Word: ghosts
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...Hare International Airport. Rows of houses, a few still ribboned with Christmas lights, lie empty, their doors boarded up. Low-flying jets pierce the silence. Police still patrol for vandals, and contractors tend to unkempt lawns, but in the fading afternoon light, parts of this eerie village resemble a ghost town...
That self-assurance is why he's been turning down movie roles ever since the second episode of The Office. He had no interest in starring in a film he didn't have complete creative control over. His new movie, Ghost Town--a small, hilarious romantic comedy about a dyspeptic dentist besieged by the dead to help them complete their unfinished business--opens Sept. 19 and marks the first time Gervais has taken a major role in a movie he didn't write and direct. "I was being a baby. I didn't like being away from home...
That's true even if you're Paul Theroux, arguably the dean of all living travel writers and certainly one of the most accomplished. In his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux retraces the steps he took in his first notable travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, published more than 30 years ago. Ghost Train's conceit is Theroux exploring not only how the places he visited back then have changed, but how he has as well. "The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost...
...Vincent eventually quit the call center and go to work for another company (or maybe found one, Theroux doesn't quite say) that makes low-cost shirts for big American brands like Kenneth Cole and Tommy Hilfiger. These guys are "exploited?'' They don't seem to be. Considering Ghost Train is supposed to hark back to the journey Theroux took three decades ago, we might get a better sense of whether or not Vidiadhar and Vincent are exploited if we knew what their parents' lives were like. But Theroux doesn't bother to find...
First, there's not a lot in the preceding pages to support Theroux's proclamation that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians - their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited...