Bend it Like Beckham
Racism is common and widespread in society today. Racism is referred to as discrimination against members of different complexion and imbalanced traits. In the film, the racism theme dominates when Mr. Bharma is against a soccer team. He denies her daughter from participating in the team because he experienced extreme discrimination when playing in a soccer team before when he had a turban. He also fears that the daughter will get hurt because of her unequal traits. When he was young, Mr. Bharma played bowling for his school and was not allowed to play in the clubhouses. He was discriminated against for his complexion and his turban and was sent home. His experience causes Jess to live fearfully, and she’s hesitant to playing sports. He is also afraid that his daughter will be treated differently than him. The film continues, and she plays a soccer game but experiences racism during the game. An opponent pushes her and creates a fight while abusing her. The referee sends Jess out with a red card claiming that she overacted over the tease. This decision affects Jess making her furious, angry, and distraught. This film involves a variety of themes: Language and gender roles, racism, ethnocentrism, and culture. Language and culture also imply wrongful stereotyping and how the environment impacts people’s cultures, not only where they are born. The film directs every character into facing a different form of racism and solutions to deal with the discrimination.
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is a structured series that involves eight women negotiating their lives through multiple cultures. There are four mothers, and each has a daughter. The mothers are immigrants from China, and their daughters are English speakers with minimal knowledge of their mother language, Chinese. The four women formed a club known as a mah-jong-and-investment group, and they meet after 30 years. They struggled in China, and as immigrants in America, they desired a new life without misery. They decide to unpack their old lives and make changes to work towards their dreams and ambitions. The mothers adapt to the new language and culture, but they don’t change completely. They adapt to the language, but they maintain their customs, ceremonies, and rituals of their past in China.
In contrast, the daughters are indelibly and thoroughly polished as they are Americans by education, birth, inclination, and this causes generation conflict, questions of identity, and cultural confusion. The daughters start despising the Chinese culture of their mothers and start avoiding them. Whenever the mothers attempt to teach them of their Chinese history, struggles, and expectations, the daughters disapprove and wrestle them. This havoc causes separation, and the daughters go silent on their mothers. This gulf is unbridgeable, and the barriers grow as there is a huge difference between the American culture and Chinese culture. Later, the daughters come to terms with their origin fact, and they finally listen to their mothers’ stories. They come into term and reconcile as they learn the links of their pasts and presents.
Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation is a film that shows language and cultural differences between Japan and the United States. A businessman, Bill Murray, decides to travel to Japan to venture into business. Upon his arrival, the film uses juxtaposition to show the differences between the west and east. For instance, he appears to be taller than Japanese men in an elevator. This fact implies that people in the west are taller than people in Japan. Materialism was expressed in metaphors and imagery. Japan is known to be a highly populated country, depicted in the film through billboards. Several scenes showed roadside and building advertisements showing groups of people doing things together. In the United States, the streets are evenly populated, and this showed the difference in culture. Japan’s city life was busy, and people were packed on the sidewalks with little cyclists’ spaces. Many scenes included people gathering to eat, sing, and dance together. This imagery represented collectivism, where the film showed how the Japanese things together instead of the individualistic culture of the United States. The film generally showed the comparison of people in the US and those in Japan. The US environment is calm, and people tend to live simply as opposed to the scene where Bill is in a photoshoot and the photographer speaks too fast as he shows his hasty schedules.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
The Gods Must Be Crazy is a slapstick comedy film directed to be vague and multicultural. It consists of three different plots. One is a Kalahari tribesman who travels up and about to dispose of an empty Coke bottle that caused a commotion in his community. The bottle was a new item that fell from the sky believed to have been sent by the gods. It began to disrupt the peace and harmony of his community due to curiosity. Two, a white scientist named Mr. Steyn escorting a beautiful schoolteacher through a bush. Lastly, a group of black revolutionaries failed an assassination mission on the run. The three plots occur concurrently and display the differences in language and culture in a funny manner. The international movie has remained popular because of its charming and captivating nature. The film shows a political view of the different groups, and this also shows the cultural inequality in the society. On the hunt to the edge of the world to bury the bottle, Xi encounters civilization. His tribe has not reached the Stone Age, and he meets the people from the rest of the plots. However, Xi fails to cope with the new modern culture and decides to return home. On his way home, he slaughters a goat, which stumbles him into the revolutionaries who arrest him. He is puzzled because he did not understand why he got arrested for killing a goat while in his tribe; there is no right to own any property. He is finally rescued by the white and the schoolteacher of the Christian missionary school in Kalahari. The humor in the slapstick comedy film shows collectivism and individualism, ethnocentrism, emotional language, and intercultural communication.