Avalon

source: Avalon

How often may we have said that our own "dull" lives could never be made into a movie? Well, this beautiful film shows that the ordinary lives of an immigrant and his family ARE worth watching. Barry Levinson has helped me see the extraordinary in the ordinary. He has made me look at my own extended family with new eyes. All good films (and theatre and novels, etc.) help us experience and accept the humanness in all of us. Levinson certainly has that special magic touch in AVALON. He has simply, softly, and brilliantly connected us to the human family and its collective hopes and dreams, foibles, stumbles and successes. Bravo! Encore!

Barry Levinson set out to show that the extended family has expired; the nuclear family is dysfunctional and the cause of our urban, suburban, and exurban blight. Stories passed down from generations, the life blood of our ancestors, have ceased to exist, replaced by stories created from whole cloth by unknown writers sitting in sterile offices, working for substandard wages so they can support their families' television viewing habits and other distractions. The wholesomeness of the extended family, so necessary in the Old World, is not functional in the New World. Families break up, separate, and find, upon reflection, that it is the individual relationships which give us joy, and joy is the operational word that describes this work - joy of the innocent child and later, the joy of being loved, cared for, and wanted.

Avalon is one of only two movies that I paid to see in a movie theater, but walked out on. It was putting me to sleep. The movie's pace drags. Maybe it got better in the 2nd half, but you couldn't buy coffee in movie theaters in those days, and I didn't have any caffeine pills.