#not phm

- Lars and the Real Girl: Explores how the use of imagination and fiction, combined with strong loving community support, can be extremely powerful tools for helping an individual find their way through, and heal from, grief and trauma. We cannot heal using only our rational minds, and we absolutely cannot heal alone. (Loved this one; phenomenal acting; so kind; have tissues handy.).

- Half Nelson: The Machine's got us all in a headlock, and it always has. Trauma propagates across the generations, for all of us, in different ways, and much of it is intentionally inflicted as a weapon of division and control. Despair and oblivion are so, so easy to slip down into. The only salvation is to reach out, lift each other up, SEE one another, tune in, attune, give a shit. You will fuck up. You will get it wrong. So many forces are arrayed against you. Learn your history. Keep trying. (Incredibly impressed with the power of the performances and the earnestness and urgency of everything; can be tough to watch.)

- La La Land: Regret. What if I had gotten my shit together when I was younger? What if I hadn't made all those mistakes? What if I'd chosen my partner more intentionally, found a better balance between me and them? What might have been? (Love letter to jazz, film, piano, acting. Evocation of both highs and lows. Fun, beautiful, charming, gave me hope. Then WRECKED me (still recovering)).

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Are you crying yet? Because I sure am, all over again. To me, La La Land is a sad movie about regret. The "I Want" song in this film is a duet. Sung by two people who, despite what they profess to want, don't actually care if they know just where they'll go. What they really want is a voice that says "I'll be here, and you'll be alright." They want to be that for each other. And they fail.

They fail because they don't have the relationship skills and experience to know how to support one another, how to choose one another in the face of, or in harmony with, the competing demands of their career dreams, how to handle insecurity and envy with generosity and grace. Instead, they get lost in la la land (fear, ego, doubt). The heart-rending "What if?" montage at the end, when they communciate without words, just through Sebastian's music (like jazz musicians who don't speak the same language), shows them both realizing how their life could have looked, if only they'd both known how to make those choices back when they had the chance. If only they had wanted each other as much as they had wanted love. If only they had been ready for each other. If only.

In the end, they both got what they said they wanted, but they both lost** what they sang they wanted. And in a film that highlights the power of music to speak truth, that ending just chokes me with regret.

*You could read the audition song as Mia singing about taking the leap to move to Paris. Or you could read it as her taking the leap into a relationship with Sebastian, and acknowledging that leaving him would make a mess, and declaring, sadly, that she will do it anyway.

I can't...

There's so much I need to say. But, if by some miracle there is another human on earth who hasn't seen it / doesn't know the story, I don't want to spoil it.

I just...