SherryBaby

SherryBaby
Written and Directed by Laurie Collyer
2006

I haven't written about any music or movies in a while for two reasons: 1 I haven't heard much new music due to an extreme lack of free time and 2 the movies I've seen in theaters lately have all been of the summer blockbuster variety and as such not really worth writing about. So today I wanted to write about a film I just watched online (legally, of course, through netflix) called SherryBaby. It is a film from Laurie Collyer starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Before I get to my review, I should mention that Maggie Gyllenhall is the celebrity that I would most like to date in the entire world. My love for Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley aside, Gyllenhaal manages to exude both a sexiness and an earthy naturalness that I think makes her the best young actress out there today. And she takes interesting roles too.

Take this one for instance: Gyllenhaal plays Sherry, a recent parolee who was in the clink for some sort of vague drug/theft related charges for three years. In that time, her daughter Alexis, who was an infant when she was sent away, has been raised by her brother and sister-in-law. Sherry says she wants desperately to be a part of her daughter's life again but her actions don't really match up with her words. Instead of trying to stay on the straight and narrow and cooperate with her parole officer, she is combative, confrontational, and obnoxious. She spends much the movie with the attitude of a petulant little child but instead of outright temper tantrums, she generally uses her sexuality to get what she wants. And therein lies the main reason this film doesn't work for me.

I have never seen a film before (that I can think of) in which the alleged protagonist has seemingly no redeeming qualities. Sherry is basically all flaws. Of course Collyer tries to make the character more sympathetic by giving (and by giving I mean not so subtly forcing down our throats) hints that Sherry was sexually abused in the past. To me, while sexual abuse certainly is tragic, it is no excuse for the fact that she can't see what a piss-poor excuse for a mother she is. She is no more mature than her own daughter of kindergarten age. In one scene, at the child's birthday party, Alexis pushes one of the other kids over for touching her presents. As Sherry is reinforcing and condoning the act ("Don't let anyone take anything away from you" or something to that effect), her brother and sister-in-law have to whisk the child away to put her in time out for misbehaving.

Make no mistake, the blame lies solely on Collyer's shoulders. The film is superbly acted by the infinitely talented and beautiful Maggie Gyllenhaal (Call me!) who breaths life into the character, unlikeable though she may be. Believe me when I tell you I have known parents like Sherry (two of which are responsible for my seriously fucked up adopted sister) and her portrayal is as real as it gets. Which is probably why the film felt so goddamn depressing to me. I think the characters I was rooting for were the brother and sister-in-law and the young Alexis, because every time there was another scene change, it seemed like Sherry was digging herself back into her old ways and making no attempt to grow and mature emotionally to the point where she could handle a child.

Now that I think a bit more about it, I don't think it was a bad movie or script. I thought it was perhaps just too real. For me a movie should be an escape from the crushing realities of the world around us. But SherryBaby is a reminder of that same world. It's a fucked up world and I think Collyer captured it very well. But goddamn is it depressing. Oh and frankly Collyer did commit one mortal sin by bookending the film with this abysmal Melissa Etheridge-y music that just made me grimace with pain. I cannot confirm whether it was in fact Etheridge singing as IMDB and Wikipedia were of no help and I am too lazy to spend all night searching elsewhere. Suffice it to say it was just plain awful music. I don't know if I would recommend this film or not. I'd say if you are ever considering adopting, maybe watch it to see where your new angel is probably coming from. Otherwise, it's just too depressing.

I've got some other thoughts whirling around in my head, especially since I also just saw the documentary Maxed Out about the credit/debt industry. Really provocative stuff. I think that may be a post for another day soon. Goodnight all.

What dreams may come...

Well if anyone has been checking this blog recently, you may be lamenting the almost three week gap between posts. I have been on finals week, vacation in the middle of the forest, and without internet at my new apt. since my last post but I assure you this is the soonest I could get back on here. And it's a good thing too because I have had a lot on my mind recently, probably enough to fill two posts so this will one will be a corollary to my last post.

You may recall that my last post was on my recent turn to godlessness. Today I have been thinking about immortality. You see, in giving up the possibility that there is a personal and loving god that wants to hang with me when I die, I must accept the fact that there are now only to ways to live on after I die: fame and family. These are much less permanent, of course, but nonetheless powerful, I think. Hell, even the people who believe in an immortal soul want to earn some measure of fame and it is everyone's evolutionary imperative to try to reproduce their genes. So as my brief tenure on this little planet approaches two decades, I am faced with the realization that both of these methods may be rapidly fleeing from my grasp.

Of course, for most people the much easier method of attaining some measure of immortality is through reproduction. You don't exactly have to be a rocket surgeon to make babies. In fact I would say that in terms of reproduction rate, the most ignorant populations tend to have the highest growth rates. But I digress. By far the harder thing to achieve is fame. To be remembered in the long run you have to do something really astounding. Babe Ruth achieved immortality by becoming such a dominant force in baseball that even decades after all his records had fallen, his name is still whispered with reverent awe when people talk about the greatest players who ever picked up a bat and a glove. In my field, I would argue, it is perhaps a bit more difficult to achieve this level of fame. This is because physics, unfortunately, is much less accessible to the general public than sports. If you asked the average person on the street to name a physicist you might get Newton, or Einstein, or perhaps even Richard Feynman if the person is particularly perverse. These men all have one thing in common: inspiration. I believe that true genius requires something in the brain that the rest of us don't have, a way of looking at things that is so extraordinary that it only occurs in maybe one in a billion people, perhaps even more. Newton revolutionized scientific thought by having the audacity to suggest that the objects in the heavens are governed by the very same laws as objects here on earth. Einstein likewise took two simple and related observations (1 that the speed of light is invariant between different constant velocity observers, and 2 that one cannot tell the difference between being accelerated and being in a gravitational field) and turned the world on its head once again by proposing that, not only are space and time fundamentally linked, but they can be warped and curved. The most staggering consequence of this is that two observers moving relative to each other will not agree on the simultaneity (or the correct order) of two disparate events. My point is these were two men who were completely unique for their times in terms of the way they thought. Indeed as I approach the twentieth anniversary of my birth, it may be time for my to acknowledge the possibility that I am not lucky enough to have this extraordinary kind of mind.

But the other option is not looking so great either. I think most people would find it pathetic for a heterosexual man of twenty to never have had a girlfriend. But alas, such has been my lot so far. I suppose I allowed myself to be preoccupied with other pursuits in high school but it seems like every girl I take an interest in now already has a serious boyfriend. Needless to say my prospects of leaving a part of me behind when I die feel like they are dwindling daily. (Disclaimer: please do not read this as a declaration that I am looking to have kids right now. It just seems like the older I get without gaining any kind of romantic experience, the greater the probability that I end up spending my days alone and, ipso-facto, of leaving no one behind when I die.)

And I do fear death. I think it would be foolish not to. Richard Dawkins writes that (and I'm paraphrasing here) he does not fear death because he was dead (so to speak) for billions of years before he was born and it never seemed to bother him then. This is a bit to clever for me to find it entirely comforting. Perhaps its because I was raised to expect immortality that it is so hard to let go of the idea now.

So goodnight everyone. You can expect to hear from me again in the next few days.

Beelzebub has a Devil put aside for me...

In my quasi-infinite spare time I have begun to work my way through the This American Life archives online. For those of you unfamiliar with TAL, it is a public radio program, produced in Chicago and populated by effete New Yorkers, that is syndicated nationwide. Each week they have a theme and they get writers, comedians, and journalists to contribute stories that illustrate that theme. The result is a show that is for the most part insightful, funny, emotionally gripping, and simply captivating. Today I hit up their ten-year-old episode titled "Pray", a show about prayer and Christianity from a couple of secular liberal media archetypes. It reminded me of a lot of crap that has been festering in my mind for some time now about my loss of faith.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I was raised Catholic, attended a Catholic high school, and, at some point, was so well indoctrinated into church dogma that I was considering the priesthood and attended a conference for young preachers as a representative of my school. It seems a bit ironic to me that I didn't really question my faith until I was fully embedded in a Catholic high school. You see, most Catholics never actually read the bible. Unlike many denominations, the scriptures seem to be a much more tangential component of the Catholic faith. Much more prominent in the Catholic church are the rituals and tradition of guilt. But in my freshman year of high school, we were required to actually read and discuss the bible. If you actually pay attention to the bible, you will find that the very first two chapters of the bible are contradictory. They offer two completely different accounts of the creation myth. And it was all downhill from there. We went through the draconian codes of the Mosaic law. These govern everything from what and how you should eat to what a woman should do when she is menstruating. Oh and it recommends the death penalty for absolutely everything including a sentence of stoning for children who disobey their parents.

So if any of that sounds a bit crazy to you, you and 9th grade me would be on the same page. Of course, my teachers explained these inconsistencies and ancient legal codes away as symbolism and hyperbole. But these explanations were hardly satisfying and my doubts continued to nag at me. By the time I was a senior, all that was required to tip me form believer to non-believer were a series of, in retrospect, minor disappointments and unfortunately poorly timed personal mini-disasters. I won't bore you with the details but suffice it to say that my loose grip on my faith finally slipped away.

In the couple of years that have passed since then, I have struggled with a lot of questions. If not god then what? Without god, is there any sense in speaking of morality? Etc.

But then I thought about what drove me away from the church in the first place: the gaudy pageantry and spectacle of the mass rang false to me, the scripture and demonization of sexuality preposterous, and the notion that the humble servants of god in the church hierarchy should deserve to live in opulent palaces embodied hypocrisy for me. And then there were the fundamentalists. If there was any one thing that I hated most about religion then and now, it was the groups of people who believed that the scriptures were one hundred percent true, in every possible sense of the word. There is something terrifying about people who are fully confident in their own righteousness and who believe that something better awaits them in the afterlife. In non-fundamentalists, this latter belief may provide some comfort in times of sorrow or misery, but in the fundamentalist, it can mean a completely reckless disregard for their own life and for the rest of life here on earth.

Which brings me back to This American Life. The episode I linked above featured Ted Haggard, of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and some of his parishioners. You may recognize Mr. Haggard from the end of the documentary "Jesus Camp," in my opinion one of the most frightening movies ever made, or the fact that this crusader for literal interpretations of biblical morality has a meth and male prostitute addiction. Now normally, the exploits of the batshit crazies on the Christian right are good for either a hearty chuckle or a horrified gasp. But the interviewees in this particular episode of TAL really made me think. Can these people really not see the absurdity of the religious buzzwords and talking points that come out of their mouths? Can they really still believe, in this day and age, that their prayers will drive bona fide witches out of their neighborhoods?

So I decided that my instincts against religion outweighed my questions about the consequences of disbelief.

And then I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and, not only did it answer all of my questions but, it reaffirmed the reasons that I left the faith in the first place in much more eloquent and well thought out prose than I could pretend to emulate here. And so I stand before you today and I have decided to "come out", so to speak, as an atheist (or "Bright" as Dawkins would prefer) once and for all.

So that's it, sorry for the long post. Leave some comments if you want.