Skip to main content

Infinitely Polar Bear - film review

A film written and directed by Maya Forbes of Boston and set in the 70s.  It is autobiographical showing the life of a person with bipolar disorder / manic depression.  The protagonist played by Mark Ruffalo is a nervous wreck who is shown to have a high IQ but is completely awkward and borderline alcoholic.

He along with his African American wife are raising two daughters in a Boston neighborhood while being on the poverty line.  Some aspect of the film seemed incongruent but may have been intentional.  For example the family lives on handouts from a great grandmother who has all the money tied in a trust.  But Mark's character Cam is shown always wearing Lacoste brand shirts, which tend to cost in the triple digits.

The wife played by Zoe Saldana also seems to be dressed well regardless of calling out how poor they are in many scenes.  The film has a sort of home movie type feel which was produced by the director's husband.  One of the children (the older sister) is the daughter of the producer and director.

Maya is herself blue blood and was educated at Exeter and Harvard, as in comes from money and that was a theme that is followed in the film.  Cam discloses to his daughters over a chaotic scene how he got thrown out from both Exeter Academy (an elite school in New Hampshire) and then Harvard for being completely out of control.

He is an adoring parent and dotes on his kids inspite of his disabilities and the film tries to show the racial and socioeconomic divide being viewed through the lens of the black mother and white father and the society around them.

Candid and funny but bit long in the tooth.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A few good books

 On an informal mission to read one book a week as long as the eyes allow for such ambition. Fiction or non is not important as long as it entertains and /or educates. To that end the past few weeks have brought a bounty in the form of some wonderful and then not so engaging literature. Among the notables are - Non fiction category: 1. Good arguments by Bo Seo (how to handle a dispute or debate the most efficient way possible) 2. Genesis by Eric Schmidt (and former US Secy of State Henry Kissinger, who recently passed) - how AI might affect our lives as we know it 3. One in a billion - Zarna Garg (an autobiographical look at an Indian born American woman with a bindi narrated in a standup format - yes it is at times cliched but still funny) Fiction: 1. Personal by Lee Child (a vigilante story with Jack Reacher the giant, nomad protagonist of Child's novels goes hunting for a sniper) 2. Ramayana unraveled by Ami Ganatra (she might disagree about it being a work of fiction but oh wel...

Back in DC

This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...

Costa Rica

 Our first foray into Central America. That elongated isthmus that forms the geographic boundary between two vast continents of North and South America. Specifically landing for NYE 2026 in San Jose, Costa Rica. Capital city for this region that does not have its own army, instead relying on its big bro the Estados Unidos to the north is a metropolis of approx. 500K people. Largely wilderness and with both a Pacific and Carribean/Atlantic coast the country is rich in bio diversity. In Spanish it means the rich coast so named by Columbus landing in early 16th century and being mesmerized by the local tribes sporting gold jewelry.   Our stay included visiting the foothills of a large strato volcano called Arenal and enjoying the naturally heated thermal baths for a while.  Lunching amidst lush forest and watching indigenous species of avian noise makers fly overhead. Toucans, some sort of pea hens, multiple song bird species completed the spectacle. Iguanas and a lonel...