Just a tad more serious than usual

[cupiscent]

Before it shut down, the cinema on Bourke used to do $5 tickets one day a week. Now that's a cheap-arse Tuesday. But $10 isn't bad either, when regular tickets are $16-17 a pop, so the Male and I are initiating Tuesday night as "date night" - dinner and a movie - because with our movie-viewing habits, it starts adding up

Comments

[phaetonschariot]

Apparently the best place for ANZ tourists to go is the Mediterranean, especially anywhere near Gallipoli. Also Britain purely for the fact that there are so many ex-pats.

It kind of says something about the world that that sort of volunteer work actually exists. Especially as a white person in a developed country, the idea that your very presence might prevent a massacre, just because you're white, really shows how much privilege and entitlement we're born with still. I think it's probably easier to forget that here than in America because, well, we never really hard laws forbidding blacks and whites to marry each other, or slavery to abolish, and there are still huge race problems here but it's much more prominent in other places. Which isn't necessarily a good thing because it means we can put blinkers on and fool ourselves into thinking there isn't a problem.

[cupiscent]

I'm not sure about Britain. There are so many annoying drunken ex-pats I think your chance of being randomly beaten up over pent-up grievances may be higher. *G*

Sometimes I think that guy had the right idea; go overseas and try to solve things there, because you can't solve the shit at home, it's just too close, it's in your veins and the air you grew up with, you can't even see it.

I think what's terrible is that it's true, it would take the deaths of white people to make the vast majority of the world pay attention to the slaughter of thousands somewhere in Central America.

[phaetonschariot]

Yeah, I mean, obviously they had to have a reason to think it would help to start it and to see that it does help to keep doing it. If you zoom out and look at a big timeline of human history it's actually really quite bizarre that things are like this now, it's only been about 2500 years that white civilisations have been coming into positions of power I think... the most thought-of civilisations before that are, like, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, Persian... I suspect the whiter ones had power at the right time, rather than more power, so that they could harness new ideas and technology to become even more powerful and spread out, etc. And did some pretty awful things to keep the power, too. Maybe in a couple more millenia Asian cultures will have tipped the balance again, or, hell, Middle Eastern.

It's also pretty funny looking at a big timeline like that and realising that there's only been people here for a few hundred years, and white people like two hundred.

[jacobean_ruff]

Hi there, I found your journal while semi- trolling through other pages but got stuck here for a bit and actually read some of your entries. Then, I see we are both from Melbourne. I thought id add you.

As for the movie Bailbo I was scared off it because of LaPaglia, but perhaps I should reconsider.

[cupiscent]

Why hello there! You are surely most welcome; I should warn that I blab randomly about a whole lot of shit, like fan stuff (bandom and Trek and Star Wars and crap) and movies and music, though I see that the music certainly won't be a drag for you! \m/ And you have Dethklok on your list. I laugh and laugh and laugh and make more metal signs. Friending you back just for that, but y'know, if I get boring, every day is defriending amnesty day around here, no sweat.

LaPaglia scares you? Look, I'm not going to lie, it's really not a barrel of laughs. But it was a lot more fun - Australian charm and sly jabs - than I thought it was going to be. It's good cinema, and challenging without being harrowing.

[frivol]

I agree with you on Balibo- everyone should see it.
It is a damned fine film; despite the fact that you know how it's going to end, you are still engrossed to watch it unfold; and Anthony LaPaglia and Oscar Isaac are both simply superb. It's such a shame that there is still apparently a cringe factor over Oz films. This one, shocking as it is at times, has so much more heart than some recent ones I've seen.

(Did you see the recent Compass episode, featuring Paulie Stewart, the brother of Tony Stewart, one of the 5? He's a Dili Allstar, and ex (I think) Painter and Docker. I began watching it, and had to download it from the ABC to watch it all. Recommended! He is a very positive person, but the effects of what happened are still very much with him- and us.)

[cupiscent]

It really was good. I was dithering on it because I was worried it was going to be too hard-core, just harrowing, you know? But it wasn't. Challenging, yes, and confronting, but still good cinema.

I didn't see that! That would've been really interesting. I might try chasing that up.

[cupiscent]

Come in, come in, the more the merrier! Or maybe not merrier on something like this, but certainly interesting.

It is totally understandable that Australia's viewed poorly in East Timor. We really do owe them; for things they've suffered because of us, or on our behalf, and the things we've stood back and allowed, or actively assisted, to happen to them. We have a lot of ground to make up.

That said, I feel sometimes - but you'd be in a better position to know, I'm sure - that the whole of the greater Indonesian archipelago doesn't really like us very much. Which on the one hand is troubling - our nearest neighbours don't like us, what does that say about us? On the other hand, I'm not sure Indonesia, in particular, is a country/regime that it's good to be liked by. If you follow.

IR will never not be mind-bending. Nature of the beast.

[cupiscent]

(Belated response: weekends are bad for internet-time.)

I'm intrigued by this. Maybe my feeling about how Indonesia felt about us is a media-angle thing, and I'm relying too much on the media to tell me what to think about the world (very likely). Certainly my "knowledge" about Indonesian government is purely filtered through the media - I'm thinking specifically of uncertainty about the fairness of the judiciary process (though I care very little for the Schapelle Corbys of the world, I hasten to add), and a general totalitarian... flavour to things. But that's just things that I hear. You're really highlighting for me that I no longer do my own reading. Then again, once I start reading about the world, I could not even move for a week, and then I'd be behind again...

*blinks* This is possibly all the thinking I'm capable of on a Monday morning.