I truely like the full-shots from the helicopter/plane. Sometimes you can get a better understanding only by stepping back and observing from far away. However, the background music at some point makes me feel like this is a Transformer movie, and little bit over.

This is the last movie of this course. It’s quite interesting to look back and think about how the two musical movies in the 30th (Flying Down to Rio) and the 40th (Down Argentine Way), with the Good Neighbour Policy in power, tried to depict Latin America as exotic but at the same time not too much different from the North, so that the two continents could be allies and could work together for the region. Now in this final movie, the good and the bad are not too different as well. Although as most of the time the “bad” guys are the Latinos and the “good” guys are Americans, but in the end we discover that the “good” American is using a “bad” Latino to wipe out another “bad” Latino, and the “bad” Latino is using the “good” American to get personal revenge. It seems like a win-win situation, that the outlaw is terminated in the end, but actually it’s at the expense of turning the law-enforcement into the outlaw. And there is no going back. “This is the land of wolves.” How can lambs kick the wolves out?

We’ve been obsessed by the word “hero” in the past few classes. Some of us argue that there is no need for the existence of a hero in movies like, for example The Three Burials, in which I really don’t see why we should heroize Pete or Norton. However, this movie is clearly an American “hero movie”. Cops are the most common heroes in this world. So can we nominate Matt as hero? He is CIA and designs the operation to wipe out the Mexican cartel, but he doesn’t work by the book. Can we say Alejandro is a hero? He kills the big boss of the Mexican cartel who’s responsible for the explosion which killed two of Kate’s men and many many other crimes, but he belongs to Columbian cartel. Can we call Kate or Reggie a hero?  They work by the book, but probably by themselves and by the book they would never find the big boss. How do we define a hero? By the process of what he’s done or by the result of what he’s done, or something else? I don’t believe there is universal answer, and every one has a hero which match their own criteria.

So for me, what is true and eternal is that there is nothing eternal and true. The North and the South are “others” reciprocally, but maybe in the future they will become the same self once they find a common “others”, let’s say, ET?

My last doubt is, by crossing the border, either North or South, does it makes you “other”? or is it just a fantasy?

I really like Tommy Lee Jones because of Man in Black, and I see a very similar character as well in this movie.

This is a really good movie. I bursted into tears as well as laughters. I remember a movie in China some years ago, about a peasant who works in other places to earn a living, but he wants to get back to his hometown and get buried there after he dies, just like Melquiades, and the movie is detailed with how his friend manages to carry his body hundreds of miles back to home by lying all the way through, because in China, dead people must be cremated right away. It’s a comedy because of the lies his friend makes, but as well it’s very touching, about how a true friend can be.

This is a very different board area comparing to Touch of Evil. Los Robles is a small yet prosperous town due to the traffic of people and business (legal as well as illegal). Instead, what we see in “Three Burials“, I believe it’s more or less what the real situation is in the border between US and Mexico, where most of the wetbacks will choose to come illegally to the US. It’s vast and wild, but the same dangerous as Los Robles. I don’t see the blend between two cultures/people, but rather conflict and violence.

It’s movie which turn the common world up-side-down: a wetback who eagers to go back, a gringo who goes to Mexico illegally, a border patrol who is no longer the representative of the law but a prisoner and also enters Mexico illegally, and while it’s talking about the illegal immigration, it’s the other way round, from the US to Mexico. However, we know that the main theme, the hidden theme is still the wetbacks. Just this time we get to see from the opposite perspective, from the perspective of a gringo who’s friend of a wetback, of a border patrol and from the Mexican people, not from the politicians and mass media reporters.

Crossing the Southern border again changes people. Pete has got the courage to propose to Rachel, and Norton finally admit his sense of guilt. Or maybe “change” is not a correct word, because I believe Pete loves Rachel from long time ago, and Norton does feel somewhat guilty right after he killes Mel. Therefore, instead of “change”, maybe it’s better to say that crossing the border “enlarges” people’s true sentiments. So does it mean that crossing the Northern border makes people hide their feelings?

This is the second film in a row which talks about dictatorship. I never believe that all dictatorship is evil and has negative effects in all the aspects, nor that all revolution/democracy is good and has positive effects. It’s so much more complicated than merely good or bad.

Another very interesting thing is that, although at the very beginning of the movie Walker, the script says “It’s a true story”; however, it’s really hard for me to believe that Walker truely managed to flee Mexico in the armed insurrection like the film says, and even harder when Walker walks so pacificly in the battle in which the Americans unexpectedly win and overthrow the government of Nicaragua, in spite that this is a very serious movie, compared to the comedy film Bananas of Woody Allen, in which with all the parodies and exaggerations, somehow I do believe that some one in this world would actually do as what Fielding does when he is picking up porno magazine, or what he does in the subway with the two thugs.

Lastly I want to say something about interpretation. The two female protagonists, Walker’s fiancee Ellen and Doña Yrena, both are silent to some extent: Ellen literally cannot speak and has to use sign language and waits to be interpreted by Walker, meanwhile Doña Yrena only speaks Spanish at first and in order to be heard by the Americans she needs an interpreter as well (I was as surprised as Walker in the end to learn that Doña Yrena could actually speak fluent English, and I cannot understand this plot).  It reminds me of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which we studied and discussed in the previous term. Some how it’s accepted as a consensus that the subalterns can physically speak, so it’s better to modify this question as “Can the Subaltern be Heard?” In the case of Ellen, she cannot speak by her voice, but she speaks by signs, and Walker does know the sign language, so he can “hear” her. However, at the mean time, he chooses to hear what he wants to hear, and interprete her words into the ones he thinks appropriate, so in this way he cannot, or rather, he doesn´t want to hear her.

        The funny part is that both of them do know that their words are not translated accordingly, they are angry, but they could do nothing, or rather they does nothing afterwards, especially Doña Yrena. But in the end, even though she speaks her mind in English, Walker still chooses to ignore, which may suggest that the reason Doña Yrena didn´t speak English at the begining is because she already knew that she wouldn´t be heard.

I am very obsessed with Presley’s obsession with his hair. In the whole movie, there is only one scene (that I remember) in which his hair is messy, that is when he finally finds courage and jumps off the cliff, and he waves in the water to the crowd. As soon as he climbs up to the terrace of the hotel, his hair is already nicely combed and styled like always. I think this is because, for a super-super-star as the “King”, his image is required to be fixed, and this fixation can also be seen in other parts of the movie. Like the way he sings and dances (I don’t think his movement when he sings can be called dancing, but I’m lack of a more specific word).

Unlike the previous musical movies, many of the songs in this movie are not sang live in the scene, but rather like a background music, which gives me a feeling of seperation, like a music video, that he is only in charge of acting, and he doesn’t have to worry about the singing, because a well-recorded sound track will be played. Again I think this is because the movie has to garantee a “Elvis Presley”, instead of a character named Mike Windgren in a movie. So if in previous movies it’s true that we see both the character and the actor at the same time in the movie, in this one, I only see the King. For one reason, it’s because I don’t think Presley acts as good as the actors in the previous movies, and for another, it’s the fixation of his image required. In my opinion, for some movies, the audience are more than willing to pay and go to the cinema only to see the real actor in an unreal situation, but not an unreal cinematic character.

Another very interesting thing is that sometimes, the Mexican characters speak Spanish in an American way, mostly with the pronunciation “R”. It seems that they work very hard to attract the American market instead of the Latin American.

I am very curious about the reason why the movie sets up a character of a female bull-fighter, Dolores Gomez. At first I thought it’s because of a wave of feminist movement in the US at that period of time, but then the movie goes back to the cliche of the female subordination to the male. Dolores the Latina is depicted as a brave and free image, yet she falls in love with Presley at the first sight like usual.

In all, I like this movie. It’s not a “bad” movie as Jon described before the screening, although the narrative and the acting is not as good as “Touch of Evil” or “the Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, but I think it’s good as a musical movie.

First of all, it was quite strange to me that this 1948 movie is black-n-white, because Down Argentine Way in 1940 already has the technology of a colored movie, but the lack of coloring is not affecting the impact of this motion picture, and I am so glad that we finally get “down” to a more realistic life-style. All the four movies we saw before are somehow fantasy, like bubbles in the sky that we common people can never touch, all thouse celebrities and wonderful dancing and singing, and horse show….

    This is a really really great piece of work, the tension and those hints that appeared at the beginning which all have a reason afterwards, like the lottery Dobby bought, and the gold-digging history Howard was telling the first time Dobby and Curtin saw him. However, it was not very convincing for me the brusque change of Dobby in the second part. For me, I see no reason he changes so much from one extreme to another. At the beginning he begs for money and he feels fine about it. He is not very picky at the kind of work he is offered, and when he and Curtin know that the contractor is a liar, and they find him, beat him and get their salary back, Dobby has the chance to take all the money the contractor has in the wallet, but instead, he doesn’t even think about taking one more peso than what’s entitled to him. So it’s really difficult to imagine that such a decent man will change so much after he finds the gold, especially he even tries to kill Curtin, who has saved him before.  Of course this is the main idea about this novel, that Don Dinero es el más poderoso, but at least from the movie, I don´t think his change is well explained.

    This movie is already after the Good Neighbour Era, and we see a totally different Mexico. However, as I said before, it´s a more realistic world, because first of all, we finally see local Mexican speaking Spanish, and Howard translates for the Anglo. So what´s different is not hidden anymore. We also see some similarity as the Federales do hunt down the bandits like US police chasing for bad guys. So Mexico is not a lawless place. Anglo and Latin do have differences and similarities. Pretending that in this world only exists that latter wouldn’t make our planet better, just like the Good Neighbour Policy, which couldn’t last long.

The Indian tribe that Howard lives with in the end is a very good example. They have their own norms, like they consider it polite to smoke other people’s tabacco, and they have to thank Howard for bringing back the boy’s life, and they would even use force to keep Howard with them. These may seem wierd at first, but in the very essence, this is what every people would do. People offer hospitality by giving away what they have, like food or place to sleep for even strangers in old times, and we do thank those who have helped us, just that each and every one of us do it differently. So being same and different is actually the same thing.

Back to the main theme of the movie/novel, which is long-lasting since, maybe, the time when human people first invented MONEY, it’s like a curse for me, that we think we humans are clever enough to create this and that, but in the end, we discover that these creations become our masters. We human beings are the biggest enemy of our own kind (and of course, of all other species). There are no other animals or diseases that have killed more human people than human people ourselves. Yet we still are at guard toward wild animals, and considering them as a threat when they come to “our” land, the land that we took from them long time ago. I recently read a news saying that somewhere in Canada people had to shoot dead a bear because it came to the city and became a threat to the people. And I was so angry, because you could have just used an anaesthetic rifle instead. Maybe it was an urgent situation, I don’t know.  It’s just so difficult to understand the logic these days, that since every human has their human rights, even the most cold-blooded serial killers, who has deprived other people’s human right, they can live in a well equipped prison cell, enjoying their life sentence. They will have a doctor to attend when they are sick, and they get fed everyday. Yet those animals…. I think I am a little carried away….

The movies shows that paradise/happiness is actually not built by money. Curtin says the happiest time of his life was when he worked in a orchard; and Howard finally decides to stay with the Indians in Mexico and he is treated like a god and where he lives is a paradise, because he used his knowledge and saved the drowned Indian boy. It’s really a interesting question to think about, that since we created the concept of money, why and how come that people think that money is the thing that could make them happy? It’s easy to prove it negative, because it’s impossible to think that before the creation of money, people were never happy.

So happiness and money is not necessarily related, nor is Latin America and money, so by crossing the border south what could people get?

I was amazed by the development of the motion picture between 1920 (The Mark of Zorro) and 1933. And the creativity of Hollywood in movie making, I am just running out of words to express myself. Apart from all the music, singing and dancing, the airplane-wing-dance sequence at the end of the film was just astonishing, and according to Wikipedia, it’s made by special effects, but I actually believed that it was true airplane doing the trick when I was watching the movie. I don’t which would surprise me more, its being special effects or its being real.

Since we are here to talk about the border, in this movie, there is actually a two-way of crossing the border, as in the first part, the young Brazilian lady has crossed the border north to US, and in the second part it’s Roger Bond crossing border to the South. The film is focusing more on the second crossing, which is understandable, as it’s a Hollywood movie, and moreover, it’s male dominant at the time.

However, I find that the female protagonista’s crossing the border to the north doesn’t seem to change too much her usual behaviour, only that she is more flirtatious at the first scene, and Roger does fall for that, and of course for her beauty.

And the leave of Roger in the end was not expected at all, because from the first class we’ve been focusing on how people can change after cross the border, either imaginarily or physically, and usually they free themselves more when they cross the southern border, but Roger’s leave makes him more like a northerner, abiding by the moral protocols and being a gentleman. In the end it is Julio who acts more freely although he doesn’t cross any physical border.

Another interesting thing about crossing the border is when Roger’s small plane mis-lands on what they believe is a desert island, and both of them are talking to their true self and get persuaded and kiss one another. I think this kind of fighting between the true self and the social self (I don’t know if it’s called id and ego in Freud’s work?) is very popular among the audience even to the actual date, since people in the society always have to act apropriately, but in fact many social rules are not very natural and humane, and this kind of inner fight does happen a lot, but we don’t talk about it too often in our daily life, like it’s something that we only talk to a shrink, our best friends, or only in our diary. And now we can see it on the big screen. It makes me feel somehow that I myself is there on the screen and let go some depression and anxiety. So to me, walking into a cinema is kind of like crossing a border.

Last but not least, I really don’t like the scene when the woman shouted cannibals when she sees some indigenous on the “desert” island. It brings back all the memory of the cruel colonial history, and yet the director is trying to make fun out of it.

Zorro was one of the very first heroes that appeared in my childhood, actually the others were mostly from cartoon, so I really admired him a looooooot！ Especially in that time when you didn’t get to see much western stuff in China. In fact the only Zorro I watched was Alain Delon, and I really like him much more than this 1920’s version. I remember that in this movie Lolita calls him a “fish” as her first impression, which is an excellent description. However, I was impressed by his movements when he is trying to escape from the troopers. It might be the very first “parkour” on the big screen.

However, after equipped with all those notions of colonization, descolonization and de-colonization, I watched this Zorro from a different perspective, and came up with a totally different conclusion. I find that the story of Zorro is just another stereotype western hero move, just that this time the writer makes Latin America as the background, just like in “Le Magnifique”, you just change the background music and have some locals walking by, and you can make a movie titled “The Man from …” anywhere you fancy. Latin America is again a touch of exoticism in Western literature/movie/culture.

Although in the very first line, it says “Oppression, by its nature, creates the power to destroy it”, and Zorro stands out as the savior of the oppressed. He does avenge for some Indians and the priest, but the biggest move he takes against the oppressors is because his Lolita has been captured and oppressed. I remember when he calls together all the caballeros in town to dress with a black mask and ride black horse to break the prison where the Pulidos are kept, he frees one of the Indian prisoners, and he says something like I let you go because I know your story. At first it may appear that Zorro has his own judgement and he frees the innocent ones and let the real bad people stay in prison. However, I begin to think, if you Zorro already know that this good Indian has been kept in the prison, why hasn’t you turned up earlier and free him/her, but only comes now that Lolita is imprisoned? And this Indian, for me, is just a collateral benefit (I don’t know if there is really a frase “collateral benefit”, I just got it from “collateral damage”)

For me, this conflict between the oppressed and the oppressor doesn’t make Zorro the savior of the Indians anymore (I used to think of him like that). It is admirable that a man who is benefiting from the “oppression” can stand up and fight for the oppressed, but now I see it more of a conflict inside the colonisers instead of the conflict between the coloniser and the colonised. Or indeed, colonization may just be another way to express “oppression”. As long as there is hierarchy, there is oppression. Before the discovery of the New World, the Europeans oppress upon one another, and the history of colonization is just a change of the place where such oppression takes place and a change of object of the oppression.

I also see a very serious self-oppression/colonization, like when Lolita says “if I were  a man, I’d ride the highway like this Zorro”, or those many Indians who act as informers or assistants of the troopers. It is very difficult to free those who are oppressed and imprisoned mentally. So Lolita will remain always a figure to be saved, and she would never think of saving herself and helping others. And so are those Indian informers.

I have some doubts. 007 always changes the bond girl, but all the US superheroes they do have a “fixed” wife/beloved one. Is it a UK vs US style?

And is Zorro the first hero in black? Because commonly we would think of good characters in white and bad characters in black, but in this movie the troopers are riding white horses and the caballeros and Zorro have black horses. Is this another element that makes Zorro classic?

Oh, and one more thing about the rape (Captain Ramon tries to rape Lolita) which kind of again support my view that the colonization of Latin America is just another move-on of the oppression that the Europeans are accustomed to do. So when we talk about how the colonisers raped and exploited over the people and the land in Latin America, don’t be surprised, because that’s what they always do. So again, civilised and barbarian, this is a question…

The following is the impression I had and the note I took while I was watching the movie. Before the screening, Jon mentioned that this was some sort of a “Sub” James Bond movie. I hope I am spelling “sub” correctly.

The overall comment that I have is that this is a counter-stereotype movie. Just like what Cervantes wants to do with Don Quijote to criticise those novels of caballerismo, the director is using this movie to criticise the 007-style movies. And the director actually expresses his intention through Christine, a student of sociology, which is not a very common act in movies.

For the first 1/3 of the movie, it’s a mix of all the stereotypes of 007 movie–heroic secret agent that never dies, beautiful bond girl who will eventually fall in love with “007”, a touch of exotic (Mexican) ambience, and a clever bad guy who dies or escapes in the end. However, with some exaggeration, it becomes a comedy in this movie.

Then with the intrusion of a maid vacumming, the movie takes place now in a real world in Paris, where it is always raining, and the leading actor is living a humble life as novel writer. He is exactly the opposite of 007: he has no love, no money, with a bad shape, and is struggling in his career as a novel writer. He’s written 10 (or maybe more?) novels as a serie with the same heroic secret agent and the same bad guy from Albania. In every novel the secret operation takes place somewhere exotic, however, he has never been to those places, and all the knowledge he knows comes only from a map of that place, some brochures and his imagination. So here we can talk about some of the construction of the image of Latin America.

Just like what Roland Barthes mentions in The Blue Guide, “[f]or the Blue Guide, men exist only as ‘types’. In Spain, for instance, the Basque is an adventurous sailor, the Levantine a light-hearted gardener, the Catalan a clever tradesman and the Cantabrian a sentimental highlander (Mythologies. Noonday Press, 1972, pp74-75), places exist only as “types” as well: in order to show to the readers/audience the world of Acapulco, all the author/movie director needs is a band of mariachis, some local dancers and the pyramid. And if I were a lazy director, I’d just replace the people with pandas, play some background music of a Chinese opera, and let the fight take place on the Great Wall, and I’ll have my own movie titled “The Man from Beijing“. Just don’t forget to add a lot of blood and sex into the movie, and this can be the next blockbuster. No wonder last year an article written by Artificial Intellegence entered into the final round of a literature competition in Japan. With all the stereotypes, the actual human intellegence may eventually give way to AI.

Of course, this movie is used as a weapon to fire at all the 007-stereotypes, so in the end, the secret agent who is always the representation of masculinity is feminized and falls in love with the bad guy who is no longer bad anymore but a cute guy (and I imagine they will live happily ever after…), and the beautiful heroine is abandoned, covered with mud, and there is no big blast or nuclear crisis.

Another thing Jon mentioned before the screening is how caracters tend to release a burden and become a different type once they cross the border to the South. It’s like what the author in this movie is doing: once in the novel that he writes, he is the God in this imaginary world and can do whatever he couldn’t do in the real world. South is always co-living with the North. The civilized need the barbarians to reflect their civilization, although we always doubt whether civilization exists in the almost 500 years of colonization.

Yet from my perspective, the more extraordinary people are in their imaginary world, the more frustration they’d get in the real one, because the contrast is bigger. So I really doubt that people could de-stress themselves by crossing the South border, as long as they have to get back to North in the end.

Lastly, I have some doubts about the movie.

1. Why there is emphasis on the author in the real world keeping smoking?
2. Why does the director use so much white in the movie? It’s comprehensible that the bad guy is always in black;however, while the secret agent wears from time to time white shirt, the bond girl is almost always in white, and the helicopter, and the car, and in the real world in the movie, there is a lot of white as well. I wonder if there is something in it.
3. Why use classic music in the imaginary world of Acapulco? I remember one clip that the mariachi band playing Hendel, which is apparently very odd.
4. Why do women in the real world always break glasses, like the maid, and Christine?

To conclude, I really like this movie, for it works perfectly as a comedy in the first part, and then after laughing a lot, it can get you to start thinking a little bit. I don’t like the fact that the director let Christine say about the 007-stereotype, which makes the movie academic.