Can someone help me out with the difference between tropes and memes, perhaps with examples of each? I’ve been having these interesting conversations with my older son about Internet-based, popular culture memes. A lot of what he describes as memes, I would have called tropes. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about and the usual dictionary definitions are not helping me much. In practice, what do “we” mean, inside the academy and out, by these terms?
Month: November 2010
omg The Maid (chile)
opening scene. raquel, a youngish-looking maid in a wealthy chilean household, is thrown an after-dinner birthday party by the family she has been serving for 20 years. turns out it’s her 40th birthday. you do the math. twenty years? 40 years old? dang. half a lifetime spent living with these folks. as if to flesh out your perplexity, shock even, at this extraordinary but all-too-common fact of human existence — people indenturing themselves to others — the director, sebastián silva, segues with a merciless look at the routine of raquel’s life, which consists of focused, meticulously practiced, down to a T, not-a-second-of-rest work. Continue reading omg The Maid (chile)
Crime stories, sort of
I’d recommend three recently-watched films, each of which plays with the structure and function of crime narratives in ways that intriguingly reframe the romanticization common to the genre. All are good, but I’ll start with the least successful and work my way up to one I thought was kind of fantastic.
Who Gives a F@&! About the Morgans?
Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009). What a shittily shitty piece of absolute shite. I could stop there, but I want to say a few words about the film that could have been, the film that might have been a tad better than the one I watched (until I could watch no more, I stopped with about 20 minutes left).
Quick synopsis: Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant) and Meryl Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker) are husband and wife undergoing a painful separation. He is a lawyer, she is the head of a real estate firm. They have butt-loads of money. Paul wants Meryl back and talks her into a date. Going neither poorly nor well, the date ends uneventfully. But as they say their goodnights, the two witness the murder (holy cow!) of a would-be client of Meryl’s. Having seen the victim, knife in back (really? a knife?), plummet to the sidewalk in front of them, Paul and Meryl look up to the balcony from which the victim fell and there they catch a glimpse of the murderer (who has a scar on his face!). Fearing the murderer will in turn spot them, Paul grabs Meryl and together the two hide behind a truck that happens to be parked in the street near where the victim fell. Get this, the truck suddenly pulls away! That’s right, the driver didn’t see the body land right in front of the truck, nor did the driver hear the body hit the pavement, or Meryl’s rather audible gasp. So, as the truck has pulled away, Paul and Meryl’s cover is blown and the murderer, looking down from the balcony above, spots them. Convincing? Hell yes!
Continue reading Who Gives a F@&! About the Morgans?
ajami
quick plug for Ajami, the israeli/palestinian film that was nominated for an oscar last year. it takes place in the eponymous section of jaffa, where christians and muslims live uneasily together. the tension, though, is not so much between christians and muslims as between crime gangs whose ruthless illegality intersects with the equally ruthless israeli occupation. even though jaffa is an israeli city, the occupation permeates the movie — through the presence of the wall (which is handily penetrated by cross-border drug and weapon smuggling), through illegal border crossings of migrant workers, through legal border crossings of israelis who need to get into west bank, and through the general violence perpetrated by israeli security forces against arabs (muslim or not).
in the meantime, we also get a sense of the way in which arab justice structure and community support systems continue to operate in what would otherwise be a waste land of violence and lawlessness. elders of both christian and the muslim faiths get together and figure things out, brokering precarious truces and stopping seemingly unstoppable carnages. Continue reading ajami