Otchuda-Say

I enjoyed this for its typical Moby approach to telling his stories. Combination of Moby playing with wooden figurines representing his parents and childhood traumas, friends role-playing psychiatrists, combined with animations to describe feelings of mess and loneliness during different times in life from childhood abuse through adolescence living in abandoned factory to music and fame and breakdown, all mixed with archival footage from music tours and collaborations with David Bowie. If you're a fan of Moby, you'll enjoy this self-throwback of the artist very much. Must-watch right after reading his 2 memoir books. 👍👍👍

This is a movie based on a book by Jane Hawking, the wife of the famous Stephen Hawking. However, since I watched it after reading the book, I can say this movie is an easy, romantic, and cheaper construction of their lives. What they went through together is much more layered, nuanced, unbelievable, and difficult than the movie portrays. I believe three movies could be made because this movie only shallowly touched on the three main powerful stories that could be extracted from their lives.

One story is, of course, that of Stephen's brilliant mind and the discoveries he achieved, regardless of his difficulty in writing, speaking, and communicating. This would be a story of one man's quest to discover one mathematical equation that describes the whole universe, and inside it would be an answer about where we come from and where we go, intertwined with the philosophy of existence and his own wife's spiritual beliefs. This could be a truly intriguing movie to watch.

The other story is that of a life with disability and ignorance of national health systems, of the most severely disabled persons. This is a story not only of the lack of medical treatment when you are not rich and not having rich supporters or inaccessibility of working and living spaces but also of the closest family making a weekend house inaccessible for their son. It's about the huge painful living the disabled person goes through when the nursing systems and truthfully unwanted outsiders in the form of carers and assistants become 24h/day intruders in the house. They wouldn't be friends otherwise, but now they have an entrance into the most intimate private ways of a person or, in this case, of a whole family. They can destroy your family by manipulation, emotional blackmail, and putting themselves before everyone else in the household, just because they are necessary and in the position to do so, as if this family is there for them and not vice versa. I myself continuously experience the intrusion of persons in my life who should be of help and assistance, but at the same time, too many of them feel invited to judge my way of living and my morals. This comes from people who have questionable morals and ways of living themselves. Not to mention those who would easily steal things from the house just because they know where every single thing is. The notion that even the most famous disabled persons experience this comes to me as a terribly sad realization. Posing for photos and cameras beside me when I travel around the world for art festivals and being part of this visual documentation to be shared on social platforms and media is a way for these poor persons to grab a little attention for themselves, as if taking credit for something that a disabled person achieved. This is a reason why Stephen, when receiving accolades from the queen or different awards, even after divorce from Jane, invited her to escort him as a token that she actually deserves to be in these photos and these events recognizing his achievements.

Another possible movie is, of course, about love and marriage and all the difficulties that it goes through when two people love each other but lose each other through the ways of difficulty, illness, career, social circumstances, family influence, "carers" manipulations, and in the end different needs and different ways of approaching saving their individual selves from insanity.

So, read a book, and then watch a movie just to witness the marvelous Oscar-winning acting of Eddie Redmayne. I will not go now into the justification of choosing a non-disabled actor for this role because this is another huge topic, and it's a thin line, walking on the triangle sides of positive discrimination versus profitability versus ignoring, i.e., negative discrimination of minority groups in the art world.