Fox Searchlight is finally going wide with its supposed indie swill Bend It Like Beckham this weekend--from 119 to 990 theaters, nationwide. Ugh. What a piece of crap.

Do not get suckered into the great big fiction that this is the great little indie fillum of 2003. It is pure drivel. And how sad to have the lie foisted upon us during the rare summer apparently packed with so much indie splendor. (I have to say supposedly, because there are still so many I have to get to, and I just can't find the time. That's why I'm writing to warn you. (See, this is all about you! You you you you you! I don't want you to pass up Winged Migration or Capturing the Friedman's for this garbage and feel as cheated as I did. I didn't want my eight dollars back so much as my chance at a wondrous experience back.))

The hokum on screen could only occupy about 10% of my attention, so I had nearly two hours to prepare my grocery list; enumerate my sins for the past month, ask forgiveness, and feel guilty for an hour and a half; and consider just which infantile model this movie was attempting to emulate. The finalists are:
- ABC Afterschool Special
- Baywatch
- The Love Boat

Hhmmmm. Are those all the same model? It was Baywatch that kept coming to mind watching the acting--and it was impossible to see the people on the screen as characters--all you could see was Acting; and really lame attempts at Writing. I don't just mean the acting was bad (and a few of the actors actually are not bad), it was just specifically Baywatch. So many moments felt like . . . shit, I have no idea of the Baywatch names: I used to tape it sometimes and FF through to look at some of my favorite bodies. Yes, it featured some great bodies---but I would slow the tape to normal speed to enjoy them, and the most unintentionally comical exchanges would unfold. Nothing had ever brought me back there again until this unintentional comedy (except maybe seeing the occasional clip of Olivia Newton John in Grease on some awards show). I guess Beckham was intended as a comedy, just not in the places they attained it.

When the closing credits rolled, I was stunned to see so many Indian names--along with quite a few anglos, as expected. There's precious little Indian about this movie: totally an anglo view of a foreign culture as oddities: the main character's parents could almost as easily have been Mormons or Puerto Ricans. Except with different music for the incessant montages. It was really culturally offensive aside from just being off-the-charts cheeseball and incredibly boring.

If that "culturally offensive" line makes you think this might just be a high-horse response to material I didn't want to like, let me assure you I was bored shitless and laughing at all the wrong places before I ever got around to noticing that. The Indian characters were so two-dimensional it just made them unengaging to watch. The whole conflict felt contrived.

And it lacked any of the Indian flavor of even a Bollywood/American hybrid with a half-sitcom heart like Monsoon Wedding. I know that wasn't the deepest thing in the world, but at least it gave you a flavor of India. Matter of fact, it made me incredibly homesick for Asia--I sat through that whole movie dreaming about returning. This film could sputtered straight from the mind of Queen Victoria herself. It had very much the feel of a 19th century Empress of India's take on those queer little ferners.  That kind of attitude toward your subject isn't just offensive, it's incredibly uninteresting.

Really, really crap.

So once I got tired of giggling about how much it reminded me of the Love Boat, I sat there wondering: what is it delighting so many people in this packed theatre? (I saw it when it first came out, and was supposed to be the big new indie sensation coming over from England.) Why was it such a hit in England? What are these people getting from it that I'm missing? Especially at the art house theatre?

Well, England is pretty easy to explain. The same title that confused audiences over here was pure gold on the island. Beckham is bigger than Tiger Woods there, more like a rock star, and the title and his cameo illustrate just how crassly commercial this piece of crap is at its core. It was an incredible stretch to get his name into the title. Yes, the protagonist plays soccer, and yes she mutters a few lines about dreaming of him, but those were completely tangential and could have been--probably were--just written into a later draft by the marketing people. And the art director threw up a bunch of posters of him on her wall. Big freaking deal. Her aspirations toward him, specifically had virtually nothing to do with the movie. If not for his star appeal, the title would seem incredibly peculiar, because it's completely inappropriate for the material. But they squeezed in just enough about him to warrant a cameo at the end, and the announcement that he appeared in the film would be all it would take to send this one to the top of the charts over there. And once it found its audience . . . don't forget, The Love Boat had an extremely successful decade-long run.

Now for the U.S. audience. Well, I always like to sit toward the front in any theater, partially for a good view of the film, but mostly for a good view of the audience. I always like to look around and see how the rest of my peers are experiencing it. I was stunned to see their amusement at this one, but I also couldn't help noticing their peculiar composition. I may have been sitting in an art house theatre, where most of the films at least aspire to something insightful or original, but I was not sitting among the audience normally I normally see there. I was sitting amongst my parents. Not just older, not the NPR crowd, more like the bangle-bracelet on a 50-year-old crowd. Big hair, big glasses. Sally Jesse Raphael. (Sally's not even worth looking her name up to spell it correctly.) Sorry mom, if you're reading this, but you go out to one movie a year and it's usually something like Sister Act 2, and I know you find it hysterically funny, but . . .

Maybe that explained the audience. They sure did seem to be tickled by those silly ferners. Wait! That's the model! This was The Beverley Hindubillies. (I'm realizing this on an update of the post and I'm going right back up there to the title and changing it.) The movie was pretending to be about the struggles of an Indian girl facing the cultural divide in modern England, but the Indians were all ridiculous straw men: peculiar little narrow-minded ferners who just couldn't comprehend the superior modern Western world. Until the Love Boat ending, when they suddenly saw the light and everything just turned out just grand! It's a wonderful Hindubilly.

I've been watching Paul Bremer (our man set up as governor/dictator in Iraq) on Charlie Rose, and I've been pleasantly surprised. Charlie gave him the full hour, and it's taken me nearly a week to get through it all, because he's kind of a bore. Boring, but thoughtful and bright. I actually had a very similar reaction to him as I did to General Rosa at the Air Force Academy.

Once again, this is an impressionistic response. It's not like I've been watching him on the ground in Iraq. But at the very least we've got a wise, thoughtful guy, who makes a lot of sense. I feel much better about that situation. Still pretty leery about the White House boys giving him what he needs.

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Bremer also just announced this morning that Iraq's Governing Council could be replaced through general elections held within a year. NYT story here. Video of him making the announcement here.

Shew! Election returns are mostly in in Cambodia, and it appears it was a relatively clean election, without the violence and intimdation of the last one. From AP:

Hun Sen's party claims win in Cambodia
July 28, 2003  |  PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) -- Prime Minister Hun Sen's party on Monday claimed victory in general elections, saying it expects to win around 73 of the 123 seats in the National Assembly.

Independent observers monitoring the count from Sunday's vote also indicated the Cambodian People's Party was on its way to another five-year term, which had been widely expected. Official results are due Aug. 8.

If confirmed, the results would give Hun Sen's party eight more seats than it held in the previous parliament, but it will have to form another coalition government. Cambodian law requires a party to hold two-thirds of the seats, or 83, to govern on its own.

Largely averting the violence that marred 1998 elections, the latest vote was seen as a further step in Cambodia's efforts to leave behind decades of unrest -- including a long civil war and the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-79, during which 1.7 million people died.

This is certainly distressing. I lived in Kuwait for two years after the Gulf War and still have Kuwaiti friends there. When I left nearly ten years ago, they were optimistic about liberalization over the next decade or two. They were hoping it would be well under way by now. Unfortunately, it's going in the opposite direction.

I'd really love to return to see how the mood has changed over the past decade. Especially toward us. They were still in love with their American liberators when I left, but the honeymoon had definitely subsided. American expats by and large all employed the same barometer to gauge the level of Kuwaiti enthusiasm for us: the ease of smuggling alcohol into the country.

I was in and out nearly every month for business reasons, and it didn't take long to learn how to get a half dozen bottles in every time. I was up to something like a dozen in a row, and even when you did get caught, it was usually one for you, one for him (the customs agent). But it really started tightening up in my second year. In the last few months I got hauled into the back twice for a strip search--a comical version of a strip search, where they were too embarrassed by even partial nudity to let me pull more than one article of clothing up or down at a time, and certainly never my boxer shorts. But they were harrowing at the time, and the second time I was forced to sign an Islamic oath written in Arabic, with all the blanks to be filled in later and that one really scared the crap out of me. Scared right out of smuggling, which was a big deal, because there was nothing to do for entertainment but get drunk until the weekly FedEx packet arrived with a fresh video or two.

Hmmmm. Reading this, I'm starting to see why they might not like us, but the booze never flowed as freely anywhere in the country as when the royal family members threw a party. It's not like everyone wasn't aware of it ...

Oh God, I'm way off track. It's such a complex world over there, and it's idiotic to try to capture it in a few paragraphs. I wanted to say that it's sad about the liberals biting the dust (and of course it's liberal in the broader sense of a liberal democracy, which both Republican and Democratic Americans will lament.) 

The AP story also mentions in passing at the very end that only 15 percent of the citizens--which make up less than a third of the population to begin with has the vote, but doesn't explain about the levels of citizenship (first class citizens, second class, etc.) . . . It's really a slim minority voting, so you have to wonder if this is indicative of the full population or not. Or worse in the wider population.

I'm getting insatiably curious to find out what's really going on over there. All I need is one really gullible magazine editor silly enough to send me over there for a month.