I have been railing about the fact that so many films that I have seen recently are too damn long and would benefit from much tighter editing. But is it in fact the case that films are actually longer than they used to be? I intuitively thought they were but the data don’t seem to back me up.
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This is a documentary that by all rights should be offensive and yet it was likable. It tells the story of Ivan Thompson, a 60-year old cowboy from New Mexico who acts as a matchmaker between American men and Mexican women. He stumbled into this business after his own divorce when he placed an ad for a wife in Mexican newspapers and received about 80 responses. He realized that if there were that many Mexican women who were seeking American husbands, then he might be able to match them up, so he advertised his services to American men. The takers are usually older divorced men who seek more submissive women and think that Mexican women make better candidates.
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Last night, I binge-watched five episodes of The Rockford Files on Netflix in memory of James Garner who died on Saturday. It kept me way past my normal bedtime but it was my way of memorializing someone who gave me, and so many others, hours and hours of pleasure. Unfortunately, Netflix does not have episodes of Maverick or I would have watched those too.
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He died yesterday.

I loved watching James Garner from the time I first saw him in the cowboy TV series Maverick. He was perfect in the role of a wry nattily dressed card player roaming the west and getting into adventures. What made him unusual as a cowboy was that as far as possible he would try to avoid getting into fights (he did not like the idea of getting hurt and besides he did not want to mess up his clothes) and did not want to be a hero and preferred to use his wits to get out of trouble but at the same time his sense of what was right kept getting him involved on behalf of the downtrodden.
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I saw this film over the weekend and it was a huge disappointment. I was expecting big things because the central idea was interesting and it was critically acclaimed and won director Spike Jonze the 2014 Academy Award for best writing of an original screenplay. But I found that it really dragged.
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