Hi!

For my Adult Development and Aging midterm, I have to write on a character from a movie who primarily depicts issues of aging. The character could be in transition from one stage of life to another, or facing issues of the life stage that he/she is in.
I have been considering White Oleanders. I thought that the daughter would make an interesting case. I could include feministic issues, adolescent issues and also Mahlerian ideas of separation-individuation.
However, a less complicated character would make it easier for me to compile the paper. Any suggestions?

I can think of 2 good movies, Labyrinth (1986) and MirrorMask (2005). Both are the story of a young girl discovering adulthood through a fantastic world.

"All About Smith" -- a middle-aged man gets widowed, retires from his job, and marries off his only child, a daughter. All this, within a matter of a week or two. The guy goes on a caravan-tour (I don't know what they call these big bus-sized rolling homes here in America) of America, I guess to discover it, himself, his life, what he's made of. A Simon and Garfunkel song, forty years later. It is also a good, enjoyable movie, notwithstanding the fact there are no explicit sex between really good looking people, and there are no alien transvestite robots blowing up San Diego, either.

A movie on aging and maturing while young, and passing into adulthood from girlhood at least though some of the many-many gates a female must pass through when maturing, is "Close to Home." It's an Israeli movie, two girls in the army, and how they lose their rough edges as they mould their, each her own, personalities to become compatible with the other's. The friction between the two chisels them, not scratches them; their different values teach them, not create judmentality; their individual vulnerabilities make them bond, not create an atmosphere in which opening up to the other one means exposing the self to hurt. And they both go through this, in baby steps, with the backdrop of living in a country in which personal space is far more restricted than here in North America, everyone is poor to our standards, and they live in constant fear of being blown to pieces.

"Close to Home" is subtitled, and it is hard to watch, because there is lots of action in facial gestures, in emotions in the voices, but the speech is rapid, the subtitles cruelly don't wait for you, t they keep rolling like some Ole' Man River, and you can't catch it all in one pass. I watched this movie with two very smart middle-aged women, after myself having watched it in a movie house and once at home on a DVD, which I bought (for a lot of money) on eBay. All three of us missed at least something. We talked about it, replayed some of the parts to settle arguments, and then, and only then, did we each know what the movie was all about. If you speak Hebrew, it'll be easier.

This may sound absurd, but how about "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"?
Of course it's a strange movie with the title character growing younger as time progresses, but at least it covers some interesting time periods. It does cover feminism (Daisy, the lead female character is way ahead of her time).

Synecdoche, New York. It painfully depicts Phillip Seymour Hoffman dealing with physical decay, mental exhaustion, lost love, regret and mostly coming to terms with death (the greatest line is when he says, "We're all hurdling towards our inevitable death, yet pretending we're not." ). Be forewarned, it is often surreal, metaphorical and abstract. So when you watch it, think about what the artist (director/screenwriter Charlie Kaufman) is trying to say.

I like Dylan's choice. A great movie about decay, entropy, and the inevitability of the universe's combined effort to hurtle man towards doing nothing, toward his inability to do something, which is a synonym for his inability to successfully establish his own immorality. In reality, or even as a personal belief, nothing more. We can't even do that without throwing our sensibilities out the window. Man makes time slow down to a crawl, and he achieves immortality by killing the world (stopping the change in it) around him.

The movie is about a race against time, and the two runners in the race are man and time. They both get exhausted, as does the audience after three hours of watching this movie.

But I think the best line is when he says, "I hate it when your labia majora gets caught in the gap between my front teeth." "Me too," replies the woman. Always elicits a kind, light-hearted smile or gentle laughter in the audience. We all know how that feels.

There are quite a number of sex scenes in the movie, which is good, some with explicit full frontal nudity, some with a really obese but good-looking woman (my equivalent in her sex).

The movie sadly, and horribly, lacks in violence and in alien space robots with laser guns and other showy firepower, but you CAN see some semi-decomposed bodies prone on the pavement towards the end. I guess the director luckily realized just in time, before the movie ended, that he would be the laughing stock of the industry if he did not try to indicate violence or final death-struggles in the least.

In the special, extended, anniversary edition of the movie the director's comment explains how the writer/director barricaded himself on the scene, and went on a hunger strike, and only communicating to the general world at large with repeating the sentence "I will NOT use a real or even a wind-up Arnold Schartzenegger in my frigging movie," but a team of forensic psychiatric negotiators convinced him at least to use some corpses and crows to eat them on some of his scenes, if he does not want to get tarred and feathered in Hollywood.

"On Golden Pond" is a classic for aging issues.

Synecdoche, New York would be tough to cleanly extract realistic issues from the freakin' weird part.

I suggest looking into Mrs. Dalloway, but my all time favorite is 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp", a very entertaining film as well as excellent film making!

Kurosawa's "Ikiru"

Kurosawa's "Ikiru"

Absolutely. I am mad at myself for not thinking of this one.

The subtitles might kill you, though. The one I rented had only Papuan-New-Guinean subtitles. Luckily my roommate was Hannibal Lecter's grandson. But he did not speak English or Hungarian (that's why we got along so swimmingly, sharing a room and our girlfriends) (BUT NOT MEALS) so we called in the landlady who knew a bit of Bengali and Sanskrit, and chain-synchronised translation took place that involved, but was not restricted to, three belly-dancers (of different dialects of belly), and two pantomimes.

The movie was fantastic. My favourite line was the overtitle to a chapter, "Death casts a spell" that eventually trickled down to me in translation, "Dead cats can't spell."