 Good afternoon. Welcome to Coronavirus and our mental health. I'm Ken Bernus and I'm coming to you from Alieva on the North Shore and today is June 22nd, two days after the summer solstice and summer, well the summer heat is coming. Get ready for it. Let's talk about Coronavirus update. Interesting things happening, but things are sort of well explained. Okay, two weeks ago when I was on this show, we were the leader of all 50 states, is the state that was surging more than any other state. Well luckily we've gone down since then and we've given up our throne, our championship to Idaho and Wyoming. So if you have friends that live in Idaho or Wyoming, you'd probably better send them a wishing you will and give them your support. But like everything, the surges come and go. There's a surge and then we fall back and there's a surge and then we fall back. And if you take a look at the statistics, both from the Department of Health in Hawaii and from the New York Times looking at America's statistics as a whole, we are down significantly from our surges by. But unfortunately we are not close to our low spot either. So if this is low and this is high, we're somewhere right around here. And what that means statistically, and again we're comparing states across every hundred thousand people in the population. What that means is we're taking a look at the United States as a whole. There's about a hundred thousand new cases every day. And if we look at Hawaii as a state, it's about a thousand new cases a day. And they, that varies that thousand from about 700 on up to about 1100 per day. But it's hard to sort of figure it out because we're now, is our most people doing a weekly count rather than a daily count. So it's hard to sort of tease that out. In fact, all these statistics aren't approximation because the variants are so different and we know so, still know so little about the variants, the coronavirus variants. And the way we measure things differs significantly. So, you know, sort of bear with those statistics, but what you can really tell though is sort of the trends. And the trend for us in the last couple of months has been staying at that level here, not close to our bottom, not close very far from our top. But that means that coronavirus is not going away. And it makes us, or most of us, uneasy. Even when we're tired of lockdown and we're out there without our masks, and we're not social distancing, and there's a lot of people we're visiting and a lot of tourists coming in. By the way, if you want to come to the North Shore beaches, be prepared. There's lots of traffic coming up with the tourists because they're out there and forth. So our cases are staying high. Now with every variants, the new variants that we have, what you notice with the Omicron and the other variants is that they're very, very infectious, but they're not killing us as much as the original variants were. So we're down in deaths, but we're still up in new cases and hospitalization. Where that's leading is sort of a fatalistic view for a lot of people saying to themselves, you know what, so far I haven't got it, but I've got friends, I've got family, I've got neighbors who've caught it. I'm probably going to catch it somewhere along the line, despite the fact that I've been vaccinated. And we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. Despite the fact that I've been vaccinated and that I've been boosted, I still may and probably will catch this thing. Well, that leads to a very uncertainty at even negativity, because it's like, oh God, it's coming. It's going to hit me sooner or later. What I've been trying to do the last number of times with you all is to try to get us to move from the negativity to positivity and take a look at things that we feel good about. Things that put us in that frame of mind where we're smiling rather than frowning. And we're not so much worried about tomorrow, but we're living in today and enjoying today. And believe me, Hawaii is the place to enjoy life. So to help me out with all that is my good friend, Greg McDonald. He was here earlier, a couple of months ago. And I now want to welcome him to the show. Greg and I, when we talked last time, we talked about psychology and teaching and a lot about music, how music brings us joy. Well, today we're going to talk about motion pictures, because both of us are fans of motion pictures. So without further ado, let me welcome my good friend and guest, Greg McDonald. Hello, that's me, not the other guy down there talking. Yeah. Terrific. Well, I would like you to start off with, because Greg and I had talked earlier about movies, because we're both such fans. And I sort of asked Greg, let's talk about some movies and get specific. We'll talk about some specific examples and see how they can make us feel better in these dark times. And so I guess the first question I would like you to sort of jump in on, Greg, is one of the movies that you first thought about, one of the movies that you thought, wow, I really enjoyed that movie. That movie made me really feel good. So if we could start there, sure. Terrific. Sure. I'm going to start before that and give a prequel. Sure. When Ken asked me the question of doing this program and movies that made us feel good, the first thing that happened to me was like an overflow of, in a second, I saw every movie flashed through my mind that I ever saw. And I thought, how in the hell am I going to pick out any one of them, because I love them all for different reasons. And I had to kind of keep kind of putting some parameters on the way I was thinking and just try to grab ones out that for some reason maybe went through my mind a little bit slower and not so fast. And then ask myself, why did I stop on that one? Because I have no idea why I stopped on that one. And then that's kind of the way I got my mind to slow down so I can answer the question. And there's way more than what we're going to talk about here. Okay, so I think the first one that came to my mind was Shape of Water, which is probably one of those movies that I would call has the worst title to interest the most people to come and see. Kind of like the title, No Country for Old Men. That's one of the best killer psychopath movies I've ever seen. Yet that title probably scared away anybody who was, you know, a younger or anything like that. But anyway, so Shape of Water did the same thing. And it was a very confusing title. However, that title grabbed my imagination like, okay, I mean, that tells me absolutely nothing about what I'm going to see. Therefore, I want to see it. And what I liked about it, and what movies do for me in general, in terms of this being also about how we're coping with all the consequences of the virus and work closed down and things changing and people coming and going and all that crap that we've never seen before, what movies do for me is they give me a respite from all of that. They don't necessarily hear the stress, but they do for the time that the movie lasts. So anyway, what Shape of Water did for me was, first of all, it was incredibly interesting because it's a blend of a monster movie, a love story, a little bit of comedy or lightheartedness, a murder. There's a whole lot of things that go on, plus incredible visual effects that I've never seen, not effects, but just the set cinematography. So what grabbed me was, when it finished, was I thought this, if I had to call this by one word, it wasn't a monster movie, was it a horror movie, was it a science fiction movie. Oddly enough, I would call this a love story. It was a romance, but it was a romance between an attractive deaf woman and a monster that lived in the water. And the way they used all those elements to pull that story together was, first of all, just completely absorbing. So I won right away with being taken out of my normal life for the duration of the movie because that love took me out of it. But the way they resolved it, I don't want to step on this too much because I want to hear Ken's input. I think I was almost most impressed by the ending. I kept thinking, how are they going to end this impossible love story? How are they going to end this? And it was a beautiful ending, enough so that I can actually tell you, I had tears in a monster movie. Okay, so you want to jump on? I think you're absolutely right. In fact, Guillermo del Toro, the director, would totally agree with you. He made that clear in the DVD specials that this was a love story, not a monster movie. And most of his movies fit that. It's not the fact that they're monsters. It's their people that are marginalized. She's marginalized because she doesn't talk. She's mute. And she's a cleaning lady. And so everybody looks down at her. They don't think possibly that she has a brain in her head because she can't talk and that she's a cleaning lady. And so they just totally marginalized her. And of course, the same thing is happening with the quote monster, which he calls the fishman. And despite the fact that the scientists are telling him, we need to study this person because this person's intelligent. And he's going to tell us a lot about what's going on with living organisms. And no, the bad guys are saying, no, we're going to kill them and dissect them, yada, yada, yada type of thing. It was just an amazing reference to us in how we treat people, except we get to see them how they treat the monster and how they treat people like Sally Hawkins who played the deaf mute in the picture. Now, one of the things I just wanted to jump on real quickly, and then we can go to another movie of yours, is that unlike Country for Old Men, which sort of kept me mystified as far as the title goes until the end, I know immediately once the picture started about the shape of water, because he does the whole thing about decorating your apartment, which everything starts in this green and this oceanic artistic setting. In fact, the very famous Japanese painting of the wave that comes in actually did that on her wall and then overpainted that so that you can see if you look closely, it's still the wave there, except it's now in you have to look closely to take a look at it. But then the room fills up with water and we see her as she looks in the water. And that was to me, not only a great ending, which I agreed with you, but it was a stunning beginning and had me from the very moment. Wonderful picture. And we stop, I think what really helps us in the coronavirus is we stop and think about people and we pay more attention to people, which is something that we've been moving away from because our world has been expanding through the iPhone and we look at the iPhone and we've got 500 friends on there, 500 friends that we don't know very well, except that they're friends of ours on Facebook or whatever it is. And we don't spend that quality time with the individual getting to know that individual. And he lets us do that with these characters in this film. It's just beautiful. Wonderful film, Greg. Thanks for really suggesting that. What were some of the other ones that you took a look at that you said, wow, that really moves me. That affects me. I've always wanted to do an improv with you. This is close to that. You know, we talked about improv and how actors, a lot of actors study improv. And it's kind of like improv for the, I don't, out of respect for the audience, I don't even know if you know what we're talking about, but improv is a type of theater where you have no lines. You're given something and you respond to it. And the whole thing has to evolve from everybody wondering what their role is going to be. So you just threw me an improv without knowing it. Okay, good. Yeah, when you talked about, oops, when you talked about friends on the computer. So I'm going to talk about her. As you can see, the link, because it's about, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, it's about, it starts walking Phoenix and Amy Adams. And and Scarlett Johansson. Scarlett Johansson asked that voice. Anyway, make a long story short. He falls in, he falls in, he's divorced and he's alone. And he has like a computer radio next to him that wakes him up with a voice instead of a ding dong ding dong. It's a woman's voice. This woman's voice, however, is an AI. So the AI is trained to listen to his breathing and his, the way he says things and then to interpret that emotionally. He, he wakes up falling in love with her because she, she's so tuned in to him, right? And at that point, I'm going, okay, where is this going to end up? You know, I mean, they're not going to have kids. That's for sure. Okay. So, so, so then there's another twist in it that, that is part of what I like about movies that helps me be away from the COVID insanity world is, is when there's a new, a new twist, not something that I kind of anticipate what's coming. Like, and there was a twist and the twist was this AI was trying so hard to be able to relate to a human that she requested he train her what love is. Now, is that interesting that we were just talking about love showing up in, in strange ways? Okay. I mean, love, love in a monster. Now it's loving a machine voice, right? And he falls in love with her. And a long story short, she's only in test format. So after about a month or so, some period of time, she has to say to him that she's being taken down because there's some imperfections in the program. But he's come to relate to her as a real person. And she's become able to relate to him as a real person. And so they're both in, in what appears to be sadness and sorrow of separating, except you also understand that she has learned the words of sorrow and separating and you have no way of knowing whether she's really feeling it or not. Because she's convincing it. Okay. So anyway, it ends and he's thrown in into a crisis and he goes to visit a gal friend of his, not a girlfriend friend, but a girlfriend. That's Amy Adams. And he admits to her what's been happening. And she admits to him, me too, that she's had, she's had the same experience going on. And they discover that each other has been being fulfilled by these AI, hybrid AI techniques. And he feels guilty about it. And she has that, she has a, you know, sometimes can we remember, we remember phrases and sentences that just get burned in our head? As he was feeling guilty about it, you know, I'm ashamed, you know, fell in love with a wife. She said this, I'd write it down and make sure I'd remember it. Falling in love is a socially, is socially acceptable insanity. Falling in love is socially acceptable insanity. And I just laughed. I laughed because I thought, in a way, since nobody's ever been able to really define love, except when you're in the presence of it, you know it. That brings me back to the whole shape of water thing. Is that the shape of water kind of brought them together in a way they both knew what was happening, but there wasn't really a way that anybody would understand, oh, we're in love. Okay. So it's something you know when you're there, but all the words don't really work, right? So they rediscover each other. You see that, but you also know there's only five minutes left in the movie. So you know, they're not going to, like, go on to another story. Again, it's the ending. I'm always taken by endings. I'm going, okay, what are they going to do? Because they're just friends. They're not boyfriend, girlfriend, but they have discovered something that is more than friendship. So they walk to the roof of her apartment building, I guess. And at that point, there's no more dialogue in the movie. And he sits down because he's looking at the skyline. So you're looking at his back. So the camera's behind him, looking at his back. She comes and sits next to him, still nothing. Like, well, like, you know, continuing the conversation. That's what a lot of movies would do. They fill it with conversation or dramatic music, right? And it's all silent, as I remember. And as the camera draws back, all you see is she puts her head on his shoulder. And that's the end of the movie. And I thought, oh, God, that's it. That's skin to skin kind of love. But the AI type love still wasn't knocked. It wasn't made bad. It still worked. Yeah, let me jump in on that. Yeah, because this is really important in movies. That makes a great movie is that they let you make your own decisions about the ending. I made a different decision about the ending of this picture than you. And that's what makes it, you know, people get used to, okay, the good guys win, the bad guys lose. There's some sort of nice need tying up. But the great movies oftentimes leave you with the ability to sort of interpret it in your own way. To me, the real key to this was the AI relationship. Because to me, it wasn't that just she went away for a tune up, so to speak, is that what you saw their relationship going was she's nurturing him. She's been trained as an AI to respond to those things, which you talked about. But along the way things change, and she starts opening up, she starts learning. And that's the thing that he really hooks onto because he's now no longer just talking to a robot or an AI, artificial intelligent, he's talking to somebody who is questioning. And that's the wonderful thing about this. And now if we take a look at Shape of Water, for instance, they get together at the end. And it's this unlikely, crazy love thing. But eventually they find a way to be together. In her, they can't be together. Like you say for all those reasons. And she has to exit. And she's exiting in my way to learn and to further explore. Which, by the way, a lot of AI movies and books are exploring now because when do we start becoming a human being? When we start questioning and when we start thinking for ourselves. And clearly Scarlett Johansson in this picture at the end was thinking for herself, at least in my way of thinking. So it was this wonderful type of thing. And the key thing for Joaquin Phoenix was the fact that he had been opened up to love. And all of a sudden he could see that in others around him. Once you experience that, you become more receptive and you start noticing other people more and you start seeing the possibilities of love. Another picture that Greg and I talked about was Midnight in Paris. And the same thing happens in the ending of Midnight in Paris is that he meets two wonderful women. Well, he's with one woman and meets another one. And doesn't wind up with either one of them. Because both of them are not accessible. Just like in her, Scarlett Johansson is not accessible to Joaquin Phoenix. So what happens is he's now open to sort of look around him. And he finds the person that he was attracted to almost from the beginning of the picture, but he didn't realize it. And he connects with her at the ending. And so love makes everything sort of possible. Even in a coronavirus time, even in a negative time like what we're facing with climate change and wars and everything. If you get close to people and you love people and care about people, it makes everything sort of possible. Whether they get together at the end like they did in shape of water or whether they find each other in an unexpected place like they did in her and Midnight in Paris. Wonderful. And I've flummoxed you. You're thinking about this. Talk to me, Greg. Yeah, all I can think about is I saw the picture once when it came out and I fell in love with the picture. I haven't thought a lot about it since. Was it Midnight in Paris? Yeah, Midnight in Paris. And all those things you said, yes. I went with this. The me that watched it way back when remembers what drew me was the ideas that other places in times are better than the one we're in right now. Because he goes through the period of art and literature and different actual physical periods of time, which was an interesting leap to actually try to put that in a movie. And I think I do that. Like even now, I wish things were the way they were earlier before the virus. And even before the virus, there were other times when I wished that maybe I had picked a different career or been in a different place or something like that. So I think what I remember most, and you've made me want to watch it again, what I remember most is that we frequently think that other times and other places would be better than the one we're in right now. Absolutely. Yeah, we're running short. So let me just sort of pull that together because that's exactly the way I felt coming out of Midnight in Paris. The grass is always greener on the other side. We look back and we think the past is better than today. We think, gee, if I was living here, rather than here, that would be much better. If I was with this person rather than this person, I wish, you know, it's like my cats. My cats always take a look at the food that I'm feeding them. And it's exactly the same for all my cats, but they stop halfway through to sort of explore the other persons because they're thinking that the other cats got the better food. Exactly. You know, and it just, you know, I'm thinking, no, no, it's all the same. The opportunities are all the same. And I grew up, of course, in the 50s and into the 60s. And people look back on the 50s as the nostalgia time. You know, Owen Wilson looked back on the 20s as being his time he wanted to go to. And the lady he ran into looked back on the 1890s as the time that she wanted to go back to. Neither one was happy with the time that they were in. But if you take a look at that, there were problems in the 20s and the 90s. And there's certainly were problems during the Eisenhower years in the 50s, which we don't talk about. But we have that memory that remembers the good things of the places we've been the past years that we've been living, the people that we've been with. But if it brings us back like this movie did to the present, and that's where Owen Wilson wound up in midnight in Paris was the present and thinking, gee, you know, I should live now and look around. And that's what he does at the very end of the picture. He looks around and he finds this lady, he finds the place that he wants to be, not these other places that he thinks he wants to go. And I think that that's the whole thing of the coronavirus is that if we get stuck in negativity, the cure for that is not to wish we were somewhere else or at a different times, but to see all the positive things that are happening around us. And thank goodness we live in Hawaii where we've got a lot of things we can look around and say, you know, thank God, I live in paradise. You know, even during the coronavirus, I'm in paradise. And it helps keeps us, you know, really, you know, on an even keel in stormy seas, to so to speak. So, like I said, we're really out of time. Greg, last thoughts before we say goodbye? No, I don't know the audience very well. Do they ever write in and comment? Because it'd be interesting to see what people, if other people had movies that did something for them. Absolutely. And we run periodically the place to go. I'm sure Michael will run that in the bottom of the thing about how to get the questions in it. We certainly would like that. You can see it at the bottom right now. Send us a question at. So, please, if you're out there, let us talk, like Greg is saying, and I appreciate you bringing that up, Greg, because that makes us closer. And that's what Greg and I are both here about, is to talk to you all out there and discuss what you want to discuss and answer questions that you want to be answered about the coronavirus or anything or about movies. And I'm sure I could probably talk, Greg, into coming back on movies, because we didn't even begin to talk about all the movies we talked about. So thank you very much, Greg, for being with us. And I hope to see you again at some future show. Thanks. I will. And I want to say thanks to all the staff at Think Tech Hawaii. Certainly Jay and Haley and Michael and all the people who assist us. And again, I want to thank everybody out there for tuning in and listening and doing as well as you can do in this difficult time. God bless.