Two rather dark films

It is winter and although the weather is somewhat on the warm side it is still cold. After seeing two rather dark films over the past week, I am more than ready for springtime!

The first was “The Assistant,” starring the young actress Julia Garner as Jane, a new staffer to a film company executive. The entire movie is, quite literally, dark. The lighting in the offices seems rather dim, the furnishings stark, and most of the characters dress in dark, solid colors. The film takes place over just one day in that office as Jane goes through her various low-level tasks. Although we learn that she was an honor student at Northwestern University, she has taken this job in the hopes of eventually becoming a film producer. We never actually see her boss, but we do hear him and he is clearly quite a miserable fellow. When a new young woman is brought onto the staff, it is clear that she is there as his newest young conquest.

In one especially difficult scene, Jane meets with a human resources person to voice concerns over her boss’s relationship with that new staffer. The conversation quickly seems to derail as the HR representative makes it clear to Jane that she might not wish to file a complaint if she wants to keep her job.

All of the performances, particularly Julia Garner, were excellent, but it is not an easy story to watch.

The second film we saw was “Ordinary Love,” starring Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville, both British actors in their 60s, but with the latter of which I was not familiar. I suppose it would be fair to say that we were interested in this film because we had seen previews and knew it traced a year in the life of a couple, Tom and Joan, following her diagnosis with breast cancer. After positive lymph nodes were found during the lumpectomy, she opted to undergo a double mastectomy followed by a rather grueling regimen of chemotherapy.

Of course, as a Professor of Radiation Oncology in a department that treats many patients with breast cancer, Barry was a bit puzzled by the way this was presented. As many of you probably know from experience with yourself or a close friend of family member, there are two routes for treatment of breast cancer: mastectomy (surgical removal of the breast and surrounding lymph nodes, if cancer is found in them) or lumpectomy (removal of the tumor) followed by radiation treatment to the whole breast and the axillary lymph nodes. Either might be followed by chemotherapy. Since Joan had already had the lumpectomy, Barry wondered why the possibility of following this with radiotherapy was not considered. But, as I reminded Barry, this was not a medical school course but a dramatic movie, so they might fudge the details a bit.

The film then followed the couple through the year of treatment. There were a number of references to a daughter who had died as an adult, although it was not clear just when or under what circumstances that happened. Tom and Joan seem to be oddly cut off from the rest of the world, but it is not clear whether that was simply to focus the tale on this couple or to tell us something about them. Eventually, the stress of the ordeal does begin to take its toll, but by the end you do feel that their marriage will survive this ordeal.

There were definitely some moments that felt all too familiar to us, but the main thing that struck me was how isolated the couple seemed. I can understand how that could happen, because most people simply do not want to burden their friends with this particular misery. All I could think about was how truly blessed we are to have our wonderful daughters and sons-in-law and our six amazing grandchildren. I do often feel badly that I have not been able to do as much for them or spend as much time with them as I would like, but just knowing they are there has added an infinite joy to our lives that simply cannot be found anywhere else.

I told Barry that the next movie we see needs to be a comedy!

Love,

Rebecca

West Side Story

“Hair Love,” the animated short film about which I wrote in my last post, won the Oscar for best animated short! Great choice. Truth be told we had not seen most of the full-length films nominated, so I cannot really say too much about the selections made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its 92^nd year.

Moving from movies to Broadway shows, we went last Sunday afternoon to see “West Side Story,” which is currently in previews and scheduled to open on February 20^th.

I was surprised at just how familiar I was with the music, although I certainly never saw the play on Broadway and I cannot recall having seen the movie version, which won ten academy awards in 1961:

·         Academy Award for Best Picture – Robert Wise, producer

·         Academy Award for Best Director – Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

·         Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – George Chakiris

·         Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – Rita Moreno

·         Academy Award for Best Art Direction – Set Decoration (Color) – Victor A. Gangelin and Boris Leven

·         Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Color) – Daniel L. Fapp

·         Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Color) – Irene Sharaff

·         Academy Award for Best Film Editing – Thomas Stanford

·         Academy Award for Best Original Score – Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, Irwin Kostal, and Sid Ramin

·         Academy Award for Best Sound – Fred Hynes (Todd-AO SSD), and Gordon E. Sawyer (Samuel Goldwyn SSD)

After seeing the Broadway production, we spent a couple of evenings watching the 1961 film, which Barry had recorded some years ago but we had never watched. The current Broadway production is a rather darker and quite differently staged version than the film and presumably than the original Broadway play. Much of the wonderful music is still there, although notably the song “I Feel Pretty” was not included.

The current Broadway production is most interesting in its combination of live actors in front of a large screen that projects the actors juxtaposed with street scenes of the West Side of New York through the use of a person walking around the stage with a camera. This is an expanded version of the technique that was used in the recent Broadway production of “Network,” which we saw and I wrote about in May of last year. Through use of this technique, you could see the gang members with their tattoos and scars blown up to enormous proportions, depicting them as menacingly aggressive from the start of the show. This is very different from the 1961 film, in which they were portrayed as basically good-hearted “juvenile delinquents.”

One thing we found extremely disconcerting was the number of young children in the audience. This is not one of your typically joyful Broadway musicals by a long shot. There were definitely children in that audience who were far too young to be exposed to the violence embodied in these characters; the current production depicts what was clearly an attempted sexual assault that is quite a bit more explicit than the movie version. Perhaps some of the younger children, who appeared to be no more than six or seven years old, did not even realize what they were watching. But I have to wonder what their parents were thinking and how many of them had at least a few sleepless nights after their Sunday afternoon at at the Broadway Theater.

This production has also been in the news because of a controversy involving the actor who plays Bernardo, Amar Ramasar. Ramasar was dismissed from the New York City Ballet in 2018 after a female dancer filed a civil lawsuit against the company and other defendants alleging that Ramasar and two other male dancers exchanged explicit photos of her and other female dancers without their consent. Protesters have called for “West Side Story” to fire Ramasar over these allegations. In fact, there was a note in the playbill indicating that the role of Bernardo was being played by a different actor, but I do not know whether that was related to this issue.

Have a great weekend!

Love,

Rebecca

Animated Short Film Oscar Nominations 2020

One of our favorite movie theaters in New York is The Landmark at 57 West. They show a particularly compelling set of films. Here are the films currently showing:

1917

Little Women

Knives Out

Jojo Rabbit

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts - Animation

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts - Live Action

Pain and Glory

Incitement

We went to see the 2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animation. Some of them were rather strange and difficult to understand, but we especially enjoyed three in particular.

HAIR LOVE

Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver

An African-American father learns to do his daughter’s hair for the first time.

This film tells a gripping tale, presumably based on a true story, but it is not until the final moments that you find out what is really going on. The full movie (about 7 minutes) is here.

MEMORABLE

Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre

Painter Louis and his wife Michelle are experiencing strange events. Their world seems to be mutating. Slowly, furniture, objects, and people lose their realism. They are “destructuring,” sometimes disintegrating.

I am not sure I precisely understood this film the way it is described here. It seemed to me that it was more about a husband sinking into dementia.

SISTER

Siqi Song

A man remembers his childhood and growing up with an annoying little sister in 1990s China. How would his life have been if things had gone differently?

This film also has a rather surprising, albeit sad, ending when you realize what story is really being told.

If you do have a chance to see any of these, animated shorts are really a fascinating art form.

Love,

Rebecca

A shock

I ended my last post, just a few short days ago, with the words “We all need to laugh as much as we can.” Never could I have imagined just how prescient those words would be.

Although a message had gone out just a few hours after the end of Shabbat, I did not come downstairs and check my e-mail until mid-Sunday morning, and was shocked to see the following:

Bereavement Notice- Rebbetzin Annette Wolk z"l

With profound shock and deep sadness, we regret to inform you of the passing of our founding Rebbetzin, Rebbetzin Annette Wolk z"l, beloved wife of our Rabbi Emeritus Rabbi Howard Wolk, mother of Elie (Amy) Wolk, Michal (Rabbi Eric) Olshin, Yo (Lani) Wolk, Rabbi Akiva (Dr. Rachel) Wolk, Gavi (Talia) Wolk and Shimi Wolk, grandmother of Ruby, Sydney and Sammy Wolk and many other grandchildren and legendary Limmudei Kodesh teacher for decades at the Akiba/Yavneh Academy of Dallas

Note: z”l is the English shorthand for the Hebrew phrase זיכרונה לברכה , which means “may her memory be a blessing.”

At first glance, not quite absorbing what I had read, I assumed it was Rabbi Walk’s mother who had died, but then I quickly and shockingly realized that the announcement was about Rabbi Wolk’s wife.

I was able to get in touch with an old friend from our Dallas days to confirm this terrible event. Apparently, Annette z"l had died in her sleep on Friday night. She was staying at the home of a friend while Rabbi Wolk was in New York waiting to leave for Israel after Shabbat. I cannot even imagine the horror that the friends with whom she was spending the weekend must have felt when they awoke on Shabbat morning to find her gone.

As it is Jewish tradition to bury as quickly as possible, the funeral took place on Sunday. Fortunately, another friend sent me the link and we were able to watch as Rabbi Wolk and each of their children spoke about their wife and mother.

We spent our first five years as a married couple on the University of Rochester campus. From 1978-1980, Barry was a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory and we lived in Patchogue, a small town in eastern Long Island. During those years, Rabbi Wolk led the small orthodox synagogue in Patchogue. There were only a handful of young couples in the community, so we were all very close, and I remember spending quite a lot of time with Annette z"l and the rabbi, who lived in the same garden apartment complex as did we. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship, we moved to Dallas, Texas where Barry was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas. Just weeks before we left Dallas to move to Sharon in 1986, Rabbi Wolk called us to tell us he was coming to Dallas for an interview, and he was offered and took that post. He stayed there for some years before moving on to a position in West Hartford, Connecticut, but after a few years there he returned to Dallas and the Wolks made that their permanent home.

In my memories of Annette z”l, she was always smiling. I took a look at her Facebook page and found hundreds of pictures of her radiant smile. I have to believe that somewhere she is still smiling at her husband, children, and grandchildren and everyone who had the pleasure and honor of knowing her.

Her memory will be a blessing, as was the life she lived.

Love,

Rebecca