Indochine

Last year, my friend Bob complained to me that he had just wasted 100 minutes of his life watching Lost In Translation and he wanted them back. I can now say that I know from where he comes. While I really liked Lost in Translation, I have just seen a movie that felt like an enormous waste of time. That movie was Indochine. It was 156 minutes long and it was one of the most boring movies I have ever seen in my life. While it was very beautifully shot and won the Golden Globe and Oscar for best Foreign Language Film in 1992, I did not find it compelling. I suppose part of the problem was the fact that it told the story of the French colonial period in Viet Nam from the perspective of the French. I was very turned off by the colonizers treatment of the natives. I suppose it would be kind of like watching a film on WWII from the perspective of the Germans or the Japanese.

On a completely different front, I had a busy volunteering weekend this weekend. On Saturday, I was at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. I saw several friends that I haven't seen in a while and its a good event because after finishing you definitely feel like you have done something. On Sunday, I worked at Spring Brook Nature Center in Itasca. They were having a Winter Festival and as they are a bird rehabilitation center, they had several owls and raptors out for educational purposes so visitors could view them. I worked for about half the time on helping people into and out of snowshoes and the rest of the time I helped children set up to do ice sculptures.

In the news in the last week, R&B legend Wilson Pickett died of a heart attack in Reston, Va on Thursday. He was 64. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, he was best known for the songs, "Mustang Sally", "Land of a 1000 Dances", and "In the Midnight Hour". Wilson Pickett became famous in Detroit on the Motown label, the next story I have has a Detroit connection as well, its just odd. A man driving on I-96 in Livonia died as a result of injuries from a dog falling on him after falling off an overpass and crashing through his windshield. The man had the presence of mind to continue driving in a straight line and pulled to the side of the highway. The dog, a 60 to 70 pound Labrador Retriever, that police suspect fell off the overpass as a result of trying to avoid an accident, succumbed to injuries at the scene.