Film Festival Film #6: Blessed

Blessed is an Australian feature film about parent-child relationships. It's structured in the hyperlink cinema style, with multiple story-lines going on. The first part of the film focuses on the children. Most of the kids are in their teens; one is now an adult. Some of them are runaways. Others are rebellious. There don't seem to be any healthy parent-child relationships that are part of this story.

The second part of the film backs up and re-tells much of the story from the perspective of the mothers. (I think there's only one father in the entire film).

Dysfunctional parent-child stories can often really hit me, but this one not so much. I think I found it a bit manipulative. It used all the Big Pathos story elements. Kids running away because of sexual abuse. Suicide attempts. Trouble with the law. Other tragedies. And the film tended to be permeated with an uber-seriousness that, I think, grew to be a bit monotonous.

But, also, I felt like there was something going on with class in the film. The parents all seemed to be poor or working class (with the one exception: the mother of the adult child appeared to come from a higher class, but had a Marxism fixation). To some extent, I felt like the story seemed to be saying, "poor people make terrible parents." Which, yuck. (There was a line in the end credits that suggested that the film came out of a workshop called "Who's Afraid of the Working Class?", so maybe that's just a consequence of its origins.)

Art is Why I Get Up in the Morning

Art supplies are freakin' expensive.

An interesting essay on R2P

There is the deeper problem with R2P [Responsibility to Protect] -- namely, that the states with the "capacity to act" may use this new right and escape from the sovereign equality premise of the UN Charter to attack as a matter of expediency and self-interest. Is there any reason to believe that there is a new morality in the leaders of the dominant states to prevent this, and is it a coincidence that, in this era of pressure for a R2P, it comes primarily from a country that has openly declared a determination to dominate and has committed major Charter violations repeatedly in the past decade? [...]

It is a stunning fact that of the 14 indictments and arrest warrants to have been issued by the ICC [International Criminal Court] through mid-2009, all 14 were against black Africans from four countries (the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Uganda, and the Sudan), and not a single one of these 14 indictments was brought against a client of the great Western powers (such as Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, perhaps the most prolific tandem of killers to rule on the African continent during the current era).

— Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights

Not that David Peterson.

To a large extent, I believe in the ideals of the UN. I think it's pretty dysfunctional at the moment. And I think that the historical veto-holders need to have that power taken away from them.