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Sunday, August 12, 2007

Foreign film weekend

I was alone this weekend, and for the most part, I spent it catch up on office work. But as an indulgence, I decided to splurge on foreign films. I chose four, and the helpful woman behind the video store counter told me there was a special - 6 for $15, so I picked up 2 Hollywood films to round it out. So, two long days later, I found that I’d chosen 6 winners:

The Story of the Weeping Camel (National Geographic) - a lovely story. No sex, violence, “action” - just a straight-up story about how a camel that rejects its colt is brought round by a violin serenade. English subtitles.
Water (Deepa Mehta) - Marvellous film about the lives of widows in India in the 1930s, about the time Ghandi is released from prison. I watched the subtitled version before I realized that the second DVD had an English version - not dubbed, but filmed simultaneously in English. I think I preferred watching it in Hindi.
Talk to Her (Aldo Almodovar) - Twisted plot but presented, as Almodovar generally does, in a human and interesting way.
Free Zone (Amos Gitai) - Great film about an Israeli, a Jordanian, and a Jewish-American ... but wait, the Israeli is from Europe via Auschwitz, the Jordanian is a Palestinian Israeli, and the American comes to Israel to be told that she’s not really Jewish. And when they end up in the Free Zone to conduct some business, they seem compelled to play out an age-old dynamic. Excellent acting.
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch) - Of all the movies, I thought this one a big gimmicky - it could have been more. But I enjoyed it as a film to watch while multitasking - it was perfect to turn my attention to while waiting for content to upload a very slow website.
Proof (John Madden) - Excellent film. It was disconcerting, but that was the point, being taken on the same ride as the protagonist. It would have been even better if the ending hadn’t been quite so formulaic, but it is a Hollywood film, so I wasn’t expecting anything that deviated from the norm.

Seeing has how nothing has been on television for weeks, this has been a welcome treat. Now it’s nose to the grindstone again.

Monday, August 06, 2007

About that disability

If I remember back to about 1997 or 1998, trying to take a ferry to Vancouver Island, my grandson in a stroller, hiking it from the overflow parking lot to the ferry terminal, inflaming my arthritic hip so badly that all I could do during my “vacation time” was to lie on the sofa and take painkillers, and try to hobble around after my grandson to supervise him. At that point, a friend of mine suggested that I apply for a handicap sticker for my car because, “after all, that’s who they were meant for.” He meant well, but the effect was like having a glass of cold water in the face; it never occurred to me to take on the label of “disabled.” First of all, my experience with labels were that they were thrust upon people, as unwanted mantles to be worn, the seeds of racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism - you name the “ism”, someone will find a way to invent one and use it as a weapon. Second, I didn’t feel “dis” anything. I had a job, I was raising my grandson, I was paying taxes - all those things that made me a functioning member of society. The two concepts didn’t emotionally go hand-in-hand, although intellectually I knew the difference - I worked in an agency that advocated for legal rights of those who’d been wronged.

Walking the Pride Parade route this weekend made me realize that if I don’t take care of my other hip, it will soon go, too; I had to get out my handicap sticker today to cope with a not-so-big box parking lot. But at least my disability is well-defined, unlike the late 1990s when life stressed my system into food sensitivities that gave me an array of symptoms that were confused for fybromyalgia. Having a disability as amorphous as fibromyalgia or other less-understood chronic illnesses does tend to bring out the whacky comments, though, from people who “know.” Chronic Holiday is a wry look at some of the things that people with disabilities get to hear, ad nauseum.