As I said in the last post, The Secret of Roan Inish is my favorite "take heart!" movie, ever. I thought of putting a photo of little Fiona looking out the window, on my desktop, to remind me to be single-minded and childlike. (It seems to work for a lot of things. I'll get back to you on that one.)
One reason Gess and I decided to call these "movies for life" is because snippets of them play through our daily ups and downs: we find ourselves repeating lines; asking, for example, "What would Fiona do?"--and so on. So I'll set the scene for this film with an image: Fiona is patiently lighting a fire on her first trip to the island, using two flinty rocks and some twirly dry moss.
There are two movies that have tinder-lighting images in them that remind me to take heart when I am overwhelmed. One is, in fact, The Edge, though I didn't mention it, in those posts: Charles Morse builds a fire. The other is The Secret of Roan Inish.
To back up: Fiona makes several trips to the Island of the Seals, and hangs out there by herself, while her uncle and her cousin are delivering mail or setting (crab? lobster?) traps, as the case may be. Never mind that no one in the family's "set foot" on this place of bad memories since "the evacuation"; they seem willing to let the little girl knock about there for half a day or so, while they go about their business. Everyone's got a lot of nostalgia--more algia than nost, as it were--for the place, so maybe they were just waiting to be asked.
Fiona's undaunted by the state of disrepair in which she finds the three cottages. Evidently, when she was younger, she lived in one of them. She pokes around. On the second trip, she heads straight for the one that appears to be inhabited. Sure enough, there's kindling lying about, and all she has to do to build a fire is bump a couple rocks together a few times with her chubby hands. A spark flies; the tinder flares; a fire is built. She curls up for a nap, and has a vision that's more important to the plot than the fire is; however, it's the fire that sticks with me: tiny twigs burning and crisping, lighting other tiny twigs....
Perhaps it's the fact that my life seems to keep returning to 'Start,' that makes this image, and its sister image in The Edge (when the men resign themselves to their fate, and gather crisp moss to start their fire) so powerful. Nowadays, when I'm faced with startup woes, startup resistance, startup angst--I see a spark fly and a fire light. It reminds me that home fires are built one crackling twig at a time.
Tink is at work.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Hurry Up to Grow Up
At the beginning of ATL, Rashad shares something his father used to tell him. "Dreaming is the luxury of children. I should enjoy it." But when Rashad's parents die in a car accident, Rashad's own childhood ends, and he forgets his father's advice.
When we met Rashad, he is dealing with school by day and cleaning offices and stores with his uncle by night. He is also trying to watch out for his younger brother Ant. Rashad is saving his meager wages for Ant's future. He plans to send Ant to college with what he is saving.
At the same time, Rashad is forced to remain a child. He must heed his uncle's rules at home. He must attend school and do well. He is not grown yet.
Rashad's brother Ant doesn't seem to have heard his father's wisdom. He isn't waiting for some undefined future. He is eager to be grown. He wants to get his and now. To Ant, that means getting paid and getting laid. In the early part of the film, Ant approaches several girls and women with no luck. And in one daydream sequence, he swims after floating bills in a pool. He resorts to selling for a drug dealer. It gets him the girls (at least one that we see), but not much money. He gets arrested. And worse, when he doesn't have enough to pay his boss, he gets shot. His rush out of childhood comes at a high cost. In the end, he backpedals to regular teenage life.
Another character in the film who doesn't know Rashad's father's good advice is New New, aka Erin. She is Rashad's pretty, mysterious girlfriend. No one has told New New about childhood and dreaming. She is eager to define herself on her own terms. But she is subject to her parents' terms. She lives two opposing lifestyles at once: upper class glamor with her parents, ghetto fabulousity with her friends. She attends the private academy of her parents' choosing, but plans to attend a Historically Black College or University of her choice instead of the Ivy League school of their choice. She tries to live the "black" heritage her parents now deny. (Though glimpses of her parent's backgrounds seep through. In a heated discussion with Erin, her father yells, "Keep talking to your mother like that and your lips are going to beat you to the hospital!") Eventually, New New's façade of urban culture is revealed and removed. It nearly costs Rashad's love.
Remember your teenage self. How often did you ache to be older, grown, making your own choices? What were your plans? Who were you going to be as an adult? What job were you going to have? Where were you going to live?
Odds are that few, if any, of your plans and dreams came true. It's more likely that you have wished, on occasion, to not be grown just yet. To have your basic needs and more met through no stress, worry, or effort on your part for a day or two. Of course, you can't go back again. But you can remember those days with more fondness than when you were living them. After all, they have made you who you are today.
When we met Rashad, he is dealing with school by day and cleaning offices and stores with his uncle by night. He is also trying to watch out for his younger brother Ant. Rashad is saving his meager wages for Ant's future. He plans to send Ant to college with what he is saving.
At the same time, Rashad is forced to remain a child. He must heed his uncle's rules at home. He must attend school and do well. He is not grown yet.
Rashad's brother Ant doesn't seem to have heard his father's wisdom. He isn't waiting for some undefined future. He is eager to be grown. He wants to get his and now. To Ant, that means getting paid and getting laid. In the early part of the film, Ant approaches several girls and women with no luck. And in one daydream sequence, he swims after floating bills in a pool. He resorts to selling for a drug dealer. It gets him the girls (at least one that we see), but not much money. He gets arrested. And worse, when he doesn't have enough to pay his boss, he gets shot. His rush out of childhood comes at a high cost. In the end, he backpedals to regular teenage life.
Another character in the film who doesn't know Rashad's father's good advice is New New, aka Erin. She is Rashad's pretty, mysterious girlfriend. No one has told New New about childhood and dreaming. She is eager to define herself on her own terms. But she is subject to her parents' terms. She lives two opposing lifestyles at once: upper class glamor with her parents, ghetto fabulousity with her friends. She attends the private academy of her parents' choosing, but plans to attend a Historically Black College or University of her choice instead of the Ivy League school of their choice. She tries to live the "black" heritage her parents now deny. (Though glimpses of her parent's backgrounds seep through. In a heated discussion with Erin, her father yells, "Keep talking to your mother like that and your lips are going to beat you to the hospital!") Eventually, New New's façade of urban culture is revealed and removed. It nearly costs Rashad's love.
Remember your teenage self. How often did you ache to be older, grown, making your own choices? What were your plans? Who were you going to be as an adult? What job were you going to have? Where were you going to live?
Odds are that few, if any, of your plans and dreams came true. It's more likely that you have wished, on occasion, to not be grown just yet. To have your basic needs and more met through no stress, worry, or effort on your part for a day or two. Of course, you can't go back again. But you can remember those days with more fondness than when you were living them. After all, they have made you who you are today.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Living with a Passion
As I said before, Rashad and his friends have worries. They are on the verge of adulthood, and already they are dealing with younger siblings, menial jobs, and an uncertain future. And of course, there are relationship problems, between them and with others (girls, mentors, family). Their one release, and the one passion they share, is skating at Cascade on Sunday nights.
Cascade is a skating rink of a style not very far past that nevertheless many consider bygone. On Sunday nights, it's the place for the teenagers of ATL to be. As Rashad himself shares in an innocent voice over, inside Cascade, "it's like all our problems don't exist. Only place where we all felt like we could be free... School sucks. Rent past due. Your girl left you. On Sunday night, none of that count. You could be whoever you wanted to be."
Skating is their passion. Cascade is the place to be. Especially for Rashad, who explains that even when the rink is full to bursting on Sunday nights, sometimes he feels "like I was out there all by myself floating above it all. No lies. No pain. And no worries about what tomorrow might bring."
That's exactly what a passion should do for you: make you feel like you're all by yourself, floating above all your worries.
What's your passion? I know you have one. Everyone does. It's the thing you're always thinking about, always want to be doing. When you're engaged in it, the whole rest of the world fades away, and the hours pass swiftly. It may be knitting blankets for patients at a children's hospital, or planting in your victory garden. It could be reading all of Jane Austen's works, or restoring vintage muscle cars. What is it?
Have you made time for your passion lately? Are you living it, or putting it off? Daydreaming about it, or acting on it? (If you're not living your passion, maybe a five-week plan will help you make time for it.)
I'm not going to waste time telling you that life is short, and you can sleep when you're dead. I'm only going to say, live your passion. Make time to engage in it. And in those minutes, let all your cares fall away.
A lot of things in life are complicated. But this little lesson is not. Do what you must and what you are passionate about. That way, you'll be a happier you.
Cascade is a skating rink of a style not very far past that nevertheless many consider bygone. On Sunday nights, it's the place for the teenagers of ATL to be. As Rashad himself shares in an innocent voice over, inside Cascade, "it's like all our problems don't exist. Only place where we all felt like we could be free... School sucks. Rent past due. Your girl left you. On Sunday night, none of that count. You could be whoever you wanted to be."
Skating is their passion. Cascade is the place to be. Especially for Rashad, who explains that even when the rink is full to bursting on Sunday nights, sometimes he feels "like I was out there all by myself floating above it all. No lies. No pain. And no worries about what tomorrow might bring."
That's exactly what a passion should do for you: make you feel like you're all by yourself, floating above all your worries.
What's your passion? I know you have one. Everyone does. It's the thing you're always thinking about, always want to be doing. When you're engaged in it, the whole rest of the world fades away, and the hours pass swiftly. It may be knitting blankets for patients at a children's hospital, or planting in your victory garden. It could be reading all of Jane Austen's works, or restoring vintage muscle cars. What is it?
Have you made time for your passion lately? Are you living it, or putting it off? Daydreaming about it, or acting on it? (If you're not living your passion, maybe a five-week plan will help you make time for it.)
I'm not going to waste time telling you that life is short, and you can sleep when you're dead. I'm only going to say, live your passion. Make time to engage in it. And in those minutes, let all your cares fall away.
A lot of things in life are complicated. But this little lesson is not. Do what you must and what you are passionate about. That way, you'll be a happier you.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
New Movie! The Secret of Roan Inish
They say the Irish are storytellers, and this is the story of how a plucky little Irish girl reclaims her heritage after being treated to a series of them--stories, that is--told to her by various relatives on her visit back to rural Ireland. Apparently, Fiona Coneelly is island stock. Her aunt and uncle are renting a cottage with a view out its windows of the land that the Coneellys left, years back, but still own. Fiona's sent to stay with them, and she starts right in asking about the island.
The Secret of Roan Inish is a bit hard to get into, at first. The plot advances a bit slowly; the editing's a bit stiff; the Irish English, a bit, well, impenetrable. I discovered it before I had the luxury of turning on subtitles, and I taught myself its lines, by, well, you know, watching it over and over. Once I'd seen the film enough times that I could understand what the characters were saying, I could pretty much say it along with them, and so many of their lines stuck in my head, in the brogue in which they were delivered.
The Secret of Roan Inish is taken from a children's story. It's magic realism, I guess they'd say; the real-life tale is interspersed with fanciful chapters of the family's history, which appears to be all tied up with the local seals--I do not mean Navy, here!--thanks to the fact that, back generations ago, the Coneellys apparently mixed blood with a Selkie woman. Their mainland neighbors whisper about it, still, making the family wish it could just go back and live on Seal Island (that's what Roan Inish means). Fiona's the catalyst, but first she has to grok the present-day environment; she's spent the last few years living in Dublin with her alcoholic father who's a factory worker, there. They own some pretty cool real estate, for peasant folk. If I owned an island, I'd rattle the cage about it, too; I would!
This is my favorite encouragement film. Fiona's the 'little engine that could,' and in the end she makes things happen. Many of the quotes occur to me “in times of trouble,” and, though I take issue with more details in this story than in the others I’ve reported so far, I love it all the more for what I perceive to be its flaws. (Why does your uncle drop you off on the island the first time you ask him to, when no one else—neither adult nor child—is allowed to go there? Why is your uncle so willing to launch into a maudlin tale about the day the family evacuated the island, right after he declares his reluctance to speak of those events? Why are the little boy’s footprints bigger than his sister’s hand? And so on.)
I’ll attempt the usual five (more) posts about Roan Inish:
1. Arrival, Setting the Scene
2. Fiona’s Heritage
5. Forced Into Action
It’s a sweet film, I think you’ll like it as much as I do!
The Secret of Roan Inish is a bit hard to get into, at first. The plot advances a bit slowly; the editing's a bit stiff; the Irish English, a bit, well, impenetrable. I discovered it before I had the luxury of turning on subtitles, and I taught myself its lines, by, well, you know, watching it over and over. Once I'd seen the film enough times that I could understand what the characters were saying, I could pretty much say it along with them, and so many of their lines stuck in my head, in the brogue in which they were delivered.
The Secret of Roan Inish is taken from a children's story. It's magic realism, I guess they'd say; the real-life tale is interspersed with fanciful chapters of the family's history, which appears to be all tied up with the local seals--I do not mean Navy, here!--thanks to the fact that, back generations ago, the Coneellys apparently mixed blood with a Selkie woman. Their mainland neighbors whisper about it, still, making the family wish it could just go back and live on Seal Island (that's what Roan Inish means). Fiona's the catalyst, but first she has to grok the present-day environment; she's spent the last few years living in Dublin with her alcoholic father who's a factory worker, there. They own some pretty cool real estate, for peasant folk. If I owned an island, I'd rattle the cage about it, too; I would!
This is my favorite encouragement film. Fiona's the 'little engine that could,' and in the end she makes things happen. Many of the quotes occur to me “in times of trouble,” and, though I take issue with more details in this story than in the others I’ve reported so far, I love it all the more for what I perceive to be its flaws. (Why does your uncle drop you off on the island the first time you ask him to, when no one else—neither adult nor child—is allowed to go there? Why is your uncle so willing to launch into a maudlin tale about the day the family evacuated the island, right after he declares his reluctance to speak of those events? Why are the little boy’s footprints bigger than his sister’s hand? And so on.)
I’ll attempt the usual five (more) posts about Roan Inish:
1. Arrival, Setting the Scene
2. Fiona’s Heritage
3. A Plan is Hatched
4. Life Goes On5. Forced Into Action
It’s a sweet film, I think you’ll like it as much as I do!
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