You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry
I rented the 2007 film The Painted Veil last night on a whim. The cinematography is gorgeous, but the pacing is hit-or-miss. In one scene, Edward Norton (in his pre-Hulk days) walks into a cholera ward in rural 1927 China, and nearly vomits into his cloth face mask. The costume piece looks a little too familiar in 2022. He spends the rest of the film trying to convince the rural, superstitious villagers to do the basic things that will stop the epidemic: Stop bathing in the same river you pull your drinking water from, and stop burying bodies in the riverbank. The town’s well water is also contaminated, so we have to seal off the well. You cannot keep dead bodies in your house, even for religious rites. You have to bury them, or burn them. He’s trying to save them, and they hate him for it. They also hate him because he’s a British expatriate in a country ravaged by colonialism, and he has little regard for their culture or religion, especially in the face of