Joy’s Favorite Flicks
I look for movies that have some redeeming value; something more than a simple romance or adventure or who-done-it. I love movies that have metaphysical components, or that make me laugh. And I enjoy the ones with an unusual twist. I don’t use a rating system because I only review movies that I enjoy. I consider (almost) all of these to be four or five stars. Thanks to NetFlix, we now have access to movies from all eras.
Please do send me your own reviews of movies you love. If I like them I’ll review them and perhaps I’ll add your comments. Use your real name and city, unless you’d rather not.
Bookmark this page and come back frequently. I add several movies about once a month.
Agnes Brown........
All of Me...........
Ayurveda—The Art of Being...........
Being John Malkovich...........
Casanova...........
Core...........
Dancing at Lughnasa...........
Emmanuel’s Gift...........
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...........
Far from Heaven...........
Guru...........
Happy Feet...........
House of Sand...........
Housesitter...........
Innocence...........
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)...........
The Kite Runner...........
Last Holiday...........
Masai: The Rain Warriors...........
Multiplicity...........
The Pianist...........
Prime...........
Proof...........
Rivers and Tides...........
Shipibo Konibo...........
Shortbus...........
Snow Cake...........
Splendor...........
Taken...........
Talking To Heaven...........
Tampopo...........
Ten Canoes...........
Walk The Line...........
Water...........
Combine a slice of Ireland with a passionate friendship between two gutsy women, living through thick and thin, and you have the story of Agnes Brown, complete with laughter and joy, a widow with seven kids, and a mean money-lender. It’s a precious movie that will make you laugh and cry. If you’re a woman, see it with your best girlfriend. Angela Huston combines a great performance with fine directing.
Personally I think this is one of the funniest, most wonky movies I have ever seen. It features Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin at their absolute best. They were both nominated for Golden Globe awards as best actor and actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical. Steve Martin won the Best Actor award from the National Society of Film Critics and from the New York Film Critics Circle. Australia Theatrical called it “The funniest movie since Tootsie.”
It’s a loony spoof on New Age spirituality, full of peculiar twists. Jon Carroll’s review says it all:
it has the funniest 10 minutes of screen time since the movies started talking.
And the most unpromising premise. Lily Tomlin is a sickly rich person who wishes her soul to be transferred to someone else's body just at the moment of her death. Richard Libertini is the guru who will make it all happen; Steve Martin is the skeptical lawyer who is working for Tomlin. Complications ensue. Tomlin dies, her soul moves to an odd brass bowl, which is then knocked out a window. The bowl hits Martin on the head, and suddenly Lily Tomlin is inhabiting the body of Steve Martin (with Steve Martin still in it).
A power struggle ensues. The right side (Tomlin) does not wish to cooperate with the left side (Martin). Both personalities are angry, confused, inept. It is an astonishing illusion: Your brain knows that it's only watching Steve Martin hurling his limbs around, but nothing you see on-screen confirms that. His left foot moves bravely outward, intent on getting back to his office; his right foot remains glued to the ground. His right hand clings to a parking meter desperately; his left hand just as desperately tries to pry it off. All the while, he is engaged in a furious argument with himself, by turns sarcastic, seductive, wheedling, raging.
(1984)
This is a remarkable documentary, and well worth the time if you are at all interested in this ancient art of healing. There are several techniques shown that I have never seen before. Even the art of reducing specific stones to ash and taking them internally was mentioned briefly, but unfortunately it was not described in great detail.
Watching this DVD is like going to India and finding some of the old revered teachers and healers and having them talk to you and share their knowledge, and being able to watch them at work, treating patients and harvesting and preparing herbal remedies. Quite fascinating. We are very fortunate that this knowledge is being preserved before it is lost. (1002 minutes, 2002)
If you enjoy having your mind twisted, and going through secret portals, and the possibility of literally being inside someone else’s head, you will like this very strange movie. John Malkovich is an actor, actually, and he plays himself, but then, so does everyone else. No need to say anything more. Just sit back and let your mind get bent.
For a silly romp with lots of laughs and a darn good time, this movie is a winner. I still can’t figure out how they managed to make the topic of female oppression and the inquisition into something funny! Heath Ledger plays Casanova, and Sienna Miller plays the one woman who scorns the man whom even the nuns adore and protect. It takes place in lush 18th century Venice, as Casanova falls in love and attempts to pursue the woman who tries to avoid him.
For a great adventure and sci fi movie that is completely believable, combining 1960s style sci fi movie with great acting in a character-centered movie with awesome visual effects. The theme is the gradual diminishing of the earth’s electromagnetic field that protects us from solar winds and the rays of the sun. Without that protection, the protagonist in the movie speculates, microwave radiation will literally cook our planet, and that is what starts to happen when high altitude static discharges make dramatic patterns in the sky, and pigeons drop out of the air.
The one fly in the ointment, from my perspective, is that the diminishing of the electromagnetic field has happened fourteen times before, and when this occurs, the fluid next to the earth’s core just starts spinning in the opposite direction, sometimes causing the polarities of the poles to switch direction.
The question to explore is what will happen to all the life forms on this planet if and when this occurs? Will the lack of magnetism actually erase our memories the way that a big magnet can wipe tapes clean? Will people go crazy? Will people die? How can we prepare ourselves for such an event? Is this what the Mayan calendar speaks about happening in 2012? Is this what actually happened to Atlantis?
Unfortunately, none of these questions are examined. Instead, in true American fashion, our heroes (including Hilary Swank at the helm) make their way to the core of the earth, with the mission of detonating a nuclear reactor that will supposedly prevent the liquid surrounding the core from changing directions. Do they get there on time? And does it work? And do they get back? Those are the questions that keep you at the edge of your seat. (2003)
It’s a sad movie, but it’s also joyful. It’s a slice of life in Ireland in the 1930s. We look in at the lives of five sisters and their elder brother, all single, living together, trying to keep the family together and to survive under difficult circumstances. It’s the time of the first “wireless;” a radio that brings Irish music to these people who, despite such hard times, cannot resist an opportunity to sing and to dance. The acting is completely believable, and Meryl Streep shines as the eldest sister who tries to stay in control but fails miserably.
The story is told by the young and only son of one of the sisters, whose father came back when he was about eight, before leaving again to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The brightest time for this group came one evening, after the radio had been on the blink for a long time, and the boy’s father managed to fix it, and the music came pouring back into their lives, lifting one sister after another—despite every effort to stay prim and proper—into the most glorious riotous reveling dance. The boy tells us, “When I think of that summer, I think of it as dancing—dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—dancing as if language no longer existed, because words were no longer necessary.”(1998)
This is a true story about a man from Ghana who was born without a tibia, so he has one very short leg. Ten percent of the people in Ghana are disabled, and they aren’t allowed to work; they’re expected to become beggars—and they actually earn more than most people who have regular jobs. Having a disabled child is considered a curse upon the parents; a punishment for past-life sins. The parents are expected to kill these children. Emmanuel’s father abandoned the family after his son was born.
Emmanuel had a vision to become a whole person, and to make it possible for other disabled people to be treated with respect. He persuaded an organization in the United States to donate a bicycle which he rode it across Ghana, gathering support along the way. It’s a beautiful, touching, and inspiring story, narrated by Oprah Winfrey. (2006) Note: This 80-minute DVD is available through Stephen Simon’s Spiritual Cinema Circle, and it is also with Netflix.
Joel (Jim Carey) lives a meaningless existence. “I go to work and come home from work. My journal is empty. Nothing ever happens to me.” One day Clementine, a gorgeous, wild woman (Kate Winslet) comes into his life, complete with blue hair. She picks him up on the subway—or did they meet at a party on the beach? In any case, within a year it’s obvious their lifestyles aren’t meshing, especially when she crashes his car and comes home drunk at 3 am, and he accuses her of “making friends by sleeping with them.”
When Clementine marches out of Joel’s life, she makes an impulsive decision to wipe him out of her mind, with the help of an experimental medical procedure. When Joel finds her the next day at her job, she literally doesn’t recognize him—and she has a new boyfriend. Joel is absolutely devastated and makes the decision to wipe her out of his mind.
But the procedure goes a bit haywire. Memories get jammed and wires get mixed and we see scenes of the relationship that are supposed to be getting erased from his mind intermixed with events occurring amongst the people who are working the equipment. And we see Joel’s ambivalence about losing all these memories.
Surely this gives us time to reflect upon our own desires to wipe certain experiences from our minds. This is a rich movie, brilliantly acted, and ingeniously written by Charlie Kaufman. Be sure to catch the Bonus Materials on the DVD for a much deeper appreciation of the true magic that French Director Michel Gondry works with the cinematography.
I rarely see movies twice, but when I saw this one the second time, a few years later, I liked it even more. The first time it was pretty tense; the second time I could relax and enjoy it. Both Carey and Winslet make huge strides out of their usual roles, giving amazing depth to their characters, and Director Gondry gives them plenty of space to improvise and make the script their own. This is an extraordinary movie: funny, scary, romantic, sad, creative, bizarre, and whacko. (2004)
This movie begins in the fifties in Connecticut. I grew up during the fifties in San Diego and in Los Angeles. Other movies that depict this era feel to me like a vague facsimile. This movie made me feel like I’d been dropped down into my old neighborhood; I couldn’t believe how real it was.
The family has an unreal feeling to it, but that was exactly the way that middle class families lived their lives. They were totally unreal with each other.
This movie is about what happens to an unreal family when reality rears its ugly head. It’s about the impact of homosexuality and racism on the lives of these people.
It’s a sad movie, and I don’t recommend it for entertainment value. But I am grateful that someone bothered to create an emotionally and historically accurate depiction of exactly how it felt to be in a cross-racial relationship in that era. It’s hard to believe, but it’s totally accurate.
I can’t speak to how it felt to be gay at that time. Though I find it hard to believe that a successful business executive would leave his wife and move in with his male lover in that era (or even now!).
The main part of the movie takes place in 1958. In 1959 I was 15, a senior in a Jewish high school in Los Angeles, and I had a black boyfriend at Los Angeles City College. I met him at a house with Freedom Riders; black and white young people who went to the South to ride busses and deliberately violate the law that said that blacks had to ride in the back of the bus. These were courageous young people; passive resisters who frequently were beaten up and put in jail.
On the weekends we picketed Woolworth’s, to protest the fact that in the South, black people were not allowed to sit at the lunch counters with whites.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, there were just a few places where Richard and I could hang out and feel comfortable. I never took him to my house, and he never took me to his.
Once we borrowed a friend’s car and took a drive to the country. It seemed that almost every car we passed stared at us. We were violating a strong taboo.
I realize now that our willingness to violate that taboo was just one step that helped pave the way to making interracial relationships less frightening to people.
This is indeed a movie about a time and place that is Far from Heaven.
Julianne Moore played the wife and mother impeccably, and she was nominated as Best Actress in the Academy Awards. (2002)
The Guru is actually the Guru of Sex who is actually a dance teacher who admires John Travolta and travels to America to follow his heart and live his dreams. In pursuit of an acting career he inadvertently ends up on the set of a porn flick and befriends the leading lady. She turns out to be spiritually oriented, and he puts himself under her tutelage so that he can learn the wisdom that he then teaches under the guise of the Guru. This is a clever and funny movie. (2003)
Using the basic information conveyed in March of the Penguins, a beautiful movie about the remarkable mating and breeding behaviors during a year in lives of the Emperor penguins of the Antarctic, Happy Feet looks, at first, like a simple cartoon and children’s version of the same story, with a slightly different slant. It tells the age-old tale of the Ugly Duckling; in this case, Mumble, the one Emperor Penguin who cannot sing, and thus cannot attract a proper mate. But he has a different gift, though at first it is shunned and he is shamed for having it; he can dance.
And along with that, he has a mission: he is determined to find the Aliens who are stealing the fish that are the life-blood of his community. His commitment is to find a way to communicate with that which is good in them, and to persuade them to change their ways. The heartwarming (and possibly even believable) ending is reminiscent of what might happen if the Indigo Children and the Crystal Children (those with higher consciousness and not much karma to burn) merged with the growing community of adults who have a sense of morality and caring for the creatures of the planet.
The sound track was great, and Robin Williams and Nicole Kidman, among others, added their voices to the stunning animation.
Warning: for young and highly sensitive children, this movie does have some scary parts. (2007)
The filming of desert scenes is pure poetry, as this movie, brilliantly directed by Andrucha Waddington, tracks the lives of a mother and daughter through several generations as they move from the city to the desert (to get out of debt) where they literally become trapped by the dunes and are forced to make alliance with a band of men who are descendants of runaway slaves, who do not believe that the slaves have been freed.
It reminds me of Woman in the Dunes, an old favorite of mine. These are not happy stories, but they stand as brilliant reminders of the fortitude of the human soul.
There are tricks in the handling of time that produce surprises that are quite fascinating in this unique and original screenplay
If I was giving out Academy Awards, and if this was an American rather than a Brazilian film, I would want Fernanda Torres to receive the award for best actress, and I would want Fernanda Montenegro (who initially plays her mother and is in reality her mother) to get nominated as best supporting actress, and I would nominate this film as one of the best films and screenplays of the year. Stunning! (2007)
Every now and then a really funny movie comes along, and this one certainly qualifies. Goldie Hawn plays a cute babe (Gwen) who lies through her teeth and weasels herself into the most improbable circumstances with an architect she sleeps with once (Newt, played by Steve Martin) who has built an exquisite house for his hoped-for bride-to-be who turned him down flat. The story of how Gwen moves into the house he built, in a small town where he once lived, and befriends his parents, his neighbors, and even his ex-girlfriend and boss, convincing them all that she is his wife before he gets a chance to protest makes for a hilarious story—particularly when Gwen’s clever lies engage his boss so that he is ready to give Newt a coveted promotion, and his old girlfriend starts to think he’s pretty desirable after all. (1992)
This is such a beautiful, touching movie. Forty years ago a young man and woman fell in love, and then she had to leave, and they went their separate ways. Each of them married, had children, and lived reasonably good lives. Or did they? Twenty years ago the woman’s husband had an affair, and though she forgave him, they stopped being lovers. Her life has been fairly empty since then, and she hardly knew what she was missing until this old lover showed up in her life, and swept her off her feet again. At the age of nearly seventy.
What tender love scenes; interweaving memories from their youth with loving moments in the present. Juxtaposed with the shock of her husband and his inability to believe and then to accept that his wife is having an affair at her age!
How tastefully Paul Cox has written and directed this movie about love. It is a song, a poem, a watercolor painting, a bit of philosophy, a spiritual commentary. Filmed in Australia, it is refreshing, sweet, tender, sad, delightful, and extremely honest. It firmly puts an end to the myth that older people don’t have sex. As the movie so aptly portrays, some do and some don’t.
The music is wonderful. As are the stunning performances by the beautiful Julia Blake, who won the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Female Actress, and Charles Tingwell, who plays her lover, a retired organist. Paul Cox was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in 2001. At the Montreal World Film Festival, Innocence won the Grand prix des Ameriques Awarrd and the People’s Choice Award. American film critic Roger Ebert praised it as his favorite film. (2000)
I don’t normally care for operas, and especially not operas in English. This is a rock opera, and it began as an opera score in 1970, written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (who also wrote the score for Evita, which also preceded that movie). Then Norman Jewison came on board as an incredible director, and this film adaptation was released in 1973. It was the eighth highest-grossing film of that year.
The movie begins with a red-and-white school bus traveling down a dusty road in the desert of Israel. The bus comes to a grinding halt and dozens of actors pile out and instantly begin to unload the bus, climbing onto the top, shaking out the dust-covered tarp, and throwing the props to the actors below, then finally lowering the huge cross.
The stage is a temple ruin in the middle of the desert with an additional scaffolding. This could easily have been the inspiration for Burning Man’s location in the Nevada desert in 1990.
It’s hard to believe that there is no spoken text in this movie. Everything is delivered in song, and yet it is always easy to understand each word and it rarely feels stilted or artificial. In fact, the voices in song are totally appropriate because they carry the emotional impact so powerfully, especially with the soul-searching performances by Ted Neeley (as Jesus) and Carl Anderson, now deceased(as the black Judas).Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson were both nominated for 1974 Golden Globe Awards.
This is written as Judas’s story of what happened to Jesus (and to himself). In this rendition, Judas’s main objection to Jesus is that he allowed people to believe that he was the son of God, and therefore not human, and so no one could hope to become like him.
My understanding is that this belief did not come from Jesus, but was a direct result of a decree by Emperor Justinian in 545 AD, which led to the doctrine that Jesus was the only son of God. But even in John 17:20-21, Jesus is quoted as saying, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
The reason for making Jesus the exclusive son of God is explained very succinctly at http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-pope.htm, where you can also read about why the concept of reincarnation was removed from Christian theology for similar reasons:
“A powerful group of . . . . Cardinals convinced the Emperor that if people realized they were the children of God they might begin to believe they no longer needed an Emperor, or to pay taxes, or to obey the Holy Church. But since they reasoned that only Christ had come from God but God made brand new souls at the time of conception and only the Holy Church could bring these souls to God. Without the protection of the Empire or the guidance of the church, all people would be doomed to be forever cut off from God in Hell. This doctrine was very acceptable to the Emperor.”
The extra material on the DVD is well worth watching, including an interview in current time with Norman Jewison and Ted Neeley. I had a hard time opening the interview; I had to open “Languages” and choose “English” before it would click open.
I strongly recommend this movie; it is an all-time great.
Don’t see this movie unless you’re willing to spend most of the time sitting at the edge of your seat. I felt as if you had been in Afghanistan and experienced both the joys of the culture and the absolute horror of the Taliban. This is more than I really wanted to know about how it feels to be torn apart by the ravages of war. But the kites! The intensity of the children’s faces as they fly the kites! And the loyalty of two boys for each other. And the betrayal. And the redemption. Ah, it’s all there.
What a rich tapestry. An incredible movie. The movie is based on a best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, about an Afghan refugee who barely escapes to America, and then returns on a mission. Kite-flying was a fine art in Kabul, where battles were waged in the high skies, and one kite would cut down another until only one remained. Then kite-flying was banned by the Taliban. Seeing Kabul before and after the Russians and then the Taliban took over was very sad. But I hear that kite-flying and kite wars are becoming very popular once again, and you’ll see why when you watch this movie.
The New York Times and Herald Tribune gave awful reviews of this movie. I think they’re snobs. They questioned its authenticity. Well, men like high-adventure, thrill movies, and they don’t worry about authenticity. This was based on a novel, not a documentary. It’s scary and it’s thrilling and it has big slices of reality that make it pretty interesting. That’s good enough for me.
The New York Times also said, “The two lead child actors, both nonprofessionals, are predictably appealing, but only because they’re children. . . . Mr. Forster never makes you believe in these children or their woes.” Well, he certainly wasn’t speaking for me! (2007)
It seems odd to build a funny comedy around a woman who is supposed to die in three weeks. But if anyone can pull it off, Queen Latifah does. This is definitely a feel-good movie, with improbable scenes, and a great supporting cast including LL Cool J as her would-be boyfriend, and Gerard Depardieu as a famous French chef.
When Georgia finds out she is going to die, it totally changes her life. She comes out of her box. She talks real to people. She doesn’t mess around. She inspires everyone who comes in contact with her. And she has a totally good time that is completely infectious, so that politicians, bureaucrats, and up-tight women have a chance to get real for a change. It is refreshing.
This is an update of a 1950s comedy with British comedian Alec Guiness, based on a cynical and droll screenplay by Beardsley, rewritten for a woman. The current version (2006) was twenty-six years in the (re-) making.
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Myths make a people. Myths grow out of the extraordinary faith, or bravery, of single individuals who then serve as archetypes, to be honored by their community.
One of our own biblical myths centers around Abraham, who is told by God to sacrifice the only son that his beloved Sarah bore to him, miraculously, in her old age. Abraham's faith, and his willingness to pursue this totally senseless task, is heralded by our culture as exemplary.
Yet who in this modern ago could imagine making such a sacrifice?
In The Rain Warriors, we see a myth in the making. We see the sacrifices that a group of young warriors are willing to make, believing that their actions will bring rain, and that the rain will save everyone in their village from certain death.
We see the making of a myth among a people who feel, to our eyes, like humanity's ancient history. Yet the young actors in this movie are not ancient; they are contemporary Masai. Those huge loops in their earlobes are not manufactured in Hollywood. We are witnessing some kind of reality.
That is what Director Pascal Plisson, raised in France and in Kenya, and committed to naturalism, wants us to feel. (He achieved this in a previous film, Himalaya.) Plisson does not spare us the slow pace of life on the African savannah of Kenya. We are there with the young warriors. We are suffering with them, frustrated with them, and celebrating with them. They speak their own language, and we read the subtitles.
Sometimes it is boring, sometimes inspiring, but it is definitely worth watching (if you like that kind of thing). And it is certainly mythic.
If you’ve ever had the thought that you could get more done if you could clone yourself, this movie will get you over that idea quickly. It’s very funny, and not very believable, and yet it makes perfect sense. Little problems crop up, like who’s gonna sleep with your wife? This causes a lot of bedlam, especially when one of your clones turns out to be seriously retarded and completely zany.
Michael Keaton plays the (five) overworked contractor(s), and Andie MacDowell is his (one) wife. (1996)
I have seen plenty of movies about the Nazis, and about the Warsaw Ghetto (1939-45), but this one is truly extraordinary. It is especially poignant for me because my grandparents, who were Jewish, died in a concentration camp in Poland at this time.
It never occurred to me before to think about details of their lives such as food, and music, nor to think about the fact that all this was going on just as I was being born into the world, and to wonder how it was for my mother to know that her parents had died in such a brutal way, and how that affected her during her pregnancy and my birth (for which my father was not present, because he was in bootcamp). We never spoke of any of this in my home. It was simply a terrible fact that my grandparents and two of my aunts and an uncle by marriage and a niece and nephew died in a concentration camp.
There is something so very human about this movie; seeing these events so intimately through the eyes of one very sensitive musician. The movie is based on the memoirs of the famous Polish concert pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman,. It was written just after the war, while the details were still fresh in his mind. It is truly a triumph of the human spirit that he miraculously survived, through his music, with the help of compassionate Polish people, and ironically, through the assistance of a high German officer who clearly loved the music.
It is a terribly tense movie, with hardly any let-up. I strongly recommend taking a break in the middle (it’s two and a half hours long). But do see it, if you can handle the tension. The acting (Adrien Brody) and directing (Roman Polanski) and the piano-playing (by famous Polish pianist, Janusz Olejnikzak) are incredible. I’ve never heard Chopin played with such an exquisite combination of delicacy and strength, and the hands of this pianist are a sheer delight to witness. Polanski won the Academy Award for directing this movie and Brody won Best Actor, and Donald Harwood won Best Adapted Screenplay. At the Cannes Film Festival, the movie took the prize for Best Film in 2002. This film is Polanski’s greatest triumph because he, too, survived the war in a ghetto in Poland, and he, too, lived a life devoted to his art.
A gorgeous blonde falls in love with a cute guy who is 14 years younger than she is. She reluctantly confides in her Jewish shrink, an open-minded but slightly up-tight lady, played by Meryl Streep. Then there’s a hilarious twist that makes for good laughs, nice romance, and a few good insights. I definitely enjoyed this movie, and Streep was good as always as an up-tight shrink, but simply not convincing as a conservative Jew.
With Anthony Hopkins as the brilliant professor who is sometimes ghost and sometimes appears in the flashbacks of his adoring daughter who cared for him when he went crazy, and she seems to have gone a bit weird herself. The young man who was his student continues to search through his teacher’s meaningless journals in the attic while interacting with the daughter, which turns into a nice romance, and then the controlling and annoying sister comes to wrap things up and sell the house and something unexpected happens. It makes a nice view, with a little romance, and some pretty good acting.
What a beautiful and unusual film! At first Andy Goldsworthy (the artist who is featured in this film) seems like a peculiar eccentric who dabbles in creating “ephemeral sculptures” that are rapidly destroyed by the forces of nature. Why on earth does he deliberately create them in places like tidepools? And why does he bothers chewing on that little piece of ice, exposing his hands to the freezing cold, in order to create an arc of ice that he seems to take so seriously!
But THEN, when the first morning light hits that ebbing and flowing arc of ice, even he is amazed!!
Though it lasts but minutes before the very force that illuminates it becomes the force that destroys it, it is precisely that poignant moment of ecstatic creativity poised precariousy (as we all are) between birth and death that is the whole point of Goldsworthy’s creations.
By the time we reach the end of this 90-minute film (which is the perfect medium for recording this unusual art form) our artist cum philosopher is making a lot of sense, and his artwork has sculpted itself upon the landscape of our minds with a sweet mixture of joy and sorrow.
Having spent a month with the Hopi Indians in the late sixties, I have known the bittersweet feeling of being privileged to be accepted among these people, while at the same time feeling huge sadness tinged with anger that these cultures are being wiped out by well-meaning missionaries. In this beautiful documentary by Willem Malten, we have the rare In this beautiful documentary by Willem Malten, we have the rare circumstance in which a group of Shipibo Konibo people, after living in the city, decide to return to their native culture, which is a 20-hour boat trip into the heart of the Peruvian rain forest. They had the insight to realize that their culture was dying out, and it would be valuable to record it before it was gone. The Aneshiati ritual had not been performed for 40 years “because of lack of money, and pressure from the missionaries.” Only the oldest members of the tribe remembered it, and they would instruct the younger ones on how to perform it one last time.
The ritual is accompanied by the consumption of ayahuasca, a hallucinatory plant of the jungle, as well as manioc, mixed with saliva for fermentation. This ritual takes weeks of preparation. It begins with the building of a lodge, and the building and painting of huge pots, and the carving and painting of a huge drum, and the weaving of special robes and skirts for every member of the community. The designs that are interwoven throughout are exquisitely beautiful, reminiscent of fractals and of Australian Aboriginal art.
It is obvious that the longer the film-makers stayed, the more they earned the trust and good humor of the Shipibo people.
The movie is full of the Icaros, the songs of the shamans, with a few translations. One of them has a surprising message:
The Great Canoe of the Wind is coming
From the Ends of the Cosmos
It comes like This:
All kinds of Mystical Healers
From Strange Space Cities
…they will come in it …
These Doctors and Sublime Beings
Bring Strong Medicine
And Wisdom to this Earth
Another is less surprising, when one knows that those who use ayahuasca are known to have a deep personal communion with the plants, and a visceral sense of the connectedness with all life:
And the visions rose
Out of the darkening voice
Out of the night voice, the secret voice,
the rain voice, the root voice.
Through his chant he saw his blood in the veins of trees.
It appeared in the green of his eyes.
He felt the snake that was his skin
and the monkeys of his hands,
He saw his faces in all the leaves
and could recognize
those that were poison
and those that could save.
A strange movie. Not much plot. A sex therapist (“I prefer to be called a relationship counselor”) is counseling a gay couple, loses her cool, and punches one of them. While she apologizes for her unacceptable behavior, then breaks down and admits (as if it’s an excuse for her behavior), “I’ve never had an orgasm!”
They take her under their wing and send her to the Shortbus, where every possible sexual variation is available, so she can work on her problem. It sounds kind of shallow, but it’s surprisingly well done and believable. The movie was co-created by the producer with the actors, with the intent to show explicit sex outside of the porn movie context, and to show sex as being funny.
There was something refreshing about it. I enjoyed it. (2006)
If you like in-depth character sketches and momentous acting, Snowflake is a stunning movie. Signourny Weaver should get an academy award for her extraordinary role as an autistic woman who has lost her daughter, and Alan Rickman is brilliant as an extremely withdrawn man who slowly opens up to three different women. In the end, it is the autistic woman who receives his most heartfelt thanks because she is the one person with whom he can truly be himself.
Is it possible for three people to be in love? Yes, it is. But in order to get film space in America it has to be portrayed as a silly, zany, sexy movie. But it works! If you like to laugh, this is a sweet, funny movie; just sad enough to feel real, but just bizarre enough to feel like a spoof. Johnathon Schaech and Matt Keeslar cozy up to Kathleen Robertson. (1999)
In 2002 Steven Spielberg colluded with the nearly new SciFi Channel to produce twenty hours of a TV miniseries called Taken. The whole miniseries is now available on six DVDs. In this context Spielberg was able to tell the stories of many generations of three American families who reputedly had experiences of being abducted by aliens, including the 1947 Roswell crash, in which a space craft was reputedly found, and bodies, including one live alien. This and the story of the military cover-up is told in graphic detail.
This is not the feel-good kind of story that we got from Spielberg’s famous and loveable ET. These are abductions by the “Grays,” and they aren’t pretty. The implication is that there are beings from outer space who take people up into their ships and then probe their bodies in various unpleasant ways. As disturbing as this seems, I find it highly believable, because I have had at least a dozen clients who have described similar experiences, and none of them had ever heard of such a thing happening. Their stories were so similar to each other, and so similar to the stories told in Taken that I find it difficult not to believe them.
I do want to emphasize that I know far more people who have had positive encounters with aliens, and even in Taken, one of the ETs seems quite loveable. My friends who claim to be in contact with the ETs tell me that the Grays are just one group, and they aren’t doing that kind of thing anymore. What a relief!
Meanwhile, I think it behooves us to hear the stories of people who have had encounters with ETs. The people who have had these experiences and who dared to talk about them have been subjected to ridicule and have had their careers and/or their family life ruined. Two of my clients had their children taken away because their husbands thought they were insane. This ridicule has prevented the American public from hearing the true stories. Spielberg and the SciFi Channel have had the courage to tell these stories. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out www.disclosureproject.com and watch the 2001 National Press Club Press Conference Video.
One of the participants in the Disclosure Project was Daniel M. Salter, a 73-year-old retired former counter-intelligence agent and a member of the original Blue Book Project. His expertise was radar and electronics, and his field of investigation was UFOs, aliens, and particalization. He describes the Disclosure Project for Nancy Redstar in her book, Truth or Consequences: “This was a historic event for witness testimony for 20-25 military, intelligence, government and corporate individuals who were involved with UFO projects over the last 50 years. Select witnesses met with congress and staff on Capital Hill, as well as institute leaders, White House, and pentagon staff and officials….
“As we testify before congress, representing a military group, we are freed of the secrecy oaths. There is no need to be secret anymore. Who is our enemy? Not Russia—not even China. We want to drop the veil of secrecy, because the public has the right to know. We are losing out on many advanced technologies with respect to energy and the continued pollution of this earth. By keeping the secrecy and using the old internal combustion engines, we continue to destroy our planet. We don’t have to do this. We could convert to electromagnetic propulsion systems, which pollutes nothing and uses no fuel. Electromagnetism is a free source of energy, not only throughout our planet, but throughout the universe.
“We are now at a technology crisis, and a global emergency with respect to our natural resources, which we are burning up. Electromagnetic propulsion uses nothing, pollutes nothing. Once we put this energy system into motion, it will remain forever. We must drop the veil of secrecy about UFOs and their advanced technologies, thus creating a renewed global perspective, a renewed mindset for the entire planet. We have not got time to waste. We can’t wait anymore. We have to do it now.”
The people who testified at the National Press Club anticipated that their impressive credentials combined with their convincing testimonies would lead to Congressional Hearings. Unfortunately, this has not happened.
(2002 – The first two DVDs of Taken had two parts each and were more than a total of 2-1/2 hours long.: By the time I got through the second DVD I decided that I’d had enough. It was very interesting and well done, and it might even be true, but it was just too creepy for me.)
For the last couple of years I have been yearning for a movie that goes beyond the cliché themes of most modern movies. My own life experience as a Vibrational Healer has given me constant exposure to true life stories that involve past lives and disembodied spirits as well as amazing synchronicities and telepathic connections.
This 3-hour movie satisfied all those needs. It portrays the true and amazing life of James Van Praagh, who has had the gift of being able to see and speak to the spirits of the dead from an early age. It shows, with great honesty, the despair he experienced both as a child and as an adult, trying to come to terms with this gift that was considered a curse by his family and church
Interwoven with this theme is a compelling and often quite frightening (yet absolutely real) mystery story that involves the deaths of seven young boys, which Van Pragh (Ted Danson) eventually solved by working closely with a determined woman detective (Mary Steenburgen). This movie is based on Van Pragh’s book, Talking to Heavebn: A Medium’s Message of Life After Death, which became a New York Times bestseller. Queen Latifah and Jack Palance also play winning roles. (2001)
What a deliciously ridiculously funny movie! It’s a Japanese spoof. It’s about noodles, but that’s not all! What’s it about? How does it hang together? What is the point in all this?
If you don’t know how to make a good soup by the time you finish, well who cares? Tampopo, by the way, is the name of the widow who is trying to support herself and her young son (despite the gangsters who hang out at her noodle house, scaring away the customers, because their leader wants her to be his moll). But that’s just a little piece of the pie.
Food sex, the old woman who squeezes and ruins the fruits and cheeses, all kinds of themes weave in and out and somehow miraculously hold together in what could be a string cheese of different stories but isn’t.
It is, by the way, in Japanese. It’s best that way. You should know that noodle soup (ramen) is a tradition in Japan, with every location featuring its own variation of this simple soup, with noodles in a meat-based broth, topped with pork, green onions, and seaweed.
The main theme begins when a truck driver tells his cohort about an old man who taught him how to eat noodle soup. The camera pans to the scene with our hero as a youth eagerly slurping his ramen, while the older and wiser man sits contemplating his. “What are you doing?” asks the younger fellow. The older man describes the aroma of the broth, the light glistening on the pork, the fat globules floating in the broth.
Then he clicks open his disposable chopsticks and brushes the top of the soup, touching everything. “What are you doing?” asks the young man.
“I am expressing my affection,” explains the old man.
Do you know how much the Japanese love food? Well, if you didn’t know before, you will know after you see this movie! Having spent a month in Japan, in a Zen monastery, I have a certain appreciation for the topic. While I was there I watched as 1000 people stood and then sat in line, at the monastery, for no less than three hours, waiting to experience the Japanese Tea Ceremony. In Japan, the tea ceremony is a religious experience. The Master of Tea is considered on a par with other spiritual teachers.
In the movie, when the truck driver tells Tampopo that her noodles aren’t good, this is a major insult. When the widow chases after the huge truck to beg the truck driver to come back and be her noodle teacher, this is funny, and yet it is also plausible!
Written and directed by Juzo Itami, it has been called a Japanese noodle Western. In the sub-themes, I kept thinking I was watching various parodies on Western cowboy movies (which are very popular in Japan). Wikipedia says, “The main storyline has been compared by some to that of the Western movie Shane, and also to the movie Seven Samurai and the Western based on it, The Magnificent Seven.”
In the end, it’s all about slurping. There’s a funny scene in which a man goes to a fancy restaurant. Up in the balcony you can see a group of young women with their teacher, who appears to be teaching them about Italian food. Now she is instructing them about how to use a spoon and fork to properly twist the noodles before silently placing them in the mouth.
Meanwhile, the Japanese man downstairs is loudly slurping his soup, which is considered perfectly polite in Japanese society. The girls are trying to imitate their teacher, but finally they all give up and succumb to a raucous slurping fest.
The final scene is simply a woman nursing. The camera slowly moves closer and closer to the infant and the breast. Lovely, but what does this have to do with food, you ask yourself. . . .
(1985)
This is an incredible movie. At first I could hardly believe my eyes. People walk around stark naked (except for little decorative strings that don’t really hide anything). It was like looking at a moving National Geographic Magazine from when I was a kid. But these were aborigines who were speaking their own language, and making their own bawdy jokes. It was like stepping back in time, to the 1930s, before contact with the white men. These people didn’t look or act like actors; they looked and moved their bodies and behaved absolutely authentically.
I was in Arnhem Land just a few years ago, teaching children in the school in a settlement near Alice Springs. The kids wanted to learn about the American Indians. I lived with the Hopi for awhile, so my friend got me a position teaching for a week. My friend was a school bus driver and I rode with him where most white people were not allowed to go.
I know how “primitive” these people still are. They sleep outside and the small children run naked, and it’s hard to get the kids to wear shoes to school, and the tooth-brushing happens in the classrooms because it won’t happen at home They don’t live by clocks. They live in government homes, on government subsidies, but if they get cold, they’re liable to throw a door or a table in the fire. My friend would drive up and down the roads honking his horn to wake up the kids, and then come back later to pick them up. He went there every year for a few months, to capture wild camels and take them back to Sydney.
But the people don’t go around naked! How did this filmmaker persuade these people to do this? The story gradually unraveled, through the Interviews on the DVD, and on the Internet.
Director and filmmaker Rolf de Heer was invited by David, one of the aborigines, to come and make the film. They decided to recapture the old ways by accessing the library of 30,000 photos taken in the 1930’s by Donald Thomason, an anthropologist. The man and his photos are revered by the aborigines, because they are a link to the old ways. “He walked next to my naked grandfather.”
One of the photos shows a group of aborigines in ten hand-made canoes, and that photo was the first inspiration for the film.
The movie has a narrator, David Gulpilil, who tells the story, in English, of a young man, Dayindi, who lusts after his older brother’s youngest wife, wondering why his brother gets to have three wives and he has none. While the men are on a hunting trip, the elder brother takes the opportunity to tell Davindi an ancient story about another young man who lusted after his brother’s young wife, and the terrible things that happened to the whole tribe as a result of that.
As the present-day story is enacted in color, and the ancient story is enacted in black-and-white, all of the actors in both stories speak their own aboriginal language, with subtitles. In the ancient story, trouble begins when a stranger approaches the camp. The stranger is wearing a loincloth over his genitals. The realism and the aboriginal humor come out in moments like this when the men speak amongst themselves, “Why does he cover his prick?” “Maybe he’s got a small prick.” “Never trust a man with a small prick.”
It is the first full-length film made entirely in an indigenous Australian language. Ten Canoes was Australia's official entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 2007 Academy Awards. It was nominated for seven Australian Film Institute awards, and it won six, as well as three awards from the Film Critics Circle of Australia.
Rold de Heer wisely employed Peter Ojigger as a co-director. In the Interview with Peter, he speaks English with difficulty, but his reason for wanting to make this film is very clear: ”All the white men come more and more and we can’t stay in our laws …. White man is just trying to destroy us …. But if we’re gonna do this film, then they can recognize us. ‘Ah, these people still have culture and all those systems.’ If we can’t do this movie, all these white people can just come and come … they’re just putting us down, because we’ll be at the bottom and at the top will be white man.
“But you people came here to help lift our futures. So when we’re gonna die, maybe the new generation can see that picture, where we’re going and where they started from. That’s what I want to see. To teach them. Because we don’t want to lose our culture.”
When I was in Arnhem Land I made friends with the principal of the school. He told me about some of the old ways. But then he said he could not answer any more of my questions, because the men kept these things secret, and if he shared with a woman, it would be against their laws. He would be in danger of death, because that is how the laws are enforced.
This was what Peter meant when he said, “All the white men come more and more and we can’t stay in our laws…” Many of the laws are enforced by death, but the whites have taken away their method of enforcing their own laws. We think we’re more “civilized,” but I wonder if that’s true?
In the ancient story in Ten Canoes, a man from another tribe was accidentally shot. At that point, the two tribes could go to war, or the first tribe could agree to sacrifice one of their men to the other tribe. An elder chose the later, and the matter was resolved.
This was such a mature decision that one might well consider if these so-called “primitive” people, who managed to live in harmony with the land and with each other for hundreds of thousands of years, might have something to teach us about peace and warfare (to say nothing of ecology)?
I wanted to support them in honoring the old ways, and yet I realized that in the old ways women were oppressed, and among today’s aborigines, women are often treated badly. I wonder if we could teach them something about honoring women, and they could teach us about honoring life and the land? (2007)
Johnny Cash is a legend, especially since he died in 2006. He seems to have had a strong influence on Bob Dylan, among others. Girls swooned over him. His story is classic; why is it so compelling? The rise to fame; the falling apart of his marriage; losing himself in drugs.
Then there’s June. The one who sang with him, and loved him unconditionally. When he hit bottom, she (and her parents—who had been in the music business) watched over him while he suffered through withdrawal.
Then came his rebirth, and finally his marriage to June, and 35 years together until he died, and then she died just four months later. It’s a classic love story: sad, inspiring, scary, torturous, and ultimately affirming of life and love. Just what we all need. Brilliantly enacted. It is a gem. (2006?)
It’s hard to believe that in India, even today in many places, women are considered half dead when their husbands die. They are exiled in ashrams and fed only one meal a day, and the young and pretty ones are hired out as prostitutes, to make money to feed the others. It is considered sinful for widows to remarry.
Their plight is made even more poignant when the widow is an eight-year-old girl (played beautifully by Sarala Kariyawasam)—she should have been an oscar nominee). It’s not surprising that when this third movie in a trilogy, written and directed by Canadian-East Indian, Deepa Mehta, was to be filmed in India, it was met with major protest and they had to finish filming in Sri Lanka.
The first movie, Fire (1996) was about traditional Indian women being lovers with each other. The second, Earth (1998) was about the partition between India and Pakistan. The third, Water, is a sad movie, but there are moments of joy and beauty and even a fleeting romance (the would-be lovers played by Lisa Ray and John Abraham). Set in the thirties, we get a glimpse of what it was like for inhabitants of India to hear word of this man named Gandhi, and how his teachings changed their world. I am grateful that we have women producers and directors who can tell the real stories of women. It is a beautiful movie. It was rightfully an oscar nominee. (2005)