going to the movies in Yuma Az.
Going to the movies in Yuma, Arizona
They have a ‘Harkins Theatre’ here in the Yuma Palms, which is a beautiful outdoor shopping centre featuring palm trees, piped music outside, and places to sit and visit while enjoying the ambiance. This theatre has fourteen movie rooms with comfortable, reclining chairs, yada, yada. Anyways, you can watch your movie, then go into another room and watch another one, or three or four, for that matter. They tell you it is fine.
When you buy the refillable popcorn, you take the bag home with you and bring it back next time to be refilled. You can’t do it more than three times, though, because they mark the bag with a marker after the second fill, lol. Just to set the record straight, the other movies are usually over half empty, and the popcorn thing, well, we all know the popcorn (6.75) costs more than the movie, 5.00. (ummm, that’s senior price)
Philomena, the movie.
This movie was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and it was a good movie. I’ve been getting a dose of history from all these ’based on true story’ movies that I’ve been attending lately. I was appalled at man’s inhumanity to man in the movie Twelve Years a slave. That we treated black people with such disdain and cruelty is incomprehensible to me.
The ‘Monuments Men’ told a story of how Hitler stripped the European countries of all historical and cultural treasures and planned to display them in Germany or to destroy them all if he died, omg!
But I want to talk about Philomena. This was about a woman searching for 50 years for her son that she had birthed in a convent, only to be given away by the nuns. I’m catholic so I had a special interest in what this story was about. We all know women… well, I should say women of my age all know someone, either a friend or family member, who has given a child up or ‘gone away’ and had a child that was given up for adoption.
My younger 15-year-old sister gave up a baby boy, and I have two cousins who did the same. One cousin died in a tragic car accident in her twenties, and her biological daughter came looking for her years later. My other cousin, who later decided not to have any more children because she lost a young brother to muscular dystrophy, which is a hereditary gene, has been searching unsuccessfully for her biological son for years.
Then there was a girlfriend in grade ten, who went away to school in another city for one year… right! This was standard practice in ‘our time’ when it was definitely frowned upon to have a child out of wedlock. Times have sure changed, and that’s a good thing.
Anyways, back to this movie, and I should say here that this is a true story. This takes place in Ireland, and although it is not a unique situation, catholic girls having out-of-wedlock babies in convents and giving them up for adoption, THERE IS A TWIST TO THIS ONE.
These nuns, for one reason or another, and the movie does not explore this, ‘sell’ these babies and children to Americans for 1000.00. This is not authenticated but introduced by local gossip. The children were all ages but mostly very young, and the girls were allowed an hour a day with their babies and children, after working all day, every day in the laundry business that the nuns had set up. The girls were required to work there for four years to work off their debt.
These girls gave birth, and many died along with their babies in childbirth, without the benefits of doctors or drugs or even decent human compassion. This is what this movie depicted. The reason for the lack of compassion was the girl’s obvious lack of character in succumbing to being with a boy and taking off their knickers.
Most girls back then were pretty much clueless about their bodies. Most, if not all, didn’t even know what a ‘clitoris’ was… just saying.
The very sad story here is about ‘Philomena,’ and that is her real name. She kept going back to the convent, trying to find information about her son. The nuns kept sloughing her off with platitudes, but she persisted and wouldn’t give up.
Her daughter then enlisted the aid of a somewhat celebrated journalist. He had come into a little bit of political shit happening to him and decided to pursue this story. At first glance, he thought it was really not worth his time, but it ended up becoming a successful book written by him about Philomena’s story.
Ok, so I didn’t start out to tell you the whole story; they have this movie for that. What really disturbed me was that this poor woman was searching for her son to let him know she didn’t want to give him up. The son, it turns out, had died 8 years earlier from aids and had been searching for her as well, even going to Ireland.
Meantime the woman was in the States looking for him with the journalist’s help when she found this out. Her son had gone to the same convent, only to be told that his birth mother only come there to give birth and didn’t want anything to do with him! Her son had gained a lot of attention as an accomplished lawyer and became an advisor to two presidents in his short time here.
Now talk about man’s inhumanity to man. Philomena’s story made me cry, but the injustice of it all made my skin crawl. Maybe this is why I needed to write about this. Religion and politics must be bed partners, and they produce and orchestrate such injustice and heart ache and destruction to the human spirit! I wonder how we even put up with this, and we do every day, even today!
copyright
March 2014
Footnote: This movie was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2014, including best picture.