The Darjeeling Limited
Road to Morocco (1942): In their third colonial-imperialist "Road to" movie Bob Hope and Bing Crosby take a wacky romp through North Africa. My, isn't Morocco backward!
The Guru (1969): The third Merchant Ivory feature stars Michael York as a George Harrison-esque rock star who goes to India so a Ravi Shankar stand-in can teach him the sitar. The meeting of worlds ends at an impasse, but not before York has co-opted India's culture for the British music industry. So it goes.
The Sheltering Sky (1990): Paul Bowles' novel about an American intellectual couple adrift in post-WWII Africa deconstructs the Western gaze upon foreign lands. Not so with Bernardo Bertolucci's sensual, gorgeous but terminally waffling adaptation, which reduces the source to bickering Yanks John Malkovich and Debra Winger meeting Africans who are no more than mystical (and of course never-subtitled) Others.
The Rules of Attraction (2002): Late in Roger Avary's rotten-to-its-core Bret Easton Ellis take, trust-fund asswipe Kip Pardue recounts his whirlwind trip through Europe--a dense, four-minute block of ugly Americanism that'd make even Hostel's leads cringe. "Saw the Tate. Saw Big Ben. Ate a lot of weird English food. It rained a lot; it was expensive; and I'm jonesing. So I split for Amsterdam."
Heading South (2005): Lorded over by grand dame Charlotte Rampling, a group of rich white women partake in Haiti's "sex tourism" industry, throwing untold cash at the island's hot (and desperate) young thangs. This is the evil twin of ugly Americanism, with director Laurent Cantet so unambiguous and self-righteous in his condemnation of its libidinous subjects that you may be driven deaf by the tongue-clicking.
The Darjeeling Limited (2007): Indispensably wealthy American brothers go to "experience something" in India, "probably one of the most spiritual places on earth." After all, that's what it's there for.
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