Author: Overcoming Adversity | Buteau’s Odyssey

Sarah had been low contact with her mother for the past few months and was approaching her first Mother’s Day. “I mailed a card and scheduled a text message to be sent on Sunday,” she said. “But why do I still feel guilty? Like I should be doing something more?” “What more do you think you could do?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Anything more just drains me emotionally. It reminds me of all the birthdays and holidays and graduations she ruined. I spent years ignoring those things and turning the other cheek just to save face for…

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The Outsiders, the Broadway musical directed by Danya Taymor and based on the novel by S. E. Hinton, brings to the stage a novel that has touched generations. The story follows Ponyboy Curtis as he moves through a world divided by class, violence, and the desire to belong. The conflict between the working-class Greasers and the wealthy Socs shapes the emotional and psychological landscape of the story, influencing how the characters experience identity, fear, loyalty, and survival. Having already seen the show multiple times and spoken with members of the cast, I feel deeply invested in the story and the…

Having played the ever-resourceful Tree Gelbman in the Happy Death Day movies, Jessica Rothe is no stranger to playing a character trapped in a loop of lethal carnage, but in the new film Affection, she finds herself entangled in a whole other type of vicious cycle as Ellie, a woman who wakes up to a doting husband (Joseph Cross) and concerned daughter (Julianna Layne). The only problem? She doesn’t remember either one, instead having memories of a different husband and a son. That’s only the first of many intriguing twists and turns in Affection, the impressive directorial debut from BT…

By the time many people seek treatment for an eating disorder, the focus has often become food, weight, behaviors, and medical risk. Those things matter deeply, but beneath the symptoms, another story is often unfolding quietly in the background: a story about attachment, safety, connection, and the fear of being too much, not enough, or emotionally unprotected. Attachment theory helps us understand how our earliest relational experiences shape the way we regulate emotion, seek comfort, respond to distress, and experience ourselves in relationships. Eating disorders are not caused by attachment wounds alone, because genetics, temperament, trauma, neurobiology, culture, and dieting…

1980’s Mother’s Day is one of the most brutal slasher-revenge hybrids of the entire decade.It’s the perfect horror movie for Mother’s Day … obviously!You really can’t tell the story of Mother’s Day without bringing up Friday the 13th.Thematically, the movies are almost identical — they both revolve around murderous boy moms, they both involve women in peril in the woods of New Jersey, they both have Carrie-inspired jump scare endings. Not only were the two films shot and released around the same time, they were even filmed in close geographical proximity to one another. Of course, the films had drastically different…

I’m not married. I’ve never been married. I’m an undrafted free agent out of my prime. My longest life commitments thus far have been to a wine club and Netflix — both of which I’ve quit and resumed multiple times. My parents, though, have been married since they eloped after sneaking out their bedroom windows at age 16 in Wichita, Kansas. They remain the closest thing to the definition of “soulmates.” Much has been penned about the free-spirited male species, as if we were as rare and captivating as the Northern White Rhino, and as hard to tame as the…

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The past—self‑evidently—is gone and cannot be changed. The future is a descriptor for what does not exist. The only time that exists is now, and it is in this existential time of now that decisions and choices are made. All choices result in consequences. What about the future? The reality is that the future does not exist. The future is a construct, and from intellectual and emotional perspectives, there is a perpetual acceptance that it—the esoteric future—actually exists. However, the existential reality is that the future is not an external force; it is, as noted, a construct and intellectual projection.…

CREATORVC has a history of creating massive documentaries that delve into different corners of the horror genre. Many of their endeavors are large-scale docs that cover a variety of films from a specific timeframe. The entries of the In Search of Darkness series are all massive in scale, but focus on each individual film for only a few minutes before moving along to the next offering, while The Thing Expanded takes a deep dive into a single piece of film history. It’s a challenge. Is it possible to sustain interest in a single film over a five-hour period? You would…