A Movie for Caregivers

A beautiful new movie is on its way to us from Paris. Opening this week in New York City Michael Haneke's "Amour" is described as a masterpiece about love and aging and, yes, caring for someone who is ill. I have been following this film since is Paris debut and now it is near. This is a movie for all of us because it is about aging--and few of us will skip that..and it is about caring for someone we love--few of us will skip that.

Here at the link below is the New York Times review:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/movies/michael-hanekes-amour-with-jean-louis-trintignant.html?

Art and Death: Holding Our Own

I watched this extraordinary documentary with three good friends this week. I had seen this film in a class on Caring for the Grieving last year and I was so moved I had to have my own copy. I tracked it down and made a movie night. It’s not everybody’s idea of a chick flick—but really, in a sense this is the ultimate love story and a heartbreaker that makes you happy to cry a lot.

Holding Our Own is about fabric artist Deidre Scherer who creates  “paintings” from her real life sketches of people who are dying. Her work is extraordinarily beautiful and her craft amazing in the ways she creates super-realism in portraiture using layers of fabric. But the other beauty is her belief in and her philosophy of the role that death plays in life.

The second focus of this film is the Hallowell Chorus in Burlington Vermont. Hallowell is a group of amateur and professional singers who volunteer to sing at deathbeds and in hospitals with people who are near death. Again, no, it doesn’t sound like fun but in fact this is stunning.

Watching this extraordinary film with close friends led us to an intimate conversation about our beliefs in life after death, and what we might like for our funerals and our desires for the way we’d like to experience the end of our lives.

Holding Our Own was produced by Paul Newman and it’s available from Netflix or can be purchased on Amazon. It’s a fabulous intersection of creativity and death—which is to say generation-- or life and death.

50/50

Maybe like me you put off watching the 2011 comedy/drama 50/50. I didn’t watch it for a year. I assumed it was either a sappy, tearjerker about cancer, or a gross, expletive-deleted, Seth Rogan 20-somehting boy story. I didn’t know, and didn’t realize, it was both.

Watched it last night and we laughed and cried. Yeah, John too. I am glad I didn’t see this at the movies with friends though. Not because the cancer scenes cut so close to home but because there is one boy-to-boy discussion of girl friends and sex acts that made me blush. If I saw this movie on a first date I’d leave the theater in sunglasses and go right home.

But, we’re not dating, we’re married, and we've done that sex act many times, and I’m laughing as I type this, Ok it’s funny.

And yes, Seth Rogan is mostly a pig but, a pig with a heart for friendship and some insight into how guy pals talk and fight and love each other. Yeah, the movie is a love story and –spoiler alert—the love object is not Anna Kendrick.

I would put 50/50 in my top three cancer movies. Check it out. But not on a first date.

Stranger Than Fiction

Last night was a great Friday night at home. I stirred up Cajun steak tips and sweet potato fries. Almond Joy ice cream for dessert. And then we watched my all-time favorite movie: “Stranger Than Fiction”. I love, love, love this movie. I watch it at least twice a year and it’s new every time.

“Stranger than Fiction” has the most amazing cast: Emma Thompson, Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah and Dustin Hoffman and it’s about everything: literature and art, careers and creativity, and especially about death and love and taxes. It has one of the funniest pictures of a stuck writer I have ever seen and one of the greatest, most poignant love stories. And it’s about death. Facing death, accepting death. (That’s why I need to talk about it here.)

This movie makes me believe in art, in love, in courage, and in the sweet strangeness of human beings. And in cookies.

Guys: this movie sets the bar for how a man can win a woman’s heart with a gift. And ladies: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s handbag --and her arms, oh, her arms. Makes you want to do pushups over and over and over.

Stranger Than Fiction. It’s on Netflix.

The Big C

We are watching the first season of the TV series “The Big C” starring Laura Linney. (Last seen as a family caregiver in “The Savages” with Philip Seymour Hoffman”). The Big C is wonderful, witty and thought provoking. And it hits every stereotype about cancer: the smarmy platitudes, the saccharine support group, the “cancer is a gift” message and the “your anger caused your cancer” craziness. Linney just explores and pushes back in the most wholly human and imperfect ways.

The premise of the show is great: What would you do if you were diagnosed with a late stage cancer and you knew and your doctor knew but there was some delay—weeks? months?--before anyone else knew. In that cocoon of time and spiritual space who would you become? What  would that secret knowledge let you try out before the expectations of “cancer patient” surround you?

The C Word

Well, yes, there is that C-Word. The one that is awful and horrible and grounds for divorce—(unless it is said in bed in the absolutely right moment of passion, heat and disinhibition.)

And then there is the other C-Word: Cancer. The one we talk about here.

There is a new Showtime TV series premièring August 16th referring cleverly to both of those words.

“The C Word” will star Laura Linney (John Adams, The Truman Show) as a suburban Mom with Metastatic Melanoma.

“If someone told you that you had two years to live, how would you change your life?” is what “C Word” producer Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City)-- herself a cancer survivor—wants to ask viewers of this comedy series to consider.

Red Light Night

I’ve completed my Scarlett Letter month. I re-read Hawthorne and watched the public TV made for movie recreation, and then, reluctantly decided that I had to see the Demi Moore version that was a movie a few years ago. So we rented Demi’s version—the title caption says, “Loosely based on Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter”. And dear God it is loose and base.

The movie stars Demi as Hester and so she is spunky and feminist and bold from day one. Her strength does not come from her trials and tests per Hawthorne but instead she’s a fancy dress puritan who boldly flirts with the naked swimmer of a minister and she wows him with her beauty, physical strength and sharp mind. They both love to read! Wow! And yes it’s true that Demi took the liberty of changing one of America’s greatest novels to give it a happy ending—no death for the Reverend Mister Dimsdale—instead he gets to start a new life with hottie Hester and adorable baby Pearl.

But now I know—and you know –don’t rent this movie.

The fun part of our night was the rest of the scarlet theme. We included red foods, red lingerie and red light bulbs in the living room. At least Demi/Hester wasn’t the only one having great elicit sex.