All the major characters in this movie are corrupt, emotional wrecks or they end up dead, except for Angela Bassett’s character. People of color are usually the first to go in these movies. She makes it to the end.

It’s worth mentioning that the director of “Strange Days” is a woman. Kathryn Bigelow. Her first movie was “Near Dark”, which is a far-better-than-average vampire movie set 1980′s Texas. Some of her movies are pretty awful, but “Strange Days” is not one of them.

On the DVD of “Strange Days”, her commentary is very interesting. She talks about the movies’s opening sequence, which is a real tour-de-force.

Her “K19: The Widowmaker”, about an accident on a Russian nuclear submarine is also worth seeing.

I’d love to be able to talk someone — Audrey maybe, since she teaches high-schoolers… just a thought, no obligations, Aud (: — into a reflection on this toxic co-optation of liberal feminism that glorifies the impossible idiocy of “you can be powerful (at the men’s game) and still be a desirable (to men) sex object” meme in entertainment and advertizing.

Hollywood will go only so far, in criticizing capitalism. That doesn’t stop me from appreciating a fun time at the movies.

Really good blog.

I was born and (partially) raised in Morelia, Michoacán. Michoacán is the Mexican state with the more dollars of family remittances per capita, one of the largest per capita emigration ratios. One out of every 5 Mexicans live abroad. And I estimate that one out of every 4 Michoacanos live abroad.

The economic disaster that devastated my state worsened in the 1980s and 1990s (thanks, Paul Volcker!). Its seeds were sown in the 1960s and 1970s, with the crisis of rural Mexico. Since the late 1970s, the area where I was born (Tierra Caliente) evolved into a big exporter of drugs to the U.S. And then the “war on drugs” happened.

This stupid “war on drugs” has been a disaster for Michoacán like nothing else I can think of. A huge percentage of the male adults from many towns in Tierra Caliente are either in the U.S., dead, or in jail. A vast criminal industry (and its accompanying culture) has emerged in the state with its own law of the jungle.

In Uruapan, not long ago, drug lords dumped a bunch of human heads in a disco to let their enemies know how ruthless they are. A friend of mine (who is a labor litigant and activist in Morelia), lucky enough to have the same name as one of the suspected killers, was recently detained until they cleared the confusion. Judges, cops, journalists, innocent bystanders, etc. have been killed. I’ll let readers make the connections with the state of affairs in the U.S.

A couple of days ago, four inmates with long sentences took a group of public defenders and visitors as hostages and demanded an SUV and other thingies to escape. There were negotiations and some of the hostages were released. Then yesterday, the federal investigation agency (AFI), i.e. the Mexican version of the FBI, staged a ride that failed spectacularly. Five people were killed. The government looks utterly incompetent to manage these crises, and the crises keep getting bigger and bigger.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/11/19/index.php