Do the right thing

Cultural difference is something you cannot really understand until you experience it yourself. I do not understand it before I study abroad in another country and identify myself as “foreigner” for the first time. I’ve told in my communication class that it is people’s nature to view things that is different from what they are familiar with as “strange” instead of thinking that their culture may also seems “strange” from other people’s perspective. I remember that once an American asked a Chinese student: “Do you Chinese eat dogs?” and the Chinese student responded: “Do you American eat turkey? Turkey is our favorite pet in China.” Of course turkey is not our favorite pet but I think what this means is to remind people who think they are in the most civilized and prestigious culture that sometimes things you think is normal may be weird in another culture too so the only way we can get along with each other is to view people who do not like us as different instead of strange or inferior.

“Do the Right Thing” vividly pictured a black community in Brooklyn and did a great job to present us a real African American lifestyle. The typical black culture makes the only white neighborhood seems very incongruous, especially in that historical period of time. Although Sal tried so hard to get himself and his family to fit in this community, the anger African American had towards white people make all his effort in vain at the end. I was moved when I heard Sal saying that he was proud that his pizza feed those people and he enjoyed to grow old with them. At that moment I thought it is very possible for black and white to get along well, however, what happened next made me question this.

Radio Raheem’s death in the movie was an accident, the police man may be responsible for that but there is no way for all the neighbors to blame on Sal. People just found the pizza restaurant to be the only place they can give full vent to their anger. It is even more ridiculous that they tried to destroy the Koran grocery store. The Koran guy saved his store and family by telling those black men that they are the same. He is right, they are same and equal although they have different skin colors. However, the anger removed people’s wise and the violence made the peace impossible.

The first and the last shot in the movie are very interesting. The movie began with a black woman dancing aggressively. Her facial expression and her body movement expressed her anger, pain and despair. She wanted to fight against what oppressed her and that is what all African Americans want. This also explained their behavior later. At the end of the movie, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advocates nonviolence, is followed by a quote from Malcolm X, which says, in effect, that nonviolence is fine, but only as long as it works. According to Canby, the movie and the quotation at the end wanted to show people that it is necessary to have a spirit to fight back when they were facing injustice. However, I still believe that violence is never a way to resolve a problem and that may be why Martin Luther King is remembered and respected by more people comparing with  Malcolm X.

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9905E5DF153AF933A15756C0A96F948260

  

Shaft 2000

 First, I do not like the idea that the new Shaft is the nephew of John Shaft, it sounds odd and I think it will be better if the character could be the same Shaft. Then comparing these two Shafts, the new one’s characteristic is much less attractive. The old Shaft is a very unique black American who has his own special style while the new Shaft seems more common. Moreover, I do not like the frequent use of dirty words in this movie, they sound unnatural for me. 

Second, the role setting of the new Shaft is very different from that in the old one. There is not a very clear bad guy in the old Shaft while the bad guy in the 2000 movie is very obvious—a white rich guy who is a “race killer”. This is also because of the different racial background from 1971 to 2000. In 1971, it is not appropriate to set a clear negative attitude towards white elite and target them as race killers. Although the new Shaft clearly brings in the racial topic and tries to use the different role setting to challenge people’s ideology, it does not achieve this goal as effective as the John Shaft movie in 1971. Part of reason is that although the movie tries to make the audience channel their anger on the white rich guy and make Shaft more heroic through comparison, the character (Shaft) himself is nothing more than a good gunner. The way he uses to kill or punish those bad guys is not special or smart.

The ending of this film disappointed me. All those judge scenes in the movie seem try to make people question the legal system but that is not the goal for this movie. It is supposed to be a movie that is all about a special hero according to its name (Shaft), however, it fails to do that, the main character is not a major focus in this story.

I feel really excited when the same music started, however, the music does not match this film as much as it matches the classic one. But I cannot deny that due to the technology development, this new movie is more exciting to watch comparing with the old one.

      

John Shaft

       Shaft is a very interesting movie in which you can see how African American’s culture being mixed with but also differentiates from Hollywood’s ideology. It is a James Bond film in African American version—A though guy with great sense of humor and good taste, saving people’s lives and having sex with beauties. However, it reflects and mocks racism by making Shaft not only black but also an angry one.

       It is clear that he does not trust white people, even Vic who always helps him. His attitude towards Vic and those black guys is very different. He can help and forgive black guys who hurt him before because they are black and in Shaft’s heart, they are brothers. On the contrary, he cannot treat Vic as brothers because he is a white man. Another example is his attitude towards black women and white women. We can tell that he is serious about the black woman who loves him; he is very gentle and caring to her. However, he plays a player’s role to Lisa, the white woman who has a crush on him; he just wants to have sex with her and then ask her to leave. We should acknowledge that although he is very capable, he has not been treated equally as white men in the society and that is where his anger comes from, for instance, the taxi driver who prefers to take a white man than Shaft.

       As Tidyman mentioned in his film review, although shaft has a swinging bachelor pad in Greenwich Village and works out of an office in Times Square, he always hang out in Harlem and other black neighborhoods. “His clients and friends come from the streets, and his cases often involve various black mobsters and/or radicals”. The difference strengthened by the society between black and white influences Shaft’s self-identification and also makes us view him more as a black person than an agent. In another world, his race contributes more to who he is than his occupation.

       The music in this movie is very famous. They are also originals of classic black music. They strengthened Shaft’s identity and make this movie different from normal Hollywood gangster films. As I wrote before, music in this film also contributes as means to highlight black ideas.

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/shaft.html

Faat Kine

As Gadjigo said in his film review, Faat Kine is “writer-director’s laser-sharp commentary of post-independence in Senegal”. Faat Kine is an independent woman who was born at the same time as Senegalese independence. She is a successful station manager of a multinational oil company as well as a single mother who never married. Women’s lives are the most powerful mirror of a country’s civilization. Different lives among Kine, her mother and her daughter reflected the changes in Senegal.

Kine was an ambitious woman who dreamed of becoming a lawyer after her education. However, she was seduced by Gaye, her philosophy professor, and left alone pregnant in her last year of secondary school, just months before her final exam. She was then expelled from school, and the unfair treatment showed a society that was controlled by men and weak to protect women. Kine’s pregnancy was a shame for her family, her conservative father even tried to kill both his daughter and her newborn. It was Mammy, Kine’s mother, who shielded the children with her body from her husband’s vicious blows. Mammy used to be a very powerless role in her family, but after decades, she became the most respectable women in Kine’s house. The movie indicated us that then Kine became a successful woman partially because of her beauty and sexual attraction. All of Kine’s encounters when she was young showed a post-colonial time when many waver at the crossroads of change and conservatism.

However, everything is changing. By the time that Kine’s children are graduated from high school, she is already a strong and liberated woman. She fights back whenever people want to take advantage of her and has control over her personal life. She works hard to get her children higher education to achieve the dream she failed to reach before. Her son, different from his father, represents a new generation that fight for democracy and equality. He tries his best to protect his mother and his generation is the hope for the revolutionary future.

Because of the colonization and globalization, many African countries were affected by Western ideologies. They adopt new ideals such as liberation and equality and fight against conservative traditions. Faat Kine showed the process of changing, from an old African world to a new free world. Maybe it is a good thing but who knows what has been lost during this transaction?http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/Rgadjigo.html

Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon the Time in the West is a great western movie which tells a story about a widow competes with a railroad tycoon and a cold blood killer who try to rob the land bought by her died husband. However, the main focus of this movie is not the story but the characters. All the characters have their own goals but the desire for surviving brought them together. The races behind the main characters are something that challenges the ideology at that time. Frank, he cold blood killer, who apparently is the bad guy in the movie, is a White American; Cheyenne, the bandit but also a ‘green wood hero’ is half Native American and half White American; Harmonica, the avenger, obviously a positive role, is a Native American.

The movie challenges the ideology for most Americans at that time, which is Native Americans are inhuman, fierce and cruel while those cowboys in the west are brave, tough and good, by totally changed the normal roles of a white man and a Native American in movies. The audience has to accept that the nasty, cruel killer is a white man and the mysterious, attractive, and innocent guy is a Native American who was hurt and humiliated by white men before. The change of roles help people give up the stereotype of a certain race.

Another thing the director did to challenge people’s ideology is that he chose Henry Fonda, the actor who always play a righteous man, hero or gentleman to play the role of a heartless killer which, in another way, challenged our habitual thought.

The music in this movie is very famous; almost every main character has their own music that represents their personalities. Another thing I found was very interesting is their attitude towards death. Being in a situation that people can die in seconds, no character in this film is afraid of death. Harmonica’s brother choose to die instead of linger on his brother’s shoulder; Frank wants to pay anything including his life to know who Harmonica is; Harmonica doesn’t want Frank to be killed by his rebellious followings; Mr. Morton wants to be close to the water even he is dying. Water is a symbol of hope and fortune in the movie. Frank and Morton try so hard to get it even at the cost of their lives.

http://i.mtime.com/mrbig/blog/4875557/2/

The Searchers

To be honest and say, i really did not enjoy this movie. Although i know it must mean something historically--a dark look at the American frontier and the bitter struggles between the Indians and the settlers in the years following the Civil War, a lot of shooting and editing problems in it made me feel uncomfortable. However, i also noticed that it is not fair to judge an old movie based today's stander since the techniques cannot be compared. The Searchers told a story about two cultures that cannot tolerant each other--Native Americans and White Americans. It may intend to say that the hatred between Native Americans and White Americans is caused by misunderstanding and we should not stereotype or kill each other. However, this intention does not seem obvious to me, instead, i found this movie itself was stereotyping those two groups.

Firstly, i do not like the way the movie  portrayed Native Americans. It seems to me that they are stupid, violent, and inhuman in the movie. However, those are only misunderstandings White Americans have towards them, not the truth. They have their culture, their way of living and their emotion, however, i cannot see any of them through the movie. One idea i think the movie was delivered was that kill is understandable and reasonable between White and Native Americans.

Secondly,  i really do not think that many sound effects in the movie are necessary. Suspicious music appears frequently, which are distracting and annoying. Also, there were a lot of irrelevant stories going on which made me fail to concentrate on the searching process. The storyline was not very clear and sometimes, the director tried so hard to bring some humor to the movie which, from my point of view, hurt the story. Something that really needs to be shown, such as the process of Ethan's change and the difficulties they were facing when searching for Debbie, was not clear in the movie. So i found the story to be unrealistic because i cannot understand why it took them several years to find Debbie and how Eathen's attitude changed.

Another thing that disappointed me was that there was no exciting moment in the movie. Even there were, they ended too fast.  I was expecting a climax since the movie begin, but i never found one. I assumed that there would be one when Scar saw Martin in his temp and i expected a fight between them. However, the story ended in a second after Martin shoted him without showing his face. I do not know is that because of the media regulation at that time or lack of advanced techniques, the gun shot scenes never appeared. Sometimes we only hear the sound of shoting but no image of people got shot.
http://classicfilm.about.com/od/westerns/fr/TheSearchers.htm

The Panama Deception

I've been thinking about this documentary after i watched it and i have to confess that it had a great impact on me and made me think about American politics differently. I am a political science minor and thinking about getting a PHD degree in international relations in the future. I choose to study it here, in America, is because i thought US was a symbol of the free world, a place that fully support democracy. However, not only the video we saw today but also America's attitude towards what is going on in Egypt now, showed that democracy, as a way of improving people's lives, is only for western countries. For many other places in the world, it is just a excuse for America to control them.

The documentary begins with showing the beauty of the Panama City and civilians' happy daily lives with light music. Then it suddenly changes to a scene of bombing at night with sound of people screaming and gun shooting. It implies that comfortable lives for people in Panama were broken by the invasion. Then scenes are changed back and forward between the interviews of people who witnessed the attack and the interviews of the US officials who were in charge of the invasion. After hearing people in Panama talking about the situation of innocent people died, family members being killed by the military, audiences find the officials’ announcements, for example, no Panama citizens died because of the invasion, to be extremely ridiculous. The comparison clearly differentiates deceptions from the truth.

Then the documentary talks about the history of the relationship between US and Panama and tries to find out the real reason for the invasion. During this process, the scenes are changed back and forward between the reality in Panama and the media report of Panama in US, such as the TV announcer’s report and the headline of mainstream newspapers. By doing that, the documentary recalls all the excuses Bush used to explain the invasion and proves that all these excuses are lies. The most ironic moment was that when the previous scene showing that people in Panama were suffering, the following scene changed to Bush’s speech and he announced that Panama now was free. The documentary finally reveals the real reason for attacking Panama is not to protect Americans in Panama, but to ensure US’s control over Panama.

Next, the documentary explained why citizens in US could all being fooled during that time. It showed that the media was actually under government’s control. Journalists did not have the freedom they were supposed to have. Moreover, people in US seems to be less critical and suspicious about their mass media or government because they know they have democracy, so they just trust whatever they were told,

The Panama Deception is really a great movie and I feel so lucky that I had a chance to watch it. The documentary itself never said what deception is and what reality is, however. A lot of comparisons the director uses make it easy for audiences to distinguish lies and truth. As Ryan mentioned in her film review, the camera works and the editing techniques in this documentary are not the most outstanding part, however, the overall significance of The Panama Deception is to be an impressive source of information on an event the US government would sooner have us forget.


http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/CineastePanamaDeception.html