 and hard times. I'm Ken Burtness and I'm coming to you from Haleva out at the North Shore. And today we have a fun program because we're going to take a look at holiday movies, things that really make us feel really nice during the holidays, which we need. And I'll talk about that in a minute, but first let me introduce my guest, a very good friend of mine and fellow movie buff, Greg McDonald. Greg, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. I love it. Yeah, the thing with holidays, and Greg's a psychologist like I am, that's very difficult is that there's a lot of great fun and enjoyment happening with many people, but there's a lot of sadness and there's a lot of grief, depending upon your circumstances and how you come into the holidays. So it can be a very positive experience and a very negative experience as well. So, of course, our program is all about finding happiness, so we're going to focus on movies that make us happy, and we're going to take different holidays. I think more movies, of course, focus on Christmas, but we're going to save that still toward the end of the program, that in New Year's, and we're going to tackle some other holidays, and we're going to look at six movies, and we hope you enjoy our conversation. And Greg's going to start us off with a holiday that's really, I think, very special to the island, and that's Girls' Day, and he's got the pick of Girls' Day for us, and let me turn it over to you, Greg. Start us off. Okay, well, Girls' Day is not one of those holidays that I tend to think of as something I've celebrated all my life until I married Junko, who's Japanese, and it's a big deal in Japan. So, I thought, okay, Girls' Day, what movie would I pick? And it was kind of easy. It came to me right away, Barbie. And Barbie was one of those movies I probably hadn't planned on seeing because the previews are very cartoonish, and didn't seem like my kind of movie. But, you know me can. You know, I go anyway sometimes, especially if I don't like something just to see why maybe I wouldn't like it. And it did start out cartoonish for me, although fun. It is absolutely fun. I recommend it highly to everybody. But there were some, sometimes there's points in movies where I feel like the movie took a giant step in a new direction that was totally unexpected, and this movie has several of those, which you wouldn't think from the fluff of the commercials. Near the beginning, there's a dance scene where they're all dancing and having fun, and all of a sudden Barbie stops, and I think the music stops, and you don't know what's happening, right? And she says, has anybody thought about death? And I thought, holy, holy moly, Barbie brings up death, you know? And because she's immoral, right? I mean, that's a doll. And just that thought, I thought, how creative. Now, where is Rhetta, the writer, going to go with this? And she takes it into an interesting place where Barbie, and I don't want to get into telling the whole story, but if we think, if I think of how feminism affected me going through college in the Bay Area during the heyday of militant feminism, we were pretty much afraid of women. They'd yell at you if you opened the door for them and say, I'm not helpless, I can do it myself, and it's like, whoa, you know? And I knew that, God is a feminist, right? And I thought, oh, okay, this is interesting. So what happens is, Barbie's given a choice, God, it's hard to be brief on this, to go out of Barbie Land and be a real person, and they put her in like Santa Monica, Hollywood. And in Santa Monica, Hollywood, she sees how men control everything. And she says, oh, the way to break out of who we are is to learn how to control, like men do, because they have it down. So she takes it back to Barbie Land and turns all the women into like control, like men control corporations, and nobody is happy about it. And she realizes it's not working. And the next big turnaround, I thought, where's she going to go with this? The next big turnaround is they introduce the creator of Barbie. And Barbie has, like a therapist, Barbie has to talk to the creator. And she says, I just, I don't know, I don't know what, what am I supposed to be? You know, I tried this, I tried that. And I'm paraphrasing all of this. The creator says, that's the way I made you. I made you so you could be anything. And I thought, how interesting. Now you can be anything. You don't have to be a fighter against male domination. You can be anything. And so she can, who has been her boyfriend in the storyline, wants to get back in with her. And she's, she rejects him, which she's never done. I'm almost done, Ken. And she rejects him. And what she says to him, he says, like, why, what's wrong? And she said, you need to know who you are. Which is the same thing that her creator kind of asked her, who are you? And I thought, I thought, okay, this is where I can end it. You know me, I can go for him. I thought that's an interesting thing because I thought what Greta did was create feminism 2.0. Where it's no longer us against men. It's us, all of us, men and women deciding who we are and seeing if we can figure it out together. And that's, that's where I thought the genius of the movie mixed all the cartoonish with this great underlying storyline. For me, anyway. Yeah. And, and I totally agree. The director, Greta Gerwig, you know, and Margot Robbie, who really, you know, collaborated with Greta a lot on this movie. The two of them did a terrific job and they, they walked a very fine line, which is very difficult for movies. This movie, like you said, could have been geared towards kids. Or adults, and somehow they walked the line and satisfied both. It could be serious or it could be silly. They walked the line in that I could have music or not have music. They were doing all this and especially the one part that I liked was that they made fun of Mattel, who's behind everything and supplying all the money, and they were able to make fun of their boss and get away with it. Now that's a really fine line. So it made it a very interesting movie and a very brave move, you know, to do this for them to step out and give people what they didn't expect. It was very brave and that makes a picture great. So, and I think we're going to see that not only at the Academy Awards, but also interesting and how much money the movie made. I think it made a lot because it reached a lot of people. Yeah, let's go on to our second movie, which is also something that was totally unexpected. Although it was, we took a look at a move at a holiday that really wasn't a holiday and that's Groundhog Day. It comes up every second of February and which is coming up early soon in our year that we're filming this and it's always interesting and it's always fun. It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek type of holiday that we don't get off from work, but we really can have fun with. And the movie takes a much more serious thing by, of course, and most of you may have seen the movie, with Bill Murray, who plays basically a not-so-pleasant guy at the beginning of the movie and holds that for quite a while. And Bill Murray is very great at that. And he sort of makes himself very unpopular at the beginning of the movie. And then the movie starts over again. The next day, it's still Groundhog Day. And for the rest of the movie, we're just going from one Groundhog Day to the other. And, you know, like you're talking about mentioning death in the middle of Barbie, well, mentioning repeating one's life during the middle of a movie here. And all of a sudden, we're back at the same plot, at the same thing, with the same music waking you up. And, you know, going through the day, in his case, being a weather person, coming and talking about the weather and whether the Groundhog's going to see his shadow, et cetera, et cetera, just keeps playing over and over again. But it's totally different every time because he's different. First, he's really trying to find out what is going on and why is this happening to him. And then he decides, well, you know, I'm doing this. Let me see if I can do this better. And he's trying different things and making the same mistakes and then making different mistakes. And it's the whole process of how can we know each other better, which is great getting back to Barbie. And knowing each other and being ourselves and accepting ourselves turns out to be a great movie with really pleasant moments all through it as far as surprises, pleasant surprises, interesting things happening, et cetera. And what did, what did you think of it, Greg? Well, it was genius, especially Bill Murray, it's a perfect part for him. Yeah, I thought it was slightly different. I liked the idea that he's this cad who's arrogant and thinks the world should love him. And he's going to do something below his deep indy, which is, once again, go look at the Groundhog Day thing, which he thinks is just, I mean, he's way better than that. Now, the surprise here for me was when he starts waking up with it at the same time every day and the same things are happening and he goes to the same lady for breakfast and all that kind of stuff. What was very interesting is each of the days were slightly different. At first I expected, well, every day will be exactly the same because he's repeating the same thing, but it wasn't exactly the same. Every day, like you said, he would try something different. So that made, gosh, I don't know, five or six, seven attempts for him to break what I'll call the loop or lack of a better word. He was stuck in his loop that was repeating every day. The thing that hit me was the bottom line of what he was doing in each loop was trying to control. Now remember, he's an egotistical maniac, so he's not used to not being in control. So for me, I was following a story about a man who's running out of ways of being in control. And at the same time, he has this attraction towards how to get me down. Sort of died, by the way. Me too. Yeah. And in the last scene, it's kind of like he's burned out all of his attempts to control. And something in it, it's like love takes him over. And I thought how interesting that this movie was about being in control, but love can't be controlled. So he had to run out all his controls until he was open to the fact that I really love this woman and then it had a nice Hollywood ending. So that's kind of where I took it as along the way is a joyful movie. I highly recommend it. That's just the way I saw his struggle. Yeah, certainly the idea of not only letting love take him where it go, but let him let himself let everything go that control go and let, you know, let his life live it out and start doing the things that he wanted to do. In addition to, you know, angst thing about and obsessing about Eddie McDowell and the McDowell, he tried things that he never tried before that he always wanted to like playing the piano. You know, all that sort of stuff was just great. I mean, let's go on to the next movie which Greg picked and which was surprised for me because it's a Mother's Day movie and it was pretty heavy Mother's Day movies. Yeah, I'll tell you what, when I when I when I knew that Mother's Day was going to be the movie I had to pick, I thought, oh my God. So I immediately, to tell you the truth, went to Google and I and you can Google in top 50 Mother's Day movies, right? You just you don't see the movies. You just see what they are. You can see the names of them. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of them and my one take from all of them was most of the mothers were like abused mothers and struggling to put something right in their life. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But I was struck with how many of the ones that they were considering the best were basically about it abused mothers. Let me just put it that way. Right. And so then when I thought about, well, first of all, I love this movie, Three Billboards. This is the weirdest title, isn't it? Who'd have gone to a movie called Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri? Not exactly a movie to be drawn to by the title. Anyway, and, you know, we're talking about happiness in movies. And this is a movie about a murdered daughter. Right? How do you make a happy movie about a murdered daughter? And so you meet Frances McDermott's mother and she does the typical things when the daughter's been murdered. She tries to get help and nobody's interested. It's like it's not a big enough story. And she decides to take things in her own hands. Now this is where I think it gets funny and sad at the same time. It's one of those movies that let you go back and forth. She rents Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. And she puts up a message about how the local police department's doing nothing. They don't care. My daughter's dead. I don't have the exact words, but that's what she said. And everybody was shocked that a woman did that. And the scene that stands out to me is this one. She's invited to come out and be interviewed at one of the signs. Kind of like, why did you do that? You know, and the TV people were sort of regular TV people, which is going for emotion. If you notice that, interview people tend to go for emotion. If they can get a tear, they've earned their money. So anyway, they're going for emotion. And all she gave them was, excuse me. Okay. All she did was give them hell. She swore at them and she told them what low likes they were. And the way in which she did it just came out rapid fire. It was funny. So that's where it got funny, right? Then they leave. And this is what brought tears to my eyes. This is what I knew this would be one of my favorite movies always. She's alone. And they left some junk around. So she's picking up because the sign is about her daughter. She doesn't want to have the junk that they left behind the trash. And she picks up the trash. And then all of a sudden she stops and she looks up and often the distance about 200 feet is a deer. Looking at her. And I love it when a director takes the risk that I'm going to explain. No music. They stayed on that scene. Nobody moved in the movie for probably one solid minute. And it's like that minute drew you right into what she was feeling. So for the first time we've seen her combative. And all of a sudden you feel her pain. And she says to the deer. I know it's you. I know you're there. Oh my God. Even goosebumps now. As I said that. And so anyway the movie plays out. Trying to find this is a question for you. It's a good segue to you. Yeah. The movie plays out her trying to find who did it. And there's some very funny things that she bombs the police department. I won't get into that. The ending again was a huge risk. She and a cop who would sort of befriended her with a struggle. Find out that the murder might likely be in another town and they get in the car and they're going to go get him. And the final scene is there in the car and she turns to him and she says. Maybe she maybe we should turn around and go back. How is he into the movie. I thought wow. Well there was actually there was an agreement. He really asked him if we should go ahead and do this and take this guy out. And he says I don't know. I'm not sure. Yeah. And he says are you sure. And she says. I'm not so sure either. Right. And it leaves us with that thing. Which is. I mean filmmakers do this. Good filmmakers a lot. They'll leave it up to the audience to decide what they're going to do. Are they going to go ahead and try to take this guy out or are they going to go back. Yeah. And that's the important thing to me was that she was questioning it. That all through the movie. She wanted just she was angry. Or that her daughter was murdered and raped. And then totally ignored. And nobody was coming in up with the killer or anything or even seeming to try to do that. And she was. Here's the word hell bent on getting justice. And all of a sudden through everything that happened in the movie. She's coming to the grips with. Maybe revenge is not the best idea. Maybe you know. She's not she's not there to be you know to say no. But she's thinking about it. And that's really the risky part to me. And the moving part. And by the way I would just tagline with Francis McDormand who's just. An incredibly wonderful actress that scene that. Greg is talking about with the deer. The reason that she's such a great actress is that. Like Greg says nothing is happening. But the camera is panning often to her face. And in her face you see the tears in her eyes begin. And you hear it in her voice. When she's talking to the deer wondering if the deer is her reincarnated daughter. You know are what part the deer plays. And I'm sitting there and like Greg I'm very moved. And a lot of it is the actress just being. Incredibly wonderful. And showing us that internal stuff. Which most movies don't do. So. Thank you for recommending that movie it was. I didn't quite find it as funny as you did but. It certainly was a great movie and well done. Let's go to. Because we're running short on time. And it doesn't look like we're going to get to Christmas or New Year's. But. Maybe I can talk Greg into coming back to pick up those and maybe some other holidays. The fourth holiday we're going to take a look at. Is President's Day. And the reason I chose that was because. We're in the middle of. Well let's put it this way presidents and the presidential election coming up. Is all in the news. And so much of what comes out. During an election and during all times. Is. I don't know how else to say this but a lot of. Yes. You'll excuse the expression. There's a lot of spin. There's a lot of. You know. Way to get votes that may or may not be. Very close to the truth are at least it's not very not. Giving us much knowledge about the two people involved. So the American president and the reason I really was. Drawn to that all all the movies that sort of. Take place around the presidency. Joseph is a very human president. President who has. Been without his wife for as well as wife passed on so he's been a. You know a widower. And he's raising a daughter. And the presidency is a very lonely job. And we get to see and Michael Douglas is playing the president. Him at. Being very vulnerable. We get to see him behind the scenes not the stuff that comes out for the television. But the stuff that is him. Trying to deal with the fact that he's now attracted. And that Benning who is wonderfully attractive in this movie. And what is he going to do about this he's the president. And so what he does is he tries to keep everything private. Like most of us try to do when we're. Maybe in love or you know maybe we're not broadcasting it all over the. The world. For whatever reasons and. He's trying to find some privacy which he cannot do. And unfortunately in politics. Too often if you don't respond to people. They take advantage of it and attack you and that's what happens. He gets attacked as the president which we. See this all the time. In our presidential elections so. It's very topical. It's very typical. But behind it all we see the president as a human being. Very well done by Michael Douglas and. Wonderfully done by his opponent at the beginning. But he's also a person with a lot of heart. And a lot of caring as well. That's why I picked it your reactions Greg. Much the same. The last thing you said kind of impressed me. I saw her as. Smart and. Feminist but. You know, you know, You know, You know, You know, You know, You know, You know, You know, Feminist but that gentle side was. I hadn't really noticed that when I watched the movie and that's really true. She really. Did a nice job with the two sides of the way she's going to. Play out. Her conflict with her job. And her boss. But. But all of the bosses. Of either one don't want. This relationship to happen. Right. Because she's kind of she's an environmentalist. And. The president is. May or may not be, but he has to figure out what can he say to look at him elected, whether it's. In favor of environmentalism or not, so he's got that struggle going on. And so she pushes a lot on him to kind of open his eyes on what's going on. But. I know you're going to hate me on this. It's the same theme again as what I said before. For. Um. For the president. It's he's trying to control everything. And when he finally realized he can't control, he comes to the end of his. Power of control, he realizes that love is more important. And so he falls in love with her and it ends with a love at the end. So that's kind of what I saw. Um, and it had been a long time since I've seen the movie, you know, some of these ones that you suggested. I hadn't seen for a long time. So I'm going off. The memory. But my memory is I love the movie, but I never thought of it before in terms of how their relationship evolved. I think when I first saw it, I was just more interested in the president. Because I was probably when did they come out 95 or something? I don't know. It's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. 95. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, the thing at the end was that. Yeah, he. I don't know if he gives up control, but he gives up to love. Well, that's what I think. Yeah, he decided to take control at the end. Where he just stops being a non verbal and goes after the people that are going after them and standing up. For people who love and people who care about each other and. And they're right to do that and he comes up very strong at the end. So he's the. You know, it's it's a movie that embraces and. Looks at us from both sides. And doesn't give us easy plot lines of good and bad and. They lived happily ever after and all that, but really looking at people and individuals, all of the movies that we talked about. And I think that that's what makes a great movie and certainly a movie that you want to watch over and over again. Yeah. Well, it looks like we're definitely running down on time and as I was worried about, we didn't get to. Either Christmas or New Year's, but. I'm hoping I can talk Greg into coming back and we'll tackle that maybe some other holidays. Maybe in the summer, maybe that's good because there's always summer movies we could sort of segue that in start off with the that and then. Go to the summer movies, which always. Depended upon by the. You know, by the powers to be and the money. People on getting them a big return that everybody going out to the movies. In the summertime, when everybody's offer, at least a lot of people are off. So. Look forward to that and hope you can come back in so we can get to those 2 movies, Greg. And maybe talk a little bit about the summer movies. Count on me. I appreciate that. You know, that's 1 of the great things is when you have friends. That you can talk to them about. About anything and Greg and I love to talk about movies together. And I hope you. Whatever you enjoy, whether it be movies or music or art or that that you have friends that you can. Talk to about that because I think that's really the way to find happiness. And with that, let me say thank you to the. The staff of think tech away. Of of course, Michael and. And our boss much appreciated all your. Your help in putting this on and especially I want to thank the people out of the audience. And tuning in and reaching out to find happiness because. That's very difficult nowadays and so every time I see you. We get to talk about something happy and I enjoy it and I hope you do too. Hope to see you in 2 weeks. You will do it then and in the meantime for everybody. Aloha.