Film
STRONGER
Flashbacks & Triggers
Remembering Jeff Bauman’s PTSD
PTSD always follows trauma. No traumatized person is “strong” enough to escape it. Yet, for complicated reasons, Post Traumatic Stress symptoms are too frequently off everyone’s radar, particularly the radar of the one suffering. The reasons are both straight out of the DSM-V and very individual. Jeff Bauman’s story in David Gordon Green’s powerful new film, Stronger, with Jake Gyllenhaal’s deeply moving performance as Jeff and Tatiana Maslany’s complex and engagingly real portrayal of his girlfriend, Erin Hurley, is a good place to start understanding what happens after trauma.
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LEO HURWITZ
A Pioneer In The Beginnings Of
America’s Documentary Film Part 1
Leo Hurwitz’s Family Influences
Leo Hurwitz (1909 – 1991), a pioneer documentary filmmaker, was part of a small group who founded America’s documentary film. Notably, Leo and his colleagues invented the social documentary form. According to his son, Tom Hurwitz, Leo’s films “exemplified a new way of making films about the real world. And about ideas that help us…
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MOTHER!
Narcissism? Yes, But, Mother Earth?
… I Don’t Think So.
The environment? Really? Narcissism is more like it. I’m sorry, Darren Aronofsky. Not in a million years would I think Jennifer Lawrence’s character in Mother! is supposed to be Mother Earth, if I hadn’t read an interview with you. But, even so, she isn’t exactly an earthy type of woman. Bountifully giving to everyone and then having…
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WIND RIVER
Confusing Gap in FBI Agent
Jane Banner’s Character
Where does Wind River’s Jane Banner, FBI Agent, (Elizabeth Olson) fit into the mix of marginalized Native Americans and a white Game Tracker (Jeremy Renner) with a significant loss of his own? And, who was she anyway, coming out of nowhere in all her conspicuously dissimilar blonde beauty? We never really know. The film, with…
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DEMOLITION
Tearing Down Walls
Against Grief
Director Jean-Marc Vallee’s film, Demolition, stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Davis Mitchell, a man who tragically loses his wife in a sudden car accident. If you haven’t seen the film, Demolition is a must-watch to understand the subtleties of this post and, more so, the intricacies of Davis’ reaction. This is a film about a man’s…
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ELLE
Trauma & Perversion
Where Does Triumph Come In?
Trauma. We know it. We experience it. We’re left with its aftermath – when Director Paul Verhoeven’s “noir thriller,” Elle, careens to its conclusion. Leaving the theater, my mind was spinning. As Verhoeven says, the film has: “an enormous amount of ambiguity, gaps that are in the narrative on purpose for the audience to fill in.”…
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