Day 190: Detachment

A substitute teacher tries to stress to his class the importance of thinking for themselves. And a failing school is plagued by loneliness and struggle.

Each of the characters feel alone and undervalued and they’re aware that it’s unlikely to change. Meredith (Betty Kaye) is a student and she’s quite creative but her father dismisses her photography and wants her to work harder and lose weight. After a few of Henry’s (Adrien Brody) lessons, she wants to open up to him and share how she’s feeling. But she can’t and she eventually kills herself at school. There’s no one she can talk to and she can see no way out of how she’s feeling. The film uses parents’ night to hammer home the absence of parents in the lives of the children; not a single parent shows up for it. If they’re not willing to make the effort to hear about how their children are doing in school then they’re clearly failing to take an interest at home. Teachers can only do so much, children need their parents to play an active role in their lives.  

Henry meets a very young prostitute and he lets her stay in his house. He cares for her without being condescending and she comes to be less aggressive and more trusting. They buy each other gifts and make breakfast for each other and they grow quite comfortable together. But Henry has difficulty forming any kind of attachment and he knows she can’t stay with him forever, so he phones a foster care facility to come and take her away. She’s devastated, as is he, but it seems like it was good for her.

In class, Henry stresses that the kids have to think for themselves and to form their own opinions. To rely only on what you’ve been told for your understanding of the world is to become insignificant. You have to question everything and read as much as you can. The teachers aren’t to blame for what goes on in schools, they’re just doing the best they can with what they’ve got. There needs to be more freedom for expression so that the kids can find out who they are. I understand there has to be some rigidity in the curriculum but if you make every student learn the same things in the same way with no allowances for individuality then you end up with children who have no interest in what they’re learning. And in fact, I’d say they’re not learning anything, they’re just memorising enough to pass exams. There’s too much importance placed on grades and not enough placed on learning, so all the joy goes out of it and that’s why you end up with so many young people killing themselves over exams.

Really liked this film and how it highlighted the loneliness and insignificance felt (at some time or another) by everyone.

8/10

Day 75: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

An inventor who causes chaos in his town pretty much constantly thinks he has stumbled upon the creation that will save the people of his town from a life of only eating sardines; he’s going to turn water into food. And he manages it but the machine goes a bit haywire and ends up in the clouds where it takes in massive amounts of water and therefore produces massive amounts of food. It rains food, basically. That is the gist.

Flint is a great character. I love that he keeps on making new things even if they don’t always turn out how he expected. He’s left alone by the people in the town because they think he’s a nerd (which is apparently a bad thing? I never understood the nerd hate) and because his inventions usually spell trouble. So he’s left pretty much to himself which gives him all the time in the world to be awesome. Then along comes a lady who understands his inventions and is just as excited about them as he is and he’s instantly smitten (you can tell because his eyes go all huge and sparkly, that is the universal sign, I’m sure I don’t need to point that out to you). Her favourite food is Jell-O so he makes her a giant Jell-O mountain and carves out the inside so it’s got a piano and a huge chute and it is just excellent, I’d have proposed immediately if I was her. Is there any way to talk about someone you like without sounding like a teenager? “I ‘like you’ like you”? There is no adult way to say it, is there? I guess you can just say ‘I like you’ but then if you’re friends already, it’s like, of course you like me, we’re chums, no? We need a new way to say it. “I like you as more than a friend” is not a good way to say it, it sounds so weird to me. Suggestions!

The amount of parental love in this film is just great. You hear snippets of conversations between parents and their kids and they’re telling them they love them. And the town cop is always telling his son he loves him, and then he saves him from the foodalanche like a champ. Then there’s obviously the heartfelt moment between the proud father who didn’t always believe in his son and the son who thought his father never supported him. Ugh, it’s so sweet.

Right, so, I know it’s a stupid film but I actually loved it. The only cop in town has chest hair that moves when there’s a problem, I mean, come on! There was science, and jokes, and romance, and food, I don’t really know what else you could want, friends.

7/10

Day 55: The Godfather

The head of one of the major Mafia families in New York, Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), is shot after he refuses to help another of the families sell drugs. His sons attempt to deal with this and there’s quite a lot of murdering. Eventually, Michael (Al Pacino), steps up and restores a sense of balance, becoming the new Don Corleone.

The change in Michael’s character was brilliant. He starts off as this sweet guy who doesn’t want to get involved in his family’s business but as people come to rely on him he ends up being a total badass and sets everything right. I didn’t like how he was just replacing the women in his life though; first he’s with Kay (Diane Keaton) then he has to go away so he shacks up with Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli), then she dies and he goes back to Kay again. Women aren’t interchangeable, I don’t like the idea of just dropping one and picking up another. Kay isn’t even a good choice for what you’d need in a wife when you’re head of a mafia family, she asks way too many questions. And then he had to lie to her at the end, I just can’t see it going well. I can't believe I'm saying Diane Keaton isn't a good choice for a wife, my brain must be broken.

When Carlo (Gianni Russo) was beating Connie (Talia Shire), I was so angry I can’t even describe it properly. I’m not even sure I understand how he thought he would get away with hitting her. She is the daughter of Vito Corleone, are you just out of your idiot mind? My notes just basically consist of lots of swearing and rage for any scene that he is in. I’m glad Sonny (James Caan) beat him but he should’ve murdered him, I was just hollering at the screen for him to kill him during that fight scene. Then when Michael was letting him be part of the family, I was confused for a while but then I realised what was going to happen and I literally could not wait. So glad they strangled him, shooting would’ve been too quick. I’m the least violent person but I just can’t handle it when people think it’s acceptable to hit their spouses.

I was dreading watching this film (a gangster film that’s 3 hours long? Aah) but it turns out that I actually loved it. So brilliant, I never once checked to see how long was left because I wasn’t sure I even wanted it to end. The feeling of family running through each relationship was lovely, and the suspicion of almost everyone kept everything nice and tense. Loved it.

9/10