The Prestige

At first it seemed like Borden was obsessed because of the way he acted. It was all he ever thought about. He was just as ready to steal or find out other magicians tricks and make them his own and it seemed like he never had a second thought about it, or thought that it was wrong or unprofessional. After he met Sarah he started to become more secretive about his tricks and eventually she got fed up with it. As the movie went on, however, we see that his rival Angier becomes very obsessed and goes to great lengths to one-up Borden and eventually ends up retiring because Borden was convicted of murdering Angier. The twisted part of this movie is that when everything is revealed at the end it all makes sense but you almost feel sorry for Borden because his twin brother was the one hanged for supposedly killing Borden. In the end you realize that Borden and his brother were committed, not obsessed. Committed people don’t bury other people to get what they want, nor do they get their girlfriends to spy on their enemy because they can’t be original themselves. So in my view, Borden is committed not obsessed.

Sugar Cane Persepolis

To me the characters in these movies seem unfair in terms of treatment. In Persepolis, when she lived in her home country, gender played a big role in society. Women would cook, clean, be separated in school, and would have to wear clothes that would cover their entire body. However, in Sugar Cane Alley there were many differences. For example: the movie was based on skin color and not ethnicity. The lower classes would work the cane fields all their life, those who were a little more malleable would be trained as guards and sent to work directly under the whites. The similarities are the discriminatory actions and underlying subscripts that tell us of a society that is thought, by most people, to be inferior to a higher power or dominant race. My reaction to both of these movies is that the treatment of one particular group of people should not be any different just because of past events or wealth. People are people and even though we are all human, being discriminative because we think that this color of skin or because this person is a man or a woman must mean that they are not intelligent and that they can be made to do whatever we want is not fair. If we are to think like that, how would you feel if you were in their shoes? Could you do what the men and women did in the cane fields? Would you be able to be brave like Marjane and deal with the things she had to? So if you feel anything when watching these movies it should be something close to sadness, anger, or understanding of what other people have to go through to make a decent life for themselves. Other than all that, I thought the movies were very entertaining and informative.