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Attitudes about Aging

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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.
08Jun

Amour

After winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012, Michael Haneke’s Amour has received rave reviews from most reviewers, and more recently, an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. At first viewing, Amour seems like it could be a departure from Haneke’s other films, which ask the viewer to tolerate wanton violence or at least the ever-foreboding threat of violence.
08Apr

To Age or Not to Age

In To Age or Not to Age, independent filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas has put together a fascinating exploration of what current research has discovered about the potential to alter the biological process of aging in humans and other animal life forms. The film does a good job of taking a potentially difficult to understand science and making it understandable at a basic level. In the film, several leading researchers talk about how discoveries that were made in the early 1980s are now being refined and brought to clinical trials to test their effectiveness at delaying the onset of major diseases in humans, and thereby extending the human life span.
08Apr

About Face: Then and Now

About Face: Then and Now is a revealing and realistic film about supermodels. With perfect beauty and smiling countenance, their faces capture would-be readers of the world’s most popular fashion magazines. They stride and slide confidently down fashion runways, expressing haute couture confidence befitting the expensive clothing they model.
07Dec

What Time is Left

As young videographer Dakin Henderson (What Time Is Left) drives to a family meeting to discuss his Grandmother Deedee’s desire for a living will, he sings a lament: “And I’m young and stupid. Oh to be old and wise, to be comfortable with the process of my own demise.” The lyric accurately captures the common theme of these two films—the life-long, continuous attempts that people make to come to terms with the meanings of aging and of death. Both films were motivated by different yet personally relevant death experiences.
05Dec

Hope Springs

In the film, Hope Springs, Nebraska residents Arnold and Kay have been married for 31 years. Each morning, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) marches into the kitchen, places his suit coat and briefcase on a chair, and is served the same breakfast by Kay (Meryl Streep) which he eats behind the newspaper. Each night he falls asleep in front of an “improving your golf” program on TV and is woken up by Kay, after which they say good night and retire to their separate bedrooms. As trite and stereotypical as these early scenes in the film are, they do quickly establish the context out of which the movie unfolds
Movies About Aging and Elderhood