My Flesh and Blood

***Be warned, this film is difficult at times to watch (but worth it)***

The world is so full of misery, and that's not being melodramatic, it truly is, and this film is a great example of it. A woman named Susan Tom has and I'm sure will continue to adopt kids with special needs, 11 of them as of when the film was made.

Two of the little girls are missing their legs entirely, others are confined to wheel chairs. One boy has cystic fibrosis, another is mentally challenged, one kid has epidermolysis bullosa that makes his skin fall off his body, a little girl whose whole head was burned in a fire, it goes on and on like this. Some of the kids are terminal and many of them live with pain everyday. Watching this women not only take on one child who needs her help but over ten, and that's not including the ones that died in the past is truly amazing.

I had to work hard not to cry, it wasn't out of pity though. Watching someone in pain has always had that reaction for me, and I'm sure many other people have the same. I thought going into this movie that it would be uplifting, and in many ways it is, but it is also a documentary, and there's no writers here, just the plain truth and reality of the situation, and no ones going to come riding in with the cavalry to save some people. This family is so beautiful though, they all care for one another so much, and I guess in that way love will save them.

I was disturbed to find a villain early in the movie, actually we meet him in the very first scene. His name is Joe and he has cystic fibrosis. Now when I say this don't get me wrong, he certainly does bad things, but he's still a child, but I'm not going to kid the situation, he was dangerous to his sisters, but still a victim himself. For that I felt so bad for him, he's a victim and the only thing he can do is victimize other people, and he is angry and he has every right to be. 15 is to young to be dying.

The truly amazing thing about this family is that they really don't even hint at letting anything hold them back from what they want to do, not that any of their disabilities should hold them back. The story takes place in four parts, they start in the fall and end in the summer with a montage to introduce each new section in the movie, with these montages they showed how truly normal these kids are. In one they are ice skating...all of them are (including the girls who have no legs.) In another they are swimming in a pool. So many times I laughed during it because as kids they are just funny, they just say funny things.

In an unexpected turn, but smart choice the kids don't talk about their disabilities to the camera, only Susan does that, instead they let the kids talk about who they are, what they like to do. In that way we learn who they are, and not what disability they have, that doesn't define them, its of course something they live with everyday but it is not who they are. More often than not you see smiles on their faces and hear them laughing, even with the challenges that Susan has to overcome having to care for so many kids you can see that she is happy to be doing it, and making her life and theirs better. These are kids who were dumped in the system by parents who couldn't or just didn't want to care for them. Here she is doing what they couldn't do times 11.

The title is accurate, we are all of the same flesh, we are all of the same blood. Watching someone being truly humane reminds me that we as humans might not be as bad as it sometimes seems. I recommend this film to everyone, not only to remind yourself of how lucky you are, but more importantly to see some truly strong people, disabled....no, they are stronger than I ever could be. 9/10 stars.

An American Affair

The description of this movie on Netflix was right, and at the same time so wrong. It described it as a kid (Adam) who gets a crush on his neighbor (Catherine) and he really likes her...blah blah blah. All of that is true, but there's so much more to it than that.

Ill start out with the obvious plot point they left out, Catherine is having an affair with President Kennedy and its shortly before he is killed. Huge bombshell there, suddenly the movie went from a coming of age story, which it was, kind of, but then became a political thriller of sorts. But before I go much further I will start from the beginning.

Adam seems to be somewhat of a closed off loner, he sets up his friend to get into a fight in the school yard just so then he can see people hit each other. There's a girl that he likes, but he doesn't know how to handle that whole situation (we never did) When he sees Catherine and what she does with many different men he steals some of her mail to get to know her better, and when snooping around her house is caught and tells her hes looking for some after school work.

She puts him to work in her garden and on the surface it all appears pretty normal, but the sick thing is that she knows what he thinks of her and doesn't mind, in fact she encourages it even to the point of letting him watch her have sex (he's in the closet but she knows he's there) She does drugs and doesn't hide it from him, she even brings him into her world of painting, which in that we learn the most about her. Besides what we learn about her through her art she is mostly a mystery to the audience, and I like that.

As the story goes on and Adam starts to get a little to curious he ends up spying on the wrong kinds of people, and when Kennedy is killed he starts to really get himself into some trouble.

It was a strange little movie, the morals and ethics of the characters were muddled to say the least, and you never really get any of the characters. The acting though is still very good, I think for what the script must have been the actors did the best, but as it was a dark story. I think they needed to shoot it a little darker in both image and tone, or get a different director who could have twisted it a little more.

The end resolution come quick and out of the feeling of the rest of the movie, and that sort of upset me, if they would have made the rest of the movie feel darker and more threatening then the ending would have been a great exclamation point. But since they took on the rest of the film differently it just seemed out of place. I did like how they dealt with the CIA and how as a new agency in the country it was very scary, hell its still scary now.

It didn't really offer anything new, and it was not handled well enough, so for that I give it a 6/10, but a high six. There were some good scenes and some cool shots, but again it wasn't anything new.

Director: William Olsson

Starring: Gretchen Mol, Cameron Bright, James Rebhorn

Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

This is not the first documentary Ive seen on the subject of our Electoral system, all of which sprouted out of the total fuck up that was/is the election of 2000. We can blame several people and groups for that one, not the least of which is the main stream media who basically called the election before they had all the numbers, thus creating a landslide effect for Bush.

I could easily go off on a political and ethical tangent that has lots to do with the documentary, but would mostly be my opinion and not about the film. So I will do my best to steer away from things not covered by the movie. Am I surprised that the election in 2004 appeared even then to be stolen? No. When you have an electric voting machine that has no paper trail and no way to verify the votes that have been cast then of course someone is going to take advantage of that. Most of the documentary focuses on that, but before I jump into that I will do my best to outline the other plain scary actions that went down during the '04 election.

-Not enough voting machines in poorer areas, or areas with African and Hispanic people.
-Broken Machines.
-People being turned away.
-Lines at times exceeding 12 hours.
-Voter intimidation

The list just keeps going, and then add on top of that that when some of those people voted for Kerry the machine voted for Bush in their name. All of which is a very simple thing to do when writing software. The two companies who make the voting machines contribute money to the Republican Party.

According to exit polls and primaries Kerry was set to win by a 3% margin with him at 51% and Bush at 48%, a pretty good margin. When election results were coming out the numbers flipped, and Bush won by 51%. Doesn't necessarily sound big but that's 3,000,000 people who suddenly changed their votes or lied to the exit pollers. The odds that the exit pollers were wrong is 1:10,000. It seems pretty obvious what happened. They talk about the county that had 600 sum odd voters, and the votes from there tallied to over 4,000 all favoring Bush. There were examples of this in 11 battle ground states all favoring Bush.....accident?

The thing is, at this point why does it even matter, he did his damage with those extra four years he got, and Yay for Obama, but the thing is is that they didn't really fix the problem by 2006, or even by 2008. I remember I voted on a touch screen computer just like they show in the film for the '08 election. I got a paper receipt showing who I voted for, but I got to keep that, thus not doing much to help the computer problem.

The film was very well done, it was understated, they let the people talk and didn't add in any editor or narration commentary. They didn't try to go over board with effects, or little animations but just let the subject speak for itself. It wasn't terribly long, only 81 minutes, so for that I think it could have been longer, its a pretty hefty issue. If we don't have real elections anymore then we don't have freedom, a very cut and dry concept. Overall it gets a 7/10. They could have made it longer, but was still a tough little pill to swallow.

Director: David Earnhardt

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport

I watch a lot of documentaries on the holocaust....I mean a lot. This one promised to be a little different, by focusing on the children's stories of those who escaped from Germany through the use of the Kindertransport to England.

It certainly delivered on that, but other than that I cant say much more about its qualities, it certainly was very good, but was some how lacking. It clocks in at an hour and fifty five minutes, and honestly I was never bored, but it was all things I had heard before, in a format that was also very familiar. I think the film makers should have taken another approach in letting the people tell their stories, or paced it differently.

The stories are truly heart breaking and all you can do is watch and wonder how you would react to such a situation. Your parents put you on a train to the coast with the promise they would be right behind you, and then never seeing them again. One such story involved a girl who was continually called down to the train station and her name was never on the list, so one day, on her fifth time being called down by the Nazis she simply said that she really wanted to be on the train, the guard asked if she was sure and she said yes, they put her on, but it wasn't headed to the coast...it was going to Auschwitz. She never finishes where that story went, because we all know what happened to her, she later says she came out weighing 58 lbs at the age of 15, truly terrible.

Out of the 1,500,000 children that died in the Holocaust the Britain's took in 10,000. In comparison it doesn't seem like much, but why even try and make sense of it, or throw more blame around.

It was a well made documentary, and won an Oscar for it, but is it one that everyone should run out and see, it doesn't top my list on Holocaust docs to watch, but is powerful none the less. 7/10 stars.