Focus NJC

[colin]

I just this film, based on an Arthur Miller book (play?). It satrred William H.Macy and Laura Dern, both of them fine actors.

It is set in during ww2 in NYC. Macy and Dern paly characters who are mistaken for jews and are persecuted by the O. Crusaders. It is very interesting for the fact that these two are not jews. It is a clever way of bringing points home. In the end they tho they identify themselfves as jews(even tho they are not). Redemption.

I haven't seen a movie like this for a while and won't agian for a while. I find them too upsetting. I often wonder who these films are made for. I cannot imagine bigots watching it let alone being moved by it. ( in one scene they watching a film at the cinema and it is obvious that on screen jews are being rounded up and killed. someone calls out somthing like 'not the children',and a man in the audience stands up and yells'why not, they're Jews aren't they?).
I know imtimately what this sort of hatred does to people. what it does to the hater and the pain caused to the hated.
I witnessed the murder of my best friend, aged 7, in a racist killing. The small town I lived in Aussie beat a boy half to death becasue he was gay. he left town. That made me feel really comfortable to live there! I left that town too but only because my whole family did and it had nothing to do with that incident. My father would not have defended him. He was strange. This illustrates his oddness, for me anyway: I got to know some people, adults, a woman and her gay friends. I was 15 and finally I got to know people like me. Anyway some how or other thislady introduced a very camp man to my parents and we all went on a barbecue. During it, this man told of how he had survived the concentration camps.this moved my father almost to tears. The man went onto with his story. about how he had finally been reunited with what was left of his family and how they had all, bar none, rejected him because he was gay. My father, who had beaten his 'cissy' sons, said that he wasn't surprised they had rejected him as he was such an embarrassment, or words to that effect. No tears now, only contempt. I find that odd.

Most of the people I know are racist/homphobic. However, these people are on the outer fringes of my life. you have to deal with people. However, one of my dearest friends is a racist. She knows I feel differently to her. But I love her anyway. She was the ONLY person, who lived near me, that was there for me when the chips were down when i got sick and when the homophic crap that eventually forced us to leave where we lived got out of control. In my younger more idealistic days, I would have said that i would never have a racist as a friend. (she had odd ideas about gays too).She lives bang in the middle of a hot spot for racist trouble. She balmes the wrong people. Would I support her in that? No and she knows it. But we still lvoe eachother. Nothing is ever black and white.
Fortunately where I now live is peaceful. it is rife with the same attitudes tho. However, we are left in peace. It is safe to walk the streets. No one puts bricks thru our windwos, no one yells obscenities at us, no one assualts us. But I know exactly where I stand with most of these people, i am not a fool. There is not a place on this earth where it would be different, no haven, no homeland, no home.