Tag: movie review

I Love It the TV Show Adolescence

On By Donny Lee DukeIn applied nonduality, childhood education, Poetry, ReviewsLeave a comment
my own 13-year-old Nithish
With over the top crime
get a modern classic.
Are you a surgeon?
Oh my God,
you’re a baseball bat.
The look behind the ship
is very primitive.
There’s mom and pop and the show
and the school bag.
There’s the policeman with his gun,
the psychologist with her table.
Society is not challenged
in its moving parts.
We are blamed on social media.

A kid kills then what?
The repercussions of society.
We do not see where his crime came from,
like there’s a killer in everyone
waiting for social media.
Children will take a knife and stab someone,
and they are perfectly normal.
Where did his rage come from?
He wasn’t beaten at home.

Adolescence doesn’t show this.
It can’t.
They were construing society
to make it say something it doesn’t.
Crimes do come out of the woodwork,
but with the attention to detail on this one,
this was aimed at social impact.
Perfect television The Guardian says,
and they convened with Parliament.

They wanted to get a point across they said.
I don’t know was that toxic masculinity?
It makes kids kill.
They really hate Andrew Tate,
but do kids act like that,
divorce from themselves and murder someone
if they aren’t already predisposed?
Can we see the answer here?

I don’t think we can see nothin’ but what the producers want us to see /
and want society alarmed.
It’s propaganda
beautifully done.
You can’t argue with it,
but I can do more than that.

Let’s put a kid’s genitals on the screen.
What happens in adolescence?
The biggest thing in their lives,
gargantuan wears.
Their genitals have needs
society doesn’t recognize.
That thing growin’ between their legs,
openin’,
pulsating,
it won’t leave them alone.
They have to do something with it,
but they’re not allowed.

They get tripped up with masturbation
because it’s an ashamed text.
Some parents guard against that,
some societies.
Never is it okay
on the news.
Now let’s turn the volume up,
and they have to.
Can you admit a sexual need?

Why is it normal for a 13-year-old boy
to just stay away from vulvas
and the tits of some girl he likes?
Why is normal for her to refuse him?
Okay we don’t want unwanted babies
and disease,
but what is your beef with them touching each other?
They’re budding all over the place,
and that’s only arming them
for the institution of marriage years from now?

What they can’t they touch each other?
Is it all a fear of sex
brinin’ babies along?
Have you met a one yet
that did not come from intercourse
in the intimacy of two people?
Yes marijuana leads to heroin I know,
but children fumblin’ with each other,
children not older teens,
are just not that competent, you know?

And maybe we could mitigate that
with better education,
and all through growin’ up
their genitals were not squashed.
We have to keep adults off them,
but other children no.
It leads to a safe society,
letting little Johnny express his gun,
little Suzie what she’s got.
Do you know where sexual disease comes from?
Squash a kid’s genitals and see.
So many social ills come from there.
Adolescence can you see that,
or are you just too ripe blind?

Can we get to the human drama of the thing,
the confusion of a child
all alone
growing up.
No matter how many people around them,
the scuttlebutt of their mates,
they outgrow their skins, you know?
And they’re punished for it.
We have no outlet for them.
We make them toe the line,
stuff them in school,
sports and whatnot,
and regulate all their time.

They’re gettin’ hair down there
and unspeakable urges,
but there’s still monsters under the bed,
and they can still rock with a teddy bear.
They wanna be held at night
if they’d admit it,
and in everything they look at they just want to be loved.
Do you feel that?

What do we do to make it right?
There’s so much we’re not doin’,
I can’t turn on the light for you.
There’s a space a garden I said,
and we’re worms in it tillin’ the soil.
We haven’t opened our books yet
and reviewed the hidden skies
or walked across our dreams at night.
We can’t see consciousness in our book
and we share it all,
and how we all sit together in time
hidden identities of one another.
You look at the outer book
and fail
with the tribe of children.

You don’t know how to meet them
in the bigness of their thoughts.
You give them grocery lists
and jobs to do,
and you entertain them awhile,
but can you reach them where their soul touches earth?
Can you take their hand

and lead them past rainbows and hidden splendors
to discover their purpose in time?

You don’t know what I’m talking about,
and I’ve breached it again,
your idea of society,
but you will take a child and throw them in jail,
whatever you call the detention center,
and rub their nose in their crime,
and you call that good society,
and the protection of children leads here?
Get tough on them they're kids
who’ve committed crimes.
It’s the only way you deal with crime
since the beginning,
takin’ an eye for an eye
or a tooth for a tooth
or as close as you can get
with make them suffer in prison.
Can we get outta here?
It doesn’t
the ramrod Adolescence.

Some weird stuff
I’ve blighted you with,
I’ve put on your phone,
and you will just ignore me
again.
I’m talking to the public.
I don’t get the reach of Adolescence.
It’s spurred you on
to make social change
where kids watch social media.
Meanwhile your hand is down their pants
terriblin’ their teenager,
and I’ve used an analogy don’t get mad.
You are not right with them,
and you know it.

All you give to them is the machine,
the dissatisfied lives you wear,
the boredom
that rich people wear.
I’m goin’ through the roof.
Want to join me?

A TV show called Adolescence,
a molten band,
you’ve all been fooled.
It doesn’t solve anything.
It only makes you cry.
It doesn’t even identify society
as what’s wrong with us.
What social media show us,
all our fault lines.
Get rid of the looking glass yes,
and go back to newspapers and television sets,
so’s they’re not so visible to us.

A kid will consider it.
If you’re not too busy with your life,
if you hold their hand there,
no Nazis present
or policemen,
you can wrap their hand around social media
where we make a better world,
even watchin’ Andrew Tate videos
or the mean Vegan Teacher.
You let them chose the material,
and then you engage them there.
Am I spittin’ out fluff?
I’m giving you the history with my kid,
until the TV show
went off the air,
the tragedy
that showed me adolescence’s fall.

The Last Stadium on Earth

On By Donny Lee DukeIn movie review, Poetry, supermindLeave a comment
A Tumblr gif from the movie Problemista
Have brain damage,
that’s not really politics.
It’s a funeral.
Who would see The Last Tree Trunk on Earth?
Critics say it’s a good movie.
It’s spills bad.
It was filmed inside Iran
in secret trees.
It’s got a wallop to it.
You see freedom up close
thrown out in the street and beaten on.
You see it shot with knives.
This is a real camera folks,
and girls just want to have their scarves
not choke them to death.
Is anybody watching this?
Can anybody care?

The Seed of the Sacred Fig
was put in the wrong house.
Brilliant you hear the arguments at the table
theocracy speaks,
but it’s shot in red and white,
and we practice human nature
with a murdering gun.
We do not show human nature.
A father and daughter are not that red apart,
suddenly,
unexpectedly,
so the plot can aim its gun.
Would a family go mad,
horribly so,
for a strength to resist evil
that none of them felt they had?
An entire lifetime together
with daddy milk
and a mother devoted to everyone,
it lands on the freeway
I will hunt you down and kill you
love said.

How tall these movies are
in our backyard.
They bring humanity under the gun.
Has human nature been robbed of its sense?
It’s blow out of proportion
so it can impress audiences
and score award points.
We see human nature sick and dying
in movie after movie,
and we can’t get over the villain.
He is so perfect in his craft,
miraculously a monster
just doing the impossible.
We love to hate him,
and if it’s a her all the more.

They’ve confused us
with what’s real.
Human people don’t act like that,
and these movies have us all alarmed,
riding out our hate
in tickets sold.
What’s the point of all this mess?
Make more bucks,
and let’s take these artistic challenges
and make them rob people wear.
My God that’s a talented movie
just on our disease.

Alejandro in Problemista
almost makes the villain human,
but then he wrote the apology.
We’d have to go to Sing Sing for a good movie
in emotional fare,
so Shakespeare on Earth.
Let’s not get too gay in National Anthem
and spoil the show.
We have purpose in our lives
this movie knows not of.
You wear a good Holocaust
in A Real Pain,
tryin’ to show it right,
on the level of human eyes
a human drama.
What am I doin’?
Showin’ you my movie list.
I watch a lot of movies.
I’m really into them.
This is the way we spend human nature,
in identifying roles.
We get involved with a part.
We identify with a character,
a plot.
It wears our lives
in symbolic meaning.
We get at the stuff.

We invest ourselves there
oh so strongly.
We’re raped
with a bad ending.
A good movie can make us feel good about ourselves
and improve our lives.
It can heal.
It can do bad things.
It can tear up our lives
for a moment of all meaning.
It is so very powerful,
cinema.
It goes directly to the starting point,
where our lives came from and why.
Alejandro is good at this.
Amazing creativity
those scenes where he’s talkin’ to someone,
and it shows the whereabouts,
the representative part.

Drum roll please.
We are creative edges of time.
We stand and sing our lives
an entertainment for deep meaning.
So many roles wear our lives.
Can you get at the audience?
Being after being,
shrouded in unimaginable mystery,
have a total immersion gamble with our lives.
Of course we like movies.
We are there.

A Rumpelstiltskin comes along and plays the keyboard,
and we’re on bended ground
unable to figure out destiny,
but we can get back to ourselves.
Audience after audience prevents us,
the cliffhanger of our lives
their entertainment point,
but they value our lives
in our bid for freedom
and to discover who we are.
It’s their thrill.
They clap when the angels sing.

Are you crazy yet?
You’re just gettin’ started.
There is so much behind the scenes
in the dragnet of who you are.
I cannot show this to you,
the person you are on high,
the actor that has donned
this long line of all these lives.
I can only keep tryin’
in poem after poem and my symbolic life,
but it’s a farce you know.
I’ve really let yah down,
right where you needed me,
and there’s no way to make that up.
When you see it’s a game,
though a meaningful one,
know like you know the body you wear,
because you have seen it with your own eyes,
that you are an actor in a cage,
a player playin’ time,
the first thing you do is fuck up.
It’s the proud of human nature.
It’s so stupid.

It prevents me from showing you who I am
and who you are,
unimaginably big,
but that’s life,
a goddamn movie

that just throws you for a loop,
and you can never get it right
until you stop the pretendin’
and come together on yourself
what you need beyond time.
You’re not the audience I’m speakin’ to when I say
I’m puttin’ on those shoes.
Feel the thrill?
A poet measure
this poet smiles.

How do you chew on that poem?
We grow in stadiums.
A Watcher watches our lives.
It’s dream big.
It’s not who we are the audience
in prerecorded time.
This is not the first time creation mount.
Great DVDs we live
for their viewing pleasure.
We are that Watcher you see,
not the audience pang,
and we can’t get over him.
It’s too stadium big.
It transcends time and space,
but above our roofs it’s there,
the hidden keeper of our lives,
who we return to,
the one who started it all
in our little universe.

You don’t believe me I know,
but you’d like to.
The hidden meaning of our lives
are compassionate witnesses
beyond number and form.
Everywhere they look
they are there
the meaning behind creation
on this bended globe,
in this starstruck universe,
and they change us with a look
the bearing on time.
They are the Watchers behind time
watchin’ the movie us
them very selves in time.
Can you feel them?

Your true self,
they bring you home.
Months of capacity
open those gates,
if you’re ready for them again,
and you’ve been there before
for a brief moment
a time or two
in all your many lives
where afterlife grows.
It's a certainty you remember.
It’s a certainty you hold in your skies
that you farm into your very ground
I’ve planted this poem with,
a vehicle of my own return
one sudden afternoon
before the death of me.
You come up with yourself
in the ultimate game of life,
the ultimate paradox of life.
That’s a round of applause.
You hear the whole stadium sing
your great escape,
your victorious mile
I put better in progress.

Alejandro,
he did it.
I’ve seen what movies
list as our great surprise.
Too mundane to take it
where we meet beyond the universe,
they give it gas and go.
Are you hearin’ this?
Same image credit as above

Movie Review of ‘Divine Access’

On By Douglas M.In ReviewsLeave a comment

divine access poster

Some months back I posted a movie review of the Jamin Winans film The Frame, and though I am a proponent of the film for various reasons, I make it clear I don’t consider it a spiritual film. To justify that I threw out a working definition of what I thought a truly spiritual film would be. I consider a spiritual film to be one that acknowledges in some way that our true purpose in this world is a shift in identity, a change in consciousness resulting in an actual lived experience of ourselves as God, Being, Oneness or whatever you want to call it. Recently, I saw a film which I feel isn’t quite knocking on the door of that definition, but it’s at least turning in the driveway. That movie is the recent independent film Divine Access.

This movie is worth seeing for a number of reasons not the least of which are great performances by much of the cast. It also has an entertaining and to a certain extent meaningful story punctuated by some very clever and amusing satire on religious veneration, new age spirituality and gurudom.

The main character is Jack Harriman, who grew up making the rounds of the New Age circuit with his New Age mom accumulating a vast wealth of teachings and scriptural quotes from Buddhism to Christianity and everything in between. Growing up in that free love atmosphere, Jack also fostered his passion for the opposite sex. Fast forwarding to the present we find Jack as a 40 something underachiever whose life largely revolves around his johnson and trying to bed as many women as possible.

Things change though when Jack’s friend Bob, who’s aware of Jack’s vast religious knowledge, invites him as a guest on his no-budget late night cable access show Divine Access. On the show Jack debates and shows up current host Reverend Guy Roy Davis, and after a favorable response from viewers, Guy Roy is out and Jack is in. Things pick up steam from there on out when, by Bob’s prompting, Jack gives a talk in town, and one viral video later Jack embarks on an inspirational speaking tour of the southern United States. His main motivations though for going on the tour are to make money, ‘selling ideas for cash’ as he puts it, and to hook up with loose women who are attracted to his celebrity status, and who are propositioning him via email. Jack claims not only to have no original ideas, but also no belief in the things he says. From his perspective he’s giving people hope, and as long as the people believe what he says that’s what matters.

Among the important supporting characters in the movie is Nigel, who works as a ‘catcher’ catching fainters who’ve been slain in the spirit1 at religious revivals. He tags along with Jack to serve in that capacity if necessary and also keeps a journal chronicling the events of the speaking tour as well as Jack’s teachings. Another character is Amber, a down on her luck prostitute who presents Jack with the chance to help a woman unselfishly as opposed to trying to get her into the sack. Then there’s Marian, a mysterious woman who knows things about Jack that she shouldn’t and pops in at different points in the story to challenge Jack’s indifference and call him on his behavior. She represents a divine element in the movie since she’s obviously not a normal human and she can appear superimposed over other people as well as vanish into thin air. What is she, some form of God,  an angel, or a representation of Jack’s soul? The movie never actually tells you, but it does show that she can be seen and heard by other people than Jack, so she’s not just a figment of his imagination.

The story also periodically shifts to follow the exploits of Reverend Guy Roy, who blames Jack for the loss of his late night TV pulpit and who he views as a minion of Satan. As the hapless Reverend’s life and mental stability come unraveled, things build to a final showdown with Jack at the movie’s climax.

Now I won’t tell you what that climax is, but I will say that I was at first disappointed with it. Afterwards though, I realized it would have been hard to take the story any farther without it crossing the threshold to a spiritual movie and actually addressing the idea of a shift in consciousness. As it is, Jack’s wisdom is mostly along the lines of what you’ll mainly find in trendy best sellers from the Self-Help section of your local bookstore.2 It’s not pointing people to that change in consciousness. In addition, Jack’s growth is towards the genuinely sattvic3 man that he is and is trying to deny. It’s not a growth toward surpassing man.

Regardless of that, I’ll say again that the film is well worth seeing. It’s a story of growth and redemption and of accepting one’s destiny, and because of these things I feel it stands out from even the small crowd of independent films. Ultimately it’s a ‘human’ story and not an ‘exceeding the human story’, but it does have the element of divine help in the figure of Marian who is pushing Jack towards self-betterment. That, for me, is what really raises the other elements of the film to a step on the way to a truly spiritual movie, puts it in the driveway. For those thirsting for such a movie I think, like me, you’ll find a little sustenance in Divine Access.

Notes

  1. Being ‘slain in the spirit’ refers to the practice of people falling to the floor in religious ecstasy. Usually their fall is broken by ushers or ‘catchers’.
  2. I say ‘mainly’ because you’ll also find the likes of Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer in the Self-Help section.
  3. Dictionary.com defines sattvic as: having a serene, harmonious, balanced mind or attitude.