Friday August 15, 2014
7-11 Cebu
Not much on my mind first thing this morning. Jeepneys are going by and filling up with customers. I can’t say with any confidence who all these people are and where they are going. Many are students. That is clear. Others are going to work, but I have no idea what kind of work. It’s not like Bay Street in Toronto with lots of suits and business clothes. Jeans, shorts, tank tops, and T-shirts are the norm. My coffee seems weak this morning. I think I didn’t get a big bean grind out of the machine. On the positive side, the one friendly and somewhat efficient worker was on duty at the 7-11. She isn’t super fast, but she is competent and she thinks. She’s the only one. She’s also very friendly, which I like. She smiles.
I watched the Hitchcock movie Frenzy yesterday. I didn’t mind it. It wouldn’t make my list of the greatest films of all time, but I can see it making a big splash when it came out in the seventies. After I finished watching the movie and left the Internet café, I suddenly had the strong feeling that I’d already seen the movie. That happens sometimes, and it usually turns out that I HAD seen the movie. It was just so long ago and under such different circumstances that I forgot. In this case, I imagine that I saw a censored and shortened version on TV. I was surprised, to be honest, at some darker and more gruesome aspects to the film. It seemed too explicit for Hitchcock. Overall, I found the acting to be excellent. I liked the characters and the setting, too. The tone was a bit uneven with some dark comedy making an appearance and striking me as out of place. It was like watching a Three Stooges moment suddenly crop up in the movie Seven. It felt weird. The plot was also a bit loose. My guess is that Hitchcock ran out of time. Most of the film was very slow and deliberate. Then the ending sped up and became very rushed. I’m fairly certain big chunks were cut out because there was some information missing entirely. And with that information gone, the ending felt implausible. Felt rushed.
I think there are a lot of movies like Frenzy that I saw long ago and have forgotten. I’ve reached 2000 on my list of watched movies on Facebook. I’m sure I’ve watched lots more, but I can’t remember many of them – particularly the old classics and a whole bunch of international movies that I saw at film festivals and repertoire theaters and that sort of thing.
I’ve been listening to the podcast Filmspotting. Before that, I listened to other movie podcasts. One interesting thing about these podcasts is that the guys in them are twenty to thirty years younger than I am. That’s interesting because being born in the eighties and nineties, they see movies from that era as being before their time. So all the movies that I grew up on are “old” movies to them. In their first episodes, the Filmspotting dudes talked about all the movies that they HAVEN’T seen, and that amazed me. They both worked as professional movie critics and yet they hadn’t seen a huge range of movies that I would consider must-see films. They’ll confess that they hadn’t seen Apocalypse Now or Jaws or Goodfellas or Raging Bull and dozens and dozens more. They have fond childhood memories of things like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They basically have an entirely different pop culture background. I also listen to the Adam Carolla family of podcasts, and this comes up all the time there. Adam Carolla is my age, but all his employees are in their twenties or early thirties. So Adam is constantly referencing things like The Brady Bunch and Hogan’s Heroes, which his employees know nothing about.
It’s occurred to me that someone of my age is in the perfect position to know a lot about movies. I came to movies late, but even so I was growing up in a golden age of movies – the time when movies were changing and things like The Godfather and Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were coming out. So I saw all these movies, and then I went back in time to watch all the classics – Billy Wilder films, Orson Welles films, the classic westerns and spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock, Casablanca and other Humphrey Bogart films, and on and on. These younger guys grew up with films from perhaps the late nineties and early 2000’s. And then when they went back in time to watch the “classics”, they were watching Star Wars and Jaws. They just never had the time or interest to go back to the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. At my age, I covered the whole history of cinema.
I’ve also been watching VICE, and I get a kick out of that skinny white kid that works as a host. I can’t think of his name. I watched a few episodes of the VICE on HBO series. They sent this kid to Senegal to report on the traditional combat sport lamb that is a huge deal there. It was done on purpose, of course, but it was still amusing to see this tiny guy with his ivory white skin next to giant pure black professional Senegalese fighters. This white kid is fearless, though. He doesn’t flinch at anything. If he has to go to some remote village and go through a crazy voodoo ceremony and drink magic potions and strip down to a loin cloth, he does it. They also sent him to Indonesia to report on the smoking insanity there. He visited a backstreet medical clinic where they treat people with made-up medicine. They actually smoke as part of the cure and have smoke blown into their ears and get wrapped up in tin foil and covered in potions. All of this was to remove dangerous “free radicals” – the things supposedly causing all the diseases. He put himself through all the treatments without batting an eyelash. He also went to China to take part in matchmaking events. The idea is that there are so few women in China that men have to compete so hard to find a girlfriend or wife. My skinny white dude wandered around the marriage markets being ridiculed and rejected by everyone. He finally did get a first date with this young Chinese girl, and she commented that she thought Western men were supposed to be bigger and more rugged.
My favorite episodes, though, were the ones where they went to India and North Korea. In India, they visited a slum in Mumbai and reported on the vast gap between the rich and the poor. I’m not sure that I was impressed with their reporting per se. Simply showing one super-rich billionaire living in a massive house next door to a slum does not make a case for anything. It’s striking and visually interesting, but it isn’t proof that there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor. This gap probably is widening, but this show didn’t prove that. I still loved the show, though. These Indian billionaires are insane, apparently. I hadn’t heard about this before, but I guess it was big news. These billionaires build not houses but entire tower blocks to serve as houses. They are pretty much skyscrapers and have a staff of 600 people. And that is their house. Then they have a fleet of yachts, helicopters, private planes, and luxury cars worth a quarter million dollars each. And this massive tower sits right on top of huge slums filled with people living in shit. Shane Smith, the founder of VICE, did this story himself and he spent time with one of these billionaires. This billionaire didn’t want to talk about it, but he was currently building his own skyscraper house that was going to be 10 stories taller than the other dude’s. Total insanity. Still, I’m not convinced that it is bad. A bleeding heart type might think it would be better for this guy to help the poor and give away billions of dollars instead of building these houses. However, I don’t think it works that way. You can give away a billion dollars and it would just sink into the multitudes and disappear without leaving behind a ripple. National economies are much more complicated than that. You can’t just give away money and think that will fix things. Improvement has to be organic and natural to that country. And, of course, Shane Smith and the VICE team showed only the billionaires and the slum dwellers. They didn’t show the massive groups in between – the millions and millions living just ordinary lives in the city – not rich and not poor. This part of Indian society has grown massively in the past decades. Things are getting better for them. Shane Smith could have gone to other parts of Mumbai and filmed massive traffic jams showing how many vehicles are on the road. Someone has to own each of those vehicles, so it’s not like the entire country consists of slum dwellers.
It was a different VICE dude – the one with lots of tattoos on his arms – that went to North Korea. I love anything from North Korea. That place is just too weird to believe. This same dude also went to China to report on the ghost cities there – all those massive collections of apartment blocks that are completely empty. I remember seeing that show – or another like it – a few years ago. I guess everyone is holding their breath and waiting for a real estate crash in China based on all this speculative building. I have no idea. China and the Chinese people are profoundly different from the USA and Americans. From an American point of view, it is insane to think that you can build billions of dollars worth of apartment buildings and have them just sit there empty. Someone will eventually notice and wake up and see that it is insane and then the whole economic house of cards collapses. But, in my experience, the Chinese have vastly more ability to just ignore the insane and accept it. They’ll just keep on working and living their lives in the shadow of total insanity and lack of logic and common sense and it won’t bother them. I saw that all the time in Taiwan. The Taiwanese would just keep working away at something their boss told them to do even though they knew it was stupid and pointless. It was only the foreigners that would get up and go to the boss’s office and say that it was stupid and suggest a better way. So I can imagine the Chinese economy surviving a massive real estate bubble that would cripple other countries. The Chinese will keep building these empty apartment buildings as long as they are told to do so and they won’t question it. And, as we all know, money doesn’t really exist. It exists only because we all agree that it does and have faith. As soon as that faith is gone, the money disappears and the economy collapses. The Chinese can keep their faith a lot longer than Americans.
Just sitting here, I’m amused to see how image conscious the Filipino men are. They are particularly concerned with their hair. They are constantly primping. They stop at cars and trucks with tinted windows so they can look at their reflections and get their hair back into position. They often seem like girls to me.