I'm back in Sai Gon and drawing a complete blank, because Apocalypse now got me again. Apocalypse yesterday. Why do I keep going back to this place? Much has happened in between. Kate and I visited the Mekong Delta, and in a little town called Ben Tre, we discovered that there are places in Vietnam, which are cities, where being a white person is still such a novelty that every kid on every bike and every guy squatting on the sidewalk and every lady running a soup stand will say hello to you, not to sell you something, but simply to get a response so you can both smile together. We didn't see a single other tourist in Ben Tre, and that is what made it so awesome.
You know what movie you shouldn't see? "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage. Now this probably falls on deaf ears since this movie probably came out when I left Canada like 7 months ago but it just came out in Asia and it SUCKS. Unless of course you like racist and vaguely anti semitic, or maybe just pro Jehova's witness propaganda. The idea for the movie could have been something, except that someone already made this movie, and it was good the first time, and it was called
Contact. I will spoil this movie for you now just so you don't go and see it. At the end Nicholas Cage has to give his son up to aliens which are pure energy (but with angel wings) that draw them up into a ship to avoid the apocalyptic solar storm that is consuming the earth in a conflagration that simply takes as long to destroy the earth as it takes to spin on its spit roast - I mean axis. The kids, both white (one was his girlfriend's, but she died) get abducted, or rather 'assumed' into heaven, I mean a ufo, where they take off into space and get dropped on another planet where the grass looks like sea anemones waving in the tide, and wearing their new white flowing garments of burlap the children skip happily, hand in hand, toward some sketchy big white tree of life. They're smiling because they know they get to start the human race all by themselves, which is awesome when you're 10 and your parents got torched in a solar storm on your home planet on the other side of the galaxy. So unless you want to see some nutbar's version of rapture don't go see it. When we saw the kids skipping toward the tree, wade and I both leaned toward kate from opposite sides and whispered "don't eat the apple, whatever you do."
How about for this blog entry I rip into this movie? Because I saw it like a week ago and the hate has not faded.
The kids are white, and everyone is cool with two white kids perpetuating the human race? Really? I was acutely aware of this sitting in a movie theatre in vietnam, and I thought, what about the Vietnamese?
The kids were holding two fat white bunny rabbits before the ascension. What the fuck does this represent? Noah's ark? Are we beaming up two of everything? Are bunny rabbits the first priority? If we want them to survive in the wild should we really bring the albino ones? They kind of stand out. . . or are we bringing blind hawks and retarded snakes to account for this? Why does Nicholas Cage's character have to be an astrophysicist? Is this to show that even astrophysicists can believe in God, as long as he looks like aliens? The best part was that Nicholas Cage's character developed the leading model of the possibility that a solar flare could reach all the way to our planet and incinerate it, but nowhere in the movie does someone request an interview with him about the impending armageddon, and at no point does he try to alert "everyone" that the shit is about to hit the fan, even though he knows it, not just because he developed the model, but because he decodes a time capsule his son found, which was full of dates of disasters and death counts for events that happened after the time capsule was created, and the capsule predicts this armageddon. He's far too busy to tell anyone about it, because he's busy chasing a crazy lady around in wild car chase scenes that end in her death anyway. I hate you for doing this Nicholas Cage. Why are creationists so uncreative? Isn't this irony at it's finest? They have 'creation' in their name, but they never create anything new, except the occasional excuse I guess. . .They couldn't think of anything better than this? Rapture? Really?
Ugh.
That movie gave me a hang over. Yesterday when we got back to Sai Gon we decided to see a movie that didn't suck, so we saw X Men, since that just came out here, and it was AWESOME. now tell me how a movie that presumes to deal with our origins as humans and our potential end can completely suck in the face of a film about a guy who gets his skeleton coated in metal so he can cut his brother's head off with retractable claws? It just shows how much of an idiot you have to be to screw that up.
Wolverine is Canadian.
Inside there was a DJ (that's all I wanted) A surfboard on the ceiling that said "Charlie don't surf" on it in huge letters, and a couple of hundred people obeying a ratio of 1 white rejected man to 2 gold digging vietnamese girls. Just standing in there was a cultural experience to say the least. Kate, Wade and I just stared, and when things got too blurry we pulled the pin. Fast forward montage to sitting on the back of a motor bike again, this time I feel like i'm going twice as fast. I have can of beer in my hand and I'm lavishly signing Robert Goulet. I am remotely aware that Kate is on the back of the neighbouring bike sliding in and out of my periph, she's got a beer can too, and so does her motorbike driver. Nice of you Kate. Wade is on the other side and the ribbons of road whip past and the lighs trace and streak until we come out of hyperspace and we're standing outside our little hovel. At 2:30 in the morning the nice lady slides the armoured door open enough for us to squeeze through, and kate and wade blast the arrested development DVD's they're addicted to while the world shuts off like a TV for me. Poof, here I am, hungover, listening to the din of motorbikes and horns under the thunder brewing over Sai Gon, and thinking about how nights like that become average in your life.