I just picked up Siddiq Barkmak’s Osama the other day. The film is a Middle Eastern Mulan story with the Taliban as the bad guy. A widowed nurse who is confined to her house without work and a male to escort to assist her in evading the wrath of the Taliban on, decide to disguise her daughter as a boy and send her off to work. The plan goes successfully until the Taliban move through the streets wrapped in black garments proudly toting AK-47s to round up all the young boys for military/religious school in the true would be Taliban fashion.
Barmak successfully portrays the oppression of Afghani woman to a western audience. He does so through meticulously constructed scenes that stir up uncanny sentiments such as crowds of woman all draped in blue burkes as they parade down the street like ghosts chanting in unified high pitched voices and the almost voiceless performance of the young main character.
The film takes you closer to life in Taliban infested Afghanistan than any news cast or newspaper ever has. I appreciated the way Barmak avoided cutting a clear line between patriarchal, criminal men, and victimized woman. In the film we see both sexes on both sides of the conflict.
published on Apr 27, 18:20 in Writing, Poetry
Ever since I started posting on this site there have been a variety of large hiatus’ between posts. So here’s another one of those attempts to start posting again. I’m a soon to be college graduate and the world keeps screaming at me “Network young one! Network!”
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published on Feb 12, 14:37 in Reviews, Films
I just recently re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Any exposer I had had to this film was long before I had tapped the surface of my film studies education. Naturally, that means my opinion of this film has substantially changed. I have always been intrigued by this piece of work that plays between a masterpiece of photography and mise-en-scène and a strongly imposed bit of social commentary. There aren’t many directors out there these days who dare to say it like Kubrick did, especially not in the american film world.
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published on Feb 11, 07:24 in Reviews, Films
Martin Scorsese’s New York New York, made in 1977, is a vaudeville film made to imitate the style of many 1930’s Hollywood cinema.
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published on Oct 4, 06:59 in Writing, Politics
So it all started in my grammar class the other day when we had to give an oral presentation in french. One girl gave a presentation on American health insurance versus French health
insurance. Of chores, French health insurance is all public and paid for by the government through French taxes. I will never understand why Americans are so freaking afraid of taxes, not that paying taxes would solve the problem of health care for Americans. The prof was really shocked in class to hear that not all Americans have health care and that it can be really difficult to get, and I was really shocked to learn how little my fellow Americans in the class knew about the situation.
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published on Jul 24, 04:01 in Writing, Other-writing
Well, here I am in France. I have been here for over three weeks now and I have not written yet. My intention is to spend this next school year studying in France. I will also be traveling a lot while I am here so be prepared to see a lot about Europe in my posts for the next year. Perhaps there will be some reviews of great European films and books, don’t be surprised when my English starts to go down the hole though!
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