When Precious Met Alice: Kind of a Movie Review #9

...went to see the new Alice in Wonderland...3-D, IMAX....guess you could say I’ve joined the twenty-first century...or the psychedelic era...hell, the movie cost more than I used to pay to see a Grateful Dead show...with some similarities...

...beyond trippy visuals, though, the movie offers little chance of expanding consciousness...a wealth of joyfully absurdist poetry sucked out of the story in favor of drably conventional Hollywood fantasy adventure...surrealistic pillows given way to cheesy swords...any feints toward poetic madness rapidly contracted, shriveled and shrunken away with lameass explanations for anything in danger of expanding the viewer’s imaginative scope...(the Mad Hatter gets turned into a boring action hero, for chrissake...like Mel Gibson with Carrot Top’s hairstylist)...

...all in all, more C. S. Lewis than Lewis Carroll...if more liberal-minded....a grown-up Alice making the story a bit less Victorian-pervy, more modern-day female-empowerment........as such, offering, I guess, a better role model for my young nieces than the standard Hollywood princess shrinking away dreaming of a handsome prince/sexy vampire...but that's not saying much...

...one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small...
Grace Slick

...if not for concerns about subject matter leaving them permanently traumatized, I’d be more likely to recommend sending the kids to see Precious....hell, having read Sapphire’s Push a decade ago, didn’t know if I was ready for it...but, flying from San Jose to George Bush International...relaxed and flexible from all the yoga and beach time...if not enough to make a coach seat comfortable enough to concentrate on reading for three and a half hours...mind relatively open and non-depressed...had a little TV on the seat-back in front of me with fifty-something cinematic pills to choose from...and went for it...

...while the movie only vaguely implies at least one of the novel’s more horrifying aspects, there are lots more where that came from...in an utterly harrowing portrayal of a young woman, Precious, the likes of whom most of us would prefer to ignore...trapped in a rabbit hole of poverty, neglect, rape, incest, illiteracy, and AIDS...told she’s stupid and worthless by a mother who treats her as little more than an object to be used and abused...grown huge on junk food, disappearing inside....

`I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: `I'm growing.'
`You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (not in the movie)

...and yet, the movie’s ultimately about growth...kinda like yoga*...finding possibilities for expansion in unexpected places**...that sacred something remaining, no matter how fucked up and hopeless-seeming a person might appear on the surface...and the importance of having the compassion to see that something even in people it'd be easier not to have to see at all...

I am large. I contain multitudes...
Walt Whitman

...near the end, Precious' mother*** gives a monologue...revealing, even more than before, just how toxic she is to her daughter...and, probably, to just about anyone else likely to come in contact with her...but, also, the far more difficult truth that, in the end, she’s another desperately wounded human being...so twisted and lost in her damaged mind it’s hard to imagine how she could find peace...but one of us, nonetheless...if we can grow large enough to acknowledge her...

* that said, it should be mentioned that Gabourey Sibide, who plays the title character, says she hates yoga...would like to kill it, even....though I suspect that has more to do with airbrushed mass-marketed images than core philosophies...

** hell, it turns out Mariah Carey can act...who could’ve imagined that?...

*** played by Mo’Nique...representing one of the rare instances in which I actually agreed with Oscar...(though, if I had my way, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep would win practically every year)...(then, if I really had my way, I'd probably be married to Cate Blanchett...but, anyway...)...

I'm Not There...and neither are you... (Kind of a Movie Review #2)

I’m not there, I’m gone.
Bob Dylan

Just got the DVD of I’m Not There—a movie that makes little sense to normal people—and, somehow, my explanations don't seem to help much: “that part represents Blood on the Tracks...and that part’s kind of a mix of the Basement Tapes, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and a couple other things...and that part’s kind of a parody of parts of Don’t Look Back, and Eat the Document, as well as an homage to Fellini and Godard, and the conversation the Dylan character's having with Michelle Williams’ character, who’s based on Edie Sedgwick, who Dylan wrote ‘Just Like a Woman’ about, and Lou Reed wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ about, is mostly lyrics from an obscure song called ‘She’s Your Lover Now,' and the Dylan character's played by a woman because...um....’” Nonetheless, every time I see it—and, truth be told, I've been watching it over and over—I become more convinced that it's the best thing to make its way to a movie theatre so far in this young century...capturing the masks and mythologies around Bob Dylan in a dizzying mosaic...from Cate Blanchett’s brilliant androgynous rock star to a surreal funeral in an absurd circus-like village that Pat Garrett’s about to put a highway through...though it's also more than that, since, even if most of us haven’t gone to quite so much effort to construct and project various personas as Dylan...or Bowie...or Madonna...that doesn’t mean they’re not there....

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

People talk a lot about the real me, as if any one me is any more or less real than any other me...and, more often than not, the real label tends to get pinned to our worst selves...be nice to somebody for years, but the one day you're not so nice, suddenly it’s now I’m finally seeing the real you...though, fortunately, mothers and any others we’re lucky enough to have love us unconditionally tend to see only that sweet child underneath all the thorny scar tissue...and certainly deserve to be loved unconditionally right back for that...even if it's no more the whole story than the other....

The heart of the confusion is that man has a sense of self which seems to him to be continuous and solid.
Chogyam Trungpa

Here in America we’re really into re-invention—as you’re no doubt aware, even if that awareness is mixed with resentment toward the English teacher who made you read The Great Gatsby—hell, be who you wanna be is kinda like an outtake from the Bill of Rights...or at least it would’ve been if Amendments I-X had been written as series of Positive Affirmations....

I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else.
The Lemonheads

Of course, the web has created endless new possibilities for being who you wanna be (though I, in case you’re wondering, am every bit as brilliant and studly in real life as I seem here)—as I said to a friend's fourteen year old daughter: “most boys your age on the web are actually men my age...and you don't wanna meet them”...that would probably count as little more than a virtual truth itself, but this is the internet we’re talking about....I actually downloaded the Second Life thing...curious about what possible appeal there could be for middle aged suburbanites to enter a virtual community to role-play as middle aged suburbanites, like I’d read about in the New York Times. In between laptop crashes, I somehow stumbled into the...well...raunchier neighborhoods...where children—virtual or otherwise—were the only thing not allowed...while toilets...Great Danes...horses...never mind. The one thing that surprised me, at first, was how predominantly female the crowd was...probably four or five beautiful, lingerie-clad female avatars for every male...and the vast majority of them lesbians, where I’d expected mostly nerdy guys. It didn’t take me too long to figure that one out....

Baby Wontcha Make Me...HAPPY

In fourteen months I’ve only smiled once
and I didn’t do it consciously
Bob Dylan

who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Kahlil Gibran

If I’m gonna write a top ten list, it’ll generally be something like Top Ten Lou Reed Lyrics (#1 How do you think it feels, and when do you think it stops?; #2 I thought I was someone else, someone good) or Top Ten British Obscenities (#1 wanker; #2 shite). This time, though, I'm going positive, and listing things that make me happy—ten fucking positive statements—three more than I made during the entire year of 1993...and most of those were either sarcastic or along the lines of “I love fucking with people’s heads”...since, y'know, I’m trying to be more open to the universe...or something...anyway, here goes...

#1 Friends and family—no matter what horrible things I say behind their backs
#2 Dogs—Fargo and Bella, pay attention
#3 Bob Dylan—I offered up my innocence, I got repaid with scorn—me too, Bob, me too
#4 The woods (actual woods—with trees—not to be confused with the Sleater Kinney album of the same name, though that kicks ass, too)
#5 The ocean
#6 Yoga

-like marijuana, but good for you
#7 Coffee
#8 Walt Whitman

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

#9 The Victoria’s Secret Catalog—for the articles
#10 Cate Blanchett—CALL ME

(thanks to http://www.oceanofperspectives.com/ for inspiring this post) (or the nice parts, at least)