Some films I watched recently

We renew our DSTV subscription every month but now and then, the subscription expires and then our 'cash flow' doesn't permit us to spend the $ 103.00 and there's a gap of a few days. Recently, this gap has extended to a couple of weeks as we keep forgetting to do it, even though there is 'cash flow'. This results in being forced to watch a film from my DVD collection and to listen a lot more music. 

I usually buy dozens and dozens of DVDs from my trips to Pakistan: a mix of the latest Hollywood and Bollywood releases and, the odd random film title from other film industries scoured at various DVD shops in Islamabad. 

See my pseudo reviews:

Boyhood was a little disappointing. I remember reading that this film was made over 12 years. Do I remember reading it or hearing about the process while watching the Academy Awards? The same Academy Awards where Patricia Arquette made an embarrassingly ignorant white feminist statement? Well anyway, I have meant to watch it for some time and finally managed to. 

That the film captures almost all of a boy's childhood until he starts college is truly an impressive scope. The film captures some of the highlights from the era: the invasion of Iraq, Obama's election, etc. 

The film is definitely told from the boy's point of view. It has some very sweet, funny and tender moments. When the boy turns 15 or 16, his father (divorced from his mother) takes him for a day out and, when his father tells him he sold the sports car, we immediately guess why the boy looks so heart broken even before it's revealed that his father promised him the car on his future birthday. His father laughs because he doesn't remember the promise. One feels the boy's heart break because we know and remember all the promises our parents made to us. In this sense, the film really does manage to tell the story from the boy's point of view. 

We can feel most of his disconnect from all the phonies in his world, in his family, in social norms, and so on. In some way, some of the film's moods reminds me of Holden Caulfield's angst. 

Almost at the end of the film, Patricia Arquette's character breaks down when her boy is about to leave home for college. Most of her grief is for herself. 'Is this it? Is this my life?' she cries. 

I didn't find any of the characters endearing, heroic or particularly interesting. For a brief moment, I thought the father was gay when he brings his kids home for a weekend and his roommate is a male musician friend. But later he gets hitched to a younger woman from a Bible-thumping/gun-bearing family and has a baby, going to re-start his family. He even makes the cliché statement at his son's graduation party and thanks his ex-wife for working so hard to raise their kids to which she is pleasantly surprised. What a cliché moment.  If anything, both parents are extremely self-absorbed and selfish. The mother makes one disastrous decision after another and, gets hitched to men who are violent and abusive. She laughs at her poor mistakes and what she put her kids though. She seems to have a luxurious lifestyle in that she is allowed to make such mistakes but doesn't seem to have much repercussions. She even seems to have become an intellectual by getting a degree and teaching college courses and throwing intellectual parties.

The boy's sister is so happy she is finally out of her home and, she tells her brother's girlfriend that if one's parents don't support you financially, you don't have to listen to them. 

Was this a banal, white middle class life we saw on screen? Was it meant to show its mediocrity? Was it trying to be ironic? Was it a study of childhood? If yes, it was boring and I don't know what I learned or particularly enjoyed about it. Moreover, I got so depressed looking at this picture of a family, of a life that is so unrooted, so shallow and so pathetic. What culture, what values and what struggle did it really depict? 

I rather wish we had seen a black boy's boyhood. Wouldn't that have been more interesting? How does a black boy's childhood look like in the United States? Or a black girl's childhood? Isn't the entire white middle class story well known already on screen? Don't we know how white middle class people talk, feel, and go through via films and television series? We can even predict that even if aliens are invading Planet Earth, they will first attack either New York or a white middle class suburb in the middle of nowhere and, the family in question will first have an emotional melt down because their parents are divorced. We know that whenever anyone comes home they first go to the fridge and immediately take out a drink. We know that some families are intellectual, conscientious and knowledgeable about history, politics, etc but remain largely in their white spheres. Sometimes, we see World War 2 movies and white families bravely sacrificing their sons and brothers and husbands.

It is also true that very rarely does an American film show the actual American society that has black, Latin, indigenous, immigrant peoples. The average film can't grapple with showing American society the way it is. They manage to show life in New York for example as only white. Or, they show families living in small towns neither racist, neither enlightened, neither ignorant, neither anything but protagonists.

Why is the base, the starting point the white protagonist, the white character? Why do films either have to be about a black character or a white one? Why can't stories be told which capture the full spectrum of what life is really like in the United States?