POSTWAR BRITISH MASCULINITIES

I’ve watched an interesting interview on youtube with Katie Couric and Elton John, and how he turned the film Billy Elliot into the award winning Broadway show. In the interview, John explains that what hit home with him most in the movie, was the very end when Billy dances to Swan Lake and his father is in the audience. John said that his father never approved of what he did, and even when he became successful his father never showed up to any of his shows until eventually they reconciled, but there was never a moment of approval like Billy had. John also said that a big difference between the film and the musical, is that the musical is just as much about the miners as it is about Billy. The true part of “Billy Elliot” was the situation with the miners, and so John was inspired to make that part of the film more evident in his show. The main theme he talks about in the show is what I think is a main theme in the movie, that something beautiful can come out of something tragic, such as Billy’s dancing coming out of the miner’s strike and all the opposition he had to go through to get to where he is at the end of the film.

CBS Interview with Elton John on Billy Elliot

Yes, even though the film has a focus on England, it is still a part of Britain and I felt I had to make this point because the British Empire can be seen as playing a vital role towards the portrayed negativity of English people against southern Asians. The British Empire had at its highest power was called an empire where the sun never set because of its increasing spread across terroritories around the world. One of the countries that the British Empire had ruled was India until its independence in 1947, when they also split from Pakistan into, at least initially, Muslim and Hindu nations.

The point about this that I’m trying to make is that the English that Combo associates with think that south Asians have come to their homeland and have taken their jobs and positions when it was just a few decades earlier that it was the British going to India and literally taking over their land. I found irony in Combo’s anger at least for this point.

(But then again the irony should exist for racists in general regarding this)

i enjoyed this course a lot, the movies were interested.  I favored some rather than others and connected with many of them on some level.  It was nice learning new terms regarding film and noticing that Directors have a hard and challenging job in getting their point across when it comes to political influential films.  It must be hard not to be repetitive when films before them have covered the same points and objectives.  I appreciated the comments and view points each student had and the light debates regarding gender, sexuality or parental responsibility regarding the films.

This was my favorite movie of the whole class, i loved every part of it.  one of the funniest parts in my opinion was when Shaun and his mother went to the store to by him a new shoe.  They were waiting for the lady to return with his size and she was  apparently taking a long time, he said something like “why is she taking so long” and when she came out he said to his mother “oh, there she is, that was quick, not bad timing at all” or something of that nature.  It was hilarious, he was just so excited to get those boots.  the one thing that made my stomach turn was the relationship between Shaun and Smiley it was absolutely disturbing and disgusting.

I absolutely loved this movie, i laughed, i cried and at times was very angry.  The relationship between Billy and his grandmother was a relate able one and this made the fathers sternness not as horrible.  I loved how she would stand up for Billy when he was having the argument of dancing with his father in the beginning of the movie.  concerning his preference in a love, I do believe he was straight and not gay at all.  this is the horrible perception that many get when they see and guys perusing careers that may be more feminine to society such as a nurse or hey, a dancer.

The scene where the Priest has just been shot and he is running into the room and we’ve also realized that during this time period (as the Professor had mentioned that Ireland and America has had the largest number of cases regarding sexual abuse with Priests and children), it seems ironic that the actor who plays the Priest is Irish and the room he enters just happens to have a boy in there. Either I might just be reading too much into it but were we supposed to think the Priest was abusing that child or was it just simply ‘the priest bringing about the death of a child’ as a symbol of all the sexual abuse cases around the world.

In This Is England, what do you guys feel about the relationship of an older woman dating a younger boy.  I feel that it’s just totally wrong to take advantage of an innocent boy.  Maybe it’s a different mind set, but a 19 year old going for a 12 year old is just wrong.  Maybe if it’s a 50 year old going for a 43 year is better.  It bothers me why people would go and become pedophiles.

I actually liked In Bruges until the last half hour of the film. What was the point of the movie if the two main characters were going to end up dead? Not that we know 100% if Ray dies but most likely he does. I found the end kind of unrealistic especially in regards to their deaths. I was surprised at how long it took these characters to die. It took Ken getting shot and to fall from a building and he still was not dead until minutes after the fall. Also Ray, he got shot what 8 times? Yet he was still alive and moving, the dragging out of their deaths was annoying. And I didn’t see the point of Ray dying, especially since in most of the film we see Ken convincing him and helping him to not kill himself. He even sacrifices his own life to save Ray for absolutely no reason. Also it seemed like him and Chloe were going to have some type of future together where Ray can take Ken’s advice from all that happened. It was also just so predictable at times, like when Ray is on the boat and he says how it is too far of a distance for him to get shot, and of course he does. Also, when Harry shoots Ray and we see that Jimmy gets killed, I had a feeling that was going to happen, especially when Harry was telling Ken if he was in Ray’s position he would have killed himself on the spot and also with the amount of people that were there. I did like the film at first, I though it had a good plot and humor but I just thought the ending ruined it.

Prior to watching the Full Monty, I didn’t understand what the phrase meant.  Watching the ending of the Full Monty, I finally figured out what it meant.  It is when a dude or dudes go completely nake and show their “package.”  In urbandictionary.com 

Since Teresa had mentioned the references to earlier films, I just wanted to add that the opening scenes in this film were pretty similar to those in Full Monty. There’s the playing of scenes that are not part of the film itself, and we can tell because the scenes are a bit fuzzy unlike the rest of the film. But whereas in Full Monty the film showed the great times at the peak of the steel mill industry followed by the harsh reality of what had followed, This is England showed the whole situation in the opening clip. We saw good times that were immediately followed by some of the tragedies of the war. I think that there’s a sense of continuity since the music didn’t even stop or change like I thought it would; the upbeat tune continued to play until it faded into the beginning of the film.