Thursday 21 March 2019

The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: The Movies of Nicole Holofcener: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

     The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: Part Two




        It's great that nobody smokes cigarettes in the movies I've seen that are scripted and directed by Nicole Holofcener. Yet her politics don't turn me on.
      Holofcener is not a progressive which is too bad. Her film 'Please Give' features Catherine Keener as a middle-aged mother who runs an antique and furniture store in New York City. Keener, like myself is a liberal who gives sometimes big sums of money to the poor and the homeless. I give fifty or thirty cents a time to panhandlers. Keener gives away sometimes twenty dollars a time.
     Now in the film no one thanks Keener for helping people, and some like her teenage daughter just dump on her. An older neighbour throws the birthday present that Keener gives her into the garbage. An African-American man refuses part of a leftover meal that she offers him. He explains that he's waiting outside a restaurant to get a seat inside the place. Keener's daughter tries to stop her giving $20 to a homeless man.
      "You never give me $20," she says to her mother and she grabs the $20 and keeps it.
    At one point in the film Keener breaks down and cries when she sees mentally challenged teenagers playing basketball. Yet afterwards she doesn't volunteer to work with them. And at the movie's end everything turns out well, as Keener finally forks out $235 dollars to pay for her daughter's jeans. All of these events shouldn't surprise anyone.
     "I don't think you'll find too many left leaning films coming out of Hollywood," one film critic told me years ago. How many American film makers lean consistently to the left? Maybe there's three or four. Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and John Sayles come to mind. In Britain there's the great Ken Loach. And that's about it.
     Like most film directors Holofcener's a conservative. The main message of 'Please Give' is: Give money to your loved ones and you'll do fine. It's a waste of time and money helping the poor and the homeless. Few powerful or wealthy people will disagree with this message. So though I like parts of Holofcener's films she's not my favourite  film director.
    I like the fact that no smokers pop up in her flicks. I just don't like her politics.

Tuesday 19 March 2019

The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: The Movies of Nicole Holofcener by Dave Jaffe

   The Movies of Nicole Holofcener: Part One.




    Nicole Holofcener has become one of my favourite movie directors. Holofcener is in her late fifties, lives in southern California and sets some of her films in New York City. "She's a bit like Woody Allen," some people say about her films. I don't think so, though she knows Allen very well. After all, her mother's second husband was Charles H.Joffe who produced dozens of Allen's movies.
      Hiolofcener's one of my favourite directors because so far in all the films I've seen that she scripted and directed, nobody smokes tobacco. People drink a bit in her flicks and in one of her films, namely 'Walking and Talking', two people smoke pot together. Sometimes they drink alcohol. yet they don't smoke cigarettes.
   Now Holofcener may or may not be as great a director as say Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Atom Egoyan, Lena Wertmuller or even Woody Allen. Yet in nearly all the films I've seen people smoke cigarettes. And smoking is dangerous. Every year 15,000 Canadians die from smoking. Smokers have strokes, or get cancer or their hearts just stop ticking. So they die often in their sixties or even earlier.
     "Cigarettes are dangerous," one of my previous doctors told me. "Stay away from them."  Holfcener's characters do.
     That doesn't make Holfcener a great director for some critics. Her films are mostly about women interacting in families or friendships and sometimes they hate each other or hurt each other. "There's no story line," one woman told me after seeing the film 'Please Give'. This may be true but the interactions that women have are the story. Still, whatever the flaws or lack of action in this woman's films, her flicks don't show glamorous film stars smoking. That can turn young people onto this most dangerous activity.
    I like this woman's work. Her films aren't violent, bloody or physically brutal. People hurt each other but mostly through words. Holofcener's main star Catherine Keener never lights up a cigarette in any of the films I've seen her in. For that, I thank them both. And I also than Ariel Levy a writer for 'The New Yorker' who turned me on to this woman' work. Holofcener is I believe an advocate of not smoking. Her films are anyway.

Wednesday 13 March 2019

Inside Unity: A Poem by Dave Jaffe.

  Inside Unity: A Poem by Dave Jaffe.




    There's no kneeling
    Only healing
    Inside this church.




   No talk here of the Gospels
  Or Moses or much of Christ.
  If there is a God
  Who has trod
  On this earth
  This Creator's light
  Splashes down on our faces
   From a blue sky
  That hovers way above the church's roof.




  The words of the minister
  Aren't sinister.
  They stroke my scarred face
  Stitch up the epidermal surface
  Where a week ago
  A surgeon's knives
  Scraped cancer away
  From the dark floor of my mind.


  This minister talks of healing
  Not sealing
  Away stark memories of the past
  In locked vaults of times gone by.
  His words gently touch my skin.
  "Life if good," he says.
  To me this means
  There is no sin.



   Outside
  The city clears its throat
   From the mouths of a million cars.


  I'm sorry.
 I can't worry anymore about poisons
 That scud around in the earth, the air and the water
 Or the starving billions
Or those led  to slaughter
 In Syria or elsewhere.
 For now I am healed.
 No need to steal
 Fragile moments of happiness
 From the present of my life,
 Or look in fright
  Toward its end.


 "In unity," someone said,
  "there is strength."
  In this Unity Church I have found happiness.
  Just enough to return for another day.