Pop Song of the Week: "Go Home"

Some prejudices even the Hag can't overcome... Dammit!

Trying to Find a Better Life at the Movies

I am always tempted to recuse myself from reviewing movies like the 2011 release A Better Life because it is hard to pretend I can be unbiased about the subject manner. But then it is very hard for me to be very unbiased about many subjects. Besides, it is not like diehard Anglophiles recuse themselves from reviewing English movies. Nor do Francophiles recuse themselves from critiquing the latest Gallic film. If anything, I tend to be a little harder on movies about Mexican-Americans and their immigrant parents because my expectations are higher. I find it ridiculous to pretend that movies about Mexicans should be novelties when there are already so many of us in the American movie-watching population. Moreover, I find it equally ridiculous to pretend that we are incapable of inspiring the same great stories that we take for granted in other segments of the American population.

In any event, A Better Life is not the best movie about Mexican-Americans and immigrants that I have ever seen--but it is not a bad movie either. After having seen Mexican actor Demián Bichir play a wealthy drug-dealer-turned-politician in the American cable TV series Weeds, I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how well he played a character on the other end of the class spectrum--though I am not quite happy to note that his two biggest parts in America thus far involve variations on decades-old stereotypes.

Some parts of the movie were a bit too good to be true. Bichir's character Carlos Galindo, a humble illegal immigrant working as a landscape worker in southern California, seemed at times to be a bit too mellow for a guy who has had so many setbacks in his life. The conflict between him and his American-born son seemed to get resolved almost a tad too easily to be believable. But some areas--like the relationship between him and his sister--were all too believable, and even the rather silly event that landed him in trouble was more believable than most illegal immigrant apologists would have you believe. (I am not an expert on illegal immigration but I have met enough such people to know that while some such are more law-abiding than one would expect from their circumstances, still others are not quite as law-abiding as they could be.)

For what it is worth, my own father was never an illegal immigrant but he did have the same air of being wiser than his years that Bichir brings off so well in this movie. Indeed, much of this film's merits lies in the way it focuses on aspects of Mexican and Mexican-American culture that are still invisible to most American movie-goers.

If there is one such drawback to such a movie, it is that we are fast approaching the point where most Anglo-American movie-goers are not likely to welcome future work in this area. Already there is a tendency to see such movies as propaganda more than art, which I find ironic since it can be argued that movies that show the opposite viewpoint of illegal immigration are also more propaganda than art. Besides, propaganda tends to be in the eye of the beholder, and while I must admit that my views of illegal immigration are a bit more mixed than those of most Hispanic liberals, I must confess that I grow increasingly wary of those who only cry "Bias!" whenever a particular story is not in their favor.

But then most people rarely go to a movie theatre to have their political opinions challenged. And even more rarely to have them changed.

Movie Song of the Week: "Beauty School Dropout"

Listen to Frankie Avalon, kids. Stay in school!

Movie Quote of the Week

The newspaper was wrong.
--Mary Steenburgen, Time After Time (1979)

TV Quote of the Week

I knew there was more to English television than Masterpiece Theatre.
--Kate Hodge, She-Wolf of London, "Nice Girls Don't"

Comic Book Image of the Week

Oh, no! Not Sylar?!

On second thought, this image was drawn long before anyone conceived of the TV show Heroes. And one suspects that character on the cover could beat Sylar with one arm tied behind his back. Though if they ever make Alan Moore's Miracleman into a movie, I would not be a bit surprised if Zachary Quinto (the actor who played Sylar) ended up playing this character as well.

Quote of the Week

How should an aging, black jock like myself know anything about pop culture? Man, I am a living part of pop culture and have been for nearly 50 years. Beyond that, I think pop culture expresses our needs, fears, hopes and whole zeitgeist better than some of the more esoteric and obscure forms of art.
--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, "Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto", The Huffington Post, February 4, 2013

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy a pleasant day with your own mothers.

Pop Song of the Week: "Danny's Song"

In honor of Mother's Day.

Movie Song of the Week: "Baby Mine"

From the 1941 Disney classic Dumbo, it is the ultimate Mother's Day tune. Please feel free to share it with your mother.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Ruben Navarrette, Jr.!

Born May 11, 1967.

He is a nationally syndicated columnist best known for his non-fiction book A Darker Shade of Crimson, a book written about his years as a Mexican-American student at Harvard.

He has also become notorious with liberals for being an apologist for former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Administration. For that matter, he is not very popular with many conservatives because of his sympathy for Mexican illegal immigrants even though he is often quite conservative on the issue compared to most Mexican-American journalists.

I was a big fan of his book when it first came out but I have not been too crazy about his more recent work. And yet I find his book more provocative than more politically correct books I have read about Mexican Americans--perhaps because it was one of the few books I have read about Mexican Americans that do not portray us as a social problem.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Martha Quinn!

Born May 11, 1959.

She was one of the first video jockeys to appear on MTV and to this day, my favorite. She also had a short-lived career as an actress, but the less said about that, the better.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Ellen Ochoa!

AKA Ellen Lauri Ochoa.

Born May 10, 1958.

She is a former astronaut and current Director of the Johnson Space Center. She became the first Hispanic woman to go into space when she went on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993. For what it's worth, she is also half Mexican on her father's side. It is a shame she is not more famous but then most nativists like to pretend that Hispanics like her are the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Ariel Durant!

Born May 10, 1898. Died October 25, 1981.

She is best known as the late spouse of historian William Durant although she helped him so much with his work that she deserves to be recognized as a historian in her own right.

Ironically, her work and her husband's are frequently passed over as old-fashioned by modern liberals who would be shocked by how young Ms. Durant was when she got married. She was fourteen when she and her husband tied the knot and the two of them had met when she was a student of his. In fact, Durant resigned his post as her teacher in order to marry her. Of course, most historians would argue that the Durant's relationship was more the exception to the rule than the rule itself. But, hey, it worked for the Durants. And thus far history has judged them less harshly than their critics.