Baz Luhrmann’s Australia
December 1, 2008
Baz Luhrmann’s hugely anticipated Australia has all the elements of a classic epic movie but mixed reviews have cooled ambitions for success on the international stage. It is that country’s most expensive film to date with a budget of US$130m, an A-list cast including Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman and fellow AussieHugh Jackman. So much hype has surrounded Luhrmann’s new movie that the tourist industry is counting on the film’s success to uplift the industry’s decline. Talk about pressure. Kidman plays an English aristocrat who inherits a cattle ranch in Australia at the start of WWII. She teams up with cattle drover Jackman after rival owners plot to take her land. The pair drove thousands of animals across the country, fall in love, dodge Japanese bombs, and take in the panoramic vistas.
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: The Best Epics of All Time
December 1, 2008
Milk: The Slaying of Harvey Milk Was Never a Gay Hate Crime
December 1, 2008
Milk is the much anticipated new movie from auteur Gus Van Sant and chronicles the assasination of charismatic Harvey Milk in 1978. Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. His legacy is still apparent in San Francisco today where Milk is still a hero of the Bay Area.
On November 27 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by another city supervisor, Dan White. White had recently resigned from his position and wanted his job back and blamed his former colleagues for denying his attempt to rescind his resignation from the board. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after using the infamous “Twinkie Defense,” sighting his addiction to sugary foods as a factor of his depression and subsequently a cause of his diminished responsibility in the deaths of these two men. White served just five years in jail and was released in January 1984. He committed suicide the following October 1985.
For Thanksgiving I visited my Aunt, my father’s sister, who is a world renowned Chinese ethnomusicologist, a retired music professor at Arizona State University, author, and recent speaker at the Library of Congress in Washington where she lectured on a rare Chinese opera form: Kunqü: China’s First Great Multi-art Theatrical Tradition . Professor Marjory Bong-Ray Liu is the sole expert on the form and recently donated decades of research to the Library of Congress. My aunt and my father were the product of a mixed marriage; the children of a bold English explorer mother and Internationalist Chinese father. My father married an English woman, making me quarter Chinese.
I shared Thanksgiving with my Aunt and her grown children. Her husband was Chinese, making their children more than two thirds Chinese. Around the table where the mixed races of Chinese, English, and Japanese. In a sea of dark hair and dark eyes, I was the only cousin with red hair and blue eyes. Everyone talked with pride of their heritage and I found joy in belonging to a family of “mutts.” This brought my Aunt in to the discussion of President-elect Obama. She spoke for all of us in our understanding of this new president as a man of mixed-race and not an African American man. This is not a triumph for African Americans, after all he is half caucasian, this is an undoubtable triumph for a nation built on the mixed races and a changing landscape of all nations, literally mixing together. This is the triumph of the “mutt.” This is a triumph for the millions of mixed-race Americans who make this country strong but also for those who have suffered the racism that goes hand-in-hand with those who are “different.” African American’s may shout the loudest but they are certainly not the only non-caucasians who have suffered in this country. Let’s not forget the Asians, Indians, and hispanics.
Our new president is not a black president, he is and always will be, a mixed-race president. I am proud of my Chinese and English heritage and the new president who represents all of us who are “mutts” from many great nations.
