Tag Archives: Indie Film

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)

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Sometimes you start a film and there’s such a specific sense of place, rhythm, and tone you perk up in anticipation. I felt that sensation from the opening credits of this new film starring Daisy Ridley.

The score is replete with a few murmuring voices and a harp, and there’s the muted color palette of a certain sleepy town in the Pacific Northwest. There’s an instant sense of where we are and what end we might be converging on. That is, besides death.

Sometimes I Think About Dying is directed by Rachel Lambert from a screenplay co-written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, and Katy Wright-Mead. It’s easy to pigeon-hole it as a project filling the quirky indie fix and the proof of concept seems littered with a minefield of tropes.

Fran (Ridley) works in an office — the dreaded 9 to 5 desk job — and between emails and spreadsheets her mind will drift away to far off places in her subconscious. It’s also a movie with plenty of inserts of contorted posture. At times it’s uncomfortable watching her exist.

Robert (Dave Merheje) is the new guy. He’s personable and a little dorky in a charming sort of way. Make him a cinephile and you have a perfect movie character. He feels like the Yin to Fran’s Yang and somehow that bodes well.

They don’t so much have chemistry as stunted, awkward interactions. They go see a movie at the local art house theater. They have pie afterward as one does. One wouldn’t label them a couple so much as they’re two people looking for a connection; he’s just moved to town and well, she’s not the most sociable human being.

In this depicted life of dreary and at times surreal isolation, human connection is such a moving balm. They meet up again and she sees his new home, gets the tour, and learns he has his own past; he’s been divorced, not once but twice.

Ridley’s performance does feel like a performance, but the act of playing something so stunted and repressed and yet giving the sense of a charming person just trying to get out is such a meaningful focal point. Because in another movie it would vie to get bigger, but she never allows it to get into a cartoonish heightened reality of indie purgatory.

A distinction must be made. Fran doesn’t hate her life. She’s good at her job and in her own way is a part of the ecosystem in the office. Whereas Excel sheets and requisition forms are soul-crushing for someone like me, Fran seems to thrive in such a regulated environment. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t also feel the pangs of loneliness. It’s not like they are mutually exclusive; people are nuanced.

Within the context of the film, budding feelings are meager but precious. Her personal hurt and even her greatest transgression are never extended blow outs but these contained moments thoughtfully developed within time and space by the filmmakers.

Fran and Robert get invited to a get together and they both oblige. The subsequent gathering of murder in the dark is a nice evocation on the movie’s primary theme. It’s a visualization of death for a character who does consider its headiness from time to time. The best parts of these scenes is that they feel like a rambunctious good time. That is one of the movie’s strengths: balancing these emotions of warmth and affability with real melancholy.

Robert tells her later in the car, “You’re secretly good at a lot of things. You just don’t let anyone know.” It’s true. Introverted people like this do exist in the world. I feel like I know at least a few of them. On the surface, they seem so taciturn and unassuming but there interior lives or even what they do in their off hours are so vibrant. They offer so much, but they don’t need to tell everyone about it. Selfishly I wish we knew about more of them because we would do well to learn from their example.

My primary critique of the movie initially might have been its opening runway. It felt like for a fairly truncated film, it took a lot of time to get to Robert’s introduction; we even watch as they give a going away party to his predecessor who is set to retire and go on a cruise with her husband.

But even this is paid off when Fran stops by a local coffee shop to get donuts for the office. She’s going through a different kind of pain and regret because she said something regrettable that she cannot take back; she wants to acknowledge her remorse; tell Robert how she feels. But how can she do that if she can barely string two sentences together?

There Fran bumps into her retired co-worker surprised. She was supposed to be on a cruise. Except her husband had a stroke; she couldn’t bear to tell anyone and so now she drinks her coffee alone and looks out the window at the harbor wistfully. Fran could have traded pleasantries and left it at that. There is no personal utility to stick around, and yet she stops and sits down. She makes the decision to listen and her reactions feel real.

Somehow these feelings make her empathy and concern genuine. The action of getting something for her coworkers — a learned altruistic behavior is one thing — but there is also another turn. For one of the first times, we see her sympathy on display for another human being. She connects even if it’s just a little thing.

Later, she asks Robert genuinely, “Do you wish you could unknow me?” What a question, but it comes from such a place of honesty and fear. It fits hand in hand with the hypothetical question, “If you died tomorrow, would anyone care?” Could the lie be true? The voices in our own heads can be vicious.

There’s probably an HR caveat in here somewhere, but a movie is a movie. What lingers is this reverberating optimism. Human connections are worth the risk and effort. I left the film thinking, “Me too, Fran. Me too.” I resonate with this title though not because of some kind of ideation. From dust we come and from dust we will return. 

In the final embrace of the movie, it’s in a copy room. But within seconds it’s transformed into a garden-like greenhouse — a little slice of paradise. The imagery seems only fitting. We were not made to be alone.

3.5/5 Stars

Mystery Train (1989)

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I hold an immediate affinity for the images at the core of Mystery Train: A Japanese couple (Youki Kudo and Masatoshi Nagase) riding a train. This is the ’80s so they’ve got a walkman with an audiocassette tape, and it’s blaring Elvis! It becomes apparent they are making a pilgrimage to Graceland so famously immortalized by Paul Simon. The song “Mystery Train” becomes an apropos and uncanny way to enter the story while paying homage to the King.

Jim Jarmusch always strikes me as such an open-minded and curious filmmaker. Modern society speaks in terms of diversity and inclusion, but the beauty of watching a Jarmusch picture, it’s the fact he’s not looking for these things in order to meet some quota. He seems generally interested by the stories and perspectives a whole host of characters can provide him, and his films benefit greatly from this enduring proclivity.

Regardless of where the funding came from, who else would consider making a film about two Japanese youth in search of Elvis Presley in the 1980s? They spend the first several minutes speaking a language that the primary audience probably does not understand. They likewise are bewildered by a upbeat yet motormouthed docent at Sun Records. Still, somehow shared passions for Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison et al., draw them together in inextricable ways.

There’s something perfectly fated about the whole thing with Screaming Jay Hawkins as a rather flamboyant hotel clerk aided by a youthful bellhop (Cinque Lee). I don’t know how to describe it but Hawkins has a command or a sway over the picture rather like Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. His presence is felt and becomes so indelible in accentuating an aura. He comes to represent a certain era and a place in human form.

Jarmusch’s characters of choice often feel like sojourners, strangers in a strange land and Memphis is such a place. It is a film that features degradation — cracked pavements, garish neon lights, and portions of the world that are not perfectly manicured. What a concept. It’s almost like Jarmusch is giving us the real world albeit composed through his own cinematic lens. It’s no coincidence it has this kind of baked-in glow of Paris, Texas another film of geographical Americana captured so exquisitely by Robby Muller

It’s only a personal observation but my level enjoyment slightly decreased with each descending story. As someone who journeyed in Japan and went to one of the greatest concerts of my life in Yokohama, I feel this kind of kinship with these Japanese youths in their pilgrimage to Elvis and Carl Perkins. Also, on another level, this is a point of view we just don’t often see in movies of the 1980s or even today. Jarmusch is not using them as some kind of stereotypical punchline. He’s genuinely interested in their story and allowing it to play out in front of us.

Then, there’s Nicoletta Braschi in part two. She’s told a ghost story by a dubious stranger and gives him a tip to be left alone. She too seeks asylum for the night at the same hotel and gains a chatty roommate (Elizabeth Bracco) who is linked to our final vignette.

This last interlude with Steve Buscemi feels like it exists in the time capsule moment of a certain era where Tarrantino, the Coens, and others were making these stylized, often grotesque comedies. Elvis (Joe Strummer) gained his nickname inexplicably, but he’s also started to become unhinged because his girlfriend went up and left him. The cocktail of booze and firearms make his buddies Charlie (Buscemi) and Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) uneasy. Although it feels more like an absurd episode of The Twilight Zone than Lost in Space.

Regardless of my own preferences, Jarmusch still gives his world a sense of purposefulness. Again, it’s this serendipitous quality reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s fated films where lives cross paths and intersect in deeply poignant ways.

There’s something somehow elegant about the structure. It’s certainly premeditated and Jarmusch purportedly was inspired by classical literary styles in constructing his triptych, but it’s also a genuine pleasure to watch it unfurl.

The movie revolves on the axis of a few shared moments and places: A hotel, a radio DJ (Tom Waits) playing “Blue Moon,” and a gunshot. But it’s not like they’re all building to some kind of collective crescendo; it’s more so just a passing indication of how lives, whether they mean to be or not, are often interrelated.

Characters orbit each other and interact in these preordained ways that reflect the mind of the maker, in this case, Jarmusch. There’s something oddly compelling and comic about it, but there’s simultaneously a sense of comfort. We have order and a kind of narrative symmetry leading back out from whence we came.

Jarmusch is calling on the poetry of the ages and so in a movie that seems to have a free and laissez-faire attitude, there’s still a very clear order behind it, three distinct threads end-to-end and yet still interwoven into a tapestry that we can appreciate. Mystery Train represents the best in cinematic storytelling — with purposeful composition and aesthetics — but also a sense of aura and inscrutability.

It’s funny and yet when it’s over there’s also satisfaction and a hint of wistfulness. I wish there were more of its ilk today. The movie that’s come the closest is Paterson — another modern jewel from Jim Jarmusch. I see that film in a new light as a much older, wiser, and more forthcoming Masatoshi Nagase sits down on a bench with Adam Driver.

Again, it is a story about the human journey, how we are all travelers in some sense, and what a beautiful thing it is to relish the road because it can lead us to so many beguiling places if we take the time.

4/5 Stars

The Intruder (1962)

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Before he became a caricature of his former self, even before the days of Captain Kirk and pop culture canonization, The Intruder is a reminder of something else in William Shatner. He still feels ripe and almost dangerous with a charisma that has yet to be calcified or even corroded by time.

The same could be said of Roger Corman at least if you only have a perfunctory understanding of his career like me. He is the master of fast and cheap entertainment turned out for profit at a rapid rate. Surely, The Intruder doesn’t fit into the patchwork of his career.

Before we blandly christen him the “King of Schlock,” a more nuanced observation seems to be in order, considering both his talents and his ambitions. Others must speak to this more knowledgeably. All I can say is that this specific film totally obliterates any preconceived notions of what we are getting.

Shatner stars as Adam Cramer, a self-described social reformer with a skeevy look in his eye to go with a cool disposition. He’s headed out on the latest bus to help the locals fight the government implementation of integration in the town’s high school. Under the guise of the freedom-loving Patrick Henry Society, he’s ready to stir up some action. Give me Liberty or Give me Death (though mostly death). In other words, a real creep.

He sets up shop at the local hotel — it bleeds with crusty southern hospitality — feeling like a stronghold for a racist status quo. He’s put up by a sweet ol’ lady while his next-door neighbors, a gregarious salesman (Leo Penn), and his flirtatious wife (Jeanne Cooper) don’t leave much to the imagination. We know what they’re doing and they don’t much care who knows it. It’s a good thing because the walls are especially thin in a place such as this.

Although the film is primarily white-centric, for a white audience, there are some black characters playing crucial roles on the periphery. One is the local minister, a man of faith who takes his calling seriously. He exhorts the youngest members of his congregation in meekness and prays over these 10 lambs from his flock. He’s well aware they are about to enter the valley of the shadow, a space no young person should have to be subjected to. Still, the letter of the law in some ways falls on their side in the face of threat and injury.

One evening on a grand old southern estate Cramer holds a rally to rile up the townspeople, spewing all sorts of epithets, and appealing to their spirit of discontentment.  The NAACP is a communist front, headed by a Jew. It’s all a sham. The government can’t be trusted and The Patrick Henry Society is tasked with preaching the truth — at least his version of it.

As we watch the masses be swayed and he skillfully plays them like a marionette with public opinion in his palm, the deviousness comes into full color. He’s a Lonesome Rhodes-type figure who uses his own magnetism to get what he wants.

When the whites, armed with their newfound ammunition, take to the streets ready to victimize a black family driving home the movie becomes too real. It’s almost like the film was overly cognizant of its time with an incisiveness toward the hot-button issues of the age. Even today it feels gutting to watch whether fiction or not. The images strike too close.

Shatner riding in a hooded caravan with a gang toting a cross through the black community is horrifying. There’s a faceless dynamiting of a church with the faithful minister left for dead. The only other time I recall something comparable in mainstream Hollywood was the mobbish vitriol in Phenix City Story a few years earlier. To Kill a Mockingbird is wistfully nostalgic in comparison. Right or wrong, The Intruder has no such illusions.

Cramer is a man who happily takes a prison sentence telling a wealthy backer (Robert Emhardt) to never underestimate a jail sentence — remember Socrates, Lenin, Hitler… How you can conflate all these men says so much about you. And of course, there’s no mention of Dr. King. This is not the kind of man to dignify a fellow reformer on the other team with an acknowledgment.

The most curious figure (aside from Cramer) is Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell). He’s a southern man. He’s been inculcated with the prevailing sentiments of the South, but he also seems to have a higher standard. It’s partially because he’s the herald of the local news — he has journalistic standards — but there’s something else we have to spend time with him to figure out. His wife disagrees. Grandpa wants to disown him. His daughter (Beverly Lunsford) is probably still trying to make sense of it all. Regardless, he believes the law must be carried out.

I don’t know if we ever get a clear indication of why. Although he’s not the only one we can say this about. I’m not sure if we ever get a precise reason for Cramer’s actions either. He’s not a Southerner and there’s never a clear indication he’s truly aligned with the white community, at least not when it gets right down to it. He’s not a Southerner. But he knows he can manipulate them for his purposes.

My fear is that the film is still too much the pipe dream of well-meaning moviemakers where southern guilt all of sudden turns a few solitary individuals into men and women of conscience. Maybe this is historically true. I don’t know, but for all the stories that ended like this with a life saved and a wolf in sheep’s clothing defrocked, we know that history was not always so forgiving. It is strewn with the names of men and women who were degraded, intimidated, and often killed.

That’s why part of me rumbles with a deep sentiment that must be acknowledged. It wants to cry out and warn folks not to see this movie. The inclination begins when they threaten to flip a black family’s car and reverberates again when a young white woman gets coerced into crying rape against a fellow black student named Joey (Charles Barnes).

There’s almost something indecent and profane about it as it echoes things that really came to pass. It’s this fine line I don’t know quite how to reconcile. Because I’ve rarely seen a movie this fierce and unflinching for the era, and yet in the same breath is this what is required then or now? It’s an open-ended rhetorical question. I don’t know the answer.

If the box office receipts are testament enough, the movie didn’t make much of a dent but for entirely different reasons. Roger Corman seems to have made his own implicit response. He never made another such picture again instead relegating his talents to Vincent Price Poe dramas and other such fare blessing the film world in another way. Yes, it was cheap entertainment, but also a breeding ground for some of the up-and-coming stars of the New Hollywood generation.

He did in fact make his own diagnosis of the film’s lack of success, which might be telling if not altogether definitive:

“I think it failed for two reasons. One: the audience at that time, the early sixties, simply didn’t want to see a picture about racial integration. Two: it was more of a lecture. From that moment on I thought my films should be entertainment on the surface and I should deliver any theme or idea or concept beneath the surface.”

Still, with a man’s face buried in the grass, a man fallen from grace head first, The Intruder totally reframes my perceptions of the now chubby anachronism of Shatner’s persona. I won’t say it redeems it so much as it augments it with a kind of duplicitous venom. It’s a new astounding contour to his career.

I’m still not sure if that’s a hearty recommendation or not. This is a very triggering film and a deeply onerous watch. The discerning viewer should make their own judgments. Because for some this kind of burden might be necessary. For others, it might be too heavy to bear.

4/5 Stars

 

Note: This review was written before Roger Corman’s passing on May 9, 2024

David & Lisa (1962)

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Keir Dullea is an actor who will always be most prominently remembered for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s Dave of pod door fame. However, part of me wants to promote him as the lead in David and Lisa because this film from Frank Perry, in its quiet empathy and emerging relationships, feels more deeply like his film.

It relies heavily on his turn as a grim young man with OCD-like symptoms. As his mother drops him off at a psychiatric center for a brief stint, he immediately carries himself as a youth too smart for such an establishment. He’s an aloof loner with cold temples and the most severe eyes. Surely, this is a story about David’s transformation.

But the ampersand in the title reminds us that he only works in tandem with another life. Likewise, Dullea’s performance gains more meaning when he is put up next to Janet Margolin in her screen debut. She causes him to change and shift even as he elicits something out of Lisa.

Since I got my first introduction to Margolin in Take The Money and Run and became instantly smitten, it’s fabulous to see her in another role that plays so exquisitely off her inherent human charms. Lisa is a young teenager with a penchant for rhyme. If we want to diagnose her, she has schizophrenia, but the beauty of the film is watching people reach out to each other, instead of categorizing each other dismissively.

Even someone like Howard Da Silva is a pleasant surprise. In the old days, he mostly played conniving heavies in film noir; here he settles into the role of benevolent authority quite easily, and it’s a fine look for him. He wears it well. David is so quick to distrust him and what he stands for. Over time, the authenticity is so apparent that even he is won over. He comes to appreciate the place as home. It’s a space to belong.

However, if I’m honest, David and Lisa is the kind of film that feels like it might be frowned upon today if we know nothing about it. Still, there’s a tenderness in the love story that I can’t quite shake. It’s disarming and totally flies in the face of expectations.

I realized that whatever way you take it, there are these kinds of overt metaphors to the film. People who are different than the society around them somehow find solace in this shared sense of otherness. He meets her with rhyming and she meets him in a way by not reaching out with human touch. The things that ostracize them also have the inertia to draw them together.

If these are idiosyncrasies, then they respect them and respect each other enough to take their predilections seriously. Meanwhile, “normal” well-adjusted people at the local train station castigate them as weirdos better resigned to the funny farm.

But even when David makes a brief return home, the perceived distance at the dinner table and the manifold hangups of his own parents, make it apparent we do not live in a society of the well-balance and the imbalanced. Those in the former category either do a better job at hiding it or they have enough money to smooth it over. Success and status can cover a multitude of social sins, at least on the surface.

There’s one particularly crucial moment where I became mesmerized with Margolin watching her sway with the metronome although it precipitates a kind of demonstrative ending that doesn’t do the story much service. In one moment of annoyance, David lashes out at Lisa only to work tirelessly to win her back. Their chemistry is so fragile, held together by wisps of gossamer thread, but that makes it all the more vital to maintain.

When Dullea scampers up the Philadelphia steps, and they share a moment so much unspoken emotion is carried with them in the scene. It’s only the two of them. She no longer rhymes. She’s fully herself. “Me,” she says.

He reciprocates by doing the bravest most vulnerable thing he can, asking her to reach out and touch him. I remember a line of prose by C.S. Lewis about love being vulnerable and this lasting image is a testament to this truth. Here the pain and transparency brim with sympathy.

David and Lisa can be characterized as a romance, although it is one where the leads never kiss, never embrace and only touch in the final frame. Somehow it’s packed with more import than many other films claiming the same genre conventions. Because what some other films forget is that love and affection, romance, they all require so much more than physical touch. It’s about warmth and stillness. Willing to open yourself up and be hurt by other people even as you stretch yourself as a human being.

For a film about psychological disorders from so many years ago, there’s a gentle subtlety to David & Lisa; it’s quite extraordinary, and Dullea and Margolin make a wonderful pair together. It’s only a shame they were not both allotted even more high-profile vehicles commensurate with their talents.

3.5/5 Stars

The Little Fugitive (1953)

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The aesthetic of The Little Fugitive is made plain thanks to chalk drawing credits playing over “Home on The Range.” We are about to enter a little boy’s world with all the joys and menial problems an adolescent life engenders. The key is giving these problems credence. Because in a young life, they feel ginormous.

Joey Norton always has his trusty pistol and holster and his big brother Lennie can always be found with his harmonica. They have your typical sibling dynamic. The little brother nagging, the big brother both put-upon and protective.

There’s an initial impression from the clunky dialogue causing the illusion of the film to falter. However, everything else around it feels real and sincere in a way we are unaccustomed to seeing in 1950s American films. Then you realize the whole picture had its dialogues done after the fact and it falls into place.

Coincidentally, it does give it a European sensibility with the dubbed dialogue. I can see how a film like this might have come to Cahiers du Cinema, Francois Truffaut in particular, and lit a fire under them. This is what movies could be, and not only something they could be, but also something attainable to others as long as they had a personal story to tell.

The 400 Blows but also Breathless and Le Beau Serge, developed narratives out of spaces the directors knew intimately. It wasn’t outside the purview of their experience, and it made a stunning entry point into their respective cinematic visions as they continually evolved over time. Still, one cannot discount their origins.

In the era of The Little Fugitive, a boy’s world was occupied by very specific things: baseball, guns, cowboys and Indians, television serials, comic books. The premise itself feels like an episode of Leave It to Beaver albeit outside of the watchful eye of middle-class suburbia.

Mother has to go away to pay a visit to a sick grandparent. Lennie has to watch over his little brother, and it’s going to derail his birthday outing to Coney Island with his friends. We have a simple dramatic situation and although he’s not a bad guy, he needs to use his boyish ingenuity to find a way out of his responsibilities. A dagger made out of ice is too impractical so they get the idea of using ketchup to fake a grisly death like they do in the movies.

The trick works wonders on getting rid of a pesky brother, and the film really comes into its own as they take it to the streets, and he’s out on the lam. It seems prudent to mention Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin, the trifecta behind the film’s conception.

Their greatest asset was a cutting-edge 35 mm camera both portable and unobtrusive making The Little Fugitive landmark for another reason. It really feels like one of the obvious birthplaces of independent cinema because we have this idea of film emerging from the studio lots out onto the streets. And these aren’t just exotic foreign locales but the humble spaces you and I frequent in our daily lives. Even these spaces can have their share of fascination for a willing audience.

It’s a cornucopia of leisure, a boy’s delight having a day on Coney Island. We get a steady stream of vignettes: photo cutouts, batting cages, hot dogs, watermelon, the beach, ball toss, and whirling carousel rides providing full immersion of a different era.

Not since Harold Lloyd can I recall such a great showcase for Coney Island. We’re even reminded recycling was a problem at the beach back in the 1950s too. Joey quickly learns he can make some loose change culling the seashore for glass bottles and simultaneously proving himself to be inquisitive and quite entrepreneurial.

I’m not sure how our little fugitive had so much money to begin with; the film doesn’t find need to explain itself, but then he figures out how he can get more and uses them on a very sound investment: pony rides. He’s positively infatuated with ponies, and it shows him returning time and time again just to get another chance to live out his dreams on the range.

Although the film is mostly kid-centric, it’s a pleasure to observe several of the adults who seem to be genuinely nurturing souls. Whether it’s the photographer (Will Lee) or Jay the ponyman (Jay Williams), they seem to encourage kids in their interests and imagination. It would be so easy for a film like this to feel severe and somehow oppressive, yet what comes off is the lightness and the joy of each of these very specific moments as experienced by a little boy.

If I’m honest, I’ve recognized a growing bias in my own film appreciation. I’m partial to films that use modest means, modest runtimes even, and still manage to transport us with stories and worlds we can relate to. I can think of no finer compliment for The Little Fugitive because it captures a moment plucked out of my parent’s generation, honed in on a very particular Brooklyn milieu, and through its images we are able to imbibe all these tactile sensations pulling us into the moment.

Although the boys at Cahiers can feel a bit arrogant and combative, even in how they dismissed much of the past and canonized the auteur-director as king, I do like the idea that they placed no undue importance on bigger, larger productions tossed out as awards bait. There’s something almost more satisfying happening in a movie like this because not so many folks will be joining the bandwagon — the fad of the cultural moment. That is the road lined with glitz, accolades, and transience.

Only with a bit of diligence and an open mind, do we get the opportunity to unearth it, and what a glorious joy it is. Unassuming gems like this make the moviegoing experience such a spectacular journey of human revelation. Because this little boy’s day speaks to so much and since I was a boy once, it resonates deeply. I won’t forget it until the next time I return to this story caught in time, where it will be waiting for me again even as I continue to change. This is the magic of the movies.

4.5/5 Stars

Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Jim Jarmusch

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Screenshot 2020-02-17 at 3.40.27 PM

One of the most revelatory aspects about becoming more familiar with Jim Jarmusch is how international his films are. At the very least, there’s this sense of them putting a lens to a broader cross-section of society.

He is unequivocally American, but whether it’s because he’s a cineaste or driven to a global perspective through music or other interests, he paints with a canvass broader than simply the American experience. He also seems to understand the American experience is framed and colored by those who come to us. In fact, we are a melting pot, as Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, made up of all nations.

As a storyteller, Jarmusch seems drawn to what I’ve heard termed the “mearcstapa” — the border walkers — people on the outskirts. They could be expatriates, foreigners, or people who simply conceive of the world in a different manner than you and me. Although the term is recontextualized from its Medieval connotations, it does take on renewed meaning. In the case of Stranger Than Paradise, it’s a visitor from Hungary.

But if any of this dialogue runs the risk of making the story sound too rarified, rest assured, it is far from that. It’s a picture content in the simplest of moments. The plot as it were is born out of a statement. Eddie (John Lurie) has a cousin arriving and visiting him from Hungary. That’s it right there.

He feels put upon having her stay with him. He doesn’t show her the town. He doesn’t give her food. He’s the most inhospitable person in the world. But then again look at his life. He subsists off TV dinners and beer.

His only friend is Eddie, a shifty-eyed, flighty fellow who’s half-witted in a lovable kind of way. They spend time watching football, playing cards, drinking beer, or going to the races. That’s just about all they ever do. And it hardly changes with the addition of Eva.

Still, what the movie exudes resolutely is a style and an aesthetic, forming something more substantial than the sum of its modest parts. Because it’s certainly humble, and the antithesis of flamboyant production values, and yet it manages to supersede the simple nature of what is happening onscreen.

Take, for instance, the sequence where Eva is walking down the streets with her suitcases in hand to the tune of “I Put a Spell on You.” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins rumbles across the pavement, and it’s oddly mesmerizing.

Pairing this with the black and white cinematography, dominating the film with a dreary, dilapidatedness leaves a startling impression. It’s both the prevailing sense of the world and somehow complementary to the budget and resources he’s working with.

I am reminded of the early films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder because there is the sense of almost two-dimensional space in many of the scenes — simple but purposefully done. In the case of Jarmusch, there are hardly any cuts, with the shots put end-to-end and void of any other type of true editing. It’s the simplest form, really, cut together by way of black inserted between the sequences.

You could point out Jarmusch is making a kind of glorified short film, and that’s how the narrative began sticking the footage together in three segments. But the black in-between the visuals also function as a kind of ellipsis.

Because pretty soon Willie and Eddy get up and go from Brooklyn and road trip it out to Cleveland. Why? Because Eva’s there. She is a fellow sojourner, and so they take to the road in order to catch up with her. In one of his typically dorky observations, Eddie tells his buddy, “Before I met your cousin, I didn’t know you were from Hungary or Budapest or any of those places. I thought you were an American.”

Pretty soon they’re staying with the Aunt and back to watching TV and playing card games. Shooting the bull and chewing the fat like they always do wherever they go. Even miles away in the icy tundra of the Midwest they realize, “You come someplace new and everything looks the same.” Restless for some meaningful experience, they head off to sun-soaked Florida to seek something else.

Finally, there’s some action, albeit off-screen and pretty much only alluded to. The boys lose all their dough at the dog races. In her own absurd turn of events, Eva winds up with a mother lode in drugs. That could be a whole rabbit hole all to its own. Instead, they take a trip to the airport to set up another adventure…undoubtedly just as absurd as the last.

It might not seem like much, but that’s the entire charm of Jarmusch’s movie; he’s so very comfortable bending away from Hollywood convention. Where location shooting becomes more of an in-joke than of a particular commodity and characters and story are more likely conduits of style. In fact, to this day, he’s made a career out of it.

Now, Stranger Than Paradise feels a bit like Richard Linklater’s Slacker. They played as important catalysts for subsequent generations of filmmakers because they were unique and of their own time with their own vision. And part of their merit is having done it first — using the world at their disposal and creating something that stays with us however mundane and unadorned.

Part of the paradoxical charm of Stranger Than Paradise is how you could conceivably make a movie like it, and yet you couldn’t ever match its essence because Jim Jarmusch made it just so — distinctly individual and measured to his own personal liking. That’s what it has going for it even to this day. It’s unmistakably him.

3.5/5 Stars

Paterson (2016): Poetry in Everyday Rhythms

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“Awesome. A bus driver who likes Emily Dickinson.”

This sincere pronouncement comes from a young girl — a fellow poet — as she leaves to go off with her mother and sister. She leaves behind Paterson (Adam Driver), a pensive bus driver, sitting on the brick wall, having gifted him one of her poems. Theirs is an instant connection. One of appreciation for observation, for words, for beauty.

Paterson is ripe with moments like this ambushing us with an understated resonance. Scenes of kindred spirits seeking each other out and finding some meaningful common denominator that they can relish together.

Jim Jarmusch feels like a man born of a different era — the last bastion of the old way. There are other directors who are older and more storied like Martin Scorsese or Clint Eastwood perhaps, but he is learned and the disciple of some of the great cinematic artists of the 20th century. We’re talking about titans as diverse as Robert Bresson, Nicholas Ray, and Sam Fuller.

He understands space and framing, how they define a composition. He’s not afraid of time or silence and how they can build into something revelatory. Normally, his creations might be defined as off-kilter and individual. He was very much at the epicenter of the indie film movement that revamped in the 80s. In fact, the true glory of Paterson is how pedestrian and how plain, how ordinary, and how pleasant it feels.

It’s actually not Emily Dickinson but William Carlos Williams who is Paterson’s favorite poet. There’s a self-reflexive nature to it. I know little about Williams work aside from the fact he has an epic poem called “Paterson.” And it’s true our story takes place in Paterson, New Jersey, where our main character acts as a stand-in for the town (and the poem) he shares a name with.

It’s an observational film just as Paterson is a man who watches the world passing by, existing all around him, as he drives his usual route. He is not someone the world normally esteems as an artist; he is a humble blue-collar poet. He fills up his days listening to conversations about Hurricane Carter or between a pair of high school anarchists (a nod to Wes Anderson’s youthful lovers in Moonrise Kingdom).

There’s not an antagonistic bone in the man’s body, and the movie happens to deliver a particularly warm portrait of marriage. As he spends his days working and nights tucked away writing or walking the dog, his wife (Golshifteh Farahani in a marvelous piece of casting) is swept up by dreams of cupcakes and country singing, even as she supports his writing. She is both the antithesis and the utter complement to Adam Driver.

Laura coaxes him to share his work and get it out so people can enjoy it as much as she does. Her palette and interior decorating are dominated by black and white, and she revels in her side hustles. Whether or not she becomes some great culinary or country music star seems immaterial. Paterson gently reciprocates the encouragement abounding in their household and what remains are modest joys.

The story is not beholden to typical structures of narrative. Although it does have something in common with the creation poetry of Genesis, working in the rhythms of the week in an unflustered, unhurried manner. There’s a tranquility to it all, displaying the innate power of habit and routine

Like clockwork, he goes out to walk the dog, a bothered bulldog named Marvin. We never ask to know why he does it. It’s become a kind of established fact. Just as the nightly stop at the bar to chew the fat happens. The conversations cover local heroes like Sam & Dave or Lou Costello. It feels inconsequential but somehow pertinent to the kind of syntax and meter the story is looking to evoke.

The poems read throughout the movie by Adam Driver in a deliberate, partially stunted diction are much the same, exhibiting this kind of straightforward, no-frills lucidity. He rehashes and molds them methodically before jotting them down in his hidden notebook. In fact, they are penned by Ron Padgett, a writer deeply admired by Jarmusch himself.

As someone who has dabbled in the art, you respect people who are brazen enough to become untethered from something so comforting as rhyme. Because rhyme gives you some sense that you are creating something beyond prose. It takes a braver, more audacious soul to strip it down and make it so closely reminiscent of normal everyday language and yet articulated and manipulated just enough that there is no recourse but to call it poetry.

Likewise, the dialogue throughout the movie is not realistic in nature. The words feel specifically chosen — very particular — not always right or real but given to their own cadence. There’s something so refreshing and freeing about it because it allows us to live our lives and feel they have meaning and significance in their very ordinariness.

Akin to the security guard in Museum Hours, here is a man living for more than a paycheck, and they both seem to see beyond the normal things that distract us — to somehow come to terms with beauty in the most extraordinary of places. And by this, I actually mean the ordinary places where others fail to look or cannot see.

I realized halfway through, Paterson has no cell phone; it’s part of what plants him into an altogether different era and makes him feel like a man Jarmusch might admire and heartily identify with. He lives a simpler, some might say, purer life without white noise and distractions.

However implausible, the moment that feels like a climax truly does burn deep, speaking as someone who has devoted a lot of time to writing — much of it unseen by the external world. To lose your work is a horrifying thought, but it also serves as a reality check.

It’s not so much devoting time to writing but having enjoyed the process — being able to uncover and appreciate and put words to what you have been so privileged to experience as a living, breathing human being. If we write and create merely to be remembered, it will never satiate. How much more can we relish the process if we enjoy every rhythm?

Because it’s exactly that: a process. As another character who traverses a tough world of his own admits to Paterson, “The sun still rises every day and sets every evening. Always another day.” It’s inevitable and a bit of a final exhortation — to Paterson and to all of us.

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The final scene is the kind of cinematic loveliness you find in a certain brand of movie — the Museum Hours and the Columbuses of the world. Where there are interactions that are amicable, pensive, and beautiful.

They need not be rife with conflict or gargantuan stakes. They are found compelling for the mere fact they drink deeply of the wells of mankind and speak to who we are as people. Crossing cultures and borders and time and space to fuse human beings together.
It could be art, it could be architecture, it could simply be the need for human contact.

Here it’s poetry. A Japanese sojourner (Masatoshi Nagase) sits down at a bench with Paterson, and they share what can only be described as a moment — albeit a cinematic one — and it’s exquisite in all its unadorned subtleties.

We need one another and we can light the fire under others providing inspiration, hope, and subtle encouragement. Far from entertaining angels unawares, it might just as easily be that we can give a lift to a burgeoning artist or at the very least an unassuming one.

If nothing else, Paterson is a stirring reminder and a quiet call to appreciate and cultivate the beauty around us. We are in it together. Art need not always be a profession. Sometimes it fills the spaces in between bleeding out of people’s lives because they know no other way. They cook for sheer passion. They play music because they have to. They write out of some otherworldly compulsion.

This is art at its most elemental form, and we are all better for it. Paterson reminds us about the rhythms of life and how everyday ordinariness can be magnificent and more than worthy of our creative energies.

4.5/5 Stars

Slacker (1991): Richard Linklater’s Ultimate Independent Film

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Slackerposter.jpgKudos must be extended to Richard Linklater for actually being proactive and going out to shoot the movie countless of us have doubtlessly tossed around in our mind’s eye. Taking our town — the places we know intimately — and building a portmanteau out of it with a group of friends.

There’s nothing flashy or that original about this universal concept per se, but it always strikes one as more than just a straightforward story. There is a bit of artistry to its execution, while still functioning on the most shoestring of budgets.

Even one of my favorite bands in high school, Reliant K made their own rendition involving a soccer ball. But again, Linklater has time and history on his side, because he was the one who actually got it made. Few others would have the wherewithal to get it off the drawing board.

What’s more, Slacker actually has some genuine life to it by capturing a very specific subculture and locale like a time capsule of 1990s Austin, Texas. It takes pieces of the world he knows and promotes them to a wider audience, which is one of the cool perks of cinema. It’s able to take a localized image and globalize it, despite how humble the reach might have been, to begin with.

Better yet, the up-and-coming director dares to open the picture with his own monologue, musing about his dreams and alternate realities to his uninterested taxi driver. He teases a hypothetical scenario where he was invited into a beautiful girl’s hotel room just for standing at the bus stop. He matter-of-factly curses to himself that he should have stayed behind, before picking up his bags to go, effectively choosing a different fate.

From thenceforward, the camera is on the move as well. Because this isolated sequence is only one among a whole bunch of other asides helping to predict the conversing integral to The Before Trilogy or even a more communal vision like Dazed and Confused. Though the characters nor the dialogue builds that same type of rapport with the audience, one could easily argue they are not supposed to.

This is a near stream-of-consciousness exercise with the camera following its whims, roving around, and taking an almost bipolar interest in everything. You get the sense Linklater knew full-well what he wanted to capture; still, he makes it look organic. There’s this constant mixture of intellectualization and socializing going on.

A mother is run over by a car. A husker sings his tune on a street corner. People run into each other serendipitously. Handheld walk-and-talk scenarios make the action simple and fast.

Some of the characters are definitely “whack,” but that’s all part of the fun. The dialogue grabs hold of any weird quirk or a bit of oddness it can from conspiracy theories, aliens, television, the JFK assassination, anarchy, literally anything at all.

This one is an important landmark of indie filmmaking right up there with Cassavetes works or Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), paving the way for everything from Clerks to the wave of indies that came to fruition in the mid-90s and early 2000s.

While I don’t find it quite compelling in this given era, there’s no way to underplay what it means for movies. Many are indebted to Linklater, and the beauty is that the director is still churning out quality work, both personal and commercial.

In fact, I’m a little in awe of him, because it seems like he’s constantly managing to make the projects he wants. He will not give up on his own artistic aspirations. In the age of the blockbuster, those are admirable motivations.

3/5 Stars

The Florida Project (2017): The Antithesis of Hollywood Escapism

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When we run in different circles it’s easy to have a conveniently jaundiced view of our society. On a personal scale, I’m talking about our neighborhoods, our towns, our community institutions. We turn a blind eye to those things that do not concern us — maybe they’re below our station in life — and so we live unclouded by the hardships around us.

We form tribes and often do our best to stay separate whether it’s along social, ethnic, political, or religious lines. Though we have an innate desire to pair off and form communities, it can have detrimental side effects. At our very worst, we become polarized units totally at odds with one another. To a lesser extent, our enclaves remain insulated and never interact or acknowledge those outside our social bubble. Places like the Boys and Girls Club, Food Banks, and churches slog on without vibrant community support systems because heaven forbid we lower ourselves.

The Florida Project is a sobering portrait and an altogether necessary one because it offers an uncompromising glimpse at a lifestyle that’s easy enough to disregard. This is an issue needing recognition.

Because just down the road from Seven Dwarves Ln and Disney World, the purported “happiest place on earth,” there are signs of degradation and malevolent poverty. We are met with the garish purple and pinks of the low-rent hotels.

But there are two obvious camps. Tourists who are only passing through and the locals who have set up camp long-term living week to week on the money they scrounge up. Spend some time there, even during a seemingly carefree season like Summer Break, and you see the deleterious nature of the ecosystem. Such activities seem endemic.

Front and center are Mooney (Brooklynn Prince) and her band of friends. They’re like a merry band of precocious little terrors. If they were older we might call them hoodlums but now they have the pretense of being cute. Except they’re hardly innocent. Spitting on someone’s car from a second story for “fun” and getting in any type of conceivable mischief they possibly can. Like turning off the power in the throes of summer or panhandling.

They are the epitome of the cliche “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” And yet their behavior is indicative of their parents (or lack thereof). Because a lot of what Mooney does feels reinforced and learned from her role models. It becomes equally evident her imagination is always vibrant out of necessity. It shields her from the world and her constant state of want. It is her only avenue to something better.

But we must ask where will the buck stop? Is it the social systems being flawed or non-existent? Halley (Bria Vinaite), Mooney’s young and disaffected mother, looks to sell perfume for a profit at a nearby resort just to eke by a day late on rent. She has trained her daughter up to scrounge for change to buy ice cream. Mooney always shows up at the back door to receive handouts of free waffles and extra maple syrup with a friend.

The kiddos go on a demolition rampage and when they’re bored of that they divert themselves by lighting a house on fire. Of course.

It grabs the attention of the entire neighborhood and necessitates the local fire department coming out to quell the flames. It’s like a block party the way the locals congregate, drinks in hand, whooping, and snapping pictures in front of the conflagration. The kids don’t seem to realize until after the fact, the effects of such a serious form of arson.

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Through all these ordeals, Willem Dafoe is the Most Valuable Player. Because as the local manager of the Magic Castle, Bobby, he provides some semblance of well-meaning humanity in an otherwise unfeeling and incredibly tense wasteland. Because the crusty exterior reveals a genuine concern for kids and even when he’s disgruntled his hard-working, good-natured spirit shines through. He extends the same care to a trio of inbound storks that he does the tenants who are constantly harrying him.

There so many hardships and yet the people resigned to this life have issues of their own. There is a pervasive disrespect shown to everyone and lifestyle choices are a bit dubious at times. The saddest aspect is impressionable children being subjected to so much that is objectionable at such a young age.

Halley has left her former career choice as a stripper behind, but she seems less than enthused about applying for new work. She also shows attitude toward anyone who will not immediately bend to her requests or even those who try and stay on their side. Her retaliation can be utterly malicious, at times, even as her sense of entitlement is trying.

Likewise, she teaches her daughter posing for hypersexualized selfies while her smoking, drinking, and male company with no sense of commitment, only prove detrimental to her daughter. These are the exterior issues that make themselves plainly apparent.

My only concern or minor reservation is the fact we never get much of the interior life of these adults. I would like to get to know Halley and Bobby better. But because this is very much Mooney’s story, grace can be extended. Her point of view is the most applicable to this narrative because it is not able to comprehend everything or even bring it to a succinct resolution. There are so many unresolved issues. It should not be on a child to have to solve them.

It’s the realization, in the end, Mooney is just a kid. She doesn’t know the situation her mom is in. She isn’t completely liable for all the behavior she perpetrates.  In many ways, she’s oblivious and yet all the negative influences affect her even implicitly. She cannot comprehend the nuances of her mom’s situation because to her it’s simply the way life is. There is no other example to match it with. It starts with the social environment around her.

In a final twist, Sean Baker deems to cap his film with a Disney ending with the girls running off from the dizzying world around them for some type of oasis. Make of it what you will. It’s a bit like running off to the movies because you want to escape life. But The Florida Project is not Hollywood escapism. It’s immersive, yes, but in a way that will make you reconsider the current cultural landscape. If it does not make us open our eyes and carry a dose of empathy for those residing in our own communities than few things will.

The Florida Project does not cast blame and yet it draws us inward to ask the honest questions. How is our society failing? What might we do to fix this? On the smallest, most personal scale, what can each of us do to promote human flourishing? Because one thing is for sure, even if the movies normally coming out of the industry reflect otherwise, this is not an isolated occurrence.

Our society is full of Mooneys and if we learn anything from this film it should be to appreciate their worth as human beings even as we grieve their unfortunate circumstances and life choices. If we are more fortunate than them, it is solely a gift and we were blessed so that we might be a blessing to others. To those who much has been given, much is expected. I’m saying this as much to myself as anyone else.

4.5/5 Stars

Eighth Grade (2018)

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Eighth_Grade.pngIt’s not exactly The Godfather but in its opening monologue, using the awkward tween, like-laden mouthpiece of Kayla, Bo Burnham re-exerts his creative voice on the media landscape. What is more, in a world becoming continually more obsessed with relevance, shareability, and trends, Eighth Grade promises something of actual substance.

Because it dares to do what few films have done (or done well), which is enter the perilous trenches of middle school plagued by all the anxiety, bodily changes, and nervous stuttering that goes with such turbulent territory.

Looking into Kayla’s face for as long as we do — every painful tick and averted gaze — we realize this message to “Be Yourself” on her channel is as much of a rallying cry for her than for anyone else. But that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? We live life for affirmation and to know we are not alone.

I can still recall when I was in middle school (10 years ago now), which must feel like eons for middle schoolers right now. But the big new gizmo was the iPhone. MySpace was just becoming a thing of the past as the Facebook storm began to creep in. By the time of my final year in high school, Instagram was on the scene.

Now people (even me) don’t really use Facebook. We’ve moved onto Instagram, Snap Chat, and new uncharted frontiers. In the social media age proliferating with Instagram stories, Youtube vlogs, podcasts, snap stories and whatever else that is new and novel, there is a hyper-awareness of technology, surpassing anything we have yet to see.

Our daily brand — how we showcase ourselves to the public — is so important as is second-guessing every text and emoji to make sure they make us come off in the right light. In fact, even by the movie’s conclusion, we feel saturated. But the truly sobering aspect is seeing how it so directly overlaps with my own life and the lives of friends as we navigate this age. It’s not too far removed from us.

Eighth Grade is also a film that greatens my resolve to go on a technology detox in some shape or form. Kayla, constantly scrolling, plugged in with earbuds, is not so much a bygone figure but a mild reflection of many of us — even those of us who are older.

But on the Middle School front, there are also instantly recognizable vignettes from rubber bands on braces to health class and superlatives within the student body. It is these relatable elements causing Eighth Grade to mirror Boyhood in how it capably recalls a certain time and place.

And like Edge of Seventeen, there’s a fascination in the bad boy who by any subjective standard is arguably the most uninteresting specimen of the opposite gender in the entire pack. It’s the way our adolescent brains function causing us to channel people through a very specific filter.

Initially, the movie feels more low key and less edgy than aspects of middle school I remember around the fringes. However, there also manages to be ample truth. Though everyone has diverse experiences, there are other elements proving themselves universal.

There’s the invitation to the pool party which is in itself ripe with so many potential humiliations. The over the shoulder slow track as Kayla plods along tentatively is one of Burnham’s favorite tricks to get inside her character — epitomizing just how much of an unconfident, introvert she is among her peers.

It turns out to be a bit like a three-ringed circus but not in some outrageous way — in the everyday idiosyncratic, cringe-worthy way we no doubt experienced in our own lives. We are allowed to observe the silly flirting rituals of the genders. How a girl’s mother invites her 50 “best friends” to the party thereby netting a veritable lode of presents.

Then we are reminded of how fledgling teenagers coexist (or don’t) with their parents. What follow are the well-established angsty, taciturn evasion tactics. It’s one of the strange mysteries of the universe. Everyone else’s parents are fine but the moment we hit a certain age our own parents find a way of wheedling under our skins and our own issues and insecurities meets head-on with these people who love us and often try our patience.

In the darkness, in front of a glowing screen — not only the circadian rhythms are thrown out of whack — but with technology literally when we wake up (phones as alarm clocks) and web surfing before bed, there’s room for concern. There is little space left over for quiet. We are never alone. Never allotted time to simply exist, undistracted.

In one moment Kayla utters the cutest prayer about the first day of her high school “audition.” If we were to take it seriously, her prayer is answered in the form of Olivia, a bubbly high schooler, who instantly puts her shadow at ease. But while Olivia is easy and kind and inclusive, her friends are a shoddy bunch.

Between them, we have the confrontation of this idea of micro generations — how quickly things change now — and how we are “wired differently” based on when we grew up. Middle schoolers versus high schoolers, then college students, and now an old fogey like me out of college.

An awkward interaction becomes progressively creepier in the darkened back seat of a car when she is getting driven home by a boy. In fact, it turns into a traumatic experience. No young woman should have to deal with something like that in an already harrowing world. It breaks the heart because we know there is a truth to it.

Kayla gratefully finds another worthy friend in Gabe — who is the dork to trump all dorks — but he’s also a person of quality because he’s never destructive or narcissistic. There is an authentic warmth to him which makes him worth having in your corner. When he asks Kayla if she believes in God, munching on fries and chicken nuggets it’s matter-of-fact, if not candid.

The conversation feels so forced and awkward but they are both on equal footing, worrying and concerned and so it makes every weird observation or odd behavior part of the new, accepted status quo. None of it matters. They are friends.

These moments trigger brief wisps of memories where I wish I could go back to those days armed with a few of the things I learned now. Being content in my own skin enough to take leaps of faith, being bold, and making an idiot of myself more often. It works when you have people in your circle who aren’t trying to play a superficial popularity contest with you. They’re the definition of what a friend actually is if you look it up in the dictionary, instead of a convenient social conception.

In the end, I couldn’t help wishing Eighth Grade was a television program instead of a film. I’m not sure if this is a negative conclusion to come to. All I can consider are my warm memories for The Wonder Years and then Freaks and Geeks, which both gave us such meaningful articulations of a certain time in life. Kevin Arnold’s voiceovers as his adult self are a thing of legend. And Kayla gives us a similar entry point through her vlog. But it doesn’t feel as visually cinematic as it does episodic.

Burnham’s finest scene is probably the pool party because like other films before it, he’s able to use that arena to give us something about our main character. To some degree though, the film is full of astute and highly personal insights, there is something tiring about montage, vacuous pop music paired with voiceover.

Then again, if there was anyone qualified to look at this material in this manner, it probably is Burnham who himself began as a YouTube personality. There is an instantaneous bit of truth he can inject into the movie and even if this was all it was, there is something to it. If it connects with some kid on a meaningful level, I would consider it to be an unequivocal success.

Elsie Fisher is a name I recall from Despicable Me but in this live-action performance, she brings the crucial unassuming charm to push the role into a believable world. A connection is made thanks to her and when the credits roll we want Kayla to be herself knowing full well how special she is. Mr. Rogers isn’t in vogue with middle schoolers or high schoolers and yet there is such lasting veracity in one of his most famous affirmations.

“You make each day a special day. You know how? By just your being you. There’s only one person in this whole world like you. And that’s you. And people can like you exactly as you are.”

I think we could all use more words like these in our lives. Replacing Twitter feuds with uplifting words of praise seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. It only takes one voice to start a movement.

4/5 Stars