I can hardly wait for May to arrive. AMC and other movie channels usually run a month long tribute to John Wayne by showing his movies over again. The Duke died in 1979 so many of these films are dated and you know the outcome. The Duke is always the good guy and right away you can spot the bad guys. This desire for a nostalgic moment (or month of such moments) is propelled by the two last films I have chosen to watch.
One was Lorna’s Silence: the story of an Albania girl who enters into a sham marriage to a Belgian drug dealer to get Belgium citizenship so she can get a license to open a snack bar. At the end she is running for her life and hiding in a cold shack in a forest somewhere between Belgium and Albania laying on a simple wooden bench and whispering to the non-existent child she imagines is in her womb.
The second film is Shutter Island, the Scorsese film which took in the most money at the box office this week. In this one a US Marshal arrives at an asylum for the criminally insane on this island off the coast of Boston to investigate the disappearance of an inmate – or a patient, as the staff likes to refer to them – and winds up quietly heading for a lighthouse on the island where the doctor and staff will perform a lobotomy on him.
Let’s just say these films were not my cup of tea and I like the simpler world of the Duke.
