RYDER
WINONA
MOVIE JOURNEY
WINONA
RYDER
MOVIE JOURNEY
Copyrights Š 2014 by Bonita Rachel Published by Boresta Media , a division B + R Media, Inc. Hanglekir Street 7 No.2 , Senayan - South Jakarta www.boresta-media.com ISBN 01 : 13-087-20-995 ISBN 04 : 12-1245-578-21 Printed in Indonesia Designed by Bonita Rachel
WINONA
RYDER
MOVIE JOURNEY
Bonita Rachel
“
Maybe YOU can relax in a haunted house, but I can’t. Lydia (Beetlejuice)
“
W
inona Laura Horowitz was born in Olmsted County, Minnesota. She was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents’ friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley’s wife.Her stage name derives from Mitch Ryder, a soul and rock singer.Her father chose the name on a whim because he heard a Ryder song in the background while talking on the phone with her agent. Her mother, Cynthia Palmer (née Istas), is an author, video producer, and editor.Her father, Michael Horowitz, is an author, editor, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller.He also worked as an archivist for psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary (who was Ryder’s godfather). Her father’s family is Jewish (they emigrated from Romania and Russia), and Ryder has described herself as Jewish.Many of her father’s family perished in the Holocaust. Her father’s family was originally named “Tomchin” but took the surname “Horowitz” when they immigrated to America. Ryder’s father is an atheist and her mother a Buddhist;they encouraged their children to take the best part of other religions to make their own belief systems. Ryder has stated: “I still practice Buddhism to a certain extent and I believe in karma.”[citation needed] Ryder has one full sibling, a younger brother, Uri (named in honor of the first Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin), and two half-siblings from her mother’s prior marriage: an older halfbrother, Jubal Palmer, and an older half-sister, Sunyata Palmer. Ryder’s family friends included her godfather, Timothy Leary, as well as the Beat Movement poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.
In 1978, when Ryder was seven years old, she and her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (120 ha) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or television sets, Ryder began to devote her time to reading and became an avid fan of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. She developed an interest in acting after her mother showed her a few movies on a screen in the family barn. At age 10, Ryder and her family moved on again, this time to Petaluma, California. During her first week at Kenilworth Junior High, she was bullied by a group of her peers who mistook her for an effeminate, scrawny boy.As a result, she ended up being homeschooled that year. In 1983, when Ryder was 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she took her first acting lessons. Ryder graduated from Petaluma High School with a 4.0 GPA in 1989.She suffers from aquaphobia because of a traumatic neardrowning at age 12.This caused problems with the underwater scenes in Alien Resurrection (1997), some of which had to be reshot numerous times.
R
yder was engaged to actor Johnny Depp for three years beginning in July 1990. She met Depp at the Great Balls of Fire! premiere in June 1989; two months later they began dating.During their relationship, Depp had a tattoo placed on his arm reading “Winona Forever,” which he had altered to “Wino Forever” after their separation in mid 1993. Following her split from Depp, she dated Soul Asylum front man Dave Pirner for three years, from 1993 to 1996. She later had a two-year relationship with actor Matt Damon between 1998 and 2000.
I
n 1993, Ryder offered a reward in the hope that it would lead to the return of kidnapped child Polly Klaas.Klaas lived in Petaluma, the same town where Ryder grew up. Ryder offered a $200,000 reward for the 12-year-old kidnap victim’s safe return.After the girl’s death, Ryder starred as Jo in the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and dedicated it to her memory. Little Women was one of Klaas’s favorite novels.During a sentencing hearing related to the 2001 shoplifting incident (see below), Ryder’s attorney, Mark Geragos, referred to her work with the Polly Klaas Foundation and other charitable causes. In response, Deputy District Attorney Ann Rundle said: “What’s offensive to me is to trot out the body of a dead child.”Ryder was visibly upset at the accusation and Rundle was admonished by the judge. Outside the courthouse, Polly’s father Marc Klaas defended Ryder and expressed outrage at the prosecutor’s comments.
O
n December 12, 2001, Ryder was arrested on shoplifting charges in Beverly Hills, California. She was accused of stealing $5,500 worth of designer clothes and accessories at a Saks Fifth Avenue department store.Los Angeles District Attorney Stephen Cooley produced a team of eight prosecutors. Cooley filed four felony charges against her.Ryder hired noted celebrity defense attorney Mark Geragos. Negotiations for a plea bargain failed at the end of summer 2002.As noted by Joel Mowbray from National Review, the prosecution was not ready to offer the actress an open door to a no-contest plea on misdemeanor charges.Ryder agreed under signature to pay two Civil Demands, as permitted under California’s Statute for Civil Recovery for Shoplifting, from Saks Fifth Avenue that completely reimbursed Saks Fifth Avenue for the stolen and surrendered merchandise while detained in the Security Offices of the Saks Fifth Avenue store, and before she was read her Miranda rights and arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department. During the trial she was accused of using drugs, including oxycodone, diazepam and Vicodin (hydrocodone/APAP) without valid prescriptions. Ryder was convicted of grand theft,shoplifting, and vandalism, but was acquitted on the third felony charge, burglary.In December 2002, she was sentenced to three years’ probation, 480 hours of community service, $3,700 in fines, $6,355 in restitution to the Saks Fifth Avenue store, and ordered to attend psychological and drug counseling. After reviewing Ryder’s probation report, Superior Court Judge Elden Fox noted that Ryder served 480 hours of community service and on June 18, 2004, the felonies were reduced to misdemeanors. Ryder remained on probation until December 2005.
“Who understands ANYONE these days…“ who WANTS to? Dinky Bossetti (Welcome Home, Roxy CarmichaeL)
Lucas (1986)
FIRST
MOVIE
L
ucas Bly (Haim) is an extremely intelligent, but nerdy 14-year-old high school student. He soon becomes acquainted with Maggie (Green), an attractive older girl who had just moved to town. After meeting Lucas on one of his entomological quests, Maggie befriends him, spending time with him during the remainder of the summer until school begins. Lucas, who finds himself a frequent victim of bullying and teasing, has a protector of sorts, Cappie Roew (Sheen), a fellow student and football player; Cappie was once one of Lucas’ tormentors, until Cappie contracted hepatitis and Lucas brought him his homework every day, ensuring that Cappie didn’t fail and have to repeat a year of school. Even though Lucas deems it beneath her, Maggie becomes a cheerleader for the football team in order to get closer to Cappie, on whom she has a growing crush. Angered and offended by Maggie continuing to ignore him, Lucas begins to irritate Maggie, continuing to castigate her cheerleading as “superficial” and making the incorrect assumption that she will be his date to an upcoming school dance. Maggie complains to Lucas that she’s interested in things besides just hanging out with him all the time, and Lucas’ unrequited affection for her continues to upset him.
E
verything changes on the night of the dance when Cappie is dumped by his girlfriend Alise (Thorne-Smith), who has noticed his budding attraction to Maggie. A depressed Cappie finds comfort with Maggie at her house—much to the chagrin of Lucas, who has arrived, in tuxedo, to pick her up for the dance. Even though Cappie and Maggie invite him out for pizza, he rudely rebukes them and rides off on his bike. Rina (Ryder), Lucas’ best female friend, encounters him as he sits by a lake, looking at the dance festivities on the other side. Even though she has obvious feelings for him, Rina consoles Lucas as he frets about him and Maggie being “from two different worlds”. Meanwhile, Cappie and Maggie are out for pizza alone. From afar, Lucas happens to be riding by and witnesses their first kiss. Shattered, Lucas takes drastic action the next day.
I
n a last-ditch (and misguided) attempt to impress Maggie and gain the respect he so desperately craves, the diminutive Lucas joins the football team. In the shower after practice, Lucas endures perhaps the worst prank yet from his constant tormentors Bruno (Tom Hodges) and Spike (Jeremy Piven). At the end of that day, Maggie chases Lucas, who flees in embarrassment due to the torture inflicted on him, to his favorite hiding place (beneath a railroad overpass) to talk with Lucas. After she tells him with kindness that she wants him to be her friend, Lucas tries to kiss
Maggie. Maggie backs away bemusedly, and a heartbroken Lucas screams at her to leave.
T
he next day, Lucas, still reeling, removes his helmet during his first football game (the uniform was too big for him) and is severely injured, requiring hospitalization. Maggie, Cappie, and Rina attempt to contact Lucas’ parents, though Maggie discovers that she does not know Lucas as well as she thought she did. Correcting Maggie’s misguided impression that Lucas lives in a large luxurious house she has seen him at several times before, Rina shows the pair that Lucas lives in a dilapidated trailer with his alcoholic father and works as a gardener at the large house where Maggie had visited him previously.
M
eanwhile, Lucas’ schoolmates hold a vigil in the hospital for him as he recuperates. Maggie visits Lucas’ room that evening and sternly tells him never to play football again. Lucas promises, and the two reconcile, picking up their close friendship where they left off. They speculate as to where they will be when the locusts return seventeen years later, with locusts being one of the many scientific things Lucas introduced Maggie to during their summer together; both express the hope that they will still be friends when the locusts return again.
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ucas returns to school a short time later, with schoolmates all casting surprised looks at him as he walks through the hall. Many talk amongst themselves about what he did on the football field, and how the jocks at school likely have it out for him now. Upon reaching his locker, he finds Bruno and Spike waiting for him. Thinking it’ll just be the same old story, Lucas tries to ignore them as he opens his locker. Inside is a varsity letter jacket, emblazoned with Lucas’ name and number (72) on the back. As Lucas takes it out in shock, Bruno starts the “slow clap”, and the entire hallway starts applauding. Maggie, Cappie, and Rina are all there, too, leading the applause as Lucas raises his arms triumphantly and smiles.
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ne evening, an elderly woman tells her granddaughter a bedtime story of where snow comes from, by telling her the story of a young man named Edward (Johnny Depp), who has scissors for hands, the creation of an old Inventor (Vincent Price). The Inventor’s final result was a humanlike young boy who had everything except for hands, but the Inventor suffered a heart attack and died while in the act of giving a pair of real hands to Edward, leaving him “unfinished” forever.
M
any years after Edward was created, local Avon saleswoman Peg
Boggs (Dianne Wiest) visits the decrepit Gothic mansion on the hill where Edward lives. There, she finds Edward alone, and upon realizing he is virtually harmless she decides to take him to her home. Edward becomes friends with Peg’s young son Kevin (Robert Oliveri) and her husband Bill (Alan Arkin). He later falls in love with the Boggs’ beautiful teenage daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder), despite her initial fear of him.
P
eg’s neighbors are impressed by Edward’s adept hedge-trimming and hair-cutting skills (both of which he does with his scissor-hands), but two of the townspeople, a religious fanatic named Esmeralda (O-Lan Jones) and Kim’s boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), are not impressed. One of the housewives in the neighborhood, Joyce (Kathy Baker), an ageing seductress, suggests that Edward opens a hair-cutting salon with her. While examining a proposed site, she attempts to seduce him in the back room, causing Edward to leave in a state of panic.
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anting money for a van, Jim takes advantage of Edward’s ability to pick locks, and uses this as an attempt to break into his parents’ house. The burglar alarm sounds and everyone except Edward flees, despite Kim’s angry insistence that they return for him. Edward is arrested, but is released when a psychological examination reveals that his isolation allowed him to live without a sense of reality and common sense. At the same time, the arresting officer befriends him. Meanwhile, infuriated by Edward’s rejection, Joyce exacts revenge by claiming that he tried to “rape” her. This, added to the “break-in”, causes many of the neighbors to question his personality and, therefore, ruin his popular reputation. During the Christmas season, Edward is feared and outcasted by almost everyone around him except the Boggs family, resulting in the family becoming outcasts as well.
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hile the family is setting up Christmas decorations, Edward creates an angel ice sculpture. The shavings create an effect of falling snow, which Kim dances under. Jim calls out to Kim, distracting her, and Edward accidentally cuts her hand. Jim says that Edward had intentionally harmed her and attacks him. Edward runs away, tearing the clothes Peg gave him, and wanders the neighborhood in a rage. Kim, fed up with Jim’s behavior towards Edward, breaks up with him and he goes to his friend’s van to get drunk. While Peg and Bill search for Edward, he returns and Kim greets him with a hug. When Kevin is almost run over by Jim’s drunk friend, Edward pushes him out of the way, but cuts his face, causing witnesses to think he was attacking him. When the police arrive, Edward flees to his hilltop mansion and the neighbors form an angry mob, led by Joyce, and follow, despite Peg and Bill’s pleas. Officer Jim tries to deceive everyone by firing a few shots into the air to give the impression that Edward is dead, but the mob refuses to listen and they continue to the mansion to see if Edward really is dead.
K
im runs to the mansion and reunites with Edward. Jim follows her, attacks Edward and angers him when Jim brutally assaults Kim. Edward stabs Jim in the stomach and pushes him out a window to his death. Kim confesses her love for Edward and shares a kiss with him as they say goodbye. Returning downstairs, Kim lies to the townspeople saying that Edward and Jim killed each other in the fight. She tells them that the roof caved in on them and shows them a disembodied scissor-hand similar to that of Edward’s. Shocked and saddened over his death, the neighbors return home. At the same time, the guilty Joyce realizes what her lies have done.
T
he elderly woman (who is actually revealed to be Kim in her old age) finishes telling her granddaughter the story, saying that she never saw Edward again. She chose not to visit him because she wanted him to remember her the way she was in her youth. She also mentions that Edward is still alive, seemingly immortal since he is artificial and can never age, and he “creates snow” from his ice sculptures, which falls upon the neighborhood below. She tells her granddaughter that “Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it.” While Edward creates more ice sculptures, a flashback of a young Kim is shown dancing under the snow falling from the angel ice sculpture above her. (Source: WikiPedia.)
edward scissorhands (1990)
KNOWN
FOR
DRACULA (1992)
KNOWN
FOR
I
n 1462, Vlad Dracula, a member of the Order of the Dragon, returns from a victory against the Turks to find his wife, Elisabeta, has committed suicide after receiving a false report of his death. Enraged that his wife is now damned for committing suicide, Dracula desecrates his chapel and renounces God, declaring that he will rise from the grave to avenge Elisabeta with all the powers of darkness. In a fit of rage, he stabs the cross with his sword and drinks the blood which pours out of it.
I
n 1897, newly qualified solicitor Jonathan Harker takes the Transylvanian Count Dracula as a client from his colleague R. M. Renfield, who has gone insane. Jonathan travels to Transylvania to arrange Dracula’s real estate acquisition in London, including Carfax Abbey. Jonathan meets Dracula, who discovers a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Mina and believes that she is the reincarnation of Elisabeta. Dracula leaves Jonathan to be raped and fed upon by his brides and sails to England with boxes of his native soil, taking up residence at Carfax Abbey. His arrival is foretold by the ravings of Renfield, now an inmate in Dr. Jack Seward’s neighboring insane asylum.
I
n London, Dracula emerges as a wolf-like creature amid a fierce thunderstorm and hypnotically seduces, then rapes and bites Lucy Westenra, with whom Mina is staying while Jonathan is in Transylvania. Lucy’s deteriorating health and behavioral changes prompts Lucy’s former suitors Quincey Morris and Dr. Seward, along with her fiancée, Arthur Holmwood, to summon Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who recognizes Lucy as the victim of a vampire. Dracula, appearing young and handsome during daylight, meets and charms Mina. When Mina receives word from Jonathan, who has escaped the castle and recovered at a convent, she travels to Romania to marry him. In his fury, Dracula transforms Lucy into a vampire. Van Helsing, Holmwood, Seward and Morris kill Lucy out of mercy the following night.
G
ary Oldman as Dracula. After Jonathan and Mina return to London, Jonathan and Van Helsing lead the others to Carfax Abbey, where they destroy the Count’s boxes of soil. Dracula enters the asylum, where he
kills Renfield for warning Mina of his presence. He visits Mina, who is staying in Seward’s quarters while the others hunt Dracula, and confesses that he murdered Lucy and has been terrorizing Mina’s friends. A confused and angry Mina admits that she still loves him and remembers her previous life as Elisabeta. At her insistence, Dracula begins transforming her into a vampire. The hunters burst into the bedroom, and Dracula claims Mina as his bride before escaping. As Mina changes, Van Helsing hypnotizes her and learns via her connection with Dracula that he is sailing home in his last remaining box. The hunters depart for Varna to intercept him, but Dracula reads Mina’s mind and evades them. The hunters split up; Van Helsing and Mina travel to the Borgo Pass and the castle, while the others try to stop the Gypsies transporting the Count.
A
t night, Van Helsing and Mina are approached by Dracula’s brides. They frighten Mina at first, but she gives into their chanting and attempts to seduce Van Helsing. Before Mina can feed on his blood, Van Helsing places a communion wafer upon her forehead, leaving a mark. He surrounds them with a ring of fire to protect them from the brides, then infiltrates the castle and decapitates them the following morning. As sunset approaches, Dracula’s carriage arrives at the castle, pursued by the hunters. A fight between the hunters and gypsies ensues. Morris is stabbed in the back during the fight and at sunset Dracula bursts from his coffin. Harker slits his throat while a wounded Morris stabs him in the heart with a Bowie knife. As Dracula staggers, Mina rushes to his defense. Holmwood tries to attack but Van Helsing and Harker allow her to retreat with the Count. Morris dies, surrounded by his friends.
I
n the chapel where he renounced God, Dracula lies dying in an ancient demonic form. He asks Mina to give him peace. They share a kiss as the candles adorning the chapel light up, Dracula turns back to his younger self, and Mina shoves the knife through his heart. The mark on her forehead disappears as Dracula’s curse is lifted. She decapitates him, and finally gazes up at the fresco of Vlad and Elisabeta ascending to Heaven together.
B
lack Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s fifth feature film, sees him return to the territory of madness and obsession that drove his masterful first feature Pi and combine those themes with his observations on the desire for glory and fame that drove his most recent picture The Wrestler. The intersection proves a powerful and arresting vision, though days after I left the theater I’m still not certain that I liked it. This isn’t surprising; Aronofsky’s vision often settles on extreme, unflinching material; often his characters drive themselves to madness, self-destruction and death. Other than the David Fincher of Fight Club, I cannot think of a director whose vision is as uncompromising (in that light, I am very interested in seeing how he approaches next year’s X-Men movie The Wolverine) or as unbound by the sometimes rigid structures of genre.
T
his is not to say that Aronofsky is unfamiliar with genre territory. Pi, for all of its artistic flourishes, can easily be seen as a marriage of science fiction and horror. The Fountain, though not technically science fiction, used many of the genre’s images and conventions to tell a story of obsession, love and loss; watching it is like watching an adaptation one of the best Harlan Ellison stories that Ellison never wrote. Similarly, Black Swan, with its emphasis on sexuality, dark surrealism and the world of art, seems transliterated from an unwritten story not yet collected in a killer horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. Make no mistake: for all of its indie drama cred, Black Swan is a horror movie, though its horrors are the Second Stream ones explicated by Kathryn Cramer in her introductory essay of David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent. Psychological terror in the tradition of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion or the works of Dennis Etchison rather than the overtly supernatural.
I
t begins with a dream. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) poses on a darkened stage but with a spotlight completely focused on her. As she dances a male performer joins her, and as their dance becomes more energized he begins to take on sinister, demonic qualities until he comes to resemble the frightening figure from Fantasia‘s “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence. Though arresting, the sequence and Nina’s subsequent detached assessment feel aloof, as if Aronofsky and screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin attempt to build a wall between the movie and the viewer. It is one of the movie’s few missteps, though it may be intentional; from this point, the viewer cannot help but be drawn in.
A
member of a New York City ballet company, Nina competes for the lead in their production of Swan Lake alongside newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis). Director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel, in a delightfully smarmy performance) thinks Nina is perfect for the White Swan but believes she lacks the passion and sensuality of the Black Swan. When Nina approaches Leroy to ask for the
role he kisses her, expressing surprise and exhilaration when she bites his lip and consequently casting her in the lead. As she practices, Leroy criticizes her dancing as the Black Swan as “frigid,” urging her to lose herself in the role and stop worrying about perfection.
A
n ironic demand, for Nina’s precarious sense of self is in danger of teetering into the abyss from the movie’s beginning. Much of her behavior displays evidence of psychosis: she scratches her shoulder raw, obsessively cuts her nails, and becomes paranoid when she learns that Leroy has cast Lily as her understudy, becoming convinced that Lily is trying to take the role away from her. And she begins to hallucinate: she begins seeing Lily as herself, at one point has an elaborate (and steamy) lesbian fantasy about her (answering the question of how you get men to see a movie about ballet), and in one incredible sequence pulls a black feather from the scratch in her shoulder and becomes the Black Swan, her eyes reddening and her legs twisting into the shape of a swan’s.
A
ronofsky’s disturbing imagery easily could have slid into self-indulgence, but he benefits from screenwriters and actors who respect and understand the material. Natalie Portman, a beautiful young woman with incredible insight, disappears into her role as Nina, as does Barbara Hershey as her controlling, overbearing and demanding mother. Both women look drawn and tight, as if their countenances are ready to snap. Both roles demand much from them and both actresses deliver; I will be very surprised if Portman is not nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. In such company, Mila Kunis seems outmatched; though beautiful, she doesn’t have the ability of Portman, though she certainly gives what she can. The screenplay avoids the most obvious possible traps (having Lily become Nina’s doppelgänger, for example), though on occasion Aronofsky can’t help but let the movie dip into clichéd horror conventions. It’s a credit to his skill that these don’t harm the movie. His understanding of horror allows him some play with the genre’s tropes, but it’s clear very early in the movie that he isn’t interested in play.
A
nd that’s where Black Swan might run into trouble with horror fans, to say nothing of the average moviegoer. Though there’s much to recommend it, Black Swan stands as an uncomfortable experience; its vision will be too uncompromising for some, too relentlessly grim for others. A lesser director, one steeped in genre tropes and slick professionalism, would have made a movie easy to like but hard to respect. Doppelgängers, sexual abuse and overt conflict would be far easier to identify but ultimately could be dismissed as silly. Aronofsky, more interested in art than craftsmanship, seems intent on doing the reverse: he wants you to respect what he does, not like it. It makes Black Swan hard to enjoy, but not easy to dismiss.
black swan (2010)
KNOWN
FOR
“
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60′s.
Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted. Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
“
S
usanna is a young woman of eighteen, and her life isn’t exactly what a “normal’ eighteen-year-old’s is suppose to be like. To her, any kind of sex is casual, and it doesn’t matter who she does it with or when, as long as she gets it.
A
t graduation she falls asleep, proving she has little interest for the norms of prize-givings or anything to do with what’s accepted by society. At her father’s birthday party she is under dressed and is of course moaned at by her hypocritical mother. Here we learn that her parent’s friends are just as false as what is accepted by everyone. And then it becomes clear that Susanna has been sleeping with her mother’s friend’s husband.
T
his drives her to try to commit suicide with aspirin and a bottle of vodka to get it all down. At the E.R. she claims that she doesn’t have bones in her wrists anymore, and tells the psychiatrist at home that the bones grew back by the time she got to the hospital.
S
o she is shipped off to a local mental institution and put in the ward for women only. Here she meets a multitude of people who really do have problems: an anorexic, a girl who burned herself as a child, a lesbian (at the time was thought of as a mental disorder), a bulimic, and her roommate, a compulsive liar, to top it all off.
T
he ward is run by Nurse Valerie Owens, who is very clever, but is unable to become a doctor due to her race. All the nursing staff and the patients are kept marginally sane by Valerie, and she and Susanna have a complex relationship. Susanna is questionably diagnosed with having a Borderline Personality Disorder.
T
hings really get started when the sociopath run away patient, Lisa, returns to the ward and turns Susanna’s world upside down and inside out. She is a force to be reckoned with---she is magnetic, rebellious, doesn’t take her meds and is unhealthy for the other patients as she breaks down their self-esteem regularly. Due to the fact that her last best friend, Jamie, couldn’t hack it when she ran away, Lisa befriends Susanna and together they start a world of trouble. Susanna keeps a diary of all her thoughts and feelings, illustrating in it too, and telling the tale of her stay through her daily entries.
Girl,Interrupted (1999)
most
RECENT
H
er ex fling, Toby, comes to visit her and she very nearly tries to have sex with him in her room. He tells her he wants them to run away to Canada together so that he doesn’t have to go to Vietnam. He tells her she isn’t crazy and that the girls in the asylum aren’t really her friends. But she refuses to go with him, subconsciously beginning to rely on Lisa.
T
T
he next morning Susanna wakes up and goes for a walk, to escape the sound of Lisa’s voice and returns to find Daisy playing a record over and over again and Lisa in the kitchen. She goes up the stairs and finds Daisy’s wrists slit and she hangs herself in the bathroom. Susanna goes back to the asylum without Lisa, (who runs away again) and starts anew with Dr. Wick and her diary.
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hen she meets the head psychiatrist, Dr. Sonia Wick, and claims she is ambivalent, saying it means she doesn’t care. But Dr. Wick sees through this mask and decides to have Susanna see her from now on. Afterwards Lisa is taken in to see the doc, but doesn’t return and Susanna falls into a depression. Nurse Valerie has had enough and throws her into an ice cold bath to wake her. She tells Susanna, after Susanna attacks her verbally and says that she doesn’t know what she doing, that she is a spoiled, lazy little girl who is driving herself crazy! And that if Susanna isn’t careful she’ll throw her life away on some stupid rebellion.
hen she is due to leave, Lisa breaks out of her padded cell and steals Susanna’s diary. Beneath the ward in the maze of corridors, Lisa reads the diary aloud and tells the other girls what Susanna thinks of them. Susanna runs away from Lisa when she begins to chase her with a needle filled with a toxic-looking chemical. Susanna breaks her hand while trying to close a sliding metal door on Lisa and then they finally confront each other. Susanna tells Lisa finally that no one cares if she dies because she already is dead and her heart is cold, and that she will start her life again out of this hospital without Lisa and the others.
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I
hat night Lisa breaks into the ward, wild eyed and crazy, and Susanna runs away with her so they can get to Disney Land. There they hook up with hippies and eventually crash at the bulimic, Daisy’s, house after bribing her with promises of meds. But all turns bad when Lisa tells Daisy that she is a freak herself and that this apartment is all a mask to hide what’s really happening. She breaks Daisy down, finally saying that Daisy probably likes her father molesting her and that it’s probably all she’s ever known.
n the morning she is about to leave, but first visits Lisa and talks to her again. Lisa says that she isn’t really cold and that she didn’t mean to hurt Susanna. When she leaves she says goodbye to all her friends, and gets into the cab saying that being crazy isn’t about keeping a secret, it’s just about everyone being personified. And by the seventies most of her friends were out of the clinic and leading lives. The girl who was just interrupted by herself and everyone else, is finally recovered from being a supposed “borderline”.
MOST
RECENT
MOVIES
STARRING Beetlejuice
1988 A couple of recently deceased ghosts contract the services of a “bio-exorcist” in order to remove the obnoxious new owners of their house HEATHERS 1988 A girl who half-heartedly tries to be part of the “in crowd” of her school meets a rebel who teaches her a more devious way to play social politics; killing the popular kids.
REALITY BITES
1994 Generation X Graduates face life after college with a filmmaker looking for work and love in Houston.
HOMEFRONT
MR.DEEDS
2013 A former DEA agent moves his family to a quiet town, where he soon tangles with a local meth druglord.
2002 A sweet-natured, small-town guy inherits a controlling stake in a media conglomerate and begins to do business his way.
LITLLE WOMEN
1994 The March sisters live and grow in post-Civil War America.
WR
WINONA
RYDER
MOVIE JOURNEY