Sloth, Maybe?

  On Sunday, February 26th, my wife indulged my fondest wish for the beginning of the moviegoing year.   We went to see the much ballyhooed Cocaine Bear . Now I have seen two films this year prior to Cocaine Bear.   There was the three hour epic Avatar: The Way of Water .   I went into the theater for that film with great trepidation.   I had had my fill of three hour epics since Avengers: End Game and wanted no more of it.   However, I had been surprised by how well James Cameron mapped out the flora, fauna, astronomy, and culture of the various tribes of Na’vi of the moon of Pandora.   It is a lower tier Middle Earth, but it had me ask questions of the clash of cultures and how our own local astronomy helped mold our cultures and psyches. Wait, was I talking about Cocaine Bear ?   One more digression. Todd Field’s film TÁR , the tale of the rise and fall of a fictitious musical conductor played by Cate Blanchett is another exploration into an e...

I never had any personal experience with hard drugs, but nonetheless they have influenced my life. I remember a day when my mother left my estranged father and I on a line to see a movie.   When she left to park the car, Pop abruptly took me off the line with him and we wandered around the neighborhood going randomly from store to store.   As we walked along the street, I would hear him stifling a chuckle (or a sob?).   When my mother caught up with us, horrified at the thought that my father may have kidnapped me, she never left me alone with him again. When I told mom about my father’s inexplicable chuckling, my Mom said bluntly, “I think your father has a drug problem.” I had already been in classes at intermediate school where the cops told all the horror stories about drug abuse.   Through that lens, I saw my father as some kind of ghost, if not an outright monster.   I didn’t just feel he was no longer a part of the family.   I felt he was no longer o...

People who are clean and sober wonder what the factors are that would draw a kid in their early teens into the drug scene.   Poverty is the usual answer, and it’s true, but do we really know what poverty is?   It isn’t just a lack of money, or the negligence of a child’s parents.   It often takes root in the simple fact that a child may live in a building complex where there is no playground. Zoo Station, A Memoir  (1978) is based on a series of articles in Stern magazine where the main interviewee is one teenager going by the name Christiane F.   She methodically goes through her youth from the age of six to fourteen where abuse and deprivation molded her into a junkie and a prostitute. Her family came from a rural area in Germany.   Christiane, her sister, and her mother were led to West Berlin by her father who boasted of a new opportunity of founding a telephone dating service.   Christiane’s father rented a large apartment with promises of making...

After reviewing the 2021 Amazon miniseries Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo , I decided to travel back in time about 40 years to 1981, when the first film incarnation of the same title was made.   From the wayback machine, I present Christiane F. - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo .   I will refer to the 1981 film as Christiane F. so as to avoid confusion.   Most importantly I will do my best to focus on the 1981 film without drawing comparisons with the 2021 iteration. How I managed to purchase a copy of 1981’s Christiane F. is an adventure in and of itself.   My search for the film on Amazon came up dry, leading me to the 2021 miniseries.   After finishing the series, I widened my net beyond Amazon in search of the movie.   I found a BluRay copy for online purchase from Walmart. You heard me.   Walmart . Let that sink in. The title read in what turned out to be Catalan Spanish:   Yo, Cristina F.   I checked in what regions it was playable.   It li...