"Good grief"/ "A total buzzkill" (Happy Death Day 2U)/ "Overcharged for an item at checkout? You might be able to get it for free"

 Dec. 30, 2016 "Good grief": Today I found this article by Julia Cooper in the Globe and Mail.  This article is about movies with grief in the storylines.  There is psychology too:

Death appears and twitches on screen like a familiar face. It is nothing new at all. Moviegoers are as used to the splotch and spatter of blood as they are with a high-speed car chase or a teen slamming a locker with flourish.

From the campy kills of Quentin Tarantino films to the gun-slinging swashbucklers of The Magnificent Seven, to the other countless action films that debuted this year only to prove the misspent largesse of their production budgets, death and dying is everywhere you look. But what about the emotions that come with needing to process all of that blood? Where does the work of mourning happen?

An image of grief can be a bit harder to find than a sanguine puddle, a barrage of bullets or your run-of-the-mill decapitation. There are notable exceptions (consider: Beaches, Ghost, Stepmom, Still Alice), but they are in the box-office minority. 

That is, until the latest crop of Oscar hopefuls slid into theatres and affronted audiences with grief as never before.

Perhaps it’s the end of an eight-year Obama term that has filmmakers the world over burrowing into a collective sense of melancholy, or perhaps it is the median age of Hollywood film directors that has them inching closer to their own deaths and beginning to consider grief’s onset.

Whatever the cause may be, the emotional labour of mourning has emerged as a prominent, looming cloud over such recent movies as Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty (although this last film, starring Will Smith, is the glossiest and almost certainly not in consideration for any awards race). 

In each their own way, these films give us a snapshot not of death, but of grief in all its ugliness and in its ordinariness.

A storyline that follows grief doesn’t offer the same plot twist or narrative fireworks that death does, but this lack of action often requires performances and scripts good enough to translate the psychological nuance of loss.

Take, for instance, Natalie Portman as the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy, barely blinking, with a blanched complexion and bags under her sad eyes as she fumbles through the fog of her grief following her husband’s assassination that took place on her very lap.

What Larrain captures with such élan is the double bind that Kennedy found herself in: an entourage of politicians and attachés whispering in one ear to “Take all the time you need,” while mumbling in the other, “The public wants a show of grief.”

In one stunning scene, Larrain takes the viewer under Jackie’s black mourning veil as it flutters in the wind.

The camera frames Portman’s face from below as JFK’s funeral procession marches through the streets of D.C. and she is left half on display, half in the wind-whipped shadow of her immense grief.

While Jackie allows its audience to witness the unravelling of a rational mind caused by grief, Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea prefers a brooding approach to mourning.

Set in the dreary winter of coastal Massachusetts, Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler, an unlikeable deadbeat (which, keeping in mind the two sexual-harassment charges laid by separate women against Affleck in 2010 and settled out of court, might not have been too big a stretch for the actor).

Lee can’t bounce back from the tragedy he has caused and is stuck living in the aftermath. “I can’t beat it,” Lee confesses to his nephew – he cannot be resilient in the face of grief and culpability and he remains a broken man.

Bucking cinematic tradition, Manchester by the Sea refuses a more conventional narrative of resilience and redemption that Hollywood movies so love. Sometimes there is no overcoming loss; there can be no peace.

Grieving is laborious, painstaking and, most of all, endless work. Processing loss is the hardest kind of emotional labour we as humans are consigned to do – it is isolating, it is alienating and we don’t have many models for how to do it – and yet it can also bring us closer to the person we have loved. 

In their absence, the mourner can remember, commemorate and even obsess over the love they’ve lost. After all, it’s the vanishing of love that makes grief so painful.

Villeneuve’s alien-friendly Arrival bends time and warps reality in order to get to this feeling of a disappearing love and to understand grief as not always linear.

With Amy Adams at the film’s centre, trying to translate the earthly fears of humans alongside the foreignness of our cosmos, Arrival gives us Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence. This is the idea that, given the choice, you would live your life all over again from the very start without changing a thing.

Even the mistakes, even the embarrassments, even the painful parts – you would do it again, unflinchingly. To love despite disease and despite death’s eventual arrival is what makes us, as Adams’s character intuitively knows as she holds up a sign to the visiting aliens, “HUMAN.”

Rounding out the mournful movies that have ushered in the final months of 2016 is Collateral Beauty. The film’s premise follows a sort of A Christmas Carol setup with Smith (as sombre and grieving Howard) being met not by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, but by Love (Keira Knightley), Time (Jacob Latimore) and Death (Helen Mirren). 

The surprising thing about this sleek and sometimes hokey movie is that it gets a lot right about grief. Critics have already lambasted Collateral Beauty as one of the year’s worst, but what it taps into through the character of Howard is the divorcing from reality that can happen in the throes of mourning.

Howard doesn’t just see the world differently, but as emptier, and as unworthy of investing or participating in. In short, he experiences life as a death sentence.

The realest thing about this movie is the other characters’ inability to relate to Howard in his grief. Their need to fix his sorrow for their own convenience rings true in a modern world in which one is expected to get over death quickly and return to the work force as soon as possible.

All of these movies were written, optioned and in production long before the year of their release – but their timing feels almost uncanny. Although the films themselves remain mostly grounded in white, middle-class existence, they try to tap into a more relatable experience: mourning.

In a year that witnessed the deaths of David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen and Zsa Zsa Gabor; the American election of a triumphantly racist real estate developer; the siege of Aleppo; recurring terrorist attacks in cities across the planet; and the repeated killings of black men by police, these movies speak to a shared, mournful spirit. It seems apt that grief is trending in cinema.

The works of Larrain, Lonergan, Villeneuve and Frankel don’t quite manage to capture the cultural zeitgeist by the scruff (white men with film financing are not the sole arbiters of culture, after all) but they begin to by honing in on the one thing that we will all come to know intimately, sooner or later.

In 2016, Hollywood took time to grieve

Nov. 18, 2021 My opinion: Here's another #Metoo moment before Oct. 2017 and the downfall of Harvey Weinstein: 

Set in the dreary winter of coastal Massachusetts, Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler, an unlikeable deadbeat (which, keeping in mind the two sexual-harassment charges laid by separate women against Affleck in 2010 and settled out of court, might not have been too big a stretch for the actor).

Feb. 15, 2019 "A total buzzkill": Today I found this movie review by Justine Smith in the Edmonton Journal: 

Happy Death Day 2U, the sequel to Happy Death Day, is much like its predecessor — except that this time, it’s a Groundhog Day-inspired comedy-slasher in which a young woman is forced to relive her death over and over again.

It also acts as a sci-fi romance and melodrama and includes elements from classic heist films while throwing in a Breaking Bad reference.

It might be tempting to suggest the returning filmmakers from Happy Death Day embraced a kitchen-sink mentality, but if one had been available, there’s little doubt faucets and a basin would have made their way into the movie, too.

Still, the cold open is unexpectedly good.

It sets an irreverent comedic tone, prepping the audience for a winky self-parody that pokes fun at the silliness of the first movie.

If Happy Death Day 2U had maintained that momentum beyond its first 20 minutes, it could have been a great film. It does not. And it is not. The movie draws on the strange details of the first film to craft a parallel story of a science experiment gone wrong.

Upgrading Ryan (Phi Vu) from awkward roommate to mad scientist is particularly ingenious.

Whereas Ryan has room to grow and change, there is a sense Tree (Jessica Rothe) already fulfilled her mission in the first movie.

Briefly, it feels like we are actually destined for something new and exciting.

But by the film’s midpoint, we are back to Tree’s birthday hangover with more quantum physics thrown in. Like the first movie, the premise promises endless possibilities and variations, but delivers mostly conventional and predictable beats.

Rather than test the limits of the universe, the film is satisfied with playing things safe.

This includes ramming a whole bunch of schmaltzy melodrama about love and family down our throats that would feel heavy handed in a Nicholas Sparks novel.

In the final act especially, there are endless cries and confessions. For a movie that otherwise feels designed for people who play Grand Theft Auto, these attempts at sincerity feel out of place.

The very premise is that an archetypical “mean girl” is killed over and over again.

Any momentum the film has going for it is dashed as characters are forced to make a multiverse version of Sophie’s Choice.

The characters work because they’re mean, funny and dumb.

Attempting to make them fully rounded not only dashes the movie’s rebel attitude and comic appeal, but it’s also ruinous for the film’s narrative credibility.

My opinion: I don't really like horror movies.  I do like this movie review.  This part stood out to me the most: 

"Briefly, it feels like we are actually destined for something new and exciting.

But by the film’s midpoint, we are back to Tree’s birthday hangover with more quantum physics thrown in. Like the first movie, the premise promises endless possibilities and variations, but delivers mostly conventional and predictable beats."

Nov. 30, 2021 Mid- season TV shows 2022:

The Cleaning Lady: I remember reading this show in spring and am looking forward to this:

"A whip-smart Cambodian doctor comes to the U.S. for a medical treatment to save her son, but when the system fails and pushes her into hiding, she uses her cunning and intelligence to fight back, breaking the law for all the right reasons."

The Cleaning Lady (TV Series 2021– ) - IMDb

The Endgame: This show is going to come out on Feb. 21, 2022 on NBC (look at the US magazine article link below): 

"A sexy and twisted heist show on how far some people will go for love, justice and the most valuable commodity in the world: truth."

Untitled Nick Wootton/Jake Coburn Project (TV Series) - IMDb

Midseason TV Premiere Dates 2022: Full Schedule (usmagazine.com)

This week's theme is about movies:

"Joker is just a symbol"/ "Labeouf looks back at troubled dad with sympathy"

Tracy's blog: "Joker is just a symbol"/ "Labeouf looks back at troubled dad with sympathy" (badcb.blogspot.com)

"Savage satire morphs into a profound morality lesson"/ "'Joker' and 'Parasite' tap into fascination with anti-hero"

Tracy's blog: "Savage satire morphs into a profound morality lesson"/ "'Joker' and 'Parasite' tap into fascination with anti-hero" (badcb.blogspot.com)

My week:

Nov. 26, 2021 "Everything We Know About the ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist’ Revival Movie": Today I found this article by Yana Grebenyuk on US Weekly:

"‘Tis the season! After an overwhelming effort to bring Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist back following an exciting second season, Roku announced that they would be releasing a Christmas special for the hit show."

‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist’ Revival Movie: Everything We Know (usmagazine.com)

Fantasy Island: There is also going to be a 2 part Christmas episode in December.

Nov. 28, 2021 "Attention shoppers: Overcharged for an item at checkout? You might be able to get it for free": Today I found this article by Sophia Harris.  This is in time for the holiday season. Here is an excerpt:

Planning to spend big this holiday season after last year's lockdowns? It pays to check your bill before leaving the store. 

Not only might you catch a mistake, but if you were overcharged for an item, you may also be able to get it for free or at a discount.

More than 7,000 retail stores in Canada — including many large chains — are members of the voluntary Scanner Price Accuracy Code.

Managed by the Retail Council of Canada (RCC), the code mandates that when shoppers are overcharged for certain items scanned at checkout, they're entitled to compensation.

"I love it," said Roxanne Joshua, of Newcastle, Ont., who learned about the code more than a decade ago. Over the years, she says she's been compensated about 150 times after catching pricing errors at the till.

"It's great for a couple of reasons," she said. "One, obviously, I get free items or discounted items. But two, it also keeps the stores accountable."

How to get your discount

Canada's Price Accuracy Scanner Code has been around for nearly two decades, however, many shoppers still don't know about it. The code was created in 2002 by retail organizations to foster consumer confidence as stores began to adopt scanning devices at checkout.

"There was an element of lack of trust of machines reading barcodes," said Greg Wilson, the Retail Council of Canada's director of government relations in B.C.

On Monday, Karen Mellow, of Leamington, Ont., purchased a Roku streaming device at Best Buy. The advertised price in the store was $44.99, she said, however, when the cashier scanned the item at checkout, she was charged $64.99. 

When Mellow pointed out the error and mentioned the code — of which the store is a member — she said she was charged the lower price and got the $10 discount.

"Instead of $65, I paid $35," she said. "[The code], to me, ensures a retailer is trying to be honest."

The code applies to participating retailers across the country, except in Quebec, which has provincial laws covering retail pricing errors. 

Here's how the code works: When a customer alerts the retailer that the price of an item scanned at checkout (or self-checkout) is higher than the advertised price, participating retailers must honour the lower price. 

On top of that, if the item costs more than $10, the customer gets a $10 discount. If the item costs less than $10, the customer gets the item for free. 

Customers who have unresolved disputes involving the code can contact the code's complaints line at: 1-866-499-4599. 

Attention shoppers: Overcharged for an item at checkout? You might be able to get it for free | CBC News

Nov. 29, 2021 "Nameless boy remains unclaimed days after being found on streets, Baltimore cops say": Today I found this article by Mark Price on Yahoo news:

A child who doesn’t know his name or age remains unclaimed in Baltimore, days after being found wandering the streets at 3 a.m., police say. The Baltimore Police Department posted photos of the boy on social media, in hopes someone might recognize him or know his family. As of Monday, Nov. 29, the boy’s story remains a mystery. Authorities said they are treating the case as a “lost child” investigation. “On November 27, at approximately 3:00 a.m ... officers responded to 2000 Kennedy Avenue to investigate child neglect,” police said in a news release.

“When officers arrived at the location, they spoke with a concerned citizen who stated that he saw a 3 to a 4-year-old child walking in the street by himself,” police said. “The child doesn’t know where he lives or his name.”

The boy was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital and found “to be in good condition.” His current location was not revealed. The 2000 block of Kennedy Avenue is a largely residential area on the city’s east side. An investigation has been launched by the city’s Department of Social Services “to identify the child’s guardian or parents,” police said.

The police department’s Facebook post has received more than 13,000 reactions, shares and comments as of the morning of Nov. 29, including a lot of speculation on the fate of the boy’s parents. “When you hear things like this we’re so quick to pass judgment,” one woman wrote. “The first thing I’m thinking is (are) the parents even okay. ... For this child to go this long and no one has reported the baby... maybe ... they were harmed or hurt.”

Nameless boy found on street at 3 am, Baltimore cops say | Centre Daily Times

Nov. 30, 2021 Leo opinion:

Émilie Latour-Laforce from Saint-Hubert, QC, would like to know:

Are you entertaining this year for the holiday season?

I will be a guest

40.94% (1497)

I'm not doing anything this year

27.78% (1016)

I'm hosting

26.33% (963)

I'm working

4.95% (181)

My opinion: I'm not doing anything this year.  

Dec. 2, 2021 A Million Little Things: I saw the fall finale "The Things We Keep Inside" and there was warning of mature subject matter.  The ep was about suicide and at the end gave America's suicide hotline.

Canada's suicide prevention hotline:

833-456-4566

Lifeline (suicidepreventionlifeline.org)

Coincidentally, one of my friends posted on Facebook that she attempted to commit suicide by taking a lot of pills and went to the hospital.  We all posted encouraging comments. 

A convenience store cashier gives free food and cash to people: I shared this on my Facebook profile page:

This is a very heartwarming video where Adriano Gatto gives free food, drinks, smartphones, and cash to homeless people. Aww...

The song in the background is "Falling" by Trevor Daniel.

Adriano GattoArte bellezza e fantasia 😘😘😘

September 30  · 

Hope Mission: This is a good charity that helps homeless people.

Hope Mission

The Mustard Seed:

Homepage | Mustard Seed (theseed.ca)

Edmonton Free Stuff Facebook group: This is a private group.  A lot of people offer free stuff like clothes, furniture, and food.  Others ask for food, clothes, and other items.

"Savage satire morphs into a profound morality lesson"/ "'Joker' and 'Parasite' tap into fascination with anti-hero"

 Oct. 18, 2019 "Savage satire morphs into a profound morality lesson": Today I found this movie review by Peter Howell in the Star Metro:

(4 out of 4)

In his notes at Cannes for his Palme d’or winner “Parasite,” writer/ director Bong Joon-ho described his film as “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.”

That’s one way of looking at it, although the movie tests the definitions of comedy and tragedy, not to mention the film’s title as well.

The South Korean auteur has never seen a genre he didn’t want to mess with: “Okja” wasn’t just a children’s tale, “Snowpiercer” wasn’t just sci- fi and “The Host” wasn’t just a monster movie, to name a few of his earlier works. Bong’s films all contain a deep empathy for the underclass and an appreciation of the essential absurdity of life.

So it is with “Parasite,” his seventh feature and grandest mind-screw yet, which he cowrote with Han Jin-won, his assistant director for “Okja.”

“Parasite” begins as social satire, as a family of grifters in a South Korean metropolis connive to blend their lives with those of an unsuspecting rich family whom they’ve infiltrated.

The film becomes something else entirely, as satire morphs into a savage morality lesson that recalls the home invasion tales of Michael Haneke and Jordan Peele.

Aimless and jobless Ki-taek ( Song Kang- ho) lives in a crowded basement with his wife Chung- sook ( Chang Hyae-jin) and their two children: son Ki-woo (Choi Wooshik) and daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam), both in their early 20s.

When not dozing, Kim Kitaek schemes of easy ways to make money or exploit opportunities, such as the “free” Wi-fi his family cadges from surrounding homes and shops. His family are every bit as wily as he is. In these respects, “Parasite” bears resemblance to “Shoplifters,” the 2018 Palme d’or winner by Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda.

That’s only for a moment, though. Opportunity comes knocking — and so does fate — when a friend helps Ki-woo get a lucrative gig tutoring high schooler Da-hye ( Jung Ziso), the daughter of wealthy global IT company honcho Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun).

The lessons are inside the Park family’s luxurious mansion, which has a large picture window that looks onto a gorgeous garden. The Kim family has a window view, too, but it looks out into a garbage-strewn street.

Da-hye takes a shine to Kiwoo. So does her live- wire younger brother Da- song ( Jung Hyeon-jun) and their mother Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). Mr. Park is mostly distracted, just happy that his family is happy. But things started to get a little crowded.

Ki-woo coolly finagles ways to draw his father, mother and sister into the lives and home of the Parks, without reckoning on how this might affect the family and other people in their orbit.

That’s probably all you should know going into “Parasite,” which takes turns that are unforeseen even by people who know Bong’s work well. There’s talk in the film about the need or desire to have a plan, but no advance thought can prepare for what happens here.

Watch how Bong uses signs and symbols to increase tension and intrigue. The story makes creative use of Morse code, a sacred stone and a reference to human scent that hints of disdain and judgment.

Bong wants to flood our senses as he pricks our consciences. He succeeds, and then some.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/starmetro-toronto/20191018/281706911453188


Nov. 22, 2019 "'Joker' and 'Parasite' tap into fascination with anti-hero": 

Today I found this movie review by Peter Howell in the Star Metro.  There is some psychology in this article because Kwame McKenzie, the CEO of the Wellesley Institute, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and director of health equity at the Centre of Addiction and Mental Health is quoted here:

Donald Trump and his family and friends saw the hit movie “Joker” last weekend in the White House’s private screening room.

The U.S. president joins the many people worldwide who have flocked to Todd Phillips’ dark portrait of a clownish villain — played by Joaquin Phoenix and drawn from Batman lore — who is driven to homicide and mayhem by mental illness, poverty and social scorn.

“Joker” just struck the $1-billion (U.S.) gong for global box office receipts, a rare achievement and the first “R”-rated movie to do so. Awards speculation is full throttle and a sequel is now planned.

Trump reportedly loved the film, but on what basis? He didn’t tweet or otherwise utter a reaction. Was he drawn to the drama of Phoenix’s searing performance? Or was he just revelling in a form of poverty porn, munching popcorn as an entitled member of the 1% minority, as he gawked at the lowest member of the other 99%?

It’s a question we could also ask of ourselves. After “Joker” debuted at the Venice Film Festival in August, where it won the fest’s Golden Lion for best film, it was followed by mixed reviews that included much critical hand-wringing about how it might inspire copycat killings.

“Does ‘Joker’ Have a Problematic Punchline?” read a story in trade journal The Hollywood Reporter. There were also reports of theatres beefing up security, fearing a repeat of the 2012 slaughter of Colorado moviegoers by a lone gunman at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“Joker” opened without incident, and it has left behind its pre-release controversy as it has motored on to make movie history and fatten the bank accounts of director Phillips and studio Warner Bros

There’s still a question about the film’s message, however — and it’s not the one about copycat gun violence that everybody assumed.

The question is this: Do we really care about the desperate state of the poor and mentally unwell, or do we just like to gawk at them?

Joker poses the question himself, in a bloody scene in the film where he’s doing a standup routine on the TV talk show of Murray Franklin, played by Robert De Niro.

“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a system that abandons him and treats him like trash?” he asks.

“I'll tell you what you get. You get what you f--king deserve!”

Joker is the alter ego of Arthur Fleck, who dons the killer-clown disguise to express his anger at being shunned by society and kicked to the curb by Gotham City, which has just cut funding for the medication and counselling he needs to control his outbursts. The city is in thrall to Thomas Wayne, a Trump-like billionaire running for mayor.

The anti-social theme of “Joker,” and also its popular appeal, has been mirrored in another film, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” a bleak South Korean class satire which similarly won major film-festival laurels before arriving in theatres. It took the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It has since taken in $14.5 million (U.S.) at the North American box office, making it the most successful foreign-language Palme winner ever to hit these shores. It’s also deemed to be an Oscar contender. 

“Parasite” tells the story of an impoverished family, led by a man named Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), whose four members live as grifters in a big city. They conspire to infiltrate the lives of a wealthy family led by tech czar Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun), by getting hired on as tutors, a driver and a maid, but their scheme has explosively unforeseen complications.

The disparity between rich and poor is keenly felt, especially in a scene where Mr. Park, unaware that Ki-taek is hiding nearby, wrinkles his nose in disgust at the acrid smell of poverty he’s noticed on the rare occasion when he deigns to use the subway.

“For people of different circumstances to live together in the same space is not easy,” director Bong says in his notes on the film.

“It is increasingly the case in this sad world that humane relationships based on co-existence or symbiosis cannot hold, and one group is pushed into a parasitic relationship with another. In the midst of such a world, who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites?”

Who, indeed? But do we instinctively do this when we rush to see films like “Joker” and “Parasite,” eager to watch underclass misery?

I put this question to Kwame McKenzie, the CEO of the Wellesley Institute, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and director of health equity at the Centre of Addiction and Mental Health. He’s an internationally recognized expert on the social causes of illness and suicide and has also advised the Ontario and federal governments on poverty reduction.

He sees parallels between “Joker” and “Parasite” but also differences.

“In both ways, I think, it is possible to say they are trying to have a deeper understanding of marginalized people and their motivations,” McKenzie said via email.

“However, whereas ‘Parasite’ seems truly transformational — the film seems to normalize the lying and cheating of the protagonists within their sub-cultural context — ‘Joker’ is in some ways trying to explain why he became a ‘bad guy’ (with a hint of blaming society).”

McKenzie speculates that we are drawn to watch such films — and also such TV shows as “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones” and “Mindhunter” — because “we are becoming more fascinated with the psychology of the anti-hero.

“It is possible for me to imagine that people will be interested by revenge fantasy and alter egos that succeed by playing to their own rules because for many life is becoming harder, jobs more precarious, social justice seems difficult to come by and governments peddle a diet of fear to divide us and ease their chances of re-election.”

The desperate characters of “Joker” and “Parasite” would surely agree. But should the rest of us, including Donald Trump, just continue to munch our popcorn and enjoy their misery?

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/opinion/2019/11/22/do-joker-and-parasite-spur-empathy-for-desperate-people-or-are-we-and-donald-trump-just-gawking.html

My opinion: I won't be watching Parasite or Joker because they look kind of depressing to watch.