You’ve probably heard of this movie.\u00a0\u00a0 If not, or if, having heard of it, you had reservations about it (I did), here’s the good news: it’s better than you think.\u00a0 It’s an incredible, brilliant movie that shows Temple Grandin’s triumph over both the problems autism gave her, and the society that did not have a clue and did not believe autistic people had a future.\u00a0\u00a0 And it shows the value of her life’s work, her designs for livestock management.\u00a0 Because of her, half the livestock facilities in the world–not just here–handle their stock more humanely.\u00a0 And–(yes, there’s more) it shows how she thinks–because it is a visual medium, a movie can show the pictures she thinks with.<\/p>\n
I’m not much of a movie-goer.\u00a0\u00a0 I went to a special screening only because I got a big fat (literally) invitation, as a member of the local autism society.\u00a0 I didn’t expect it to be within orders of magnitude as good as it was.\u00a0\u00a0 It is that good.\u00a0 It is better than that good.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is stand-up-and-cheer-and-stamp-your-feet good (and the audience did, though out of respect for Temple Grandin, who was there, we didn’t cheer and scream as loud as we would’ve in other venues.)<\/p>\n
It’s an HBO movie, so it’ll be seen first on HBO,\u00a0 I guess (we don’t have cable, let alone HBO.)\u00a0\u00a0 But find it, somehow–if you don’t have cable, find someone who does.<\/p>\n
I will say that I think it’s not for younger autistic persons, as in showing the effect of sensory processing problems Temple suffers, it sort of creates them.\u00a0 Lots of visuals in motion, lots of sounds amplified to the intensity she felt them.\u00a0\u00a0 However, there were some autistic children in this audience (I don’t know if they stayed through the whole film, though.<\/p>\n
But…see this film.<\/p>\n
Temple Grandin said, in her comments after the film, “The worst thing you can do for an autistic child is nothing.”<\/p>\n
Carve that into your heart.\u00a0\u00a0 Don’t wait and see.\u00a0 Don’t wait until services are available.\u00a0 Do something<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Start early, expect it to be slow going (the movie shows some of that, her mother’s frustrations) but boy those little drops of water do wear away the rock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You’ve probably heard of this movie.\u00a0\u00a0 If not, or if, having heard of it, you had reservations about it (I did), here’s the good news: it’s better than you think.\u00a0 It’s an incredible, brilliant movie that shows Temple Grandin’s triumph over both the problems autism gave her, and the society that did not have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,35,39,37,17,12,26,46,10],"tags":[36,3,13,23,43,27,25,7,8,29],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-disability-issues","category-education","category-employment","category-interventions","category-life-on-the-spectrum","category-parenting","category-sensory-processing","category-socialization","tag-advocacy","tag-autism","tag-communication","tag-flexibility","tag-independence","tag-initiative","tag-motivation","tag-sensory-processing","tag-social-skills","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}