Rabbit Hole

Written by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by John Cameron Mitchell, and beautifully acted principally by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckart, this intensely emotional film is just about the most heartfelt and honest study of the desolation of loss as I've ever seen.

No easy answers here - the tag line says it all: "the only way out is through", and we as an audience are taken through - terribly, inexorably, through the grief with which this couple is trying to cope.

Kidman and Eckhart deliver on every note and never devolve into maudlin sappiness or embarrassing histrionics. Dianne Weist is subtly beautiful - more beautiful in this performance than I've ever seen - and (relative unknown) Miles Teller stands up with the heavy weights whose company he keeps with grace beyond his years.

Far superior to The Kids are All Right, The King's Speech, Inception, and True Grit et al - it is a fucking crime that this subtle, honest and in the end very uplifting little film hardly got noticed at the Oscars. Perhaps it is because it dared to touch upon a secular motif in its study of mortality... better to say nothing at all than to suggest there's no heaven... who knows. Whatever. Fuck you Academy. Brilliant, moving, brave film.

Happy belated

My father was born on May 25, 1927. This year he would have been 84. I think about him everyday. He was a quiet, introspective man perhaps bent a little too much toward the morbid in life... but he was a physician after all, he saw much morbidity in life.

Through him I've learned the difference between high class and pretension. There are many who feel a firm grasp of table manners, an in depth knowledge of fine wines, a critical eye for film and books, or even just simple material wealth and other such trivial things are part and parcel of what makes a person "high class". In relative terms my father was not anymore in possesion of these things than the next man.

My father new what duty was. He knew what hard work was, and he knew what real responsibilty was. He carried many burderns on his shoulders, admittedly some invented in his own mind - particularly at the end when cancer had spread throughout his body - but the point is, he carried his burdens for the most part with quiet dignity and moved forward. If he ever blamed anybody for his lot in life (he lost two children - one to ALL, the other to schizophrenia), he kept it to himself. At least while his mind was sound - which, toward then end, it most certainly wasn't.

But what made him high class in my mind was not his social connections; he had none, not his alma mater and certainly not his money; he had lots. It was the way he treated people. He never looked down on anyone. He talked to you the same way whether you were a prince or a pauper. And most importantly - and this you could sense when you talked to him - he had something to learn from everyone. No one's story was to "boring" or "base" for him - he looked passed the surface.

There are those who do not understand the depth of this - this is not networking; it's true human connection and compassion. It is what high class is - all the other is just pretension.