Dawn’s Thoughts

Did basic paperwork straightening yesterday — updating job search files, searching for records needed for a job interview, looked for jobs. Courtney arrived in the evening for library returns — when we arrived, we found the library closed. Dropped off books, went out to dinner at Marie Callender’s — I had soup, sandwich and garlic fries — and with Courtney lamented the inability to drink, we went out afterward and had a drink close to home.

Courtney left, and I settled down to watch my most recent Netflix, a movie I’ve seen in the stores and been wanting to watch called My Brother. If you want to watch it, as I did, for the performances of actual disabled people in disabled roles, then you will be rewarded, as the two Down Syndrome actors do an excellent job. However, the story itself has several routes and doesn’t go successfully down any of them. And I reveal SPOILERS below.
The DVD box advertises that this is the story of two brothers — Isaiah and James, who has Down Syndrome, living in a poor neighborhood with gang related violence. I assumed, since the two actors are black, that the gang voilence would be because Isaiah got invited to join a gang. Wrong. In place of gang, read “the mob.” Isaiah, upset that James has a steady job (which Isaiah himself does not actually appear to have) and needing money, is convinced by a friend to enlist the help of the mob and become a delivery man for packages.

Now there are two options here: explore the idea that James, who has some living skills difficulties (such as putting cereal and newspaper in the fridge) appears more capable than his brother. Or, instead, does Isaiah debate and choose the mob over his brother and then regret the decision? Does he debate it?

Actually, no. Isaiah agrees at once that he needs the money for the rent, despite the fact that every time we see his friend and himself they are out drinking, and there seems to be no pressing need at home for money. In one scene, Isaiah is found drunk on the floor by James, who attempts to help him up and then gives up in disgust and says he’s a baby.

Well, even though the film shows that Isaiah is in general patient and caring with his brother, in this case, I’m inclined to agree with James. Isaiah rages that he’s tired of taking care of James. Which makes sense, but appears misplaced in the story.

Alll right, so James goes to the mob, is given instructions about package delivery — which he ignores through the rest of the movie. And not just a I’m too busy for this, but as if he’s forgotten about the job altogether. He goes to a party, retrieves the package and is spotted doing so by a woman — aha, I thought, a plant by the mob — but sadly, no. Even though James and friend speculate her motives, in the next scene with her, she has turned into Isaiah’s new girlfriend. In the scene that makes the most sense here, James is jealous and wants his brother to himself, and Isaiah, patient and distracted, shows the woman out.

She becomes angry and walks out, never to be seen again.

Now this makes a little sense. James is an embarrassment as a brother — but Isaiah doesn’t seem to mind at all. Well, all right.

Isaiah doesn’t wonder about the package — we don’t see the contents, or where he put it — and except for one scene with James, he doesn’t even search for it or wonder where it went. Notes come from the mob, and he ignores these too.

A long series of flashbacks occur — the best involve the young Isaiah and James, expecially when Isaiah feels compelled to get beaten up in place of his brother, or when James calls all the men on the street Daddy — but his mother has pulmonary tuberculosis….

Yes — the 19th-century favorite for dying mothers. Possible even today, in America, so all right. I let that one slide. Naturally, the mother decides that she should share her wisdom with Isaiah as the new man of the family — and she does so, for a very long scene, which she whacks him for swearing (oddly enough, the swearing was appropriate), then instructs him, among other things, never to hit a woman and always to have respect for women.

I’m sorry — didn’t she just hit him? And his swearing wasn’t even directed at her. It might have been better if he copied what some thug said out on the street, but all right, no swearing in the house. Fair enough.

Then the movie goes overboard, with enough “remember this” remarks to gag a horse. But Isaiah, played very well by the actor — is a quiet, thoughtful, reasoning boy — makes you wonder where his patient, misguided older self lost his way — and he accepts all this and never protests taking care of James. There is a good line where Isaiah tells James Mama is going on a trip, and the boys go to the hospital to see her before she expires, still spouting wisdom like a good 19th-century dying woman should.

It’s clear that the time period in this is modern, by the way, though here again, what’s happening gets confused. I’m assuming the characters are late teens-30 years old. Yet when the heart of the movie begins — when the boys are separated by the court — Isaiah is sent to a strict prison-like school while James is sent to the “Willowgreen” institution on Stanton Island.

Here I started laughing.

The Willowbrook instution on Stanton Island existed until 1987 — its most publicly-known case is probably Geraldo Riveria’s expose in the 1970’s about living conditions there (which this film recreates almost frame-by-frame fasion in a sense (children half-clothed, nothing to do, rocking, humming, sitting under tables, etc.)). Its other well-known case is a series of “informed consent” medical experiments, where children were purposely infected with hepetitis. Institions do actually still exist — and there was a modern expose on one in Mother Jones that would have made an interested illustration here — but much less common.

So after a short scene in which we are introduced to Isaiah in his new school, politely asking to go to the bathroom to a rather bored teacher, until he pees all over the floor…But wait, isn’t this supposed to be a school for delinquints, or at least, children no one cares for? Why are they sitting silently? Why isn’t someone whispering or throwing something? Are they too frightened? The film doesn’t say. They behave better than most classrooms.

So Isaiah decides that he must go fetch his brother, because he promised Mama. All right. Next scene shows him over the barbed wire fence at night…

Well, yes, night would be better for visibility and yes, the children’s playtime outside could have very well been non-existant, so all right, at night.

Isaiah promptly finds himself inside and by not saying anything, is taken for disabled and thus shown into the dormitory, where the children are sleeping.

I’m sorry? Didn’t the institution lock the doors at night? I can buy that overworked staff wouldn’t look at the children long enough to know there’s one extra, because written accounts say that if you were quiet, you generally got better treatment, but there should have been numerous buildings with several floors and wards. How did Isaiah find the right one?

Isaiah finds his brother and the narration concludes that they stayed togerher.

Now wait just a moment. There’s an opportunity, and the film doesn’t take it. How did they stay together? In the charactor of Isaiah, the patient observer, more time should have been spent revealing daily life. Did they escape? How did Isaiah escape with his brother ? (And yes, The Wizard and Rain Man aside, that might have been overdone). Did they age out of the system? Since Isaiah adapts so well to environments — he’s so used to his brother that he doesn’t even flinch at the other disabled children or their horrible conditions — it would have been entertaining to see his adaptation to the institution. That would have been something to see. In fact, since the boys are poor, it actually would not have been unusal for Isaiah to have been placed there with James, a ready source of intelligent labor to help run the place.

But there the flashbacks end, and there, I believe is where the most interesting thing in the story lies. How did Isaiah get to the institution? What people did he meet along the way? Was he afraid of being caught? And so on. More questions than answers.

While Isaiah flees from the mob, leaving James with the instructions that the friend will come look after him (something that seems highly unlikely), the mob of course arrives to find James as collatral. They don’t rough him up too badly — there’s actually a lot more shoving around. Isaiah, on a ridiculous search for a man who might be his father — returns at the end to find his brother, and to tell him that wherever he is, that’s where home will be.

Aww…

The problem with this is, a) Isaiah really didn’t need to go looking for a potential father, here, especially since it doesn’t work out, and b) he LEFT James to the mob. If they escaped from Willowgreen, wouldn’t he already have adapted to taking James on the road with him? If they didn’t escape, wouldn’t he have learned strategies from that? And another thing, they leave the neighborhood in the end, but James is the only one with a job. I guess they’re going out in the world to starve, but hey, they’ll be together while doing it.

It does make you wonder. If the film started somewhere close to where the boys were seperated, I think it would have been better. They didn’t need to be adults. Even though Isaiah’s frustration makes sense, his journey is when he willingly goes into the institution…not when he’s an adult, playing around with the mob. He decided at that point to be with his brother and continue protecting him — and he actually fails at this when he runs from the mob. All other parts, including the girlfriend, the mob, the possible-father, are unneccessary, and should not be there. Though the film should be commended for their use of actual disabled actors — something which I hope to see more of in films — I sincerely wish they had chosen a different route for their story. I would have enjoyed much more.

Well, I now have so much soup in my fridge that it is remarkable. I have soup in the fridge and freezer. Courtney came over last night with a sack of vegetable soup vegetables and the explanation that since she is spending so much time over here eating my food and studying, she’s letting all her vegetables rot at home. So we studied all day, Courtney Japanese, and me job hunting, watched Gran Torino and then made a large pot of cabbage soup on the stove. I put in dried sage and tarragon, both from the garden, and Courtney put in pepper, basil and parsley. We chopped a large cabbage, garlic, 2 zucchini, 2 yellow squash, an onion, 2 carrots, and threw pinto beans. It made a very good soup, although we had to devise a bowl to put one zucchini in, as it was apparently rotten and tasted awful.

This means I now have the ginger, chickpea, garlic, okra and sweet pototo soup still left (yes, there was actually a recipe for it that contained the remains of my very strange pantry stock leftovers). That made a fantastic spicy soup and I have been eating it often, but still quite a bit left.

So, on to Gran Torino, which was Courtney’s Netflix. Excellent movie. I remember seeing the trailers and thought it was a bang-bang-shoot-’em-up kind of movie, and so avoided it a bit even though Clint Eastwood directed, but what I didn’t know is that it is also a very funny movie. I laughed a lot. The plot concerns a old man, very set in his ways and prejediced, and his neighborhood, which has been inhabited by rival gangs. His neighbors are Asian — and in the beginning, they have a ceremony for a baby and are killing chickens, and I thought of the Hmong — and as it turns out, they were Hmong characters. Since the main character has a shotgun he takes everywhere, and there are Hmong, Mexican and various other characters, it made me think the film might be set in the Central Valley, because that mix of cultures exists there. But it’s set in Michigan instead. This is a very old fashioned movie in the way it’s made — not so much in the language used in it — but in the pacing, the amount of talking, and the amount of characters which are the focus. It has few characters but takes the time to build them and the thier world. It also has a very Western feel to it, like what would happen if Dirty Harry retired and somebody pissed him off a bit and then a bit more. Clint Eastwood also directed Mystic River and the Outlaw Josey Wales, and they all take their time to develop the story. Even though I loved Mystic River the book, I thought something was missing from the movie - the neighborhood. Well, here is the neighborhood in this movie instead.

Of course, right after I finished the movie I had to look up quotes to it to find what I had misunderstood. The DVD has a surprising lack of extras, only a featurette on what kind of car the actors would like to buy given the chance, and another only about the car which I didn’t bother to watch. I was more interested in the story, and did find one article on the web about how the writer decided to develop the culture clash. It’s a very anthropology-like movie. (Courtney said that if you were from another country and wanted a lesson in all the racial slurs which could be thrown at someone, watch this movie. She constantly called the main character a bastard, but laughed at him as much as I did).
I also finished watching the commentary on Adam this morning. It’s a movie I finished up the other day. It’s very funny to watch the commentary, if only because they point out the things I missed while watching the movie. In one scene, a bunch of women and others are gathered around a newly adopted baby. The point of the scene was apparently that the women were offended because Adam walked off, and this was because they were lesbians and had adopted. Oops, missed that. I understood the baby was adopted, there were a lot of people around it, and I only saw the one closest as being a possible parent. I’d thought they were offended for an entirely different reason — because Adam hadn’t wanted to see videos and everyone else did. It also took me a little while to understand the significance of a scene where Adam’s girlfriend’s calendar reads “meet Adam at the theater with Mom and Dad.” What they mean is, they set up meeting at the theater, but I saw it as well, of course, they met him, because they explained in the scene that there were extra tickets. Anyway, before the scene was over, I did understand it. In another scene, the mother of the girlfriend tells Adam where she is and he walks there to meet her. In the commentary, the filmmakers said they did this because the mother wanted Adam and her daughter to get back together. Really? Didn’t realize that. Made sense to me that he would go where the mother told him — because that’s where the girlfriend was.

So obviously I missed some things. But it was an entertaining romance movie that played against its genre. The issue of whether Adam gets the girl or not is not so much an issue –at least not in the way you’d think. This is a “disabled” movie like Mask, My Left Foot, and Mozart and the Whale, and like them, there is a pivotal moment in it where the disabled person acts against another character in something that pertains to their disability. In Mask, it’s when Rocky Dennis slams a kid up against a locker. In My Left Foot, it’s when Christy Brown bangs his head on the table because everyone is taking his drink away from him (and when I saw that, I thought what a jerk, but there is a point there). And in Mozart and the Whale, which like Adam deals with Asperger’s Syndrome, one character who has Aspergers commands the other who also has it to act like normal people. In this case, there is a scene that actually causes a rift between the characters with more force, but the scene that I mean is a scene where Adam defines something practically that would be emotional. That’s very interesting. The problem I have with this issue is the subplot with the girlfriend’s father, who is going to court. The pivotal moment where the girlfriend decides she can’t be with Adam is too soon in my mind after the father telling her that she can’t be with Adam because he’s disabled. It doesn’t make it seem as if she arrived a logical decision based on whether adaptation was possible — but simply because her father told her it wouldn’t work. This may not be what the filmmakers intended, but it was confusing for me. Is it something I can understand and hope was different in the movie? Yes, it is. Is it realistic that the story might happen this way in real life? Yes, it’s very much that too. This was a good movie, but it also struck me as a very sad movie in some ways. Worth watching again.

The other movie I watched awhile back with Courtney from the library is also excellent, and like Adam, is an independent film — which is probably one of the reasons it’s excellent. It’s called The Dream Catcher, and it’s two (and almost only) main characters are Freddy, who is around 18, and Albert, who is around 14, very hyperactive, a compulsive thief and liar, and also one of the film’s funniest characters. Both of them are running away for different reasons, and this is a road movie that involves cars, boxcars, Indian reservations, carnies, swearing, more swearing, guns and the power they are seen to provide, and also how these people become family. Like Gran Torino, there’s a lot of talking, but it’s in it’s place. They follow up on all the loose ends by the conclusion. I watched commentary on this one too because I was interested how independent filmmakers could make a film that involved cross-country, trains, multiple cars, dogs, and children, multiple sets, and still make it work. There’s scene in this movie that doesn’t make any sense to me, though. It’s like the Lord of the Rings…If you owned something that made bad things happen, would you really carry it around, going “I’ve got to get rid of this, it makes bad things happen.”? Definitely a movie I would rent or own though. Different pace than really popular films.

Also, I’ve discover that Warner Brothers Archive has opened their vault and are selling DVDs of some of their older movies. Sounds like no special features at all, but still, I’ve been browsing.

I had leftover pancakes for breakfast today. Yesterday, in the middle of studying and watching movies, I did all the wash, which meant we were constantly stepping over piles of clothers, and also made the Italian Day of the Dead cookies from my new library sale cookbook In Nonna’s Kitchen. I’ve been wanting to try to make them, as they sound like a combination of all good things: jam, chocolate, coffee, nuts — and they turned out excellent. That being said, I have never seen cookies with such a texture. They turned out dark brown-purple from the rasberry jam and coffee, and they bake into this strange muddy brown color. In dough form, they remind me a lot of working in clay, the look and feel of it. But in spite of this, they tried out quite good, and I have been munching. Today I need to study braille before looking for jobs. More blogging later.

I have not written in quite awhile — since last April, apparently. Much has happened since then. Ernie came to visit in June, got a new house. Mom and Dad went away for a short trip to Pismo this December and were only gone 4 days before I called them back with the news that our neighbor Eric had died on December 6. I knew this because the police or fire dept. came to fetch me at 9 AM, looking for Mom. Then I went and sat with Eric’s wife until Mom got home. I didn’t know what to say or do. Eric was giving me tips on banjo making — though he thought I was a bit nuts in the way I make my banjos and I’m sure wondered why I didn’t do it properly. He could tune the banjo I managed to get in Reno too. He was recently teaching me how to make sourdough bread the old-fashioned way, which means I learned about the windowpane test and how to knead the bread until silky and that you can add water to the dough and not have it dry on the surface like I have it. Eric and his wife came over for Thanksgiving 2009, and I made the bread for that. The sourdough in it died, but it was still good with yeast. For some strange reason, my starter appears to be cursed with the stove being turned on, cooking nearby, pouring cold water on the yeast, etc. Something always happens to it. Around September 2009 or so, Eric lent me some of his books on historical cooking because we got into a discussion about it, as far as my project for History Club. I just returned those before Thanksgiving. It is very interesting to look at the ways of cooking that were done entirely differently historically. You wouldn’t think that baking had changed as much as it has.

I have been looking for jobs and continue to intern at the City. I recently learned how to name documents inside the scanner, which will save me a lot of time. I got an excellent letter of recommendation from my supervisor, which was kind of her.

Courtney came back from Masschusetts in September and has been great fun, especially since I now have company while working on the computer and also someone to cook with. She has showed me how to make cake, with ice cream and Kahlua for toppings, which I haven’t had before. Mmmm…

The yard has turned into a puddle the likes of which has not been seen here since the flood in 1998 (though at least these rain storms stop occasionally). Wolfie was apparently forced to swim the other day when he tried to play king of the mountain on his dirt pile and discovered he couldn’t find a way back to dry land. Wolfie has decided he wants to live in the yard — except not in the rain, so he runs out and then back in again. Walter, naturally, is the opposite and has made up his mind that he will never leave the couch or TV ever again. If found outside, he flings himself down beside the back door and complains to be let in again. Mom found out you can play with him if you roll the ball slowly where he can see it. We’ve determined that he has some visual impaired. Goes along with the arthritic and blind animals from before, I suppose.

My marvelous carniverous Shovel-Head Worm has died, as have the slugs I put in to feed him. This thing was as long as a good sized snake when Ernie found him in the front yard. He had a great stripe down his back like a garter snake (the worm, not Ernie). The internet said the worm ate other worms and animals, and since I saw no good purpose to flinging in the worm bin as I did with the developing salamander (who promptly developed more fingers and toes, better wrist and head definition in 2 days and grew remarkably — but then I removed him to the yard) — because the Shovel Head Worm would be unable to navigate with the other worms and would eat them all and be much harder to recapture. So I put him in a terraium in the back room, fed him with the slugs that had apparently found their way into the worm bin, and he appeared quite happy and wet enough. But apparently he didn’t many or any of the slugs after all, and they had nothing to eat because I don’t know what slugs eat, so they all died just the same. I’m not quite sure why, because the Shovel Head Worm should be able to live off himself for several months and as I didn’t have him for that long, I wonder what he couldn’t eat.

Kim reported tornado warnings for this area the other day, but I heard on the news that it was only the type of storm that might turn into a tornado. The weather’s funny. We had deluges for an hour, then the sky will be utterly clear and sunny, and when you look again, it has clouded over and the deluges are about to start. I have now been re-trained in lighting pilot lights, turning off gas and water, etc. in case the need arises.

i’ve been tinkering with writing ebooks and with typography and formatting. I bought a program on sale which has some interesting features and learned how to make an index on it, but beyond that it appears it may be more trouble than it’s worth. So back to the drawing board as far as that goes. I’ve also been tinkering with several stories lately — a genetically engineered children story is the newest one, followed by a historical thing which is either set in 1930’s or 1800’s, I’m not sure yet. They are going reasonably well but have no charactors so far.

I joined LinkedIn and Facebook, so am now probably more connected to the web than I ever hoped to be. My 10th high school reunion was November — good to see people again and learn what they were doing, as well as the fact that the reunion was good, easy to get to, didn’t cost much to get in, and was lit and handled in such a way that I enjoyed myself. I could actually see people enough to figure out who they were — at least, given that I hadn’t seen many high school people in a long time.

Someday I should figure out how to upload pictures to this blog. That’s all for now as I have to eat breakfast — cereal.