As you can see from my earlier posts, I’ve been reading quite a bit lately (mostly as I nurse), but I’ve also been watching TV programs and movies. The TV season is over (good, I can use a break from most shows, though I’d like to see more episodes of The Office) but I’ve been catching up on old episodes of Deadwood. I can’t watch the show when Mika is around – every 3rd word, literally, is “fucking” or “cocksucker” – but its adult themes go beyond bad language and touch on the value of life and love, moral relativism and the corruptive power of money.
I’ve also started watching Oz, a show about immates in a state prison which has some of the same themes of power and violence as Deadwood. It’s much more disturbing, however, as while I can see Deadwood as fiction (even though it was a real place at one time), Oz is all too much like the prisons I have read about. It is very disturbing to know that we support institutions whose apparent goal is to destroy the human spirit and make monsters out of anyone not already one when they went in.
In the movie realm, we went to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at Baby Brigade at the Parkway last Monday. I found it mildly interesting. Mike, who’ve read the book, enjoyed it a bit more but he said it was nowhere nearly as funny as the book.
I also just watched The Merchant of Venice on DVD. I went through a Shakespeare period when I was 14, but I haven’t like the Bard since I was a teenager. I didn’t like this play either. The movie was beautiful and well acted, but the underlying material was boring and the characters’ seemed too shallow. Perhaps nobody was all good or all bad, but none of them was too wise – and who wants to watch a play about people who only wear anger but no wisdom? Give me a villain like Al (from Deadwood) anytime.
More satisfying was The Terrorist, a movie about Malli, a young Tamil woman who has been a guerrilla all her life and is recruited to assasinate a “VIP” through a suicide bomb. The movie explores her life as she prepares herself for the task. It was quite interesting, but its plot was too facile. Malli has flashbacks to her past life, she finds herself pregnant and starts reconsidering – all without saying very much. A deeper portrait of a suicide bomber would have been more interesting, but I was impressed that this topic was even addressed in a movie. I’m also fascinated by its star, Ayesha Dharker, who was also on Star Wars Episode II. I’m amazed how anyone can have such huge eyes, nose and mouth in the same face and have it all fit in. Her face doesn’t look disproportionately big either.