Wednesday, March 16, 2011

     Tsotsi is a foreign drama film that takes place in the slums of Soweto, which is near Johannesburg, South Africa.  This film is about a young man named Tsotsi, who is known as a street thug that robs people, and even sometimes committing murders.  One of his heists goes wrong, in which he steals a woman's car and shoots her when she tries to plead with him to not steal her car.  As Tsotsi is driving off, he notices that there's a baby in the backseat of the car.  This makes him feel really scared about his current situation, but he decides to bring the infant with him to his home.  He makes the decision to care for this child, but goes through a lot of trouble to do so.  Later in the movie, he pulls a gun on a mother with her child, in which he demands her to breastfeed the stolen infant.  She complies and the infant, which Tsotsi named "David", develops a bond with the mother's child.  As a result, the mother eventually develops a bond with David and it was especially tough for her when Tsotsi had to take David and give it back to the infant's original family.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Please Vote For Me

Please Vote For Me is a Chinese documentary about democracy.  This movie is filmed at the Evergreen Primary School, which is located in the city of Wuhan.  This is a fictional movie, where a 3rd grade class in the Evergreen Primary elementary school must vote on a class monitor.  The student that gets selected as the class monitor acts as the teacher's helper, or 'student aide.'  The main characters in this film are Luo Lei, Xu Xiaofei and Cheng Cheng.  Luo Lei is the favorite among his classmates to win the election since he was the class monitor for the past two school years.  Cheng Cheng is represented as Luo Lei's main competitor and arch rival.  There was a heated argument between them during a campaigning session in front of the class, where Cheng Cheng descibed Luo Lei as being equivalent to a dictator, stating that Luo Lei beats his classmates for disobeying/not following the teacher's instructions.  Cheng Cheng believes that a good leader and class monitor will help people instead of punishing them for their mistakes.  The last candidate and the lone female out of the three candidates, Xu Xiaofei, is shown to be the 'underdog' in the election, which made it very tough for her to gain support from her classmates.  At one point, she has an emotional breakdown (crying) because Cheng Cheng told the class to disrespect Xu Xiaofei during her speech.

I can very much relate my life to the movie, Please Vote for Me, because It's all about competition, and I enjoy competing against other people a lot.  Elections in the United States have a similar competitive atmosphere to this film.  The overall lifestyles portrayed in this movie seem to reflect some type of middle-class society, resembling the lifestyles of a middle-class society in the United States.

I really enjoyed watching this film.  I thought the humor used in the script was funny, and all characters were acted very well.  I think the makers of this film did a good job on developing the storyline and providing viewers with an accurate point of view of the Chinese culture.  I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoys foreign films.