![]() With many incensed locals out for Japanese blood (though they remain uncertain of “the Chinaman’s” ethnicity), Grover is forced into hiding, while Sophie is made a town pariah. Sophie and Grover’s friendship swiftly becomes the subject of invasive gossip - chiefly stoked by neighborhood busybody and self-appointed moral guardian Ruth (Diane Ladd) - that takes a more vindictive turn in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombings. As Grover recovers, he reveals himself to be both an American citizen and prodigiously green-fingered, bonding closely with Anne and building a tender rapport with her adult niece Sophie (Nicholson) - an unmarried loner yearning for more life than Salty Creek has to offer. Received with bewilderment by the townspeople, who mistake him for a Chinese immigrant, he’s placed in the reluctant care of local Missionary Ladies’ Society head Anne (Martindale), a kindly but no-nonsense widow whose chief joy in life is her florally abundant garden. The “yellow foreigner” in this case is the distinctively named Grover Ohta (“Letters From Iwo Jima’s” Takashi Yamaguchi, making his English-lingo debut), a handsome, artistically inclined Japanese-American who arrives in Salty Creek with a violent jolt: Extensively bloodied and bruised from a racially motivated beating, he’s literally dumped in the town by a passing bus. Greenwald avoids underlining the point too emphatically, though her screenplay pointedly inscribes the staggered levels of racism that, in 1941, keep the fictitious South Carolina town of Salty Creek in fragile order: “I don’t hold to waitin’ on no yellow foreigner,” a black maid pithily tells her white employer - an instance of bitter irony that might have sprung from the pages of Paul Haggis’s “Crash” screenplay. If the last 15 years of indie production models have hardly been kind to femme-driven projects of this delicate nature, “Sophie’s” core themes have gained an unintended degree of social urgency in a post-9/11 context: While Trebaugh’s narrative centers on the toxic hostility of American-Japanese relations in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the parallels with America’s still-rampant Islamophobia in the current century are all too recognizable. ![]() Some of the best-selling smart home tech included the Amazon Smart Plug, Ring Video Doorbell 2, TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Mini Outlet, and the iRobot Roomba 690.Augusta Trebaugh’s novel of the same title was published, coincidentally enough, in the same year that “Songcatcher” hit screens Greenwald reportedly spent the better part of a decade writing and funding her adaptation. Read more: Amazon reveals the top-selling items of the season as it announces 'record-breaking' holiday salesĪmazon reported that a record number of smart home devices were sold this year, and customers used Alexa for help shopping more than three times as many times this year as they did in 2017. Alexa is now usable with a wide variety of devices ranging from watches and laptops to thermostats and smoke detectors. The Echo Dot and Echo were among the most popular items sold on Amazon during the holiday season and new devices from companies like Bose and Sonos are being designed with built-in Alexa support. The Amazon Alexa app helps users customize "skills" used to command their smart home devices with the Alexa virtual assistant. People who gifted smart home devices like Amazon's Echo Dot speaker helped make the Alexa companion app the most-downloaded app in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store on Christmas Day. Shoppers are eagerly adopting Alexa into their homes and Amazon couldn't be happier the world's largest online retailer is currently leading the wave of new smart home technology. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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