onsdag den 24. februar 2010

My name is Khan

Being a teacher is hard work but it also have some perks. Every now and then the kids get vacations and even though teachers are suppose to work preparing lessons, the flexible schedule means we can work extra hard before and after and such allow ourselves a vacation as well.
Shukran Allah for that because this winter it allowed me to go to NY.
I'm in the red money wise thanks to that trip, NY is so cheap compared to DK. But it was worth it. I got to see MNIK on the big screen - happy happy me!

I read blogpeople's reviews of the movie and they are surprisingly negative. Or maybe not surprisingly, it's just that I don't think I watch movies in the same way as many other people do.
Movies are for entertainment purpose only and even the crappiest of movies are entertaining (not that MNIK is a crappy movie). Instead of being ticked off at the ignorant portrayal of USA I found it hilarious to watch KJ version of an African American community in the south. The flood had me rolling on the floor laughing, the entertainment value of those scenes scored a 12 on my tickle bone list!
I'm sure it wasn't KJ's intention to be funny but I can watch a movie anyway I want, regardless of the directors agenda and if I want thought provoking facts I read news papers.
I do not take movies seriously. And hence there are no bad movies in my book!!!

Of course I'm not so foolish as to think that movies can't affect peoples views on things but I hope/believe I'm educated enough to know the difference between fact and fiction and always when in doubt DO RESEARCH! If only everyone was like me (irony, sarcasm and satire does not translate well in writing).
Should ignorant/uneducated people be banned from watching movies? is it to dangerous? will they take anything literally? Now there is a whole new blog topic to explore!

Not really relevant to MNIK:
When in NY I met a guy who had heard that DK was the happiest country in the world. I have heard that before and I have read the research behind the statement and according to that happy in general means healthy, wealthy and educated. The research fail to mention that DK is on the bad end of the list when it comes to suicide. So what is happy? and a worldwide search involving 80,000 people is that enough to measure happiness?

I liked the NY-waley very much because instead of just taking the statement for a fact he was interested in the whys and I like people who ask questions instead of expressing absolutes (this sentence work in danish not sure if it works in English).

Veracious (sotheydance.blogspot.com)

"It's always weird to learn through movies. Not in the sense that you think whatever a movie portrays is reality, but to be inspired to find out what actually happened and what the movie did differently, or what circumstances made the movie as it is"
She has written an entry, that made me think, it is not what we know that is important, it is the awareness of what we don't know that is important.
or as Richard Cecil puts it "The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant".
Wow that was a long one I need a nap now, still suffering from jet-lag.

5 kommentarer:

  1. It's an interesting thing, this movie watching and blogging thing. I have always maintained that I'm a movie lover because I love to be entertained. Movies are a form of entertainment, whether steeped in reality or fiction. I was taken aback at the amount of negative criticism that MNIK was getting in the blog community and thought to myself: "Am I not allowed to love this film?", but I did, I shouted it to the rooftop and if even one soul learns something from something that also entertains, then it's a success in my eyes.

    SvarSlet
  2. Me too!!
    After reading other peoples reviews of MNIK I felt I had the right to enjoy Wilhelmina as well as the greater messages of this film and I felt that others didn't allow me to do so. So I got terribly defensive about the film and wrote the entry.

    SvarSlet
  3. Well of course you're allowed to love it! But other people are allowed not to love it, too. We should all get to approach and interpret the film with whatever mindset and hopes and information we happen to have - which is one reason why talking about films always turns out to be so interesting. I do think that it's a good idea for me to keep my analytical powers on as much as possible when I watch something, even if the primary (or only) thing I'm really seeking is entertainment, especially in films from other cultures when it is certain there is a lot of context and other kinds of information I am not picking up on. But that's also how I approach other aspects of culture too. Occupational hazard, maybe (I work in a museum)?

    As you probably read, I'm one of the people who was seriously bothered by parts of this film, but I realize that seeing my own country/culture represented is going to make me much more antsy about it than I am about how KJo represented the UK in K3G, for example - and I have correspondingly more knowledge/experience to add to my interpretation.

    Anyway. While I was on the critical side of things on this particular film, I'm not always. And more often I find myself on the "Why does everyone LOOOOOOOOVE this?" end of things, and I know what you mean when you talk about feeling defensive about your experience of a film when it contrasts with much of what you're reading from other people. I guess we all need to watch our tone sometimes and make sure that we really consider what other interpretations/experiences of a film might be out there.

    SvarSlet
  4. I often laugh at ignorance and that's probably why I enjoyed Wilhelmina a bit to much. I think it's a Danish thing we tend to offend people with our humour (especially Germans - go figure???).
    And I must say I was in an awfully bitchy mood when I wrote my entry and it will probably happen again so maybe I should leave warnings when I went because it's not my intention to offend:)

    SvarSlet
  5. Heehee! I wonder if KJo was trying to be _funny_ with the Wilhelmina depiction? That never occurred to me. If so, I still think he's dangerously off-base, but at least that would sort of explain it. Kinda. :)

    SvarSlet