For Timothy Corrigan, the road movie is ‘traditionally focused, almost exclusively, on men and the absence of women’ (1991: 143). David Laderman elucidates: Most road movies … retain a traditional sexist hierarchy that privileges the white heterosexual male, in terms of narrative and point of view. As in typical Hollywood films, the road movie tends to define the active impulse (here, to drive) relegating women characters to passive passengers and/or erotic destinations. (2002: 20)

A late Ming gazetteer for Hsiao-kan county in Hupeh province observed, after listing abuses in the assessment and exaction of various levies, that 'people living in the villages have to provide twice as much as those who live in towns, and those in economically distressed circumstances provide twice as much again as the [ordinary] countryfolk'.

'Ugggghhhhh!' she made a face at the packet. 'Oink, oink!' Cosmo laughed, waving a scratching near her face.

And now he's made The Number 23, a cheapie $30 million horror film about a man consumed with numerology.