Believe it or not, after yesterday's rant, there's still more junk that ought to be said. First, the death of a giant mosquito at my hands two seconds ago reminded me that they'd bombed for mosquitos here. Eddie noticed this is in final night of visiting Silistra last week and it seemed to have left him a bit worried. As far as effect goes, it has done two things: It's made the surviving mosquitos angrier and hungrier, and it has driven them indoors. This is not a scientific study of course, but I'm willing to state that my receiving over ten new bites in the last two days while keeping all the windows shut in my apartment is not a positive sign of mosquito control. The bombing has also left me less inclined to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for the next couple of months, but that's a side effect really.
Also, I had the opportunity to watch a couple of old movies over the weekend. I finally got to see "Lost in Translation." It was just as I expected: great, but probably not worth all the worry Bulgaria put me through about its coming here. I'm going to agree with the conventional wisdom that someone living abroad (or someone who has lived abroad before) would get a little more out of it. Sometimes it seems like these long periods of silence I go through sometimes just serve to puncuate great moments that would seem mundane under more American contexts.
Like a conversation with another American in a bar, for example. You walk into a bar in America, and there they are, Americans. The bar is filled to the gills with Americans. If one of them comes up and talks to you, well, that's just par for the course and you can do whatever you please with them. However, if you're at most bars in a foreign country and are visited by an American, you might be more inclined to listen to what that American has to say, just to hear someone speaking in a good, strong American dialect. Especially if that American is Scarlett Johansson.
I may not have loads of expereince in the idea, just over a year, but it's seemed to me that meeting another person, in another country, puts the two people on a similar level, whatever they've done in their lives, whoever they've met or married, or whatever, they're at the exact same spot in life there in Sofia, Tokyo, wherever. I think "Lost in Translation" gets that across well, and I think that's its accomplishment, nailing the Americans abroad vibe. The whole sexual tension thing so many people discuss is there, too. But that's really secondary.
Watching and analyzing the "Lost in Translation" DVD in the apartment of someone with a State Department fellowship who'd loaned it to one of the weekend's football organizers while she was out of town came after watching and analyzing "Blazing Saddles." We all sat around, watching, chuckling occasionally, and asking each other what the big deal was about "Blazing Saddles." There was no particular moment in the movie where anyone in the room actually laughed out loud and heartily at something in the movie.
This was the third time I'd seen it the whole way through and I still did not see one thing that struck me as out-an-out funny. Amusing, yes, the whoe movie is very amusing. Almost like watching one of my students go turn into a class clown. He tries to entertain, and I may grin for a moment before I punish him, but I've seen it all before and it wasn't terribly funny the first time. "Young Frankenstein" works for me mostly because Marty Feldman as Igor cracks me up every time I watch it, but there's nothing like that in Saddles. The farting scene? I'm sure in the 70s that was just the funniest, pushed envelope stuff ever filmed, but now it's just a bunch of farts. None of the characters really make me laugh, nothing really works in the movie. All the guys in the room watching it had a nice chat about how none of us really found it funny and how we deal with people who do watch it and find it hilarious.
I will say that it is amusing to watch, unlike angry, indoor-living mosquitos, which aren't amusing at all. The one that may have just bitten my thumb before meeting his untimely doom was particularly unamusing. But nobody ever said the Circle of Life was full of fun.
Posted by Rob at May 25, 2004 06:25 PM