Looks like there’s another new film that tackles the dementia experience. Diminished Capacity,directed by Terry Kinney, features Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, and Virginia Madsen. Here’s how the Sundance Catalog describes it:
“After a concussion leaves him unfocused, short on short-term memory, and demoted from the political pages to the comics, Cooper (Broderick), a Chicago newspaper editor, travels home to Missouri to visit his aging Uncle Rollie (Alda). On the verge of losing his home and exhibiting signs of senility, Rollie spends his time stubbornly refusing to pay bills, compulsively drying socks, and sitting by the lake editing ‘fish poetry’ (think typewriter keys tied to baited fishing lines). But when he shows Cooper a near-mint-condition Frank ‘Wildfire’ Schulte baseball card, the two muddled men–along with Cooper’s high school sweetheart, Charlotte (Madsen)–drive back to Chicago hoping to sell the antique card at a memorabilia convention.”
The buzz from the festival is that it’s pretty good. But the review in Variety was less impressed. Hopefully it will pick up a distributor and we’ll be able to judge for ourselves soon.
Hello, Anne –
Maureen Matthews has told me glowingly about your work and I am so happy to have found your website.
Maureen and I met at the Dementia Care conference in Chicago after corresponding for many months. I was diagnosed with Dementia Probable Alzheimer’s Type at age 48 in 2006.
Your path and mine are scheduled to cross when I speak before you at the New York Early Stage conference on Friday, May 2.
I know you are on the board of Story Corps Memory Loss Initiative. StoryCorps came out to Los Angeles for the Early Memory Loss Forum that we put on there last October. They interviewed seven people that day. The first interview they did that morning was with Chuck Jackson and that piece aired on NPR’s Morning Edition. Here is the link –
http://www.storycorps.net/listen/charles-jackson
PBS “News Hour” also filmed that day and their segment aired this month. Here is the link in case in case you missed it or would like to pass it on, the video of the entire segment is now available online at —
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june08/alzheimers_01-10.html
Thank you very much.
Please take good care.
Very Best Regards –
Rich
Somehow these movies never seem to really capture the whole experience of memory loss…