“Alex,” want to go to a movie?” I asked him on the way. “No,” he answered, shaking his head. Expected. I also expected to get to see about half of Night At the Museum II.

Alex made it through Shrek 3 a few years ago; he’d seen it a week or so before with his class. He made it through his second showing with only an occasionally reciting of the ABCs with his voice at full volume. Few people in the sparse audience seemed to notice. “Really,” Jill hissed to me from her movie seat at the time, “if the worst thing that every happens in their lives is that a little autistic boy makes a little noise at a movie, then f—’em,” except she didn’t whisper in hyphens.

She found $6 shows that keep the lights up and the volume a little low. I don’t think the volume and the lighting mattered to Alex, but the ticket discount sure mattered to me, especially for a movie I expected to see about half of. The movie was 10 in the morning, and informally word gets around the special-needs community that these shows could draw an audience accepting of behavior like Alex’s.

Bribed Alex with a full tube of Chips Ahoy one quarter cookie at a time. Not the healthiest breakfast, I realize, but yet again life was a matter of acceptable casualties for a desired objective: getting Alex to sit through a movie. And he did, drumming on the armrests, sometimes chattering. I can’t say he actually saw the movie, but I can’t say he didn’t, either. I have a feeling our movie viewing is about to pick up.

***

ChARMTracker, a web-based application for autism treatment management, was slated to debut today at the Autism One Conference in Chicago. ChARM is the first internet-based system available in the market that enables parents to gather, and track information they collect on their children, such as gastrointestinal and immunological issues or chronic infections or daily records of supplements, prescriptions, diets, educational interventions, and environmental changes.

The new Terminator has been “professionally diagnosed with mild autism”? From Sci Fi Wire:

Personality-wise, Cameron still has a ways to go, recently having been professionally diagnosed with mild autism. But like all Terminators to come before her, she’s a sponge for information. She’s been reading the Bible, watching TV and observing the kids around her to get a grasp on all the latest hipster lingo. It doesn’t always come out quite as it should, but she’s learning from her mistakes.

Is there the suggestion here that something being autistic leaves one a bit lacking in the personality department?

h/t to Jen!

Something to watch: The September 16th New York Times reports on Reabilities: The First Annual NY Disabilities Film Festival, which will be held from September 21-23. Among the films is Ben X, a Belgian film about an autistic boy who “hides from the harsh reality of being bullied in school by escaping to his favorite online computer game.”

And somethings more on the West Coast: Creativity Explored is a San Francisco-based non-profit visual arts center where “artists with developmental disabilities create, exhibit, and sell art.” Go here to see an online gallery of artwork. The colors and forms on this painting of cakes by Camille Holvoet draw me in.

At Back to School night, Charlie’s teacher had mentioned that she was trying to work out an arrangement with the art teachers. I really hope she can. Just this past summer, Charlie—who’s shown near-zero inclination towards drawing or art—-became interested in making things, in doing art. Creativity can’t go to waste.

A theatre production of the 1988 movie Rain Man opens this week at the Apollo Theatre, today’s 24dash reports. The National Autistic Society has been involved with the production from the script and even rehearsals, and Caroline Hattersley, head of information, advice and advocacy, says:

“For many people, the film of ‘Rain Man’ was where they gained their first knowledge of autism, so we are very excited to be so involved in this production and we’re delighted that they were so keen to represent autism accurately.

“A lot has changed in our knowledge of this serious, lifelong condition in the 20 years since the film was released. We now have much more knowledge about autism and how people can be supported to live more independently.

“One thing we are keen to emphasise is that savant skills like Raymond’s are exceptionally rare. Although there is no doubt the Rain Man film put autism in the public mind for the first time, we hope that this new stage production will give us the opportunity to discuss more about how autism affects people in different ways and what further support is needed”.

The movie Rain Man is regularly cited as the source of the “Rain Man Myth—that every autistic person has extraordinary, savant-like qualities. Is a theater adaption of the film necessary, or helpful?

Be warned. This post contains a disparate slew of references to martial arts (kind of in a Kung Fu Panda vein); chocolate (M & M’s, even); the use of the r word in Tropic Thunder; Thailand; lots of flies. (And autism, but you knew that.)

No, we didn’t once again see Po the Panda executing his moves against an opponent to get that last pad thai noodle or chocolate bar, with insects buzzing in the background. All the items listed in the first paragraph appear in Chocolate, a martial arts movie from Thailand with an autistic heroine who really knows how to kick her way around. From a review on Film School Rejects:

["Tattooed hottie"---that's a quote, please note---Zin] gives birth to an autistic girl she names Zen, and we’re treated to another montage of doctor visits, M&M’s, transvestites, and fly eating. Soon Zen is a teenager and Zin has been diagnosed with cancer and desperately needs expensive chemotherapy. Zen and her friend, Moom, discover a black book filled with people who owe her mom money, and the duo sets out to collect the debts. Lucky for them, this particular form of autism has granted Zen increased physical prowess in other areas. She can catch anything thrown at her thanks to her highly developed spatial awareness, she’s able to befriend the fattest kid in town without lowering her own coolness factor, and she can master martial arts moves she’s seen on TV (Tony Jaa footage actually) and in the streets outside. So get ready for flying fruit, knives, and fat kids… there’s a s[***]load of ass-kicking coming.

That ass-kicking takes over thirty minutes to start, but once it does, prepare to be awed. Zen (Jeeja[---"new Thai sensation, Yanin Vismistananda"]) is cute and convincingly “special” (in a Lifetime Movie Channel kind of way) when she’s calm, but fierce and fast once the fighting starts. She mimics stances and moves from Jaa to Bruce Lee including the latter’s famous thumb swipe over the nose and guttural, high pitched growl.

The fight scenes are convincingly painful to watch, but more impressively, Zen’s skills seem to increase with each successive encounter. Her fists, feet, and Chan-like acrobatics all become faster and more precise as the movie goes on. This makes sense narratively as she’s technically learning to fight throughout the movie, but it can make for some awkwardly disjointed clashes early on. A brawl in a fly-infested slaughterhouse impresses with flying knives and Jeeja’s skillful pole fighting. All of these smaller fights pale beside the film’s finale though, when she finds herself outside on a foot-wide ledge two to three stories above the street. Neon signs jutting out from the wall, opened windows, and the hard street below all play painful roles in this amazingly choreographed clash.

…

But can Claire Danes playing Temple Grandin match Jeeja’s kicks?

BethBkl about autism tattoos.

RAJ about mice models of autism.

Sue comments on sometimes moving is all you can do.

Fielding J. Hurst on the teenager who attacked an autistic teen and posted a video on YouTube.

Today’s New York Times weighs in not so much about the movie Tropic Thunder’s use of the r-word, as on the more general phenomenon of certain Hollywood movies seeking to top levels of tastelessness and crassness, and un-PC-ness, all in the name of box office revenues.

The r-word is kind of r-rated around here and, indeed, just simply rude.

And a sign of a rube?

First, I must confess: I was very fond of My So-Called Life, the TV show that brought actress Claire Danes to fame, and that only lasted (sigh) one season. For better and for worse, I still channel “Angela Chase” and hear that voice of teenage girl discontent on seeing Danes’s name—-so now I’m not quite sure how to think of Danes playing autistic scientist Temple Grandin in an HBO biopic. A commenter offers some leading questions about Danes in this role and the August 15th New York Magazine asks about how she’ll be “playing the autistic” in the context of the movie many of us are not so happy about for its used of the r-word, Tropic Thunder.

Here’s what New York Magazine has to say:

In Tropic Thunder’s most talked-about — both positively and negatively — scene, Robert Downey Jr. draws a distinction between playing an autistic character and going “full retard,” as Ben Stiller’s Tug Speedman did in the now-notorious Simple Jack. “Dustin Hoffman,” he says. “Rain Man. Looks retarded, acts retarded. Not retarded. Autistic, sure.” That HBO announced Claire Danes’s biopic of autism-rights advocate Temple Grandin the week of Tropic Thunder’s release makes the cable net’s PR team either totally foolish or evil geniuses. Danes is a capable actress, and Grandin’s story — including her work designing more humane slaughterhouses — is legitimately interesting without the requisite saccharinity usually attending such fare

New York Magazine suggests that the “real question” is this:

Will the Grandin biopic succeed in breaking the “retard” barrier for serious actresses? ……….Can a neurotypical actor ever play someone with a neurological disorder without seeming pompous and self-important at best, or horribly exploitative at worst?

Does “autistic” mean/equal “retard,” in common parlance? Or, rather, to “play the autistic,” how “retarded” ought, or ought not, an actress be? Is it possible to “act autistic” and not simply play out stereotypes of “what autism looks like”?

On which note, I am hoping that Danes does her research and reads and meets not only Grandin but other autistic adults, like many a friend on the Autism Hub (and what about Dawn Prince-Hughes?). And, perhaps too, that she focuses not on “playing the autistic” but on playing the person, scientist, author, animal behavior expert Temple Grandin.

I read about Jenny, a “special-needs elephant” (per the New York Times; she has, among much else, “crippling depression”). In the midst of discussions about the “r-word” in the Tropic Thunder movie, the words we use to refer to “kids who are different” or “academically challenged” or “special ed/special needs” resonate. When did “special” come to mean “needs SPECIAL education,” with undercurrents of, “not the most academically gifted student; not even average”?

It’s not an academic question to me. My son Charlie’s academic abilities are “way way below” those considered “average” for his grade and age. And yet Jim and I, and his teachers too, aren’t imagining things when we state that he not only “looks smart,” but that he is. His minimal language (and less of late; I think Charlie talks more and more clearly when in school with regular doses of speech therapy) makes it hard for him to communicate as much as he knows. We plug away, we plug away at the reading and the writing and, yes, it so often feels the pace at which Charlie learns a sight word is “glacial.” It often seems that, quick as lightning, he doesn’t seem to know what he did the day before.

So yes, Charlie’s “special needs” and “disabled”; he’s autistic and those are terms I use. But that r-word—-”retarded“—it has a particular sting. I’m aware of how Charlie seems “slow” and “challenged” to the general public, as I tell him several times over to put both hands through the handles of a shopping bag and answer a slurred and seemingly incomprehensible phrase he says to me. “Retarded” comes from the Latin re, meaning “backwards” and tardus, meaning “slow”—-and think about how those two words (”backwards” and “slow”) are part of the whole web of words used to describe the “mentally challenged.”

Reviews of Tropic Thunder in the New York Times and Slate suggest that the use of “retarded” in the movie “isn’t targeting people with disabilities.” Writes Dana Stevens in Slate in response to readers in an online question and answer segment:

….. like many of the groups protesting against it, you haven’t yet seen the movie—perfectly understandable as it only opened yesterday. You hold the view that the movie’s use of what advocacy groups are calling “the R-word” isn’t targeting people with disabilities; they hold the view that it is. But if the discussion is to go forward, shouldn’t everyone at least be willing to see the movie with an open mind toward the other side?

You also say, rightly I think, that words, even potentially explosive words, can’t be understood out of the context in which they occur. Satire is a notoriously difficult thing to police.

More discussion follows (with particular attention to the actor Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of a white man playing a black man in this movie). What I’d highlight here is Stevens saying that “if the discussion is to go forward, shouldn’t everyone at least be willing to see the movie with an open mind toward the other side”—-yes, of course, one needs to see a movie before issuing a final judgment its use of a word deemed offensive. But I’d also point out that that the “sides” in this discussion are hardly balanced and equal. Persons with intellectual disabilities are not in the position of Hollywood actors, directors, and moviemakers to get their views and their message out. It’s not only the use of a particular word in Tropic Thunder that troubles, but the larger issue of the representation of an individual with an intellectual disability.

For one thing, I could hardly, would never, refer to my son as “simple.”

Friends—a mother and her two sons—visited us at the beach on Thursday. Charlie could hardly go to sleep on Wednesday night, he was so excited. He woke at 5am and tried to go back to sleep, very unsuccessfully; he got up and watched YouTube videos; he conked out on the couch at 10am and awoke when our friends came at 12 noon. We went for a long ocean swim in big, choppy waves that sometimes peaked so high we couldn’t see Charlie on the other side of a wave (but there he’d be, smiling while on his back: think dolphin). Our friend helped Charlie get on an inflatable raft beside her son; Charlie’s long legs resulted in him falling off soon as a wave came (he thought that was funny).

We were all pleasantly tired and ready for a lunch of sushi, Italian bread, cheese, and watermelon; and then Charlie came the closest I’ve ever seen to have to negotiate for time on his own computer, his own stuff, when the other boys wanted to use it. Then a walk up the lighthouse and ice cream and goodbyes in the hot sun and, boom, boom, Charlie cried out really loud and clearly upset. His friends were leaving and he’d had too much fun, ridden in their car, been one of the boys……

And he told us all that, in not so many words.

HBO is planning a biopic of autistic author and animal expert Temple Grandin starring……….Claire Danes, Reuters reports, who would follow in the footsteps of Sigourney Weaver (Snowcake) and Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) in playing an autistic character. The movie has been nine years in the making. My so-called autistic life?

Regarding this boycott of the movie Tropic Thunder over its use of the term “retarded” and director and star Ben Stiller’s portrayal of “a weak-minded character named Simple Jack” : It’s starting to seem that, really, Hollywood’s got the “developmental delays”—is being “a little slow to get it”—-at least when it comes to understanding why mocking the “retarded” may be the last acceptable prejudice.

And, why they should stop doing it.

Here’s an article on the Special Olympics website about the boycott.