Do the Right Thing

For this post I have decided to analyze and decide once and for all if Sal, the pizza store owner, was a racist. Up until the end of the movie when he let our the n-word, I felt there is no way that his character was meant to be a racist. After him calling Radio-Raheem the n-word I decided that I needed to re-evaluate whether or not he is a racist. To do this I think it would be best to take all of the reasons that people feel he was a racist and prove why they really aren't as they seem.

One argument that people in class had was that when Sal was talking to Peno about how he loved feeding the people in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood he referred to the them as "they" or "them" which some thought made Sal look like a racist. While at first glance this seems to be something that someone would use to make another group of people sound inferior or different, there really isn't another way to put it without using the word "them". If you really think about it there really wasn't any other way for Sal to make reference to the people in that neighborhood without using the word they and those kids.

Probably the best argument that people had for calling Sal a racist was when he used the n-word towards Radio-Raheem at the end of the movie. In my mind I really don't think that using that word was something he had been thinking of saying and planning deep inside his head, but instead the result of his anger and the reaction to what Radio-Raheem was doing. I don't think Sal really felt that way about the people that lived in the neighborhood but was reacting to the events happening right in front of him and was very angry at Radio-R. Therefore I don't think he really meant what he said when he lashed out at Radio-Raheem.

Overall I really don't think that Sal was a racist, but just a person trying to make a living in a rough neighborhood. He didn't show many other signs of racism throughout the movie and the ones that he may have shown can be proven to be misleading. In the end I do not feel that Sal was a racist and really enjoyed watching this movie.

Battle of Algiers

For this post I have chosen to read the review from the Washington Post about the Battle of Algiers by Ann Hornaday. I pretty much agree with a lot of the stuff that she is saying about the movie, the biggest being that there were no heroes in this movie. She writes about how,

"The escalating skirmishes and attacks seem to culminate not in victory but in a far more deflating sense of inevitability."

This is exactly how I felt after seeing the movie, while at first you feel like Ali is going to be the main character and that we are going to follow him throughout the movie, it turns into many different characters with no one side really being shown as heroic. This is done by showing the planting of bombs by both sides, instead of just he French or Algerians. The movie also doesn't try to make one side look like saints and the other look like terrible people, but instead makes them both look like they are doing what needs to be done to save their country.

Another thing that Ann wrote in her review was about how the film looks like,"it is what would today be called a mock-documentary, but there is nothing mock about it" I also agree with this and feel that Pontecorvo did a really good job of using a lot of hand-held shots and black and white picture to make this movie more documentary-like. By having it this way the movie is more believable and you feel like this is actually exactly what happened during that time. I don't think that this movie would be nearly as good without those two aspects.

Overall I enjoyed this film to a certain extent as I feel like it can teach us something about terrorism and look at both sides of the problem. While I felt the movie was boring at times, there were still some good suspense scenes that made it worth seeing.

Fact Vs. Memory (Memento)

One theme that Lenny told people about during this movie was that memory isn't as good as facts and that memory gets forgotten and distorted but facts are always clear and stay the same. At first thought I would have agreed with what he said about memory vs. facts, but after watching the movie I completely disagree with him. In a way, especially for Lenny, facts can get even more distorted then memory could. Obviously if he didn't have the memory condition he hopefully wouldn't have killed Teddy and been tricked by Natalie so many times. He felt that the facts where better because they don't change, but he never considered what could happen if facts were un-true or changed to trick someone. This would seem to show that at least for Lenny, a memory would have been much more reliable than the facts that he had tattooed onto his arm.

When I first heard him say this in the movie I agreed with him because his argument made sense, Facts don't change but memory does. After seeing the movie though I would say that even in real life we need to use our memory of things more than we do facts. If people relied only facts and didn't consider what emotional and phycological effects that a certain event had on someone, then we would all be living really bad lives. I think that this can be said for Lenny in the movie because I would not say that his life seemed like it would be remotely enjoyable to live in. Overall I thought that this was a really great movie that made me think a lot "outside the box" and that the theme that Lenny presents about facts being better then memory is a really interesting concept to think about.

Kiss Me Deadly and "The Box"

Wow Kiss Me Deadly was a really strange movie. Apart from the ending which I didn't like at all, I didn't think the rest of the movie was that great either. I now understand why this was a B movie when it was released but I don't get why now it's appreciated so much. If you haven't seen this movie the rest of this blog won't make much sense to you so might as well exit out.

I'm going to compare the box in the end of the movie to a real life situation and how they're similar. First of all when the woman is opening the box she immediately starts screaming revealing that whatever was in the box was really bad and she was afraid of. My question for her is, why the hell did you keep opening it then? This is something that I don't' understand. My only conclusion is that she had to open it so that the house would blow up and the movie could come to a confusing end. The way that this relates to the real world is when people do things that they know are bad, but do them anyway. She obviously knew nothing good was going to come out of opening the box but she did it anyway. This is similar to an arsonist who starts a fire with no cause. The arsonist knows that nothing good is going to come out of lighting something on fire but chooses to do it anyway.

My final thought on this movie is that I didn't like the way that it ended and didn't really feel that everything leading up to the ending was all that special either; this usually isn't a good combination for a good movie. In the end I didn't really enjoy the movie very much but am glad to have seen what a B film noir movie looks like and how it is different from an A movie.