healnghanz Reviews

Walkabout (1971)

seeing walkabout again after 35 years was amazing

[10/10 · 16 January 2006]

what is life changing about this film is you get to experience the life of an aborigine in his natural environment. with no help from anything except the land itself and thousands of years of culture behind him, he hunts lizards and kangaroos with handmade spears straightened by his teeth. he drinks water right out of the dirt with a straw stuck in the mud. its amazing. and it changes you. you see as if for the first time, the power and the credibility of what the native aborigine represents. he doesn't need clothes, or money. he just needs to be a part of his world, which he is at total peace with. what could be more sane than that.

juxtaposed against a father taking his children out for a picnic in the bush who cracks up and commits suicide, leaving his children stranded. in their innocence they actually do pretty well for themselves, coming upon an oasis, but it dries up the next day. thats when the aborigine arrives.

the children see him as a life saver and even though they don't speak the same language, the little boy in his desperation points to his mouth and says glug glug glug and the aborigine laughs hysterically and goes back to the dried up oasis and starts sucking water out of the ground with a straw, then gives them a drink.

so begins the journey where the children learn the ways of the aborigine. but they are not aborigine. they are very Australian, at least the girl is. eventually the aborigine brings them closer and closer to civilization, which seems absolutely barbaric by comparison. the aborigine does not kill for sport, and he uses everything and takes nothing more than he needs. the Australians, kill for the enjoyment of killing. finally the aborigine sees a road and touches it with his foot, he sees a steer and tries to kill it but is almost run over by some white hunters, who kill just to leave the animals rot.

this vision of depravity so terribly affects the aborigine, so devastates him that he goes almost mad. he returns back to the hut that he brought the girl to, possibly out of his love for her, and he dances a dance of desire for her. the girl gets scared and starts to hide from him in the shack. you get the real sense of houses containing shadows that cut people off from the direct experience of one another that they had when they were out in the wilderness under the stars.

he dances and dances, but she ignores him, rebuffs his gentle advances. she falls asleep and the next day the boy finds that the aborigine is not moving. he is up in a tree, apparently dead.

the girl and boy make their way back to civilization, which is horrifying. the movie abruptly ends with the girl older now thinking back to the time she had in the wilderness.

i am not giving this movie justice. just suffice to say it breaks your heart. you feel the loss of the aborigine. the impact is tremendous because this is real. he lost so much. yet the world doesn't seem to care. why in gods name cant we care about what we have done to the people who have given us the gift of showing us how to live in harmony with nature. happy. without doubt. full of joy. we cannot improve on this. man living in harmony with nature is perfection. what can we say about our own civilization, filled with suffering and people preying upon each other. our world is hell compared with what the aborigine has in his hands, or had. we made sure that our misery became his misery.

as the earth is used up this movie is more and more relevant. but we have become so crippled we cant even cry for what has gone, never to return. what a loss! Why don't we see it? the innocence is gone. we killed it. we killed it. we killed it.

A Huey P. Newton Story (2001 TV Movie)

an absolutely beautiful and riveting rendition

[10/10 · 5 January 2006]

I have never seen a performance of such rich intensity in a one man show. The actor became Huey P Newton, brought back to life, became him, alive and living as him now, not as a history of him, but actually is him. You are challenged by him, and in his interaction with the audience, you see people being moved, no shocked out of their lethargy, and back to the essence of the dream that the black power movement represented. The black power movement that I was never allowed to see. Through the filtered media, in which we are spoon fed half a dozen stories a day that fit some kind of prescription for complacency and helpless outrage designed to keep us watching but doing nothing, Huey sucked on a Kool, chain smoking them as he spits out bullets of truth like tears and laughter. You feel the tragedy of his loss, which is our loss. And its an outrage that I never got to know him. He talks about the fact that the FBI felt that it wasn't the guns that were the main problem with the black panther party, but when they started to feed the poor, that was when they were really considered to be really dangerous. That had to be stopped. this show contains a thousand of these stories, that tickle and lacerate you, they revise your history. he slaps you in your face and you are so grateful to be awake and alive. when he cries you cry for him, for you and for everyone that missed out on what was trying to be accomplished. Martin Luther King wasn't the whole story of the civil rights movement. If it were, then how come his death was followed by the mass incarceration of black people in this country, and the crack epidemic, and the implosion of the inner city and its schools. Whoever shot Huey , it wasn't a drug dealer, no you know who it was. You know. The waited, they bided their time and they took him out. WE took him out because he was right, and when he became right and true it became intolerable. In our society, the truth needs to be destroyed because the truth ushers in change, and when change comes in, and the lights go on, the people making billions and trillions off of the misery of others will do anything to prevent that change from happening. Thats why we are looking to burn oil at the moment we understand global warming. Thats why we are pretending to create democracy in Iraq. We wont tackle the real issue of finding alternative energy. We don't have the courage to create full employment and the result is that we have given our destiny over to countries like china who makes deals to provide slave labor to transnational corporation's like walmart so that we lose all our jobs in exchange for cheaper and cheaper good. Our lives are disintegrating, and our politicians are as morally bankrupt as they are expert in manipulating our fears. We have replaced our factories with prisons. Higher efficiency means cheaper goods but meaningless service jobs at MacDonald's. We are in a state of perpetual undeclared war so that there is a rationale for watching everyone. We are turning, imperceptibly, into what the soviet union was. We live in gated communities that are not unlike versions of feudalistic states back in the middle ages. soon walled cities will be back with us. 40 million people have no insurance while doctors make half a million dollars a year. hospitals are going broke but they pay their executives half a million dollars a year. we spend 63 billion dollars to fix up new Orleans but the people are still living in the dark while halliburton fixes pipes, not people. the black homeless people from that disaster cant get jobs rebuilding their city because the clean up companies will only hire illegal aliens who are dirt cheap. Huey P Newton is not dead. He lives on. He lives on every time we get outraged at what is happening here in America. Wake up, the walls are crumbling around you. Huey! Huey!We are Huey! Remember what the old African said. You is We.