WORLD TOUR Day 25 - New York, NY
BEFORE: My tour of New York City is half over, and coming out of the tunnel, we logically end up on one of its many highways. Linking from "Daylight", I'm quite shocked to learn that Dan Hedaya and Richard Jenkins, two of my go-to connector actors, have never been in the same film. Hunh. No worries, Dan Hedaya was also in "Shaft" with Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "The Avengers"), another well-connected man.
THE PLOT: The story of what happens one day in New York when a young lawyer and a businessman share a small automobile accident on F.D.R. Drive and their mutual road rage escalates into a feud.
AFTER: New Yorkers get a bad rap, when it comes to matters of driving courtesy and manners in general. If you ask around, take a survey of people and ask them which city has the rudest drivers, the most common answer you get is equivalent to "this one." Every city's residents believe that their drivers are the worst, so what does that tell us? (Seriously, what does that tell us? Seems like an inconclusive result to me.)
I came to New York to attend college when I was 17, and then I stuck around (Yeah, there was this girl - but that's not important now.) Had I been inclined to leave the city, I don't know where else I'd go, I didn't have another plan in place, no ambition to head out and make the most of whatever L.A. or Chicago or (shudder) Boise had to offer. I infiltrated the enemy camp, and ended up fighting on their side. I came to see the circus, and I took a job in the sideshow.
What I've learned from my years observing the New Yorkers is that they operate by a certain set of rules, which have been put in place for their own benefit/survival. The problem is, nobody TELLS you the rules, and they have an annoying tendency to vary, from neighborhood to neighborhood, or even from person to person. Some are very simple - don't carry a map and look like a tourist, don't walk through bad neighborhoods after dark, don't carry your money in your back pocket. To that list I like to add: don't preach religion to me loudly on the subway platform, don't cough or sneeze on your hand and put it RIGHT BACK on the subway pole, and above all, don't be walking all slow in front of me, weaving back and forth on the sidewalk when I am TRYING TO GET SOMEWHERE.
See? I've become one of them. Go on, save yourself, it's too late for me now. If I try to live somewhere else, I'll never make it through the day, knowing that the world's best pastrami sandwich or matzoh ball soup is NOT just a short subway ride away. Other cities have pizza, other cities have bagels, but come on, it's just not the same. As Woody Allen said about New York, "I need to know I can get Chinese food at 3 am - I never get it, but I need to know it's there."
What's that you say? Tonight's movie? Right, right. Like last night's film, it starts with a series of contrivances, kicked off with a traffic accident. We all "know" what you're supposed to do when you're in a traffic accident - get out of your car (assuming it's safe to do so), make contact with the other driver (even though he's a complete MORON, obviously), and calmly exchange contact information and insurance paperwork. That's one school of thought. In New York City, you're just as likely to encounter somebody who wants to settle it with fisticuffs, or perhaps someone who'll throw you a wad of cash because no one needs to make the insurance companies any richer, or even someone who'll inform you that he was "never there", and if you know what's good for you, "you didn't see nuttin".
The film is a primer on what can happen when characters representing the two schools of thought clash - the honest insurance salesman who wants to do thing the "right" way, and the shady lawyer who's late for court and just wants to write out a blank check and be done with it. But the two men unknowingly have interrupted each other's lives, and their accident has implications beyond the damage to the cars. They each come to regard the other as the thing that's standing in their way, the thing that's holding them back from some measure of success.
What follows is a game of one-upsmanship that didn't need to happen, the characters are given several opportunities to be the bigger man, to return the property the other one needs, to not seek revenge. But why be nice when you can destroy another person's life? It would be SO easy for the movie to devolve into a live-action version of Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd, and it almost does.
But that's when reflection at last takes over, and the serenity prayer is spoken, and another meaning is given to the film's title. Without getting mushy here, each of the two lead characters eventually realizes that he is at least partially to blame for his situation, and it's not going to improve unless HE improves. Time to get out of the rut, the downward spiral, to get off the crazy merry-go-round that has no end. Petty vengeance didn't get them anywhere, and bigger vengeance didn't help either, so it's time to change lanes and try something else.
Also starring Ben Affleck (last seen in "Forces of Nature"), Toni Collette (last seen in "The Hours"), with cameos from William Hurt (last seen in "Robin Hood"), Sydney Pollack (last seen in "Michael Clayton"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Friends With Benefits"), Amanda Peet (last seen in "Gulliver's Travels"), Matt Malloy, Bruce Altman, Dylan Baker (last seen in "Secretariat").
RATING: 7 out of 10 A.A. meetings
New Yorkers! You'll pee on a hot dog cart but when you see an ungloved hand touch a pole on a subway car you suddenly turn into Felix Unger!
ReplyDeletePfeh!
Why would I pee on a hot dog cart? Unless it's on fire...
DeleteMy other bugaboo is people in the food-service industry who think those little plastic gloves are some kind of magic device that allows them to stop being careful or thoughtful.
I've seen food workers wearing the plastic gloves while talking on their cel phone, and then go right back to serving food. Well, great, my food is protected from their hand germs. But they were talking into the phone, so their mouth germs are now on the phone, and they're holding the phone with gloved hands, so their mouth germs are now ON THE GLOVES.
It's like they've never seen an episode of CSI or know anything about transfer.
Some food workers store the gloves in their pockets while they handle the (presumably dirty) money, then put them back on. Well, how clean are their pockets?
It's one thing to keep their hands from touching my food, but it's not a cure-all. They still have to use their brains and watch what else they touch while wearing the gloves.