 Okay, back we're live, it's one o'clock on a given Tuesday, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech and today we're gonna talk about the movie show. This is the movie show with George Cason and we're talking about a movie called The Father. Okay, if you haven't seen it, you should. And we're gonna examine that in the context of our lives here on the planet. But let me add that movies are more important or are more being made. There are more international movies being made, more movies with more range, you know? So violence and vengeance may not be, you know, as popular as it was actually. My wife turns on movies from all parts of the world that she learns about other cultures. She learns about what's happening there. She learns how they live. This is a fantastic education. We are lucky in a sense. It's a lucky aspect of COVID that we have such fantastic movies all over the channels, especially cable. Anyway, so George Cason is our movie critic and we're gonna criticize, we're gonna write critic comments and make critic conversation about The Father with Anthony Hopkins, who is a remarkable actor and demonstrated his craft in The Father. So George, The Father, just a very quick summary of what the movie is about. This movie is about an elderly gentleman, former engineer who has dementia, Alzheimer's, but he doesn't really realize that. So the movie shows him from his perspective what his reality is. And what is really critical here is that the director and the playwright has shown how his perceptions are distorted from his own eyes. So it's a very, very stellar performance by Anthony Hopkins, also a performance by Olivia Coleman, who places daughter. And you get a perception of what it is to have Alzheimer's and to have dementia. And that's in a nutshell, that's it. And then we can get into the particular. Now, let's unpack some of that, as you mentioned it. You said it was a stellar performance, indeed it was, but why? What was it about his performance that turned everybody on this way? I mean, he just played the role of a guy who was degenerating, what's so fancy about that? It's just the realism. He shows himself, he shows his feelings very clearly and very, you know, fatically. And I think that's what does, that's what does it. I mean, he's an actor par excellence, you know. He played, I remember seeing in 20 years ago the silence of the lambs when he played Hannibal Lecter. You know, he was this evil man that was killing young women and skinning them. But I mean, every role he gets into, he completely gets into the role. So I think it's just his acting ability to pretty much get himself into the role, into the mind and heart of the protagonist there. So he's just- And often enough he selects a protagonist who has got some kind of mental disability, silence of the lambs, he's a psychopath. And I agree with you. I mean, not every role, but a lot of his roles are like that. And he got into that pretty deeply. He understood, he learned what was in the mind of a full-fledged psychopath and you saw it in him. He looked at it through the eyes of a psychopath. Then it's the same process in the father. He looked at the world and acted the role from the point of view of a dementia patient, which is not easy when you are not a psychopath and not a dementia patient, you have to take on that guard and learn to be that person and show us how it is to be that person. Which in the case of a dementia patient, that's really hard to do, but he did. I remember one part, George, I don't know if you caught this. There was one part where his eyes were frozen and he was looking up into space in the ceiling. His consciousness had left him for at least a little while. And I said, how can you actually convey that to an audience, to a movie audience? How can you make that happen so that you look like you're not there, that you went into space? And that's the real talent that he was able to do that. Now, that's the mark of any par excellence actor, actors, but they can actually get themselves into the role and project what's inside out, for that role. Now, one of the things that I remember is that this director sort of gives you little clues early in the movie. Like he's in what he sees to be his flat, you know? But then as he opens the door, he's in the care home that they show you at the end and it's all more institutional design, or architectural design. And it flips into that. So he says, well, wait a minute, he's opening the door of his apartment building and he's obviously in a care home and an institutional facility, which is not an apartment building. So that's just a little clue that something is a miss. And then there's these two caregivers that you learn at the end because he's actually in that care home, right? And the woman who's the nurse and the orderly or the other nurse, the male nurse is coming into his perception as if he's in his flat, right? And he says, who are you? Who are you in my house, in my apartment? Who are you? But he doesn't realize that he's not there. He's already, so there's a lot of these twists and turns. So you really don't know until the end of put it all together. So he may already be in that care home with his nurse, right? And yet he's still projecting all these things, his younger daughter or older daughter. Is he, I mean, you're right. It's brilliant work on the part of the director. Brilliant, brilliant. Because you don't know where he is. It sort of conflates his life. And sometimes this flashbacks or flashovers. And where is he? Is he remembering this real time? Or is he remembering it from the vantage of a guy who's losing his mind? Where is he coming from? And we get the feeling that the hard drive, his hard drive is all scratchy. And it's going in many directions at the same time. And you begin to get the feeling that he is reaching out in his memory to various snippets that took place before. Not too long before, but sometimes way before. And he's living his life in this kind of fragmented mental state. And then if you go to the scenes in the care home, he's really out of it. So what you get is two levels. You get what's happening in the care home with this very nurturing nurse who really cares about him. I liked her a lot. She wasn't on the screen that much, but I liked her. And so that's the reality. But then you get these flashes of memory that are not the reality. And so you're jumping back and forth and you're living his life through his mind. But time has all merged up. Time has all blended, fragmented, blended. So you have to watch it carefully to figure out where he is at a given moment in the movie. And it's not until the end where it all pretty much comes together, the last few minutes of the movie where you, but he's given us clues, as I said, all along. And then it comes into that at the end. Yeah. Did you react the way I did when I... The director is showing us that he's angry, that the character is angry. He's showing us that the character is bossing people around and doing things that are completely irrational, sometimes malevolent. And did you feel at any point in the movie that he was dangerous? I don't think he was dangerous to the people around him. I think he's just a bossy personality. That was part of his personality before he got dementia. And sort of being the father figure, that a lot of fathers sort of take that role. You know, they're the head of the household. I mean, my mother was a very assertive woman who had a career, like most women were housewives in that era and she went into fashion. I won't get into this. She worked for Gloria Vandible's mother and aunt, you know, in an atelier on East 57th Street, back in the 30s and 40s, most women were just housewives. But the thing is, so yeah, he took the role, he had the role of the father. So it was his personality. But when you take that and you add the dementia, right? And then he's angry because his perceptions are so distorted that he thinks people are, you know, the whole thing with the watch, he keeps losing his watch when he just, he hid it in a certain safe place and then he forgets and then he thinks that the caregiver is stealing from him, you know? And so the whole thing is, I don't think he was dangerous. I think he's just angry at his situation at the end. He comes to terms with that in the care home and he starts crying because he realizes that he's lost his marbles. And, you know, he must have been a very strong-willed person, as I said, you know, in his earlier years. So that's just frustrating. I mean, in my age, I get frustrated when I can't remember something, senior moment, you know? But I don't think he was there. Well, he was way beyond that. You know, the other thing I wanted to, you know, ask you about is he seemed to handle the whole thing as a patient, an Alzheimer's patient who was true to form. I mean, in other words, I had the feeling that there were a lot of doctors, psychiatrists, who had experienced with Alzheimer's and dementia, who were consulting on this movie. Because each of the events that took place, each of the reactions, the little episodes that he had, seemed to me to be an accurate statement of what would happen if a person were diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Did you get that feeling? I thought it was medically accurate or psychiatrically accurate this movie. Definitely, as we have said in the past, other movies had not done their research. They did their research. They did definitely had some consulting because it was so realistic the depiction that Hopkins did and his daughter, Olivia, played the role of Olivia Coleman. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more that did a lot of research. They did their homework. That's why this movie got so many awards. Academy Award, screenplay, and Florian Zeller and his other co-person. Best Actor, Anthony Hopkins, Supporting Actress, Olivia Coleman on a few of the awards. I wonder who this movie interests. From a technical point of view, I think everybody will agree. Whether you gave them an award or not, that just was an excellent movie. Because of the acting, because as you say, of the homework and the accuracy of the episodes, you know, with the medical context. But I'm wondering if somebody say in his 20s or her 20s, watch this movie, would it be a whole hum? Because although there are tens of millions, maybe more even, of people in this country around the world who are in Alzheimer's and who are aging with dementia. If you're young and you're in the movie going audience, this may be a whole hum for you. There's no violence. There's no significant action. It's all, you know, a psychiatric experience. And that cuts out a lot of generations, doesn't it? Yeah, I think so. Unless they have a grandparent that they're familiar with, that has dementia, and then it would be realistic for them. Like my parents were quite old when they had, I was the first child. My mother was like close to 40. My dad was 40. And then they had my brother in their 40s. So I experienced an elderly parent at a younger age than most people, you know, I mean, most that most young people would be. But I mean, it would be a whole hum unless they have a personal attention. You know, I mean, I'm going to school now my old age to do a lifelong dream. I wanted to go to architecture school and I couldn't, my dad died and I couldn't go to Syracuse. I had to go to Stony Brook because it was a public university. I had a region scholarship covered everything. Syracuse wouldn't have covered. So the bottom, the bottom line is not to get back on the thing is that, you know, I'm with students that are very young and their perceptions are very different in their late teens and 20s. You know, I remember when I was sitting, when I was a college student at a normal, my early 20s, sitting with one of my professors and he's really slow thinking out every word, you know, and it was annoying me because, but now, from my perspective now, I realize I have to sit and think, you know, because I'm sort of slower or maybe I measure my words more. Number one is the three things I like to mention in that context. Number one is people are living longer. And, you know, we don't really know what causes Alzheimer's. It's a very interesting segments on 60 minutes about Alzheimer's. And of course it was the Alzheimer's drug three weeks ago that was announced and it was a sad story because this drug, the name of which is unpronounceable, this drug was approved after a medical committee voted against it in the FDA. And they were so offended that three of the medical committee quit after that. The FDA nevertheless approved the drug. It costs $55,000 a year this drug. It has serious side effects this drug. And its efficacy is very questionable this drug. But there are people in this country that are so determined to help their parents, their grandparents, that they, you know, politically advocated for the drug over the objection of these doctors. Anyway, point is that we have a society where people are getting older. They're experiencing Alzheimer's and dementia. We don't have a drug really yet for it. We don't even understand exactly what the plaques are all about and whether they cause it or just our correlation to it. And so that's one point that age is creating a lot of more Alzheimer's dementia patients among us. And it's really wrecking that chapter in their lives. And sometimes that chapter starts early, like in their fifties, believe it or not. I mean, you know, you mentioned before the show that there are people out there who have Alzheimer's and dementia in their fifties. Sometimes they do get violent, by the way, I can tell you. So what we have, what we have is a, it's a, it's an epidemic of Alzheimer's. And these, these kids in, you know, in high school and college, you think it's a ho han, they should think again, because it's coming to a person near you to a relative near you. And you ought to be concerned about what the medicine is. You ought to be concerned because as we get older, this is going to be what we're left with. And it's going to be a hard life. It's very hard to take care of an Alzheimer's patient. It's really, I can remember stories of people who did, and they were, they suffered mightily, you know, in the years who reached an Alzheimer's patient and declined. And it's expensive, you know, to be an Alzheimer's patient. And the whole thing is that it's an epidemic in this country. And what do we do about that? And so this movie should appeal to a whole lot of people because either they have the problem on their hands now, or they will. And then of course, and the last one I want to make before I get off my stump here is, you know, did it occur to you in the course of this movie that one day, maybe sooner than later, you'd be on the other side of the screen that you'd be in the Hopkins having this same experience that he was portraying. Because the numbers are so dramatic about the number of people who come down with this, and they don't know why. They don't know how to deal with it. But people come down with it by the tens of millions. And why does that not include you and me, George? Well, one of the things that you alluded to, Olivia Coleman, she has a superb performance as the daughter and her feelings, her emotions, she cries. It's just totally frustrating for her to deal with her father in that state. And so many people that I know have parents who have Alzheimer's. It's completely frustrating because they don't know who you are and they mix things up. And it's just you're dealing with a person who becomes literally an imbecile because of this disease. Now, with me, my mother at 87, when she passed away from leukemia, her mind was a sharpest attack. And my dad died young. So I don't have that. And my two grandfathers were murdered in Turkey. So they were in their 30s. So I don't know, dear. Both my grandmothers didn't have Alzheimer's. So genetically, I don't think I'm a key candidate for Alzheimer's. But as I said before the show, my roommate, former roommate, who's 12 years younger than me, already has early Alzheimer's and he's only 61 years old. And he's an heir to this big fortune, which I won't, you know, everybody would know. And his mother, she's had, she has Alzheimer's big time. She, she was, she was 18 when she had him. So she's also about 80 years old and she has big. So I mean, this is a friend who I once ruled with who, who has already, you know, can't remember anything from his youth, you know, and he's only 61 years old. So there's, so I'm familiar with that. And I have friends who have parents that I know how frustrated were. So for me personally, I don't think it's going to happen to me because of my family background, cancer, leukemia, heart disease. We have that in the family, coronary stuff, strokes. But, but there are others who, you know, who, who may have. Well, that's the thing, you know, if you, you can get by all the other things that kill people, all the other diseases and conditions and what have you, then you're left healthy, but you're older. And the chances of coming down with, you know, some kind of Alzheimer's or dementia issue is that much greater because you've, you've survived all the other things. You know, the one thing that's worth mentioning, George, is this is an English movie. It takes place in England. Anthony Hopkins plays the role of an English retiree. And, you know, his, his daughter is English and his daughter's husband. By the way, it was all picked off at Anthony Hopkins, the Anthony Hopkins character. He is so angry because this guy is, is wrecking his life and lives in his home. And it's, you know, it's a big stress on the marriage. And he isn't like it at all, which is part of the plot, if you want to call it a plot where he and his wife, the daughter, they take off, they can't stand it anymore. They make their way to Paris from London. But I think, you know, one thing I want to point out about that is, okay, it's an English movie. It has certain, you know, European aspects to it, but it could and is happening anywhere. It just as well could be an American experience. You don't have to track it very far to see it as an American experience. Do you agree? Oh, yes. I mean, because the Florian Zeller is from France. And this was a British French joint, you know, production. And then as you said, the son-in-law Paul, he slaps, you know, the father, because the father's being so obnoxious, right? And as you said, he is living in their flat, their apartment, and he thinks it's his own. I mean, he's in his mind. He's still in his own, his own apartment. That's why he mixes up. There was his younger daughter who died. We'll get into that. He had a painting of hers above his fireplace, but the painting was not in the flat where he's living with his daughter. So he starts screaming that somebody stole the picture his daughter did that's over the fireplace, but he's not in his flat anymore. So I mean, yeah, I mean, it could be anywhere. I mean, my former roommate, as I said, I mean, his mother's an heiress. I mean, if I mentioned the name of the firm, you would know immediately that products, we use them every day. Every sports person uses their products, right? And she's got a major Alzheimer's. I would have the money to go to 55,000 a year to try to sell her. And then I won't say the name. My former roommate, I mean, he, they can afford it. But I mean, you know, for me, I'm into this holistic stuff, macrobiotics and all of that. So I mean, I really think it could be dietary. You know, Reagan used to gulp down jelly beans. Yeah, but we don't know what it is. We don't know how those plaques form. Yeah. The most repeated statements I've heard about it is that if you, if you're healthy, otherwise you're in better shape. If you do exercise. And mostly, most of most repeated off repeated statement, I hear about it. This is not any medical advice, but as if your mind is active, you'll less likely come down with either dementia or Alzheimer's. And I think that that makes a lot of sense to sort of exercising your mind. But what, you know, one thing we're almost out of time, George, and I want to throw one more possibility at you. Or reaction, if you will. I saw this movie. That's educational. This was an education. You know, because many people in the country have not been close to an Alzheimer's patient. They have not experienced living with an Alzheimer's patient. They have not seen or even heard about the difficulties of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. And that, you know, they're ignorant in that regard. They hear about this, but they don't, they don't have any life experience in it. This movie shows you what it's like. This movie takes you there. And I would suggest as I did, that this is a accurate statement of a, what it's like to be an Alzheimer's person, even from that Alzheimer's point of view in your own head, and be the family around him, the family around him who has to suffer his irrationality. And in some cases, not this case, but in some cases, his violence and his attachment, where you're looking to recreate the relationship you used to have with this relative, but it's gone. And you have all kinds of burdens in dealing with him. And, you know, it's like Alzheimer's 101. If you didn't know about Alzheimer's, this is a great way to learn about it because in fact, many of us will, will have to know about it going forward. Don't you agree? Definitely for those who are not familiar. I mean, I'm familiar because I know people who have that. Yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely a learning experience to come face to face from the eyes and the mind of the actual patient. Right. Who has Alzheimer's has dementia. Right. Definitely. It's definitely something that, that you're actually, you're actually in, in, in his mind. You can actually see what's, and at the end, when it all comes together, and this is brilliant, directing, brilliant screenplay, you know, where you actually see it, what was happening if you didn't completely understand. Right. They gave you a little tidbits. Right. Like when they, he opens the door and he's in a care facility, but I couldn't agree with you more J. This is, this really will help people to understand if they haven't experienced this in their own life or know of people who have that problem. So yeah. And for the young, you know, one of the things is, you know, with the youth, right. There's a dichotomy between young and old, you know, they have the perception of old people. I mean, I'm going to, with students who are in their twenties, teens and early twenties. And they say, what is this old, this old dude doing here in our class? You know, that's, I think that's part of it. Some of them have that perception, but you know, it's, it bridges the gap between the middle age, the young and the old. Yeah. So it's, it's a learning experience. Yeah. And one last point, you know, we had talked about a global phenomenon. It's not limited to England or the US or even the West. It's everywhere. I guess the longer you live, the more likely, you know, you'll have the experience. But, but, but Anthony Hopkins character lived in London. His family had the money to have that flat. They had the money to put him in a care home, which is often the case about people that we know, they don't have the money to go through that experience. But there are hundreds of millions of people around the world. In the US to age into homelessness, they have no money. They have to throw themselves on the generosity of the state, or on philanthropic, you know, donors and organizations. And their life is not nearly so sweet. They don't have a flat to go to their family has abandoned. They don't have a care home to go to, they'll have to go to a care home of way, way lower levels of care than the one in the movie. And so I think we have to, you know, do a sort of shout out here who all those people who were never actually diagnosed, who were never actually treated, who were never actually cared for, who in fact have Alzheimer's and dementia in their, in their elder years. And that's a whole different level of tragedy. Yes. Yep. And that's ubiquitous for so many other conditions that, you know, that if you don't have the bucks, you know, you're going to deal and, you know, and those of us who are dealing with limited retirement funds, you know, and everything keeps escalating. The rents, the food, everything. So yeah, we really have to make a balance. You know, we have to, these people who are improved care for those who can't afford it as well, you know, because it, and they're on the streets, you know, you see them on the street. I mean, we have that problem here and they keep, government officials keep talking about it, but the situation of the homeless is horrible here. You know, this is a tourist economy and to have people on every street corner in such dire situation is, it's not good for them. It's not good for the tourist industry. And this problem still hasn't been solved. So, I mean, I'm, I'm really progressive in my ability, in my beliefs that we need some social programs for people. Yeah. Well, that's maybe that's the last point just to make about this movie. This movie teaches you to care. And how important it is that we as a society care for people who cannot care for themselves. It touches your heart. A very valuable experience and far more useful and interesting than watching violence and vengeance movies on table. So it's good that this is playing on cable. This is the kind of movie that you can learn from. I give it a 10 thumbs up. Same here. Thank you, George. The movie show with George Casey. And if you want to know more, about dementia and Alzheimer's, take your health back is on in half an hour. And Wendy Lowe is going to cover pretty much the same subject. So if you want to go to the next level, just hang around on think tech. Thank you, George. Aloha. Thank you for providing that information.