Word: mothers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rogers brings to Zimbabwe that he truly excels. His characters, and his country, are full of contradictions. His parents' defiance of Mugabe's regime is partly based on ignorance. Their enemies can be cruel, greedy and bloodthirsty, but also kind and righteous. As the country implodes, Rogers' tough, cynical mother breaks down in the middle of a bungled backstreet deal for a fake passport. Her idea of Zimbabwe, she realizes, is a long way from the daily reality faced by millions of her countrymen, or even, now, herself. "She no longer understood her town ..." writes Rogers, "the town where...
...tobacco-farming town, with no connection to his Chinese heritage. His grandparents emigrated from China in the 1880s, and his family was completely assimilated - he and his siblings spoke only English. At 6, after a white schoolmate called him "Ching Chong Chinaman," Yang went home upset and asked his mother if he was Chinese. She gravely told him yes. "I knew in that instant," Yang writes on his website, "that being Chinese was a terrible curse...
...movie has no stars, few recognizable faces. And unlike so many American films, which cast gentiles in Jewish roles (Imelda Staunton, for example, as the stereotype mother in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly drawn - Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would find deafening - but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, "Oy vey!" or talks shtick. If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive "Why me?" when...
...into the realm of the genuinely distinctive. Hoffmann underscores his intimacy with the story, which closely parallels his own life, by sharing his name with the narrator. The reader enters the narrator’s life during the 1940s. Living in what would become Israel, Hoffmann’s mother dies in the first line while British soldiers mill around the fringes of his memory. As is his wont, the speaker transmits his reactions to the moments that are most eventful by way of the images he recalls alongside them. The memories that tie themselves to his mother?...
...Venice Film Festival—an honor previously given to fellow Arriaga actor Gael García Bernal—which her bracing performance richly deserves. Although uniformly believable, the remaining cast does not reach Theron’s or Lawrence’s level. As the guilty mother, Kim Basinger is so shakingly fragile that she comes dangerously close to over-acting, which is frustrating given the subtlety of the rest of the film. J.D. Pardo is effective but one-dimensional as the son of Basinger’s paramour, and José María Yazpik is intriguing...