EL NORTE (1983) is Gregory Nava’s story of what he describes as the “shadows,” the vast mass of illegal immigrants doing all kinds of blue-collar labor — gardening, busing tables, laundry — throughout California’s cities (and beyond). It’s an amazing movie and as relevant today as 1983.
David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez play Mayan siblings in Guatemala. When gunmen target their family — dad, a coffee picker, was talking union — they have to flee to El Norte, the United States, where they’ve been told even poor people have cars, refrigerators and flush toilets. After they complete their long odyssey (one horrifying highlight is crawling through an abandoned tunnel filled with rats) they have to find jobs, adjust to the culture and struggle with the pressure to compromise on their own values. It also has some remarkably funny moments, such as when someone teaches them how to pass for Mexico (so they won’t be sent back to their deaths in Guatemala) by cussing more.
It’s not an upbeat movie or a feel-good movie but it’s beautiful to look at and an engrossing drama. I think it’s well worth watching. “No-one fights over bad land.”
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH (1965) was an early Merchant/Ivory film in which a troupe of British Shakespearians struggles to keep performing in post-colonial India despite competition for their audience from cricket matches and Bollywood films. And what will happen when the daughter (Felicity Kendal) gets involved with Bollywood director Shashi Kapoor, who’s also having an affair with film star Madhur Jeffries (yes, the future cookbook author was an actor in her younger years)?
By today’s standards the Shakespearian performances on stage seem extremely mannered, making me curious if that’s a shift in style or that the characters aren’t good actors. Either way, it’s a better film than the same producers’ The Wild Party a decade later. “We are all forced to make cuts in the text written for us by destiny.”
It’s been almost a decade since I watched the YOUNG JUSTICE cartoon, not from lack of interest but not having access to HBO (now AKA Max). That changed and I recently finished up the third season, YOUNG JUSTICE: Outsiders. Restrictions on JLA activity and an investigation into metahuman-trafficking in the European kingdom of Markovia leads to Beast Boy creating a separate team of yes, outsiders (including versions of Halo, Geo-Force and Terra) to protect meta-kids outside the League’s rule-bound set-up. Good stuff. “That break-in at Good’s was a ‘rogue op’ where we were saved by the co-leader of the Justice League and a Batman Family drone!”
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