Word: monsoon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...against whitewashed temple walls. The air is thick with the scents of jasmine and the tiny yellow flowers of the ubiquitous neem trees. Seeing the 900-year-old temples from behind the sealed glass windows of a private car would be a lamentable disregard of nature?s pre-monsoon celebration. Despite the heat,the best way around Pagan, also known as Bagan, is by bicycle. All it takes is a subtle alteration of the typical itinerary?rising with the roosters, napping in the afternoon, and starting again in the evening...
...Burma, a country where symbols and omens are woven into the fabric of life, the portents were all positive. True, University Avenue, the winding road leading to the monsoon-stained mansion where opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since September 2000, was still closed off. But behind the sawhorses, blue-trousered municipal workers could be seen repairing potholes and sweeping the sidewalks clear of cheroot butts, palm fronds and bamboo leaves. Neighbors reported that the Nobel Peace Prize winner's lawn was being mowed, her grounds spruced up. A few blocks away, the once forlorn...
...think of Kissing Jessica Stein and Monsoon Wedding as routine romantic comedies, a genre that in recent years has become increasingly desperate in its search for ways of funnily frustrating its lovers for 90 minutes or so, until the inevitable reconciliation. Think of these movies, instead, as delightful comments on how the rules of romantic engagement have loosened in the contemporary world...
...Monsoon Wedding has something else on its mind. More jostling and bumptious in spirit than Kissing Jessica Stein, it shares a similar idea, which is that the way for romance to prosper in the modern world is to leave it some space to mess around with conventional expectations. These short, sweet (and low-budget) movies refuse to develop predictably. But they bring their charac ters to good, slightly surprising, quite satisfying places. And leave us beaming happily. --By Richard Schickel
...Monsoon Wedding...