Veera-Zaara

In this movie people like to dance. There are solos and giant productions, and all the time watching it, it never occurs to me what this has to do with India Pakistan relations. Singing, dancing, singing and dancing dream sequences, marriage ceremonies, jails, and trials, are all different ways the movie tries to show culture conflict. This all done to address one major thing: India and Pakistan don’t like each other. This is rooted in religion and land. Pakistan was formed in 1947 for the large Muslim population that didn’t want to live under Hindu rule after India gained independence from the British. The CIA world fact book says that there was conflict in 1947 and again in 1965 over control of Kashmir. They are both nuclear states, so the movie has the noble goal of addressing a problem that needs resolving. But Kashmir is not mentioned once in this movie. This conflict is shown through the love story of a Hindu from India and a Muslim from Pakistan (Veera and Zaara). It would be a big issue in both cultures if Hindu and a Muslim got married. It is still a big deal, but a belief that is not as strongly held with the younger generation. The movie is an attempt to have Indians and Pakistanis overcome their social and political barriers and live in peace.

English is used when someone wants to say something smart or important or philosophical. Judges are addressed as “Your Honor” and Veera has the fancy title of “Squadron Leader”. When the Pakistani version of Johnny Cochrane says to the defense attorney “Thank you for teaching me the value of truth and justice”, he says it in English. There is modeling after the British when it comes to the military, education or the court of law, so it is not a surprise when English words pop up in such settings. When the British colonized India in the 1800s (and had tremendous influence with the East India Tea Company in the 1600s) they established many British customs. Even after gaining independence India still has some of the same trappings of colonialism.

This movie has sweeping mountain landscapes, rural villages and rolling prairies but not much city is shown. To watch this movie one would think that India had the population of Wyoming. What is seen of the city is just major monuments or inside train stations or just outside prisons. Characters do not go parading down city streets talking about flowers, love or sunshine. These routines are saved for the countryside.

Songs bring people to the movie. That is what Wikipedia tells me. Also song and dance routines are a good way to lengthen any movie theatre experience into 3 hours. That helps if you want to get out of the Indian heat. Logically song and dance routines are a good way to incorporate a lot of different actors and actresses and film production people. It is just good for the Indian movie community to have many people participating in the movie process. This movie was done in a way that people in India who enjoy Bollywood movies expect. Obviously this movie doesn’t reflect the reality of India. The general public doesn’t fly around on helicopters or look like models. This style of film making is a means of telling a story. Mass producers of pop culture like to tell stories the same way, and Bollywood is no exception. It is a form that has worked in the past, so with a lot of rich peoples’ money involved the format doesn’t change. But the content does change. This movie tries to address political and religious differences the best way it knows how: with good looking people dancing and lip synching.

Beijing Bicycle

There is a noticeable difference in appearance between the poor and rich in Beijing. Though Communist in name the economic policies created in part by Deng Xiaoping have greatly increased industrialization and at the same time class inequality. Like in America, the upper class wear fancy clothes, drive nice cars, and have beautiful homes. The shopkeeper lives where he works. The bicycle messenger spends more than a month of working just to pay for his ride. He is from the country, and it is evident is used to being poor. Towards the middle of the movie he grabs his bicycle and screams, pleading with his high school antagonists. Everyone is aware of the inequality. The students know that, even publicly, they can subject the powerless to brutality. The expensive mountain bike is a status symbol to the student, and to the main character a way to provide him with a more comfortable way of life. Both are frustrated with their financial situations, and take actions to rise higher (monetarily).

People from the country are viewed as ignorant peasants. They don’t have skills the city needs, unless those skills are physical. As large masses of the rural population shift to an urban life they are faced with poverty. The economy is booming, but there are more people than there are jobs. The rural folk have fierce competition amongst themselves. In order to have a low paying bicycle runner job you must memorize all the streets and be swift, and even then you could be fired. People in the city, since there are more of them, are harder to define. What they all have in common is that their place in society is precarious. If you are from the country you have no money. If you are from the city you may be lucky enough to be employed, but there is no safety net in place for those who lose a job. Most people have to expend a tremendous amount of energy just to exist in China. The bicycle thief’s father has been promising for years to buy his son a bike. Yet he is faced with sending another child through education. People from the city are better connected and have more money, but they are confined, like rural people, by the world around them.

The streets are packed with cars and bicycles. The sidewalks are filled with people. There are main streets that run past sky scrappers and street venders, but the back roads are a confusing jumble of lefts and rights. Old men play card games outside their apartments while trucks filled with flour take sharp turns around them. Resources and goods need to be distributed throughout Beijing, but the process looks like a race (and is in part) and is not in the least bit orderly.

The United States likes to have lower, upper, and middle class living in completely different areas. Economic segregation is obvious in America. Things are different in China. In Beijing, a wealthy business owner can look out of his window and see a person sleeping in the streets. Shacks are neighboring posh apartments. The high rises standing above the poverty are monuments to hard work as well as exploitation.

There was going to be little repercussions for beating up the main character. The history of the bicycle is complex. But nobody cared about cutting through the subtleness. There was no reason to. Here is how it went down.
1. Kid throws rock at hip bicycle rider.
2. Kid is seen with some peasant guy.
3, Rock thrower gets beaten up.
From here there really isn’t an in depth discussion into what the main characters complicity is in the entire attempted murder thing. The bloody and hip bicyclist has one of his friends hold onto the main character. In the process of events the bicycle messenger gets beaten up. He could have gotten beaten up because he just crossed the wrong idiot thug. There was probably minimal thought behind the violence; there was little initiative for any the characters to deeply understand the situation. So they didn’t. The bicycle messenger was beaten up because he may have had something to do with the stoning, and there was no harm to them if they were wrong.

We were once warriors

The Maori value strength. As a man, strength is still the most honorable title one can receive; Whether the Maori are embracing their traditional roots or are living lost in the suburbs or underpasses the traits of a warrior are the greatest thing one can be. Physical ability is shown by many of the characters. Boogie transitions between both worlds. He first displays his power by stealing car radios, and in the end by emersing himself in his roots, and performing as part of the group warrior dance at Grace's funeral. Jake, along with most of Maori he hangs out with, is incredibly muscular and enjoys large amounts of drinking, punching, and to a lesser degree, stabbing.
The violence seems to originate from a frustrating confusion of what their life is supposed to be about. Each character is striving for purpose. In their own way, many of the children try to discover their culture. Boogie's older brother Ng, gets his face tattooed and jumped into a Maori gang. Boogie practices throughout the night a ritual warrior dance, and Grace reads and tells Maori stories. Natural and meaningful connections to the Maori past are viewed as the only salvation. The movie most sympathetically looks at Boogie's on going enlightenment. At the dinner table he says to his older brother that he likes his face tattoo. His brother asks if he wants one. He declines, saying that he wears his on the inside. In the movie the need for internal development is linked with, also, an abandoning of modern society. Boogie represents the model for how Maori can transition back to what they had been.
Although never out right defeated, the Maori moved out of the hills, their ancestral homes for thousands of years, and into a world that didn't have a need for them. The oppression of the Maori is invisible. The Maori live in dilapidated houses and are viewed as menaces by the local police department. There isn't an economy to support them. The oppression is a result of the policies of the 85% pakeha (basically white people) of the population. The whites are nowhere to be seen in terms of friendship. When white people are present, it is only to take a child away, and arrest or convict somebody. Jake Heke, the charismatic psychopath, loses his job, but doesn't worry, and waits for the welfare check. Being unemployed pays about as much as having a job. By embracing modernity, or at least, by existing in industrialized society, they have become refugees in their own country. They don't, or aren't allowed by the power structure, to participate in any meaningful way in the economic or political system, so they are stuck.
The worst elements of world are unleashed upon Grace. She is nurturing, and when Jake punches his wife, and is in charge of running the family. She takes on many of the injustices that happen to Maori (and also Maori women) in every day life. These injustices destroy her. Though she represents the cruelties that are subject to the Maori, and sometimes the evils that Maori do to other Maori, she is also a thread connecting past and present. She is buried in the hills her mother grew up in. Her death helps connect the family to their origins and also shows how a broken society can make the innocent victims. The rape committed against her could, I suppose, could just as easily happened in a traditional Maori society, but it doesn’t seem as likely that she would hang herself. The developed world left her with few outlets to find help.
The countryside is, like so many movies we have seen, shown in a positive light. The picnic scene is, unlike most of the movie, quiet (except when Jake talks) and beautiful. The funeral is held in the near mountain like regions of New Zealand. It is the most scenic place in the movie. The city is cold and violent. Mostly it is just ugly. The city is a place to get drunk and waste away. In the country, in the past, they were warriors, and the movie seems to say that to develop as humans that is where they will have to return.

Rabbit Proof Fence

Maps call the area of Western Australia, that Molly, Daisy and Gracie traversed, desert and grassland. The topography of the desert reminded me of the South West United States. Vegetation was scraggly looking, and was similar to Arizona, but hillier. The grasslands, which rolled on with gentle slopes, reminded me of areas I've driven through in Idaho in Wyoming. For the most part though, it was difficult to get a grasp on the terrain of Australia. For a while they would be stomping through trees and lush grass growing near a stream, and then it would be continious grasslands, followed finally by arid desert flats. This movie is more difficult to describe than the others since there is no central location for the charecters to inhabit. Each scene is a new place.
Geography and the progession of the movie are tied together. The movie is a story about 3 girls walking from Southwest australia to Northern Australia. The girls follow the fence that plows through the landscape. As Neville tracks them, he looks at an Australian map with the 3 rabbit fences detailed on it. The entire movie is focused on location, tracking, cities, and distances. The plot focuses on each charecter and how they interact with the landscape. To the girls the land is something that seperates them from their mother. To the tracker the land is a means of acquiring wealth, his knowledge of it is what gets him money, and possibly his child back. For Neville, in this movie, he views the land as a sort of strategic aboriginal Where's Waldo game. The movie shifts from the perspectives and locations of each of these main charecters, but everything is united by the slow progression of 3 children across a desert.
This movie gets some people angry. Others think it is a dramatic and historic portrait of the racist injustices done by the Australian Government against the Aboriginies. Colonial forces make the lives of the native inhabitant horrible. White people on boats are responsible for the deaths of millions world wide. We all have read and know about that. But as history creeps into the present, the crimes of today are not looked at in the same way. Was Neville a racist, or as some writers on the internet say, beloved by the aboriginees. It was the 1930s, Neville was in charge of enforcing the Australian Government's control over the native population. Realistically, this movie is overly dramatic, and portrays the white charecters as one dimensional. Was Neville a racist, probably, but I doubt that he acted like he was shown in the movie. Did he like cricket, could he play a mean saxophone? There has got to be something more to him than was portrayed. Even Kim Jong Il (a pretty terrible person) enjoys a good movie every now and then. In The Rabbit proof fence even the nuns are jerks. There are debates about the historical accuracy of this movie. But really, though the quantity of forced family seperation is debatable, the fact that it happened is less so. Awful things happened to the aboriginees. There are policies of the federal government against this group that are available for anyone to look up. I think why this movie stirs controversy though, is because even if it is showing actual historical happenings, and the lives of real people, it does so at the expense of creating characatures of the bad guys. The debate goes on as to how involved the Australian government should be involved in Aboriginee affairs. Part of the debate by Australians would likely come from guilt, but another part arises on what is the proper way to raise a family. Aborignees and the Australian Government don't see eye to eye. This conflict will continue. In the future, when past historical autrocities don't sting so hard, a more accurate picture of what is happening in Australia will emerge. For know we get some of the story, but a complete understanding at present time seems unattainable.