I can't believe I haven't seen an adult movie since waaay back in August. So over the holiday weekend I caught up with Wes Anderson's latest, The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson's understated comedies have always resonated with me, especially The Royal Tennenbaums of a few years back. Anderson's schtick (all right, let's call it ouevre)is all about family and community. What holds families together? What pulls them apart? Anderson seems fascinated by the quirky dynamics of family. Owen Wilson tricks his brothers into a faux spiritual quest in order to make contact with their mother who has become a nun in India. All of this takes place after the father's funeral, since then no one in the family has spoken to each other. At times Anderson's dialogue resembles that of a bad acting exercise but his direction and his actors manage to strip the wood from the words. Not as strong as the aforementioned Tennenbaums, but Darjeeling is worth a trip.
During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust . The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI. The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said. The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character. He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture. He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing." This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point. I would counter with "How far we've fallen." To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has m...
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