Medicare For All
Movie Monday
I was going to review a children’s movie today and then the 29 year old woman was found in CA and suddenly my view of children’s movies went haywire.
Aberrations in news get everyone’s attention and nothing was more out of the ordinary in the U.S. in the past week than the discovery of a woman who had been kidnapped 18 years before at the age of 11. The fact that her kidnapper was also her rapist, father of her two children, 11 and 15 and a registered sex offender, and the fact that she and her children lived in a make-shift slum of tarp tents and out buildings on a property with near neighbors, and the fact the police had been alerted to these structures, had visited the home, admonished the man about the illegality of having people live in them, and then, as in every parent's worst nightmare, just feet from the kidnapped woman and her daughters, they had walked away, their duty done.; all these facts and all the others which are being revealed make for a surreal situation which is almost beyond human understanding.
All this turned my mind to the first line of For Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, “This is the saddest story.”.
For this tale of the girl turned woman, kidnapped, now found, is truly a saddest story. My mind shudders at the grief and guilt all innocent parties must feel at this junction: the daughter now apologizes for not trying to escape, the step-father whose marriage was destroyed over this horror but who is, as he said, for the first time in 18 years is not a suspect in this case. All the destroyed lives. All the sorrow and nightmares which will go well into the future which may or may not contain closure.
Of course, I am not naive enough to believe this is the saddest story. Unfortunately horrors and horrors to children occur every day throughout the world. But events like this, for me, bring our treatment of children in an industrialized society (the only one I happen to know) so much more clearly into focus.
And what medium shows this treatment to the most people? Television possibly, but movies for sure.
I was first going to look at Over The Hedge with which I have some serious problems. But that is a children’s movie with furry little creatures. Then on Saturday night I saw Her Majesty, a New Zealand film about a young girl in early 1950s who starts a letter writing campaign to have the newly crowned Elizabeth of England stop at her New Zealand town during a world tour.
On the lighter side, you see the girl befriending an outcast Maori woman, experiencing the travails of a crush on a male teacher, and standing up to blatant bigotry. On the lighter side, good does triumph over evil; her father overcomes his prejudice; the villain of the piece is royally hoisted on her own petard. On the lighter side, the girl’s parents are caring and not stock characters and her friends do not all put conventional prejudice above friendship.
And then, there is the darker side. Most commenters on IMDb liked the movie; only one saw what I did but to a lesser degree; only one mentioned sexual innuendo but I think he/she was talking about when Elizabeth (New Zealand girl, not Elizabeth II) visits her teacher.
Not to be any more cryptic: it was with the depiction of Elizabeth’s brother that I had a problem. And a serious one. What convinced the director and the screenwriter to include this pathological twit into this pre-teen tale? Did they sit around the table and muse: Hey, there is a big psychotic movie-going element out there. This is how we can pull them in.....
One commenter said she was disturbed that the brother was so mean but thought it would have worked if the character was a next door neighbor.
Hell, no. This kid was growing up to be a serial killer. Here are some of delightful things he does during the movie: gets fired for being lazy; throws a rock through the Maori woman’s house, tries to set fire to the same house; rips down and burns his sister’s pictures of Elizabeth II; attacks his sister with two friends; and tries to run down his sister’s friend while she is riding a bike.
Now to delve into just two of these acts. First, when he tries to burn down the house. His sister confronts him with a shotgun and he is stopped momentarily. But in real wimp fashion, just as he taunts his sister to shoot while still holding the flaming lighter and she must make this decision, the Maori woman as deus ex machina appears. The lighter mysteriously goes out and the scene is diffused. So somehow it's OK to put kids in dangerous situations just for the shock factor. No moral issue explored. Just: OK, bring in the Maori woman and let’s wrap this scene.
Second, and so much more disturbing is the scene where the brother (did I mention he was an older brother) appears with two friends to accost his sister. The two friends pin the girl back and the brother threatens her. It was a very disturbing scene and here is where I saw the “sex” since it was an incendiary mix of angry older teens and a young girl with a brother who had already been depicted as so unstable that rape would not have been out of the question.
But....the scene fades into the next one where you realize all the boys did was lock Elizabeth is a backyard fenced area! Take about defying belief.
The fact that our last view of the brother is in handcuffs in the back of a police car does not excuse the inclusion of this seriously warped character into the plot.
I watched this movie with a young girl and a younger boy. The boy bailed early and went to play with Legos. The girl stayed and enjoyed the movie. I spent “after time” explaining how abnormal the brother’s behavior was, which sort of diffused what I’ll assume was the theme of the movie: standing up for what you believe in. That theme was worthwhile for children.
Next week, continuing the look at children’s movies: Over The Hedge. Cute, maligned forest creatures or terminators in fur?
Aberrations in news get everyone’s attention and nothing was more out of the ordinary in the U.S. in the past week than the discovery of a woman who had been kidnapped 18 years before at the age of 11. The fact that her kidnapper was also her rapist, father of her two children, 11 and 15 and a registered sex offender, and the fact that she and her children lived in a make-shift slum of tarp tents and out buildings on a property with near neighbors, and the fact the police had been alerted to these structures, had visited the home, admonished the man about the illegality of having people live in them, and then, as in every parent's worst nightmare, just feet from the kidnapped woman and her daughters, they had walked away, their duty done.; all these facts and all the others which are being revealed make for a surreal situation which is almost beyond human understanding.
All this turned my mind to the first line of For Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, “This is the saddest story.”.
For this tale of the girl turned woman, kidnapped, now found, is truly a saddest story. My mind shudders at the grief and guilt all innocent parties must feel at this junction: the daughter now apologizes for not trying to escape, the step-father whose marriage was destroyed over this horror but who is, as he said, for the first time in 18 years is not a suspect in this case. All the destroyed lives. All the sorrow and nightmares which will go well into the future which may or may not contain closure.
Of course, I am not naive enough to believe this is the saddest story. Unfortunately horrors and horrors to children occur every day throughout the world. But events like this, for me, bring our treatment of children in an industrialized society (the only one I happen to know) so much more clearly into focus.
And what medium shows this treatment to the most people? Television possibly, but movies for sure.
I was first going to look at Over The Hedge with which I have some serious problems. But that is a children’s movie with furry little creatures. Then on Saturday night I saw Her Majesty, a New Zealand film about a young girl in early 1950s who starts a letter writing campaign to have the newly crowned Elizabeth of England stop at her New Zealand town during a world tour.
On the lighter side, you see the girl befriending an outcast Maori woman, experiencing the travails of a crush on a male teacher, and standing up to blatant bigotry. On the lighter side, good does triumph over evil; her father overcomes his prejudice; the villain of the piece is royally hoisted on her own petard. On the lighter side, the girl’s parents are caring and not stock characters and her friends do not all put conventional prejudice above friendship.
And then, there is the darker side. Most commenters on IMDb liked the movie; only one saw what I did but to a lesser degree; only one mentioned sexual innuendo but I think he/she was talking about when Elizabeth (New Zealand girl, not Elizabeth II) visits her teacher.
Not to be any more cryptic: it was with the depiction of Elizabeth’s brother that I had a problem. And a serious one. What convinced the director and the screenwriter to include this pathological twit into this pre-teen tale? Did they sit around the table and muse: Hey, there is a big psychotic movie-going element out there. This is how we can pull them in.....
One commenter said she was disturbed that the brother was so mean but thought it would have worked if the character was a next door neighbor.
Hell, no. This kid was growing up to be a serial killer. Here are some of delightful things he does during the movie: gets fired for being lazy; throws a rock through the Maori woman’s house, tries to set fire to the same house; rips down and burns his sister’s pictures of Elizabeth II; attacks his sister with two friends; and tries to run down his sister’s friend while she is riding a bike.
Now to delve into just two of these acts. First, when he tries to burn down the house. His sister confronts him with a shotgun and he is stopped momentarily. But in real wimp fashion, just as he taunts his sister to shoot while still holding the flaming lighter and she must make this decision, the Maori woman as deus ex machina appears. The lighter mysteriously goes out and the scene is diffused. So somehow it's OK to put kids in dangerous situations just for the shock factor. No moral issue explored. Just: OK, bring in the Maori woman and let’s wrap this scene.
Second, and so much more disturbing is the scene where the brother (did I mention he was an older brother) appears with two friends to accost his sister. The two friends pin the girl back and the brother threatens her. It was a very disturbing scene and here is where I saw the “sex” since it was an incendiary mix of angry older teens and a young girl with a brother who had already been depicted as so unstable that rape would not have been out of the question.
But....the scene fades into the next one where you realize all the boys did was lock Elizabeth is a backyard fenced area! Take about defying belief.
The fact that our last view of the brother is in handcuffs in the back of a police car does not excuse the inclusion of this seriously warped character into the plot.
I watched this movie with a young girl and a younger boy. The boy bailed early and went to play with Legos. The girl stayed and enjoyed the movie. I spent “after time” explaining how abnormal the brother’s behavior was, which sort of diffused what I’ll assume was the theme of the movie: standing up for what you believe in. That theme was worthwhile for children.
Next week, continuing the look at children’s movies: Over The Hedge. Cute, maligned forest creatures or terminators in fur?
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