half nelson is a small indie film exploring the relationship between a teacher, Dan Dunne (played by Ryan Gosling, the brightest acting talent of his generation) and a thirteen year old student, Drey (played by Shareeka Epps in her film debut) in a school on the wrong side of the tracks in Brooklyn.

Mercifully, half nelson strays from the usual cliches of this genre of filmmaking. While Dunne is an unconventional and passionate teacher he does not, as convention would have it, inspire his class to rise above society’s dim expectations of them and be the best they can be, he evokes mild interest from his students at best. Changing the world by changing the perspectives of his students, one suspects, may well have been the original inspiration for the idealistic Dunne, but he now holds out against cynicism by hoping “to make a difference in just one student’s life.”

But the major divergence from the standard teacher’s tale lies in Dunne’s extra curricular activities, by night is a hopeless drug addict. He manages to successfully keep both strands of his double life separate, till one evening after coaching the girl’s basketball team he is discovered getting high in the toilets by Drey. A worldly thirteen year old, whose brother is in jail and is raised by an overworked and overwhelmed single mother, Drey reacts with sympathy towards Dunne and keeps his secret. From there an unusual friendship develops.

Something of a mood movie, half nelson has the effect of allowing the viewer to squat in its character’s lives for a period of time and draw their own conclusions. It never labours or forces a point, understatement and subtlety are order of the day. It touches on important issues in today’s America but steadfastly refuses to preach, showing flawed people struggling to do their best rather than dividing characters into good/bad archetypes. It manages to be affecting and moving without ever slipping into sentimentality or melodrama, the film has a feel of authenticity and honesty that the high minded movies of inspirational against the odds teachers usually lack. It’s characters are allowed to fail and are all the more sympathetic for it. Dunne struggles with his addiction, falling deeper and deeper into it, while Drey is sucked in by the temptations of the streets. Good people falling prey to their own weaknesses, but the small kindnesses they do for each other help them keep their heads above water in a sea of amorality.

Dunne, who sets off trying to find a student he can make a difference for, ends up finding one who makes a difference in his life. Half nelson is the kind of film that makes you feel better about being an ordinary person, the kind of film that reminds you that our everyday struggles matter as long as they matter to just one other person. Go see it.

Bluegerm

This is a film that came out last year about a jewish guy (Elijah Wood) who visits the Ukraine to find out what happend his grandparents during WW11. If that sounds like ‘worthy but dull’ territory, fear not. The piognancy of it’s theme is offset by the comedy that arises out of the clash of cultures between the morose, fastitidious, middle class vegetarian American and the eccentrentic dirt poor, hard boiled yet happy go lucky Ukrainian family he hires as translator/guides.

Setting off in an old Trabant in search of a village that’s not on any map and that no-one seems to have heard of, Jonathon (Wood), ‘Grandfather’ (Boris Leskin) and grandson Alex (Eugene Hutz) get nowhere quite slowly, driving aimlessly through vast, flat, blank countryside that is stoic and silent, unwilling to give up it’s secrets, the Grandfather taking sudden, unexpected diversions through forests for no apparent reason, as if steering to an internal compass that may well have been driving haywire through years of grief or whatever madness time sets in the minds of old men, to the helpless consternation of the passengers.

Everything is illuminated is one of those rare films which is brave enough to constrain it’s emotional power within the thousand things unsaid than the few things that are. The elephant in the room rarely glimpsed but it’s presence always felt. It’s a film that reminds you that people are made up mostly of memories that are never spoken of but always there. And that a person can be killed in an instant and the person beside him merely lose his life, left with a whole lifetime to die. That the past is unseen, invisible and everywhere, buried iside us and beneath us, the foundation of the present. And tht sometimes it needs to be revisited, dug up and reburied properly, to make some room in the present for the future.

In the early days I found myself fascinated with the world. I had access all areas to the secret life of people. I’d stalk people for a while to try and catch them doing something interesting. Doesn’t happen as often as you might think. There’s a lot of downtime in waiting for a moment. In the evenings we’d all gather again with stories and updates.

Often it was easier to just go watch a film. You could really get lost in one of them for two hours. Sometimes I’d go to nightclubs. I’d get the odd feeling I got the few times I’d gone to nightclubs sober. I was almost as invisible then as I am now. The girls all glamed up, the boys in front of them auditioning for sex. They’re the loneliest places in the world.

You see colours around people. It’s just thoughts and emotions moving out into the
world, people aren’t as separate from it as they think. They tend to draw towards them what they give out. For instance, a depressed person will have a lot of black and grey, and if they are sitting with a group of people their colours will dull a little as time passes. The opposite also holds true. Most people have a whole mess of colours because they are feeling and thinking a load of different things at once. They’re pissed off at their boss, can’t wait to see their kids, got to pay the gas, where did they leave that card, you know how it is.

The temptation is to play with it. We’re all spirit so we’re hooked right in. Run your
finger through a colour and you see a little flash from their lives. Try red for a little
sexual fantasy. Easy for first timers to get this wrong, myself included. Ran my fingers through this girl’s red and saw something I didn’t want to see. Do it to a man and you get to see a model naked. The tricky part is doing this brings that thought right to the surface of the person’s mind too. The morality of messing with people’s minds is uncertain and a lot of blues are paranoid that it could be adding years to our sentence or even get you sent down. Trouble is it’s about the only kick available to us here, seems like the best fruit is always forbidden.

I suppose I should be talking more about how I got here, because I’ve got to sort this out and this is the only the only way I can think of. I know it had a lot to do with fear. I believe that around three years ago a poison entered the well of the collective
unconscious. I describe it like that because it’s the only way I can think to describe it. All of a sudden the zeitgeist seemed to become a black wave and people were holing themselves up in their rooms and not coming out for months. I talked to people who never seemed to think twice about anything before and they were telling me about going for long walks to try and clear their heads. A lot of people cracked and a lot of people died. As for myself it felt like I was sitting deep inside my skull looking out at the world through a long dark tunnel. The colour went out of the world and all I could see was endless grey.

It was somewhere about this time I grew demons. I counted three, but it’s hard to tell.
The Papa of these, the source of all my trouble, was fear. Now fear is just another
emotion, a deficit of hope, maybe. But it’s like when you’ve got a loan from the bank, as long as you pay your interest you’re fine, but if you have to pay interest on your interest you’re a goner, because fear is a monster that feeds on itself. Fear starts you off afraid of a particular thing, then starts warping your thoughts, gets you to test yourself then presents your earlier paranoia as proof of the pudding. Loading on the interest you get more disorientated, more uncertain of yourself, more fearful. Spun round and round by it’s son and daughter, obsession and paranoia, fear likes you to think that it’s greater than you are, that it has the power to change you, that it can make you into what you fear. It can’t though, for all it did to me I’m still me and I don’t know why I let the squirming little worm hold me in thrall for so long, because when you stop running and look it straight in the eye it melts away. All evil is by its nature cowardly and will only attack what it considers weaker than it. I lost so much time fighting shadows, fighting nothing and I’m still paying for it, still trying to make up for it. My weakness, my cowardice, my lack of faith.

Sitting on this hill overlooking the town, I’m trying to sort my memories. My
chronology is fucked due to the relentlessness of time here. There is only before and after that day I woke up for the last time. Sometimes the memories of before seem like dreams to me (did they really happen?) and sometimes it’s the other way around, that this the dream. I’m picking out the memories with the brightest colours and seeing where it leads me.
Out on the town with a riot in our souls we’d lace our drinks with powdered happiness and laugh at every laughing passing shape. The laughter of famished hyenas that hadn’t tasted real joy in years. Later we’d be climbing the walls of cars we were trying to steer down roads that had turned into rivers at thirty miles an hours. Colours would float past, cars on a different current. The next day we would laugh at what we could still remember. On our days off we would sit and shout and the television to remind ourselves we were smarter than everybody on it. Reality became lies and we were the truth, the only ones with the balls to really live, when all our emotions came out of a capsule or a glass.

The wind’s picking me up now and pushing me down the hill a little. It’s a nice feeling as long as it’s gentle. I used to go to the top of tall buildings before (earlier?) and jump off. You swoop, you soar, a minute of peace. Reminds me of heaven. Ever since I was a child I have this memory of heaven. It could have been a dream because I was always confusing memories and dreams then. I was in heaven and it was white, absolutely formless. I was aware of my existence, conscious of ‘I’, and other ‘I’s all around me, but we were all part of a greater consciousness and I was swimming through perfect joy. Someone a girl, who I couldn’t see but was aware of asked –

‘Do you want to go back?’

And I said ‘Yes.’

This has always been my problem. If I could choose five words to describe myself they would be ‘I. Can. Never. Say. No.’

Plato said it would all work out once we work ourselves out. The opposite of depression is enlightenment and if we could remove all the debris built up from memories and regrets we would see naturally again and know joy once more. My biggest regret now is Michelle, that I could do nothing for her. But to get to Michelle I have cover Cathy first.

We were a fine bunch – drunks, junkies, phobics and some serious nutcases. One actual nutcase. Dante we called him. When I was introduced to him I remember thinking ‘fuck that’s an even cooler name than Racine,’ but what can you do? He reckons we were all on Dante’s trip through the hells or something but that was obviously bollocks since we never went anywhere. No arguing with Dante though, logic, sense or clarity didn’t particularly take his fancy. As far as I can make out he went tripping one day with his mates and spent the next thirty years doped up in a loony bin. Couldn’t say what he died of, boredom maybe. He’d fill your mind with nonsense if you paid him any attention. Sometimes you would because listening to him was like watching colours spinning.

”Doctors told me no razor blades between meals cos everything’s red between the sheets and then they plug you into the motherboard off with eyes like a slot machine”

After a while it got annoying. Maybe after all those years he had a backlog of thoughts he had to get rid of. Maybe I’m full of shit, who’s to say?

And so we’d spent our nights chattering and our days wondering around looking at
people. After a while you’d take a few as pets. Once you knew the basic pattern of their lives, where they worked, lived, hung out, you could check in on them anytime and see how they were getting on. Like a soap opera, only with better dialogue. Cathy was my favourite. She was eighteen when I met her, in her last year of school and fairly typical in most respects. Young, optimistic, bubbly, pert. She was quite pretty and had such a natural and easy laugh I kind of fell for her. In my sad and pathetic existence I had long experience with unrequited love so it wasn’t that much of a stretch for me. Everything was so exciting to her, going out, drinking, talking, shopping. All she needed was another person and she burst into life. She talked such sweet silly nonsense I loved to just stand and watch her gush. It’s those babbling brooks again.

As for my life since that morning, I think it would be just fine if I could only sleep. Just to forget I exist for a few hours. Being constantly awake turns reality into Chinese water torture. Every moment clangs through you. Endless time. I’ll never make it till the sun burns out. Plato thought me to meditate and that helps a little. I go down and stare at the river for a few hours each day. It stops your mind degrading into a babble of nonsense.

Back when I was alive I became over time terrified of reality and proceeded to divorce myself from it through drink and drugs. Now I find myself staring at it constantly and hating it even more.

Plato was the best of us and he became a kind of mentor to me. He taught me the lore of the blues. He said he never knew a blue that was dead for more that a hundred years. Once, soon after he himself died, he met a blue who died in the civil war and that was back in the twenties. That blue, Carson, had wandering into an ambush meant for someone else, killed by his own side. After seventy years of hanging around Carson said he always wanted to see America and walked off into the sea. That was eight years ago now and I sometimes picture Carson wandering around the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, having long since lost all sense of direction.

He told me there was a psychic up in Henry Street who could see us but she wasn’t much use as she assumed we knew more about the afterlife than she did. I went to see her one time and she kept telling me to move toward the light. Once I explained there was no light she kind of dried up on me.

Plato said we’re in limbo and we’ll stay here until we’ve served our time or had some
insight or something. He said he knew plenty of blues who just disappeared. One day
they just weren’t there anymore. He’s convinced they went upstairs but nobody can say for sure.

“Yes, right everybody”

“Oh a new one.”

“Yes everyone meet -”

“You poor boy”

“Calm down Rebecca, meet Racine.”

“Racine? That’s not your real name!”

“No, but if I have to be a ghost I’m going to have a cool name.”

“Mine’s Rebecca.”

“Hi.”

“How did you die?”

They all listened like vampires feeding off the fresh energy of my voice. Their own
stories had been told to death and now they listened and questioned and listened until I was drained, sucked dry.

“Do you want to hear how I died?”

Jesus no, I thought, Rebecca seemed nice enough but seemed to have a kind of tragic
rebel hero notion about herself and by God I’d enough of that for two lifetimes.

“Sure, I’d love to.”

There were one or two groans from the congregation.

“I was a junkie for about four years-

Rebecca talked real fast, a real energizer bunny of speech.
“-and I tried to quit one night, so I locked myself into a room but the withdrawal was so bad -

she was very pretty though

“-I had a heart-attack and died -

I would have loved to have fucked her

“-I couldn’t get over the shock, I couldn’t believe I’d never be able to take smack again, not to mind-

If only I could

“-I screamed and shouted for days. Some guy down the road died at same time and
everybody thought he had a banshee. The family were always well respected after that, cos you know only noble families get a banshee.”

Ah well.