Word: motherism
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...balks at some of her school's rules. Since these rules seem to be nonsensical, we're on her side. Even when she spits at another child during recess, it's almost justifiable, because we've seen her being picked on. So when one of her teachers tells her mother Hillary (Felicity Huffman) and father, Peter (Bill Pullman), "Something's going on with Phoebe," we're initially as dubious as they are. It soon becomes apparent, though, that Phoebe is not a spirited child being oppressed, but either mentally ill or suffering from an undiagnosed syndrome. Her compulsive behaviors include...
...plot is woven from multiple fixations with Lewis Carroll's classic. There is Phoebe, who knows the book cover to cover, thanks, at least in part, to her mother, who has been unsuccessfully working on a dissertation on perversions in Alice for long enough to have taken on a twitchy, Mad Hatter-like look herself. Then there is Phoebe's drama teacher, Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson), who approaches directing an elementary school production of Alice with the dedication of Bertolt Brecht. Miss Dodger wears her hair in severe braids wrapped around her head, which have apparently squeezed all affect...
...what Phoebe does have on its side, other than Fanning's exquisite delivery, is its provocative look at motherhood. On Desperate Housewives, Huffman is mostly mired in the silly slapstick of parenthood, but in Phoebe she really gets to dig into the painful dichotomy of a stay-at-home mother who longs to have professional success. Like the smug academic dad in The Squid and the Whale, Hillary believes that her child is different from other kids in a good way, an offshoot of Hillary's own genius, which has been unfairly suppressed by domestic horrors like cooking dinner...
...wife's New Orleans funeral after her death on Fat Tuesday at age 66. But this Ernie was a fully costumed mannequin seated in a mule-drawn carriage that followed her casket. As the widow of the self-proclaimed "Emperor of the Universe"--whose 1961 hit song "Mother-in-Law" provided the name for the music lounge the couple would later establish as a New Orleans institution--Antoinette thought it her duty to keep Ernie's memory alive with the life-size likeness she kept at the establishment. The mannequin's hands were removable so that she could take them...
...Bush has maintained a ranch since 1999. Four years ago, there were some who wondered if the noise would ever stop. The President's five-week summer vacation at his ranch brought the turmoil over the Iraq war into every corner of Crawford. Led by Cindy Sheehan, a California mother who had lost her son in Iraq and swore she wouldn't leave Crawford until she met with the President, hundreds of activists flocked to the town. International camera crews and celebrities soon followed. As the antiwar crowds grew, pro-Bush protesters gathered in equal numbers...