I live in rural New England. I’m pretty sure the millennial landlord who lives next door has never worn a mask since the pandemic began. (His parents gave him a house to rent out.) As far as I can tell, no one in that family has gotten sick.

Around town, about four old people have either died or vanished within the last few months, not necessarily because of covid, although it’s definitely a possibility.

Another guy I know who lives a few streets over and who has considered coronavirus an overblown joke since the very beginning now finally has it. I’m pretty sure he’s a “moderate” Mormon. His wife is pretty cool though and has taken the pandemic almost as seriously as me. For awhile she would also complain about him every time we ran into each other. I would say hello and she would respond with something like: “I hate my husband.” That was how she said hello. They have two elementary-aged children.

Another neighbor, a white woman whose husband is a boomer lobsterman who can barely put a sentence together, has been coughing very loudly for weeks, like loudly enough for me to hear it from my house. A month or so ago I ran into her when she was unmasked at the post office along with several other unmasked neighbors.

At yesterday’s trip to the grocery store, a bunch of people were coughing. One white millennial worker was coughing and looked quite sick. None of these people were masked, of course.

  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Oh, hey, I watched that recently, too. Did you read about the life story of the female lead? Wild stuff. She was born in Manchuria to Japanese parents and starred in propaganda films during the war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiko_Yamaguchi

    At the end of World War II, Li was arrested in Shanghai by the Kuomintang and sentenced to death by firing squad for treason and collaboration with the Japanese. As tensions subsequently arose between the Kuomintang and the Communists, she was scheduled to be executed at a Shanghai horse track on December 8, 1945. However, before she could be executed, her parents (at the time both under arrest in Beijing) managed to produce a copy of her birth certificate that proved she was not a Chinese national after all, and have her childhood Russian friend Lyuba Monosova Gurinets smuggle it into Shanghai inside the head of a geisha doll, and Li was cleared of all charges (and possibly from the death penalty).

    Edited to add ( from the NYT obit ):

    Ms. Yamaguchi, who settled in Japan in 1946, openly apologized for what she said had been her unwitting role as a propaganda tool during the war. And she was one of the first prominent Japanese citizens to acknowledge the history of Japanese brutality during the occupation, an episode for which many Japanese nationalists still refuse to apologize.

      • Wertheimer [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I mostly know him from Airplane!. Hard to take anyone seriously after that. His debut film (I think?), though, is an all-time great - Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be. He plays a 19-year-old airman in love with Carole Lombard.

        Which widescreen shots especially impressed you? My favorite shot in House of Bamboo was probably Robert Ryan's entrance. Or rather Robert Stack falling into Robert Ryan's room after he's been knocked out, and Ryan calmly surveying the situation. If you watched this on the Criterion Channel, they have another feature with Robert Ryan as a villain, also in a film that makes a stance against anti-Asian racism, Bad Day at Black Rock. Fuller's a more interesting filmmaker but Bad Day is a better film, I'd say.

        You seen any other Fuller films? Definitely check out Shock Corridor if you haven't.

          • Wertheimer [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Oh yeah, Pickup on South Street is great. Widmark's sneer of "Are you wavin' the flag at me?" Love him as an antihero. I haven't seen Act of Violence; will put it on my list.