Culture Watch
Mississippi Masala is neither great nor completely bad. It sort of trundles along at a nice, comfortable, and familiar pace. And that's the problem with Mississippi Masala. The viewer has been down this road before. There is a lot going on in this film: love, lust, broken taboos, humor, and poignancy. Unfortunately, none of these themes are developed to any reasonable or believable extent.
Mississippi Masala is a love story between Demetrius (Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington), a young black man born, raised, and tired of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Mina (newcomer Sarita Choudhury), a younger Indian woman whose family lives and works in a hotel run by an extended family of Indians. They meet quite by accident, fall in lust, and ostensibly in love, break all the cultural and regional taboos, and run away together to parts unknown to do whatever they are going to do (the film doesn't say).
If you haven't guessed it already, I was not impressed with this movie. At least I was not impressed with the young Afro-Asian lovers. The Afro-American aspects of the film--relationships among Demetrius' family, Southern black ways of being, etc.--didn't move me because I know them, lived them, and have seen them before on film. But what did intrigue me was the relationship between Mina's father Jay (Roshan Seth) and his homeland, Uganda.
Jay is an Indian, but only because his parents were Indian. He was born, raised, and educated in Uganda. His closest friend, Okelo, is a black African. Jay has built a reputation as a lawyer defending blacks throughout the country. He and his wife, Kinnu, who is Indian, and a very young Mina are "living large" in Kampala among the "natives." But that comes to an abrupt halt in 1972 when now long-deposed dictator Idi Amin comes to power and decrees that all Indians living in Uganda must leave within 90 days.
"What kind of person would write an autobiography?" a good and humble friend asked me when he heard that I was planning on reviewing Niall O'Brien's Revolution From the Heart (Orbis Books, 1991). At first I responded similarly to the book, thinking that it would be another tale of the trials and tribulations of a Western missionary among the poor of the Third World. But having been taken in by O'Brien's gripping struggle to be church in the midst of incredible injustices suffered by the Filipino poor, I thank him for offering this gift to us.
The first missionary's account I ever read--Adoniram Judson's classic from Burma--convinced me to go to Asia one day and preach the word. Revolution From the Heart compels me to stay at home and work for justice.
For most of us, it is this sort of spiritual autobiography, not a theological treatise, that sparks a conversion in our lives. O'Brien's book is a veritable manual on the Word becoming flesh.
Revolution From the Heart recounts the Columban priest's work to found and develop base Christian communities on the island of Negros, struggling with the Filipino peasants to confront the violence of the landowners on one side and that of the National People's Army on the other.
O'Brien arrived in the Philippines from Ireland in 1964. The book tells the tale of the heroic acts and miraculous works that were necessary to help transform the colonial Philippine church into a living, breathing testimony of the Second Vatican Council that was just coming to an end in Rome. Revolution From the Heart offers an important example of basic Christian communities in a radically different context than the Latin American one most of us are more familiar with.
As the debate on political correctness rages, we will examine the literature that fuels this discussion.
One of my buddies from college is a poet. He also writes advertising copy.
As the folks at Mazda are always reminding us, the 1980s-going-on-'90s are really the 1950s.
There's something reassuring about the fact that the flag, the old Stars and Stripes, can still kick up so much popular controversy.
The usual rap on TV cop shows is that they trivialize real life-and-death matters into a glossy package of sanitized violence designed to sell soap and soda pop.
For this future cultural analyst, the legendary '60s were an after-school special.
Political philosophers tell us that one of the great driving forces of human history is the tension between individualism (or liberty) and community (or equality).
Someday in the far-distant future, some 23rd-century Mel Brooks may make a satirical film called The History of the World: Part MCXXXXVII.
The ad line for the new Oliver Stone-Eric Bogosian film, Talk Radio, gets my first nomination for The 1989 William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold" Award.
As this is written on November 22, 1988, the pop-cultural atmosphere is a-swamp with remembrance of things Kennedy.
The 1987-88 pop culture season was definitely a red-letter year. And the letter was Hawthorne's scarlet "A." That's for adultery, in case your high school lit is rusty.
Ronald Reagan, it is said, has run America's first cinematic presidency, often taking his ideological cues and policy prescriptions from his familiar world of the silver screen.
Perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected to happen during the Reagan era was a renewal of interest in the idea of legalizing drugs.