- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2001
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Director:
- Outstanding Performance:
- Premiss:
- The
long-simmering feud between Ben and his immigrant father threatens to boil over and ruin his sister’s18th-birthday party. - Themes:
- Alienation
- Coming-of-age
- Courage
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Empathy
- Ethnicity
- Family
- Friendship
- Humanity
- Identity
- Loneliness
- Loyalty
- Mankind
- Materialism
- Narcissism
- Personal change
Self-belief Self-expression - Sexual Repression
- Solipsism
- Stereotyping
- White culture
- White guilt
- White supremacy
- Similar to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
The Importance of Not Being White
Insightful movie about a fundamental difference between White culture and everyone else’s. While Whites are happy to abandon the concept of culture in favor of racialized politics, everyone else knows that culture is always there to define you and to help you. And it never goes out of fashion for the sake of novelty - lest you become cut-off from your roots and lost as a person.
This explains why Whites have such difficulty accepting the validity of other cultures: Their existence holds-up a negative mirror to their lack of anything worthwhile to celebrate. Hence, their penchant for drunkenness, illegal-drug taking & sexual promiscuity, which Whites usually justify by claiming: “Work Hard; Play Hard”. It also explains why Whites will never accept anyone not literally and figuratively White precisely because White culture is immutably-based on only one thing: Skin color.
The Filipinos have no such qualms about others and, despite their young here being largely Americanized, they still revere their cultural roots - because they are what made them - yet, still accept outside influences from Hip-Hop to Flamenco and Line-Dancing. Despite the temptation to act White to obtain White acceptance, the fact is that such acceptance has never happened. An implied warning against spending more than 20% of ones time with Caucasians that does not wallow in White supremacy.
The characterization is good here - especially from Eddie GARCIA - with each representing different ethnic archetypes to good and telling effect. Where the film falls somewhat short (a good & a bad thing) is in electing not to delve too deeply into character motivation; preferring, instead, not to insult the audience’s intelligence and experience with overly-elaborate explanations that they would already understand.
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