Early this evening, M and I hit the AMC to see Céline Sciamma's (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) latest film, Petite Maman, which finally hit American theaters nearly a year after it was first released in France.
Clocking in at a brisk 72 minutes, Petite Maman is a wonderful little exploration of parent-child relationships. 8-year-old Nelly's grandmother has just passed away, and Nelly is helping her parents clean out the house where her mom grew up. In the woods nearby, Nelly makes a new friend -- Marion, a young girl, also 8. Marion just so happens to be Nelly's mom's name, and she just happens to live in the very house that they are cleaning out...
The many scenes of Nelly and young Marion (played by real-life sisters) playing together sparkle with joy, and although the story plays with themes of grief, loneliness, and depression, it's an altogether heartwarming experience. I don't have any kids, but one of the things that the movie puts front and center, is a need for parents to share their humanity with their children. Remember what it was really like to be a kid. Tell stories with as much color as you can about your own childhood. Build bridges of trust and understanding. Your children aren't your equals, but that doesn't mean you always have to resort to preaching and teaching.
One would think that being housebound because of the onset of a global pandemic would have been the perfect opportunity to revive this blog. But no. Instead, as we start to put COVID-19 in the rear-view mirror, or at least learn to live with it forever, I found myself tinkering with Blogger today in an effort to migrate this dusty old thing over to my real Google account, nearly five years after my last attempt to restart was hampered by having to juggle two accounts.
Friends, I am here to say that it was successful. Welcome back to the
Amber Tower. I suspect you'll see a lot of capsule thoughts about
movies here -- Meagh and I see an awful lot of them these days, since we
signed up for AMC's A-List plan a few years back. Outside of that, we'll see what the
future holds. I hope you enjoy.
Remember what I was just saying about screen addiction and my brain turning to mush? Yeah... I'm going to come off like a pretentious douchebag, but I fear for the movie-going public of America if all of the 1-star reviews for Darren Aronofsky's mother! on IMDB are any indication. Because so many people (including some in our screening) didn't seem to get the movie on any level, I'm going to ignore the surface-level story and talk about it as the metaphor that it is instead. Although I'm confident that my old cast of regular readers here would be able to understand what's going on as the movie unfolds, I'm going to ensure it. I wouldn't consider anything I'm about to say a spoiler. These aren't twists; this is simply the context you need to understand to make sense of the movie. Otherwise, you will find it hard to get any enjoyment out of it.
mother! tells the complete history of the Earth in microcosm, using various Biblical allusions to help mark the passage of time. Don't worry, you don't need to be steeped in too much Biblical knowledge -- a basic understanding of the stories of Adam & Eve and Jesus are all that is needed. God (Javier Bardem) is living in blissful tranquility with his wife, Mother Earth (Jennifer Lawrence). They're all alone on Earth (their enormous house), and it's Mother Earth's job to build and maintain their domain ("building a paradise" as she says). God is portrayed as a poet, who's had one great success in his career (Creation), but now has writer's block. He begins to have a new idea when suddenly Man (Ed Harris) comes to the door; this is Adam. I have confidence that you can take the rest from here.
The reason none of the above is a spoiler is because just playing "Spot the Metaphor" isn't what the movie is about. There are a few different ways to read mother!, which I'll leave as an exercise to the viewer since that's where all the fun lies, but I tend to fall in line with Aronofsky's preferred reading. You can watch his short Q & A from the screening at the Toronto Film Festival, if you want to know what that is.
I am a huge fan of Darren Aronofsky. There's a reason that Meaghan and I chose him as the first director in the Decker Director Series. I like to be entertained as much as the next person, but very few people today are able to use the Hollywood machine to create multi-layered movies that take some actual work to tease apart and fully understand. We all need to be challenged sometimes, and Aronofsky consistently does this.
mother! is a fantastic movie. Much like The Fountain, I can understand why it isn't for everyone... but it should be.
If any of our directors puts out a new movie after we've completed their filmography, we organize a "field trip" to see it in theaters, usually on opening weekend. I'm bringing all of this up now because the director that we started this whole thing with, Darren Aronofsky, has a new movie in theaters this weekend, mother! We're going to check it out this afternoon, so hopefully I'll be able to put some words together about it tonight or tomorrow. It's supposedly a pretty difficult film; I'm looking forward to exercising my brain with it.
If you have any suggestions for directors we should check out in the future, or want to share some fun things you've been doing with your friends, feel free to comment.
I don't know if it's the fact that I'm getting older (I've now survived 38 years on the planet) or the constant exposure to screens in my life or the overwhelming disposability and superficiality of nearly everything in this world, but I can feel my ability to think creatively or critically slowly beginning to slip away. I've tried my best to combat the cell phone addiction that's rampaged across this country over the last ten years, but even I have a smart phone now. Don't worry; it's not that smart. Even so, I find myself checking all the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter once a day despite there not being anything particularly new or useful to be found on any of them. It's a world of information and entertainment overload, only hardly any of the information matters.
Ironically, my solution for all of this is to re-open the Amber Tower for business. Sorry in advance for overloading you instead, dear readers, but there's something about the act of putting words together in a coherent fashion that does something for your brain that nothing else can. Even if no one's still watching for updates on this blog or ever reads what I have to say, it'll be good for me and that's what I need right now.
Has anyone seen one of these new Coca-Cola Freestyle soda fountains yet?
Meaghan and I ate at the Noodles in Plymouth tonight and got to use one for the first time ever. It looks like they've been slowly spreading across the country for the last year or two, so maybe I'm completely out of the loop and they've just taken forever to make it all the way to the Great White North. If you can't tell from the picture and didn't bother to click the link, the big deal is that this is a digital soda fountain with touch-screen selection that can mix and match 100+ flavors of soda. So if you've been dying to find easy access to some Vanilla Coke or Coke with Raspberry (really?), look no further.
We didn't notice the machine was there until after we ordered, so all I can tell you so far is that it dispenses water like a pro.
For those not tracking the stretch run of the MLB season, it may not be news to you that the Detroit Tigers lost last night. However, it is if you consider the fact that their improbable win on Wednesday over Chicago, which included two pinch-hit 9th inning home runs to send the game into extra innings, raised their winning streak to 12 games.
I'm not going to predict a World Series win or even an appearance, as the baseball playoffs are an enormous crap shoot, but it's worth noting that every other Tigers team that won >10 consecutive games during a season made it to the Series. I'm looking forward to seeing what our AL Central champions can do this year.
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On a completely different note, since January I've been reading the 27 book Time-Life series on the Civil War that I inherited from my grandpa. I finished the last one this morning, detailing the failed attempt at Radical Reconstruction of the South from 1865-1877.
I've made a few half-hearted attempts in the past to read this series, but have never made it past the sixth book before. I've enjoyed it each time I've tried in the past, but failed because of the huge time commitment required. Now I'm pleased to say that I've learned everything there is to learn about the Civil War. Well, at least I've learned a lot about it.
It's already paid dividends at quiz bowl (first practice was yesterday) because I can laugh mercilessly when those puny high schoolers don't know who the Confederate general at Shiloh (and Fort Sumter) was. It's Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, of course.
