Home For the Holidays

Home For the Holidays
By Peter John Gardner

There comes a point in most people's lives where they experience a shift in attitude toward the holiday season. It's usually around the same time they reach adulthood and realize that you can't spend much longer than 8 hours with your family for the sake of your own sanity. The older you get, the more settled you become in your own life, so when you go home for the holidays, it's like walking into a time capsule where you set your mind back to your childhood and remember how you dealt with everyone's idiosyncrasies. I don't consider it a negative attitude. It's more like having to prepare yourself for having your mom wipe the 'schmutz' off your face and doing battle with your siblings over the remote control.

Home For the Holidays addresses this issue. Holly Hunter plays Claudia, an art restorer recently fired from her job and flies home to her parents' house for Thanksgiving. Also attending the festivities are Claudia's conservative sister Joanne, played by Cynthia Stevenson, and her gay brother Tommy, played by Mr. Downey Jr. Tommy brought a 'friend' of his home with him named Leo (Dylan McDermott) even though Claudia was under the impression that he's in a serious relationship with a guy named Jack.

The film captures a lot of awkward holiday moments. There is a scene at the airport which shows a group of grown adults talking on the phone to, presumably, their parents and saying things like, "Yes, I'm bringing my vitamins. Yes, I brushed my teeth this morning." No matter how old one gets, parents will always be parents. To this day, my mother still calls and/or e-mails me to make sure I'm taking my vitamins, and reminds me to say, "Thank you" whenever I receive something. Because, you know, I never learned manners in my 29 years.

Directed by Jodie Foster, Home For the Holidays spends the majority of its time documenting these little scenarios that we all face during the holidays. Especially touching is the relationship with Claudia and Tommy, who even though they've lived separate lives since moving out of their parents' home, they still immediately click and fall back into the beats of their relationship and clearly have always depended on each other to help them through their family's craziness.

By the end of the film, we learn that Tommy brought along Leo not as a new lover, but as a potential match for his sister. Of course they fall in love, and Leo hops on Claudia's plane to be with her. It must be nice to have a gay sibling to hook you up with a potential mate.

These days I don't spend much time at home when it's the holidays. Not only is it difficult to stand your ground as an adult when you're under your parents' roof, but the more family members that show up, the more old wounds get opened up. Either that, or everyone facetiously pretends that everything is awesome and no one has a bone to pick with anyone. That just makes things worse. Not wanting to solve problems with family members just deepens wounds and causes the family gatherings to feel more like an awkward lunch with your upper management than a warm, loving environment.

It should be noted to any readers that knew me in high school that Robert Downey Jr. sports the EXACT same haircut I used to have, as well as the same wardrobe of oversized sweaters and jeans. I like to think that Downey caught a glimpse of me one day and thought to himself, "Now there's a guy with style. I should ape that for my next film."

Richard III

Richard III
By Peter John Gardner

Every time a Shakespeare play was assigned reading in one of my high school classes, a common complaint heard from the peanut gallery of future brilliant minds was, "Why do we have to read this shit?" To a student that's uninterested in the material, the plays are boring, hard to understand, and contain plots that have become cliche hundreds of years later. I call it "The Nirvana Effect". It's all about context. If one is just now digesting something by Shakespeare/Nirvana, they're most likely going to compare it to a more contemporary work that used the same template but enhanced. But at the time of release, Shakespeare/Nirvana was groundbreaking stuff.

What's remarkable about Shakespeare is that if you take his plays, many of them still work if you just change the setting to a different time and place. Richard III takes the classic Shakespeare work and sets it in 1930's era England. Well, less like the real England and more like a bizarro world version where England is a fascist regime during World War II. The story follows Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, and his murderous quest to overthrow his brother from the king's throne. Richard manipulates and murders his way to the top, at one point even having his own brother Clarence executed just so that he could shift the blame onto Edward and accelerate the death of the ailing King.

Playing Richard is the always excellent Ian McKellen whose overacting brings out a slightly comical side to the character. McKellen doesn't play Richard like he would in a stuffy old theater in Great Britain. Instead he plays him the same way he would later play Magneto in the X-Men films. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lord Rivers, brother of Queen Elizabeth, and makes the odd choice of using an American accent in the film. Throughout the first half of the film, Rivers is the primary thorn in Richard's side, and halfway through the film, Downey has one of the more entertaining death scenes in this type of film which I wouldn't dare spoiling.

Back to why we still read Shakespeare. It's apparent while watching this film adaptation that one could take the themes of misuse of power and trust and apply them to any modern government. An easy analogy would be the Bush administrations use of the politics of fear throughout their term. Sure, being the big bad tough guy on the block may work in the short term, but how much good will toward us from countries around the world did we destroy because of it all? A more rudimentary example would be a co-worker that steps on other co-workers and makes false accusations about them to the boss in order to further their own career. Sure, stepping on people is one way to the top, but once you get there, people will resent you for it.

Could somebody take this play and set it during modern America? Perhaps, as there will always be a place for a cautionary tale about the abuse of power and the morality of what it takes to acquire power. Whether or not you want to place Democrats or Republicans as the totalitarian rules is up to your own politics. Personally, I would tweak things so that the Richard III turns into the story of how Jay Leno took over the Tonight Show...twice. Jay III, starring Richard Gere as Jay Leno, coming soon to a theater near you.