I went to Pelham 1 2 3 and felt sad for John Travolta

I went to this new movie yesterday wearing my new summer blouse, mainly because I have to walk for exercise now and it was time. I am fond of John Travolta and Denzel Washington, so I picked this movie. John Travolta was thinner than I have seen him for a long time, and his profile was so chiseled, beautiful. He is a very good looking man. Denzel was a little too heavy as befitting the ordinary man he played, a dispatcher in the station who ended up becoming the negotiater the gangster insisted on having. I felt sad for Travolta because he was cast as the gangster taking people hostage on the train for ransome, which role I did not think taxed him at all. He just looked to me as though he was still feeling sad over the death of his son Jett which was seizure related. I thought it was too bad Travolta could not find a role that might have let him express his sadness better than this one did.
There was non stop action. People will like it, but it did not really give us anything new on crime. No new insight. Not much depth. Same old. Same old.
It did not reach nearly the depths in me that "The Hummingbird's Daughter" did. I hope someone will make that into a movie, and I hope they do a good job. I can picture John Travolta playing the part of the rich ranch owner finding a young daughter he never knew he had and learning to treasure her. I can see Denzel playing the part of his revolutionary friend who defies tradition and teaches the daughter to read and speak English and eventually has to flee into exile from Mexico. The daughter is all but murdered, and saved by a miracle due to her deep connection to the spirit, transcending death. John Travolta needs to make that kind of movie. If these Hollywood stars rely too heavily on crime for big careers, they end up seeming like movie gangsters themselves, benefiting from crime instead of fighting it. In this movie Denzel departs from playing 'The American Gangster" as he did in a previous movie and plays the victim, very well, too. But these guys need to look for and find greater roles. We hunger for some kind of spiritual uplifting now days. Financial titans like Madoff have let us down, revealing themselves to be real criminals. We are searching, searching for heroes to give us hope again.

Psychic sister Linda gives me a novel, Shantaram, which contains a detailed description of life in Bombay (Mumbai), scene of terrorist attacks

This novel, by Gregory David Roberts, is undoubtedly based on his real life as fugitive from Australia's maximum security prison system who escaped detection for years in Bombay. As events unfolded today on the news, I was amazed to learn that the attacks that took place in the Taj Mahal 5 star luxury hotel as well as a cafe called Leopold's are described by the author as where his fugitive protagonist Lin operated, hired by the Indian mafia. He participated in all kinds of criminal activity, working for a mafia overlord, which included trafficking in passports for those willing to pay the price, securing potent drugs for tourists, most often heroin or hashish. He met up with these tourists at the Taj Mahal or Leopold's Cafe mostly. The Mafia head was from Afganistan and also recruited Lin to go with him and a group of his men back to his native Afganistan to help his people fight the Russians, who were waging a savage war there at the time. A terrible trip is described taking place in the merciless mountains of Afganistan with the whole company killed except four men who came back barely alive from their wounds. Of course most of these men were Muslim as opposed to the Hindus of India who are the majority there.
Linda gave me this novel, insistent that I read it when Raymond and I went over to her house for lunch. I regard this as as psychic pickup by her of big trouble coming to that part of the world. She also received advanced warning of the massacre in Rowanda, undoubtedly because her daughter Carissa was in the Peace Corps there at the time. My son Dan purchased the novel Shantaram and told me sometime ago that it was such a riveting novel he could hardly lay down, and so it is, and these attacks reported today in that very milieu somewhat stunned me because I had gotten so engrossed in the novel which also delineates intimate knowledge of the life lived among the poorest of the poor in a slum adjacent to the Tag Mahal, where India's poor live in little makeshift huts, jampacked together. The fugitive lives there a number of months by turning himself into a kind of doctor because of his training in first aid, and uses medical supplies that come to him from the leper's colony. He also details the ravages of cholera and the monsoon and other such hazards that India must fight constantly. I learned more about what people go through on a daily basis living poor in India here than I have in any other book I have read. I also learned what the criminal element do, who are undoubtedly part of the terrorists who attacked the tourists at the present time. This novel was published in 2003 after the author was finally recaptured, served out his term, and established a multi media company when he came out of prison. Well he has written a novel that seemed to jump into the headlines today out of the past, terrorists carrying on as they do in the novel when many of the mafia figures and friends he knew die from the hard dangerous life they live, including his first best friend he met the moment he came off the plane. He was from a poor village trying to make a better living in Bombay (Mumbai) and he died there in the hectic life in the streets, due to an accident. The terrorists today have killed more than 80 people, believed to be mostly American and British, and others are being held hostage. And I can picture it all quite clearly because a good writer put down his experiences in this city and made them come alive! Writers can save lives with the journalistic clarity of their vision, showing us what we are up against.