Quote of the Week

Gabriel García Márquez and Yukio Mishima belong in the canon because they are brilliant writers, not because they conveniently fill a particular ethnic quota.
--Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India

Trailer of the Week: Outbreak (1995)

Remember when our main concern in this area involved monkeys? And NOT animals that can fly?

¡Feliz Día del Amor y la Amistad!

The late María Félix would like to wish all my readers a Happy Valentine's Day and I echo her sentiment.

May you and your loved ones find some happiness on this day, even in the midst of these cold and depressing times.

Tomorrow Never Knows and Yesterday Isn't Much Brighter

There was a pretty good story to be mined from the premise of the 2019 movie Yesterday but unfortunately, screenwriter Richard Curtis didn't feel like digging it up. Instead he used the intriguing premise of his movie -- suppose a person found himself or herself in a world where the Beatles never existed -- as the basis of a rather lame romcom that used almost every cinematic cliché in the book.

It says something about the subtlety of the movie that by the time Kate McKinnon's character showed up to offer the protagonist a life of worldly success, it seemed a wonder that she did not appear and depart in a cloud of sulfur. Indeed, it seemed like the only subtle touch in the movie was how it downplayed the fact that the Anglo-Indian protagonist was in love with a white English woman -- a fact that once would have been considered very controversial but now seemed worthy of little more than a shrug.

Curtis does deserve credit for inserting a scene into the movie that so smacks of chutzpah that one marvels that he had the gall to write it. Then again, I'm not sure "credit" is really the right word I should be using in regard to a scene like that.

Trailer of the Week: Love Story (1970)

The movie that launched a thousand Jennifers.

No, seriously. It was this movie that made the name Jennifer -- the name of the movie's heroine -- so popular back in the 1970s.

Not Quite Caught Up in Traffic

I knew this movie was in trouble when the director seemed to want the audience to be more shocked at the sight of a white girl sleeping with a black drug dealer than at the sight of a Mexican policeman being murdered by Mexican drug dealers. It didn't help that he had one character give an impromptu -- and totally unmotivated -- sermon about the influence of white drug buyers on black neighborhoods -- a sermon I would ordinarily applaud if it did not seem so out of place in the movie. (And having it delivered by a person who was a white drug buyer himself did not improve it.)

I would like to think that the makers of this flick meant well but just the same I'm not exactly in a big hurry to see this movie again.

Book of the Week

Just when I'm ready to give up on Ben Elton, he goes and writes an excellent alternative history novel like Time and Time Again. Kinda takes all the fun out of dissing him...

Trailer of the Week: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

Cool! Phryne Fisher has a movie coming out. Let's hope it's as good as her TV show.

Quote of the Week

Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a sort of compost heap of the libidinal and the symbolic? Aren't D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Paul Theroux imperialists? What do black Africans think of Conrad, Bellow, Updike and Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why don't the white guys look for the heart of darkness in their own bathrooms?
--John Leonard, "The Heroine: A Contraption of Attitudes", The New York Times, March 21, 1982

Remembering My Last Ride on Gran Torino

It would be nice to say that the 2008 movie Gran Torino was the last good Clint Eastwood movie that I remember seeing but as much as I would like to say so, I don't feel comfortable actually saying that. Let's just say I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would...

Anyway, wasn't this movie just a race swap re-make of The Karate Kid?

Yes, in a way, it was. It also seems like a reversal of all those old 1960s and 1970s stories in which the young Caucasian guy (or girl, in the case of the '60s comic book version of Wonder Woman) learned all about self-defense from an elderly Asian man. (Call it the Remo Williams syndrome, if you prefer.)

One of the movie's main subplots had an elderly man (played, of course, by Clint Eastwood) teaching a young Asian boy the fundamentals of American manhood. Eventually the movie had Clint's character trying to protect the young boy's family from a local gang of Asian youths, eventually leading to an unexpected gesture on Clint's character's part that seemed more like a triumph of hope over experience than anything else.

That said, it was not surprising that this movie was more popular with conservative-leaning people like my mother - -who is incidentally a Polish-American who grew up in the type of blue-collar neighborhood that this movie was set in -- than with the more liberal people who have written about this movie online. The movie was a bit on the simplistic side and it was tempting to see this flick as the conservative answer to Crash. (After all, Crash -- save for a few scenes -- tended to take the same shamelessly obvious approach to its issues as well.)

I'm not going to pretend that I liked this movie as much as Unforgiven or The Outlaw Josey Wales -- indeed, I would be very surprised if I still remember this movie a decade from now.

Plus there were quite a few scenes in the movie that I didn't really care for. (For example, it wasn't enough that one character got attacked and beat up, she also had to get raped? Granted, gang members aren't known for their chivalry but still...) Nor does it help that this same plot would have seemed a bit more daring forty or fifty years ago. (Indeed, it makes a sad comment on American society that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is still a market for movies about how violent things can get when "outsiders" move into the neighborhood.)

And yet I was surprised enough by certain plot turns that I found it hard to hate it as much as other critics did. Add to that the fact that my Polish-American mother had no problems with this movie despite the number of times its script used the word "polack" -- a word she has heard directed at herself in anger more than a few times in her life -- and I must conclude that the movie had something going for it. Even if it wasn't as much as Eastwood intended.

The Accident

It never fails. I get to a point in my life where I think I can actually relax for a bit and then something happens to set me back again.

This week it's an accident. Fortunately, it was not a serious accident. No one got hurt and no one got killed. In fact, my car was the only vehicle that was damaged in the accident.

However, it does not look like my vehicle will be fixed right away and when it is, it will most likely turn out be very expensive. Which is something I really don't need right now.

So far things have fared well. I have managed to get a free tow from AAA to my local mechanic. But I have the feeling things will get complicated as time goes on.

We'll see.