Newsletter

Get the latest fashion trends, the best in travel and my life.

Attitudes about Aging

Click on any title or image to read full review

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.
05Feb

Hope Springs (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)

Most of us had already seen our third movie, Hope Springs, but we were surprised that tasked by the instructions to look for intimacy, we viewed the movie differently the second time.
03Oct

Last Chance Harvey

Last Chance Harvey (Hopkins, 2008) tells the story of an older musician, Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman), long ago divorced and somewhat estranged from his daughter, finding new love when he travels to London to attend his daughter’s wedding.
04Jun

The Intern

Not often does a film as entertainingly watchable as The Intern carry within it a positive regard for the multigenerational nature of human life in the 21st century. Generational chasms may still exist in big sectors of our culture, but films like The Intern may help reduce their size. Not that The Intern is a didactic “message” film; far from it. It is light on its feet and simply fun to watch as it unfolds the story of a successful but harried young executive learning to accept, and then trust, the help of an older worker.
04Apr

Youth

Early in this film, a remark from one of its characters laments the fact that he has become known as an actor mostly for playing the role of a robot in one particular film. This remark turns out to be a reflection of the very nature of the film, Youth. Throughout much of its 2 hours, the film feels like it could have been made by a robot. The story line moves along in fits and starts, and the characters often speak their lines with an isolated demeanor rather than truly engaging with each other. Approached in the right way, however, the film can still be a pleasure to watch.
04Aug

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a wonderfully composed film about the reuniting of an older Chinese father with his only daughter after years of continental separation.
08Feb

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel (Skogland, 2007), based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author, Margaret Laurence, takes us on a life review through the eyes and memories of its main character, 90 year old Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn). Faced with undefined health issues, she fiercely resists the attempts of her son and his wife to move her into a nursing home.
04Feb

My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond

Move back historically to the formal birth and popularization of Rowe and Kahn’s paradigm for successful aging. Move back still farther to the 1970 and 1980 decades where gestational studies show how environmental experiences and lifestyle account for physical and psychological changes once thought due solely to primary aging. Clearly, “successful aging” and its sibs—productive aging, positive aging, and optimal aging—have a rich vertical lineage spanning several generations of researchers.
04Dec

No Age Limit: Creativity and Aging

Old timers in gerontology will remember the challenge of its early days as we tried to convince a doubtful public as well as our skeptical students that human aging had any “up-side” at all. Successful aging was not yet a common part of our vocabulary.
02Oct

Josef’s Daughter

There is much that is novel about Josef’s Daughter. However, the viewer must be willing to move beyond its now-familiar message that middle aged adults are often confronted with a fresh awareness that aging and death are inexorably linked, that this linkage has undeniable personal relevance for them, and that some of them may have a difficult time coping with the fearsome implications of these facts.
03Jun

The Way We Get By

The Way We Get By offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of three elderly Maine Troop Greeters at the Bangor Airport. Because of its eastern-most location, the Bangor Airport has served as the major departure and arrival point of more than a million U.S. troops involved in the Iraqi and Afghanistan theaters of war.
07Apr

Philomena

Back in the mid 50s in Ireland, when she was a teenaged unwed mother to be, Philomena Lee was banished from her family and sent to a convent to have her child. She and the other young women sent there for the same reason were allowed contact with their babies for 1hr a day.
07Dec

Starlet

Starlet is a rich and insightful film that traces the development of an unlikely friendship between two women separated by 64 years of life. Jane (Dree Hemingway), a 21 year old who is adrift and newly finding her way in Los Angeles, first meets Sadie (Besedka Johnson), an 85 year old crusty-tempered widow, at Sadie’s yard sale where Jane buys an old but decorative thermos to use as a flower vase.
08Oct

Departures

In Departures, the topic of death is initially objectified and held at a distance. By the end of the film, death has become more personal. Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a young aspiring cellist in Tokyo and is deep in debt from the purchase of a new cello.
07Oct

The Mayor

The Mayor is a film that should be viewed by every serious student of gerontology. In a display of remarkable trust, selected residents of Town Village North, a retirement community in Dallas, TX, share their daily lives—public and private thoughts, feelings, and activities—with brilliant documentarian Jared Scheib. The most intimate focus is placed upon 88-year-old Sam Berger, called “the Mayor” by other residents because of his irrepressible social largess.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood