The Visitor

I was uber lazy this weekend. I think I wore myself out being such an angry bitch last week that I needed time to recharge my bitch-o-meter.

I spent lots of time sleeping and lounging on the couch. I went to Longs. I walked into the supermarket at one point and then walked right back out because I didn't want to deal with the crowd. I managed to do the dishes and some laundry, and then spent some time staring out the window into the back yard. It was nice.

Yesterday I watched "The Visitor" on the Starz channel. This is a channel Hubs somehow convinced Comcast to give us for free -- I forget exactly how or why this happened. Anyway, Starz ocassionally has some good movies. "The Visitor" is one of them.

This movie stars Richard Jenkins, whom you've never heard of but you've seen in things like "Burn After Reading" and "Six Feet Under." He usually plays the dad in movies. In "The Visitor" he plays a widowed professor who lives in Connecticut but has an apartment in New York that he seldom visits. One day business forces him to visit NY and he is surprised to find a couple living in his apartment. They thought they'd been legitimately renting it from someone.

He allows them to stay in the apartment while they look for another place. In the meantime they develop a friendship and he takes an interest in the African drums, which his new roommate teaches him to play. Instead of merely existing, he begins to enjoy life again.

Then, one of the roommates is arrested and detained without cause, other than that he is an illegal immigrant. We come to realize this movie is actually a commentary on illegal immigration and whether it is right or wrong to detain illegal immigrants for no reason other than they are living in the country illegally, and to then imprison them indefinitely, sometimes for years. In this post-9/11 era, the government can apparently pluck people out of their homes and send them wherever it pleases them, and no one has any recourse.

Is this right?