THE BIG SICK

THE BIG SICK is the story of comedian and comic actor Kumail Nanjani and his wife Emily V. Gordon before they were married and wrote this film together—how they met and the rest of it—the plot points of which are probably familiar to everybody by now since the story has been exposed throughout social and cultural media for weeks if not months.

Pakistani-American boy falls for "white" "American" girl (with seemingly no heritage other than "white"—somehow all the "white" ethnicities I grew up dealing with the realities of, including my own Irish-American one, have become blended into the simple category "white" these days) and the clash of cultures and backgrounds creates the story.

It's a good movie, an often pleasantly funny and moving romantic comedy that makes some good points about love crossing boundaries that in the end are always, or almost always, arbitrary anyway, no matter the traumas of history. Nanjani is a modest star who plays himself unselfconsciously, and Zoe Kazan plays Emily with zest and charm, winning our hearts the way she does Nanjani's.

All the actors are good, with lots of real comics doing stand up and off stage jokes that had me laughing pretty hard at times, and the actors playing each of the lead character's parents did as well. It's worth seeing.

MAUDIE

Sally Hawkins is one of the best film actors ever, for my taste, so MAUDIE was a must see for me, and I wasn't disappointed. She gives her greatest screen performance yet. And Ethan Hawke (who I met on location for WHITE FANG when he was still a very young actor, and he was as nice and as smart as you would expect) has always been a good actor but has only gotten better as he's aged, and his performance in MAUDIE may well be his best yet.

The story is based on the real life relationship between the Canadian "folk artist" Maude Lewis and her mate Everett. It's a compellingly intimate, and challenging, story, and director Aisling Walsh and writer Sherry White shape it so cleanly and crisply that not a move or a frame or a word is wasted. A no frills take on a woman's spirit overcoming obstacles most of us would be defeated by, but not Maudie.

Seeing MAUDIE on the big screen helped convey the soul and artistry and power of what would normally be called a "small film"—especially the contrasting of vast Canadian vistas with a cramped domestic set up that emphasizes the subtleties of the differences rather than the obvious. At least it did for me.

This is an amazingly tough and forceful film, despite the tender precision of the details and nuances of a difficult relationship, and personalities, that creates scenes of such poignancy I actually held my breath a few times out of sheer awe at the actors' artistry.

So, obviously, I highly recommend seeing it.

R.I.P. LIU XIAOBO

Known as "the Mandela of China" by some, Liu Xiaobo is the first Nobel Laureate to die in government custody since the days of Nazi Germany. Poetry is still powerful enough to frighten totalitarian power structures into jailing the more rebellious ones.

(It's true he was arrested for advocating for human rights, but among all those arrested with him, it was he alone who was sentenced to a decade in prison, and there is no doubt it was because they feared his stature as a poet.)

Long live Liu Xiabo's spirit, poetry, and purpose!

PS: I'm not crazy about the English translations of his poetry so far but here's a pretty good excerpt from his poem "Experiencing Death":

Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing


(And PPS: here's the Times obit)

R.I.P.

I come from a big family and a bigger, obviously, clan. So I was around death from my earliest days. I had a brother, John, who died as an infant not long before I was born, and my mother would talk to me about him when I was little. I went to wakes and funerals for some of my father's brothers when I was a boy. And was in my Irish immigrant grandfather's bedroom when he exhaled his last breath, which did indeed rattle.

I was in the hospital room with my mother when she passed. I had friends die and enemies, all three of my brothers who made it to adulthood are long gone and one of my two sisters, my father for many years too. But the hardest thing is when a friend loses a child, as happened recently to one of the most caring, funny, decent guys I know, and his loving and kind wife.

I've known lots of people who lost infants. I remember when my nephew Tommy died as an infant when I was still young, and now, at seventy-five, I can still picture him sitting in his high chair. I can think of other children of friends and of my larger non-blood family who have lost children still in their earliest years, or preadolescence, or teens, or young adulthood.

There is no more devastating feeling, I've experienced, then hearing the news of the death of someone's child. Even the children of strangers. And because we're so wired into the rest of the world, it's hard to get through a day without hearing of the death of someone's child.

But going today to see this friend, whose eleven-year-old son has left the physical plane, and being in the presence of the aftermath of such a tragedy, and seeing the impact it is having on him and his wife, is enough to make one, or at least me, not just cry and shout why but to long to understand how a parent survives such a blow.

The miracle is that they do, sometimes broken, still hurting, but going on, caring for other children, and other parents who have had these heartbreaking experiences, and in some ways all of us, who think: If they can go on, so can I with my much less tragic challenges. And always remembering "Love never dies."

AND THIS

ANOTHER OLD FAVORITE QUOTE

"Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity."  —Antonio Porchia (from VOICES, translated by W. S. Merwin)

ONE NIGHT ONLY/ALEC BALDWIN

Great tribute to an old friend tonight on Spike TV. A roast of Alec but really a recognition of the many sides of the man and the artist. We lived together in the 1980s in Santa Monica (he was kind enough to use his per diem from a movie job to help me pay the rent while he stayed in my daughter's room who was away at college) and he was and is one of the funniest persons I ever hung out with. He was and is a master impressionist and an obviously amazing actor, and he was and is a loyal friend. They could have done a couple of shows with even more accolades to his talent and revelations of unknown-to-most-folks civic and charitable contributions. But this was a good start.