Peace, love and misunderstanding (2011)

Ebert likes it a bit more than I did, but he, of course, captures the film in his inimitable style.

"Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" is an undemanding formula picture that's a lot of superficial fun and not much more. Would it surprise you that within 24 hours Diane and both of her children have commenced romances with locals, and that many truths will be exchanged between Diane and Grace? Woodstock is presented as a place where the 1969 festival still more or less continues, many of the flower children apparently having never left. It's very upscale in a laid-back way, like Aspen or Telluride, and Grace, for example, seems to have unlimited funds, although there's a reason for that.

 Undemanding, yes, but more than a bit maddening, for someone (me) who lived through the Sixties, even if on the fringes. Fonda's Grace saw everything, did everything, knew everyone: she calls musicians Jimi and Jerry. Her character is actually somewhat wooden; she is a stereotype.

Because Fonda is (very capably) playing a send-up of her image, the character I found most interesting is Catherine Keener's Diane. She's a Manhattan lawyer, nursing anger with her mother after all these years and making it a point not to drink or smoke — as a rebuke, perhaps. She quickly falls under the spell of Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a local furniture maker and guitarist, age-appropriate, handsome, understanding. Meanwhile, daughter Zoe locks hearts with Cole (Chace Crawford), even though she is a vegetarian and he is a butcher. Young Jake is smitten with Tara (Marissa O'Donnell), a coffeeshop waitress who wins him with a shy smile and superb latte.

I agree. But the movie has its limitations, and that prevents the characters from being complex. That was probably intentional.

These three interlocking romances mesh with Grace's non-stop adventures and assorted heart-to-heart talks, and that's about the size of it. Director Bruce Beresford seems content to deliver a charming comedy and sidestep the deeper family issues that the film could have addressed. So, all right, on that level, the film works for me. It essentially focuses on the three women, and Fonda, Keener and the fast-rising Elizabeth Olsen look plausibly like three generations from the same genes. Olsen, indeed, looks a great deal like Keener, and that is a sincere compliment. It's the cheekbones when they smile.

Yeah, it worked. Three of four stars? Seems a mite much; two would've been a mite short. So I give it 2½ stars.Joe Morgenstern liked it less than Ebert, and makes some interesting comments. Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 29%, its public 31%: cruel, but just.

The Music Never Stopped

A father who teaches his son all about his own music in the late 1950s is shocked to find his son estranged from what he has been taught: instead of remembering Bing Crosby fondly, he has become a Deadhead, is against the VietNam War, and wants to forgo college to play music. The father forces a confrontation, and is unrepentant when his son leaves home. Nearly twenty years later, for the first time the parents of Gabriel receive a phone call that sends them into a whirlwind of guilt, repentance, and, eventually, reconciliation. Except that Gabe is not well: a tumor has damaged his brain, and he can not remember anything after 1970.

One day, in a library, researching microfilm, the father, Henry, reads about a therapist who uses music to reach patients similarly afflicted to his son. It is she who manages to reach Gabe, especially once she realizes that it is 1960s music, and not the 1940s and 1950s music his father insists on, that touches Gabe deep inside and brings him out.

Nicely done. In Rotten Tomatoes, typically, it gets a higher audience mark than a critical mark: 85% vs 65%. An involving, if sentimental and predictable family drama elevated by J.K. Simmons' sympathetic lead performance. The film is based on a story by Oliver Sacks, The last hippie (which, in an interview accompanying the film, the good doctor says is based on a true case of one of his patients).

Unchained Melody

Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
...a long lonely time ...
... and time goes by so slowly; and time, can do so much,
are you ... still mine?
I_I_I need your love, I_I_I need your love
Godspeed your love to me.

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
to the open arms of the sea ... (yeah)
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home, wait for me.

Oh, my love, my darling ...
I've hungered, hungered, for your touch
a long ... are you still mine?

I_I need your love
I_I've got to have your love
Godspeed your love to me



Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time, and time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love; Godspeed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea, to the open arms of the sea
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home wait for me

Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time; and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much, are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love
Godspeed your love to me





Found on YouTube; nice version



Yet another version ...


An interesting version by Gene Vincent ...

Unafraid of the dark

McNatt, Rosemary Bray.
Title	Unafraid of the dark : a memoir / Rosemary Bray.
Publication Info.	New York : Random House, 1998.

Amid the current heated debate on welfare reform, Bray offers a compassionate and, more important, informed and knowledgeable voice. As a child growing up in Chicago, Bray's family received welfare to supplement the father's erratic income, a situation that embittered an already troubled man and worsened a volatile marriage. She laments the culture of the welfare program, the misguided policies that have marginalized the role of fathers in too many low-income families, particularly black families. She speaks out in the face of welfare reform tinged by mean-spiritedness, aimed at punishing adults who make ill-advised decisions even if it means harming children as well. Bray's memoir is also a coming-of-age story of a black woman growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. She recalls stifling poverty that had her envying rich classmates enough to steal from them to replicate the easy leisure of buying snack food and cosmetics, even as the costlier luxuries of well-appointed homes remained beyond her reach. Bray's self-discovery continues through her college years: falling in love, questioning career goals, struggling for a political place in a turbulent period of growing race and feminist consciousness. Some years after college, a lucky break lands her at Essence magazine, where she finds the nurturing support needed even by a Yale-educated black woman. A voracious reader, Bray eventually lands the ultimate book-lover's job: an editor for the New York Times Book Review. Bray's is an eloquent voice, advocating on behalf of all the children and families that continue to need help to make the transition out of poverty. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews