Nobody Nobodyknowsthetroubleiveseen

Petition to renew Three Pines: https://www.change.org/p/reverse-the-decision-to-cancel-three-pines-on-amazon-prime?source_location=search Review but mostly rant!: What a classy series! Really love that it takes place in Canada and says it is in Canada, no pretensions of LA or New York or Montana. AND has the great Tantoo Cardinal and Alfred Molina (who is British but believable as an inspector in the Surete du Quebec). The series deals with numerousf mysteries, and never gets boring, perhaps it fails with some audiences because it leaves out the rocket launcher guns and martial arts fights tv/movie cops seem to have these day. The First Nations cast are not side-lined, and are REAL PEOPLE, not fetished fictions. or helpless victims. On to the cancelling of Three Pines: it reminds me of The Porters--check it out if you can-- It wasn't picked up again because the US streaming channel funding it felt Americans weren''t interested in further following the story of Canadian black porters who faced racism, violence, and impoverishment to set up the first Black led Porter's Union in North America. Seems to be a national insult to admit the US was not the first at any one thing. As stated in Shoresy S02, the US hates to lose, but REALLY hates to lose to Canada! In film, the only time it's ok to mention Canada is if an American gets lost in it, in which case it is a terrifying UNamerican UNcontrolled wilderness of killer bears and raging moose that inevitably gets people eating all kinds of raw meat, including their BFF. So tired of that!

Am I the only person who sees Alabama (Patty Arquette) as the true protagonist and hero of True Romance? I mean, c'mon, she gets attacked by a much larger person, but she doesn't cringe or try to hide. She fights him just as hard, and she wins! Clarence would be dead without her. He's in the bathroom talking to an imaginary Elvis about being a tough guy, meanwhile Alabama is in the middle of a gunfight. Clarence gets knocked out of the picture as soon as he emerges, and it is Alabama who wreaks revenge, gets him out, grabs the money and drives the car. Anyone who thinks this is a movie about a boy who wins and gets the girl has absolutely got things backwards. Very forward thinking for its time with a female hero who might just be mom to Kill Bill's Beatrice :)

Kind of jumped the gun but had to talk about why I'm looking forward to watching this! The history of Alberta as taught in school is like the Calgary Stampede, it whitewashes Alberta's history, not just in terms of colour but origin. John Ware must have been one brave man to enter into and succeed as well as he did in a culture that thought its best and only important parts were white and British even though there were not that many white British people charging out to settle in the Canadian west, ergo the importation of the poorest and most desperate of Europe, the Slavs, brought in as a "brutish" people to clear the land for the better sort who would actualy settle and exploit the west. I saw a documentary on John Ware a while back and I thought at the time that there's NO WAY he could have been so easily accepted and acceptable, esp in a culture steeped in social and racial darwinism. It is impossible to ensure a fairer future if we don't understand or even know our history and expose the Anglo white values it is based on. A diversity of peoples live here now, and have lived here since the land was sold (!!!) by the Hudson Bay Co. to the Brits colony of Canada, at the expense of the natives who were living here! I know, I know, lots of treaties....lots of broken treaties! I stopped telling people my family heritage by age 8 because of the "how many Unkrainians does it take" jokes. How bad was it for visible minorities? Or I should say how bad IS it? .... anyway, more to come once I watch, but I can't right away so, but at least there's comments on Google now.

It's a difficult watch at times.. On the one hand the mother's self-centred behaviour seems extreme, but the way the movie is paced makes what at first appears extraordinary and circumstantial to be quite ordinary and mundane. We've all known people who can't think past their own immediate needs, narcissists who we both love and hate, and maybe at times some of us have been dependent on these people. Director Tatsushi Omori's film Mother doesn't answer any questions about what's right and what's wrong, it simply shows how disfunction can still manage to function in its own twisted way. "Mother" mostly does get what she wants, and the child gets a sense of worth even when they know mother will selfishly fritter away whatever is given to her. Terrible situation but unfortunately too often true.

I love the gentle tragedy of this series. And I love the characters, broken people who are not pretty, who are not geniuses, who are stuck, like most of us, trying to do something good but as so often happens having it turn out kind of bad, or sad, or just stupid. They are so mortal, so close to clumbsy death and disaster; each moment of their lives are almost moments, like the almost moments of almost falling off a ladder.