In season 4 of The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II (played by Olivia Colman) gets a new prime minister. At first she is excited because the new prime minister is a woman, but the new PM, Margaret Thatcher (played by Gillian Anderson) ends up being one of the toughest PMs Elizabeth has had to work with. She starts a war in the Falkland Islands and doesn’t do much to address the high unemployment rates around England. She also fires her entire cabinet of men even after she told Elizabeth she preferred men in Parliament because she thought women were weak. In one episode of the season, an unemployed man breaks into Buckingham Palace because he tries to contact Queen Elizabeth about badly people are suffering from joblessness during the costly war that Margaret had everyone enter into, but with little success. Queen Elizabeth is terrified when he breaks in, but he tells her he just wants to tell her how fucked up the situation is under Margaret Thatcher. Earlier in the episode, he is standing in a long line of unemployed citizens and is struggling to pay his bills, and not only that but his wife leaves him for another man and takes the kids with her. He has a lot to be pissed off about, and he tries to contact the government to see if they can do anything about it, but with little success. When Queen Elizabeth gets to know him more, she realizes that the unemployment situation really is bad but because she spends a lot of time in Buckingham Palace she isn’t really out with the public and so she can’t really know what goes on unless she reads the newspaper or watches the news on TV. Before the police take him out of Buckingham Palace, he tells Elizabeth that Margaret Thatcher is coming for her job next if she isn’t careful. As the season goes on, it is clear that Queen Elizabeth and Margaret don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, namely the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom and sanctions against South Africa during apartheid. However, when Margaret resigns, Queen Elizabeth, after much thought, gives her a medal for her long years of service as prime minister. I studied about Margaret Thatcher in world history class but of course, after a while I forgot all my history knowledge, so it was helpful to watch The Crown because even though it’s a fictionalized account of the monarchy it still gives some good insight.
I had been meaning to see The Iron Lady for a while, mainly because I loved Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (if you haven’t seen it she plays a demanding fashion magazine editor named Miranda Priestly who makes the life of her assistant a living hell). The Crown episodes with Margaret Thatcher mainly cover her work with the Queen, but not so much about her childhood or her past experiences. In The Iron Lady, we see Margaret Thatcher before she became prime minister. Before she married Denis Thatcher, she was Margaret Roberts, a young woman who was bullied in school for not being wealthy like the other girls but falls in love with conservatism. She meets Denis, an intellectual young man with and and they fall in love. The film mainly shows how she grapples with Denis’s death after she is no longer prime minister. One thing that interested me about this movie was that they show how Margaret Thatcher’s inflection changed when she became prime minister. Her representatives practiced with her how she was supposed to speak to the public, and she had to learn how to enunciate things more aggressively. They also show how she got her hairstyle. In the movie, she is reflecting on her past time as prime minister and what she learned along the way. She experiences hallucinations in which Denis appears to her as the voice of conscience. It’s interesting because in The Crown, Olivia Colman plays the Queen but in The Iron Lady she played Thatcher’s daughter Carol. Also Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in the movie as well (she is from a show I love called Fleabag.)
A few days ago I watched this incredible film called Biutiful. It came out in 2010 and was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. I had seen some of his other films, like Birdman and Babel, so I was sort of familiar with his style of directing. But I hadn’t watched his movies in a long time, so seeing Biutiful felt like a new cinematic experience for me. Also I loved the trailers (I rented the DVD from the library and the films were all from Lionsgate Films, such as Rabbit Hole and Winter’s Bone, which I want to see. I really love drama films and these are drama films. There was also a movie starring Will Ferrell called Everything Must Go that I want to watch at some point.)
Honestly this film was a tough one to watch, mainly because of how it deals with the reality of death. The film takes place in Barcelona, Spain, and the main character, Uxbal (played by Javier Bardem) is struggling to survive financially and with the separation from his wife, Marambra, he has to provide for his two kids. However, he also has to face the fact that he is dying of cancer and doesn’t have long to live. The movie shows how his cancer diagnosis affects him psychologically, mentally, physically and emotionally. The movie opens with a scene where Uxbal is talking with a young woman while they sleep about the story of his wedding ring and the young woman asks if she can try it on. Then we find Uxbal in the snowy woods and there is a dead owl in the snow. A young man smoking a cigarette comes up to Uxbal and they start talking. The scene ends and Uxbal is back to reality, in the doctor’s office, when he finds out that he has been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and doesn’t have many months to live.
This film was quite powerful. It reminded me a lot of Babel, one of Inarritu’s other films. If you haven’t seen Babel, it takes place in four different narratives. It follows the lives of different individuals whose lives are deeply interconnected in some way. In Morocco, an American couple named Richard and Susan are riding on a caravan and two young boys shoot a rifle and accidentally hit Susan, injuring her in the shoulder. While this is going on, Susan and Ricard’s nanny, Amelia, is taking care of their kids, Debbie and Mike, but also doesn’t want to miss her son’s wedding, which is being held in Mexico. Amelia asks Richard if she can go, but he tells her she needs to stay with the kids while he takes care of Susan after her injury. Santiago, a relation of Amelia, takes her and the kids to Mexico anyway, and they go to the wedding and have a great time, but then Santiago decides to drive them back to the States while he is intoxicated, even when people tell him that might not be the safest thing. He refuses to listen, and drives them back across the U.S.-Mexico border. Unfortunately, the border guards stop them and ask for identification, but they don’t have any, and when Santiago tries to reason with them, the guards gets aggressive and Santiago drives off but leaves Amelia, Debbie and Mike alone in the desert to fend for themselves. After spending a scary amount of time surviving in the heat of the desert, they finally get help but then Amelia is taken to U.S. customs and they tell her because she is undocumented she will be deported. Another story in Babel takes place in Japan, where a young woman named Chieko struggles with her adolescence. Chieko is deaf and struggles to get people to empathize with her situation, and her mother passed away and she is dealing with the trauma of loss. She wants to have a boyfriend but doesn’t get the validation she wants from the men she meets, and it causes her a lot of deep suffering. Throughout the film, I saw the different ways in which each character’s suffering was interconnected, which kind of resonated with the Buddhist term dependent origination because dependent origination believes that nothing exists in isolation, and everything is connected.
There is a particularly poignant and disturbing scene in Biutiful. When Uxbal goes into a night club/strip club he sees a few dancers who, instead of having human faces, have breasts for heads (I wasn’t sure if the dancers were actually wearing papier-mache breast heads or if Uxbal was actually hallucinating that there heads were breasts.) Uxbal goes to the club and ends up hanging out with Tito and his friends, and they snort cocaine together. One of the women asks Uxbal what is going on with him, and he tells her he is dying of cancer. At first she ponders this but because she just wants to have a good time she goes back to partying. I think this scene showed me that Uxbal is just trying to make the most of his remaining years of life because he doesn’t have long to live, and even when what he does is harmful (e.g. snorting cocaine) he has lost hope for living since his illness is terminal. I read this chapter in a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by Daisaku Ikeda called “Facing Illness” and he talks about how illness is a manifestation of the devil king of the sixth heaven because it saps our will to live, or our life force. However, when we chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, we can regain our life force and use the suffering from illness as an opportunity to deepen our faith and Buddhist practice. We can also use our experiences dealing with illness as a chance to encourage others dealing with illness and other sufferings. And even when people die from illness, we can still chant for the deceased person’s absolute happiness. In Buddhism, while we of course need to take care of our health, we also view illness as one of the four sufferings, which are birth, aging, sickness and death. Even if one is successful or wealthy, no one can escape these sufferings. However, when we chant, we can have the life condition of Buddhahood to transform these sufferings into a chance to develop an even deeper state of life and appreciation for life.
I’m still processing the film but overall it was very deep and Javier Bardem and the other actors gave powerful performances.
Biutiful. 2010. In Spanish with English subtitles. Rated R for disturbing images, language, some sexual content, nudity and drug use.
I had found out first about this movie from watching the Academy Awards in 2007. Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for the movie and the clip I saw him acting in was so powerful. And it’s funny because Paul Dano has such a cherubic face yet he plays this deep haunting role. I saw him in a couple of other movies. He played a writer in Ruby Sparks and a sadistic slave overseer named John Tibeats in 12 Years a Slave. In There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano plays Paul Sunday and Eli Sunday, who are brothers. Eli is a preacher at the local church and his role as the preacher was so powerful. I also love how the film uses nuances of silences and dialogues. And it also talks about the power of communication because H.W., Daniel’s son, is blown away when the oil rig explodes and loses his hearing in the blast. Daniel is pained that his son can no longer hear, and Daniel finds him a sign language teacher. H.W. ends up marrying Mary Sunday and she learns sign language and communicates with him in sign language when they get married. When H.W. meets with his dad, he brings his sign language interpreter. He tells Daniel he and Mary are moving to Mexico so that H.W. can start his own oil company. Instead of supporting him, Daniel sees this as a betrayal on H.W.’s part and calls him all sorts of names and derides his hearing loss. He disowns his son because he now feels that he has no one else to support him. H.W. supported his dad in his oil business pursuits when he was younger but when he lost his hearing it traumatized both him and his dad. Another powerful scene is when Daniel meets his long-lost brother, Henry, but then finds out that the guy who posed as Henry isn’t actually Henry, but Henry’s friend. Henry actually died of tuberculosis. When he hears this news that this guy isn’t actually his brother, Daniel is disillusioned and shoots this guy dead.
Eli Sunday’s character is also quite interesting. At the beginning of the film he seems innocent and sweet when Daniel first meets him, but then we actually see him in action as a preacher and that is a whole nother story. His first person whom he saves is an elderly woman who supposedly has the devil inside of her. Eli clutches the woman’s face and at first he whispers to get the ghosts out of her, and then he is breaking down and screaming bloody murder at the ghosts. It is a haunting scene but one that shows how Paul Dano really gave this role his all. In another scene, Eli runs into Daniel in the oil field and Daniel is angry at him so he runs Eli into the ground and smears his body and face with oil and slaps him repeatedly down. Later on, when Mr. William Bandy, the guy whose property Daniel wants to construct an oil pipeline through, and Daniel attend Eli’s church service, Daniel volunteers to go up there and Eli ends up doing the same thing Daniel did to him: slapping him across the face and screaming at him. He screams at Daniel to say that he is a sinner over and over again, and this performance was so haunting it gave me goosebumps. Eli has the guy helping with the service pour the holy water over Daniel, and Daniel feels a sort of spiritual release. Yet in the end he ends up telling Eli to say that he is a fake preacher and that God is a superstition. This goes against everything Eli taught people about faith and religion, and he says this over and over with Daniel goading him on to keep saying this.
It was interesting seeing the work that goes into producing oil. I take it for granted that I can just go to the gas station and fill up on gasoline, not knowing what kind of process goes into it. I learned about the big monopolies like Standard Oil in my U.S. history class, but it wasn’t until I saw this movie that I could really understand the process that goes into extracting the oil from the ground and also the potential injuries that could occur on the job (of course, there were probably no workers compensation suits back then). The music is pretty amazing, and I also like the lettering for the end credits. It gives the film its dark and serious drama nature. The film reminded me a little of The Lighthouse, a film from A24 starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. I don’t know how to describe it, but just the dynamic between Robert’s character and Willem’s character reminded me of the dynamic between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview. The Lighthouse, if you haven’t seen it, is about two lighthouse keepers stranded on an isolated island in New England and they both drive each other up the wall. Like There Will Be Blood, it is also quite intense.
Towards the end, in a very chilling scene, Eli tells Daniel he wants some of the land Daniel has acquired for oil drilling so he can make money because he is financially strained. However, Daniel tells him that all the oil in that land has been used up and that he can’t give Eli that land that he badly wants. He and Daniel are constantly competing for these resources. The music really added to the suspense. There is one scene where the music has a col legno sound (col legno is when you put the bow stick on the string of the instrument and hit the string with the bow stick) mixed with strings and some sort of percussive beat. It didn’t have a set key signature and the way the rhythms responded to each other conveyed the suspense of the scene, sort of like the famous score for Psycho. It is where the oil rig burns down. In another scene, H.W. sets fire to Henry and Daniel’s lodging after going into his father’s bag and reading his journal with all his notes. H.W. doesn’t get away though because his dad catches him.
I sort of thought about “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” while watching this movie. The music video for that song features children working in a diamond mine mining diamonds and it shows them in the trenches doing this kind of grueling work, and we see one of the children holding a diamond and a white person picking up the diamond from above the ground. Again, I take it for granted I don’t have to think about where oil comes from. Now that I think about it, I’m now thinking about the OPEC crisis and all of our issues with coal, oil and natural gas, and gasoline shortages at gas stations. It makes me think we take so much of our natural resources for granted. I just jump in my car and don’t think about the environmental impact.
Also I had wanted to see the film for a rather irreverent reason: the famous “I drink your milkshake” scene at the end of the film. I kept seeing clips on YouTube where people mashed the scene with Kelis’s song “Milkshake.” One time I watched an interview with Paul Dano where he talked about how people started ordering him milkshakes after the success of There Will Be Blood, but that he could never drink them because he was lactose-intolerant.
A few weeks ago I watched the film Kajillionaire, which came out in 2020 and was directed by Miranda July. It stars Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez as the main characters. The film is about a couple and their daughter who work as con artists in Los Angeles, and how, when they meet a friendly stranger on an airplane named Melanie, have their entire lives turned upside down. When I first saw the trailer, honestly the first thing that attracted me to it was the pink suds.
And then I saw the actual film and it was nothing like I expected. Actually I didn’t really know what it was about other than watching the trailer.
The film touches on a lot of key themes, one of which is love and trust. Old Dolio, who is the daughter of Robert and Theresa Dyne, has spent her whole life living in a manipulative relationship with her parents, and they tell her constantly that it’s a cruel world and everyone is out to scam them or trick them, so they need to fend for themselves as a family. The movie opens up with a bus stop and as the bus pulls away the only people who don’t get on it are Old Dolio and her parents, and so that people don’t see Old Dolio going into the mail office to take something from the safety deposit boxes there, her parents scout around and look around them as people pass by so she can go in at the right time. These many years of not being able to trust people has made it hard for Old Dolio to trust even the people with the most benign intentions. When she goes to an older Black couple’s home dressed as a Catholic student, the couple thinks she and their daughter, Jenny, went to school together and they give her a gift certificate for a massage because Jenny is a masseuse. When Old Dolio comes over, she is anxious about staying too long because she knows her parents will come over and rush her out of there since they came to pawn Jenny’s stuff for money, not let their daughter get an hour-long massage. Jenny is fine with Old Dolio asking for a shorter massage, but Old Dolio tenses up when Jenny puts her hands on her back, and so finally Jenny hovers her hands over Old Dolio to make her more comfortable. Under the headrest we can see Old Dolio quietly crying because she is emotionally overwhelmed by Jenny’s touch, which has a gentleness that Old Dolio’s parents never gave her.
This theme plays a huge part in the family’s bond with Melanie, a young woman who they meet on a plane headed to New York City. Melanie is agreeable and thinks that what Old Dolio and her family do is like Ocean’s 11 or other heist movies. But when she actually sees how Robert and Theresa carry out their plans, which is really to take people’s checkbooks and write checks for themselves, and moreover, how they treat Old Dolio, she realizes that the situation is less glamorous than what she thought. Also, when we see heist movies the people tend to get a lot of money from the heist schemes and we see them celebrating these wins in humorous ways. But in reality, the family is barely paying the rent and is always being hounded by their landlord who works at the adjacent soap suds factory from which pink suds always leak through the walls of their home. Melanie falls in love with Old Dolio from the beginning, but it takes a really long time until Old Dolio can finally trust Melanie. Earlier in the film, when the family’s landlord is hounding them over their inability to pay the rent, a pregnant young woman named Kelly calls them over and has Old Dolio sit in her childrearing class for $20. Old Dolio at first is reluctant because Kelly told her she could get her yellow slip at the beginning to show she attended and wouldn’t have to actually sit in the class, but the ladies at the sign-in desk tell her she needs to sit in the class and can get her slip at the end of it. Old Dolio comes in wanting to leave, but then she watches a video demonstrating a technique called the breast crawl, and in the video a newborn rests on its mother’s breast and approaches it gently. Old Dolio keeps coming back to the class because she sees in the video the kind of love and attachment that she never received as a child. She sees her parents getting along with Melanie and Theresa even calls Melanie “hon”, a term of endearment that she never called her daughter in her 26 years of existence. When Old Dolio finally gets a check in the mail for the rent, she isn’t ecstatic but rather sad because she realizes that she needs more than anything love and affection for her survival as a human being, not just money. She says to Theresa that she will give her the money if she will just call her “hon” like she called Melanie “hon”, but for Theresa this is uncomfortable because Old Dolio is there to do a job for them, so she mocks Old Dolio’s need for affection, joking that she’s sorry that she can’t do nice things for Old Dolio like make her pancakes, give her birthday presents, dance with her, and other things.
Melanie sees how stressful this is for Old Dolio and takes the money so they can cash it, and they leave Old Dolio’s parents behind. When they cash the money, Old Dolio just wants to cash it and go, but Melanie actually writes a list of the activities Theresa never did with Old Dolio when she was a kid, and she actually makes Old Dolio pancakes and treats her like the daughter she wanted to be treated as growing up. Old Dolio, through her deepening bond with Melanie, awakens to her sexuality as well and realizes that she and Melanie are deeply in love. Melanie opens up a whole new world for Dolio, and it’s interesting because we’d think that the closest relationship in Old Dolio’s life is with her parents but it’s actually with someone outside of the family.
And it’s sad that Old Dolio spent her whole life having her parents take advantage of her and manipulate her, but of course these kinds of relationships happen in real life and so Old Dolio’s story is not just something that happens in a movie. I understand people live through these experiences and end up making it out alive, but as someone who can’t really relate to what Old Dolio went through, it was pretty sad but also I’m glad Melanie came into Old Dolio’s life because she taught her what genuine love means. I also really loved the film score and the cinematography. It kind of made me want to visit Los Angeles again.
I just got done watching the film Spencer, which came out last year and is directed by Pablo Larrain. I saw an Actors on Actors Zoom interview that Nicole Kidman and Kristen Stewart had done with each other, and in the interview they were discussing their films, Being the Ricardos and Spencer respectively. I really loved this interview and it made me even more excited to see Spencer. But I haven’t been to a movie theater since 2020 and may not plan to go back for a while (I might just try wearing a mask but who knows. The COVID-19 situation is always changing.) so I decided to wait until it was streaming to watch it. I found it on Google Play for a good deal, I could rent it for $1.99. Seeing as how I’m saving money and finding a new job (also, it’s hot down here and I was too lazy to go to the public library and get a copy), and I craved a movie to watch, I couldn’t resist the temptation. So I got Spencer and I must say, it was a really good movie. I have seen Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in Twilight and Joan Jett in The Runaways but seriously this was one of her best roles yet. She played Princess Diana with the utmost concentration and it kind of reminded me of Natalie Portman playing Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie. It’s a similar genre: both are psychological dramas that get into the private minds of these public figures, and how they grapple with being in the public eye and telling their own stories without anyone trying to speak for them.
One key theme that I got from the film is the theme of freedom. Everything in the film, even the smallest details, is about how Princess Diana felt constrained by her environment and in the end found her freedom by saying no to it. I don’t know much about Princess Diana other than what I learned in history class in high school, and of course the film is a biopic so it was based on true events but is still fiction, but the film gave some glimpse into how Diana might have lived life and the effects it might have had on her self-image and her views about life and the world. Throughout the movie, Diana struggles with her mental health, in particular bulimia. She also encounters Anne Boleyn in many of her hallucinations, and Anne seems to constantly tell her that she is not free in any true sense and that she needs to get away from the pressures that everyone puts on her. In one scene Diana is eating soup with her family and it seems that everyone around her is looking at her in a strange way, and she sees Anne Boleyn, and then seems to rips off her pearl necklace and eat the soup with the pearls in it. She stumbles to the bathroom and vomits. In another scene she goes into the kitchen after hours and eats many of the food items from the fridge. Alistair Gregory (played by Timothy Spall) finds her and tells her to be careful about what she does in the palace since there has been a lot of publicity, particularly about Diana not keeping her curtains closed. Diana tells him to mind his business but he reiterates that he is only doing his job. This shows that even though Diana has all this wealth and prestige by being part of the royal family, she can’t just do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, because everything she does–what she says, how she behaves–will be reflected in the press’s stories about the royal family.
This movie shows that even the seemingly everyday things that we as humans take for granted can have profound significance to someone who doesn’t just get to move about and freely take those things for granted. The house that Diana grew up in is another example. She keeps telling the royal staff that she wants to go home, and leaves the grounds of the palace to go back to her old home, but the guards and everyone tells her it is boarded up for a reason and that she’s not supposed to go in there. When she finally finds a way to break into the house, she relives a lot of her old childhood memories. When she walks up the stairwell, she nearly falls through the steps because they are so old and she remembers when she was a young girl being free to play with her friends outside and dress the scarecrow in the field. Even just spending time with her children is a pleasure that she cannot take for granted because the family is supposed to abide by certain meal times, bed times, etc. So when she gives her children their presents early and is playing a make-believe game with them late in the night, they even began to wonder if their mother is truly happy with her life because they start to see how she is really suffering from mental health issues and spends a lot of time withdrawing from people. Even just trying on her clothes is a huge liberty that the staff don’t allow her, and she tells them to back off and let her try her dresses on by herself but they don’t let her.
There is also a powerful scene where Diana is talking to a pheasant while sitting outside on the steps before she is called to dinner. She sees the men shooting the pheasants for sport and we can see the deep discomfort on her face as she sees them being killed. It’s as if she can feel their pain at not being free. Sure, they are birds and they have wings, but in the end they aren’t free because humans rob them of life by shooting them for sport. When she finally can’t take it anymore, she takes her sons away from the pheasant shooting grounds and takes them into the city for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fortunately she doesn’t have to go in the actual store, she can just drive up and give a different name (“Spencer”) so that no one knows it’s her ordering. This was pretty important to reflect on because you think about all the celebrities who can’t walk out of their houses to do every day things like get ice cream or go to the grocery store without photographers taking photos of them. I used to be really into Us Weekly and People and would read sections in the magazine like “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” and would be both wowed and humored. As I grew up though I started realizing that celebrities were just regular everyday people, it’s just that the work they do gains more publicity (although since the pandemic, the jobs that didn’t gain as much news, like working in hospitals and in food service, have gained more recognition than in the past since many people realized how much they depended on those services for survival, especially during a period of mass deaths in hospitals and quarantines). I think watching Actors on Actors helped me change this perspective on celebrity because the actors are just regular people having regular dialogues, and the bottom line I got from watching these interviews is that acting is a regular job for these people but they also have families, friends, hobbies and household chores just like everyone else. I think this especially helped when watching The Oscars because before I just viewed it as this glamorous thing, and I still am dazzled by the red carpet, don’t get me wrong, but what watching Actors on Actors taught me is that the acting work doesn’t stop once you get the Oscar, even if it is your big break in the industry. It’s just the beginning; at the end of the day, it’s a job so they still need to show up and do the work no matter how many awards they may win along the way.
After watching the film I read this chapter in the book Discussions on Youth by Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, and in the chapter “What is Freedom?” he talks about what freedom means from a Buddhist perspective. After reading the chapter it gave me a more profound perspective on what freedom is. There’s a really cool quote in the chapter that resonated with me: “…no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, our hearts can be free; we don’t have to let our spirits be shackled or confined. We need to have the strength to soar on inner wings of hope and freedom and never be defeated by anything.” (Daisaku Ikeda, p. 279, “What is Freedom?”, Discussions on Youth) I thought about this when looking back and thinking about the movie. Even though in the movie Diana was in a state of suffering because she had all these pressures from the outside, she broke through that suffering and was able to savor true joy. I thought about the scenes where she becomes free and then dances to her heart’s content in all of her gowns and when she runs through the fields savoring that freedom. Honestly that was probably one of the most touching scenes of the movie.
I also really loved the music in the film. It combines elements of jazz and classical, and after the film I listened to the soundtrack because it is so beautiful and has all these incredible unique sounds. Overall, this film was amazing and I definitely recommend it!
Spencer. 2021. 1 hr 57 m. Rated R for some language.
Oh my gosh. This movie. I saw it twice and I still cried each damn time. I watched it a couple of weeks ago (6/6/22: as of today, it was a couple of months ago when I saw this film) and my gosh, when I say I bawled through the entire movie, I literally did just that. The colors. The music. The storyline. Just, like, oh my gosh. I honestly think I cried, too, because I hadn’t seen a Pixar movie in a while and forgot how much I love them. Coco and Onward were the last ones I had seen lately.
So just to give you a synopsis of the film if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s about this girl named Mirabel who is part of a renowned family called The Madrigals. They are known throughout Colombia for their incredible gifts. Her mom, for instance, makes delicious food that can cure just about anyone’s ailments; Luisa is the strong one and can literally lift anything, whether it’s a house or a bunch of donkeys; Isabela is Mirabel’s sister and is the perfect sister who doesn’t want anything to do with Mirabel; Pepa can make weather; Delores has super-sonic hearing and all the other family members have some sort of magical gift. And the matriarch holding down the fort is Abuela, who keeps everything together and makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks and damages the long-held reputation of the Madrigals. In the first musical number Mirabel is telling all the neighborhood kids about her family members’ gifts, but then after she is done they ask her over and over again what her gift is and she keeps dodging their question, instead preferring to talk more about her family’s gifts. Finally, Abuela catches her dancing and singing and asks her if there is anything wrong, and Mirabel hesitates, but then one of the kids blurts out that they were asking Mirabel about her Gift. Abuela then tells Mirabel and the kids that Mirabel didn’t get a Gift. A delivery guy then comes and has Mirabel carry a huge basket of goods for Antonio’s gift ceremony (Antonio is Pepa and Felix’s son) and mentions in passing Mirabel’s giftlessness. Crushed but trying to keep an appearance of I’m-doing-ok, Mirabel tries to help with the preparations for the ceremony but ends up damaging some of the decorations, prompting her grandmother to tell her to not help because everything must go perfectly during Antonio’s gift ceremony. Before the ceremony, Mirabel finds Antonio hiding under her bed and gives him a present to celebrate his ceremony (this scene really made me tear up because it was so heartfelt) and she tells him the ceremony is going to go perfectly. He doubts this and asks her what if his gift doesn’t work, and she helps him cheer up. When the ceremony finally arrives, Antonio is walked down an aisle in front of lots of people, but he finds Mirabel standing on the side and motions to her to come and escort him to his door, where he will be tested to see if his gift works. As Mirabel walks, she remembers when she herself was at her own gift ceremony as a little girl and nervously walking towards the door. Antonio ends up succeeding and opens the door to find his gift is that he can communicate with animals, and he finds this incredible jungle of animals when he opens the door. Everyone is celebrating, but then Mirabel stands on the side and remembers that when she tried to open the door for her gift ceremony, it disintegrated, meaning that she wasn’t given a special gift by the family Madrigal. She wonders if there is ever a hopeful future for her since she doesn’t have super crazy cool gifts like everyone else in her family does.
However, she does find something that the other members of the family don’t seem to perceive. She finds cracks in the foundation of the family home, but when she brings it up to people at Antonio’s ceremony no one recognizes the cracks and once again Abuela looks embarrassed that Mirabel even brought it up, leaving her feeling even more dejected. There is a member of the family that the Madrigals don’t talk about, and that person is Bruno, who they portray as this creepy guy who caused everyone’s misfortunes. Mirabel sets out to find Bruno but ends up bringing some glass back from Bruno’s lair and piecing it together, which is a big no-no because the family isn’t supposed to bring up Bruno. Unfortunately this happens at Isabela’s engagement dinner, when Dolores, who hears everything, finds out Mirabel visited Bruno’s lair and then tells everyone at the dinner table. The dinner is ruined and no one trusts Mirabel anymore. Before that, there was a brilliant number by Luisa, who is supposed to be the strong one in the family who lifts houses, donkeys, basically anything heavy. Mirabel tries to get some information from her, and Luisa tells her she feels pressured to lift everyone’s burdens. She then tells Mirabel that she secretly felt weak when Mirabel revealed there were cracks in the foundation at Antonio’s ceremony, and says that she often feels she carries too many people’s burdens.
Honestly, I really felt I could relate to Mirabel. She feels like she doesn’t possess a gift and often struggles with self-confidence just because there’s so much pressure on the Madrigal family to put on appearances of having these supernatural gifts, this supernatural strength, and trying to keep it all together. But later on, we find out that no one in the family is perfect and everyone actually just wants to live in a way that is true to themselves. Even Abuela realizes that neither she nor the family are perfect, but to get to this realization she had to go back and face her painful past where her husband was killed by an army of bandits and she had to fend for herself to protect her three children. Carrying this grief and trauma inside of her while keeping an appearance of togetherness was probably one of the more painful moments of the film, because Abuela really was trying her best to keep the family together and happy, but she realized that by alienating her daughter and Bruno for being different, she also kind of suffered because she couldn’t truly be happy knowing that her granddaughter felt like an outcast and like no one cared about her just because she didn’t possess the gifts they did.
This movie also reminded me of this TV show I used to watch called The Good Place because there’s a character in the show named Tahani and she has a sister named Kamilah. When they were growing up, Tahani’s parents favored Kamilah over Tahani because she got good grades in school and was an all-around perfect child, while Tahani didn’t live up to their expectations. One particularly painful moment Tahani recalls is when their parents had her and Kamilah compete to see who could paint the best picture, and Kamilah’s painting impressed the parents while Tahani’s did not. Tahani finds Kamilah put on a successful art exhibition in Hungary and is impressing all these people with her talents in art and cooking, and it angers Tahani because she’s always been compared to Kamilah for most of her life and she doesn’t want it to continue. However, Tahani realizes that she really just wants to have a loving relationship with her sister, one that is free from cut-throatness and perfectionism, one where they can just love each other for who they are, and Tahani ends up giving Kamilah a hug and telling her that their parents want her and Kamilah to keep competing with each other and it’s getting in the way of their sisterly bond. I thought about this moment in The Good Place because in Encanto, Mirabel’s sister Isabela is the perfect sister and she is just keeping up appearances of being perfect because that is what Abuela and the community expect from her. Each time Mirabel tries to talk with her or be near her, Isabela sees this as a threat to her image of perfection and gets angry and tells Isabela to stay out of her life. However, there’s a crucial moment when Bruno is helping Mirabel see into the future what she needs to do to save her family’s foundation from crumbling, and in the future she sees her hugging Isabela. At first, she is repulsed that she would even do such a thing because Isabela has been nothing but mean and condescending to Mirabel, but when she visits Isabela in her room, Isabela confesses to her that she just wants to be free to create what she wants. Her room is expected to look a certain way, but she ends up using her gift to express herself however she wants even if it’s not the perfect image people see of her. She ends up producing all these colorful powders and gets them all over her room and all over her and Mirabel and when Abuela sees this she is distraught that Isabela would ruin her image of cleanliness, but Isabela at this point doesn’t care because she’s now happy that she doesn’t have to live up to other people’s expectations of her.
This is totally random, but do you remember when they had the Oscars pre-show this year? The cast of Encanto was on the red carpet and they were talking about how they were going to perform the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” For some strange reason, I thought they were talking about the 2009 mockumentary called Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen because I haven’t met someone named Bruno in a long time and that film was one of the few times I have encountered someone named Bruno (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the film Bruno so I of course can’t talk about it, no pun intended.)
Overall, Encanto was an excellent movie and I recommend it if you haven’t seen it. Also, Stephanie Beatriz, who played one of my favorite TV characters Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99, plays Mirabel so I was really happy when I read she was played by her! 🙂
Encanto. 2021. Rated PG for some thematic elements and mild peril.
I first heard about Drive My Car when my parents told me about an article they read about it. I thought it sounded nice but at first wasn’t so gung-ho about seeing it. Then my aunt told me she fell asleep through it because it was such a long movie, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it. But I’m glad I did see the film anyway, because it is truly a deep film. It does require patience to get through the movie but it is totally worth it. I definitely recommend if you can reading the short story by Haruki Murakami first. The story is from a collection of stories he wrote called Men Without Women, and while I haven’t read the entire book I really loved reading the story “Drive My Car.” Honestly, I don’t know how to describe Murakami’s writing. I’ve read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle; After the Quake, another of his short story collections; 1Q84 and now I am reading a novel he wrote in 2017 called Killing Commendatore. The books are pretty intense and it definitely takes patience to read his works, especially 1Q84, which is more than 1,000 pages long. But they dive into very deep human issues, and each of the characters you meet in his writings are so complex in their own unique ways. I really love reading the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda’s writings on the importance of literature because he says that reading literature gives us insight into the human condition. Reading Murakami’s works showed me how complex human life is because the characters find themselves in various situations that would be fantasies in real life.
The film Drive My Car opens up with the protagonist, Yusuke Kafuku and his wife, Oto, having sex. She is telling him this really wild story and he listens to her tell the story (my description of the story she tells wouldn’t do it justice. Also, At first I didn’t even know that the opening credits hadn’t rolled until they started rolling 40 minutes into the film, and I thought, Dang that was the opening. Anyway, back to the plot.) They seem to have the perfect life together, but then when he comes home one day he finds that his wife is having sex with another man named Koji Takatsuki. Still he continues to stay faithful to her even after she slept with another man. He is driving his car one day and then gets into an accident. He and Oto go to the doctor and the doctor tells him the accident messed up his eyesight and to take eye drops for glaucoma or else he will lose his eyesight. Later on, Yusuke goes into the living room and finds Oto dead. The rest of the film is about how he handles her death. He takes on a position as a playwright-in-residence in another city and the people in charge of the residency program tell him he needs a driver because it’s their policy (they add that one time one of their artists got into a bad accident and so they made it a rule that any artist in residence needs someone to drive them.) They hire an introverted young woman named Misaki Watari to drive him, and at first Yusuke refuses but Misaki refuses to let him drive and has him get in the car so she can go on a test drive in his car. She doesn’t speak for most or any of the drive, but she lets him listen to his tape to prepare for the Anton Chekhov play he is in charge of called Uncle Vanya.
The film also navigates the challenges that Yusuke faces as a playwright. He auditions different people for the roles in the play, and it’s awkward because one of the people trying out for the play is Koji, the man who slept with Yusuke’s wife Oto. The movie also navigates how Yusuke confronts Koji about sleeping with his wife, and how Koji also misses her instead of just seeing her as just another woman to have sex with. During rehearsals for the play, Yusuke is harder on Koji than he is on the other actors because of their shared history with Oto and Koji always initiates these conversations about Oto because both of them are processing their grief at losing her. However, Koji has his own complicated history because he was framed for a variety of crimes, including sleeping with an underage woman. He gets arrested when, while at the bar with Yusuke, he beats up a stranger who took a picture of him. At first I didn’t understand why the person was taking a picture of him, but then I remembered Koji got framed for something.
One scene that was really poignant to me and my parents were the scenes where one of the actors, Lee Yoon-A, speaks in Korean sign language. After getting really excited for CODA, which is a film in American sign language, it really gave me hope to see someone who spoke sign language being included in the play. Her audition was incredible and moving and it was the first time for me seeing a play where the language was communicated in sign language. Normally the plays I see are in English (or if it’s an opera, in Italian, German or French). There is a beautiful scene where the casting judge working with Yusuke takes him and Misaki to his home, and he reveals that Lee Yoon-A is his wife and that he learned sign language because they were together. The dinner scene where Lee communicates with her husband, Yusuke and Misaki is very beautiful and is an every day conversation but was just so profound and heartfelt.
Misaki doesn’t talk much during the film and she keeps to herself, but she has a keen sense of empathy and relates well to Yusuke, and ultimately helps him process his grief over losing his wife. She can relate because she lost her mother at a young age, and her mother was abusive but she taught Misaki how to be a good driver so she carried this skill with her throughout her life. After watching the film I had a lot of respect for Uber drivers. I know that sounds random but watching this film made me think about all the Uber drivers who drove me when I went to L.A. for vacation, and one person was super quiet but they were trying to get through L.A. traffic. At first I was put off by the driver not engaging me in conversation but at least I had my book on hand to read during the drive so that was nice. The film also gave me a new appreciation and outlook on driving in general. It’s an everyday activity that people like myself do, but lately this week while driving to work I started thinking a lot about life and death, and I started chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while driving and it helped me a lot with my anxiety. I’ve realized in the few years I’ve been driving myself to work that driving can actually be a chance for self-reflection. Of course, I have to concentrate while I drive so I need to pay attention to the road but I still find myself contemplating a lot about the meaning of life when I drive. Kind of like the Saturday Night Live skit where Jim Carrey parodies Matthew McConaughey driving with this contemplative look on his face in the commercials for Lincoln cars.
I watched this movie last week along with another film called Honeyland, and I am glad my mom recommended it to me because it truly was an excellent movie. The first time I saw it before watching it a second time, I was extremely tired due to a lack of sleep and nodded off before I could get to the really good part of the movie, and so I ended up not finishing it. But then I decided to watch it again in full. And damn, it blew me away.
At the beginning of the movie, we hear a woman moaning in pain as she gives birth and the sound of her newborn baby coming out of her womb. We hear this as we look at a shot of the sea. Then we see Asato, a six year old boy, and his mother, Satako, helping him get ready for school. Later on in the day, Satako receives a phone call from the school because Asato allegedly pushed Sora, his classmate, off the jungle gym. Satako called Sora’s mom to figure out if what went down was true, but then Sora’s mom demands not just an apology, but that Satako pay for Sora’s injury expenses. When Satako tries to explain she can’t do that, Sora’s mom digs at her for not wanting to pay the expenses for the injury even though she lives a comfortable middle-class life, so she must have the money and is just stingy. When they are out and about, Satako and Asato run into Sora and his mom and his mom ignores Satako’s greeting.
Satako then flashes back to an earlier conversation she had with her husband, Kiyokazu, about conceiving a child. They try to have a baby but then go to the doctor only to find out that Kiyokazu has no sperm in his semen. He ends up having to go get a surgery to get the semen extracted from his testicles because of a possibly blocked ejaculatory duct. The couple concludes that Satako’s chance of conceiving is most likely nil and he says that the only other option would be to divorce her. Kiyokazu is later seen with his friend getting drunk at a bar; they talk about kids and married life, and his friend tells him about his life with two kids. Kiyokazu, intoxicated, tells his friend that he has to go to Sapporo to conceive and has to get an ICSI sperm injection because his sperm is zero count. He then asks what is sex, and explains that it’s a “miracle.” We then see Satako and Kiyokazu at an airport, and they find out that due to inclement weather their flight to Sapporo to have the sperm injection has been cancelled. Satako and Kiyokazu grieve over their struggles to conceive a child, but later on while watching television at home they see an ad where couples talk about the difficulty of conceiving a baby, and then we see testimonies by pregnant women about not being able to take care of their children and giving them up for adoption. One woman says the guy who got her pregnant was already married to another woman, and another lost her child to a stillbirth. The ad is run by an adoption agency called Baby Baton, where children find their parents and “ill-equipped mothers” give their kids to couples who are unable to conceive but still want kids. Kiyokazu is unsure about going to Baby Baton, but Satako is curious about it so they go to a parents night meeting to learn more about the agency. They meet the founder of the agency, Asami, and Asami goes over the rules about adoption. The first rule is for the adoptive parents to be truthful with the kids and tell them about their birth parents for the sake of the child’s safety and wellness. Other rules are that the couple has to be married for more than three years, and that there needs to be one stay-at-home parent so either the husband or the wife needs to quit their job so they can stay with the child at home. Another rule is that adoptive parents can choose the name of their child but not the gender, so they have to submit both male and female names since the agency chooses whether each couple gets to adopt a boy or a girl. After hearing a testimony from a family who adopted a child through Baby Baton, Kiyokazu changes his mind after thinking about it and the couple decides to adopt a baby from Baby Baton. Satako and Kiyokazu meet with the biological mother of the child they’re going to adopt; she is a high school student named Hikari Katakura and it is an emotional decision for her to give up her child. However, we won’t learn more about her until later in the film. We then flash forward to Asato saying sorry for pushing Sora. Satako gets a call from Asato’s teacher, Ms. Yokota, and reveals that Sora told Asato he lied about being pushed off the jungle gym, so now they can play with each other again. This is joyful news, but then Hikari calls Satako and demands to get Asato back. She shows up at the house and demands for Satako and Kiyokazu to give her child back to her, but then Kiyokazu accuses her of intruding their house and of blackmailing them.
The movie then gives perspective on the events in Hikari’s life leading up to her meeting with the couple. When she was in the eighth grade Hikari developed a crush on a guy in her gym class named Takumi, and one day she goes to his place and they start dating and having sex. Hikari’s mom meets with the doctor at the school and he tells her Hikari is 23 weeks pregnant and that it would be too late to have an abortion. Hikari’s mother cries in disbelief at her daughter’s pregnancy. Takumi meets with Hikari and cries tears of guilt and apologizes to her for her unwanted pregnancy. Hikari’s parents tell her to quit school and give her child up for adoption when it’s born, and that she still has time to study to get into her sister’s high school. Hikari meets with Asami, the founder of Baby Baton, and travels to Hiroshima with her to stay at the agency. It’s at the agency that Hikari meets other young pregnant women, such as Konomi and Maho. According to Asami, many young women arrive at Baby Baton on their own because of strained relationships with their parents. After befriending the girls at the agency, Konomi and Maho leave when they give birth to their children, and then soon after Hikari gives birth to her son, Asato.
The movie flashes forward to when Hikari demands money from Satako since she won’t give her her child back. The police from Kanagawa district arrive at the couple’s home and Detective Mishima shows the photo of Hikari, who has disappeared. The film flashes back to when Hikari is with her family at dinner and everyone else is talking about how great their lives are and Hikari feels left out. When one of the family members makes a snide comment about Hikari’s pregnancy and Hikari calls him out on it, her mom strikes her and kicks her out of the house. She revisits Asami and asks for work because she cannot live at home anymore. Asami then tells her that Baby Baton is closing down so she won’t be able to stay that long. She meets the last mom that Baby Baton will take, named Sara, and Hikari and Sara have a conversation about pregnancy. Sara asks Hikari about her baby and her relationship with it because she doesn’t feel love for her own unborn baby. When Sara leaves to give birth to her baby, Hikari finds a box of records of adoptive parents from March 2013 and finds out about her biological child’s adoptive parents. When Asami is closing up Baby Baton, Hikari asks her why she started Baby Baton, and Asami explains that thought about having a baby herself, but couldn’t, and taking care of the young mothers was in her way taking care of children. Hikari thanks her for everything and travels by sea to find the adoptive parents of her child and get him back. She gets a newspaper delivery job in Yokohama and meets a girl named Tomoka, who wears a yellow jacket and gives Hikari a makeover. They bond as friends but then two men come over and assault Tomoka for not paying the rent on time for her and Hikari’s apartment. Tomoka leaves the apartment and her yellow back behind, and Hikari falls into a depression. When her boss tells her to get help for her depression, Hikari decides to go over to the couple’s house and retrieve her child, especially since she gave all her money to the guys who hounded Tomoka over the rent.
Then we see Hikari at Satoko and Kiyokazu’s house and they still do not trust that she is the biological mother of Asato, no matter how much she is telling the truth, because she looks unrecognizable from the Hikari that they met many years ago when she first gave up Asato for adoption. Hikari cries and begs for forgiveness, saying she is not fit to be Asato’s mother. It’s shown that Satoko told Asato he has a biological mom and that two years ago Hikari wrote her son a letter, and in the letter she writes “please don’t erase me.” Satoko then realizes that she was wrong to not recognize Hikari as the missing woman that the detective showed her, and seeks out to find Hikari to apologize. She takes Asato with her to see his biological mom, and she finds Hikari standing and looking out at the ocean outside. She apologizes for not recognizing Hikari and Hikari is finally reunited with her son, Asato.
This film honestly blew me away. There is also a special feature on the DVD of the movie where French actress Juliette Binoche has a Zoom discussion with the director of True Mothers, Naomi Kawase. She discusses the process that went into making the film, and her inspiration for it. Kawase says that for the scene where Hikari meets the women of the Baby Baton agency she wanted to incorporate real women who had to give up their children for adoption because these women exist in the shadows of Japanese society, and she wanted to raise awareness of what they went through. During the filming she spent a lot of time with the crew and took Juliette and the crew to different Shinto Buddhist temples in six locations throughout Japan during the production of the movie to offer blessings to the temples. For her, Kawase’s goal in making this film was to take difficult topics and create some kind of positive value from them; I agree, because as a Buddhist myself I believe in this philosophy of value creation, where we confront daily challenges and social issues and transform them based on the view that everything has meaning and you can create value out of anything negative. We call that changing poison into medicine.
1/12/22 (this is when I started the review. I didn’t finish writing it until tonight.)
I just finished The Last King of Scotland, and I am still shaking. I’m really glad my dad warned me to not watch this movie late at night because wow, Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy acted the hell out of their roles in this movie. Normally I go back and watch movies twice, but this movie I definitely need to take some pause. It’s based on the novel by British journalist Giles Foden, which I read when I was in high school. In my world geography class we had our unit on Africa and I wanted to read more literature about Africa so I read books like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Last King of Scotland was one of the books I read in my spare time. I don’t remember how I felt while reading the book, but reading the book is definitely different from watching the movie. This is a two-hour long film and as someone who is sensitive to violence it’s not for the faint of heart, but it shows how brutal Idi Amin’s regime was. For our unit on Africa there was a list of movies to watch that we could choose on our own, and I don’t think The Last King of Scotland was on that list because it’s a school district and I don’t think they were allowed to recommend R-rated features. I overheard one of my classmates ask my teacher if he could watch The Last King of Scotland for his film choice, and my teacher said sure, but said that it was a pretty brutal film and Idi Amin was a pretty nasty dictator. Normally I read the parents guide before watching R rated films because I don’t enjoy jump scares or excessive gore, and honestly this was one of those films where I’m glad I read the Wikipedia page and the Kids in Mind content because it really does depict how brutal Amin’s regime was. Then again, is there really such a thing as a good dictator? Hitler wasn’t a nice guy, Stalin wasn’t, and Amin also wasn’t.
The movie begins with Nicholas Garrigan, the protagonist, jumping in a lake with his friends and having fun with them in Scotland, where he was born and raised. He earns his degree as a doctor and his mom and dad celebrate with him. Even though they aren’t sure of his career choice, they just want him to be happy. In his bedroom, Nicholas spins a globe on his desk to find where he would go first as a doctor, and the first spin lands him on Canada. He spins again, and it lands on Uganda. We then see him riding in a caravan through the Uganda countryside and communicating with the locals. He arrives in a village where he and another guy are the only main doctors there, and is informed by the other guy that most of the civilians use a witch doctor and not Western medicine. He comes to understand the grueling nature of the work, but finds out that the new president, Idi Amin, is speaking in the village. Nicholas is excited and persuades Sarah to come hear him speak, but she says she is unsure and doesn’t work for Amin. He tells her it’s going to be fun, and so she comes with him. They stand in a crowd and hear Amin speaking. Amin promises that his new government will be one of action and not just words, and that they will build new houses and new schools and other new infrastructure. He also tells him “I am you” and that him and the people “will make this country better.” Suddenly, an official calls Nicholas over to see Amin because he got his hand injured in an accident. While Nicholas is bandaging up Amin’s hand, an injured cow on the side of the road keeps wailing in pain and Nicholas becomes more and more agitated because he thinks the cow is distracting him from concentrating on bandaging Amin’s hand. Nicholas tells Sarah to tell the locals to do something about the cow, but even after Sarah communicates with them, nothing can be done. Finally, Nicholas gets frustrated, and finally yells for someone to put the cow out of its misery, grabbing Amin’s pistol and shooting the cow to death. At first, Amin is angry and expresses his anger that Nicholas grabbed his gun without his permission. He assumes Nicholas is British, but Nicholas clarifies that he is actually Scottish. Amin finds a connection with him and his Scottish heritage and gives Nicholas his army coat in exchange for Nicholas’ Scotland T-shirt. Nicholas finds Sarah one night and asks her out for drinks but she refuses, but he doesn’t take no for an answer and tries to kiss her. She refuses his advances and tells him she is married and doesn’t want to have an affair. He later meets Jonah Wasswa, the Minister of Health in Uganda and also meets Dr. Junju (played brilliantly by David Oyewolo) who was the previous doctor in Mulago’s hospital. He visits Amin after being summoned to see him, and Amin tells Nicholas to be his personal physician. Nicholas is at first skeptical because he is committed to his work in Mgambo, the village he was staying at with Sarah, but Amin jokes with him that it was Sarah who convinced him to stay and to take what she said with a grain of salt. Nicholas, goes with what Amin is telling him and decides to become his personal physician. Amin then invites him to a state dinner and Nicholas meets various people there, including two British officials, one of them being Nigel Stone, and Amin’s three wives, one of whom is Kay, who Nicholas develops a crush on. Amin speaks at the dinner and makes these promises to them that many civilizations have stolen Africa’s cultural traditions and borrowed heavily from African civilization, but that it’s important to remember Africa’s history and he also says that in the past few years they have reclaimed Black power for Africa. Later that evening, Nicholas is summoned to Amin’s chamber because Amin is suffering from health issues. Nicholas props him up and presses a baseball bat against Amin’s stomach and Amin farts loudly, which relieves him of his pain. He then sees a future for Nicholas as his doctor and as someone he can confide in. He tells Nicholas that his father left him as a child and he took a job in the army as a cook, where he was treated horribly, and now he is the president of Uganda thanks to the British. Later on, Nigel approaches Nicholas and tells him to stay in touch, and when Nicholas doesn’t understand, Nigel explains that people are starting to speculate about Nicholas’ unusually personal relationship with Amin and that Amin doesn’t show that much attention to someone like that. He tells him to let him know if anything shady goes on, and Nicholas poo-poos what he says, thinking Nigel is just trying to discredit Nicholas. Nicholas is tasked with taking Amin’s place at a meeting with foreign officials, and he strides in thinking he knows what to do, but even the officials are uneasy with the fact that Amin had to leave at the last minute and is just putting some random stranger from another country in his place. Amin also condescends to Jonah but praises Nicholas. Nicholas finds Kay’s son McKenzie has epilepsy. Nicholas gives him a vaccination for his epilepsy and he relaxes. Kay places her trust in Nicholas for saving her son, and his attraction for her deepens. Amin further continues to praise Nicholas, even getting him a nice new car. While driving Amin in his new car, Nicholas brings up the way Amin treats his son. According to Kay, Amin looks down on her and won’t talk to her because he sees McKenzie’s epilepsy as a defect. Nicholas tells Amin that he doesn’t like how Amin treats McKenzie, and Amin retorts that he needs to mind his business, and then tells him with a fake smile how he loves Nicholas’s honesty.
However, as the film goes on we find out that Nicholas ultimately pays the price for being honest with Amin about how he treats people. However, it’s clearly shown how Amin uses fear, gaslighting and intimidation to keep Nicholas in his power. At the pool Nicholas sees Kay and talks to her, but Kay, knowing that Amin will find out about her and Nicholas’s chemistry, keeps her distance from him. Nicholas doesn’t take a hint and maintains his love for Kay. Stone approaches him and tells him about several news reports that are coming out about Ugandan civilians that have gone missing during Amin’s presidency, and once again warns Nicholas to proceed with caution and that he is deluded into thinking Amin is a good person when he’s the one behind the disappearances. Early on, Amin tells Nicholas to be honest with him and he tells him that at a party the previous night, Dr. Wasswa was talking to a white European gentleman and looking at Nicholas out of the corner of his eye while talking to him. Nicholas didn’t like that he was being talked about and asks Amin to have “just a talk” with Dr. Wasswa, and that’s why Dr. Wasswa has disappeared. Stone tells Nicholas to be careful around Amin, but Nicholas blows up at him and tells him that “this is Africa” and that “you meet violence with violence” and that Amin knows what he’s doing and that he doesn’t see why no one trusts Amin is a good guy.
But as the film goes on, Nicholas realizes that maybe all those people warning him about Amin were right after all, because one day as they are driving in his car, they get in a car crash with a coup that is plotting to kill Amin and swerve past the coup shooting bullets at some officials inside a car. He then gets out of the car and shouts at Nicholas and accuses him of putting Amin’s life in jeopardy like that. Amin then takes Nicholas to a shed where four or five men are being brutally tortured with weapons, and Amin accuses them of trying to harm him, reminding them that no one disrespects him and that he is the president who everyone looks up to. This is a harrowing thing for Nicholas to encounter and he thinks “Um, maybe I should get the hell out of here” but it’s too late because he’s already trapped in Amin’s mind games with him. Garrigan once again reiterrates his oath of confidentiality as a doctor, but Amin accuses him of being just like the other white European people who came to Africa and colonized it for their own gain and took away from its communities. Nicholas pleads for Amin to let him fly home to Scotland since that is his home, but Amin tells him he can’t go home because Uganda is his home and that Nicholas is just like “his own son.” At a Western cowboy-themed party that Amin has with go-go dancers, Nicholas drinks and smokes himself to oblivion and recollects the traumas he has witnessed in the short time he has been Amin’s personal doctor. He runs into Kay and breaks down in tears because he wants to leave Uganda and Amin won’t let him, and she consoles him. They hide out and sleep together, and when they wake up Kay tells him he needs to find a way, any way, to get out of Uganda. Nicholas promises but again, is stuck and not sure what to do or even how bad Amin’s regime is going to get. He comes in later to his apartment only to find it completely destroyed and with his papers strewn all over the place, and picks up his Uganda passport, realizing that Amin’s officials took his Scotland passport so that he couldn’t go home. Stone meets with Nicholas in his apartment, and when Nicholas finally tells him he wants to get out of Uganda for good, Stone tells him Amin calls Nicholas his “white monkey” and has complete control over Nicholas’s whereabouts. Stone shows Nicholas photographs of civilians who have been executed under Amin’s regime, and one of the civilians we see being tortured is Dr. Wasswa. Nicholas remembers telling Amin to have a talk with him, and feels guilty for doing so. It’s at that moment he realizes that he really does need to get out. Nicholas tells Stone that he can get him out but Stone tells him “fuck your rights” and tells him to go to Amin for that. Shortly after, Amin announces on television his plan to force everyone who is of Asian descent out of Uganda in 90 days. Nicholas goes to Amin and tells him to not do that because if he expels the Asian community in Uganda, it would hurt the economy. Amin accuses him of being loyal to the Asian tailor he went to early on in the film for his suit, and Nicholas leaves and finds a bus with Asian immigrants fleeing the city, and Sarah is on the bus.
Nicholas also finds out from Kay that he got her pregnant after they had sex, and she is worried for her life at this point about what Amin will do to her when he finds out. Nicholas promises her that they will get her an abortion at the hospital, but Kay tells him it’s too dangerous. Nicholas promises her he will see what the hospital can do, but then Dr. Junju tells him he is out of his mind because Amin will find out. Nicholas ends up being too late to help Kay because Amin has him attend a press conference that Amin is speaking at. When he finally arrives at Kay’s house, he is informed by the people there that Amin’s officials took her to the hospital. He arrives at the hospital and passes by several crying civilians in a darkened hallway, and finds Kay’s dismembered body lying on the morgue table, retching in shock. Amin goes to the Entebbe airport and finds a group of hostages held there and the doctors and Nicholas try to help them, but then Amin finds out about Nicholas’ plan to poison Amin and he ends up taking Nicholas to a private spot and angrily tells Nicholas he has betrayed him and that he will get punished severely. He asks him if there is one thing that he has done that is good and that he thought he could just come to Uganda like the white dude that he is and treat the people of Uganda like they are fun and games, but that “this is not a game.” Amin brutally tortures Nicholas by having his guards pierce his chest with meat hooks and hang him by the ceiling (I didn’t watch the scene because I knew it was going to be graphic, but I could hear Nicholas’s cries of pain and that was enough for me to know that what Amin did was brutal. The scene is also pretty long.) While Amin goes out and tells the hostages he is letting everyone fly back to safety, Dr. Junju finds Nicholas unconscious and tells him he is going to let him go in secret. While Nicholas flies with the Israeli citizens back home, one of the authorities of Amin accosts Dr. Junju of Nicholas’s whereabouts and when Dr. Junju says he doesn’t know, the authority shoots and kills him while the hostages watch in horror. On the plane Nicholas remembers in sadness the times he shared with the people of Uganda and the horrors he faced at the hands of Amin’s regime. In the epilogue, it says that forty-eight hours later, Israeli forces stormed Entebbe and liberated all but one of the hostages and that international opinion turned against Amin immediately. It continues that when Amin was ousted in 1979 that all of the Ugandan civilians celebrated, and that 300,000 people in total were killed under his regime. Amin, while in exile in Saudi Arabia, died on August 16, 2003.
Honestly, this was probably Forest Whitaker’s scariest role. I have seen him in The Butler, The Great Debaters, Respect, Arrival (I also just found out he was one of the Equisapiens in Sorry to Bother You), Black Panther, but this role he was in as Idi Amin was just…terrifyingly convincing. And it’s all in his body language. The character he embodies was a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure. One minute Amin is laughing with Nicholas and the next moment he is screaming at him or threatening him. Amin gave Nicholas this illusion of safety, of security, that he was going to improve the lives of Ugandans everywhere, but it ended up being a fantasy. Amin knew that Nicholas was just a white guy coming in with a savior mentality, and I think that’s what the movie reminded me, too: to not forget the brutal legacy of European imperialism in Africa. In my world geography and history classes we read some pretty harrowing accounts about European imperialism in African countries, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get past the first few pages of King Leopold’s Ghost without getting nightmares. I picked it up because we were reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and I don’t think I finished it because I had read a lot about King Leopold’s rule on the Internet and saw brutal footage of his regime in the Congo and even just looking at the cover of King Leopold’s Ghost gave me nightmares, like I couldn’t even keep it by my nightstand (thankfully, during the 2020 global reckoning with systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, people in Belgium called to take down King Leopold II’s statue.) But I don’t want to shield my eyes from this history, because it really is important to study and learn from it. The history of European imperialism is one of gross human rights abuses, and Amin’s presidency was also one of gross human rights abuses. Before reading The Last King of Scotland and seeing the movie, I knew very little about Idi Amin, and of course I still have a lot to learn about his presidency and his life, especially because although The Last King of Scotland is based on Idi Amin’s regime, it’s still a work of fiction and it’s told from a certain perspective, that of a white guy who didn’t grow up in Uganda and is setting foot in the country for the first time. Still though, the objective fact remains that many people were killed under Amin’s regime and the film portrays this in the realest way possible.
Overall, I really loved this film mainly because of the powerful acting that James McAvoy and Forest Whitaker brought to the roles of Nicholas Garrigan and Idi Amin. And the film score was out of this world! I think not just the acting gave the film its intense suspense but also the score, which blends African music traditions with European music traditions. It reminded me of the music we studied in a class I took in college about African Popular Music, where we studied the music of people such as Fela Kuti, who was from Nigeria, E.T. Mensah and the Tempos, who were from Ghana, and K’naan, a Canadian musician originally from Somalia. While I enjoyed studying about Western classical music and I enjoy playing it, it was great to know more about music traditions that I don’t typically listen to.
Honestly, when the movie first came out in 2006 I couldn’t see it since I was way too young to watch R-rated films. But I remembered Forest Whitaker winning Best Actor at the Academy Awards for it, and after seeing the movie sixteen years after its release, and being so drawn in by Whitaker’s acting chops, I can honestly see why he won that Oscar. Because holy shit, the man can fucking act.
Here is the trailer for the film:
The Last King of Scotland. 2006. Rated R for some strong violence and gruesome images, sexual content and language.
The movie also reminded me of another movie I watched called Sorry to Bother You, which, like The Wolf of Wall Street, is a dark comedy. Of course, the storylines are different. Jordan Belfort is white and Cassius is a Black guy, and their narratives are different. However, both films make excellent social commentaries about wealth and capitalism. If you haven’t seen the film Sorry to Bother You yet, it’s about this young Black man named Cassius, or Cash, who lives in this alternate universe version of Oakland, California. He works as a telemarketer and spends time with his girlfriend, Detroit, who works two jobs to make ends meet so she can fund her artistic projects. He fails to upsell the company’s products at work and constantly has people hanging up on him. His Black coworker, played brilliantly by Danny Glover, tells him that if he wants to succeed in the world of telemarketing, he needs to put on a “white” voice (Patton Oswalt provides the “white” voice.) At first Cash is skeptical, but because he is in a dire situation with his job and his finances, he acquires the “white” voice and starts talking on the phone in a stereotypical white American man’s voice. Customers start treating him with more respect after he acquires a white voice, and he makes more money in his career and wins the approval of one of the higher-ups, Steve Lift, played by actor Armie Hammer, who offers Cash an extremely high salary for moving up the career ladder. At this time his friends are protesting against corporate America, and when Cash talks with his friends about the promises of moving up at work, his friends tell him it’s all just a dream and that moving up in the corporate world isn’t worth it if it makes him a sellout. And when Cash does become a sellout and starts living a materialistic lifestyle, his friends and his girlfriend see how much he’s changed and they go their separate ways. However, Cash realizes that Steve’s promise of corporate success comes with a dark price because Steve is the CEO of a program called Worry Free, an exploitative program where people’s lives revolve around productivity for the sake of the corporation. He plans to turn them into equasapians, people who have superhuman strength and are part horse, by having them snort a cocaine-like substance that turns them into these creatures. Cash, while in the restroom at Steve’s office, knocks on the door and an employee of Worry Free, who is an equasapien, falls onto the floor (honestly, this scene shook me.) and he runs out of there and realizes he needs to stop Steve before it’s too late.
The Wolf of Wall Street makes a similar commentary about materialism and wealth. Of course, I acknowledge that Jordan and Cassius have two totally different narratives, but for some reason I kept thinking about Sorry to Bother You when watching Wolf of Wall Street. I think it’s because like Cassius, Jordan started out not knowing much about the corporate world. He was pretty happy with his wife and his life before he took on Stratton-Oakmont, and similarly Cassius was pretty satisfied with his life and his wife Teresa before he was told to move up that he had to become someone he wasn’t. Similarly, Jordan was told that to move up in the corporate world he had to become someone totally different. He meets another woman and Teresa tells him he has become someone totally different, and they divorce. His accumulation of wealth affects his entire life to the point where he doesn’t even get sad like his new wife Naomi does when her mother dies later on in the film because he’s focused on his negotiations with the Swiss broker firm he’s dealing with (he opens a Swiss bank account in her name.)
The Arts Are Life 