Movie Reviews

After not having seen many movies last year, Frankye and I have seen 5 in the past month. We go so infrequently that we try to pick films that we heard were great or important and that we really want to see. Of the 5 we've seen, I'd have to say that I enjoyed them all.

We ended 2005 by going to the movie on New Year's Eve and seeing a film called The Family Stone. It stars Diane Keaton, but was mostly an ensemble piece. It is funny, moving, engaging and entertaining. Its the kind of movie that I would watch over and over again when it comes on TV, even if it had already started when I came across it. Other movies like that are Murphy's Romance, Steel Magnolias, and Moonstruck, to name a few.

The next film we saw was Brokeback Mountain. I wanted to see this movie for several reasons. It is based on an Annie Proulx short story, adapted by Larry McMurtry and directed by Ang Lee. The movies stars Heather Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, two good, young actors. The total of the film is as good as its parts. It is a moving and sad commentary on the homophobia, internal and external, that still lives loud within communities in America. To think that the kind of homophobia these men feared is unrealistic in the time period portrayed, one ony has to remember Matthew Shepard. Brokeback Mountain is a ground breaking movie.

The 3rd film we saw was Munich. This is a difficult movie. Steven Spielberg is a good director, but I consider most of his movies to be childish fluff. There are few films of his I consider "adult" films. He attempted to make The Color Purple an adult film, but I always felt he failed miserably at that attempt. He succeeded with Schindler's List, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan. He also succeeds with Munich. Munich is good on so many levels. The story itself is interesting, and timely. It begins with an incident at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and the last frame of the movie brings it to the present, as recent as September 10, 2001. The acting is good and each scene is efficient. There's no excess in the movie. But the real success of the movie is the pace of it and the way Spielberg builds the tension and the violence in the story. In so doing, he also builds the argument against retaliatory action and shows the futility of violence as a tool of peace.

The next film we saw is a quiet, slow, but beautifully filmed telling of John Smith, Pocahantas and the Jamestown settlement, called The New World. Starring Colin Farrell and Christian Bale, and directed and written by Terrance Mallik, the real stars of the film are Q'Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahantas, and the cinematography. The film is filled with authentic looking tribal people and the awfulness of building a community in a strange land, from nothing.

The last and most recent film we saw was Syriana. Based on the non-fiction book, "See No Evil" by Robert Baer, this is a political thriller about American business and Mideast oil. The film is relevent to today's politics, today's gas prices, and today's war. There is no one star of this film, although some of the actors are better known than others. Everyone is a supporting player, as there are several subplots weaving its ways though this film. This is the kind of film that requires attention to every frame. A knowledge of CIA and the Mideast helps to understand the actions of the characters. George Clooney and Jeffrey Wright are wonderful in this film.

I recommend all 5 films, as well as Walk The Line, which we saw in early December. There are several films I missed, which I hope to see on DVD when released. The top of that list is another George Clooney film, Good Night and Good Luck.

Reading

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Reading, and listening to books. I am always working on a book. I have been since I was about ten.

It took me a long time to learn how to read. I'm not dislexic, but I had a difficult time remembering letters and putting words together. This is going to sound stupid, but the word that took me the longest to learn was "a." I just couldn't get that the letter "a" was also a word. Everytime I would come upon it in "a" sentence I would stop in my tracks, puzzled, befuddled, and frustrated. Somehere in the third grade I got passed it.

I didn't take to books right away after learning to read. I think it took me another year. I remember the first non-picture book I ever read. It was called The Lighthouse. I loved it. It was the first time I had chosen a book by myself, without pictures, and I got lost in it. In that small book (author unremembered) I found out I could transport myself into another reality, far from the one I lived in.

I'd like to say that I became a zealous reader of the finest literature offered to children. But I didn't. After The Lighthouse and a book called The Good Bad Boy, I read what is know as "pulp fiction." One SummerI stayed with my cousin Maryann for a few weeks. While there I raided my mother's old books from her youth, which had been inherited by Maryann. They were a set of blue hard cover books with aged brown pages printed in the 1930's. I forget how many there were, more than a dozen, and they were a goldmine to me. The books were Nancy Drew mysteries mostly, with some Deanna Durbin's thrown in. I read them one after another, in the sequence in which they had been published, loving every one of them. By the time I found Nancy Drew, the author, Carolyn Keene, had written many more in the series. I hunted them down, begging my mother to buy them for me as rewards, or birthday or Christmas gifts. I went through them all, and the Deana Durbin's and the Hardy Boys mysteries.

The first adult novel I ever read was a thick, old hard covered copy of Gone With The Wind. It was one of the books my mother had, but never read. This old copy was printed on thick paper, each page containing two columns of text. I took this book with me when I went to stay with my Aunt Pat one summer. She was pregnant with her fourth child and my mother thought it would be better for me to help out my aunt then to be home on the streets in NYC. I didn't mind. I loved my Aunt Pat. I loved being with her. She was funny, and accepting, and respectful to me. She encouraged me to read the book when I was intimidated by its size. I dove in and devoured it. That began my love affair with long, detailed stories, and historical fiction. I read that novel every Summer for the next dozen years or so. it became a ritual I engaged in to celebrate my love of reading.

Over the years I moved from fiction to non-fiction, and in the past twenty years have read maybe one novel per year. I indulged my interest in biographies, American history, religion, philosophy and art. It wasn't until the paperback publication of The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, that I found an author and a character, Jack Ryan, that I wanted more of. Clancy publishes a new one every 18 - 24 months, and I sign up for them immediately at the library.

sometime last year I took out a CD version of The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith from the library. I loved it and listened to all six books while on my drives to the outer counties or S. FL. While on vacation in North Carolina this past November I picked up a mystery called The Death Artist by Jonathan Santlofer. I enjoyed it and decided to visit the library to see if there were any Jesse Stone mysteries by Robert B. Parker at the library. I had been introduced to the character Jesse Stone via a tv movie starring a favorite of mine, Tom Selleck. I found that there were four Jesse Stone novels and I gobbled them up. I started reading and listening to Parker's other mysteries and have gone through at least a dozen and a half of them.

After reading non-fiction for twenty years it is an absolute delight to read recreationally again. I don't care that its pulp fiction. I don't care that the the books are meaningless, or that I don't remember the titles. I don't care that I am spending my time and not learning anything significant. I'm just enjoying being transported to a different reality, just like I was when I fell in love with reading some forty-five years ago.

Marriage and Freedom: an oxymoron?

This past Friday I was privileged to hear a talk by a high lama of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, The Venerable Third Bardor Tulku Rinpoche, my teacher. The topic of his talk was "Karma in the Family."

Bardor Tulku Rinpoche is not a monastic. He is a family man with a wife and three adolescent daughters. As a Rinpoche (it means precious one), Bardor Tulku is uniquely qualified to talk about karma. As a family man he can talk from experience on the difficulties of family life in Buddhist practice.

Rinpoche's topic is not one I necessarily wanted to hear. I'd read his book, Living in Compassion, and know what his views are on married life. I am married, and not always happy about it. Why? Because it means I have to compromise, it means I have to put my needs and desires aside at times, it means I can't be as free as I want to be to come and go as I please. No one coerced me to get into another relationship. I put myself here and I want the good stuff of relationships.

Before I go further with this, I ‘d like to say that none of my issues are the result of any of my partner's issues, past or present. I am a product of my culture, of my generation, of the home I grew up in, of the decisions I've made in my life.

One of the interesting points that Rinpoche made was that our "...culture is so committed to individual freedom that giving up a part of that is experienced as a loss." That really hit home with me. That's a big issue in relationships for me. I feel that loss deeply, and I am always looking for that freedom. I often experience a feeling of "where's mine? when do I get mine?" The "mine" I am always referring to (without exception) is time to myself; time to not have to pay attention to another person, time to do what I want, no matter what that is.

I have always thought that this was an immature attitude. And perhaps it is. But I also think it is a result of the indoctrination of our culture. We Americans are a selfish lot. Most of the rest of the world considers Americans as children. Not because our country is so young but because we see the world as our own, to take, to play with, to drop when bored.

It was helpful to me to identify that feeling I have, usually manifested as resentment. Understanding that it is loss, eliminates the resentment because it is something coming from within me and not a result of what someone is taking from me.

Bardor Tulku said many other things as well, but it will take a week or three for me to digest his talk. I'm glad I have notes.

Doing Life

It's already January 11th. How did that happen? Well, it's only eleven days since the turn of the calendar year, but I know December 31st will come around and it will feel this quick.

When I was younger, days lasted longer, weeks lasted longer, and new years were extremely infrequent events. When I was in elementary school I remember feeling that my seven hour school day was interminable! Summers went by too fast, as did Christmas and Easter breaks. The good stuff went by really fast, the trying went by slowly.

If rapidity is the measure of "good stuff," then my life is filled with only good stuff now, because it all goes fast. I'd like it to slow down a bit, but I don't know how to do that. Even days that I do nothing but sit and relax (I call them slug days) go by with lightening fast speed.

One of the other difficult things about aging, besides the rapid passage of time, is the diminishing amount of energy I have. Today is a case in point. I would like to go home and spend several (2 - 3) hours in my studio painting. I'm not sure my energy will last that long.

It is now 4:15 p.m., I have been up since 6:20 a.m., I went to the doctor for a regular check-up, I went to the Buddhist center I attend and fulfilled some of my treasurer duties, I went to the bank and made a Buddhist deposit, I went to an art store and purchased odorless turpentine, I went to work and worked on a complex document, and I will be stopping at the bank on my way home to make a household deposit. When I get home I will do a few chores and get into comfortable clothes and that's usually when I cave in and decide I can't push anymore today.

There's no such thing as time (they say), there is only now. My now seems to be flying by as quickly as my previous now did. So I'm just doing life. Doing what I need to do in life, and realizing every now and then that the "doing" that I do is all good stuff. Whether I get to work in my studio tonight or not I've had a good day; and I wrote a blog too!

thoughts in form

I haven’t written for a while. Not since before the holidays. It’s not that I haven’t had anything on my mind, or anything I wanted to express. It just hasn’t been in words.

I’ve been very visual for the past several weeks. I get this way for periods of time. It may be a result of sensory and social overload. The holiday period often does that me.

My thoughts come in form and color, with no narration. It’s almost like watching a movie, but without a voice and soundtrack. It doesn’t have the continuity of a movie, though, more like an animated slide show. It’s a comfortable place for me to be because I think it is my natural, primal state. I think others find me flat and distant. At least that’s the feed back I get from those around me. People tell me I seem preoccupied, and perhaps I am, but all I’m really doing is watching my inner thoughts as they float by in images, shapes and colors.

Sometimes the forms will take shape and I will put them on paper, usually in my journal with pen. I do stream of consciousness doodling, sometimes pages at a time. Sometimes I will paint them with watercolor paint, other times I will use pencil to shade them, and other times I will use colored pencils to add color to the images.

This Christmas I got a sumi-e board as a gift. It’s a special board on which you can create calligraphy and images in water with a sumi brush. Within minutes it disappears and the board is dry and ready for more creation. I really like it. There are several lessons in using the sumi-e board. One is about impermanence. Everything, EVERYTHING! is impermanent. The other lesson is that not every stroke I make is worth anything more than a few drops of water and the energy I used to create it. That’s a real ego lesson. I could even create lines that could be the most brilliant thing I ever do in my life, and, like me, it will disappear in a brief period of time. And it’s ok.

So while I have not written in a while, it is not because I have not been present. I am very much present in the world and in my life. There are times when I am viewing the world from a more interior space than other times. This has been one of those periods.