Movie Review: The Trail of Tears

We are heading to The Great Smoky Mountains in a couple of weeks, and one of the things we plan to do is visit the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in North Carolina. I checked out a few books at the library, but couldn't find anything inviting which discussed The Trail of Tears. So I checked Netflix, where I've had great luck with this sort of thing in the past, but they had absolutely nothing on The Cherokee Indians, or The Trail of Tears. Finally I went a head and spent a few bucks and bought this over at Amazon, knowing that my children will pretty much watch anything I put in front of them, as long as it doesn't "count" toward their allotted "TV time". It was worth every penny.

Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy is not rated, but I'd give it a PG. There was one PG-13 part where a woman shared a story about a young girl being "attacked" by soldiers, who each waited their turn while the parents had to listen in the other room, but I fast forwarded that, having been prepared by pre-screening. It's unfortunate that that part was left in, as the rest of the movie was acceptable for my 11- and seven-year-olds. There was one part where the murder of a chief was described as having happened by him being stabbed five times, while the visual showed the rise and fall of sticks behind shrubs. All the realities of the story were presented in a way which conveyed their seriousness without the graphic violence.

I would definitely recommend watching this with children, and not leaving it to them to watch alone.

Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy was produced by Rich-Heape Films, which is a Native American owned production company. I therefore feel confident in the accuracy of the film. Several present-day Cherokees, including one who spoke in the Cherokee language, historians, and the narrator James Earl Jones, wove the story together beautifully. It was a polished combination of narrative, over acting in period costume.

From the back of the DVD box: "Thousands of Cherokees died during the Trail of Tears, nearly a quarter of the Nation. They suffered beyond imagination...and when they finally arrived in Indian Territory, they arrived almost without any children and with very few elders. In a way they arrived with no past and no future." I was happy when this quote came up in the movie itself and my 11-year-old said "I get that". My seven-year-old played with his cars in the room at the beginning, but started paying attention when the actual walking of the trail was portrayed.

I highly recommend this movie. It is an engaging way to learn about what happened to The Cherokees; to understand the hardship they faced and the realities of the government we are part of. I feel my children and I are better for having watched it.

And I look forward to stepping into history and learning more on our vacation.

Rating blogs and movies

I saw a rating posted on a blog I read pretty regularly, and clicked on it to rate my own. This blog was given a rating of PG. Want to know why? Because the word "gun" appears in it, once. You can go back and read that post here.

I found this really curious since my other blog got a rating of G despite my using the word "gun" there too. Here's the link to that post.

So obviously the rating is not accurate, even just for so-called "bad" words. The site where you can find out your rating says nothing about how it is formulated. It also doesn't say how many posts back they go in their search for bad words. The utility checked my site way too fast to have gone back through all my old posts, so I'm guessing they only check the "home page" of a given blog. The word is in the title of one of my posts, and therefore in my archives; so the word "gun" appears in the code of my home page.

I like the idea of using a rating system for blogs, despite the fact that my children do not yet read any. But I think if this rating system does get used, it will have to be more of a self-rating which we impose on ourselves. If this were the case, I would rate this blog PG, but not because of the words, but rather the subject matter. I talk about what I think about things, and even though my language might be rated G, the subject matter may very well be rated higher.

On the other hand, I have read blogs where the subject matter is rated G and the language is R. This is unfortunate because my children will never be allowed to read the blogs of some of their friends' families. Some people just have potty mouths.

With ratings, we also come up against the problem of what some people think deserves a G rating compared to what others think.

My husband and I recently watched a movie called This Film is Not Yet Rated. We checked it out because I was interested in learning how movies earn their ratings, or more specifically, who is deciding that stupid, dummy, idiot, and other such words deserve a G rating. (Although I am very liberal, I am super conservative when it comes to exposing my children to things before they are ready.)

Well the movie never specifically addressed that. Unfortunately, the movie came from the viewpoint that some movies are getting unfair ratings of NC-17 when the film makers feel they should be getting R ratings. There was also the ridiculous statement that a war movie should be rated PG instead of PG-13 because "kids shouldn't be protected against the realities of war". So this documentary wasn't getting to the facts I wanted to hear in the way I had hoped it would get there.

Nevertheless, it did show how utterly ridiculous the whole rating system is. I really can't write a better review than this portion of one I read on Netflix:

"The very nature of the uber-secretive MPAA makes any documentary on the rating system difficult and one-sided. This is because MPAA refuses to stick up for itself, as to explain itself would only make them vulnerable. And as they are already unquestionably accepted by the industry as THE standard and have the decision to enormously and financially affect 90% of movies released today, lacking any opposition, what would they have to gain? The average person believes the ratings system is mandated by some level of government anyway, why let them know who controls what millions and millions of people learn by means of movies every year?

This movie reveals the kinds of numerous fabrications, doublespeak and antidemocratic processes that can only happen when the 6 largest conglomerates of U.S. media come together and decide who gets rich and what ideas are "safe". Watch this if you are not afraid of naked people [there are many] and feel responsible enough to choose what your own children watch, and not what a bunch of white Californians with no children (ages 5-17) think they should see."

The bottom line is that it's important to watch where your children wander; you can't trust others to keep them safe, because we all have different versions of what safe means. In the movies or on a blog.

The Wal-Mart decision

Okay, so a lot of people I know don't shop at Wal-Mart because of their horrible business practicesand the incredibly poor way they treat their employees. I have continued to shop there, however, despite having watched an enlightening PBS show on the subject.



It really was quite good, and I'm going to have to pick it up to show my kids.

Anyway, I knew how awful Wal-Mart is and how I shouldn't be shopping there. But for some reason I had kept going. Even though every single time I stepped into one I hated being there the whole time, despised the messy and crowded aisles, and kept asking myself why I continued to shop there.

I was having a great discussion about this with a few homeschooling moms at a playgroup one day, and one of the women I was speaking with - someone who is always very thought provoking - was saying that we don't always have the choices we perceive we do, that our choices are really quite limited. We discussed this and she tried to explain what it is she meant, and before I knew it, out of my mouth came "well, if I'm going to continue to be able to afford to feed my family grass-fed beef, I'm going to have to buy my hair conditioner at Wal-Mart". So yes, it is a choice whether or not to shop at Wal-Mart, literally speaking. But as my friend said, my choices are really quite limited; I could choose to not shop there, and feed my family crappy beef. Is that really a choice?

Well, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that for my family, it is. I can do both, but for some reason continued to shop at Wal-Mart. Perhaps it's because I simply love a bargain. Perhaps I had started feeling that one person couldn't make a difference. Whatever the reason, I could not bring myself to stop going.

Then my ten year-old and I had a very interesting conversation about the whole thing. I explained about how Wal-Mart employees are not allowed to work enough hours to receive insurance, how Wal-Mart refuses to let unions form, how Wal-Mart bullies companies into underpricing their merchandise so they barely break even, and even covered how Wal-Mart effects manufacturers in China. We even talked about how Wal-Mart had contributed to the closing of Caldor and Ames, and the decrease of K-Marts in our area. So together we decided to stop going there. Maybe I brought the subject up with him because my conscience needed a good kick in the butt?

We went to Target instead (who of course have their own issues). I was momentarily surprised to find a few of the items on my list not available there. We surmised that Wal-Mart must have a monopoly on these brands (Ivory soap, for example). The prices were not all that much higher than Wal-Mart's were, which was good news. We'll continue to shop there for now, and maybe make the drive to K-Mart to check them out too.

Overall I am glad to have "quit" Wal-Mart. And even if they don't feel my absence, I do. And it feels good.