51 años, 9 meses, 4 días

Okay, so apparently, they made a movie of Love in the Time of Cholera, which...weird. I just can't picture Marquez's work translating into films--maybe it doesn't. I guess we'll see. But anyway, weird. The sense I got from the trailer was that Florentino and Fermina were star-crossed lovers and blah, blah, his love for her is true, so he waits fifty years for her, but when reading the book, I remember finding Florentino rather pathetic--Fermina even finds him rather pathetic after she is forcibly removed from the town they live in, and she ends up loving the man she actually marries and dismissing her affair with Florentino as teenage foolishness, much like Romeo and Juliet's actual love affair was (which is what makes the suicide so god damn stupid). Florentino is not exactly sympathetic; he's not as steadfast and true a lover as he thinks he is; he sleeps with 600 women while he waits for Fermina's husband to die, but contends none of them "counted" or whatever because he never loved them--and I think they were mostly prostitutes and married women. This is not a romantic story; it's a bizarre one, and that is why I liked it. I think the movie is, um, leaving all the weirdness out. But trailers are reductive, I guess.

Plus! It seems as though the entire soundtrack is by Shakira, which so does not fit in my head. Shakira and Gabo are both from Colombia, and there the similarities end. And I even like Shakira, okay? I own all her albums, and I had a really big crush on her in high school (before she died her hair blonde and released that English album). Wait! That's the problem: when I think of Shakira, now I only think of that American crap she does, like that heinous duet with Beyonce, but she's actually capable of much better stuff than that. So maybe she can write songs for this movie. As long as she wrote them in Spanish. I mean, her English is really good, and she allegedly taught herself the language by reading poetry, which I find awesome, but for some reason, her English songs kind of tank. (Did you know I can speak Spanish? I can. Kind of.)

Okay, so I just investigated this Shakira business, and she has three songs on the soundtrack, one of which she's already released (to my knowledge), and they're all in Spanish, so that's good news. And actually that song that I already know kind of does fit with Florentino's lovesick deal. How he imagines his lovesick deal to be--how tortured he is because he lost Fermina, and he only thinks of her more as the days go on.