Last I heard, The Green Hornet was doing well at the box office. That's too bad. It is a mess of a movie. It is not funny enough to be a good comedy and too goofy to be a serious superhero flick.
Not that it doesn't have some great scenes and really funny jokes. It wastes way too much time, however, on a silly attempt to reconcile pc tensions between the rich Brit Reid (Seth Rogen), Cato (Jay Chou), and Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz). Reid and Cato at least, had some business being in this movie. Diaz, playing a cougar with secretarial skills and a hitherto useless knowledge of criminology, sticks out like a sore tit. Do we really need to confront issues of age and gender discrimination in a Green Hornet movie?
The Green Hornet, like the mirror image character The Spider, was a product of 1930's culture. You have a rich, very White American hero with a third world side kick. Brit Reid's Cato is Chinese. Richard Wentworth (the Spider) had Ram Singh, a man from India who was really good at throwing knives.
In that context, it is very clear who is the boss man. When Ram Singh rode in the back of a taxi with his master, he sat on the floor. Was there anything fair about that? Of course not, just as there isn't anything fair about the subordination of a virtuous Samurai to his not so virtuous liege lord in Japanese film. Genuine stories, however, take place in genuine contexts and these are rarely just or fair.
It is a sign of progress that we are uncomfortable with the subordination of the very competent Cato to the inept son of privilege who employs him. In a superhero movie, that needs to be dealt with quickly and then put out of the way. It makes for interminable distractions in The Green Hornet.
Movies that focus on racial, ethnic, and class inequities almost always collapse into cliché. If you want a genuine view of another culture, skip The Green Hornet and watch Shower (1999).
The movie opens with Shenzhen businessman Da Ming (Jiayi Du) working what looks to be an ATM. But it opens a door which he enters and disrobes. He then enters an automatic shower that works like car wash. Brushes scrub him clean and a blow dryer fluffs his hair. That is the city and that is the "south", i.e., Southern China.
He then travels back to his home town in the north. His "developmentally disabled" brother Er Ming (Wu Jiang) had sent him a crayon drawing of two figures, one standing and the other lying prone. He thought it meant that his father had died.
His father is alive, still running the traditional bath house that was his life. Men come there to bathe and be massaged and get the hot glass treatment and laugh. Old men bring their crickets to fight in tiny glass arenas. Da Ming's brother, Er Ming, is simple but he can lay out towels and use the hose, and listen to another young man sing opera.
The bath house is the center of a local community that is about to be bulldozed to make way for an apartment complex or a mall (no one seems to be sure). Da Ming is rapidly entangled in the familial drama of an aged, sick parent and his adult, dependent son. He is also caught up in the dramas of a community that is about to be extinguished by forces beyond its control. We see him talk to his wife on the phone. She can't understand why he keeps delaying his return. We infer this from what he says as he talks.
Shower is a movie with a lot to say. It says it in a subtle way that is exquisitely beautiful. I learned of this movie from Netflix, which automatically recommended it after I rented the Japanese film Departures. I reviewed the latter in an earlier post. Watch both of them.
Wern't all of the earmarks in the siltumus bill bribes for getting the bill passed?Or if you want to get exact, how about this example from .On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.The senator simply stole money from us and put it in her (spouse's) pockets.Hmmm, I guess spencer would say it wasn't a bribe because they are husband and wife and love eachother.
Posted by: walter | Sunday, July 29, 2012 at 02:20 PM