"I am gonna kill Bill!" A Critical Look

In this critical look at Quentin Tarantino's movie, "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," Gary Johnson finds a simplistic theme in the movie best summed up by the title of the movie. In the second installment, The Bride, as her character is known, goes after the other half of assassins who killed her fiancé and left her for dead. Her ultimate goal is revenge against Bill, the man responsible. Johnson says that Tarantino's abilities lie in his contradictions, "to value carnage in one scene and to value the spoken word in the next." Making the movie special, Johnson says, is his unique camera angles, images and overly simplistic plot, though the characters become more developed. For more information the link above is will connect you to Johnson's article on Imagesjournal.com.

The Big Elephant in the Room

How many of you have done a 17 hour shift at work? In China Blue, directed by Micha Peled, hundreds of Chinese children work that shift every day.

Attached is a article by Beverly Berning, who explains how China Blue gives a personal face to what we only knew as a concept, child labor in sweatshops. Beverly later describes how Peled draws the problem of sweatshop labor on not the sweatshop laborer, but the multinational corporations (in this case, Wal-Mart), cold-shouldered American inspectors, and us, the consumers. Peled makes the viewer recognize this truth by avoiding the "sad sermon", and says just enough for us to recognize this national epidemic.

"It would be enough if China Blue simply worked as an exposé of the harsh lives these young girls live, but director Peled is too much of a leftwing activist to leave it at that. He has bigger fish to fry, namely the multinational retailers who set the agenda, the ones who pressure men like Lam (who comes off here less as a villain than an arriviste) to sell their blue jeans at ridiculously low prices. "

"Globalization is here to stay, and it presents us with yet another set of problems that we must address. China Blue does not offer solutions, but it might help get us to stop ignoring the problems. It is the little elephant that roared."