This week’s theme was “Some Of My Best Friends Are Black: a beginner’s guide to interracial clashes”. The movies suggested this week were given as examples of films where interracial couples or situations where there is a cultural clash are dealt with in an interesting way or are done well. Most of the time these kinda of situations have a white person with their foreign friend/coworker being used as an example of how Wacky the other culture is. This week is supposed to help shift away from those clichés to something a bit more realistic.
Once again, I only watched one film this week. But it was definitely a good one, so I felt satisfied with just seeing that one. On Saturday I watched Lost in Translation, one of the films I have been meaning to watch for ages but never got around to. A bored wife and an ageing movie star staying at the same hotel in Japan become friends when they realise they are both equally alone and confused by the place they are in.
It is interesting to think about how such an intimidating place Japan can be to outsiders. It’s one of those places that you either embrace fully or will never really understand. Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson’s character) seems like she tries to experience the various cultures in Japan and seemed to be interested in some of them, but at the same time she never really seemed to fit in. She also didn’t explore the parts she liked further. There was a superficial interest in the whole thing, but she doesn’t seem to really want to look into things more because she doesn’t really want to be there. There are scenes which show her trying out Japanese things, but most of the times she looks bored, or lost. I can sympathise with her a bit, though. She doesn’t really know what to do with her life and now she is left alone in a strange place where she can’t understand anything, which makes her feel even more lost than she would have felt anyway.It makes sense that she would have reached out to the only other person she’s really met that seems as out of place as her.
One thing that annoyed me in a way was that neither of them really tried that hard to fit in or make things easier for themselves and others. They both seemed to not speak Japanese at all (which is a bit frustrating seeing they’re in Japan), and Bill Murray’s character very obviously makes fun of the Japanese people who try and talk to him. Maybe it was supposed to play on Bill Murray’s comedic skills, or his character not wanting to be there, but it really felt like all those people who go overseas and demand the other countries to speak English. A lot of Australian people do that and it makes me embarrassed to be vaguely associated with those kind of people, so it irritated me that I was reminded of those kind of people. I liked the characters a bit less because of this; they were kinda culturally insensitive and selfish. I guess that makes them more rounded as characters, in that they’re not perfect, but it was just something that took me away from the film a little.
The other films suggested this week were Borat (a British comedian pretends to be from Kazakhstan and makes a pretend documentary about America), Silver Streak (a black/white buddy comedy that apparently did it quite well), Zorba the Greek (a British Author goes to Crete to try and fix his writer’s block and befriends a Greek labourer while there, and 2 Days in Paris (A French/American couple stop over at Paris to visit the French lady’s family). I was going to watch 2 Days in Paris on Sunday night, but I think Lost in Translation gave me enough to think about. Next week looks at the issues of gender. There are two I have been meaning to watch, so hopefully I’ll get to both and maybe some of theothers as well.