Saw the movie The Girl in the Café. Good acting and writing but... I never really like being preached at by movie (Kevin Smith, I'm talking to you!) and this movie was very much about the message: Push the Millenium Development Goals through!
One of the main ideas in it was--it isn't complicated, and it's a more important talk than anything else that politicians haggle about, and it just needs to Happen. But the thing is... the whole How to deal with Poverty issue is really complicated. That's not just something politicians say, it's the truth.
For example, I'm all for working on trade barriers to make free trade more equal (since I think a global economy isn't going away, and has potential to help some countries), but I recognize that there are still people who would be hurt by lowering trade barriers. One of the movie's characters makes a point about how subsidized British cows are, versus the humans dying in Africa (in the movie it was the usual all-encompassing "Africa" which I swear makes people think the continent is one country). But the reality is that British FARMERS are subsidized, not cows.
There's a reason why, when people vote, their more interested in issues about the local economy rather than the economies of "Africa." How much can you expect people to make personal sacrifices in order to save strangers? Is some Farmer Dude willing to live with his family on welfare? It might be, in a utilitarian sense, fair--to increase the poverty in part of the world, in order to reduce the poverty in other parts--but can you expect people to give this sort of mandate to their politicians?
This movie did absolutely nothing to address that problem. The baddies were the politicians (esp the Americans)--they were portrayed as the only obstacle to Feeding the World.
I'm not against such a preachy film in principle--if someone watches this movie and learns something about the unbelievably immense level of poverty on the planet, then great--though I doubt there's a single poverty factoid that hasn't been in a World Vision Sad Children commercial for the last 20 years. They'll learn about the Millenium Project, which is good. (Though I'm sure there are critiques to be made about that too.)
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HBO: Richard, tell us how this all came about.
Richard Curtis: What happened is my life took a strange turn, which is that I decided about eighteen months ago that I'd stop writing and sort of dedicate my time to a bit of almost activist politics.
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HBO: Do you feel it's possible to reach the millenium development goals by 2015?
Richard Curtis: Well, there are huge reasons we need to. The main reason for doing it is basic simple humanity. You cannot have fifty thousand people dying a day from avoidable poverty, which none of us would notice, it wouldn't alter the texture of our lives one jot. It wouldn't be like closing down the transport system. It wouldn't make any difference to us. And yet it would save a continent
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