Fassbinder's The bitter tears of Petra von Kant, reminding me Bergman, theater play, and is it reflection of his own life experience (of course yes i would say). Rich film language. Incredible blocking/lighting
Hitchcock's Rope
You have to say, Hitchcock Sabe Americanos!
Orlson Welles's The immortal story - rather short, but you can see his trademark style
Karel Kachyna's The Ear - a very enjoyable movie - not in a very deep way, but well done dark humor, reminded me Milos Forman, who is also from Czech
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A few days ago we visited Terminal area in Centro (south of centro Guatemala city). Many vendors, whole sale people with trucks, rough looking homeless people, sex workers, drunkards laying on the streets, strong pee smells, all over the place.
Guatemala is like everywhere else - straight men got all the privilege and pleasures - open and permitted prostitution, every-so-often football games, and of course, liquor. Women are not allowed to have legal abortion, so they will cook and have kids. There are many single mother families, just as in Mexico, if not more. It appears this bad cycle is quite common in Guatemala AND Mexico: deserted woman - single mom bringing up the kidS (many) - Mom became religious and more controlling the kids - kids grow up to be another conservative man.
Gays in guatemala are incredibly different from any other countries I visited. On grindr, the most common words are "discreto, no obvios". There are incredible amounts of profiles that have no face pictures (reminding me Asia), with intentional-incorrect information in the profile (I suppose that so nobody will find out who they are), incredible amount of flake-ness, unfinished dialogue, weirdly disappearing people. Very seldom to see gay men are looking for a boyfriend, a relationship, love.
Incredible amount of extreme religious force were observed in Guatemala and El Savaldor, mostly the evangelical and mormon preachers all over the place, especially in regular poor people's house. In San Salvador, there is this covenant church from this family's garage having preaching going on and on all nights, with very loud speaker, going to after 11pm in the weekends, and it scared all the wild dogs away too, which is the only plus side...
The 10 day driving trip in Guatemala is unforgettable: Lake atitlan (Pana), the natural reserve hiking trail (coffee bean trees and rope bridges), the avocado tree in the hotel garden, Xela, the first gay bar in history, the driving south from Xela along the river, the fancy highway from Gautemala city to the south beach VS many bumps on other highways (mostly built by local village men to slow the cars so they will have some business, in our case mostly watermelon sellers), village men fixing the road holes by filling in dirts asking for donations, the pineapple vendor, and rain forest views in Izabal, and the weird airbnb in a restaurant - george and I went inside the restaurant at night - it is open but nobody there, no lights, no other people, with two short piers going into the lake/bay. Ahhh the firecrackers!!! all over the place, the castle (good for hide and seek game i guess), I couldn't barely walk in the bay area as so many stones in the waterbed, TIKAL, is really something... Grande grande grande...Puerto barrios, such a running down city, remembering crossing street of loud evangelical church, are the sex workers, they waved to us and everybody cheered when I waved back..the trip to Livingston, the black tourist guide, the beach, and very bumping boat ride!
Can't forget how badly people drive in Guatemala, they are worse than Chinese! Finally...
