Steel Magnolias (1989)

Steel Magnolias is the ultimate chick flick about a bunch of women who are sometimes friends and sometimes frenemies who share each others’ lives down somewhere in the state of Louisiana. It opens on the wedding day of a girl named Shelby who has some kind of complicated diabetic condition that’s made her somewhat frail. Despite her mother’s and doctor’s misgivings on the subject, she is determined to have a baby with her husband-to-be. Meanwhile, a hair-dresser named Truvy has recently hired a quirky and mysterious weird chick who fits in as the outsider of the group for most of the film. Shelby invites them along with several other friends to the wedding and we watch them all grow older together over the next 2 in-movie years or so.

This film is remarkable in that it doesn’t really tell a singular story from one central character’s point of view. Rather, it opts to just let the audience peer into the daily lives of a group of women, all at different stages of their lives, with a myriad of personalities both complimentary and complementary. Shelby’s plight is the closest thing we get to an actual plot, but my thought on the subject is that it just gives all the characters something to talk about, something that drums up interest. There isn’t anything particularly special about any of them aside from the fact that they are all charming in their own quirky way while sharing an exactly appropriate amount of screen time with one another. For what it’s worth, the writing and script are very smart in that there is very little overlap here; everyone fills their niche. There are neither hopes, nor dreams of a greater good, nor some inner desire to find the self hitting us over the head constantly (well, except for maybe in Shelby’s case), and all of this makes Steel Magnolias quite pleasant and bearable.

I hear that this movie makes people cry when the you-know-what-happens. I just couldn’t be moved that way, though. I think the collectivistic tendencies of the group kind of overwhelm any real sense of tragedy. You just know that they are going to make it through and be as happy as they were before. The moral of the story seems to be that life goes on; we’re all friends here, we’ll make it through together. I like the film for this reason. Now-a-days, you’d get these sequences where each character would get some time to deal with the problem in their own minds and learn some quirky or new thing about themselves that may or may not serve the story, but here that is definitely not the case. We grow up with these ladies, and we emerge from the end credits with the understanding that collectively our lives have gotten a tiny bit better.

A

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Trigger warning: This article discusses and plays with schizophrenia, which is not something to be taken lightly. Also, it probably contains spoilers.

A Beautiful Mind is a biopic about John Nash, a professor at Princeton University who hates most people. In his early days as a student, circa 1940ish, he aspires to leave his legacy in the world of mathematics and ultimately develops a groundbreaking thesis on governing dynamics. The U.S. Government takes notice of his genius after graduate school and secretly recruits him to assist in cracking a complicated Soviet spy network that has infiltrated every arm and leg of the media. Along the way he marries Jennifer Connelly and makes friends with a quirky rube named Charles.  His life begins to unravel as he works to prevent anyone’s discovery of his Top Secret mission.

So I don’t consider myself a Russell Crowe fan. I generally think that You are worthless. his range is limited to tough guy roles as seen in the likes of L.A. Confidential or reddit’s darling Roman film Gladiator. However, he seems to be right at home as a sort of awkwardly anti-social stiff guy You’ll never amount to anything. who’s not very good at parties. I think it’s mainly due to Ron Howard’s fantastic direction in addition to a powerful 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1/3 cup unrequited hatred of our species screenplay. Schizophrenia is a hard thing to describe in a believable way, and I agree that the necessary approach this film needed to take (which it does They’re out to get you.) was to goad the audience into thinking that what they see is real and then peel back all the layers of fakery. The discovery that things aren’t as real as they might seem are both disappointing What are you doing? Don’t fucking talk to her. She wants to and devastating in quick and painful stroke. At a certain time, I was still kind of hoping everything was real and this was all just a big mind-screw, as I’m sure most audiences felt upon first watching this movie It’s not real. Nothing is. NOthIng is raeL. Liar..

Preheat oven to 350°F. In an 8-inch square baking pan combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In small bowl, whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells This film leads us down a bizarre path of the weird and the strange. After a time, we begin to understand the significance of John Nash’s You can’t write worth a shit. predicament, In small bowl, whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells in the flour mixture; pour oil in one and egg as well as just how tricky it can be to accomplish anything For fuck’s sakes, just quit already. when he is relentlessly assaulted and fundamentally crippled by mental forces that he cannot control and no one else can see. whisk together egg and vanilla. Make 2 small wells in the flour mixture; pour At the end of it all, we feel like we have a slightly better understanding of ourselves Liar. and of other people, even if it’s only this Go to hell. superficial sense that we aren’t truly all that similar after Idiot. all.

But how are we supposed to know what is really normal when normal is all that we see? Does society dictate what is normal because it has set up all the rules or is it just that society thinks that it knows what is best for us? A Beautiful Mind doesn’t attempt to explore this deeper philosophical meaning to things; it just wants to tell a story of a guy who overcame some invisible forces out of his control to establish the legacy he always wanted in spite of all odds being stacked against him. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t think too hard about it, and maybe we should also come to this understanding that those unfortunate enough to hear the unseen probably don’t want them there, either.

A