A brief update
Hey all, it’s been a while.
The reason for that is simple: grief is overwhelming in ways nothing prepares you for. I’m at a place where my day to day life approaches normality, but my energy to watch and write about movies isn’t quite back yet. I’ve been pouring the energy to write that I do have into a new manuscript. I don’t know where this project will take me, but hopefully, it’s the lift I’ll need to get back to tending to this blog, which has been such a wonderful place for me these last five years.
In the meantime, keep watching and loving movies. I’d love to have lots to talk about when I return.
Four weeks later
Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns you somehow.
I thought I understood this song before. I had no idea.
Sufjan Stevens released “Carrie and Lowell” last year and I went through the usual cycles of album appreciation. Repeated listens, changing rankings of favorite songs, long considerations of where it ranked in his repertoire, and finally moving on, returning to it once in a while but trying not to listen to it ad nauseum.
Carrie and Lowell feels new now, because before now I could not begin to understand it. The above lyrics used to strike me as poetic. Now I realize: like the best poetry, it is a description of real feeling, not a metaphor. I always assumed grief would be a single swing into despair. It’s so much more complex than anything I’ve been through. Since my mom died, some days go by and I realize I haven’t felt terrible and that feels triumphant. Car rides, dinner, and the routine of finding my mom every morning to greet her, to seek her out to say goodnight, are when I most notice she’s gone. That, and every single time I look forward to something and realize that I’m not sharing it with her.
Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow.
There are no stages of grief. If I didn’t know that was a myth already my experiences would have confirmed that anyway. Clearly delineated stages are far too neat to resemble life. At times “The Only Thing” is the only song- not just on this album, but ever sung- that feels true. But the disorienting haze of grief inevitably dissipates. I move on. And I will return to it, and then move on again. Grief has no stages. It’s not a path, but a whirlpool.
Should I tear my eyes out now, before I see too much?
Should I tear my arms out now, I wanna feel your touch
My mom died four weeks ago today. “Surrounded by her family” is how the obituary reported it. Obituaries typically attempt to paint death as something resembling idyllic. But the truth is, the last few hours of my mom’s life will haunt me forever. There is no softening that trauma; there is only not allowing it to paralyze me. The most vivid and difficult part of grieving for me has been realizing that there are no true comforts when someone you love dies. The best I can do is move on, and to be there for my family.
There’s another Sufjan Stevens song I’ve been thinking about and listening to a lot lately. It has nothing to do with death. It has everything to do with memory. The horror of the memories of my mom’s death are countered only by memories of her life. “The Only Thing” is the truth of grief. “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades” is the truth of memory.
Yes, it’s about children at a summer camp and first love and heartbreaking nostalgia and it has nothing to do with anything in my life. In the past I’ve always loved it for its sheer beauty.
But it’s the one song right now that truly comforts me. It is about feelings and moments and fragments of time long ago, so vividly rendered that I can place myself in them. And that is what I cling to. Someday the dark cloud, still so thick after four weeks, will dissipate enough that I will feel again the sunlight on the days I walked with my mom to the Dairy Queen in San Diego as a child, the evenings spent listening to her stories of growing up in the Philippines, of sharing our love of stories and telling them as I followed her footsteps into journalism school. Someday I will tell those stories myself, and if I can find a shred of the clarity and honesty that this song has, I can make sure my mom’s story continues to be told. Perhaps not today. Four weeks later, the sadness still sits heavily. The trauma, the horror, are still raw. But someday. Never trust anyone who says words don’t matter. Words have the ability to bring memories to life like nothing else. And my memories of my mom are what I have to hold onto right now. Someday, I will do them justice. That is my source of light.
Mother’s Day
You never gave up. You always fought. It was second nature to you. You had no time for complaining. Complaining was wasting time that could be spent problem solving. You never, ever stopped looking for solutions.
You moved to the United States from The Philippines in a way that you absolutely would: getting off of your college chorus tour bus and simply not getting back on.
You nearly left us 11 years ago. Your doctors said you should have. There wasn’t much explanation for your surviving a stroke, pneumonia, and heart failure. But you survived. Your entire body conspired against your spirit, your life, and you fought back and won. When you could talk again you told us: you weren’t going to leave us, not then. Not while you could fight.
You always fought for your children. You listened to us, trusted us because you raised us to be honest and worthy of your belief. As I grew up I was astonished by how many people didn’t have that. With you it was never a question: if we needed someone to fight at our side, you were always first in line.
I know you fought until the end. I know that if you could have fought your illness any more, you would have. I know that your soul has an eternity’s fight in it. Eventually, cancer would no longer let your body keep up. But you never stopped stopped fighting. You let us know that, in your final words. Cancer didn’t win, mama. It could never conquer your spirit. Your spirit will continue to fight for our family, for us, and through us. We will continue your fight for you.
Happy mother’s day, Mama. I love you. Never stop fighting.
She’s gone
Those two words still don’t feel like reality. My mom Kathleen passed away almost precisely 48 hours ago. In the time since I have broken down sobbing dozens of times. And yet I read those two words and I still can’t quite grasp what they mean.
I know the rawness of her loss will linger for a while yet. There will be times when I can’t hold in my grief and I will stop in my tracks and allow my sadness to overwhelm me for a moment. I know that there are going to be moments of sadness that I can’t yet predict, as I go forward in my life and realize all the little things about her that I took for granted. I’ve begun to have some of those. I recently began work on a book. As I started it, before my mom died, I thought how much I was looking forward to reading her passages as I progressed with my writing. As much as I can continue my writing it in her honor, I know I will catch myself looking forward to reading to her in the future tense, to seeing her smile, hearing her laugh, feeling the love of writing that she shared with me.
I know that there will be times in years to come that I will miss her unbearably, in ways that I can’t begin to predict in the present rawness. A wound hurts differently than a scar.
I am more acutely aware than ever how my mom shaped who I am today. Once upon a time, her blog was something I occasionally read with a smile, a space that I let her have to herself to reminisce and reflect on her remarkable life. Now it is precious to me. It is the closest visible link I have to her love of writing and mine. I read her stories here and realize how much I owe to her, as a writer, and most of all, as a person.
My mom loved people and loved their stories. In the aftermath of her death, I have been stunned by the massive outpouring of support and love from so many people around the world. The morning after she died, I was awoken by a bombardment of texts and Facebook messages. Cataloguing every tribute to her, many from people I didn’t know personally, has been a nearly full-time effort. I’m not surprised, of course. I was aware that she kept regular correspondence with old friends, many of whom she joyfully reconnected with on the internet. The stunned feeling stems from the scope of it. I knew she was a remarkable woman. I didn’t realize just how many people knew that as well as I did.
She’s gone. I know that. She lives on in many ways. I think everyone who knew her can agree with that statement no matter what their belief system. As a Catholic, I believe her spirit lives on in a literal sense. As her son, I burn with a need to carry on her legacy of loving people and telling stories. She, herself, blazed a path that traveled the world and connected deeply with more people than I can comprehend. No matter your take on the aftermath of death, if you knew my mom, she lives on with you in some fashion. I can’t believe my mom is gone. Part of that is grief. But part of that is also the knowledge that she lived too fully to ever really leave.
My mom Kathleen, my dad David, and me at my grad school graduation
My mom and me when I was newborn. I had life-threatening health issues as a baby; the joy on her face here reflects that I had just been given an all-clear and could soon go home. She was finishing college at the time and took me with her to her classes. She got me started on my love of learning, reading, and writing at an early age.
Quick and cheap last second Oscar predictions
Sorry for lack of posts these last few weeks, readers. I have a lot of half-finished pieces in my drafts that I haven’t quite figured out. More posts coming soon.
Before all that, I’d be remiss not to post some Oscar predictions. I couldn’t find a window today to get to that until now.
Best Picture: The Revenant
Best Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The Revenant
Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Best Actress: Brie Larson, Room
Best Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Best Original Screenplay: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight
Best Adapted Screenplay: Adam McKay and Charles Randolph, The Big Short
Best Animated Feature: Inside Out
Best Foreign Language Film: Son of Saul
Best Documentary Feature: Amy
Best Documentary Short: A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
Best Live Action Short: Ave Maria
Best Animated Short: World of Tomorrow
Best Original Score: Ennio Morricone, The Hateful Eight
Best Original Song: “Til it Happens to You”, from The Hunting Ground, Lady Gaga and Diane Warren
Best Sound Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Sound Mixing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Production Design: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Cinematography: The Revenant
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Costume Design: Carol
Best Film Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Visual Effects: The Revenant
Praise
This afternoon, my grandmother Patricia Joaquin Burkhalter died. Lila, as I call her. She was 84.
Born and raised in the Philippines, she survived World War II on the run with her family from Japanese soldiers. She raised 8 children. I am one of her 14 grandchildren. She introduced me to classic movies as a child. I would spend New Year’s Eve watching old movies AMC and TCM, trying and failing to stay up until midnight. To this day, when she was around, it felt like home.
She was my standard for resilience. I took for granted her ability to overcome anything. She went quietly today, and I can only assume that it was precisely her time.
I’m listening to one of my favorite musical cast albums right now, In the Heights. In my review of Brooklyn, I praised it for managing to encapsulate so universal an experience in such a specific immigrants’ story. In the Heights does much the same thing in its story of a Latin American community in Washington Heights. I need these stories in my life. They help me feel closer to my Filipino heritage, and remind me that I wouldn’t be here if my grandmother and mother hadn’t been bold and courageous. In the second act on In the Heights, the protagonist’s grandmother dies suddenly. The entire cast joins him in an impromptu hymn. Alabanza, they sing. Praise.
Lila is an honorific invented by my older cousin Catie when she was a toddler. She was the first child in my generation. My grandmother wanted to be called abuelita, a holdover of the Spanish influence in Filipino culture. Catie mustered “lila”, just one letter off of the traditional Filipino word for grandmother: “Lola”. It was sort of perfect.
Lila beat cancer at 60. Barely two years later, her husband, my grandfather, died of pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed on Good Friday and died on Easter. It’s been 23 years since he died. I thought about that a lot today. It was their wedding anniversary. Such a long time to be apart.
Lila lived through the death of her daughter, my auntie Lizzie, of mesothelioma. In the last year, two of her siblings died. When my mom was wavering between life and death a little more than 10 years ago, thanks to hospital-acquired pneumonia after a mild stroke, Lila was there, making sure my family held things together until my mom got better. She had an endless resilience, reinforced by a wicked sense of humor. You have that when your next-door neighbor is killed by a bomb when you’re 12 years old, when you go to college in Minnesota after growing up on the Equator, when you marry a white man in Georgia in the 1950s. She always survived. Over the past few years she’d had a number of frightening medical episodes. She always pulled through. This morning, my mom told me she was checked into the hospital for low blood pressure. It sounded routine. “Oh, okay,” I said, nonchalantly. Compared to past events, it didn’t sound like something to worry about. An hour and a half later, she was gone.
There’s only so much fight in every person. Lila had enough for three lifetimes. Earlier today, my sister posted a picture of Facebook of Lila as a young woman, staring into a canyon in the South Dakota Badlands. It’s the image I want to hold in my head of my grandmother, from a time before I ever saw her and yet so undeniably reminiscent the person I will remember.
Alabanza, Lila. I love you.
Movie review roulette: selection #3
Here’s my running list of films, compiled at 3 in the morning yesterday, aiming for as much variety as I could cognitively achieve at that hour.
Three Colors: Red
Raise the Red Lantern
Ratatouille
The Princess Bride
Children of Men
Yojimbo
Being John Malkovich
Millennium Actress
La Dolce Vita
Rear Window
Jaws
Arsenic and Old Lace
Casablanca
Au Revoir Les Enfants
The Tree of Life
I stuck them in a list randomizer, and its choice was:
So that write-up will be going up next week.
New to the pool (replacing Three Colors: Red): Dark City
Oscar Predictions Part 2: The Techs and short film
The tech and short film Oscars can be an odd bunch to predict. They usually are hell for me, as I try to deduce some formula based on Oscar history plus the wind speed in Palo Alto on the night of the Oscars divided by the circumference of Harvey Weinstein’s ego. Suffice it to say, I never get them right. Last year, my sister predicted them based on gut feeling right before each of them was handed out, and nailed almost every pick. For the sake of this blog, I’m doing the same thing (except film editing, which is a tad easier to predict)
Also, I’m going to hold off on predicting Animated short until I get the chance to see a few of them this week. As before, predicted winners in italics.
Film Editing
The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball
Whichever subtle nuances the Film Editing branch bases their eclectic nominees off of tends to be forgotten by the time the actual Oscar get handed out. This award tends to go to the most obviously edited film nominated. Sometimes that’s a good thing (The Bourne Ultimatum) and sometimes not (Chicago). This year, that, and Hugo editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s three-Oscar pedigree, makes the choice pretty easy. Hugo might very well sweep the tech and art categories this year.
Sound Mixing
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
War Horse
It felt right.
Sound Editing
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
War Horse
Why not.
Visual Effects
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
Historically, when Best Picture nominees are present here, they always win. Since Star Wars began the trend in 1977 (the year the award was christened with its current name), 16 Best Picture nominees have been nominated for Visual Effects as well. The only three not to win (Apollo 13, Master and Commander, and District 9) lost to other Best Picture contenders (Babe, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Avatar). I’m not betting on Hugo to break the trend, not without good reason.
Documentary Short
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
God is the Bigger Elvis
Incident in New Baghdad
Saving Face
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
Not to sound cynical, but the Academy seems to love documentary shorts about people dealing with terrifying medical problems. Not to minimize the horror of the subjects of Saving Face have dealt with, or the efforts of the heroic surgeon it profiles. I’m simply saying that I knew what I’d predict to win pretty quickly as I read the nominees’ synopses.
Short Film (Live Action)
Pentecost
Raju
The Shore
Time Freak
Tuba Atlantic
Knowing nothing about the nominees but what their trailers on the Oscar website told me, this one looked the most interesting. That’s better than what I usually go on (darts).
Tomorrow: Screenplay, Animation, and Foreign Language predictions
Oscar Predictions Part 1: The Pretty Categories
With the Oscars now five days away, I’m unveiling my predictions in batches. I’m starting with some of my favorite, most overlooked categories of the night: the art categories. Or as I, and some of my friends at Culturish call them, the Pretties. I’m a sucker for a movie that looks good, so these actually matter to me quite a bit, more than Best Picture most years (if only because my favorite film in a given year tends not to win, as is the case with most people I imagine). Anyway, on to the predix (predicted winners in italics)
Art Direction
The Artist
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
This category leans lush. All things being equal, that’d favor the gothic, battle-torn Hogwarts, but the Harry Potter series has yet to win an Oscar. It can be hard to tell when Hugo’s sets end and special effects begin, but that didn’t hurt Avatar or Alice in Wonderland. It’s literally the most visible film in the batch. That should be more than enough.
Costume Design
Anonymous
The Artist
Hugo
Jane Eyre
W.E.
Presence in other Oscar categories matters little in the category. Past winners include The Young Victoria, The Duchess, Marie Antoinette, and Restoration. Period films dominate the category, and the older the setting the better. Eight of the last 13 winners have been set in the 19th century or earlier.While The Artist and Hugo are both threats, I’m going with Jane Eyre and its designer Michael O’Connor, who won previously for The Duchess.
Cinematography
The Artist
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
The Tree of Life
War Horse
My favorite Oscar category. This is the one time I’ll let my heart dictate my decision. Emmanuel Lubezki should win this handily. Hell, he deserved to win already for The New World and Children of Men, and probably for A Little Princess as well. I pray he doesn’t become another Roger Deakins. The Tree of Life is one of the immaculately shot films I’ve ever seen, but I suspect War Horse with its countless pretty canvases and vistas is more attuned to the Academy’s taste. Hugo, for that matter, might ride the Avatar “it’s shiny, so let’s throw these awards at it and call it a day” rail to a win. Still, my fingers are crossed.
Makeup
Albert Nobbs
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
The Iron Lady
Unless the Academy is deeply impressed by Meryl Streep’s overbite, I expect the Harry Potter series finally gets an Oscar here. I know they seem to hate Harry for some odd reason but come on. They made The Wolfman an Oscar winner last year. I doubt their resentment goes so far as to reward that film and deny Harry Potter here out of spite.
Tomorrow: The tech and short film awards
The Sixth Station 