UP and away (in memory of my grandmother)
today is the anniversary of my maternal grandmother’s death on 7/21/2003. she was a loving mother of 8 children, 20+ grandchildren, and now a number of great-grandchildren i can’t even count. many of us grandchildren lived with my grandparents for various reasons for different lengths of time, and i lived with them in Harbor Springs, MI the spring-summer of 1991, when i was 14 and finishing the 9th grade. it was a rather tumultuous period of my family life, but Grandma was always there and having that safe place to go to was invaluable. i can’t write much more about her and the memories now because it’s too hard. we all miss her dearly.
when i saw the Pixar movie “UP” for the first time, i cried during the first montage of the old man and his wife buying their house, growing old together, and the feeling of loss when she died and he was left alone to ponder their lives and things they’d never done, including her lifelong dream to go to South America, and his fight to save his home – the place that held all of the memories. it reminded me so much of my grandparents, and of my grandfather, who still lives on there in that quiet little town. unfortunately, the farm house they built together and lived in for decades burned down shortly after i moved to California and my grandfather lives somehwhere else now. but in my mind, that is always where they lived, and i know that house was full of memories and dreams.
part of the reason i am going to South America (on August 2) is because of that film. i want to grow old with Jay and not have any regrets about what we dreamed of and didn’t do. i want to make sure that we don’t put aside things like travel until it’s too late. i know in the film the wife was perfectly happy with the life they ended up living, and i know the same is true for my grandmother, who loved her home and her children and her church and her small town. i don’t even know if she ever really wanted to travel, but i do, and if i have a fear of anything – it’s regret, and so this trip i’m taking is, in part, in honor of the memory of my grandmother, bless her soul.
Filed in autobiographical | Tagged with family, pixar, wanderlust | Comment (0)the princess tales continue
earlier this year i read “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister“, a retelling of the Cinderella story that is extremely well written and engaging and not at all what you think it’s going to be (same author as the very popular story of the Wizard of Oz witches, Wicked. i liked this one much more than Wicked.). i learned a lot about 17th century life in Holland and Dutch art, for example. honestly, i don’t read too many books these days, as i find it harder and harder to find novels that hold my attention. i start a lot of books. i don’t finish many. this one, i read pretty much cover to cover. i kept meaning to recommend the book here, and it wasn’t until i came across two items about princess stories yesterday that i remembered. again: highly recommended.
so the two princess sites: first, “Fallen Princesses“, a photo essay:
As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm’s stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney’s perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.
then, NPR points out that Pixar’s 13th movie finally has a female heroine, and guess what. SHE’S A PRINCESS.
Of the ten movies you’ve released so far, ten of them have central characters who are boys or men, or who are anthropomorphized animals or robots or bugs who are voiced by and imagined as boys or men. These movies feature women and girls to varying degrees — The Incredibles, in particular — but the story is never “a girl and the things that happen to her,” the way it’s “a boy and what happens to him.”
I want so much for girls to have a movie like Up that is about someone they can dress up as for Halloween, as Anika Noni Rose said about starring as the voice in The Princess And The Frog. Not a girl who’s a side dish, but a girl who’s the big draw.
And I’d really, really like it not to be a princess….don’t the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn’t you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?
the whole “princess” phenomenon is one of the reasons i can’t stand Disney to no end, and i think it’s sad that Pixar has followed its leader in this regard. not only that, but the premise is sort of vomit-inducing:
In Scotland, Merida (Reese Witherspoon), a member of the royal family, decides to give up her family name for her dream of becoming an archer. Merida makes reckless choices, resulting in the destruction of her father’s kingdom and her mother’s life. Merida then struggles to set things right.
so the girl decides to break out of her assigned gender role, which results in everything getting all fucked up?
oh, Pixar. you almost had me at UP.
Filed in tv, books and movies | Tagged with pixar | Comment (0)and there are storms we cannot weather
i just watched the video of susan boyle singing ‘i dreamed a dream’ again for her final performance for britain’s got talent, and it brought a tear to my eye. i mean, the song always does, for some fairly inattributable reason to me – i think it’s the “and there are dreams that cannot be” line, it gets me every.fucking. time. – and sung by the likes of ms. boyle, well, there you have it. and then after all that she needs to go to the hospital for stress and exhaustion? shit, i haven’t suffered the slings and arrows of overnight international fame, and i often seriously think i could use a little medically-induced R&R. poor woman.
anyway, it reminded me that i went to see the new Disney/Pixar movie “UP” in 3D a week or so ago, and i want to recommend it to everyone. it’s one of the extremely few movies that have ever made me cry in a theatre. and by extremely few i mean that i can recall 3: Fahrenheit 9/11, Finding Neverland, and now UP. many of my friends (girlfriends, mostly) where shocked to hear this when i stated it. “you’ve only cried at 3 movies?! how can that be?!” well, the thing is, fiction doesn’t usually do it for me. i guess i don’t have much of suspension of disbelief. i don’t get carried away by characters. most of the movies that have really moved me to tears have been documentaries, about real people who suffered real things. The Real Dirt on Farmer John almost made me cry, and so have many other docus. but i don’t ACTUALLY cry very often. same with weddings. eyes get a little misty? yes. actually cry? no.
but UP? well, i don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but in classic Disney form, a parental figure dies in the first 10 minutes, setting the audience up with all kinds of sympathy and/or empathy for the main character who has to overcome some kind of adversity. and since, in this case, the character reminded me SO MUCH of my grandfather, well, there were waterworks.
besides that personal connection (which i’m sure i share with millions of others; that wasn’t a coincidence), it was just a great film overall.
But what thrills me the most about Pixar movies is that the filmmakers take very simple themes and riff off them, like fine jazz musicians, revealing new and sublime layers of complexity. The basic message of Up has to do with how the pursuit of our dreams may seem important (after all, that’s one of the things America is all about, isn’t it?), but it’s our relationships with other people that shape and contribute to our lives in sometimes mysterious and mostly unquantifiable ways that even the fulfillment of a lifelong wish cannot match. Cram all that into the image of a man carrying his house (his American dream) on his back, while you draw parallels to the current recession, and you’ve got heady stuff for a cartoon.
and it was heady. so heady i would feel weird taking a child less than 10 or 11 to it, because it seemed almost too mature. maybe they’d be distracted by the amazing 3D effects and not really think too much about the actual story, but i think it’d be a tough to explain to them if they did ask that yes, sometimes, there are dreams that cannot be, but if you live your life right, maybe that’s ok.
Filed in tv, books and movies | Tagged with pixar | Comment (0)
