Travels in the Riel World

You’ve seen The Lord of the Rings and dreamed of traveling to New Zealand, where many of the amazingly beautiful scenes were filmed. You’ve sung along with Meryl Streep during Mamma Mia and wondered what achingly beautiful Greek island was the setting for that movie. Yes, movies can be a great boost to a region’s tourist industry, and a chance to visit the site of one of your favorite films can be a fun activity while traveling. Victoria Brewood recently put together a great article for BootsnAll about seven of the best movie locations around the world:

New Zealand: ‘The Lord of the Rings’  - The stunning scenery in the Lord of The Rings trilogy really put New Zealand on the map as a backpacker location – perhaps it should really be called Land Of The Rings. Kiwi director Peter Jackson didn’t have to look far to find the perfect location for the magical ‘middle earth’ in the three movies.

The Lord of the Rings was filmed over 274 days, using 350 purpose-built sets in more than 150 locations over both islands. It is the first time an entire feature film trilogy has been filmed all at once, making it one of biggest productions in movie history. The rolling hills of Matamata were chosen to house the hobbit holes of Hobbiton and the village now presents itself to visitors with a sign saying ‘Welcome to Hobbiton’.

Tongariro National Park is home to three volcanoes; one of these, Mt Ruapehu, was transformed into the dark and fiery realm of Mt. Doom where the ring was forged. Visitors can also ski on Whakapapa Ski Field on Mt Ruapehu, which was used for Middle Earth’s snowy slopes. Queenstown, New Zealand’s adventure capital, was the setting for numerous scenes including the Eregion Hills, and the Pillars of Argonath. Tourists can also 4X4 across the Ford of Bruinen, which was filmed at the Shotover River near Arrowtown or walk the serene forest of Rivendell which is in Kaitoke Regional Park.

Greece: ‘Mamma Mia’ - The most uplifting things about Mamma Mia apart from the classic Abba tunes and all-star cast dancing around to big show stopping numbers, are the beautiful blue waters, narrow cobbled streets and whitewashed houses of Greece.

Mamma Mia was filmed on the islands of Skopelos and Skiathos, two of the Sporades Islands. Skopelos is about a half-hour hydrofoil from Skiathos, and you can either fly to Skiathos airport or take a ferry from Athens. Skopelos is where most of the locations can be found; that beautiful church where the wedding takes place is Agios Ioannis Prodromos Monastery, which is perched on top of a 100-metre promontory.

Kastani Bay and beach is where the song Does Your Mother Know was performed and it’s at Glysteri, on the northern coast of Skopelos, that Amanda reads the diary to her friends. It’s also where Sophie, Bill, Harry and Sam leap from rocks into the sea during Our Last Summer.

What about The Sound of Music in Austria? The Beach in Thailand? Those are included in the full article, along with several others. Read it and dream.

You’ve heard about the British penchant for the stiff upper lip and their disdain for unseemly displays of emotion. But you wonder how true it really is. After all, we live in an age of emotion. People bare their souls on reality television shows and Facebook pages every day. Old habits, though, die hard. The British may be less formal and more emotional than they once were, but they’re stoic and serious compared to Americans. Or at least that’s what they want to believe.

A perfect example of the battle the Brits engage in between stoicism and emotion came in the public response to Kate Winslet’s sobs of joy during her recent Golden Globes acceptance speech. The event - and its aftermath in Britain - is captured nicely in this story:

Britons are a chauvinistic bunch, proprietary about their place in the world and eager to see their talents recognized abroad. So they were gratified in January when Kate Winslet, one of their favorite home-team actors, snagged a Golden Globe Award, her second of the night, for her performance as a frustrated prisoner of suburbia in “Revolutionary Road.”

That is until, failing her own actorly advice to “gather,” she began hyperventilating and burst into convulsive sobs, right there on stage…

Oh my God, was the general reaction in Britain. “Most people watching actually wanted, literally, to die,” wrote Caitlin Moran in The Times of London…

Why were they so harsh? Part of it was that, despite their increasingly American forays into public displays of feeling … many English people still feel repelled by all that capital-E emoting. Instead, said Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, they stick to the old standbys: self-deprecation, false modesty and humor.

“While British actors are dying to get those awards as much as anyone else, they are supposed to pretend they don’t really care and that it doesn’t really matter,” he said in an interview.

I had the pleasure of seeing Slumdog Millionaire this past weekend. I enjoyed the movie and can see why it’s a favorite of awards voters this year. But in addition to the accolades, the movie is also receiving its fair share of criticism for what critics have dubbed “slum voyeurism.”

I don’t get the criticism, frankly. Yes, there are graphic scenes of poverty and child exploitation, but the film just mirrors reality. It’s an unfortunate fact of life in India that so many people are so desperately poor. But it’s certainly not the only fact of life in India, which is a fascinating place where all of the wonderful and abominable extremes of life somehow co-exist quite openly.

The film has not proved to be quite as popular in India as it has been in the West, perhaps because of the very familiarity of its subject:

“You can’t live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your way to work,” says Shikha Goyal, a public relations executive who left halfway through the film. “But I don’t want to be reminded of that on a Saturday evening.”

Goyal was quoted in a story about the movie in Time magazine, which explores Slumdog’s improbable rise from indie film to Oscar contender. Also worth checking out is this interview in Newsweek magazine with director Danny Boyle. An excerpt from Boyle’s comments:

In India itself, there’s been a cloud over what have otherwise been very sunny skies for the film. Some activists have claimed that the title is demeaning. What did you mean by “slumdog”?
This is one of the saddest things for me. People are absolutely entitled to say whatever they think about the film. Protest is a healthy part of life in India, provided it doesn’t become violent. Basically [the title] is a hybrid of the word “underdog”—and everything that means in terms of rooting for the underdog and validating his triumph—and the fact that he obviously comes from the slums. That’s what we intended.

Some people seem to feel that you are shining a spotlight on Indian poverty.
It’s an entertainment, in the end. It’s not a documentary. But we wanted to depict as much of the city as possible. For me, it wasn’t the romantic “Rocky” story. My central thrust was to try to capture, within our narrative, as much of the city as possible, and you cannot ignore that part of life in Mumbai—nor would I want to. It’s crucial for me. That’s the bedrock, the starting point. I would do that again because it is one of the most extraordinary things that hits you about the city, the way that the slums sit beside everything else. They’re not ghettoized, they’re not separated—everything sits side by side.

For me, the slums were so extraordinary. This is something that’s very difficult to convey. I think when you go, if you don’t know the city, as I didn’t, part of you expects abject poverty. And what you find, of course, is an extraordinary energy of life there. People on all sorts of levels are all working, doing bits of business. You sense a kind of resilience against all odds. It’s really breathtaking. As a filmmaker, I wanted to try and capture that energy, as well as show the circumstances in which people are forced to live. But despite that [the people] are extraordinary. I hesitate to use the word inspiring because you would be foolish to use that word about it, but on a human level, it is inspiring. If we could all live our lives as resourcefully as people with so little do! Whereas we [in the developed world] live in such luxury, yet complain about things and moan about things. There are people who are making the most of themselves in very limited circumstances.

Yes, apparently “The Oprah Winfrey Show” is a hit even in Saudi Arabia, where Oprah has become a source of inspiration to many Saudi women.

When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence…

Saudi women say they are drawn to Ms. Winfrey not only because she openly addresses subjects considered taboo locally, but also because she speaks of self-empowerment and change.

Wafa Muhammad, 38, a mother of five from Riyadh, said she believed that, in their adoration of Ms. Winfrey, Saudi women are expressing a hesitant sense of longing for real change in their country…

In a country where women are forbidden to vote, or to travel without the permission of a male guardian, a sense of powerlessness can lead women to look for unlikely sources of rescue, Ms. Muhammad explained. “If women here have problems with their fathers or their brothers, what can they do but look to Oprah?” she asked. “The idea that she will come and help them is a dream for them.”

Every country has to deal with contrasts between its rich and poor citizens. But in few countries is this disparity as stark as it is in India. A new film there (“Barah Aana”) looks at the life of migrant workers who are employed as waiters and chauffeurs, and it explores the contrasts between their existence and the lives of those who employ them. It has apparently stirred a good deal of conversation in India, as described in this NY Times article.

India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.

“Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”

The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives…

The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.”

There is an interesting story in the Washington Post about a new and younger group of Muslim televangelists who have not only been taking advantage of advances in technology to spread their message, but who have also been promoting a more contemporary and tolerant form of Islam. an excerpt:

Muna el-Leboudy, a 22-year-old medical student, had a terrible secret: She wanted to be a filmmaker. The way she understood her Muslim faith, it was haram — forbidden — to dabble in movies, music or any art that might pique sexual desires.

Then one day in September, she flipped on her satellite TV and saw Moez Masoud.

A Muslim televangelist not much older than herself, in a stylish goatee and Western clothes, Masoud, 29, was preaching about Islam in youthful Arabic slang.

He said imams who outlawed art and music were misinterpreting their faith. He talked about love and relationships, the need to be compassionate toward homosexuals and tolerant of non-Muslims. Leboudy had never heard a Muslim preacher speak that way.

“Moez helps us understand everything about our religion — not from 1,400 years ago, but the way we live now,” said Leboudy, wearing a scarlet hijab over her hair.

She said she still plans a career in medicine, but she’s also starting classes in film directing. “After I heard Moez,” she said, “I decided to be the one who tries to change things.”

Masoud is one of a growing number of young Muslim preachers who are using satellite television to promote an upbeat and tolerant brand of Islam.

Television preaching in the Middle East was once largely limited to elderly scholars in white robes reading holy texts from behind a desk, emphasizing the afterlife over this life, and sometimes inciting violence against nonbelievers. But as TV has evolved from one or two heavily controlled state channels to hundreds of diverse, private satellite offerings, Masoud and perhaps a dozen other young men — plus a few women — have emerged as increasingly popular alternatives.

Masoud and others promote “a sweet orthodoxy, which stresses the humane and compassionate” as an alternative to “unthinking rage,” said Abdallah Schleifer, a specialist in Islam and electronic media at the American University in Cairo.

As a “contemporary figure,” Masoud is fast becoming an influential star among youth from “a middle-class full of yearning” who will eventually become decision-makers across the Middle East, Schleifer said. And as a product of American-founded schools in the region, Masoud is able to speak with authority about Western values in a way many others can’t. His most recent show, a 20-part series that aired this fall on Iqra, one of the region’s leading religious channels, attracted millions of viewers from Syria to Morocco. Clips of the show appeared immediately on YouTube, and fans downloaded more than 1.5 million episodes onto their computers.

Slowly but surely, women in the ultra-conservative nation of Saudi Arabia are beginning to gain some of the rights and freedoms that females in most other countries have long taken for granted, including the right to divorce, travel abroad without a male, and own a business. The ability to legally drive a car still eludes Saudi women but the topic is being broached more often these days, even on a popular television show, as this story reports.

In a recent episode of Saudi Arabia’s most popular television show, broadcast during Ramadan this month, a Saudi man of the future is seen sitting in his house as his daughter pulls into the driveway, her children piled into the back of the car.

”Where have you been?” the father asks.

”The kids were bored, so I took them to the movies,” she replies, matter-of-factly, as she gets out of the driver’s seat.

The scene may appear mundane, but in Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden to drive — and, by the way, where there are no movie theaters, either — the skit portends something of a revolution. From a taboo about which there could be no open discussion, a woman’s right to drive is becoming a topic of growing and lively debate in Saudi Arabia…

”We are telling everyone this is coming, whether today or tomorrow,” said Abdallah al-Sadhan, producer, writer and host of ”Tash Ma Tash” (”No Big Deal”), a variety comedy show that is broadcast during Ramadan and tackles controversial social issues in Saudi Arabia. Other episodes have also shown women driving in what Mr. Sadhan says is a deliberate message. ”There will be a time we will accept it, so now is the time to get prepared for that.”

The debate over women drivers is centered, not surprisingly for Saudi Arabia, on religious and moral issues.

Some Saudi officials and religious men agree with the women that Islam does not forbid women to drive. In the past, Saudi women were able to move freely on camel and horseback, and Bedouin women in the desert openly drive pickup trucks far from the public eye.

Clerics and religious conservatives maintain that allowing women to drive would open Saudi society to untold corruption. Women alone in a car, they say, would be more open to abuse, to going wayward, and to getting into trouble if they had an accident or were stopped by the police. The net result would be an erosion of social mores, they say.

A new movie about travel was recently released, The Darjeeling Limited by director Wes Anderson, about three brothers and a trip through India. I haven’t seen it yet, but World Hum has some thoughts about the film.

An excerpt from their review:

Hollywood rarely produces a great travel film. It endlessly mines the road trip for material but doesn’t get at the actual experience of travel, the drama of which, for most of us, involves neither bad guys nor tragic endings, but rather logistical snafus and the occasional small epiphany.

So it was with trepidation that I approached director Wes Anderson’s new movie The Darjeeling Limited, about three bumbling brothers on a train trip through India. By the end, though, I wanted to join the protagonists as they ran, yet again, for the train. The Darjeeling Limited is a fresh and funny lesson in that most ancient piece of travel wisdom - it’s about the journey, stupid, not the destination…

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, about a chance meeting in Vienna, and Cedric Klapisch’s L’Auberge Espagnol, about year-abroad students in Barcelona, are two of my favorite travel movies. The Darjeeling Limited, like them, is about people thrust together in strange places. Nothing much happens, but when the story is over, everything has changed.

Has anyone else seen the movie? What did you think? What are some of your other favorite movies about travel?

Most people have heard the term Bollywood used in reference to India’s film industry. Few people know that Bollywood actually turns out more movies each year than Hollywood does. But until now, most of these thousands of Indian films have followed time-honored story lines and have been produced by a tight-knit group of directors and producers who often worked spontaneously, without schedules or budgets.

Now, however, that is all changing. Newsweek International has an interesting article about the past and present of the Indian film industry:

India makes about 1,000 movies a year, including Bollywood’s 200-odd Hindi pictures and others in regional languages—about 10 times Hollywood’s total. But until recently, every Bollywood movie was an independent film made by a producer-director who ran his operation like a mom-and-pop shop. Deals were cut off the books between film families. Marketing was left to theater owners. And writers scripted scenes on the day of shooting, following stock formulas: brothers separated at birth; village rebel vs. rapacious landlord, or cops vs. robbers.

It was considered the height of innovation simply to meld these elements, creating, say, a story about brothers separated at birth who grow up on opposite sides of the law but then ultimately join forces against an evil landlord after much singing, dancing and weeping.

In its heyday, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, Bollywood managed to pack cinemas throughout this movie-crazy country with such fare. But its formulaic plots grew stale at just about the time that TV penetrated middle-class homes…

That may finally be changing. Indians are getting wealthier. The younger generation is spending more on entertainment. And innovators like Screwvala have begun professionalizing the business, bringing in outside investors and accounting standards and aggressively marketing films with novel plots.

There is an interesting experiment happening on Canadian television at the moment.  A sitcom about Muslims - called “Little Mosque on the Prairie” - that uses humor to explore relations between the Islamic community and other Canadians.  According to this article:

The show follows a small group of Muslims in, of all places, a prairie town in Saskatchewan where, in the first episode, the group was trying to establish a mosque in the parish hall of a church. A passer-by, seeing the group praying, rushes to call a “terrorist hot line” to report Muslims praying “just like on CNN,” which touches off a local firestorm.

Hoping to avoid making a stir in the town, the group hires a Canadian-born imam from Toronto who quits his father’s law firm to take the job — career suicide, his father thinks. On the way, he is detained in the airport after being overheard on his cellphone saying, “If Dad thinks that’s suicide, so be it,” adding, “This is Allah’s plan for me.”

The first episode of the show last week drew a near record audience and people associated with the program hope it can help to foster some bit of understanding about the Muslim community.

The show’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz, said that she was not trying to bridge all of the cultural gaps, but that she hoped the program could elicit laughs on all sides and perhaps foster a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

“I want the broader society to look at us as normal, with the same issues and concerns as anyone else,” said Ms. Nawaz, who based the series loosely on her own experiences as a Muslim woman who moved from Toronto to the prairie. “We’re just as much a part of the Canadian fabric as anyone else.” …

The show has generally been well received by Muslim leaders, who welcome the light touch it brings to issues that are normally debated in numbing seriousness.

“Muslims are a bit late in laughing at themselves, but we have to use humor to remedy these divisions, just like any community,” said Mohamed Elmasry, an imam and president of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

A new Bollywood movie has apparently become all the rage in India these days and is making a pop icon of Mahatma Gandhi.  Not only that, but the film has coined a new word - Gandhigiri, which is supposed to be a means of fighting with moral force rather than with physical strength.

The movie will no doubt make it to the U.S. soon, but in the meantime here is an excerpt from a column about the movie in the Boston Globe…

A new hit movie in India has somehow managed to make Indians shift their focus from Brad Pitt, who is adored there, to the most important figure in modern Indian history — Gandhi. …

In the movie, titled “Lage Raho Munna Bhai,” gangster Munna Bhai meets Gandhi and instead of indulging in his usual “dadagiri,” meaning bullying, he endorses Gandhi’s teachings of non-violence and battles with his enemy by giving him flowers, rather than punches.

“Gandhigiri,” a term coined by the movie and a play on the word “dadagiri,” means to use moral force and kindness to make a point or fight injustice. College students in Lukhnow, who in the past held many violent protests, decided this year to practice “Gandhigiri” and pass out flowers instead of screaming angry words. …

Elsewhere in India, thieves who stole goods from a poor man decided to return them after watching this movie. The governments in many states have declared the movie tax-free, so moviegoers will not be charged tax when buying a ticket, and the leader of the Congress party, the ruling party in India, has urged members to watch the film.

The Washington Post also wrote about the movie recently and noted that …

“Gandhigiri” clubs are being set up in some cities to tame reckless drivers and corrupt officials by handing them flowers with a smile just as Munna and his followers do in “Lage Raho.”

For even more info, you can check out the movie’s official website or this wikipedia entry.

Since culture influences the very way we perceive the world, it’s natural that it should also affect the way in which video games are designed and constructed in different countries.  Aleks Krotoski of gamesblog (via Cross Cultural News) examines this topic on her site and looks at some of the differences between Western and Asian video games.

One obvious difference is in the types of characters and situations.  She uses a wikipedia entry as a reference to determine that:

Western RPGs are set in a fayirie fantaysie type of environment, with bawdy barmaids and lots of rats. They tend to be dark, brooding, and the action often takes place in a location where at least one of the main characters has to be English. Tolkien-obsessed. …

Far Eastern RPGs, on the other hand, are often set in colourful spaces which feature a mix of traditional “Eastern history and mythology”. They also take manga and other highly stylised content as their inspiration, whereas we take elves, warriors, etc.

Even more interesting, I think, are some of the differences that are based on our cultural perceptions of the world.  Her sources here include a blog entry from Terra Nova and research done by Prof. Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan.  Krotoski writes:

…there’s some evidence to suggest that people from the West and people from the East differ on more than game content; we also differ on what we pay attention to. This may have implications for the types of games we each prefer. (Terra Nova) eloquently explains findings of a study by Prof Richard Nisbett:

“One of conclusions of Nisbett’s work is that given an image a Westerner will tend to focus on prominent details where as someone from Asia will take in the images as a whole and the relationship between things - they tend to give a more overall, complete account of a scene.” …

“Another point that Nisbett makes is that Westerners tend to assume linearity but Asians assume circularity. For example he gave in a recent interview was a stable set of circumstances a Westerner will tend to think that this signified a trend and that things will continue in the same fashion but an Asian will tend to think that it is indicative of the potential for change and ultimate return to some pre-existing state.”

Cross-cultural specialists regularly note that Westerners view things according to their component parts and see time in a linear fashion, whereas Asians see the world holistically and view history as being more circular.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see these perceptions also show up in video games.  One more indication of the importance of culture in understanding the world.

Anyone a fan of the Globe Trekker television shows?  They’re on public television and so don’t have a wide audience, but the shows do provide a great view of low-budget, independent travel around the world.  Their website has interviews with some of the show’s hosts.  Here is an excerpt from an interview with Justine Shapiro:

What’s the most important experience you’ve learnt from your years on the road?

I believe that it’s only when you read, travel and talk to people that you can come to realise that the things you’ve taken for granted all your life aren’t necessarily right. People think that when they travel somewhere they’re going to go and learn about that place. I think what happen a lot is that people go and learn about themselves. They realise ‘Oh God, all my life this is what I thought was important and now I see that for other people other things are important’.

Tens of millions of people now know that Taylor Hicks is the newest winner of American Idol.  But what about Indian Idol?  Yes, the pop culture tv phenomenon has its own spinoff in India, where it’s also a huge hit.  This article in the International Herald Tribune discusses the popularity of this and similar shows in South Asia.  It also provides telling clues about Indian culture:

How India is changing, on the one hand, and becoming more meritocratic…

If nothing else, the proliferation of these contests testifies to a powerful set of beliefs among a generation of middle-class Indian youth: that they can make it on merit, that democracy will trounce favoritism and that no matter whether a contestant has unsung small-town roots or lacks family connections, talent will be recognized — and that the masses of unsung small-town Indians can make that possible.

“It’s our way of participating, in a vicarious manner, in this great Mumbai dream,” said Shailaja Bajpai, a television critic at The Indian Express, an English-language daily. “It says, ‘O.K., we can rise.’ “

While at the same time hanging onto other traditions, such as male dominance and provincialism…

Two uniquely Indian features have grafted themselves onto these talent shows. Not a single woman has been crowned a winner … To Ms. Bajpai’s mind, the exclusion reveals a persistent reluctance of the Indian audience to endorse an entertainer who is a woman. “Nice girls don’t go up there and become winners,” is how she put it.

Second, the talent shows have offered a platform for marginal, small-town India to rally around its own … Repeatedly this year, the judges on “Indian Idol 2″ appealed to viewers to cast their votes on the basis of merit, not parochial pride.

In last night’s finale of the Amazing Race, after nine countries and 59,000 miles, it came down to a nail-biting race to the finish between the “hippies” and the “frat boys.”  In the end, BJ and Tyler, the freewheeling, globe-trotting, self-styled hippies from California, edged out Eric and Jeremy, the former college athletes from Florida, in a leg that took them from Thailand to Japan to Alaska to Colorado.

It was nice to see the winning team be a duo that truly enjoys and appreciates the opportunity to travel, meet people and interact with other cultures.  In the post-race interviews, though, the most appropriate concluding remark came from second-place Eric, who said he learned that “the world is actually not that big a place. You can go anywhere and it just takes the will to do it.”

It’s not every day that a big budget film is produced in a country where movie theaters are still considered illegal (because it promotes the mixing of the sexes).  But that is exactly what is happening in Saudi Arabia, with a new movie by Saudi producers examining the conflict within a family when a young girl is torn between career dreams and household expectations.  Prince Walid bin Talal, who owns the production company, says:

 ”I am correcting a big mistake, that is all,” said Prince Walid, sitting in his office high above Riyadh. “I want to tell Arab youth: You deserve to be entertained, you have the right to watch movies, you have the right to listen to music.”

And the cultural struggle that is depicted in the movie?

“The struggle within the different elements of Saudi society today is almost as strong as that between America and the Arab world,” said Ayman S. Halawani, the producer. “Many families have moderates and extremists. … And we want to show the struggle that happens within.”

The producers hope to show the movie to Saudis elsewhere in the Arab world, as well as in European film festivals.

Do you watch the Amazing Race?  Michael Yessis and Jim Benning, co-editors of World Hum, debate whether the show is worthwhile television (Michael) or a lame depiction of travel (Jim).  I’m on Michael’s side.  I watch the show, and any program that shows the world to Americans has to have value.

Michael and Jim do agree on the value of another travel television show, Globe Trekker, which does a great job of showing independent travelers in action around the globe.  Unfortunately, since it is on public television and doesn’t involve a race for a million dollars, it draws a decidedly smaller audience.