope over the years and has encouraged me to keep striving for those dreams that I think are impossible, like becoming a writer and a musician. I still battle my own doubts and insecurities about being a good enough creative, but chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helps me challenge those insecurities head-on so that I don’t let perfectionism, or my inner critic, keep me from taking action towards accomplish my goals and dreams. And at the end of the day, what my Buddhist practice has taught me is that it’s not just about reveling in my own success, but about encouraging others to achieve their dreams, too.

This movie reminded me of some other movies I have seen. There was this movie I saw called The Florida Project and it was directed by Sean Baker, who is a really good filmmaker, if you haven’t seen his movies. I have only seen Tangerine and The Florida Project, but I want to see his other films because he is a really good director. The Florida Project is about three kids who are all friends with each other and who all live in a budget motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which is near Walt Disney World. I had this idea of Walt Disney World being this magical place, but this movie showed me that income inequality is still a reality even in the most seemingly magical places. The people who stay in the budget motel are all struggling to make ends meet, and one of the main characters in the film, Halley, loses her job as a stripper and has to find other ways to make money, relying on her friend Ashley, who works at a diner, for food. Halley’s daughter, Moonee, is oblivious to the struggles that the adults go through, and she and the other kids do stuff like steal ice cream and set an abandoned house on fire. Halley and Ashley’s friendship goes down the deep end when Ashley finds out that Halley has resumed sex work and is bringing clients into her motel room, and she threatens to tell on her. Halley beats her friend up and when her and Moonee go to the diner where Ashley works, Halley gets upset when Ashley refuses to give her free food anymore. Finally Ashley caves and reluctantly serves Halley and Moonee breakfast. When Ashley finds out that her son, Scooty, was involved in setting the house on fire, she tells him that what he did was really bad and explains what the consequences of his actions are. Halley, however, doesn’t really care what Moonee does. She is struggling to survive and the antics her daughter gets into is the last thing on her mind. Like American Honey, this movie is a very sobering portrayal of poverty in America, and there is no savior character who comes to save the characters who are struggling to make ends meet. These movies give a realistic picture of class and income inequality.

I also really love the acting in American Honey. I saw Riley Keough in this movie called Zola (like American Honey and The Florida Project, it is an A24 movie) and she was really good in her role as Stefani. If you haven’t seen Zola, it’s a movie based on a real Twitter thread that A’Ziah “Zola” King posted about how she worked as a stripper in Detroit and met another young woman who was also a stripper, and how this young woman, named Stefani (in the Twitter thread, the girl’s name is Jessica) coerces Zola into going on a trip with her, Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek, and her pimp X, but the trip ends up being a sex trafficking operation. At first, Zola is thrilled to have a sisterly bond with Stefani, and when they are all in the car at the beginning of the film, they are all rapping to “Hannah Montana” by Migos and having a fun time. However, as the trip draws on, Zola starts to have a gut feeling that this trip isn’t going to be a fun time. Stefani, who is white but talks in a “blaccent,” talks in a degrading way about how this Black woman was “up in her face” and Zola is visibly uncomfortable. Zola ends up having to take stripping gigs that don’t compensate her fairly, and also Stefani’s pimp, X, is intimidating and threatens Zola, Stefani and Derrek throughout the trip if they don’t do as he says. It’s interesting how in American Honey, Riley Keough plays a character who is running the magazine crew and is in charge of getting the money everyone makes. Her character, Krystal, has a very scary power and wields it against Star, threatening to kick her off the team if she continues to pursue Jake. In Zola, however, Colman Domingo’s character is the main guy who everyone is scared of, and Riley Keough’s character, Stefani, has to submit to everything he tells her to do. In one scene, Zola helps Stefani make more money from her clients after she finds out that X was having Stefani charge clients a low rate. When X finds out that Zola was helping Stefani, he is upset and when Stefani gently asks him if she can have some of the money she made, X withholds the money from her, telling her she should be even grateful she has food in her belly. Stefani is left feeling powerless and Zola is left feeling angry.

The music in American Honey was incredible. I love hip-hop and the soundtrack had a lot of great songs. I was curious about the significance of the movie’s title, and in one of the scenes in the film, the teens in the van play “American Honey,” a song by a group I love named Lady A (they used to be called Lady Antebellum, but they changed the name in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement because “Antebellum” is reminiscent of the South’s racist past. Of course, racism isn’t a thing of the past in the South. It’s still very much alive.) To be honest, it was a little uncomfortable at first hearing the white characters use the N-word when singing to the rap songs and even calling each other the N-word. But it’s not something that’s new to me. Growing up in the South, I often heard white kids say the N-word in jest and even call me the N-word at times. I often heard kids of all races saying the N-word as a joke. In Tangerine, the white characters, Chester and Dinah, use the N-word around the Black women in the film, and they call an Armenian cab driver the N-word, but their use of the N-word doesn’t go mentioned or anything. I remember one time I was in the car with a bunch of my friends (I was the only Black person in the car) and “Holy Grail” by Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z came on. I and the friends started off having a grand old time singing to Justin Timberlake’s intro, but there is a verse where Jay-Z uses the N-word over and over again, and my friends sung along without censoring the word, giggling as they said it, like “Oh my gosh, this word is so fun to say!” I was uncomfortable, but I was afraid that I would come off as being overly sensitive if I told them that I wasn’t ok with hearing them use the word, so I looked out the window in silence, pretending to not care. One of the girls in the car asked if I was ok, and I told her I was fine. I’ve moved on since then, but I just wanted to mention it because I thought of that moment as I was watching the movie.

Ok, I’m pretty tired, so I’m going to wrap it up and just end things right here. I’ll probably have more thoughts about the movie that I want to share over the course of the week, but I’m going to take a break. In short, if you haven’t seen American Honey, it’s a really good movie.

American Honey. 2016. Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, drug/ alcohol abuse– all involving teens.

Movie Review: Priscilla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Review: Causeway (in honor of Memorial Day)

I’m pretty late in writing this post since Memorial Day happened last week, but I wanted to squeeze in a movie about veterans to commemorate the day. I was figuring out what movies to watch for Memorial Day, but I have a weak stomach and probably couldn’t sit through Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, even if these are critically acclaimed movies. However, I remember trying to catch up on my Oscar-nominated movies last year, and I missed one of the nominees. It’s a movie called Causeway, and it stars Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (I was almost going to type “Brian Austin Green” because I watched an episode of Abbott Elementary and Barbara Howard keeps mixing up Black celebrities’ names and White celebrities’ names. She says she loves Brian Austin Green, but she meant another actor, Brian Tyree Henry.) I saw the trailer, and I love A24 movies, so I was pretty excited from the beginning to see this movie. I am forever thankful I have access to Apple TV, because Causeway is an Apple TV movie.

Causeway is about a young woman named Lynsey, who returns from fighting in Afghanistan to her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, after suffering a traumatic brain injury. The beginning of the film shows how she goes through rehabilitation and has to learn how to speak and walk again after the injury. She also has to take several medications and suffers severe PTSD. She leaves the rehabilitation center even though the person taking care of her doesn’t think she is ready to leave, and she moves back home to her mother’s house. She gets a job cleaning pools, but while she is driving the truck, she has a panic attack and cannot steer the truck and ends up crashing it while driving through a busy intersection. She takes the damaged truck to a mechanic named James (Brian Tyree Henry) and has him get it fixed. He tells her that he will call her when it is fixed, and she says she doesn’t know her phone number. At first, he thinks she is kidding, but she tells him she is actually serious that she doesn’t remember her number. He develops a deep understanding towards her, and they develop an incredible friendship.

This movie reminded me of another film I watched called Mudbound. In the film, a white couple named Henry and Laura McAllen move near a Black family named the Jacksons in 1940s Mississippi, and they have to navigate racial tension. Ronsel Jackson and Jamie McAllen both serve in the war. Even though they fought in different units, they come back feeling disillusioned and lost after the war. The rest of the family can’t see eye-to-eye, but Ronsel and Jamie develop a meaningful friendship and share with each other their experiences fighting in the war. Jamie experiences PTSD and has serious flashbacks to when his fellow pilot got killed in battle. Ronsel comes back to a world of Jim Crow racism where he can’t go through the front door of a shop like white people do just because he is Black, and where he gets called “boy” and the N-word. Both Jamie and Ronsel struggle to readjust to life back at home, and even though they live in a segregated community, they treat each other like brothers and friends. In Causeway, James empathizes with Lynsey because he was in a traumatic car accident and he lost his leg and his nephew, Antoine, who died in the accident. Both James and Lynsey dealt with the worst kind of suffering imaginable, and due to their shared experiences, they develop a very deep connection of trust and respect. There is one scene where James takes Lynsey out to eat and a guy hits on Lynsey when she is trying to enjoy her time with James in peace. Lynsey lies and tells the guy she has a boyfriend, and James tells the guy to back off. After the guy leaves, Lynsey tells James that she doesn’t have a boyfriend and while they are leaving the diner she tells him that she is actually a lesbian. But James is respectful of that, and they end up smoking weed and drinking beer on a bench in a basketball court. Lynsey opens up about her brain injury, her brother’s drug addiction and how her mom was the only one left in their house, and James tells her about the car accident he was in. I think what their interactions showed me is that vulnerability takes courage and it’s not easy to open up to people we don’t know, but once we do it can open the doors to a beautiful connection.

Even though I don’t have PTSD, I felt I could kind of relate to Lynsey’s struggle with mental health. She goes to the doctor, and he goes over her medications, and she tells him that she wants to stop taking the medications. He tells her that getting off the medications could cause depression, seizures and other side effects, and that she is probably functioning precisely because she is taking the medication. He then has her tell him in more detail about the brain injury she suffered, and she discusses it in more detail, reliving the nightmare that she lived through. She later tells the doctor she wants to redeploy, but he tells her she might not want to do that because she suffered a traumatic injury, so she needs significant time to recover from the injury, especially since the injury impacted her mental health. But she tells him that she wants to redeploy because serving in the war made her feel like she had a purpose, while back home in New Orleans she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose. She tells her mom that she wants to redeploy, and her mother tells her to not go back. Her mom tells her that a friend of hers is hiring in an office she works at and encourages Lynsey to take the job, but Lynsey says that she is already employed cleaning pools. Her mother is disappointed that she is cleaning pools instead of working a comfortable office job, but Lynsey tells her that she can’t work in an office at the moment while she is trying to recover from the injury, especially since she is still just getting back to life at home. I remember when I was in my junior year of college and I suffered a serious depressive episode, and I came home for winter break and my parents found out I was depressed and they sent me to a therapist, who referred me to a psychiatrist. However, I didn’t think I needed to get on antidepressants, so I decided not to go. I also begged my parents to let me go back to school and my parents asked, “Are you sure?” because they were (reasonably) worried after what happened, but I told them I would be fine, and that I just wanted to graduate. However, I came back for the second semester, and it was even harder, especially because I still wasn’t seeking professional treatment for the depression and kept it hidden from so many people. I felt deeply alone, and I had no friends in the new dormitory I was in, so I couldn’t really talk to anyone about what I was going through because I didn’t think anyone would understand.

However, I remember there was a young woman who lived two doors down from me and somehow, she saw deep down that I was depressed, and so she showed me one day that she made a WordPress blog page for me with a message saying, “It’s important to SHARE.” I can’t remember what each letter stood for, unfortunately, but she made it for me because she saw I was really going through a lot of sadness, and she wanted to be there for me. The first week of college, she asked me for directions to a building on campus and we ended up having a really great conversation as we walked. I didn’t know that even just an interaction with someone could save my life, but looking back I have so much appreciation for this person because I really was suffering and felt I had no one to talk to, and she was the only one who could see I was going through something even though I hadn’t opened up to her about my depression. I think watching Causeway showed me that it’s important to ask for help, especially when it comes to struggling with mental illness. The film shows that asking for help isn’t easy, and it often comes with feelings of shame. Lynsey wants to live her life normally again after the brain injury, but she needs to spend a lot of time in recovery. She cannot do a lot of stuff on her own and has to have someone help her. She ends up moving back home, which she doesn’t want to do because she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose living at home anymore. There is one scene where James opens up about the car accident that he was in that killed his nephew. James’s fiancée was in the car accident, and after her son died, she left James, so now James lives by himself. He offers to let Lynsey stay with him because he is lonely and wants to have companionship, but she politely declines and decides to continue living with her mother. However, Lynsey realizes that her mother isn’t looking out for her daughter’s best interest. In one scene, they are in a pool in their backyard just spending time with each other, but then Lynsey’s mother gets a call from someone and leaves Lynsey sitting by herself. Lynsey decides that her mother doesn’t actually care about her life, and she decides to eventually go live with James. I kind of related to Lynsey’s struggle because at first when I moved home, I just needed a place to crash, but I was also incredibly depressed. I hadn’t finished addressing the mental health issues I dealt with in college, so I needed time to address them after college. I remember spending days lying in bed as I searched for jobs, getting rejection after rejection. Most of my friends lived in other parts of the country, and I didn’t see them as much, so I got really lonely. I think having my Buddhist community around was so important during that time because the people in the community supported me and encouraged me not to give up. Even though I didn’t get the symphony job I wanted, I got a job at Starbucks and looking back, that was the job I needed because I needed to gain some basic work experience. In retrospect, I think at the time, I needed to take care of my mental health and focus on paying off my student loans rather than trying to get the job at the symphony. In Causeway, even though Lynsey’s mom tells her she needs a better job than cleaning pools, Lynsey likes the work she does with the pools and it’s where she and James hang out a lot.

Honestly, even within the first ten minutes of Causeway I was crying a lot. Even though I don’t have PTSD, just seeing how Lynsey really struggles through recovery and with her mental health made me think about my own recovery from my depressive episodes. I wanted to just go back to being busy all the time and running around on high energy 24/7, but my depression was a wake-up call for me to slow down and take care of my health. Having depression made it hard for me to do a lot of things I took for granted, and there have been many times it sapped my will to live, but now that I am recovering, I am taking everything a day at a time. I also began to appreciate the little things that I take for granted, such as waking up and brushing my teeth, eating food, and getting sleep. I think also the film score in Causeway was really beautiful and so I think that is why I cried. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing this movie again. It was a really powerful and heartfelt film. Also, the acting was incredible! I remember seeing Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, and she was a really good actress in that movie. And Brian Tyree Henry was in another movie I saw called Widows, which was also really good (I saw it three times because it was THAT good.)

Causeway. 2022. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry and Linda Emond. Rated R for some language, sexual references ad drug use.

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