Entertainment

Last night's episode was pretty painful. The white girl rap...ouch, that hurt. It's remarkable how negative, critical, insecure, and judgemental The Sparks seem to be. There's something poisonous there.

Today I finished watching Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002,PG). From Wikipedia:

Rabbit-Proof Fence is an Australian film based on the book of the same name by Doris Pilkington Garimara about three young half-caste Aboriginal girls (one of whom, Molly, was her mother) who ran away from a Western Australian settlement at Moore River, just north of Perth, in which they were placed in 1931, in order to return to their Aboriginal family. The film follows the girls walking for nine weeks along 1,500 miles of fence to return to their mother's community at Jigalong. The fence is "rabbit proof", preventing rabbits from crossing.

I give it 4 out of 5.

An interesting new TV show premiered on FX last Wednesday at 10 PM, "Black. White." It will air weekly at that same time. Not that I'm a fan of reality shows, but after one episode I like this one. It seems like it may be a worthy successor to FX's previous reality show 30 Days which I really liked (I'm glad to hear that a second season of 30 Days is coming this year). In "Black. White.", a white family and a black family find out what it's like to switch lives. The main conflict in the first episode is that the white dad who is in black disguise thinks that the black dad is obsessed with the subtle signs of racism and sees them everywhere. The black dad who is in white disguise thinks the white dad can't recognize the subtle signs because he doesn't have the experience of a lifetime spent as a black man in a white society.

For movie night today, Lisa and the kids watched Monsters, Inc. (2001,G). From reel.com:

Two monsters who specialize in scaring young children find their world turned upside down when a three-year-old girl follows them back to their headquarters.

They liked it, though Lisa thought it was a little too "rowdy." Elliot said, "What's rowdy?"

Tonight I finished watching Control Room (2004,NR). From Wikipedia:

Control Room is a 2004 documentary film about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command, as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I thought it was pretty interesting to see some of the TV images (e.g., of captured American soldiers) that I had originally seen glimpses of on US news when the US news was reporting on the fact that the footage was being shown on Al Jazeera. Also seeing the interaction between the skeptical Al Jazeera correspondents and the surprisingly balanced spokesmen for the US troops. I give it 4 out of 5.