David Muenker, 57, USA

Age Esteem is feeling good about yourself.  Being happy in your now with esteem at any age.  One of the things you would initially think of is age being older.  But I think it is regardless of the age you are.  Whether you are a teenager or 20 years old you still need to feel good about what you are doing, what you are contributing to the world, how you’re showing up.  Maybe it’s more critical for a lot of people of our age who have been sort of following a path that wasn’t what they wanted.  They weren’t following their dreams, just following what their education and expectations had led them to.  And now they are at a point of reexamining themselves and wanting to know how to place themselves in their reality, their now.

David’s tips: Smile at yourself.  It’s not as serious as you think.  Have fun.  That’s why we’re here.   Give as many hugs and kisses as you can.

David Muenker is an independent professional photographer.

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Healthy Hair

The condition of our hair contributes to our personal image and age-esteem.  As we get older, our hair often begins to thin and we may even lose much of it.  (Good news for women. Typically, although women may lose hair, they rarely become bald like men do.)

What can you do to help your hair thrive?

• Brush your hair frequently to help the circulation go to the head. It will strengthened your hair, make it shiny and help prevent hair loss.
• Be sure to get enough iron in your diet.  Iron is very important in keeping hair healthy and to avoid hair loss. Iron is found in spinach, liver, shellfish, red meat and soybeans.

Note: Studies have shown that older people with a high iron content have the same type of brain activity as younger adults.

Grandma Nature

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Traditions can also be solo.  Sometimes it is fun to begin a meaningful tradition just for yourself.  It can provide a wonderful  means to pamper yourself by repeating something that you especially enjoy.   This will increase your happiness which also enhances your AgeEsteem.

A tradition can be related to a hobby or sport.

• Fishing on the first day of the season no matter what the weather.
• Getting up to watch the sunrise on the first day of summer.
• Making a collage of photos at the end of each year.
• Giving something you own to someone who needs it on your birthday.
• Treating yourself to a special brunch each Sunday.

Of course these solo traditions may become contagious and  include other people as well.

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World Penguin Day coincides with the annual northward migration of penguins which happens on or around April 25th.  It is believed that they migrate north to have more daylight since they cannot see well and the light is essential for finding food.

Penguins do not fly. Rather, they walk or waddle and slide.  They are amusing to watch as they parade around in their black and white tuxedos.  This is a great exercise for your age esteem since the they are bound to provoke your laughter. and laughter is healthy for both mind and body.  You will probably need to got to the zoo to watch them.  Unless, of course, you  live in Antarctica, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, the Falkland Islands, or the Galapagos Islands where they are found.

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Sharing the sunset

There are numerous places in the world from the U.S. to South Africa and Australia where my husband and I have joined the local tradition of watching the sun go down at the end of the day.   It is like donuts and champagne or balloons and dancing on New Year’s eve or a picnic on the first day of summer.  As soon as we repeat the event, it becomes tradition.  We expect it and look forward to repeating it yet again.

Traditions are  healthy for our age-esteem.

• They give us occasion to celebrate.
• We look forward and plan for these events, whether as organizer or participant.
• Traditions are social events that bring us together with others.
• Traditions are often inter-generational, offering an opportunity for all ages to have fun together.
• They create memories and images to savor and to share.
• They do not need to cost anything, like sharing the sunset.

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Susanne Brennan 39, Australia

When I hear the words Age Esteem I think of however old you are you’re valuing the contribution you are making.  I remember a particular phrase that we were using and that was shared with me.  “Be yourself, because everyone else is taken.”  I liked it because I think it catches that idea about valuing who you are with your own uniqueness and your own difference. And I think one of the things we’re learning through the notion of inter-generational conversation is how wherever we are coming from whether it’s your age, your background, your culture or your education,  everyone is bringing a valued perspective to a conversation.

Susanne’s tips: I think for me it’s about taking every opportunity that comes and living without regrets, so not looking back and thinking, “Oh I wish I had”, or looking forward and thinking “I’m worried that I won’t have”, but rather  enjoying where you are and doing the best you can wherever you are.

Susanne Brennan is a barrister in Melbourne, Australia and president of the World YWCA.

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Time For Tea

Take time for tea. There is nothing like a cup of hot tea to warm and comfort. It has many medicinal uses as well.

Green and black tea are the most useful. Both are known to  prevent the coagulation of the arteries, thus preventing heart attacks.

The Japanese and Indians first discovered the anti-inflammatory properties of green tea many centuries ago. Green tea aids in the improvement of the functioning of the brain. It has been shown that brain activity in older people is equal to younger persons when tea is regularly drunk over a period of time.

In addition green tea contains fluoride which strengthens teeth and enamel.  At the same time it fortifies bones, which can offset osteoporosis. Older people must be especially careful as bones become more fragile, thus causing them to break should they fall.

There are beauty benefits in tea as well. Studies show that it fights premature aging and sharpens concentration. Nowadays we often see cosmetics, perfume and other beauty products proclaiming tea as an important and efficient ingredient in stopping the aging process from within and without.

Grandma Nature

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Movies – Films

Superb  ****    Very Good   ***     Good **       Mediocre  *      Forget it   -

Why Not?

Blanc comme Neige (vo French)   **1/2  A happy and successful man living in the south of France, with a thriving car dealership and a gorgeous wife, has a crooked partner and two ne’er-do-well brothers on his back. Inevitably, things begin to unravel badly as he gets in deeper with a Nordic mafia that was involved with the partner. Excellent acting by François Cluzet and Olivier Gourmet saves this taut crime story with some holes in its scenario.

Remember Me **  Looks like Robert Pattinson produced this film to further enhance his brooding aura that has teeny boppers crying for more since the Twilight franchise. A sullen young man who resents his tycoon father (Pierce Brosnan) and misses his deceased brother falls in love with a cop’s daughter who also has a dark death in her past. But their happiness is jeopardized by a momentous happening, which actually makes the film. Powerful ending!

Chicas (vo French)   **  The fine playwright (Art, The God of Carnage) Yasmina Reza has written and directed her first film and it’s moving and effective. About a mother and three sisters, it feels autobiographical, with the bitter theater actress probably her own character. Introspective and revealing.

The Bounty Hunter **  Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler have a great time bugging each other while trying to forget they were ever married (but oh, they look so good together). She’s on a police wanted list and he’s the bounty hunter. Good laughs if you’re not expecting much.

Valentine’s Day **  This is a light pastiche of several lives around Valentine’s Day and the hopes and disappointments that all the related hype entails. The fun comes from the multitude of stars in cameo roles, but Demi’s boy, Ashton Kutcher, is the most charming and convincing.

Greenberg **  Ben Stiller’s gone serious. He’s a depressive New Yorker who comes to stay at his brother’s California home and ends up with a younger, similarly lost girl. Curious, meandering, but what’s the point?

La Danse (vo French)  **  This lengthy documentary observes the Paris Opera Ballet, its choreographers, classes and performances. It’s for those who love dance – the daunting and intricate sculpting of the body in movement. But it could have been cut by a quarter and given more character through the dancers rather than repetitive shots of corridors and exterior scenes.

At Your Own Risk

Sherlock Holmes *1/2  Just love Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch), but why has he turned scholarly Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his sidekick Watson (Jude Law) into violent action heroes?! All the explosions and noise wipe out any semblance of a plot.

L’Arnacoeur (vo French)   *1/2  A supposedly seductive conman falls for his victim in Monte Carlo. Vanessa Paradis is adorable, but would you fall for the guy (Romain Duris)?

L’Immortel (vo French)   *1/2  A mafia-type rivalry in Marseilles (based on a true story) is heightened by the always “sympathique” Jean Reno, but the excruciatingly violent scenes are outrageous. A Goodfellows wannabee.

Nenette (vo French)   *1/2  Orangutans are such fun to watch, but more than an hour and a half of old Nenette, mostly immobile, is a bit much. One can watch similar things on the nature channels.

Law-Abiding Citizen *  More blood and gore, in minute detail, in the genre of the Silence of the Lambs or Seven. This may give impressionable adolescents cause to act likewise. Shame on Gerard Butler (he’s everywhere these days), who produced this and plays the devious protagonist.

North (vo Norwegian)  *  Boy, do you know you’re north – icy, slow, pale, frigid emotions.  A chain-smoking, drinking, depressed ski-lift operator goes farther north to connect with a neglected son…..

Couples Retreat - Juvenile, light garbage. Save your money!

Neptune Ingwersen

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Movies – Films

Superb  ****    Very Good   ***     Good **       Mediocre  *      Forget it   -

Worth your While

Alice in Wonderland ***  The fantabulous team of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter is back to enchant us once again, after such delights as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd. It’s of course the classic tale of Alice, who is somewhat older this time, with a wonderfully dazed and touching Mad Hatter, as only Johnny Depp could portray.

How to Train your Dragon ***  Dreamworks is inching in on the brilliance of Pixar animation with exuberant tales like this one about a Viking village that is constantly attacked by dragons. But the son of the village chief just doesn’t feel like killing them, to his father’s shame. In fact he ends up befriending one of them …This is an invigorating and humorous tale of understanding those whom we have mistakenly come to fear and hate. Wonderful!

Men Who Stare at Goats (Les chèvres du Pentagone) ***  Don’t take this film seriously and just enjoy a super team of actors including George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey. You’ll laugh yourself silly at the antics of an “anti-war” unit in the U.S. Army. Weird, goofy and a hoot!

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang ***  Set in the English countryside, this is a magical, feel-good film for the whole family, with a disguised Emma Thompson (who also wrote the screenplay) as an amazing nanny who is transformed with each good deed she teaches her young brood. The kids are great, as is the versatile Maggie Gyllenhaal as their mother, along with a woozy Maggie Smith. It’s a moving, funny and adventurous story of a family waiting for Dad to come home from war.

Les Invités de mon Père (vo French)   ***  With a super cast that includes Fabrice Luchini and Karin Viard as his sister, this is a film    about a close-knit family that wonders what’s up with their father when he takes in a dubious mother/daughter duo from an Eastern-bloc country. Anne Le Ny’s refreshing French comedy manages both to amuse and dissect a multitude of family quirks and prejudices.

Shutter Island ***  If this is not an homage to Hitchcock, I don’t know what is. There’s the twisted plot, the heightened colors and fake backdrops (especially at sea), the winding staircase in a lighthouse (Vertigo) and even a cliff-hanging scene (North by North West). Scorsese and DiCaprio give us the shivers until the brilliant ending, better than any of Hitchcock’s. I didn’t want to see the film, as it seemed so creepy, but it was finally well worth the chills.

The Ghostwriter **1/2  Here is Roman Polanski’s take on a Tony Blair-like British leader’s memoirs and intrigues – an interesting, austere political thriller with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan.

Tetro **1/2  A young sailor from Europe arrives in Argentina to find his long-lost older brother. Francis Ford Coppola has turned to dramatic black & white to tell this tale of a family torn apart by an overbearing, illustrious father with some deep secrets. Intense and esthetically sumptuous, it’s a grand old melodrama set in Buenos Aires.

Precious **1/2  Highly acclaimed and Oscarized, this downer of a film is about a terribly abused black girl who gradually comes out of her shell through a caring teacher. Fine acting all around, especially by the abusive mother, but the whole tragic process leaves you feeling queasy.  Can any of this relentless scrutiny help somehow, somewhere?

Chloe **1/2  There are films that grab you from the outset and don’t let go. This is one of them, though it leaves you with a disturbing sense of guilt for having watched it. This slick psychodrama, about a wife who hires a call girl to get at the truth about her husband, is an intense observation of the twists of life by the renowned Canadian/Armenian director Atom Egoyan (Exotica). Julianne Moore is especially effective in this remake of the original French film, Nathalie, which starred Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart.

Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec (vo French)  **1/2  Luc Besson (Le Grand Bleu,Subway, Angel) knows how to make films, even if critics regularly drub him – jealousy? This one is pure action/fun entertainment (in the genre of Indiana Jones or Romancing the Stone) based on a well-known comic-book series set in the Paris of the early 1900s. A feisty journalist, Adèle, goes off to Egypt and its pyramids to find a way to cure her comatose sister. It has great characters, exotic locations and cinematography, but it could have been shortened for better effect.

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Movies – Films

Superb  ****    Very Good   ***     Good **       Mediocre  *      Forget it   -

It’s been almost three months since I’ve written about films! I was away in balmy Florida, but have been keeping up with the movies and have stored them in my head and some in my heart. A few I’ve almost forgotten, they were so inconsequential. Now I’m back, with a backlog of reviews. I know some of the films may be gone and others have not yet arrived, but I hope these inevitably brief reviews will get us up-to-date. And there’s always DVD and Amazon.com.    Neptune Ingwersen

Unmissables

An Education ****  Here’s an intelligent, engrossing and brilliantly acted ensemble piece from England. It’s about a bright young girl who gets waylaid on her mission to attend Oxford, by a seductive older man played by a smooth Peter Sarsgaard. By Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners), it’s set in the early 60s and has it all – a whirlwind romance, misguided parenthood, ambition and folly. Sweet Carey Mulligan was nominated for a best actress Oscar, but lost to Sandra Bullock.

The Last Station ****  This beautifully-acted and atmospheric jewel of a film by Michael Hoffman recounts the turbulent love between Leo Tolstoy and his tempestuous wife, as they spar over his literary legacy to the Russian people, in the last months of his life. Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer are wonderful as the fiery couple (both nominated for Academy Awards), as are their cohorts, James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti. An illuminating work, both emotionally and historically. (I would have given this or An Education the best film Oscar).

Green Zone ***1/2  Matt Damon is getting better with each film and his partnership here with director Paul Greengrass, with whom he’s done the Bourne series, doesn’t hurt. With his clear blue eyes and cute pug nose, Damon is the embodiment of the “good” American in Iraq at the beginning of the invasion, when the troops were frantically searching for WMDs. This smart action yarn tells it how it was – the deliberate deceptions, the Iraqi side (brilliantly done), the different layers of command. Brains and brawn together, what more would you want on a movie night?!

Soul Kitchen (vo German) ***1/2  Fatih Akin, the German/Turkish director of Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite, is a fan of Jim Jarmusch, and it shows in his eccentric, meaningful films full of color and passion. This one, about the troubles of two close-knit brothers and a funky restaurant in Hamburg (where Akin was born), is joyous, energetic and great fun, showing  marginals in a little-known side of Germany.

Les Chats Persans (No one knows about Persian Cats) (vo Farsi)  ***1/2  This is a surprising, multi-awarded (Cannes, Miami, Sao Paulo) Iranian film about one of the thousands of underground rock bands that exist today in Tehran. Since they can’t perform there as freely as they wish, the lead boy and girl of a band are trying to go to England to give a concert. To help them recruit new band members and get the necessary papers, they turn to a riotous wheeler-dealer (Hamed Behdad)who can charm anyone into anything. By the Kurdish/Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi of A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly, this is a breath of fresh air and a true picture of the suppressed vitality that is Iran today – a must-see for a better understanding of a burgeoning, multifaceted, misunderstood country.

The Hurt Locker (Démineurs) ***1/2  Winning the Oscar for best film and best director, this film by Kathryn Bigelow is a tense study of a bomb squad in Iraq, and one of them in particular (Jeremy Renner, Oscar nominee), who is as fearless and cool under fire as a Steve McQueen character. Filmed in almost documentary style, the story does not delve into the politics or ethics of war, but just observes the raw fear and almost drunken high experienced by those who face instant death at any moment. Powerful – but was it the best of the year? And is it universal enough for the honor?

Crazy Heart ***  Here’s a slow, lazy look at an aging country singer who once was somebody and is now playing in sleazy joints and slowly drinking himself to death. It’s all downhill until he’s interviewed by a lovely young thing and they begin to fall in love. Jeff Bridges mightily deserved his Oscar for this role of a lifetime (one of many for him), which completely carries the film. But Maggie Gyllenhaal isn’t far behind, with her tender portrayal of a lover and a mother. And then there’s Colin Farrell in a surprising cameo role. This is one fine coup for first-time writer/director, Scott Cooper.

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