Jia Lin’s Weblog

The last movie that left me in tears is March of Penguin-and I blamed it to hormone, since I was about 8 months pregnant then. However, this is indeed such a sad movie that reminds you how cruel and futile life can be, no matter how selfless and determined maternal or paternal love can be- in the movie the mother penguin was killed by seals the moment when she dived  into the water to feed themselves, after three-months of march in storm and hunger and finally reached the ocean. I burst into tears when I thought of the baby penguin hundreds of miles away will be starved to death under its’ father’s wings. The movie is full of such cruel moments that imply the hopeless future lying ahead of the baby penguins, and it tears my heart apart. Then I survived a few good movies that almost made me cry, like Painted Veil (love didn’t conquer death), Blood Diamond (young African kids were turned into senseless guerrilla killers), or Children of the man(when dying Clive Owen taught the young mother burping her baby)…now the second movie that moved me to tears, is, surprise- Dreamgirls! I was on treadmill most of time since the upbeat music kept me moving energetically, then all of sudden, Jenifer Hudson’s role was betrayed and abandoned  by everyone she loves,  she turned to Jamie Fox, the men who she loved dearly and who hurt her so much, and she sing in a deep voice, almost in a whisper, that “And I am telling you, I am not going”, with so much wounds and so much dignity. Man, she is so good-pulling out so much real feelings from such a cheesy-most-of-time movie. Now what it is about these two movies that make me cry? One is a documentary about the bird, one is a musical with, well, a lot of singing and dancing. One is so white (I mean the Antarctic, one is so black (I mean the skin). Acting is certainly important-Penguins are natural-born stars, so is Jennifer Hudson. They certainly connect with human emotion, so do a lot of other good movies. I guess more importantly, it has to connect with each individual audience’ personal experience and feelings-like when a baby was on the way or a sad memory of younger days when loved one turned back on you. 

“Down in the valley” is the strangest American movie I’ve watched in recent years. First, it’s hard to place the movie in certain category the whole time you are watching it. It starts like a love story between a lonely teenage girl and a sunny mid-aged cowboy and together they pursuing trueness of life. In middle of the movie, the cowboy shot the girl in rage, and abducted her little brother to San Fernando Valley, and led a couple of days of ranch life he dreamed of having with the girl. Then you realize what the girl thought she wanted was not really what she needed, and the cowboy was not what he claimed, or what he thought, he was. Then you think maybe the movie is more about the struggle of a pure being of natural human against the industrialization. The cowboy appeared to have all the qualities of a dreamer-an outsider of civilized society and machine culture, lover of nature and horse, and believer in love and heart. On the other hand, to be a poor dreamer in a commercial society, he had to find his way of survival, such as stealing or intruding others’ property. He has his perfect excuse to himself about shooting the girl (he thought the girl was not quite herself when she said she would not run away with him), but he lied to the little boy to protect his loving image and alienate him from his father. Then we realize he is not a cowboy from South Dakota, but a Jew growing up in the valley. We don’t know if he’s schizophrenic or if he is a con artist. We don’t know how he came up with the cowboy personality and mindset (maybe western movies), but there is certain no space in the valley for cowboy way of life.The girl’s fostering father, a police officer who loves guns and lacks communication skills with his children, represents everything that the cowboy is not. A symbol guardian of social order and morality, he thought he knew how to discipline and protect his children, though he’s often at lost at the burst of the daughter’s wild spirit. Under the legitimacy the state granted him on the two children, his action and rationale are accepted and protected, even they don’t come with affection and understanding, as the cowboy provided. At the end, the father shot the cowboy to death and the two kids, in tears, spread the cowboy’s ashes to the part of valley that has not been developed in the city expansion. You come to realize, maybe the movie is about the struggle of the two social forces that fight for the future of human beings: humanity vs. law and order, nature vs. machine, sensibility vs. sense.