{"id":13753,"date":"2011-07-01T01:50:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T08:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2011\/07\/01\/13753.html"},"modified":"2011-07-01T01:50:20","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T08:50:20","slug":"a-couple-of-notes-on-the-termi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2011\/07\/01\/a-couple-of-notes-on-the-termi\/","title":{"rendered":"A couple of notes on The Terminal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've had the 2004 movie The Terminal<\/cite> out from Netflix for a long time; finally decided last night to watch it.<\/p>\n

For the first half-hour, it held pretty much no interest for me. Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European guy, Viktor, who gets stuck in legal limbo in the JFK airport. The fact that it's a Spielberg movie tells you pretty much everything you need to know, and the plot was proceeding along predictable lines.<\/p>\n

One of the subplots involves a black woman (the actress looked vaguely familiar, but at the time I couldn't place her), Dolores, who handles Viktor's repeated applications to enter the US, and a Latino guy, Enrique, who's secretly in love with her from afar. Enrique bribes Viktor with food to find out more about Dolores.<\/p>\n

About a minute after I started wondering whether I should give up on the movie, Viktor asks Dolores if she likes films, and she says no, and he asks what she does like, and she says “Conventions.” And I thought, huh, obviously she wouldn't mean sf cons (because this is a mainstream movie); I wonder what she means.<\/p>\n

And then the scene cuts to Viktor telling Enrique about the conversation:<\/p>\n

\n

Viktor: So she go to these conventions dressed as Yeoman Rand. Yeoman Rand.<\/p>\n

Enrique: She's a Trekkie! She's a Trekkie!<\/p>\n

Viktor: Favorite episode is “Doomsday Machine.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I laughed out loud, and decided to stick around for the rest of the movie.<\/p>\n

The rest of the movie turned out to be reasonably charming, though largely predictable. The above exchange was the high point, for me.<\/p>\n

But this morning when I woke up, I realized two further things, unrelated to each other.<\/p>\n

First: There's a surprisingly high percentage of people of color in the main cast. The prominent secondary characters are a white guy, a white woman, an Indian (South Asian) guy, the abovementioned Latino guy and black\/Latina woman, and two black guys; there are also assorted tertiary characters of color. Of course, almost everyone becomes focused around helping the protagonist, who's a white man—but at least the character is a non-American who has trouble with English (although played by a white American actor, of course).<\/p>\n

As usual with movies I've seen lately, I would've been happier if the female characters had been more numerous and more prominent. Which indirectly brings me to my second realization from this morning:<\/p>\n

Dolores, the Trekkie character, was played by Zoë Saldana<\/a>. Who, five years later, went on to play Uhura in the new Star Trek<\/cite> movie.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had the 2004 movie The Terminal out from Netflix for a long time; finally decided last night to watch…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}