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Attitudes about Aging

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31Jan

Finding Tatanka

Videographer Jacob Bricca created Finding Tatanka to gain greater understanding of his father, Kit Bricca. He hoped to fill in blank spots that have remained in their relationship across the years and, hopefully, to reach a resolution that might enrich it. The result is a video case study of this father–son relationship and more largely, of a visionary known over the years as Kit, Chris Cougar, Buffalo, Buffalo Waves in the Breeze, and Tatanka .
31Jan

The Age of Love

At the outset of The Age of Love , an elderly man shows videographer Steven Loring a snapshot of his wife and himself taken at night: “We were right in the woods and it was great. We could sit in the creek with a case of beer in the water. You love each other and you have a good time, no matter what you do—whether it’s drinking or walking or sitting at the fire at night.
31Jan

Coming of Age in Aging America

Coming of Age in Aging America is perhaps the most important film to emerge to date within The New Gerontology paradigm. In contrast to the historically dour 4-D perspective on aging (decline, deterioration, dependency, depression), it is refreshingly optimistic and celebratory.
31Jan

I Won’t Go

Oli Truss is a single older housebound woman in her nineties who lives alone in her rural home somewhere in Britain. As a child, videographer Georgina Hurcombe was her neighbor. She recalls the animals running around on Oli’s property and how “she used to teach me math after school.” That was 15 years ago.
11Dec

Bubbeh Lee and Me

This ingenuous film documents a visit that videographer Andy Abrahams Wilson made over two decades ago to see his widowed grandmother, Bubbeh Lee, over the Jewish Holidays in Florida. At the outset, Wilson explains that at the time of the filming, he had been making this trip for several years, wondering if each visit might be the last.
11Oct

The Farewell

When a lie becomes part of carefully orchestrated communication in the service of the perceived good of the lie's recipient, is it justified? The Farewell presents this question within a scenario that is also complicated by the differing societal assumptions expressed in Eastern and Western cultures.
11Oct

Grow Old Along with Me: The Poetry of Aging – Part 2

Few poets celebrate aging as exuberantly as Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” Browning’s optimistic sentiments are purposefully embodied in the title and content of this lovely film produced by videographers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele.
06Sep

Going in Style (2017 remake)

Allow me to start this review on a personal note. In reviewing films for this journal, I have tried to find those films that present aspects of elderhood in an insightful or credible way, and that are often not well known. Such films, I’m finding, are harder and harder to come by. So, for this review, I decided to dip into the pool of more mainstream films that may simply be fun to watch without having much to meaningfully “say” about elderhood.
11Jul

Diane

Diane is one of those rare films that reflects human life as it is—in all its personal complexity—rather than one of the more commonly gratuitous films that present excessively dramatized/glamorized views of life as many wish it to be.
11Jul

Grow Old Along With Me: The Poetry of Aging, Part 1

The prime motive behind this important and revealing video was the desire of filmmakers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele “to make a positive contribution to the issue of aging by finding wise and vital elders who would guide us through the process” (Anne Macksoud, Personal Communication, June 14, 2019).
11Jun

95 And 6 To Go

In 95 And 6 To Go, videographer Kimi Takesue introduces us to her grandfather, Mr. Tom Takesue, a 95-year-old Japanese American and resident of Hawaii. Videographer Kimi has returned to Hawaii to provide him with “support and assistance” due to the recent death of his wife, Ethel.
11Feb

The Kominsky Method

Humor can sometimes be a helpful diversion in dealing with uncomfortable emotions—but humor that is flippant and tin-eared is not. If I were confined to one adjective that best defines the new Netflix comedy, The Kominsky Method, it would be “flippant.”
11Feb

Quilts in Women’s Lives

Quilters. What comes to mind? If you do not quilt and know little about those who do, perhaps you see an image of a frail old woman wearing a lavender dress with a lace collar. She is seated in a rocker and stitching with needle and thread (Fons, 2018).
11Dec

Book Club

The new film, Book Club, while often relegated to the dismissive “Chick Flick” category, is ripe for some serious review and critique. I’m aware of the obvious risk here for me as a male to offer a review of a film that deals with sex and intimacy from an expressly woman’s point of view.
31Jan

The Babushkas of Chernobyl (reviewed by Rick Scheidt)

There is a magnetic attraction in the stories of elders, who by choice or happenstance, face unique, and extreme life scenarios that exceed the imaginations of those of us who live securely under the thicker part of the normal curve. The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a riveting watershed for gerontologists.
10May

The Sense of an Ending

In The Sense of an Ending, we finally have another film that reflects on a character’s early and later life personas. The film’s main character, Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), is jostled out of his somewhat routinized and placid life by a letter from the mother of one of his first serious girlfriends in college some 45 years earlier.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood