Film: It's about love...

So great it deserves it's own post. In the last scene of the movie Still Alice, daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is reading from Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" to her Mom, Alice (Julianne Moore):

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.
God! It's been years since I was on a plane.
When we hit 35,000 feet we'll have reached the tropopause...
The great belt of calm air.
As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there.
The plane leapt the tropopause...
the safe air and attained the outer rim...
the ozone which was ragged and torn...
patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth
and that was...
frightening.
But I saw something only I could see...
because of my astonishing ability to see such things.
Souls were rising...
from the earth far below...
souls of the dead of people who'd
perished from...
famine, from war, from the plague...
and they floated up like skydivers in reverse.
limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.
And the souls of these departed
joined hands...
clasped ankles and formed a web,
a great net of souls.
And the souls were three atom oxygen
molecules of the stuff of ozone...
and the outer rim absorbed them
and was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever.
In this world, there is a kind of
painful progress.
Longing for what we've left behind and...
dreaming ahead.
At least I think that's so
That's it.
Hey.
Did you like that?
Hmm, what I just read.
#Did you hate it?

[Alice mumbles incoherently]
[Alice continues mumbling]

What...
What was it about?
Love.
#Love.
Yeah mom.
It was about love.
The End @
STILL ALICE

Film: Still Alice

I'd seen a poem posted on the internet a lot recently titled "Alzheimer's Poem". Maybe it was unearthed due to the popularity of the 2014 movie Still Alice based on Lisa Genova's (fictional) 2009 book of the same name. In the movie, Julianne Moore is Alice Howland, neuroscientist and linguistics professor who just celebrated her 50th birthday. She is also beginning to suffer from a rare form of early-onset Familial Alzheimer's disease. Moore won the Academy Award for her epic performance of wife, professor, and mother of 3 children slowly losing control of her life due to the devastating illness.

Alice's daughter Lydia asks her what it actually feels like to have Alzheimer's. Her response:

Well, it's not always the same. I have good days and bad days, and on my good days I can, you know, almost pass for a normal person. But on my bad days I feel like I can't find myself. I've always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me and I can't reach them and I don't know who I am. And I don't know what I'm going to lose next. .... Thanks for asking.

Thanks for asking, indeed.

Film: What We Do In The Shadows

Stu: [Showing the vampires Google] Anything you want to find you type it in.
Viago: I lost a really nice silk scarf in about 1912.
Deacon: Yes, now Google it.

We meet Viago, Deacon, and Vladislav in this hilarious and terrifying mockumentary written by Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.. It's Nosferatu meets the Trailer Park Boys, stumbling into the Night of the Living Dead trying to make it in the 21st century. All you need to know about Vampires!

Film: The Red Balloon

Anthony Bourdain summed this movie up better than I ever could in his book Medium Raw:

"The poor kid is clearly impoverished and clearly unloved. He wears the same clothes every day. Immediately on finding his balloon, he's ostracized by society, banned from public transportation, chastised at school, even ejected from the church. His parents are either dead or have abandoned him--as the hideous crone who cruelly throws his balloon out the window at first encounter is clearly too old to be his mom."

As I read his description, I couldn't help it, I got that cringey frisson of dread, immediately knowing I'd seen the movie at some point in my life, most likely as a young child, and while remembering little details of it, knowing full well that I disliked it very much. Now that I have actually seen it again, all I can say is, some things are better left in the past.