2000-12-04 - 02:20:14
Some things sound a lot cooler before you do them. Seeing a movie in Kurdish is one of them.
Saw A Time for Drunken Horses the other night at the art-fart theater down the street. I�ll give the director some credit--he did manage to convey to the audience that northern Iran in winter is really, really cold. And that it sucks being a crippled Kurdish kid in northern Iran in winter (as if I�d had any doubts about that going in--being a crippled kid in California was bad enough). And that if you give a mule a whole bottle of vodka and put a couple of tons of crap on its back, it�ll fall down a lot.
Beyond that, the film was a head-scratcher from start to finish. The subtitles didn�t help matters. I�m sure Kurdish is a very rich and expressive language, so why were all the English subtitles only two or three words long, and incoherent besides? ("Men don�t cry," says the village doctor, as he jabs a gigantic needle into the crippled kid�s ass for about the hundredth time in an hour.) Why do Iraqis need school textbooks and monster-truck tires so badly that they pay Kurdish kids to risk their hides to smuggle them over the border? What was the crippled kid�s deal, anyway? And if the whole point of marrying off his sister was so the groom�s family would pay for Tiny Tim�s life-saving operation, why didn�t she and her family tell the groom�s mother to stuff it once she threw that hissy fit and demanded that they take the kid back home with them? And what was up with the ending? The movie just sort of stopped--as if they�d run out of film or stepped on a landmine or something--kind of like what I�m doing right n
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