Tidbits

A week or so ago I caught The Last King of Scotland, which is - I hesitate to say good, as it isn't, really. Forest Whitaker is awesome and James McAvoy isn't bad, but the movie as a whole left so much unsaid that it was somewhat frustrating.

I do find it interesting that the user comment on IMDB mentions that McAvoy's character is, "highly unlikable...for the most part comes across as a flighty, over-educated twit with foggy ideas on good deeds and uncontrollable hormones that lead him to hounding after every marginally attractive married woman he comes across," because to my mind, part of the point of the doctor is that you are not meant to sympathize with him. There are shades of metaphor in the character of the doctor (Nicholas Garrigan), a Scotsman who becomes Idi Amin's personal physician, and, if the events in the movie are even partially accurate, one of his most trusted confidantes and advisors. Much like the countries of the West, Garrigan is an enabler; he sees what he can get out of Amin, and blinds himself to the paranoid, homocidal reality. Garrigan is a mirror for us all, a reminder that we are responsible for some of the most rephrensible acts the world has seen, and not just in some mealy-mouthed intellectual, "We are all inter-connected" bullshit way.

Before the movie played there was a trailer for a film version of The History Boys, based on the play of the same name and boasting most (if not all) of the same actors. Anyways, there's a bit in the trailer when a teacher is talking to a kid about reading, and how the joy of reading is when you read something written years, decades or centuries before your time, something you yourself had thought, and it was like a hand from the past, reaching out to you to comfort you.

Personally, I had always taken the replication of thoughts in a much more negative way, as a sign that there was no such thing as an original thought, and, basically, people are stupid and unable to move beyond the same questions, generation after generation. And really, it's sort of the same thing, it's just a nicer way of looking at it.

Over the past few months I've had a number of people tell me I was shading quite negative/cynical in my attitude. I'm not really sure if they're right or not. But when enough people tell you they think something, it probably behooves you to engage in a bit of self-examination. The other response, I suppose, is to find new friends, but I don't really see how that would help if those people were right in the first place. Unless the new friends you got turned out to be emo-goths, and then you could be like, "Dude - I am too negative."

I've also been having some visa issues as of late. Seems I missed a deadline and such for extending the visa I was on. People are scrambling, things are being talked about and it will either work out and I'll be able to stay or it won't and I won't. In some ways, I see this as a good thing; it's a problem I would have had to deal with eventually, so might as well get it out of the way now. As an odd aside, though, I wonder how exactly people go to LA (or wherever) from Canada and magically get cast in things; what sorts of visas do these people acquire? Because they obviously can't have one going down in the first place, frequently they just sort of show up and start auditioning. This, in itself, might be questionable - one of the interesting asides from the Katharine Hepburn book I read was how so many movie stars in the Golden Age were reputed to have had horrible first screen tests, at least partially (or perhaps mostly) because the studios figured the general populace would be more accepting of "underdog" actors who were at first denied their shot at stardom by ignorant executives. However, I can't shake the impression that somehow, some way, people show up, audition, get cast and then get visas, presto change-o and such.

Blah for visas and immigrant law. Blah.