To place an obituary, please include the information from the obituary checklist below in an email to obits@pioneerpress.com. There is no option to place them through our website. Feel free to contact our obituary desk at 651-228-5263 with any questions.
General Information:
Your full name,
Address (City, State, Zip Code),
Phone number,
And an alternate phone number (if any)
Obituary Specification:
Name of Deceased,
Obituary Text,
A photo in a JPEG or PDF file is preferable, TIF and other files are accepted, we will contact you if there are any issues with the photo.
Ad Run dates
There is a discount for running more than one day, but this must be scheduled on the first run date to apply.
If a photo is used, it must be used for both days for the discount to apply, contact us for more information.
Policies:
Verification of Death:
In order to publish obituaries a name and phone number of funeral home/cremation society is required. We must contact the funeral home/cremation society handling the arrangements during their business hours to verify the death. If the body of the deceased has been donated to the University of Minnesota Anatomy Bequest Program, or a similar program, their phone number is required for verification.
Please allow enough time to contact them especially during their limited weekend hours.
A death certificate is also acceptable for this purpose but only one of these two options are necessary.
Guestbook and Outside Websites:
We are not allowed to reference other media sources with a guestbook or an obituary placed elsewhere when placing an obituary in print and online. We may place a website for a funeral home or a family email for contact instead; contact us with any questions regarding this matter.
Obituary Process:
Once your submission is completed, we will fax or email a proof for review prior to publication in the newspaper. This proof includes price and days the notice is scheduled to appear.
Please review the proof carefully. We must be notified of errors or changes before the notice appears in the Pioneer Press based on each day’s deadlines.
After publication, we will not be responsible for errors that may occur after final proofing.
Online:
Changes to an online obituary can be handled through the obituary desk. Call us with further questions.
Payment Procedure:
Pre-payment is required for all obituary notices prior to publication by the deadline specified below in our deadline schedule. Please call 651-228-5263 with your payment information after you have received the proof and approved its contents.
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Rates:
The minimum charge is $162 for the first 10 lines.
Every line after the first 10 is $12.20.
If the ad is under 10 lines it will be charged the minimum rate of $162.
On a second run date, the lines are $8.20 per line, starting w/ the first line.
For example: if first run date was 20 lines the cost would be $164.
Each photo published is $125 per day.
For example: 2 photos in the paper on 2 days would be 4 photo charges at $500.
Deadlines:
Please follow deadline times to ensure your obituary is published on the day requested.
Hours
Deadline (no exceptions)
Ad
Photos
MEMORIAM (NON-OBITUARY) REQUEST
Unlike an obituary, Memoriam submissions are remembrances of a loved one who has passed. The rates for a memoriam differ from obituaries.
Please call or email us for more memoriam information
Please call 651-228-5280 for more information.
HOURS: Monday – Friday 8:00AM – 5:00PM (CLOSED WEEKENDS and HOLIDAYS)
Please submit your memoriam ad to memoriams@pioneerpress.com or call 651-228-5280.
There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.
Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction of “Eleanor the Great.” If Johansson nails anything in her debut, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” (and there are some), Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.
That’s the good about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and a bit treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently passed, and so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) in New York City.
Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian poo-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, as she’s alarmed to discover. Put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.
Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman) who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice — declining to participate — before she makes the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.
Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic originas because they’re both lonely, and in mourning, Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, who has also recently passed. They both struggle to connect with their family, Eleanor’s terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Nina’s TV anchor father, who is paralyzed with grief over the loss of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.
Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big, dramatic explosion of revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.
It’s still hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb, as Eleanor, is too endearing to stay mad at.
Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.
‘Eleanor the Great’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, some language and suggestive references)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: In theaters on Friday, Sept. 26.