Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 24 October 2003 — Page 24

PAGE C6

THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2003

Radio' with Cuba Gooding Jr. has to be the 'feel good film of season'

By ANDREA CHASE "Radio" is a film that snrams “Fool good Him ol’tlio soason" and. woll it is. The niee tiling about this warm and oozy film about a mentally ohallonged man linding aeeeptanee with a high Crossword Answers

sohool football team is that it doesn't try too hard. The score may he overwrought, hut writer Mike Rich and director Michael Tollin never thwack us over the head with the simple moral values celebrated here. The time is the place is Anderson,South Carolina, and our hero is the eponymous Radio (Cuba (looding .Ir.). I lo’s spent his life isolated from all but his immediate family that's dw indled down to his mother (S. Kpatha Mcrkcrson of "Law and Order "), the typically stoical yet good-hearted type found is these types of stories. It's rendered him shy, but also spared him from learning cynicism. That all changes w hen he takes a football that flies over the local high school's fence and the football team decides to teach him a lesson. Their coach

(Kd Harris) finds Radio bound hand and foot in the equipment shed w ith his team lobbing footballs at it. Instead of punishing them by just making them run extra laps, he does something better. He coaxes Radio to he part of the staff, forcing the guys to get to know him as a human being instead of someone w ho's different. Sure, all that time w ith Radio is time away f rom his w ife (the vibrant Debra Winger relegated to the loving spouse role) and daughter, Mary Helen (properly preppy Sarah Drew) causes some unhappiness, but it doesn’t drive anyone to drink or inappropriately risky behavior. And when the chips are down and the crisis brews because there has to be a crisis, they rally with a tight support system.

Ghostlv Gala * Celebrating 40 years of Frightening Fun

Oct. 17-31 The Children's Museum Guild invites you to the Haunted House Ghostly Gala. Join the festivities with the Minster family, our mysterious hosts. They're just dying to show you a good time! Choose from Friendly Hours for children who scare easily, and Frightening Hours for children who dare to be scared. Get advance tickets online at www.ChildrensMuseum.org or visit your local Marsh Supermarket. For more information, call (317) 334-3322

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis /1m fxihioir/iH/iry e\fH‘rieuie in /etirnin^ Tuesday - Sunday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. 3000 N Meridian St Indianapolis • (317) 334-3322 or (800) 208-KIDS • www.ChildrensMuseum org

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Instead of that being the whole story, though, that’s merely the jumping off point. In the course of the film, basically decent people are made better people by knowing Radio and Radio finds his place in the world with a few bumps along the way. He is a holy innocent, whose boundless joy, once he comes out of his shell, first takes people aback and then draws them in, even the school’s principal, played by the always reliably grounded Alfre Woodard, is won over against her initial better judgment, allowing Radio the run of her high school. Cuba Gooding Jr. gives an affecting, unstudied performance with a face dominated by truly ugly prosthetic teeth. His Radio can seem brusque and his attention wanders, but you

never doubt the big heart underneath, even when he’s getting pushy about the arrival of his peach and blackberry cobbler. Harris is properly laconic as Coach Jones, a man who believes in playing fair and in the semi-divinity of Cowboys coach Tom Landry. “Radio” is a sweet film that plays to the heart with little pretension aside from that annoying, overblown score that I was going on about. It doesn’t ask us to plumb any painfully deep emotional depths, or challenge any of our paradigms, but it’s a film that values right over wrong and to which you can take the whole family without worry ing about awkward moments. That’s saying something these days. Copyright 2002-2003 KillerMo\ieRenews.com.

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Book outlines continued collapse of middle-class By KAM WILLIAMS For Tho Rocordor

(The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, Basic Books, 255 pp ) “The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. “Our study showed that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts. The signs of middle-class distress have continued to grow, and ... if those trends persist, more than 5 million families with children will file for bankruptcy by the end of the decade. That would mean that across the country nearly one of every seven families with children would have declared itself flat broke.” Excerpt from book In the wake of the feminist movement of the ‘60s, women in droves began entering the work force voluntarily. But somehow, over the intervening years, jobs which had initially represented aliberating, supplemental source of discretionary income have come to be a critical contribution to the average American family’s budget. The economics has evolved to the point where, today, most double-income households depend on both spouses to meet the escalating, but essential, subsistence costs associated with child rearing, health care, transportation, insurance, and the mortgage or rent. Sadly, we see that with unemployment steadily on the rise, loss of a job byjust one parent is increasingly upsetting a delicate balance that can plunge a middle-class family headlong into financial ruin. And since even the fiscally-prudent are increasingly findingthemselves in this unfortunate predicament, a couple of experts finally decided to research the frightening phenomenon. For, at a time when the president is asking Congress for $87 billion more in aid to reconstruct Iraq, why not pause to ponder evidence that millions of U.S. citizens here might be equally in need of government assistance? The mother-daughter team, respectively, of Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren and Wharton School of Economics whiz Amelia Warren Tyagi make their case in The TwoIncome Trap: Why MiddleClass Mothers & Fathers Arc Going Broke. The pair assembled a team of scholars from seven different universities to examine the money management habits of people declaring bankruptcy in five states: California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. The alarming results of the research they conducted explodes the myth ofthe irresponsible debtors well-deserving of their lot. Instead, they identify a system without a safety net where mothers must work. Th is means that a disaster like sudden unemployment, a catastrophic illness, ordivorce tends to impose some unbearable hardships. I found this book fascinating, as it not only identifies the source of the problem but it also offers some practical suggestions the country ought to implement before it finds itself in a full-blown depression. The authors' ideas include parental control of public schools, a re-regulation of the lending industry, and an end of deceptive, corporate propaganda.