The Mexican

The Mexican is a 2001 American comedy film directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, with a plot that is a mixture of romantic comedy, adventure and road movie.

The script was originally intended to be filmed as an independent production without major motion picture stars, but Roberts and Pitt, who had for some time been looking for a project they could do together, learned about it and decided to make it. The movie was then advertised as a typical romantic comedy star vehicle, somewhat misleadingly, as the script does not focus solely on the Pitt/Roberts relationship and the two share relatively little screen time together. Ultimately, the film earned $66.8 million at the U.S. box office.

Plot

The story follows Jerry Welbach (Brad Pitt) as he travels through Mexico to find a valuable antique gun, The Mexican, and smuggle it into the United States. Five years earlier, Welbach had caused a traffic accident in which he hit the car of local mobster Arnold Margolese (Gene Hackman), who was jailed for five years after the police searched his car following the crash, finding someone tied up in his trunk. In compensation for the jail time, Welbach has been sent on various errands by Margolese's second-in-command, Bernie Nayman (Bob Balaban). Retrieving the gun will be his final errand. Welbach has a girlfriend, Samantha (Julia Roberts), whom he argues with constantly and who leaves Jerry prior to the trip over his lack of commitment to their relationship.

Mexican

Mexican may refer to:

See also

The Mexican (short story)

"The Mexican" is a 1911 short story by American author Jack London. It was filmed in 1952 as The Fighter starring Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb.

Background

Written during the Mexican Revolution, while London was in El Paso, Texas, "The Mexican" was first published in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1913 it was republished by Grosset & Dunlap in the collection of short stories The Night Born. The protagonist is based on the real-life "Joe Rivers," the pseudonym of a Mexican revolutionary whose boxing winnings supported the Junta Revolucionaria Mexicana, a group of revolutionaries-in-exile. Joe Rivers eventually retired from boxing and became an ice deliveryperson in El Paso.

Plot summary

The story centers around Felipe Rivera, the son of a Mexican printer who had published articles favorable to striking workers in the hydraulic power plants of Río Blanco, Veracruz. The workers are locked out, and the federal troops are sent against them. Rivera escapes the massacre by climbing over the bodies of the deceased—including those of his mother and father. He makes his way to El Paso, Texas where he comes into contact with the Junta Revolucionaria Mexicana. He volunteers to serve the Revolution at the office of the Junta, who, suspicious, put him to work doing menial labor.

LD

LD may refer to:

In science and mathematics:

The logarithm of base 2, , from the Latin logarithmus dualis

In technology:

Ice (Dukaj novel)

Ice (Polish: Lód) is a Janusz A. Zajdel, European Union Prize for Literature and Kościelski awards-winning novel written in 2007 by the Polish science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj, published in Poland by Wydawnictwo Literackie. The novel mixes alternate history with science fiction elements, in particular, with alternative physics and logic.

Ice will be published in English by Atlantic Books in June 2012; and possibly in other languages too.

Universe

The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.

Ice (Sorokin novel)

Ice (Russian: Лёд, Lyod) is a 2002 novel by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The story is set in a brutal Russia of the near future, where the Tunguska meteor has provided a mysterious cult with a material which can make people's hearts speak. The book is the first written part of Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, although the second part in the narrative; it was followed by Bro in 2004 and 23,000 in 2006.

Reception

Jon Fasman reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Times, and wrote that it "provides a head-scratching pleasure and deceptive quickness similar to that found in the novels of Haruki Murakami". Fasman continued: "Ice is a thriller in the truest sense: In addition to a swift and sure plot, reading it affords the thrill of discovering something new. Like Michel Houellebecq, Sorokin obsesses over the ways that the needs and decay of the body betray us, even if he lacks that author's haughty, nihilistic French grimness. Murakami writes with more whimsy and a similar feel for the pleasure of a swift, humming plot, but Sorokin is less burdened with nostalgia, less preoccupied with loss and a sense that life is better elsewhere."Ken Kalfus of The New York Times wrote: "In his frigid antihumanism, Sorokin parts company with Russian satirists like Gogol, Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha and, more recently, Viktor Pelevin. Jamey Gambrell, who has produced luminous translations of lyrical contemporary Russian writers like Tatyana Tolstaya, transforms Sorokin's staccato cadences into a hard-boiled English that suits the novel's brutality, especially in its violent early chapters. But even with help from a sensitive translator, American readers taking a whack at the novel with their own ice hammers may have trouble finding its heart, and even more trouble getting it to speak."