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.

Movie Song of the Week: “I Enjoy Being a Girl”

From 1961's Flower Drum Song, it's the one song that annoys PC types even more than anything from my beloved West Side Story. And yet I can't help but notice that we have not been exactly deluged with musicals about Asian-Americans since then, either from the people who admire this movie or from the allegedly more enlightened people who hate it.

Anyway, I'd like to think that Nancy Kwan's appearance in this number has an appeal in this number that transcends race. However, I wish her voice wasn't dubbed.

Oh, well.

I hope you all enjoy it.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

All-American Girl: “The Apartment”

I rented a DVD of the old Margaret Cho sitcom, All-American Girl, a few months ago in the hopes that maybe the show has improved with time.

It hasn't.

To be fair, Margaret Cho isn't exactly my favorite comedienne. I once bought one of her comedy albums on CD and found myself at best underwhelmed.

But even she deserved better than this generic mess.

And even the funniest woman who ever lived would have difficulty getting laughs from this show's dull-as-dust scripts.

The most shameless example of why this show was destined to become a failure was the episode “The Apartment.” The whole premise of the episode had Margaret's character (imaginatively named Margaret) moving into an apartment with two female friends.

Once there, the three friends began having “wacky” roommate problems. Not funny roommate problems like one might see on Buffy The Vampire Slayer's fourth season. That would imply that the episode was amusing.

No, these were “wacky” roommate problems. The type of problems that Hollywood scriptwriters found funny but no one else found amusing.

The oddest of these problems was a certain roommate's sudden desire for indoor nudism. Interestingly enough, such a desire was never hinted at in previous episodes. Nor was it hinted at in subsequent episodes. For that matter, it was never really explained in this episode why the roommate in question had such a sudden burning desire to take off her clothes in front of her roommates. Indeed, the only reason that made sense was a simple one: the scriptwriters' desire to provoke interest in the show from heterosexual male viewers.

Of course, seeing that this program aired on commercial TV, the show's creators were forced to hedge their bets by having said roommate's less family-friendly body parts obscured from TV viewers via pixelization. Thus we're supposed to be intrigued that said woman was naked but frustrated that said portions of the woman's anatomy weren't visible to the TV audience as anything but a strategically placed blur.

In any event, the episode still managed to be boring. Even insultingly boring.

Jodie Long (the actress that played Margaret's mother) showed a touch of class in a scene toward the end, in which she talked Margaret into moving back home, but as a whole, the episode, nudity and all, was still part of a generic TV sitcom -- and worse yet, part of an unfunny generic TV sitcom.

I suppose the one thing worse than seeing a naked actress used to elicit cheap laughes was having to see said actress elicit no reaction at all. Except, perhaps, pity for seeing her stuck on such an awful TV show.

Sociological Irony of the Week

Mi novia and I made the mistake of going to a local pool hall the other night, only to discover that the place was way more expensive than the usual pool hall and had no public restrooms. Moreover, the place had no jukebox so the only available music was an odd mixture of sexually explicit and politically incorrect hip-hop being played on the PA system -- the type of music in which almost every song uses the N-word umpteen times and sings about sexual intercourse in a way that makes Berlin's classic “Sex (I'm A)” sound like an Amy Grant song. (I usually have no problems with hip-hop but this type of hip-hop I definitely had a problem with.)

Needless to say, mi novia and I didn't stay there long. (We played one game, then left.) But I did find it funny that though the songs were all by black singers, both the manager of the place and the majority of the customers were Asian-American.

“Even Old New York Was Once New Amsterdam...”

According to an article in the New York Times, New York City is losing black and white residents and gaining Latino and Asian residents.

What does this mean for the future? I don't know.

We've been getting members of the Nueva York diaspora down here in Texas for years. My first American girlfriend was a former resident of Nueva York. One of my favorite college English teachers was a former resident of Nueva York. And one of my ex-co-workers at my present job was a former resident of Nueva York.

In short, gente have been leaving Nueva York for years. So what's so new this time?