This 1982 film starring Robin Williams is described on Wikipedia as a comedy-drama. Other than the scene where he buys a home that an airplane has JUST crashed into "because it has been pre-disastered" -- so he figures the odds of anything like that happening again are astronomical and he and his wife will be safe there -- I can't recall anything at all funny about the movie.
It's been a lot of years since I've seen it and I frankly don't really remember it that well. I remember the above schtick about buying a pre-disastered home and I remember the memorial service for his "feminist" mother.
His mother had him out of wedlock and conceived him when she was working as a nurse by raping a brain damaged and dying patient who had a chronic hard-on. She wanted a child but not a husband and chose a really awful way to go about it.
The movie frankly paints her as rather pathological. It's sort of inevitable that she winds up murdered for her toxic brand of "feminism."
Her and her followers all hate men so much that her memorial service is a women-only affair and her only child is not allowed to be there due to being male. So he dresses as a woman to attend it.
When someone recognizes him, he has to flee. He is helped to escape the angry mob attacking him by someone attending with him -- a transgender former football player named Roberta -- and also some random woman he has never seen before.
The random woman identifies herself as Ellen James. She does so using the book he wrote about her, as seen in this clip: To me, the best part of this movie is the character Ellen James.
She is a girl who was raped at the age of eleven by two men who cut her tongue out to silence her and this "inspired" a group of really toxic women, women who were closely associated with Garp's mother, to cut their own tongues out. She wrote to them and asked them to stop this practice and they voted to ignore her request and continue it. And then she helps Garp escape the memorial service after a "Jamesian" without a tongue who previously knew Garp outs him and notifies everyone.
In my twenties, I was talking to someone who began saying "My parents were (some political label)" and I didn't know what that meant. So he told me about some guy who died in some violent manner that fostered a kind of movement or group to be named after him, sort of the way the Jamesians in the movie are named after Ellen James.
In response, I told him about Ellen James from this movie and how she did NOT approve of the movement named after her and the practices they employed and asked them to stop but they disregarded her wishes. And when they identified Garp at his mother's memorial service, Ellen James helped him escape their wrath.
And he said "That's powerful."
People sometimes end up being a symbol for something they never had any desire to be a symbol of. What people project onto them says more about the people doing the projecting than it does about the person they have decided to rather viciously use against their will.
I will suggest this likely applies to one Jesus of Nazareth, who was told from birth he was someone special due to the "star" he was born under and then died gruesomely on a cross when he couldn't find some means to escape the social garbage people insisted on hanging on him.
It's been a lot of years since I've seen it and I frankly don't really remember it that well. I remember the above schtick about buying a pre-disastered home and I remember the memorial service for his "feminist" mother.
His mother had him out of wedlock and conceived him when she was working as a nurse by raping a brain damaged and dying patient who had a chronic hard-on. She wanted a child but not a husband and chose a really awful way to go about it.
The movie frankly paints her as rather pathological. It's sort of inevitable that she winds up murdered for her toxic brand of "feminism."
Her and her followers all hate men so much that her memorial service is a women-only affair and her only child is not allowed to be there due to being male. So he dresses as a woman to attend it.
When someone recognizes him, he has to flee. He is helped to escape the angry mob attacking him by someone attending with him -- a transgender former football player named Roberta -- and also some random woman he has never seen before.
The random woman identifies herself as Ellen James. She does so using the book he wrote about her, as seen in this clip: To me, the best part of this movie is the character Ellen James.
She is a girl who was raped at the age of eleven by two men who cut her tongue out to silence her and this "inspired" a group of really toxic women, women who were closely associated with Garp's mother, to cut their own tongues out. She wrote to them and asked them to stop this practice and they voted to ignore her request and continue it. And then she helps Garp escape the memorial service after a "Jamesian" without a tongue who previously knew Garp outs him and notifies everyone.
In my twenties, I was talking to someone who began saying "My parents were (some political label)" and I didn't know what that meant. So he told me about some guy who died in some violent manner that fostered a kind of movement or group to be named after him, sort of the way the Jamesians in the movie are named after Ellen James.
In response, I told him about Ellen James from this movie and how she did NOT approve of the movement named after her and the practices they employed and asked them to stop but they disregarded her wishes. And when they identified Garp at his mother's memorial service, Ellen James helped him escape their wrath.
And he said "That's powerful."
People sometimes end up being a symbol for something they never had any desire to be a symbol of. What people project onto them says more about the people doing the projecting than it does about the person they have decided to rather viciously use against their will.
I will suggest this likely applies to one Jesus of Nazareth, who was told from birth he was someone special due to the "star" he was born under and then died gruesomely on a cross when he couldn't find some means to escape the social garbage people insisted on hanging on him.