JANUARY SALE!
Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off!FIND EVENTS AND APPEARANCES HERE.
I admit I have a soft spot for Keanu Reeves. I think it may be more for the actual person than the screen personae, but I enjoy them too. There are so many things I like about him on and off-screen. He has roots in Hawaii, like my husband. He’s a Canadian citizen, which speaks for itself. His partner is a gray-haired artist only a few years younger, a rarity among movie stars. And when I saw Bertolucci’s Little Buddha in Italy 30 years ago with Susan Sontag whispering simultaneous translation in my year, I found him completely believable as Siddhartha.
I would love it if you watched Good Fortune, a film written and directed by Aziz Ansari, who stars as a down-on-his-luck gig worker, along with Reeves as a sort of apprentice angel, Seth Rogen as a venture capitalist zillionaire, Keke Palmer as lovely and determinedly hopeful union organizer, and Sandra Oh as a powerful supervisory angel, keeping tabs on Reeves and many others. There’s also a great lineup of performances by minor characters.
The film turns on a sort of prince and pauper structure, where Ansari’s character is offered the opportunity to trade places with Rogen’s. It’s well done, engaging, and a fresh take. One of the things I liked most about the film is the contrast it affords with many movies and TV shows that focus on characters who are struggling, disadvantaged by dominant social attitudes and structures. I often—not always—get the feeling that those filmmakers see their characters as icons of pathos and more symbols of inequity than full human beings with capacity, complexity, anger and compassion, need and generosity. Good Fortune has none of this, and because everyone depicted is a mixed bag of everything that makes us human, it feels true.
I’m also on a kick these days about redemption, the ability to learn from experience and change. On our most recent podcast episode, François Matarasso and I talked about the too-common and repugnant social attitudes that reduce people to one thing and see them as irrevocably doomed to a life shaped by whatever deprivations and disasters have befallen them. It’s a pernicious attitude that to me has little basis in fact. I can’t count the number of people I know who’ve risen from the mucky ground in which they were planted to bloom in beauty. We see the path of redemption as made by walking (to paraphrase Spanish poet Antonio Machado): learning through not only one’s own experience but by drawing from the great well of culture filled to the brim with others’ stories.
In Good Fortune, the characters walk that path and grow. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
“Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite, from the Good Fortune soundtrack, possibly the most psychedelic music video ever.