The Vol Abroad reviews some stuff

Sometimes I wish I was good at film or book review. Maybe it’s years of built up resentment from the school book report, but what I really want to do is say “I read it. I thought it was boring/ok/pretty good/great. I would (not) recommend it.” Strike out as appropriate.

Film:
We saw Borat. Rubbish. Can’t believe I spent money on the DVD. He should be slapped for rudeness. The character on his old show was pretty well conceived – but in the movie it was executed lazily. Only the bear head and the line “We support your war of terror,” were any good. And continuity…did anyone notice he went to DC and then to a local tv station in Jackson, Mississippi (without naming it – but they did show the weather chart – and everybody knows that Yazoo City is in Mississippi) and to Virginia and then to Jackson.

He’s goin’ to Jackson and people gonna stoop and bow.

We saw Magicians. Written by the writers of a British tv series Peep Show – one of those Brit specialties in cringe humor – so funny sometimes I couldn’t breathe while watching it – and co-starring Robert Webb and David Mitchell – the stars of same Peep Show – it plays off some of the same riffs. Not quite as uncomfortably funny, it was still pretty good, enjoyable. Watch it.

Last night on broadcast tv, we watched The Queen. It was watchable. Interesting reliving the time after Diana’s death. Helen Mirren was soo much better than all the rest of them, why did they get that James Cromwell guy to play Prince Phillip. I normally like him, but he just couldn’t wear the part.

Books:
I’m reading pretty slowly these days. Buddy has started to take an interest in the things we take an interest in. Like the tv remote control or books. Buddy likes to grab books. Buddy likes to tear pages. Buddy likes to eat books. But I have fairly recently completed Wicked. I thought it was pretty good. If you kinda like the whole Oz thing and maybe have read one or more of the original books and you’re over the age of 14 – like a mature 14 – then I would recommend it.

O’Henry twist

It’s not quite The Gift of the Magi – but both of us received DVD sets for Christmas – and last night our DVD player gave up the ghost.

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We didn’t pay much for our DVD player. We bought the thing at ASDA – a supermarket chain owned by WalMart. We bought it because once during a trip to the dump I found about 30 ring binders full of porn DVDs. Clearly a local production company was having a clear out. Now, I have to say I’m not a big fan of porn or the porn industry but also not being one to sniff at dumpstery-goodness, I thought – this must be a sign. A sign to get a DVD player. Because up until that point the Vol-in-Law was having a one-man boycott on DVD players because of the the artificial segmentation of the global market into DVD regions through a mere twist of code – just to extract the maximum consumer surplus. Code which some poor Swede went to jail for cracking.

But when you’ve got 2 binders full of dumpster porn (we randomly selected two – it just wouldn’t be right to have a whole shelf of the stuff – that would be trashy) you gotta have something to watch it on. So we bought a cheap DVD player and 8 Mile with Eminem which was super discounted.

Thanks goodness Mr Marshall Mathers. It turns out that they weren’t porn DVDs at all, but rather CDs storing files of porn movie cover art and promotional materials.

And I really enjoyed watching 8 Mile. And we returned the nasty promotional materials whence they came.

How’s that for an O’Henry twist?

TCP movie review

Pretty much why I won’t be seeing the new Beowulf movie. I think Aunt B has covered nearly all the points.

• Judging by the trailers it just looks creepy, but I grant that’s a matter of personal taste.
• This is really the first literary work of a fabulous English language literary tradition. Why do you want to go messing it up?

I always thought Beowulf, or maybe some combination of that and John Gardner’s Grendel, would make a great film. But I wanted something that would help kids cheat through 12th grade English, not something that would give kids a completely distorted view.

Sicko crosses the pond

Michael Moore’s film Sicko is finally being shown in British cinemas*. I’m sure many Brits will take this as an opportunity to gloat and to bask in the reflected glory of the sacred status of the National Health Service. Apparently, Mr Moore paints an overly rosy portrait of the NHS.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m like many who can say “At least it’s there.” I’ve used the service for the normal, the chest infections and the sprains. I’ve used it for the stupidly self-inflicted wounds (I got glass in my eye from an art project gone wrong). I’ve used it during my pregnancy and emergency c-section. And through all that, I’ve never paid a penny for services and I’ve paid very little for prescriptions. Although, of course, I have paid. I pay through my taxes.

I’ve probably experienced some of the worst of the NHS. London gets a raw deal from most national services. We really don’t get what we pay for. I could complain a lot about my maternal care. I didn’t have a continuous relationship with any single person on the obstetrical staff. The conditions in the post-partum ward were extremely unpleasant (lack of privacy, noisy, hot and piss-poor decor**) and I rarely saw the same professional twice. But on the upside, they supported my home birth until I passed out of their clinical guidelines (baby was 16 days late). I could have chosen another, prettier hospital. But the hospital I chose was across the street from our house and is a center of excellence for obstetrical emergencies. And, at least, it was there.

And I never had to worry about how I was going to pay or what it was going to cost.

I never had to skip appointments because I couldn’t pay. I never had to negotiate a payment plan with a hospital and hope it didn’t go to c-section because then I’d have a bill I couldn’t afford. This happened to women on the American baby discussion forum I participate in. Some folks on this forum even now have worries about their babies’ health but are putting off visits to a pediatrician because they’re waiting for new insurance to kick in.

We all know that there are problems with American health care, but there are problems with the NHS, too. Just different problems. Problems which Michael Moore didn’t raise: From Peter Bradshaw’s review of Sicko in The Guardian.

By way of contrast, Moore visits those countries with free healthcare: Canada, France and Britain. And this last visit is the one to make us sit up. With much elaborate comedy and saucer-eyed cod-acting, Moore visits the NHS hospital of Hammersmith in London, and deploying many a gasp and double-take, refuses to believe that the sick folks aren’t charged hundreds and thousands of dollars. He doesn’t mention the waiting lists, the filth, the degrading mixed wards and the MRSA that are a staple of all media coverage of the National Health Service. So perhaps he’s got a starry-eyed view of our healthcare.

And he goes on to suggest that maybe Mr Moore has the right idea:

But isn’t it obtuse to focus so excitably on what goes wrong with our health service, when so much more routinely goes right and when, incidentally, there are those with a vested interest in promoting these scare stories as an excuse for privatising it? Isn’t it, for all its faults, exactly the miracle that Michael Moore portrays it?

Actually, no. The NHS is not the miracle that Mr Moore portrays. It’s a system, designed by humans. Humans with good intentions, but humans who get things wrong. Like all systems it has its flaws. And when we ignore the flaws and make the system sacrosanct then we have no chance to learn from other systems and to correct those flaws, to innovate and improve.

The same with the American healthcare system. It’s not the envy of the world any more. It’s inadequate and does not provide the American people what they pay for. It’s the most expensive health care system in the world and it’s no longer delivering the best outcomes.

But yet, there are some really good things about American health care. There are some wonderful things that need to be kept and nurtured. Americans, like the British, need to look with a clear eye to their health care, keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.

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*I won’t be seeing it – at least not in the cinema. I don’t like the cinema and what with the baby and all, it’s not really easy. But I anxiously await the DVD release.

** You can say that this matters little, but I think that people do fare better in nicer surroundings. Partly things were bad because I gave birth in June – and a new maternity ward was due to open in September.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Last night Fahrenheit 9/11 was aired on British TV’s Channel 4. I saw it in the cinema when it first aired over 3 years ago. It was a special airing for the anniversary of 9/11.

Going to see the film had been a special event. A North London theater was filled almost entirely with Americans and a glass of wine was included with the price of admission. There were a few special guests from the host population – like my husband ( at least I thought he was pretty special) and Richard Dawkins – who I think is an asshole. Dawkins was asked to say a few words to the audience – and basically he lambasted the American population for our collective stupidity with a special mention to the unenlightened Red-Staters. I was fuming.

About the film itself – I remembered relatively little. Except for the powerful twin towers montage that never actually showed the towers. That was still brilliant, stunning and emotional. But a lot of the other elements of the film seemed a bit strange, from a time gone by, even though it came out nearly three years ago.

Clearly the piece was designed to damage Bush’s reelection chances. That didn’t seem to work. There were lots of references to the cosy relationships between the Bush family and Saudi families – including the Bin Ladens with an almost catch phrase like “that’s something the Bushes didn’t want the American people to know.” Well, now we do know and it seems like most people just didn’t care.

I had forgotten, too just how many different angles Michael Moore uses…ok, the Bush clan is in hock to the Saudis – so they didn’t pursue them after 9/11 like they should have – but wait – the Saudis didn’t actually want a US invasion of Iraq this time – so, huh? No wonder people didn’t manage to take a clear message away from this film.

There’s another montage in the film of happy smiling Iraqis during the Saddam Hussein years. I remember thinking “Yeah, right – like life was so rosy under Saddam.” But now, and in comparison to the sectarian slaughter…well, I certainly don’t want to defend that torturous madman, but gosh Iraq ain’t the country it used to be (except maybe in the Kurdish areas – though even that’s starting to get nasty, too).

I kept thinking how much things had moved on since that time. Indeed, how much worse things have become.

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9/11 – 3/11 -7/7 – Never forget.

When you’re a Jet

The Vol-in-Law and I don’t go to the cinema. I think he’d like to more often than we have done, but I won’t do it. The Knoxville Dollar Theater spoiled it for me. Since then, I’ve always felt ripped off when I’ve seen a film. I don’t particularly enjoy the cinema experience and I leave grumbling like an old codger “Arrgghh, they don’t make films like they used to….”

I’m not a movie buff, I admit, but I like a good movie sometimes. In fact, we’ve just watched The Importance of Being Earnest – the one with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon and it was fun. That was just a random Sunday night showing. But sometimes we buy DVDs as well. We’ll buy them when we’re in the mood and if they’re cheap enough. Sometimes we’ll buy a whole handful. We bought some about a month before Cletus was born – and have only just got around to starting watching them.

We bought Jarhead (It was OK, a bit anti-climactic). We bought some musicals. Guys and Dolls, The Wizard of Oz. Obviously, I’ve seen them before. They’re great.

West Side Story. We bought that. Can you believe I’d never seen it? Well, I hadn’t and I’d always wanted to.

And I still haven’t seen it.

Oh – we tried. We put it on not long ago. And you know – I just didn’t like it. We turned it off after the “America” song. The pacing dragged. It somehow didn’t look right. It seemed like a weird out-of-date world with its quaint euphemisms for everything. And weirdly, it seemed kinda gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But just that little bit too gay for a story about hot heterosexual passions and street gangs.

So, I’ve never seen West Side Story, and I don’t guess I ever will. I feel a little weird hating such an icon of musical theater, but there you go.

Why I hate the movies

In the anticipatory phase of Baby Cletus’s arrival, folks told me I should take advantage of my freedom and go to the cinema.

I said I appreciated the thought, and I was enjoying restaurant meals and such like, but that I had given up on the cinema years ago – and would only go about once a year.

Why?

1. Too bloody expensive
2. Movies are no good any more, out of my one film a year for the past several years – I enjoyed but one of them – Walk the Line.
3. The experience isn’t as good as it used to be.

And why’s that?

Melusina nails it on the head:

To add insult to injury, there is now apparently assigned seating in this particular multiplex, which my husband finds dignified and civilized, but I just find it annoying. There is nothing like paying for a seat which forces you to climb over twenty people already sitting down instead of being able to sit in another row. I’d like a side order of fascism with my overpriced Pepsi, please.

For some reason this just drives me bonkers. In the theatre, I don’t mind. But in the cinema, I like the advantage of arriving early and picking my seat – preferably near an exit row – so I can make a quick getaway should the movie be too rubbish to endure.

A new wave of immigration

Like it or not – Tennessee is experiencing a new wave of immigration. Via A Cup of Joe Powell, here’s a film which captures the stories of the Mexican immigrants who are coming to America’s heartland.

“Working-class people in Mexico and eastern Tenessee are caught in the throes of massive economic change, which challenges their assumptions about work, family, nation and community. This film chronicles nearly a decade of change in Morristown, Tennessee through interviews with displaced or low-wage Southern workers, Mexican immigrants, and workers and families impacted by globalization.”

A short clip can seen here via the Austin, TX university website