30783: Kondrat (response) 30783: Kriegsman and others on "Ghosts" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

from Peter Kondrat       kondr8@gmail.com


I saw "Ghosts of Cite Soleil" yesterday. It's not a very good movie.

There were four other people in the movie house in lower Manhattan
when I saw it, none of them Haitian, none under 40.

It's about two wannabe gangsters/rappers and their attempt to stay
alive against the odds in one of Haiti's toughest slums.  I'll spoil
the ending for you: they both lose.

Much of my adult life, I have been amidst urban youth who learned how
to talk a good game before they learned much about irregular past
tense verbs, quadratic equations or the periodic table, Of course,
it's normal, you learn what you need to get by. That is what the
protagonists of this movie reminded me of.  It's amazing to me how
credulous viewers are (judging from Corbett posts) when they hear Bily
(or Andy Apaid for that matter) prattling on about what Aristide said,
or did, or didn't do. Wow! They *must* be telling the truth! The
President gave me this gun!" The President invited me to his house
last night!" It's the easiest thing in the world to say such stuff
with bravado, if no one asks you for any evidence or substantiation.
It makes you feel good, feel cool, feel powerful, The powerless often
use this mode of discourse as a way to increase their value.  You hear
the same rhetoric in a million gangsta rap videos, but I don't know
anyone who takes that sort of braggadocio seriously. . . except some
folks who watched this movie!

I found "Ghosts" boring, laughable. The narrative is disjointed. The
propaganda devices – stuff like blurring the images of the director's
"bad guys," distorting their voices, and putting ominous music behind
them – are amateurish.  I learned nothing from the movie about Haiti,
or about the protagonists. It was noisy, and it tried to be shocking.
"Full of sound and fury . . . "