Maybe it’s part of our modern, anti-depressant popping, workaholic, Starbucks-addled condition, but it seems as though every other film is about dissatisfaction. Documentary filmmaker Doug Block in his film 51 Birch Street presents his own family as an object lesson: malcontent and our collective inability to pursue our own happiness is an integral part of our culture.

The film begins 50 years after Block’s parents Mike and Mina said “I do.” The scene is familiar: children playing; grill on the patio; old folks and relations wheezing on the lawn; and, congratulations for making their marriage “work.” But the filmmaker is quick to comment that, given his father’s distant nature and his mother’s gregarious personality, the secrets of his parents’ successful marriage are just that: secrets.

We’re told that shortly after the anniversary party, Mina became ill and died. Before this news can have any real effect, we learn that Mike, now a widower, has re-connected with his old secretary and will be married only three months after his first wife’s death. The rage felt by his children is palpable, but Mike is ambivalent: he and his new wife, Cathy, display their affection openly, and his children wonder how a man who remained coolly distant toward them and their mother is able to lavish his new wife with kisses so freely.

Once Mike reveals that he and Kathy will be relocating to Florida to live out their golden years, the filmmaker begins to question his parents’ relationship: “Were they ever happy? What happened to this marriage that it could be forgotten so easily?”

The film begs for a villain, but its genius is in presenting Mike and Mina as casualties of middle-class life. Through interviews with his father and his mother (posthumously, of course), we learn that as the world changed around them, Mike and Mina became more distant: she lost herself in psychoanalysis, affairs, and her interior life; Mike buried himself in his work. When they both came up for air, three decades into their marriage, the two realized that, outside of their children, they were strangers.

The filmmaker allows us to see his parents as he sees them: Mike Block, now in his twilight years, makes half-hearted attempts to connect with his son by offering tools and badly-drawn 70s kitsch; Mina, though dead, acknowledges the failure of her marriage and her husband’s ignorance in volume after volume of her wire-bound diaries.

I found it hard to think of 51 Birch Street as a film. It’s more like being dropped into a family and watching it move around you. The camera work is comfortably low key, even off at certain times, and it appears that any real direction is eschewed for a more organic feel.  51 Birch Street is not one of those documentaries where you walk away thinking that you know the characters, but it’s not necessary that you do. All that’s required is for you to feel the length and breadth of their dissatisfaction and realize that that, too, is okay.

In The Fray Contributor

“The [local] priest tells me if I was a good dalit in this life, then in my next life I can be born into a better part of society. [I say] why wait?”

—Narasimha Cherlaguda, a member of the Dalit class (more commonly known as the untouchable caste) in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, explaining his motivation to convert to Buddhism. Although the caste system has been outlawed for more than half a century, Dalits, relegated to the lowest echelons of the Hindu religious social system, still perform menial jobs – such as handling human waste and sweeping streets – and face intimidation and abuse, particularly in urban areas.

Narasimha Cherlaguda will be joining scores of others in his village to participate in a mass conversion on the 60th anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s conversion, along with 100,000 of his supporters, to Buddhism in order to evade the social stigmatization he faced in the Hindu caste system. Anxious about losing its support base, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government reclassified both Buddhism and Jainism as sects of Hinduism in an attempt to deny Dalits dignity even in conversion.

Mimi Hanaoka

Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others’ religious, social and cultural values in the west… The running of the footage affected the sensibilities of civilized people and religious beliefs of one fifth of humanity.

— A statement issued by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an association which includes 57 member states, referring to footage recently aired on Danish television and on the Internet which showed members of the Danish Peoples’ Party (DPP) in a contest to draw cartoons mocking Islam. The members of the right-wing party who appear in the video were young, drunk, and at a summer camp over a year ago when the footage was taped. Martin Rosengaard Knudsen of the artists’ group Defending Denmark, which produced the video, denied charges of being needlessly provocative and defended the group’s reason for producing the video: “This is not an example of something that is meant to provoke. This is an example to show how things are in Danish politics.” And rightly so — to ignore the social and political milieu that contributes to this anti-immigrant racism in Denmark would only abstract and sensationalize the issue even more.

Mimi Hanaoka

Halloween season is conversion season for some Evangelical Christian churches, and seasonal shows that aim to very literally scare the hell out of unbelievers are being cobbled together in time to save the damned. The highlights at Hell House, New York’s spoof of the morality play that is being constructed in its various incarnations around the U.S., include the death of an AIDS-afflicted gay man, a lesbian committing suicide, and the gory outcome of a failed abortion. For $299 you can even buy your own kit and construct your own Hell House, courtesy of Colorado’s Reverend Keenan Roberts, the pastor of Destiny Church of the Assemblies of God.  If Roberts is to be believed, 13,000 have converted as a result of their visits to Hell Houses, but surely there are better reasons for conversion than being bullied by fear, gore, and bigotry.    

Mimi Hanaoka

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight:  Memories of a Japanese Girl
Written by Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin
Illustrated by Yaeko Sugama
Publisher:  Moonbridge Publications, 2005
  
Cherry Blossoms in Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl, written by Yaeko Sugama Weldon and her daughter Linda E. Austin is published by Moonbridge Publications and contains 84 pages of text, eleven pencil line drawings drawn by Weldon, and a two-page appendix consisting of two Japanese children’s songs, “Shojogi (Song of the Tanuki)” and “Ame Ame (Rain, Rain).”  Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is a memoir of a woman who built her life on the words her father, the village shoemaker, wrote in the back of her closet on her first day of school: “Right, Straight, Honest and
Cheerful.”  These four principals Weldon continues to adhere to in the present and has passed the ideals onto her grandchildren.

Weldon’s simple conversational style of writing has an awkwardness that does not detract from the story or the lyrical power of the prose.  Instead, it adds to the story’s charm. It is a departure from slick, glossy braggarts reminiscing about their “back-in-the-day” achievements, exploits, and shenanigans.  The simplicity of language lends a credibility to Weldon’s voice as if she is dictating her story in Japanese and broken English to her daughter Linda.  There is a kindness that comes directly from her heart that shapes her words and exudes off the page.  She has written her memories into a minute-sized book that is a giant in feeling. Easily structured, anecdote to anecdote, there is an underlined complexity built from the honesty of her emotions.  She took joy in her life, throughout her childhood and as an adult. Exposed to brutal poverty, hardships, war, and failed relationships, Weldon never loses her child-like wonder, “cheerfulness,” and belief in the good.

Her pencil line drawings are portraits of her past that come directly from experience. She has illustrated only chapters that deal with her childhood. Her last drawing illustrates the chapter called, “World War II—The End of Childhood.” The picture shows the rear silhouettes of young Yaeko and her father walking away into the distance towards the unknown.  Here Weldon’s innocence ends and the density of World War II demands an increased gravitation and a harsher detailed picture that Weldon does not want to provide graphically. She realized that no artistic medium (except, maybe, the written word), regardless of intensity or color scheme, can correctly represent the stark factuality and nightmarish vividness of being attacked by a juggernaut killing machine as technologically superior as the United States of America’s Armed Forces.  She writes:

We were young and had little fear.  In the bomb shelter we would sing and some girls would dance.  One day, as usual we ran to the bomb shelter.  One of the girls ran back to the lunchroom to use the bathroom there.  We told her not to go, but she said she had to. All of a sudden a war plane came down from the sky like a hawk to catch a rabbit.  It made a terrible loud noise and shot her with its machine gun.  She lay bleeding on the ground and we all started crying.  She died at the hospital.  She was just a young girl. After that we were just scared.  No one sang songs anymore—we just listened for airplanes.

After this incident, Weldon developed a hatred for Americans.  Her father explained that her hatred was misplaced and unnecessary.  Weldon writes:

I told my father I hated war and I hated the American military killing innocent civilian mothers and children.  We did not ask for war.  My father said to me, “Don’t hate anyone, it doesn’t do any good.  They are only doing their duty. This is war.”

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is Weldon’s statement on the survival of the altruistic and humane during all the battles in life. One can only think of how pertinent her book and ideals—“Right, Straight, Honest and Cheerful”—are to today’s Afghanistan and Iraqi citizens and our military that get caught in the onrush of our so-called liberating foreign policies.

Lee Gooden

George Miller, the director who made us believe that pigs could talk in the 1995 hit, Babe, is at it again with the 3D-animated Happy Feet and, from the 17 minutes of footage I saw at a press event, it looks like it’s going to take the holidays by storm.  

Happy Feet stars the voice of Elijah Wood as an Emperor penguin named Mumble, who can’t sing a heart song, the ditty that all Emperor penguins sing to find their true love.  Brittany Murphy is Gloria, the love Mumble wants to woo but can’t get because his talents lie in dancing, not singing.  When he’s finally cast out of the community by the stern Noah the Elder (Hugo Weaving), he runs into a posse of decidedly un-Emperor-like penguins called the Adelie Amigos who have a Latin bent to them and use dancing as their romantic lure.  With the help of these friends, headed by the Sinatra-singing Ramon — Robin Williams doing his best Fernando Lamas impression — Mumble tries to win his love back with a little Cyrano trick, but it backfires.  Without seeing the ending, I’m guessing that Mumbles finally wins his love by proving that you don’t have to be able to sing to be lovable. But whether the ending is predictable or not, it’s Mumbles’ fun journey finding himself that makes Happy Feet joyous.

From the footage I saw, I believe that this will be the smash hit of the holidays. The humor, especially from the perfect-pitch Williams playing two parts (he also plays a Barry White-type penguin leader named Lovelace), will make kids and adults laugh out loud, and the marvelous renditions of songs will also please all audiences.  The action sequences also appear to be fantastic and will no doubt spawn a merchandising frenzy.  

The rest of the cast is platinum as well, with Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, and Mumbles’ dancing performed by Savion Glover, using the same motion capture techniques used to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings films.  Also credited is the voice of Steve Irwin, the Australian TV star and animal environmentalist who was killed recently by a stingray off the Great Barrier Reef.  The film also features a new song by Prince and others by Yolanda Adams, American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino, Chrissie Hynde, Patti LaBelle, kd lang, Pink, and more.

I give credit to everyone working on the film, from the writers to the animators.  A lot of times, they put all the good stuff into trailers and, when you go see the movie, it’s a bomb. But even if the rest of the film is slightly worse than the 17 minutes that I saw, I still think it will be a great family film you can’t miss.  My five-year-old daughter who joined me at the screening can attest to my claim.

George Miller claims this film was in production before The March of the Penguins came out of the blue to become one of the most successful documentaries of all time, but it certainly can’t hurt the prospects of this film.  Happy Feet I’m sure will be around through the holidays.  I think the buzz is growing because, over a month out, the studio is starting to run ads on television.  I think they know they have a big hit on their hands and they want to make sure everyone else knows that, too.  I’m doing my part to help them out.

Happy Feet is released by Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures and opens November 17 in theaters everywhere.

Rich Burlingham

Lost beneath the din of accusations of Islamophobia and anger directed towards the Pope during the past week was one of the more curious and tasteless specimens of racism: Dennis Mitsubishi had planned (and has now withdrawn) an advertisement declaring “jihad on the U.S. auto market. The auto dealer, as parts of its “jihad,” would offer  “Fatwa Fridays,” during which sales representatives would distribute toy swords to children.

The Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained publicly and successfully to have the planned radio advertisement cancelled before it ran. Dennis Mitsubishi of Columbus, Ohio, offered a whimpering apology: “A large number of people have contacted us. Lots of them have seen the humor we were trying to convey, but far too many were clearly bothered by it. This was simply an attempt at humor that fell short.”

The Pope’s statement risked being misconstrued, divorced of its context, and mindlessly repeated for shock value; Dennis Mitsubishi’s planned ad would have simply propagated racism and bigotry.

Mimi Hanaoka