Dawn’s Thoughts

Who knew Southern Illnois was the home of rednecks?

I sure didn’t, but in about a two week period, I’ve picked up three different sources, a documentary, a movie, and a memoir that prove this is so. Things which would stereotypically be based in the south exist in these sources. Interesting. Some are better than others.
The first one, the documentary Stevie by Steve James, I first saw several years for a very good price. I made a note to watch it, since there are very few documentaries I can actually concentrate on. Luckily, this apparently disliked documentary is one i could not only concentrate on, but actually enjoyed, as difficult as the subject matter is.

More interesting than the documentary itself was reading reviews of it afterward. Since it occurred to me that I may be one of the few people with a particular perspective on this film, I decided to write about it.

Here’s the neat part: I would consider this a disabled film, though I swear to you I actually wasn’t looking for it to be one. The “main character” in it, the Stevie of the title, isn’t the filmmaker himself but his “little brother,” who he lost track of (with some obvious relief) when he went off to make movies.

Now I started watching this film and looking at Stevie, and I thought “special ed!” because he looks a little syndromey, the way he talks throughout the film (speech patterns (not that he says ain’t all the time), swearing, and apparent lack of editing (how many people would describe matter of factly trying to kill someone when they have to start a friendship over again and the friend’s children are in the room?). In fact, considering that Stevie has some obvious mental disabilities (and mental illness), anger control, and other problems, I can see why his family consistantly refer to him as about twelve years old. It greatly surprised me that the filmmaker brought his children at all. Most reviewers described the film as difficult to watch because Stevie is unlikeable.

Yes, but that’s what makes the film interesting. That, and the different things people took away from this than I did.

Steve James, who made the film, stresses in the commentary that Stevie is actually bright and able to build many things mechanically. Doesn’t suprise me — especially the ability to build things. What does interest me is that Steve James places himself in front of the camera in this documentary, so you can see the questions being raised. Reviews I read afterward criticized him for this, because at one point he has an anthropological ethical dilemma: do I continue observing and doing my job, or do I interfere and attempt to change the course of events?

In the commentary, Steve James also states that people were surprised at Stevie’s girlfriend, Tanya, a developmentally disabled adult, and that most classified her as the only girl he was likely to meet.

Hmm.

Possibly. After all, that kind of disability would leave you vulnerable to being taken advantage of, but isn’t this is a small rural town? (another fact that apparently bored reviewers to tears but that I enjoyed). How many disabled people are likely to be in such a town? (Although one of her comments does suggest a very trusting person). And there’s a kind of comeraderie among special ed students who have had similar experiences. Also, for the record, Tanya sounds mildly retarded, and folks, believe me, that is not a profound speech impediment…that’s actually really good speech. Reviewers appeared astonished that this woman could function at all — Stevie’s “guardian angel,” a woman who appears at the end of the documentary to have a good well-thought out answer.

Really? Yes, strangely enough, being developmentally disabled doesn’t automatically mean you don’t notice things. On another note, what reasons do “normal” women give for why they stay with their boyfriends or husbands?

Reviewers also seemed extremely surprised at the wisdom from Tanya’s friend, a woman I was pleased to see in the film. I started paying more attention. Stevie appeared to respect this woman as a person and didn’t mock her disability (the parts where he lost it and mocked both his girlfriend and her friend are largely cut out of the film. In fact, for someone that I sense could easily lose his temper, and who his family cautions like a child to get him to calm down, it’s actually remarkable that there aren’t more tantrums in the film). Stevie shows he can take a joke in this scene. Although Tanya’s friend’s disability is unnamed in the documentary, based on facial features, motions when excited, glasses, and speech patterns, I can make a pretty good guess…in fact, I did when the camera focused on her. The disability I assume she has does not in general have developmental disabilities associated with it, so ta-da…I perked up because a disabled person was going to have an opinion and it was going to be good.

Most reviewers apparently perked up because a disabled person had an opinion…and, oh my God, it actually was a wise, well-informed one.

Well, hell yes. Imagine that.

Where the Wild Things Are

I liked this film more than the recent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I love both books. The part I loved in the book — the trees growing in Max’s room is not shown here, but the illustrations of Max wearing a costume and chasing animals downstairs is certainly shown.

In this version, the reasons why Max meets the wild things is developed further. Max is a hyperactive, lonely child and the catalyst of the movie is something far enough away from standard that I wondered why his parents didn’t relinquish ownership of him.

Max thinks so too, because he flees immediately, The script in this movie is minimal. We learn little from this point on about the wild things other than their names; they function mainly as extensions of friends for Max. As when Max is making up stories for his mother or playing “what-if” with one of the wild things, the script seems remarkably similar to actual conversations children have. Just like an ethnographer recorded them.

In this concept, the story is not so much what happens as how it happens — Max and the wild things run about, play, build things and demolish them again — the sort of “doing nothing” that was done in Winnie the Pooh. That’s good. But although the scenery is beautiful, and everything in it has some basis in real life, the movie is also slow, in script, motion and setting. There are, however, things that I thought were clever because this is not a film that follows a standard format at all — too slow for the story-book audience, with darker areas, like an adult version.

Some of the time I was able to catch the lessons Max took away from his time with the wild things; at other times, it appeared it only provided him entertainment and friendship (which may or may not have been applied back at home). Like real life, some of the things Max encounters aren’t fixed entirely when he returns.

And if everything had its own basis in real life, when the turning point occurs and things grow worse for Max, who was that actually based on?

This was a slow, sometimes unrevealing, unusual movie which I would watch again just because I like how it’s made. Even if parts of it annoy me, it appears to have been created with someone’s viewpoint in mind because it is so far out of “Hollywood” style that i think for that alone it should be given a try.

The Sinking of Santa Isabel

Oh, what a good idea this was, and oh, how I have problems with the spin on it.

The idea is wonderful — the first part, even the promise, but the excution of it becomes boring quickly. The main character,Webster, decides that his life is at a standstill and becomes determined to spend the summer in the treehouse in the back of the house he lived in as a child.

This is a situation everyone in the town accepts with good humor, considering they already have a mailman, Peter, who rides around, periodically reading people’s mail and flinging it where it pleases him. Naturally, he befriends Webster, and the two of them, and 13-year-old Jester, all fall in love with neighbor Beth.

Now here’s the parts I thought were good. The part with the treehouse was clever, as was the promise that created it. The idea could have created a kind of return-to-childhood-joy movie, and to some extent it is, since the characters run about playing childish pranks on the nieghbors, building tin can telephones for communication etc.

But here’s the thing. Spending time in a treehouse is fine, even all summer. But Webster’s promise is much more than that, and there is the film’s restriction. It’s supposed to show three people who learn to love each other or something like that, and move on, or something, and it ends up showing them not doing all that much except bingo and sitting in a treehouse.

Each one has a secret, but I didn’t particularly feel by the end that I knew any of them well enough.Although the movie ends hopefully, because the characters are together, life has in fact gotten worse for them throughout — as it should in a story.

It just doesn’t leave you with the right kind of ending though. How will they take care of themselves?

Deliverance

Seen this movie parodied in so many different cartoons and movies that I finally had to sit down and watch it. I would have had more to say about it if I had writing earlier, but here goes.

Since it was done in 1970’s, the movie has a nice, easy beginning, where all the characters are set up in more depth than today. I knew the basics before I rented — men go on a canoe trip, there’s a banjo player, they’re deep in the hills out of their territory and local hillbillies are trying to kill them.

The only hillbillies really in here are at the very beginning and the middle. In the beginning we meet the family the main characters hire to drive their cars — inbred, mentally-retarded mountain people, every one of them. Oh, yeah, except the kid that picks the banjo — they think he’s just fine because he can play.

Here’s an interesting twist: didn’t realize that one of the banjos in “Dueling Banjos” here isn’t a banjo at all but a guitar.

The banjo picking kid in this has a very good prosthetic to make him look like he does –better than stuff I’ve seen in much later movies (Back to the Future II comes to mind).

So off our main characters go, drinking, carrying and harpooning fish galore. A small mention is made of men who go “buck crazy” and can’t shoot a gun at a living thing even if they’re crackshot, and then the film goes on. And just at the point when you get tired of all the quiet and beautiful scenery and want something to happen, there it is.

The men stumble on a still and run into some onery locals who are determined to make them pay.Here’s the problem. In desperation, they kill a man in self defense, and then, in good novel style, spend so long discussing how and why and in what way they should get rid of the body, that any remaining moonshiners could have picked them off easily.

By the time revenge occurs to them, they return quickly to the canoe and set off — trailed, naturally, by the same mean locals, determined to get even.

Here’s the other problem. I understand that the locals would be mad because strangers shot their kin. I understand that they might even be a little inbred and crazy, if you go by stereotypes and the fact that the mountains hemmed them in. But here’s the thing — the location provides them with the perfect location, an extremely out of the way area, far from their car, on the locals’ territory. It might have worked better had they gone deeper into the woods, but no, they go directly to the canoe, which the moonshiners have absolutely no trouble keeping up with.

Actually got bored with this and wasn’t particularly interested. Fast forwarded to find out how it ended. If that was me, I’d be gone from the county as quickly as humanly possible. Though what happens in the story could just as well have happened in the city.

I got this DVD because I knew it was a remake of a 1953 film, even though the DVD box doesn’t mention it…I never liked the catalyst in that film, but I did enjoy the child’s POV. That film is a very innocent film, something that would be very hard to duplicate today because our social context is so different.

For instance, in the original, Lennie, 12 years old, plays a practical joke on his 7 year old brother, Joey. I forget whether he’s playing war or target practice, but the point is this: Joey believes he shot Lennie and runs away to Coney Island, where he can earn money, ride the rides and be without supervision. Lennie regrets his joke and goes to find his brother.

Watching the original, I had a number of questions that the new filmmaker apparently has as well. First off, if you were 12 and playing war today on anything but a video game, people would look at you funny — but in 1953, target practice was likely different. I’m sure there were children mishandling firearms, but there were probably a lot more allowed to own them, without the concerns we hold looking at children and guns today.
The boys’ mother works long hours and apparently never notices her children are gone. Why? Well, if she did, the film wouldn’t a child’s anymore.

The people Lennie meets in the old version are kind if indifferent, in that they assume he’s a regular kid there — with one exception. The pony ride man suspects Joey is lost, calms him, “hires” him and gets him to tell his phone number, which he uses to alert Lennie. This is, I think, one of the best parts in the film, because an adult is trying to help Joey as a friend.
In this new version, the childlike quality of the film is gone, but a lot of the questions I had are also answered. The film isn’t a remake so much as an attempt to turn the original on its head. You can’t have children playing with guns anymore with the complete innocence the original film had, and taking this as its lead, the film updates the boys’ lives successfully. Their life isn’t entirely innocent — Mom drinks and works long hours and leaves them alone for days; Dad’s supportive and kind, and in jail.
More is made of Lennie’s friends — instead of being his age, they’re older, tougher and meaner, and a point in the film is that Lennie has to steal the gun from his house, where it is locked away in a toolbox, in order to play the “joke” on Joey.

The settings are great in this film even before we get to Coney Island. Old military forts, abandoned lots, and Lennie’s friend is an older man who allows him to repair merry go round horses…a nice touch. (In fact, this character kind of takes the place of the pony ride man in the original). The history of Coney Island is explored with B&W shorts, with Lennie as the narrator — though oddly his narrations are all about bad things that happened there — which is acknowledged later.

The mythology is in place before the catalyst. Here, if Lennie’s stories about Coney Island are bad, his Dad’s are wonderful mythical stories about Lilliputia, the land of dwarfs (made more appropriate by the fact that Dad is a dwarf)…but Lennie never hears them. Only Joey visits Dad in jail and still believes the stories…Lennie tells him that Lilliputia was a place built for freaks like him…thus giving him a good reason to go there. If Lennie becomes annoyed at taking care of Joey for one day in the original, here he is tired of it of doing it constantly.

From the original’s time period, Lennie is probably only worried about getting home on time, with Joey, and telling him he’s sorry. Watching it, though, I was thinking he’s all by himself. This new film spends a lot more time looking at Lennie’s guilt…he’s actively searching not because he’s sorry, though he is, but because he’s very concerned for Joey’s safety.

This film broadens the boys’ home life and the people he meets along the way. In the original, the only significant adult he met was the pony ride man…this version has him meet several other homeless people, including children, most of whom are kind. In the largest twist, the pony ride man is not at all the kind person in the first film.

That was a shame but makes sense. This film is darker than the first. It recognizes that if Joey runs away, the world is not necessarily a good place. (Although, at times with the shorts, it emphasizes this too much).

A number of twists at the end, some very appropriate that I wondered about in the first film, and some not, wrap up the story. Lennie is, by turns, more responsible for his actions in this film, and less so, as he makes more than one mistake along the way.

This was an interesting reimagining of this film…It worked for me.The ending…well, I had to think of it the way I thought of The Wooden Camera…they go off in the end for a fairy tale adventure. Considering Lennie’s stories of Coney Island, that may not be the case, but you can interpret it two ways, and that’s mine. This film answered my questions and fills in family life, and it does rather well I thought.

I had a very good night out last night. I went to see Josh Blue perform comedy. I haven’t been to a comedy show (and in most cases, I don’t care for a lot of the comedians I see on TV) but my friend told me about Josh Blue when he was on Last Comic Standing. “You have to see this guy,” she said, “He tells your kind of jokes.”

Well, I did a video search, and she’s right.

Good timed comedy for one thing, and disabled comedy after that! Need more disabled comedy.

So I went last night. Very nice theatre…from the marquee out front and the balcony stairs off to the sides, curtains and ceiling, I’d say it was an older theatre than I expected.

Before the show started, I explained to Courtney the things I liked about disabled films…by which I mean, the ones that actually have disabled people in the roles. I have problems with the film “The Keys to the House,” but it is also the only film where I could tell on sight that the actor in it had CP. His motions, eyes and head were familiar…and CP speech apparently sounds the same in Italian, too. Aside from Chris Burke or Christopher Burke, I’m not sure of many obviously disabled actors on television. It’s so good seeing people like people you know and like yourself on TV.

I have a copy of Look Who’s Laughing…a documentary of comedians with disabilities telling disabled comedy. It’s great, need more of it. My Thesaurus of Comedy does have a disabled section, but only about 3 jokes in it…one of these not even by a disabled person. Now I’m sure if you went around to the disabled folks I know and asked each one for funny stories, they’d have them.

In fact, I know so. People used to tell them to me. I used to tell them.

There wasn’t a very long line to get in, and a number of comedians before Josh Blue. One of the jokes I thought was good before this was the beginning of a joke with a kid in a pirate costume. The comedian complained that he was now too old to run around in a pirate costume.

I laughed a lot at the jokes Josh Blue told…but I think I came at them from a different perspective from some others in the audience. When he started talking to his bad arm, looking at it oddly as it crept about with a mind of its own, making jokes about benefits, how to make being taken for retarded work in your favor, and frustration at “helpful” disabled service (read “absolute panic at a disabled person in the room,” I cracked up.

Done that.

I guessed the joke about baby-proofing the house before he gave it. I just pictured the number of things my arm or leg has ran into of its own free will, and I could see where it was going.:)
The night wasn’t all disabled jokes though…plenty about marriage, raising children etc…and from the amount people laughed, they weren’t having a problem understanding his timing. He had very good delivery and pauses. I couldn’t clap often because I had the monocular, but half the time when people were laughing and I didn’t know why, I asked Courtney and she said, “Well, he has his arms crossed like this.”

I enjoyed the joke about Blue’s son…well, he said, when people asked if the child had CP, we’ve just discovered it’s not contagious.

:)

Waiting in the lobby later for CDs and DVDs, I told Josh Blue I liked the joke about benefits. He looked surprised and commented on that, I’m sure because the bit about benefits was a throwaway line. I was surprised too because the people in line were funny.

“He’s signing autographs.”

“How?”

Well, with a pretty well established method, seems to me. He had one hand to hold down the CD and the other to sign it. Makes perfect sense to me. The minor CP that he appears to have, it never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to sign.

It did, however, occur to me as I was signing my receipt atop CDs, that if I didn’t get my signature fitting better, that I’d be autographing something.

That, and the required 2 item minimum required with seeing the show. Damn it, drinking should improve my writing. It improves everything else.

Walking out, Courtney said people she had overheard thought Blue’s motor skills etc. were a gimmick at first. I thought that was funny. I talked about the jokes I really enjoyed, among them the one about the contagious CP.

“These jokes came about because somebody had to say that,” I said. “Maybe not in that setting, but they said it.”

Yes, well, Courtney said, it’s not contagious, but isn’t it genetic?

No. I explained what causes CP, that it was kind of a luck of the draw; that people I know have worse CP based on smaller hemmorages, or with the same gestational periods. I’ve joked about many of these things with Courtney and others, and explained to a few people. I hadn’t thought to explain further, because I assumed everyone knew by now.
But this makes me wonder. I enjoyed the jokes that dealt with ordinary life, but I enjoyed the disabled jokes because they sounded similar to things I’ve said or that people have told me about their disabilities. Funny stories. I enjoyed them because I identified with them…just as a comedian talking about tools would work well with construction workers. Misunderstandings, benefits, discrimination, being taken for retarded etc. all make sense.

Based just on the small sample overheard in the lobby, people clearly enjoyed the show, but how many understood it? Comedy, I suppose, could bridge a gap in demonstrating that people with disabilities can actually exist in society as complete people. But there’s an anthropology project.

In short, it was a great show. I would definitely go to a Josh Blue show again or any other disabled comedians provided I run across any, and I will have to try another show at that theatre…food, tickets were reasonable, and some shows are much cheaper than that one.

Well, I’ve been wanting to watch these for awhile…there’s more in the series too, including a political set that includes the film Red Menace (which I have somewhere in VHS). Communists take over the U.S. while a man sleeps…the acting is so bad it’s funny.

In these, the acting is still bad, as I expected…I had to watch in small doses, but the films from the 1940’s where actually easier to watch…slightly better acting, score, a plot, and scenery that often changed. the 1960’s special effects (regardless of the drug featured in the story) appeared to consist of classroom paint, oil and food coloring, along with some vanishing and distortion that may have been done with two cameras.

I became more interested as an anthropologist when I began to see the social customs mentioned in passing throughout some films. Much of the tone of the films from the 1960’s had actors posing common questions kids may have been thinking at the time — one with a rather stupid line at the end that they were all actors. Many times the current young adult society was ridiculed to make a point…because we all know that will convince kids not to use drugs and have sex.

Only children have dares, so of course a group of children are shown. In a hilarious example, a long-haired young man is shown talking quietly to a girl on a park bench — but the ever-present narrator informs us that this isn’t a real boy because you can barely tell him from a girl — and then goes on to demonstrate that real boys go out and do things like have rumbles in the park and drag race.

Hmmm…gee, talking to a girl, or engaging in fights and dangerous activity. This would really not be shown as an example today.

In another funny example from the 1940’s or 1950’s, social customs and gender roles are explored again. It has a woman playing baseball! This has a better narrator and, of all things, somewhat of a plot. The boy in this example has a single parent — a mother — and yet, heavens above, he can still go out and play with boys and girls and has no problem liking girls.

Never would have guessed. Having a single parent didn’t turn him into a sissy.

The girl, we are told, lives in a perfectly normal household — with two parents — though from the way the actors interact, like the Stepford Wives, it leads you to believe that the household isn’t normal at all.

In one 1960’s film, Sonny Bono, in an awful gold suit, tells students not to use drugs…because drugs are bad. Instead, they should smoke a cigarette…because, you know, cigarettes are what every adult influenced by advertising in the 1960’s was doing, so why shouldn’t you?

I half expected an advertisement for which type of cigarette, complete with brand name, like the film that was solely an ad for a pad company. Sadly, no luck.

The 1940’s film about syphillis, thankfully edited, attempted to tell people about getting treatment by repeatedly showing the type of injection they will get if they do. Oh, and although they show a younger American man coming in for treatment, their first example is an actor with an awful Italian accent.

Because, you know, all nations blamed syphillis on other nations…the French Disease, the Spanish Disease…Maybe they couldn’t resist putting a stereotype in.

Half the 1960’s films are so unbalanced as to appear to advocate for drug use. In another fabulous example of things that would never been shown to a classroom today, taking drugs is compared to playing Russian roulette — demonstrated no less.

Because you just can’t be a real man or woman until you’ve done things like, well, fought in a large group, drag raced in a group, or played with a loaded gun in a group…just so long as you don’t do drugs or sex in a group.

Oh, and you can’t be a hippie either.
Some very interesting unintentional demonstrations exist in these films.

Also included is a film about how to teach “trainables” — a term I understood only through reading a previous 1970’s book about mental retardation, but which the film’s little title card explains. This film is interesting only for being a special ed film, and is the only film aimed at teaching teachers. In order to teach teachers, they must first make them comfortable saying slang words for body parts…which are written on a blackboard.

I think I might recall this from my own class, but I shudder to think about what may have occurred the next day or next week after this kind of thing was used in a special ed classroom.

The film was done in the 1970’s, possibly when institutions were closing, and as such, all the developmentally disabled students are adults…even when they’re supposed to be young adults. Coming from, I assume, little instruction, sex education would have been necessary, but it’s rather funny to watch someone who is, if not an adult, than a prematurely-old child, talking to a teacher about puberty.

These films were fun to look at socially. I don’t need to rent them again however.

First of all, let me say I wish I had something to write other than reviews in this blog for awhile, but otherwise it would just be what I had for dinner and looking for jobs, and that gets a little boring to write about. So here we go:

I got my Warner Brothers Archive DVD’s March 1st. They’re very good…though the ads are right that there’s no extras and no cleaning up of films for the DVDs. They’re manufactured on demand, but I’m happy to report that case artwork exists, and also on the DVD. It’s plain, but it works. The thing that was not advertised is that these disks only work if you have a DVD “play only” player — something that had me cursing until I realized I could use them in the back room. It just doesn’t work on DVD recorders or on PCs. This is stated on the box, but I didn’t hear about it in any of the reviews I read beforehand.

The films themselves look great. I got I Know My First is Steven (1989) and The Flight of Dragons (1983). The first has very good picture, with occasional dust or scratches on the film visible. Sometimes there appears to be a slight jump motion from one charactor or another, but this doesn’t happen when I run the film back and play again. The Flight of Dragons is a cartoon — one of the animes I remember enjoying before anime was a popular word. I never owned this one or saw it on television…my friends owned a copy. Now of course I understand that Rankin Bass did the cartoon, as they did The Last Unicorn, and the two films are very similar — drawing styles, music, credits, backgrounds, still pictures, etc. Rankin Bass is better known for their stop-motion work on Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Like the Last Unicorn, they have an excellent script, great characters, animation that’s detailed etc. I haven’t finished the film yet, but it’s good. Some years I found one of the books the film was based on, The Dragon and the Geiorge by            , which I recognized only by the character names. I read it and then got rid of it — the basic plot of the movie was there, but the storyline with the main character’s wife, Angie, was thankfully left out of the film entirely. The film was also based on the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, an attempt to explain how dragons might have flown scientifically. I think I have seen this book but I haven’t bothered with it. The film combines the two ideas of the books and does very well. Actually, that’s a very interesting idea, combining two books with similar themes. In the film, Peter is transported a magical land, where he must help the wizard Carolinus defeat his evil brother — something the scientific Peter must do while trapped inside the body of a dragon. (Actually, a plot very similar to The Last Unicorn in a way). This is a good film, and I’m enjoying it.

I know My First Name is Steven shows the true Steven Stayner kidnapping case. I’ve been wanting this film, and convinently saw it mentioned on the WB website the day it was released, which intrigued me into looking through the rest of their inventory. I can say having watched a lot of contemporary movies and TV series for this time period lately (Growing Pains, A Son’s Promise) that this film has aged very well. Considering that at the time this film was made, the writers could have beat you over the head with the plot alone, with a Very Special Miniseries about strangers, complete with foreshadowing music and much wailing going on, it’s a relief to say that whoever put this together did any extremely good job.

Because it’s a miniseries, a lot of standard camera shots are used — a few closeups, a few establishing shots. Not fancy camera work, no special effects — and not that that’s a criticism. They have good locations in this movie, and it’s more of a character study — of Steven’s family, but particularly of Steven and how he changed.

There’s also some chilling throwaway lines in this script, that the scriptwriters had no way of knowing about when they wrote this. Funny. One of them is pointed out by the actor who plays the older Steven Stayner, in The Yosemite Murders by Dennis McDougal: the screenplay has Steven’s older brother make him a list of available girls at school — something I guess that was done in real life, and seems perfectly normal. The other is something I noticed. The grandfather in the story comments to Del, Steven’s dad, that if he didn’t have so many kids, he could afford a car that runs, and that if the kids were animals, they could pick the best and drown the rest.

The statement is obviously meant to show the grandfather’s relationship with the family — and one of the reasons he’s suspect later on — but wow, what a statement, considering more recent events.

The film comes on two discs, no extras, and it is quite good all by itself — in fact, it looks better visually than the last time I saw it on TV — but this is one film that really needs extras. A few documentaries, a TV promo trailer, other things, would really be wonderful.

The actors all do a good job in this film — and you get to know the characters pretty well. Steven’s brother Cary isn’t given much to say in the script — rightly so, considering when it was written — but as Steven’s big brother, the script does show him than the younger sisters. “Mom and Dad never come in here,” says Cary in the movie, when Steven compliments him on his drawing ability.

Huh.

But the focus of the movie is about Steven, of course, and the film actually has an arch to it that works — things get worse for Steven after he tries to go back home. This was in the book, too, but it’s great the movie explored it (as it could very well have ended happily like A Son’s Promise, regardless of the outcome). The little title card epilogue at the end of the film has been updated to 2004 — something I haven’t seen before– with one notable, but perhaps appropriate omission.

Great movie. Highly recommended. The people who made it took the time to allow it to be a miniseries and didn’t squash it down to a hour.

Howard Zinn: You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:

Maybe it was just not my morning for Howard Zinn. It wasn’t, either, the last time I tried to watch this documentary on television. Don’t get me wrong, I like Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — the fact that he uses enough block quotations to give a good picture of events and focusing on people history usually neglects. And I’d be interested in how he came to develop these ideas.

Maybe this film tries to show it — Zinn as an activist here, there, and everywhere else — but I quickly lost interest. By the time the film showed Zinn at a book signing with students being interviewed as to why they enjoyed his books, I’d lost interest all together.

the film has some good music and the credits, with little side videos, are well worth watching for some comments.

Growing Pains Season One:

Well, this is another disk of Growing Pains the series, and I have to conclude after watching several that they haven’t aged well. I remember when the show went off the air. I watched it then. I like watching many things that I enjoyed at the same thing as this show — even those shows which stress morals — like some episodes of After School Specials.

And there are times lately where I want to watch unambigious shows — now it’s getting harder to tell who at any given moment is the bad person or good guy in a series. Something to do with filming. And it’s not just this show — others like the Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons are preachy by today’s viewpoint.

But every episode in the series so far seems to be about a Very Special Episode — sex, drugs, AIDS, stealing — and here, I’m not only speaking of this show but of Mr. Belevedere too, which I watched reasonably recently. If today’s shows could be said to cater to a common person, these shows spoon fed the masses their daily moral lesson. This is something I don’t remember continuing into the 1980’s-early 1990’s, but apparently it did.
That’s all right, so long as there are enough episodes without that to stand on their own. And there don’t seem to be. And that’s too bad. It’s not that this is a bad show, it’s easy to see that the characters in it are a happy family, but still…just in this one disk, the father threatens to hit his son twice…and there’s a moral right there, for the audience. In a show like Home Improvement some years later, a Very Special Episode came alone once a year, not once a night.

I’m sad to say that maybe I’ve outgrown these. It’s nice to see shows where people are nice to one another, but the morals on top are sometimes a bit much.

This book is printed by Thorndike Books, and I picked up for two reasons: It had a cover that didn’t draw me in, but tag lines that did, and it is a large-print that is not a 1950’s mystery for adults…very unusual.

Hav’sing finished it, I can say it has a good idea — Varina, a 15 year old girl, meets a boy, Chase, who proceeds to inform her that she is really a clone, and that they must round up the other clone children. The story starts with an interesting flashback of Chase as a little kid, on a boat with 3 scientists, two of whom treat like a son, and a startling event that occurs.

Did I mention this book has cliffhangers all over? Not that that’s a bad thing, but some of them seem far-fetched. At times I could ignore the writing style, which I found had abrupt spots, with exclamation points here and there, or sentences that just didn’t read right to me. I was hoping for another The House of the Scorpion, which like this book, dealt with power struggles and human cloning, with a child narrator, and even though this is the first book in a series, I have no need to look at the others.

The main character, Varina, may be confused and disoriented with the news that she is a clone and scientists are out to get her, but she swings wildly between trusting whoever she meets completely one moment, and being suspicious of their intentions the next. While this makes sense under the conditions the book sets — for instance, that she’s just met this boy Chase when he starts telling her stories — it ends up tiresome and doesn’t serve any purpose.

I was interested with the initial trouble on the boat in the beginning, and I maintained my interest during Varina’s introduction to her life with her uncle Jim, despite some reading problems I had with the story, but as the story goes on, it lose momentum quickly. Each clone is revealed to have a particular kind of superpower (which, if they actually had them in real life would probably more a lot less controllable — like the kids who can hear people through walls but wear headphones to school).

And as each clone is selected into the group, the story of each character is repeated, so that by you get two or three characters introduced, this one story seems to take up most of the short book. That’s rather annoying.

In the meantime, guardians pop up out of the woodwork with regualarity to take care of Varina and the others — commonly people she has never seen before. Meanwhile, cliffhangers on all sides, Varina’s Uncle Jim lays in the hospital, and while Varina mentions every so often, that she wants to be at his side, that she trusts him absolutely, she goes on shopping trips with an aunt she has never met before, spents one day with the woman and concludes that with all the time spent with her aunt, she’d never learnt of her family.

Well, in a day, that might not always be something mentioned on the first day. Somehow I don’t consider a day much time.

Varina and the others manage to get cars and planes with ease and always escape just ahead of the scientists — which makes sense, as all good serials do. However, even if this is for younger readers, its cliffhangers and wording jarred me out of the story on several occasions.

It’s excellent that I found it in large print…something that should happen more with books. It’s also excellent to see a large family of adopted handicapped children in the story at one point.

It is however hilarious when Varina comments that her mouth dropped open when a child in a wheelchair stood and walked.

I laughed.

This is kind of a joke in the disabled community, you understand.

While it makes perfect sense that Varina would think that, it’s really old. To the author’s credit, the family does explain why the child walks — and it’s a reason I can believe. But here’s the thing, you can be in a wheelchair and still walk, or at least some people can. You may only be in the wheelchair for long distance walking, etc.

The story ends with a cliff hanging that’s been hinted at. But most of the book, unfortunately, instead of minor world building or charactors, is spent collecting children, running from scientists, and repeating, just so the reader doesn’t forget, that they are all clones, most with special powers and tattoos. when they’ve nearly escaped at the end, it makes me wish the characters had been developed, or had done something other than the very beginning of a story. It’s the first of a series, but there’s nothing for me to hang on to in it, nothing I can’t wait to read.

Maybe they have an adventure in the next book. But this one, I’m very sorry to say, can be summed up in a sentence: “There was once a story about clone children and they had to run from evil scientists.”

That’s the start of the story. It’s a great idea. But I needed more story here.

Well, I don’t know what to say about this one. Not much happens in it, like a European film (which I guess after looking it up, it is a remake of), and it was apparently based on a 19th-century novel by Florence Montgomery. Never heard of the author or story, but I ran into the VHS for a dollar some years ago and got it because it has Henry Thomas in it (from around the time of E.T., Huckleberry Fox and Gene Hackman, so I thought it might have a chance.

The film has great cinematography…sometimes characters will be on top one building, the camera is looking down below, people moving around, and the sky too. There’s usually something interesting in the background to look at, including an interesting house set. The film summary states that after the death of the mother, the father treats the youngest boy Miles (Huckleberry Fox) like the child he is (around 4-5) and the oldest boy Andrew (age 10-11) (Henry Thomas) like an adult.

Well, that’s putting mildly. It’s not that he treats him like an adult…he treats him like an adult he doesn’t give a damn about. Even though the character in general seems to be reasonable enough, other characters like the uncle and a second nanny also try to provide support or comment that he treats Andrew too coldly. It’s not that he leaves the kid to his own decisions — though in one scene he declares that he basically doesn’t care what Andrew does, to his face no less — and even though he admits that Andrew isn’t bad only careless, he constantly does something underhanded to him, in a way that you can believe. He doesn’t hit him (well, just once), barely yells at him, (and he apologizes when he does) but there’s this mean undertone to it. He takes Miles away, ignores Andrew’s eventual lies to get his attention, reneges on promises without explanation…and Andrew gets doors slammed in his face about twice…as if all the adults are forbidding him to play with his brother, like it’s something catching. In fact, there are two seperate conversations in this that are very strange. If I can paraphrase: “You treat that kid like he’s got a cold you don’t want to catch,” says the uncle. “[The nanny] won’t let Andrew play with me,” says Miles, a situation their father ignores. An especially chilling comment occurs while the children are in Andrew’s boat (and the scenery is great, as always): “To see Mommy, you’d have to be dead,” explains Andrew to his brother.

Aside from the fact that there’s something really sad that Andrew has to become the family storyteller, that’s a comment that really belongs in a horror movie. That’s why it works here.
First off, when the mother dies he tells Andrew that he and Mommy didn’t go away on a trip together but that Mommy actually died. Andrew becomes rather angry at this. Okay, maybe this is understandable…once, in grief…but the story builds on it. Andrew is forbidden to explain to his little brother why Mommy isn’t coming home or where she went, and when he makes up a rather nice story about what Mommy’s doing on her trip, and Miles understands immediately that his mother has died, without the words ever being said, his father takes Miles away and disregards Andrew’s attempts to explain.

Now that’s downright cruel.

In fact, people guard the youngest kid in this like you wouldn’t believe. In the context of the 19th-century tubercolisis-prone childhood that I suspect this story comes from, this makes sense. But the father and an awful early nanny, who pretends Miles is sick, swoop up to take him away everytime he sets foot outside, downtown, or gets wet and they live in fear of him ever developing a cold. Since Miles tags along and is shown playing with Andrew every chance he gets, this means everyone blames Andrew when Miles happens to plot an escape.

The first nanny is downright creepy and along with a few scenes such as a trip to the market, playing war under a bed etc. the scene that works really well is when Andrew succeeds in mowing her down in her tracks with a bicycle…a scene the movie takes a certain amount of glee in. There are quite a few happy scenes in this…subtly happy, as Andrew’s father undoubtedly comes up with a crummy way to behave toward him. In fact, Gene Hackman does this so well that I find the ending hard to believe…I don’t believe the off-handed neglect here is a new thing.

There are a few sympathetic adults in this: a man at the cemetary, the father’s co-worker, the second nanny, and that and the children playing together and having fun at odd moments actually kept my interest for the entire film. It’s a European style film done in English, and I mean that.

If the film started with melodramatic though good music it occasionally returns to throughout, the rest of it is pretty downplayed. Characters don’t simutanously burst into tears at this…at least, not often…to the film’s credit, though that’s what it’s about.
The good-old-fashioned 19th-century ending was left intact, and in a way that’s great, but it doesn’t work for me — and I love 19th century books. I don’t believe anything Andrew says in the last scene.
I guessed part of the ending early on. The rest of the movie was great to watch for the scenery, but Gene Hackman’s role kept pissing me off just becuase he played things so causally.

Andrew requests repeatedly to be sent away to school toward the end and I agree that that would have worked better. Not really, because he would have been away from home and his brother, and the scenes between the two kids work, but in this type of story, if it was done in a modern style — it would be better to have him placed in a different family altogether. Hopefully with his brother, of course.

It’s interesting to see the 19th-century ending, except they didn’t complete it. Usually that’s about the midway point where this leaves off.

All right, I didn’t expect much from this film, just on the title and cover art alone, but it kept coming up in searches on Amazon.com, so eventually I rented it. I knew it would be a TV movie, probably low-budget, but that was all right, because there are films done that way that I greatly enjoy. Even if they show their age, are overly-manipulative or have old-fashioned sentimental music (all the old Hollywood movies do, naturally, and they are excellent).

This movie is something like an hour and 30 minutes long. In that time, the length of a good sized feature film, the movie squeezes in so many things with so little development it’s really a shame. The film structure itself is relatively simple — 15 year old Terry O’Kelley iis left as head of the family of six younger children after his mother’s death and he must adjust to the new life. Yet I spent a much longer time in this movie trying to figure out what time period it was, how individuals were related than I should have (and considering my fiction, I really shouldn’t complain on this point).

The film opens with over-the-top music. It’s as if the film producers decided, “Hey, let’s make this a Heartwarming Family Movie,” and then proceeded to do it. Granted, a lot of films have done this well. But I thought the film itself was about five years or more older than it’s actual issue date, due to the music, the credit crawls, and the way some things were presented. In fact, every single time anything good or bad happens in this film, the music will tell you — along with oddly-done echoing parts for Very Bad Things.

The film starts at a funeral. Whose it is, is not immediately clear. Townspeople — who you will never see again — come up to offer to take the younger children, as they have been farmed out before due to financial troubles. They offer help. Terry and the other boys decline and say they want to stay together — then they pile into an old pickup.

Their father was also introduced at the funeral and where he goes is unclear. A flashback with a segue (the truck) occurs, though the film had to come back to the funeral scene for me to understand that a flashback had, in fact, occured.

In the flashback, Terry is the child wrangler in the back of the truck while his parents sit up front. They drive up to an old farm and are met by two people who are not at all happy to see them. I thought at first these were townspeople, again, since the funeral had just broken up — and indeed, the old man is addressed by his name (Cecil) and there was no clear indication that they are family (though I thought of that second). The problem is that the father, whose father it is, is shown dropping off the family and then immediately leaving for town without bothering to unpack. He doesn’t address the man as Daddy (or anything else) as far as I recall, and since the film goes into the truck with Terry and his mother, we don’t see the children greeting their grandfather. I mean, they might not hug him, but there would be some interaction.

The film doesn’t take the time.

The family moves to a trailer on the property (which is seen just this once). A hatchery is mentioned as a place to work, and all the kids work, Terry says. Shortly, after this, the kids are shown working in a chicken coop — one which I thought of as a smaller section of the hatchery at first — until it’s very clearly revealed that those were home chores. From the way people talk, act, and dress in the film the time period could be anywhere from the 1960’s to today. But here’s the problem: the point where you as a child are recognized as a adult is a big moment, and during that moment under no circumstances should I, as the viewer, be thinking: “Oh, so that’s who that person is!” Because Terry addresses his grandfather as PawPaw, which is I believe the first time anyone says who the man is. The grandfather is only there in three scenes which is a shame — on the porch, working and not working — and there needed to be more. The film does this again and again, picking vital scenes and jumping right to them, instead of laying relationships ahead of time.

It is made very clear that the grandfather and Terry are related but it does make me wonder. I like the fact that everyone accepts that the father will be no help, because they would have had years of experience. But in some ways it doesn’t work, because he’s not on screen long enough for any tension to build up. And the grandfather accepts Terry as the head of his family. You’d think he’d have some problem with it (they are living on his land, after all).
The only time the children show any interaction with the grandfather is basically done to draw attention to the fact that he’s not working. With the exception of an eleven year old and the next oldest child, none of the other children are defined. When the father shows up, drinking beer on the porch, the identity of the step-grandmother is finally established — too late in the story. The father has been on screen only three other times briefly, and while it’s been mentioned that he’s a truck driver and isn’t home much, and that he can’t be counted on, he hasn’t been mentioned. So when Terry’s anger and frustration — and unfortunately, I’m guessing based on context — cause him to jump the man, complete with doomsday music and echoing effects, it’s supposed to be a big moment. And I’m watching it rolling my eyes. First of all, this is obviously a traditional rural family, and probably community too, since every person Terry interacts with is Sir or Ma’am. So when he shows his lack of respect by calling his dad by his first name, that’s probably supposed to mean something. All it means is that it needs clarification — and unbelievably, the film supplies it: “You beat up our daddy!” exclaims one of the younger kids.

That’s a shame, really. And I’m thinking for about the umpteenth time “Oh, yeah, where have I seen this before: dad’s away all the time, no money, no food, child-headed family, ulcers, beating up on people, standing in at the school for parents…” — Tex (1983), fiction by Disney. Now I have problems with that film too, but not so many. And this film is based on a true story — I looked up the news article afterwards.

And in another moment that reminds me of a S.E. Hinton novel (this time, The Outsiders — and that movie had sentimentality too) — Terry stands in for a parent at school for one of the kids, behaves like a parent, which all the people in the office accept (like in Tex) — and then acts like a kid outside the office. The point of the scene is the same as in The Outsiders: “You’ve got the grades to really make something of yourself.” Now in the context that the two older brothers have quit school to work and considering the background, I can see someone actually saying this. And then the film goes and overdoes it. Hugging, sentimental music and crying complete the scene. Well, darn. The thing that’s annoying is that it should have worked, all they needed to do was ease of it a little. It’s not the acting so much, and it’s not the material, but it would have worked so much better if they’d done things subtly. If these kids are getting up at 5:30 AM to go to work and the younger ones are making breakfast for the others, then use that — and in one scene they do. And if they don’t want the County to know, surely a lot of other people in town would understand that — it looks like that kind of place. On the one hand, adults are almost universally accepting of Terry as an adult, so maybe they didn’t want to interfere.
Eventually, the store and town are shown in a small segment, and they look about like the store and town should look, but here’s the thing — Terry meets some kid he knows but he says he can’t go out and do anything because he’s taking care of the kids. Shouldn’t that have been earlier when there was really a transition? I mean, obviously, being the child wrangler of the family, he’s somehat used to it, and there’s not much protest when he really becomes in charge of everyone — and economically, that’s probably why the family seems to survive relatively well on their own.

There are two parts that make sense to me: the publicity (and lack thereof), the job (and lack thereof) and showdown with the co-guardian, (who’s willing to be co-guardian only so long as Terry is constantly grateful and obliging with little things). When Terry pisses off everyone in town it makes sense — but it does make me wonder what happened to some of the people in the beginning who might have fixed things. It also makes me wonder about the court guardian. A sympathetic character, who treats Terry as a responsible adult but also wants to help him ease up on things, why didn’t she explain his rights regarding paperwork? Just because he’s old enough to sign things doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have representation.

And another thing: the step-grandmother vanishes off the face of the earth. Although she admits a verbal agreement, I doubt she would have surrendered the land so willingly. And the father — if Terry beat him up and “ran him off” as the children say, there needs to be something more there. Even though it’s clear that people are resolved to the fact that he’s never home and won’t help, he’s never actually shown doing much of anything. For instance, it’s never mentioned that he’s not sending money home etc. They kept the “good” scenes and threw out any backstory that would have supported it.

There are such a variety of cars in this movie that it isn’t until I saw a 1986 (or around there) Volvo in the film that I could pinpoint the time period more exactly. The fact that the court guardian drives it made me laugh and makes perfect sense. I should add that in 1986, when we got our car in the city, it was the only Volvo around. To this day, when we go to the country areas like this film shows, people ask “But what kind of Ford, etc. is it?”
I won’t be renting this again. The story is good and there was more they could have done with it. Vital scenes needed to be braced up with background, particularly for the mother, father and grandfather.

For a similar movie, with a lot of children and a emotionally incapitated father, see Papa’s Angels (2000) if you can find it. It’s on VHS but not DVD yet, though I’m waiting impatiently. I almost didn’t see this film on TV and I’m glad I did. It’s about an Appalachian family in the 1930’s. The book, by the lady who played Mayella Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird was okay, but the movie fleshes it out, adding more characterization, a wonderful set that you really get to know, and excellent bluegrass music. Yes, it’s a TV family movie, too, and I believe it was done by Hallmark (and it shows) but it is done slowly and should have had more recognition than it did. I got the VHS by chance since I never saw it distributed in stores, and I believe they spent a longer time advertising in TV guide and on TV than distribution. It’s really a shame. The father Grins (Scott Bakula) as a great relationship with his kids — among them the deaf oldest child (and narrator of the book), the tomboy daughter, and the oldest boy, all well-defined. When his wife dies, there have been enough scenes with her that the viewer understands what this means to the family. By the time Grins gets to a similar point in the story as Terry got into with his father, at a country dance, and loses his temper, it’s effective. For one thing, the story very carefully established beforehand that Grins doesn’t get mad very often, and when he becomes grief-stricken and changes completely, it sure works. Neighbors and family, like the teacher and grandmother are also shown quite a bit, help support the family and talk about Grins even if he isn’t able to support the family (they don’t skip over this like A Son’s Promise does). Occasionally the story gets a little sentimental, but it works. Rent A Son’s Promise if you want — and it’s too bad I can’t recommend it — but the film is dated, unfortunately, even if the subject matter would still work today and should have worked when it was first filmed.

And go find a copy of Papa’s Angels. The movie is actually better than the book (one of te few times I will ever say that).

(As an aside, the newspaper articles I originally found for A Son’s Promise were through Google News archives — type in Terry O’Kelley and Gainesville, GA, and 1986 articles pop-up all over — but there’s an update that’s very interesting as well at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/OKELLEY/2005-03/1111980162). It shows that the story didn’t end as happily as the film shows — Terry O’Kelley won custody but had to give it up after a year (and it also gives a more sympathetic view of the co-guardian than the film implied). (The headline for this newspaper article is Band of Brothers: Seven O’Kelleys hang tough despite hard times).

The September 29, 1986 People Magazine, Vol. 26, No. 13, “Promises to Keep,” gives a lot more of the backstory before the mother’s death — living in trailers, moving all the time, having no shoes, having no friends and little education because of moving, the decision to quit school, the history of the father and mother, the younger kids crying after their father left etc.  http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20094623,00.html Great article. It also talks about the grandfather — he was tough but the kids idolized him.

There’s also a nice photo of the house in the movie — apparently on location http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertlz/3235625920/

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=861&dat=19861128&id=rCMPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NoUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5025,6944790 the headline for this one is “7 Brothers Still Apart After Nationwide Help” The Victoria Advocate, November 28, 1986, refers to when te brothers took care of themselves: “Moldy food was left out and the pet goat was allowed inside…”

Now the real question is, with all these articles, even if the kids were disillusioned by them either factually or from overexposure, why didn’t the film have any of this? Why didn’t it have the reactions to the father living, the backstory about moving and trailers…kind of shame…here the story is in articles, and they actually had enough time between 1986 and 1990 where the film was done to really do it right. There’s some great material here. They should have waited on the material and done the film later. Maybe a remake.

I haven’t watched this movie recently, so I hope I can do a good review of it. It reminds me a lot of Joe the King. Like Joe the King, A Home of Our Own is also supposed to based on a true story (in Joe the King, the main character is Joe Henry, the scriptwriter is Frank Joseph Whaley; in A Home of Our Own, where the narrator is Shayne Lacy, the scriptwriter is Patrick Sheane Duncan. Kinda neat, huh?).

Of course, everything that happens to a character in a film or book shouldn’t always be assumed to have happened in real life. For example, Patrick F. McManus, Robert Newton Peck, J.G. Ballard, etc. all have characters with their names — and not everything should be assumed to have happened.

That said, this movie’s tone is similar to Joe the King — not much happy happens here, great scenery, filming, good acting — and yet, so much bad happens that it is either true-to-life or badly edited.

Having commented on that, I should also say that due to the amount of time this film spends in its environment — a house being built, literally, by scrounging — you really get to know where the characters live. I wish I could say you get to know all the characters, but there are a lot of them — six children in the Lacey family, only two of which get any particular character development, and the mother, played by Kathy Bates. As usual, Kathy Bates looks and acts like a completely different person in this role than she did in, say, Fried Green Tomatoes, as she should. Like Joe the King, the movie also seems a lot longer than its actual length.
The main parts of the story deal with family warfare between Bates’ character, Frances Lacey a no-nonsense, hard-working, old-fashioned poverty-stricken widow, and her 15 year old son Shayne, the man-of-the-family. (Something she continually reminds him of throughout the film). (One of the repeated funny lines concerns Frances’ husband, referred to consistantly cheerfully as “that Irish son-of-a-bitch” by all concerned).
Like Joe the King, the pattern of A Home of Our Own is set within the first minutes of the film. Shayne is brought home by the police. Frances defends him, then calls for the belt to punish him for petty crimes. This is what makes her decide to move the family into the country.

In fact, in a 104 minute film, Frances calls for the belt about six or seven times if I remember correctly — until it is pretty much assumed that every time Shayne raises his voice, he’s going to get it. (But the film only shows one moment where Frances really physically loses it). Eventually, I began to understand this film in the context of a family study of the time period (the film is set in 1962).

It’s clear that Frances loves her children, though she never apologizes to them, and in fact the driving point of the movie is that she does everything for them, but it seems selfish because she thinks she can go out on dates but the children for example don’t need time to play or toys to play with. Frances wants to instill in them the self-respect to accept no charity — so that when Murray, the only other well-defined family member, barters in a wonderful salvage yard — you understand that she has made a positive impression.

In the context of, say, a working-class family of 1911, the film makes more sense. In that time period, you were expected to work as a general rule, to play as you worked — and people were not neccessarily going to praise you for that. All wages belonged to your family. All work was for the good of the family as a unit. What we think of today as becoming an adult may not have been true then. Doing the work of an adult did not neccesarily mean you were free of family discipline. For example, in one account of the Triangle Fire in 1911, a 16-year-old returned home from the fire, dirty, disheveled, etc. and got a beating from her family (I forget what the reason was, but of course, when they learned of the fire, they were sorry — I also forget which book this is from). In Little Britches by Ralph Moody, Ralph has vocational training at age 8, herding cows and being a cowboy at a ranch. His father says they are partners, and there is one scene in the book where Ralph steals a bit of chocolate, reasoning that it is his because his wages go in the pot. His father finds him, spanks him, and tells him that because they are partners, he could have had the chocolate due to his wages if he had asked and not snuck around.

Set in this type of context, A Home of Our Own makes more sense. Frances never apologizes because her children are children. She is the head of the family and if she wants to go out after working, she has earned that right. The children, meanwhile, are part of the unit of the family, and thus should work on buiding the house — and are shown to be in general remarkably willing to do so. (There is one well-done scene involving a construction accident and Murray). Shayne’s viewpoint is, I assume, that he is the man of the family, which he doesn’t particularly want to be, but if he is, he’s old enough to want to speak like an equal, to address things that he believes are unfair, such as Frances telling fairy tales of how life will be. Frances sees this not as a man-of-the-family trying to act in the role but a child acting in defiance to her.

Interestingly, despite the younger children shown doing destructive things like scribbing on Shayne’s homework or acting up in the car, Frances is seen being rather lenient toward them. There are other complications, too many almost, but there are good scenes as well– the nieghbor, Mr. Moon coming over for holiday dinner, Frances’ boss surprising her by his support, townspeople paying tips with power tools, a scene with the “family bathtub etc.)

I should also say that I have only seen one other film with a salvage yard (The War, 1993) and this film does a great job with that, and with the thrift store the Laceys frequent as well.

The other Lacey children in the film are basically there to complete the large impoverished family and are unfortunately underdefined. If they were poor, something good must have happened. Indeed, the good that happens in the end is somewhat manipulative, but makes sense — though I also feel that it comes too close behind the final show-down between Shayne and his mother to be as effective as it probably should. (For one thing, even if Frances loves her kids, and even if the family bands together as a “tribe,” you are geniunely afraid for what will happen to Murray — and no, it doens’t involve his accident). Also, much like Joe the King, and like real life, any change that happens in this movie is very small — there are no massive Scrooge-redemption moments here, and maybe that’s as it should be.
Having said all this, I would probably watch this again, simply because as much as I would have preferred parts of the film to do otherwise, they must have done something right or I would not be able to think of a character study to do on it. Most films would not show enough to build on.