While the last few years of movies haven’t been the greatest, 2024 came back roaring.
I’m not normally a movie critic-as I tend to stick with the comparisons I do with wine. I like what I like; critics be damned. I read the overly simplistic takedown of movies and then I see it and wonder who hurt that critic so badly they forget they were watching entertainment, or they completely missed the point of what lesson we were supposed to learn in said art piece.
My three favorites to end the year on were Wicked, The Six Triple Eight and Lee. These three films encompassed some of the best acting I’ve seen in decades. They took me back to movie making as an experience. They also did the thing I love the most-make you cry and get angry because they’re telling true stories of the very human complexities we haven’t quite figured out over many generations. Which is to say-we still struggle with how to treat each other as humans. Whether it was Elphaba fighting for those who are marginalized as she’d always been and felt alone in that fight, to Kerry Washington’s depiction of a leader of an all black, female infantry brigade who struggles to obtain basic civil rights while fighting for their country, or Kate Winslet as an iconic WWII Veteran photographer trying to humanely showcase the horrors of humanity, these movies made me feel exactly what I was supposed to feel.
The fabric that wove them all together felt deeper than just that, though. It was the stories of women who battled something that seems old but more relevant than ever.
You could say that black women saw, once again, how their fight felt lonely in so many ways during this election. They always see the injustice and fight for it-both during election season and every day because they don’t have any other choice but to. You could say that we’re seeing the horrors of how many black women truly die in childbirth but we’re now only realizing it because of the abortion restrictions and white women are dying now, too. You could say that Gaza and the mass graves unearthed in Syria reminds us of what humans are capable of when a thirst for power annihilates human beings. You could say these human stories repeat and repeat and repeat.
Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to human stories-because it reminds me that the human condition of suffering never ends and at some point, there is a resolution that seems to bring us back to our humanity, if only for a little while.
While my daughter, as a labor and delivery nurse that lives in the state we do, has to watch women give birth to dead babies that couldn’t get abortion care and get stuck with an astronomical hospital bill where they’ll try and tell her it’s not covered because it wasn’t pre-authorized-humanity is definitely on a downward spiral, still. And the thought of us losing Jimmy Carter and then having a man who’s sexual defamation case was just upheld taking office, all within a month, screams that our once darling-of-a country is all but dead.
The truth is, when you dig into who we’ve really always been and what we still haven’t wrestled with, the bones of our demise have always been there. The question is-what are we gonna do about it?
When I ever talk of cage diving with great whites, people think I’m crazy. “Why on earth would you ever want to get in the water with something so dangerous?” they ask. When I followed the Giséle Pelicot rape case, the answer was always easy for me. I’d much rather swim in the deep, dark waters any day, than take a chance at what man does to us all.
God, how I want my answer to change…
sharkmomma 