White Man's Burden
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Harry Belafonte, John Travolta, Kelly Lynch, Margaret Avery, Tom BowerBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, HiFi Sound, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 89 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-05-11
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Movie Reviews of White Man's Burden
Movie Review: I saw this movie in a different way them most reviewers
Summary: 5 Stars
I admit, I love this movie. Combining Harry Belafonte with John Travolta is truely inspired. Both are excellent actors in their own right. And add to the fact that both are impassioned about messages, this makes it the perfect film vehicle for them to work together in. I see this movie as White Vs. Black, as much as upper class Vs. lower class. But the added change of race reversal makes it more fascinating. In this movie there are only two races, Black and White. Blacks are the powerful majority. They own the businesses, they are the actors you see on TV and in the movies, they are the ones that have super hero dolls made after them, they go on charity junkets with the "poor white kids", making themselves feel good by pretending to care and help. Behind closed doors, they talk about how the whites really do things to themselves. The whites in this movie are poor, uneducated, trying to avoid work, feel oppressed, and blame race for all of their problems. The occasional white character in power is a "token white", placed there to meet some kind of quota, not nessicarily because he deserved it. I think that this entire movie is based on role reversal, but it also points out that the problem is not race, as much as it is viewpoint. As long as people see themselves as oppressed, they will be oppressed. The true chains are in the mind, not in the color of the skin. As for the absence of Asian and Hispanic characters, this tells something also. All conversations of race in the US (outside of a few areas like California) talk ONLY about Black and White. There is no Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton for the Asians and Hispanics. So to many people, these are the "Invisible Minorities". This was shown in this movie, because these other races did not exist at all. Because nobody stands up and screams for their rights, they are excluded from the movie, because of lower impact. This of course may be unintentional, but it seems to make sense to me. Think of the last time you saw a rally, demonstration, or public speaker talking about how Hispanics and Asians are stepped on. Name one Asian or Hispanic civil rights leader that makes headline news. But this movie is fascinating. Dark, compelling, and worth watching over and over again. Also good to show to people of any race, because it is hard to ignore the hidden truth, and also the lie that is an accepted truth. This was the second movie I bought on DVD, and still has a prominant place on my shelf.
Summary of White Man's Burden
From the producer of "Pulp Fiction" --set in a time where color roles have been reversed, John Travolta is Louis Pinnock--a poor man struggling to keep his wife and children fed and clothed. But when he loses his job, Pinnock snaps and decides to fight back the only way he knows how.The premise is interesting, but the execution fails to live up to any of its potential. White Man's Burden imagines an America where black people are the ruling class and whites are underprivileged minorities. John Travolta stars as a factory worker who is fired after making a delivery to the house of the factory owner (Harry Belafonte) and accidentally peeping the man's naked wife through a window. Now jobless and unable to support his family, his wife (Kelly Lynch) leaves him. In desperation he kidnaps Belafonte. The best part of the film is seeing African American actors filling the smaller, background roles that usually go to white actors (such as police officers and wealthy suburbanites), but the movie fails in its poorly thought-out ideas. Transposing the characters' skin color out of the thinly veiled metaphor, John Travolta's portrayal of the poor black man as violent and uneducated (but family oriented), combined with Belafonte's rich white man as just and compassionate (and also family oriented), borders on being truly offensive. The fact that it's helmed by an Asian American director, Desmond Nakano, only makes you wonder why Asian Americans are conspicuously absent (as are Hispanics) and where the heck they would fit into this world, anyway. --Andy Spletzer
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