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759 pages... in one day. The journey is over. Now what do I do?
Bordertown, a film being endorsed by Amnesty International is rooted in hard, disturbing facts. A prologue at the beginning of the film gives context to the story of the murders, and a number of scenes, including one shot inside a Mitsubishi television plant, lend authenticity to the story's socioeconomic setting. There are some very hard political statements made in this movie, about NAFTA, CAFTA, about corporations and the free trade agreement among Mexico, Canada, Central American countries and the United States. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This movie stars Jennifer Lopez as Lauren Adrian, an up-and-coming Chicago newspaper reporter who has big dreams of becoming a top foreign correspondent, and Antonio Banderas as a dedicated newspaper editor who works tirelessly against corrupt Mexican police and indifferent government officials. The fictional film is based on real-life events that transpired in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where over the course of several years, hundreds (if not thousands) of women have been kidnapped, raped, and murdered, and little, if anything, is done about it. Many were students, but most of the women work in a malquiladora, an assembly line factory, where they labor in substandard conditions for long hours and little pay. Long story short? The movie was horrible, the acting laughable, J-Lo is terribly miscast as she is just too cute to be taken seriously in the movie, and writer-director Gregory Nava falls short in his attempt to make an honorable heart-wrenching drama out of such a disturbing grim reality. BUT! It's difficult to slam a film that seeks to bring attention to a definite human rights problem that has no easy solutions. It’s a story that needs to be told. Even though the film fails to live up to its potential, there’s something to be said for taking the high road when you have an important mission in mind. Regardless of whether or not it was using a tragedy to make a B movie thriller, the representation of what is happening in Juarez is pretty good and the cast and crew should be commended for attempting to raise awareness of the ongoing murders and tell the story of Cuidad Juarez: an epidemic of hundreds of poor, pretty women systematically raped, mutilated, and strangled to death in the Mexican border town. This movie is close to my heart. I had just graduated from High School and was staying with my Grandparents in El Paso when missing girls started to turn up dead in the desert surrounding the city. It wasn’t long before rumors of a serial killer started to spread like wildfire and fed into every family’s paranoia. We were advised by authorities to travel in groups, and to go straight home and avoid secluded and high crime areas. There were bodies discovered every week that whole year. Since 1993, more than 4,000 women - workers and students - have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez, a city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua formerly known as El Paso del Norte. Juárez has an estimated population of 1,301,452 and stands on the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across the border from El Paso, Texas. The two cities form a metropolitan area of 2,280,782 making it the second largest international border community in which the developed and newly industrialized worlds meet in such a close proximity. It is a growing industrial center with more than 300 maquiladoras (assembly plants in the US border region) and is now the main logistic center in Mexico. Most of these malquiladoras are owned by American companies, utilizing the freedoms afforded in the NAFTA trade agreement, where they can pay workers only $5 a day and offer no benefits. With corporations saving billions on costs, a scandal that will draw attention to the exploitation going on in these factories is not something they want to shed light on. Subsequently, the government, whose politicians are in the pocket of the corporations that own these malquiladores, turns a blind eye to the problems, news stories are buried, and the women become sitting ducks for the criminal elements, who can seemingly do what they please without penalty. Juárez has gained further notoriety as a major center of narcotics trafficking linked to the powerful Juárez Cartel, and for hundreds of unsolved murders of young women since 1993. Unfortunately, because of widely alleged police complicity (and perhaps even participation on the part of police and government officials and local elites), the serial murders continue and most of them remain "unsolved" despite the years that have gone by. According to Amnesty International, 327 of them have been found tortured, raped, mutilated and murdered, after having been kidnapped in the centre of the city at the end of their workday in the maquilas or leaving their schools, their bodies abandoned on vacant land. Official figures are kept hidden or manipulated, and it is also likely that some of the disappearances have simply not been reported. Many victims bodies have not been claimed, either because they lived alone, were from other states and barely knew anybody in Juarez, or because they have not been identified. In other cases, their relatives, poor workers, have no means to travel to claim the bodies, and there is no official aid. On the contrary, the official attitude is to hide and underplay this barbarism. These facts can only be described as the systematic genocide of poor working or student women. The origins of this genocide are not to be found in 1993 when the first body was discovered. They go further into the past. They are linked to active duty or retired police officers and army personnel. Even before 1993, the local police participated in gang rapes of women whose bodies were then burned in order to make the bodies and clothing disappear. And today, the killings continue. 
The movie's tagline asks, “What would you do if you could see two minutes into the future?” Perhaps pick up Jessica Biel and then... uh, what was the question? Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) plays a Las Vegas magician whose cheesy lounge act is a cover for real powers: born with the ability to see two minutes into the future. He knows what number you're thinking of because he can see what would happen if he just asked you. However the movie takes great pains to tell us again and again that the very act of seeing the future changes it, which would seem to make anything he learns useless on a second-by-second basis, particularly when there are a lot of moving parts involved in what he's trying to pull off. See what I'm getting at? The movie basically revolves around the premise that Cris can see and predict the future, and yet it insists that the future changes with how we react to things. The plot nullifies its own premise. I'm sure the writers could have come up with some kind of babble that would explain all this away, but they don't even try, perhaps because their minds kept wandering back to ways to use Cris's powers to woo Liz (Jessica Biel), the only really effective stuff in the movie. Callie (Julianne Moore) was the FBI agent convinced that Cris could find a stolen nuclear weapon for her. She never considered that his ability could have limitations that would prevent him from doing that. The fact that Cris was only able to see two minutes into his own future gave the movie a different twist. She really wasn’t pursuing other avenues to find the weapon. She was just willing to do anything to get Cris to find the weapon. Julianne Moore handled the part fine even though she wasn’t the most believable in some of the scenes. Towards the end, the movie just really becomes a showcase for special effects. However, I still highly recommend the movie. Peel away the mystery, the suspense, the action and adventure, at the heart of the movie is a poignant love story that will leave you wondering, "What was the point of the story again?"
Mama needs a new pair of shoes. No, really. And it’s not one of those Imelda, deep desire for a particular pair, kind of needs, but a serious 'people-are-going-to-start-talking' need. Truth is, I am not a “shoe maven”. If I had my way, I’d have naked feet twenty-four hours a day three-hundred-sixty-five days a year, but propriety, rain and occasionally dogshit insist that I own, at the very least, a bare-bones Footwear Wardrobe. The point, to all of this preface, is that I am a minimalist when it comes to footwear, and yet, even I realize that the time has come for decisive action. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to introduce you to my Footwear Wardrobe in its entirety. Trust me, this won’t take long. 1. Broken Boots - When I bought them a few odd years ago, they were smart black boots. I liked them quite a lot. I wore them quite a lot. Apparently I walked badly in them quite a lot too, because over time their heels have begun to wobble dangerously. There’s a particular art to walking in wobbly boots, a toe-first-then-roll-onto-the-heel-solidly kind of walk. I don’t mind it all that much, but I’m well aware that on the worst possible day, some day soon, one of those wobbly heels is going to finally break and I’m going to be flat on my ass in the middle of the street, weeping over my once-smart little black boots. 2. Sad Sandals - My feet are freakishly wide, and so it’s hard for me to find a pair of those sexy little sandals, the ones with the thin bit that slips between the first two toes. I found a pair though, last summer, that were so bare and simple i felt practically barefoot in them. They were the Sexy Havaianas Sandals until the pup took to them and gnawed the hell out of their sexiness. 3. Semi-White Sneakers - I have some pretty strong feelings about white sneakers; some of them too impolite to mention here, but many of which I had mentioned to my darling husband before he thoughtfully purchased these shoes during one of my oh-my-god-i-have-NO-shoes wailings. And so, making a point to not purchase white sneakers, he brought home a lovely pair of Light Gray sneakers, which, i will tell you, I have worn without complaint for nearly five years but am damn well ready to replace. 4. Funky Flats - My feet do not stink. They may be black from tromping across city streets barefoot, or germy from the bare bathroom tile floor, but my feet are not smelly feet. It's the shoes, I tell you. The SHOES!
I saw HP and the order of Phoenix last night. I'm glad to see Harry all grown up and lose that goofy wonder-look from his face. You know, that perma astonished expression he had during the first movie. This time, he looks like he means serious business. I just couldn't help but think during the entire movie though, did Daniel stop growing? or did the rest of the cast overdose on Cherifer? Because next to EVERYONE in the movie, Daniel looked short. And the scene in which Voldemort confronts Harry (or was it the other way around?) had a very Star-Warsy undertone to it. I keep half- expecting Voldemort to finally say "I am your father" to Harry Potter. Maybe it's just the way the scene played out. Maybe I'm just nuts. Or Maybe, you're nuts. Take your pick. Also, you'd think that with all the CGI animation advancements that the world has made they would finally be able to come up with decent looking FX. But nooooo. Look at Gorp fer crying out loud. He looked fake and horrible, even my 5 year old daughter can draw a better looking giant than that. But you know who my brand new favorite character in the movie is? LUNA LOVEGOOD. She's freaky, but I think she's adorable.
As you may have noticed, blogging is on the blahhh side lately. Even my prose is a bit unmoved, unexcited, uninterested and unconcerned. Surfeited. Dead. I get moods like this from time to time. And often, conversations with me are much like holding conversations with that robot from the movie The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. One of the the few things that perk me up is change. And since i'm pretty much rooted where I am (Oh God, kill me NOW!), there's only so much change that are within my control. My blogs are one of them. But if you've been blogging as long as I have, (since 1998, ahem) and if you frequently have moods as much as I do, then it goes without saying that there's only so much creative change that you can do. Music lyrics as post titles? Done. Post titles in Spanish? sooo 2004. Post titles that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the subject matter at hand? Seriously. So, starting with my previous post, I think i'll do movie quotes. Hey, maybe i'll really cut loose and even delve into movie themes. Who knows? This should be fun. Or not. Whatever.
I tried out riding around in our community yesterday. Since everyone one else seems to be doing it, I figured I should give it a try. I wasn’t able to scrounge up any riding partners. Here’s the exact text message sent out before the ride: Even though I went out a little harder than I had planned it turned out to be a good evening and maybe most significant of all was that I didn’t stop by Alfon's afterward. I held that carrot out in front of me for most of the ride. I told myself that I needed to complete ten laps or I couldn’t join my friends for beer. So, I pushed myself to get to that tenth lap to earn my beers, and then I was so tired that I just decided to roll home and go to bed. Recently I’ve been questioning my motives in all this exercising business. It’s not exactly a natural state for a human, specially for me. I sometimes wonder if it’s an intentional stepping away for me. Do I intentionally choose bike riding because they are easy excuses for solitude? If I plan a 2-hour ride over the weekend, no one that I know is going to come with me. Of course, this could also just be that I don’t really know that many people. Or maybe I'm just nuts for really trying. Because God knows I've never finished 2 hours of ANYTHING.
There are certain numbers in my cell phone’s phonebook that i never ever call. One of them is an old friend who is alphabetically at the top of the list, though i have never called her on my cell and have only actually spoken to her once in the last eight years. Still, I have both her home and cell numbers programmed into my phone, and every time i scroll through my phonebook she glares at me. It was last November when i called her first and last. She all-but dropped the phone from shock when I said hello. We talked, maybe twenty minutes, exchanged digits, promised to plan a visit. And then nothing. Nobody made a move. Nobody picked up the phone. Yet, there she is, yesterday, today and tomorrow, glaring at me from the top of my phonebook. Accusing me every time i scroll through. She’s only twenty minutes away now. The closest old friend that I’m not actively ducking. And yet, I don’t call. The effort is somehow overwhelming and even the best case catching-up-lunchdate promises to be painful and awkward and unfulfilling. So day after day, I scroll past her but don’t delete her. I’ve never been good at that kind of thing. I like to poke at the scabs and scars. You never know when one of them will, out of the blue, start to smart all over again.
When I'm drunk off my ass I find that I usually need to close one eye to focus. And at that point the only thing violent and offensive coming from me is the realization of how much I drank and the horror of punishment when it decides to leave my body. Leave a comment and tell me I'm not alone.
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