To thine own self be true

and any credibility for the convoy’s shallow, limited, limiting agenda.

Global News headline:
“Lawyers for ‘Freedom Convoy’ leaders attempt to block Ottawa residents from testifying.”

I guess the convoy and their leaders’ freedom superceded and still supercede the rights to freedom of the residents of the city they so egregiously occupied, obstructed, and tormented. (Some pigs are “more equal than others”, as Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm.)

Uh, why come back to Canada?

The breakdown of the plane is symbolic of his failed ‘piloting’ of our country under his ‘leadership’ flight.

Maybe he can ‘dress Indian’ again and apply to live there now that he’s free of Sophie and doesn’t have much reason to return to the Canada and its serious problems he largely ignored and created since becoming our first black-faced PM.

Live and let live.

(I can’t imagine a more perfect antidote to the irrationally obsessive, prevailing political polarization going on today everywhere.)

and observed the various crazies, trolls, and meltdowns out there, I would still mostly concur with Jean Paul Sartre who wrote that “Hell is other people.”

to make a ‘short cut’!
The disrespect for culture and history is pretty much global these days.

“Imagination has no age and dreams are forever.”

Welcome to Alberta and our What-Me Worry? premier Danielle Smith who says there is no climate crisis even after another day of 10+ AQs throughout the province.  She also has previously, egregiously, gutted the provincial firefighting budget.

The genuinely blind, ignorant folks who voted UCP are now witnessing a bona-fide redneck oil and gas freak in charge of all our fates. (Our main problems are not gas and oil. They are the health crisis, the wildfire crisis, and the UCP crisis.)

She has done little to help with the wildfires, even snubbing Edmonton who didn’t vote for her and leaving it off the go-to evacuation centres when they were first announced.
This cruel, dumb-ass truck-stop owner does not give a flying fig for the people of this province. 

Government officials in Canada seem to totally lack the interest and will to fix Canada’s health crisis.

(Criterion DVD, 2009)

In the middle of German director’s Paris, Texas (1984), we see a crazy man on a long pedway over a Los Angeles freeway screaming symbolic lines like “There will be no safety zone!” to the vehicles passing by. Travis, a ‘lost’ person himself, walks past him, pats him and keeps moving on his own symbolic trek to Houston.

This is a movie about a man who majorly ‘screwed up’ his life with his wife and son and abandoned them when he couldn’t face up to his responsibility and role in a family break-up. The second part of the movie is about Travis’s search, with his son Hunter, for his wife Jane, herself troubled and lost, and his attempt to heal the family tragic alienation.

When the movie opens, memorably, on a wide-open Texas desert, we encounter a man in a suit and ball cap wandering until he collapses, and is eventually revived by an unscrupulous doctor who sees a chance to make a buck by contacting the man’s brother Walt in Los Angeles for a reward.

Walt and Travis are reunited after a four-year absence and Walt brings Travis back home to recover and to get reacquainted with his interesting 7 year-old son Hunter. Eventually father and son agree to hit the road in a beat-up half-truck to find the mother back in Texas.

Enough of the bare-bones plot. The movie is basically a significant art film about Americana and, in particular, the West in all its symbolic natural and man-made images. Each scene is deliberately composed in cinematography by Robby Muller who brilliantly plays with the myriad colors of nature and man-made signs and scenes. So much of this film is simply atmosphere, a long moving painting, but with what affects on the viewer!

The spare, unintrusive, atmospheric music is, likewise, brilliantly, composed and played by the legendary Ry Cooder. It would be fair to say that the visuals and music perfectly capture the inner and external conflicts of all the various characters and scenes.

Harry Dean Stanton gives an outstanding muted, but expressive performance as the burned-out father who eventually focuses on and fulfills his mission to reunite all three characters (with a believable twist at the end).

Dean Stockwell was drawn out of retirement as a real-estate agent(!) to realistically play the supportive, though baffled brother. Throughout, he does right by his older brother.

Hunter Carson, the son of Hollywood’s ‘Kit’ Carson and Karen Black, is simply remarkable in his first acting role; he is a natural as the confused, but game-for-an-adventure son.

Walt’s wife Aurore Clement adds a tender foreign touch in her support of Travis and her love for Hunter, her adopted-by-default son.

The likable, devoted-to-her-son Jane is perfectly played by Natassja Kinski. She and Stanton are both moving in the unusual, unconventional climax written by Sam Shepard who was the co-originator of this movie with Wenders.

There are many powerful, beautiful scenes in this emotional and realistic movie. My favorite, though, would have to be Walt’s family’s nostalgia Super 8 viewing of both couples in better times before the ‘fall’ and separation. It forms the core, archetypally, of what happiness in male-female and parent-child relationships looks and feels like.

Paris, Texas is likely like no other American-made movie you’ve seen before. The viewer simply goes along for the ride and shares vicariously in all characters’ feelings and conflicts. Like Wenders’ other classic Wings of Desire (1987), it remains a film masterpiece as well as a positive work of art about how necessary reconciliation can happen despite many obstacles, doubts, and very long odds.