dr-ehpage Reviews

Capturing the Light (2008 Video)

Thank you, Dorothy Izatt!

[10/10 · 18 December 2020]

I love watching this film. I am not looking for proof but I am looking for intersubjective experience and this film has it. For years only Dorothy saw the lights she says are interdimensional beings, but then, she was able to point them out to her daughter, too. Finally, her family watches footage of them and are astounded. Digital film experts explain in detail why her footage cannot be fabricated. She says they communicate with her telepathically. She says they have outgrown our violent impulses and fear that we are toying with forces that can rent the veil between their world and ours. They want us to recognize we are responsible not just for ourselves but also for other worlds that can be damaged by our technological escapades. For that thought alone, the film is worth watching as a reminder that we are not alone on this planet, nor in the solar system or universe. Many still have closed minds, but minds one day will open and this film helps a lot.

Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Don't Buy the Hype - This is an important and excellent film!

[9/10 · 4 December 2020]

When a friend of mine suggested I read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, I shuddered. What flashed across the mind, I told her, were those TV shows featuring the swamp people or Alaskan wild men, depicted now in Appalachian 'hill people' style. She paused and regrouped. She told me again what a great book it was and when I didn't respond, she circled back with another suggestion: "Well, would you be interested in watching the movie with us? We both have read the book." "How can you not admire her persistence," I chuckled. Afraid of being sucked into an unwanted rabbit hole and seeking a diplomatic exit, I checked the reviews. Could I find a justification for saying no? Certainly! I found was the meanest spate of reviews I have read since Spike Lee's Bamboozled, another trashed film I thought was brilliant. Now reviewers were stomping Hillbilly Elegy. They stomped it so hard that I was taken aback. "Why," I wondered. "Glen Close doesn't do trash," I reminded myself. "Never saw a Ron Howard film not worth my time," I recalled. Yet, this film was being choked to death, suffocated like a line of newly caught fish left, high and dry, on the kitchen counter to die. How could that be? Reviewers who trashed Bamboozled hadn't see its value. They declared it had no value. They predicted it would fail and ridiculed people who liked it. They made fun of Lee's vivid characters and demeaned his film-making. Their message was loud and clear: don't waste your time viewing this movie. That puzzled me. Reading the harsh reviews of Bamboozled was the moment when I became aware of the practice of movie assassination. That's how a movie and its director are killed and in the old days, before Netflix, such movies would not draw and an audience and quickly would be removed from theater circulation. Bamboozled was not just ahead of its time, it was truth-telling. Truth-telling in Hillbilly Elegy similarly may explain why most reviewers are bashing this film. Is it a mirror reflecting their own lives? Is it mirroring back to the audience an unwanted view of the self? For instance, Roger Ebert confesses good things about Howard's film, but undercuts his praise of it by declaring that these good things "vanish in the haze of the zeitgeist," while at the same time pointing a displeased finger at Howard's film directing. Ebert describes Hillbilly Elegy as "hard to appreciate," as being "encumbered by cultural baggage," and he seems unable to grasp what I see as the universal appeal of this film. Instead, he restricts the audience he presumes the film is capable of capturing. He reduces its potential audience to a stereotypical 'culture of poverty' frame of reference. As Ebert suggests, you are more likely "to connect" with this film if you grew up poor, with addiction and domestic abuse, and with other problems typical of that ilk. If you grew up differently, he further implies under the guise of film critique, then this film is way too trashy for you. By now we Americans all should realize that the classist condescension dripping from Ebert's review of Hillbilly Elegy is precisely what got Donald Trump elected - an inability of the liberal, moderate, and progressive privileged classes to recognize value in the underclass experience. This especially is the case when such characters are not sanitized according to bourgeois taste and standards of comportment. As an anthropologist, I saw in Hillbilly Elegy a richly cultural film. It is not just a case of the hill people's cultural specificity. Far more importantly, the story it conveys is about who people become when they collectively are relegated as a class to the bottom of America society where they end up living lives too ignored to enter the national gaze, unless or soft-soaped, also known as whitewashed. The film offers an astute character study. It focuses on what it takes to keep a family together given their various efforts to survive and thrive as persons in their adverse conditions. The characters in Hillbilly Elegy are living oppressed lives but the film does not preach this theme. It lets the characters themselves tell the story through their action which gives rise to and finally resolves the story's central conflict. Who they are and how they are oppressed is expressed in their postures, in their relations, in their vivid language, and in their struggle against the self-hate threatening to consume them given how meanly they view themselves through American eyes. My friend says that the film is good, but as usual, the book does an even better job at contextualizing their story by revealing the history of America's class relations that creates the disparaged community of J. D's family. Their deprivation is not treated directly but is rendered visible when one of them (J.D.) goes to Yale Law school. As a first-generation college-educated African American, I can relate to what happened during J.D.'s Yale Law dinner party experience. It parallels similar experiences of mine during my own education and academic career. As a white man he entered a higher-class world. As a black man, I entered a white elite world. But the experience is nearly the same. The snide degrading remarks; the fake apology; the downward glances assumed by the elite insiders when a capable man of lower-class origins lauds his mother's intelligence and celebrates his family's ability to overcome the downtrodden parameters of his underclass background. Eating with poor white trash is one thing, but eating with one who does not agree to feel shame about his origins is one with whom they cannot "connect." The scrutinizing elites had an opportunity they could not resist. J.D. was there to be vetted. His colleagues and mentors seized the moment to affirm their own elite class distinction by engaging in put downs of this aspiring young man who family roots are deeply embedded in Kentucky's Appalachian working class. I won't say much more about the story, but I must say that the acting was brilliant, and the directing, simply masterful. The action was so powerful that my friends and I were clinging to the edge of our seats. We imagined some better-off friends squirming and turning this movie off, and we surmised that if they did, it would reflect their refusal, like Ebert's, to connect with those deemed beneath them, with those in whom it conventionally is presumed no value lies. We thought Howard handled flashbacks elegantly well, far better than in most films we have seen, but Ebert read Howard's time-management technique as jumping, "incoherently." Instead of valuing an incredible study of the way that familial love can threaten to entrap and derail a child (J.D. played by Owen Aztalos) unless someone (his grandmother, played by Glenn Close) is brave and strong enough to break the family's downward spiral. She was able to rescue him from the family tragedy by propping him up until he can swim. Yet, Ebert reads J.D., the central character, as "constrained by his culture," as if spurring him on, much like mule, to break free from family drama and get on with a mandatory display of rugged American individualism. Film critics like Ebert often rely on the director's use of filmmaking conventions to judge movies. Hence, in sharp contrast to Howard's use of stark realism, Ebert criticizes him for not having resorted either to black comedy or to surrealism in a scene where in her earlier life (when J.D.'s mother was still a girl) his grandmother defends herself from domestic violence by lighting her assailant on fire. Could it be that the desire for such devices serve as a diversion to relieve the reviewers of feeling? I, for one, am glad I felt every raw feeling that this film evoked. I would not want to see that horrific scene treated surrealistically or comedically through black humor. It's not a laughing matter and I do not need the distance of viewing it from a perspective outside of reality. In fact, I would have found it disrespectful of the subject and of the people represented. It would have given the audience an out, allowing it to enjoy the director's approach in a critical moment when the screenwriter is encouraging the audience to take in what is really happening here in America, as if to say: People, this is real! Perhaps most ignored in this film's reviews is the strength of the women who carry the family, including the rageful, broken daughter, when the men can't show up. That pattern of male unavailability is broken when J. D., the central character, shows up to support his family. He applies the lessons learned from his grandmother when contending with his mother Bev's (Amy Adams) brokenness at a most inopportune time. Rather than to tuck his tail and slink into denial, or throw her away in shame, or regard her as a threat to his intimate relationship and potential for success, J.D. pledges to take care of her for the rest of her life, but no more tonight. He has gotten her a place to stay and evades the forced choice of family or career that capitalism so often imposes. He tackles both and wins in honor of the broken souls who raised him and held him up high, above the fray, high enough to succeed at Yale Law and to craft his family's triumphant tale. I give it ten stars and I highly recommend it.

Revolver (2005)

Excellent film

[8/10 · 24 August 2020]

I normally do not like movies about gangsters, drug pushers and warlords, but this one has all of that and it had quite a different twist. It is one of the best made films I have seen in a long time. The timing is impeccable. The scenes are well designed. The casting is marvelous. Some might call it a psychological film, but I think its more about one man's spiritual growth as he grapples with what life hands him. The writing is engaging and the action has much to be expected, but also unexpected outcomes.This keep the film fresh from start to finish and it ends in a way that makes you wonder. I wouldn't want anything more from a film and highly recommend it to people who are willing to watch a move thoughtfully with full engagement.

Down to Earth (I) (2015)

Reviewers can be interesting

[10/10 · 21 August 2020]

It seems like most people loved this film as much as I did. Yet, the negative reviews are so dismissive of the film. It did not meet their expectations and that is the point of the film. Because of our expectations, we not only have ruined the earth and the lives of indigenous people, but are ruining our own lives. The film is unique in that it explores the idea of letting go. It shows a family on a journey of self-discovery that they were able to film. They do not center their own experience but the knowledge of the wisdom keepers and this time, their knowledge states: we are dying out and what we try to pass onto the children may or may not prevail, and even may not last. It is a film about how long they have striven to hold the world together for the rest of humanity. It is about the desolation many of them have been thrown into by the desires we in the first world have been chasing. It is about the wounded soul yearning to be healed by a return to nature that we will not choose and ultimately may be compelled by loss to revisit. It made me ponder these things. It allowed me to ponder the beauty and wisdom of these elders. It helped me to see how all aware people are struggling to join together in consciousness in a local way to live a real life freed from the mass mind of consumption, industrial medicine, and commercialized identity. One day the people who are bored with this film will no longer have to see any such thing because the one's who are trying to show us how to correct our course are still largely being ignored or worse, minimized and dismissed. Please do allow this film to help you to correct your course. If it cannot help us to save the world, can it help you to save yourself? I think it takes a giant step in that direction.