Whale rider

This movie started out so sad with the mother giving birth to twins and having the baby boy die along with the mother, leaving only the baby girl, Pai The father is heartbroken and meanwhile all the grandpa, Koro wanted was to have a grandson, so he could become the tribes leader. Koro can not understand his sons grief of just losing his wife and baby son. The Koro tells the grandmother to take the baby girl away and as quoted in the movie, “you would almost think he never wanted her to be born.” It flash forwards to a few years later when Pai and Koro seem attached at the hip riding a bicycle through the countryside just as happy as can be. The father seems out of the picture and visits every now and then and on his latest visit he decides to take Pai with him. This movie has terrible acting and the title seemed to have nothing to do with the movie until the father is taking Pai home with him and she sees a whale in the ocean. These random outburst of singing between the Pai and grandmother make no sense what so ever. It is a very confusing movie. When Koro decides not to go with her father and returns to her grandparents they want nothing to do with them. Instead they start a school for boys in order to prepare them to become a chief. Pai will spy on all the classes and learn the chants and how to fight. When Koro finds out he is furious and Pai just doesn’t understand why she can not join. Pai asked her uncle to teach her how to fight, its really funny because of how out of shape he is to see him do all these fighting moves with a stick. Koro takes his students of young boys out with him to the middle of the ocean and throws his necklace in the water and says whoever brings it back to him will become the leader. None of the boys can but a few days later Pai’s uncle takes her out and she is able to retrieve it. The whole things with the whales in the water and Koro trying so hard to get them back into the water I didn’t get at all. Then Pai gets onto of one of the whales and rides it into the ocean, it’s so weird. You think she is dead but somehow survives it and ends up in the hospital. Then the movie just kid of ends with a celebration into the water and the men row away in this beautiful boat. 

Manufactured landscapes

The beginning of the movie killed me, how many rows can you show of people doing the same exact thing over and over and over again! They march all their employees out every day and they all look like clones, all dressed the same, in a pattern of 5 rows, four people deep. The get talked down to like little school children of everything they did bad the day before. This movie gave me a headache with doing the same thing over and over again inside the factory. I get that this artist was inside the factories to see where all these manufactured materials start but he didn’t have to show every little action in so much detail. It was sad to hear some of these peoples stories. Such as the one where at one village where it was also a site for recycled products such as TV monitors and when they compacted them down to size lead would leak out and when it rained the lead would pour into the lakes and streams. It got so bad that they now needed to send away for their water. This movie makes me think how lucky I am to be in America, the land of opportunities and the privilege to go to college and get a great job not sit at a desk all day doing one action repeatedly. Like the girl who had worked at the factory for 6 years and said she can do over 400 breakers a day! That looked like very tedious work! I like the comment that the guy said about ships being able to connect us and their part of the reason globalization has been able to take on the proportion that it has. Another story that was disheartening was the little boys who worked neck deep in oil mills, hauling buckets of oil. It is very dangerous and cheap work, my heart went out to them. As the movie progressed I start to like it a bit more, I like how it goes to a place of manufactured landscapes, gives a little story about it then shows the artist, Canadian photographer- Edward Burtynsky pictures of that place. People pointed out through out the film that his photos make this manufactured landscape look beautiful, I have to disagree on that, natural is better. It was stated in the film that, these people look at work “for their country”. The worlds largest damn took 17 years to complete but kept out floods, helped with transportation and electricity. 1,100,000 had to relocate to work on the damn, that is shocking to me! 13 cities had to be moved to be flattened out to make way for this damn. The people living there were the ones being paid to tear down their own communities. The urbanization in China is like no where else in the world, what used to be 70% agriculture and 30% urban is now 70% urban and only 30% agriculture. “We are changing the nature of this planet” was quoted and I strongly believe in this, we are taking a beautiful atmosphere and turning into ugly sky rises.  

War Photographer

From the very first scene in this movie I could tell it was going to be great! It shows a man holding a camera up close with smoke burning in the background and a quote appears that reads, “If your picture isn’t good enough, you weren’t close enough. The only negative I got from this movie was that some parts were not in English so as they were discussing the photographs I was reading what they were saying instead of looking at the actual photographs. They say a photographer portrays people in a way that no one else can and I believe Jim does this. He has so much courage to go straight up to people when they are in so much despair and take pictures. Such as when the mother was crying over her sons coffin, he caught her emotion in a way no one else could. It was quoted in the movie that in war, civilized behavior is suspended, this masquerade and war photographs showed this awful behavior. The story about the family living in Indonesia really touched me. The father was ran over by a train several years earlier and lost an arm and a leg and now lives in the gravel in between the train tracks. How scary for him but it is all that his wife and children can afford. This story about this man, James (Jim) is about a man that is always pushing his limits to get the perfect picture. I agree with him when he said at the end of the day people really do want to know about tragedy and what they can do to help. Such as the man who read an article about the family in Indonesia and how he is very poor but will send $20 a month to the family for as long as he can. Jim inspires people to do good. 

Shall We Dance

What I got from this movie was that a man Named John Clark who seemed to have everything and wanted nothing finally found something that he needed which was happiness. He was a very happily married man with two children but wasn’t completely satisfied with his life. He would take the train to and from work every single day and would always pass a dance studio and see this women looking sadly out the window. One day he decided to stop in and sign up for lessons, little did he know this would change his life for the better. However with him being gone all the time his wife suspects he is cheating only to discover he has been dancing all along. In the movie you don’t realize if he starts taking the dance lessons because he has a crush on the dance teacher Paulina or because he really just wants to dance. One scene where he meets his son at the bar and sees him and his new girlfriend dancing this feeling takes over him and you see all he wants to do is dance. One of the lady that takes dance lesson there named Bobby enters a dance competition and John is her partner. For weeks they practice and you can see he doesn’t mind because he just loves dancing that much. One the day of the competition Bobby and John are so great but john get distracted when he hears a, “go dad” and looks into the audience to see his wife and daughter. He and Bobby stumble and half of Bobby’s dress rips running them out of the competition. Once he sees how angry his wife is for hiding this from him he quits dancing for a while. When Paulina is having a going away party his wife leaves him a note saying to go to the party and she finally found something to put in the box for, “the man that has everything”. A new pair of dancing shoes!! He is debating on whether or not to go and on the train on the way home is a sign hanging over the dance station that reads, “Shall we dance Mr. Clark?” The next scene you see him tying up his shoes and you see him coming up the escalator all dressed up, rose in hand and he goes up to his wife, his partner and asks her to dance. Such a romantic moment! John and his wife show up to Paulina’s party and John dances with Paulina to her going away dance. I love how the movie wraps up with everyone dancing in their own atmosphere.