05Feb
Still Mine (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)
We started slow with Still Mine, a sweet and sad true tale of the losses a couple experienced as the wife begins a slow decline into dementia.
Healthy 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.
05Feb
Still Mine
One such new film, Still Mine, takes us into the lives of Craig and Irene Morrison as they face the gradual loss of Irene’s short-term memory (the comments that follow are elaborated from a review I did of this film for Itineraries, an online publication of Second Journey; Vanden Bosch, 2013b).
04Jun
Ten More Good Years
Ten More Good Years documents the experience of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender aging. Prior to viewing this outstanding film, I wondered why anyone with any sensitivity would lump lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender aging within one now-familiar acronym—LGBT. Categorical thinking, after all, makes far too easy the negative stereotyping and discrimination used so often to create, denigrate, and disenfranchise those who are not “straight.”
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.