2008-08-08

dreamer_easy: (australia)
2008-08-08 08:38 am

(no subject)

Ruddock takes aim at Labor over torture: "The Rudd government has flagged plans to make Australia a party to the United Nations' Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which the Howard government refused to ratify."

Australia to end human rights hypocrisy: "The federal government on Thursday issued a standing invitation to the United Nations Human Rights Council to visit Australia to monitor and report on human rights in the country."
dreamer_easy: (IBARW)
2008-08-08 12:02 pm

The Business of Fancydancing and Journey to Nyae Nyae

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! For more info, visit [livejournal.com profile] ibarw.

"So... what are you?

I snagged The Business of Fancydancing on the recommendation of [livejournal.com profile] qthewetsprocket. It's about four friends from the Spokane Reservation: one left, one tried to leave, one deliberately returned, and one took his own life. All of them face the hugely complicated question of the relationship between the rez and the wider world, and of their own identities (one is gay, one is half-Jewish).

I was struggling to think of what to say about it: Sherman Alexie's love of words and anecdotes, all the double-edged jokes, the moving performances, the time it takes to get used to the movie's style of storytelling... and then I hit a scene where two characters start quoting Hamlet back and forth, and my brain fell out of my ear.

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"When people saw my movies, I was very young. As you can see, I'm older now. But my heart and my soul are the same. Time hasn't really changed me."

I'd long been curious about the 1980 cult South African movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. You can easily Google up a ton of info and commentary about this weird little film, but what I'd like to direct your attention to is the documentary included on the DVD, Journey to Nyae Nyae, shot shortly before the movie's famous Namibian lead actor, credited as N!Xau (better rendered G!qau), passed away in 2003. Maddeningly, English subtitles have been omitted, so I had to use my shaky French to get the gist.

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Browsing randomly in the library I stumbled across They're A Weird Mob, a 1966 comedy about an Italian journalist who arrives in Sydney and has to cope with the local slang and customs. Hmmm, I thought, here's a possible candidate - perhaps it gives some insight into what it was like to be a post-war immigrant to Australia. No such luck; it turns out that "Nino Culotta" is a pseudonym for John O'Grady, and the story is fiction, not the autobiography I took it for at first. Plus it's pretty excruciating - basically one long joke about Funny Foreigners - which includes Aussies and their hilarious colonial slang. At least there aren't any bloody kangaroos. (It was pretty interesting to see what Sydney looked like in '66, though, two years before I was born. The Sydney Opera House is still under construction.)