About two years ago, I found myself in my cramped up, shoddy little hostel room watching a picture by the name of Mitt liv som hund (1985) by Lasse Hallström. Ah, joy. Finally a contemporary Swedish director I could enjoy whose name wasn't Jan Troell or Roy Andersson. The film utterly swept me off my feet, proceeding to carry me off to the sort of place you're only ever offered a fleeting glimpse of as your train transgresses into its crystalline, acute, cool realm, impenetrable to aggrandizement and nostalgia. I'd never forget how it made me feel.
Then I discovered Hallström was also the man behind Dear John (2010).
His filmography is littered with such bilge, with the possible but barely hopeful exceptions of What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Chocolat (2000). The horror!
Min Lu is the Burmese Lasse Hallström of prose. Time and again I keep entering his pages, hoping to be given something I once received. Time and again, I was unceremoniously denied it. I'm tired.
P.S. Seriously. What's with evidently artists frolicking about in mediocrity? Gus Van Sant is another tempting case in point here. But he gets a pass for he's more a hit-or-miss than a one-hit-wonder. Is it about money? Is it the fickle and fallible nature of the human who is to deliver art? Or are they just plain unbothered? Beats me, eh.