nicholas latkovic

Kramer vs. Kramer. Dir. Robert Benton. Perf. Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Justin Henry, Jane Alexander. Columbia Pictures, 1979.

In the town of Martin, Tennessee, Chip Hines, a precocious six year old, has only known life with his two dads, Cody and Joey. And a good life it is. When Cody dies suddenly in a car accident, Joey and Chip struggle to find their footing again. Just as they begin to, Cody’s will reveals that he named his sister as Chip’s guardian. The years of Joey’s acceptance into the family unravel as Chip is taken away from him. In his now solitary home life, Joey searches for a solution. The law is not on his side, but friends are. Armed with their comfort and inspired by memories of Cody, Joey finds a path to peace with the family and closer to his son.

“That’s it. I’m not making any more calls. You do the rest of the family list.”
“I can’t call people, Roseanne…”
“Jackie! Dial.”
“I’m supposed to be in mourning, you know.”
“Well then wear a veil over your face while you do it!”

“Wait Till Your Father Gets Home”. By Amy Sherman-Palladino. Roseanne. ABC, Los Angeles. 9 Feb. 1993.

“Say Uncle”. By Ruth Bennett. Family Ties. CBS, Los Angeles. 26 Jan. 1984.

A family weekend is fraught with emotional land mines for mercurial and sensitive Lynn as she arrives at her parents’ Annapolis estate for the marriage of her estranged eldest son Dylan, accompanied by her three younger children.

Lynn’s hopes for a joyful reunion are crushed as her wry but troubled middle son Elliot lobs verbal grenades at his mother and her relatives while daughter Alice, a fragile young woman, fights valiantly to keep her longtime demons under control.

The weekend quickly unravels as Lynn demands to be heard by her aloof, disdainful mother, ailing father, and ever-judgmental sisters, but especially by her ex-husband, Paul, and his hot-tempered second wife, Patty.

Confronted, oftentimes hilariously, with the deeply painful, half-buried truths that have given rise to the family’s primal web of resentments and recriminations, Lynn struggles to maintain her equilibrium as her best attempts at reconciliation veer quickly off-course.

Featured music:

Arnalds, Ólafur. “Everything Must Change”. Another Happy Day Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Erased Tapes, 2011.

“Family is just accident… They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.”

- Marsha Norman, playwright

“… Woman takin’ over the family. Woman sayin’ we’ll do this here, an’ we’ll go there. An’ I don’ even care.”

“Woman can change better’n a man,” Ma said soothingly. “Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head. Don’ you mind. Maybe — well, maybe nex’ year we can get a place.”

“We got nothin’, now,” Pa said. “Comin’ a long time — no work, no crops. What we gonna do then? How we gonna git stuff to eat? An’ I tell you Rosaharn ain’t so far from due. Git so I hate to think. Go diggin’ back to a ol’ time to keep from thinking’. Seems like our life’s over an’ done.”

“No, it ain’t,” Ma smiled. “It ain’t, Pa. An that’s one more thing a woman knows. I noticed that. Man, he lives in jerks — baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk — gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on — changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”

“How can you tell?” Uncle John demanded. “What’s to keep everything from stoppin’; all the folks from jus’ gettin’ tired an’ layin’ down?”

Ma considered. She rubbed the shiny back of one hand with the other, pushed the fingers of her right hand between the fingers of her left. “Hard to say,” she said. “Ever’thing we do — seems to me is aimed right at goin’ on. Seems that way to me. Even gettin’ hungry — even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.”

Uncle John said, “If only she didn’ die that time —”

“Jus’ live the day,” Ma said. “Don’ worry yaself.”

Steinbeck, John. “Chapter 28″. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.

When Arthur instigates a separation from his controlling and mentally unstable wife, Eve, the lives of his three children are thrown into turmoil as each struggles to incorporate this change into their own imperfect worlds. Strengths and weaknesses of the family are tested when Arthur meets Pearl, a vivacious and more “normal” woman he wishes to spend the rest of his life with. Director Woody Allen’s first drama garnered five Oscar nominations.

“FamilyTree is a series of portraits of immediate family members (i.e. Father/Son, Mother/Daughter and even Father/Daughter, Mother/Son). Families are photographed individually and then sized and printed at the same proportions. The two photographs are manually torn and glued together to make one portrait investigating the visual DNA passed from generation to generation. No Photoshop.”

- Bobby Neel Adams

Visit BobbyNeelAdams.com for more.

“Delicate, tender, poetic, and yet so daring. It is about the mysteries of sex and the enchantments of the heart.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Featured music:

Blonde Redhead. “Messenger”. Misery Is a Butterfly. 4AD, 2004.

Featured music:

Stevens, Sufjan. “The Perpetual Self, or ‘What Would Saul Alinsky Do?’”. The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album. Asthmatic Kitty, 2006.

With a daughter she can’t relate to and a distant husband carrying an addiction to internet porn, Sarah commences another uneventful summer until she meets Brad, a local who escapes his under-performance as breadwinner by retreating to the playground with his son each day. When a child molester moves back home after prison release, a disgraced police officer’s hate campaign stirs the community, providing a backdrop of paranoia and moral confusion as each struggles to resist their vulnerabilities and temptations. Directed by Todd Field.

Featured music:

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich. “Waltz of the Flowers”. The Nutcracker, Act II, Tableau III, No. 13. 1892.