Posts Tagged ‘film & tv’
Movies and travel are a great mix
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 [...]
Stop crying, you’re British
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 [...]
Slumdog Millionaire or slum voyeurism?
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. [...]
Oprah inspires … Saudi women
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, [...]
Rich India, poor India
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 [...]
Young televangelists promote a new Islam
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, [...]
Will women drive in Saudi Arabia?
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 [...]
The Darjeeling Limited
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 [...]
Little Mosque on the Prairie
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 [...]
Video games and culture
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. [...]
Saudi society on screen
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 [...]
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Bob Riel is a writer and a traveler. Go here to read more about Bob, his work and the Travels in the Riel World blog.
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