Talk:The Gods Must Be Crazy

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I have never seen the world in this wey. I heve learned a lot of abstract, global things for our civilization, our way of life. —This unsigned comment was added by 217.79.81.1 (talk • contribs) . --Slgrandson 19:09, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Offensive 2 Topics to discuss in article if they can be properly verified & sourced 3 Ungwatsi... 4 In hopes of improvement... 5 Sigmund Freud 6 Cargo Cults 7 No longer accurate? 8 pronunciation

[edit] Offensive

I'm not a bushmen yet this move seems offensive (I guess so??), I saw somewhat allot of it and they make the Kalahari peoples look stupid. --King of the Dancehall 14:53, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Then you, unfortunately, missed the entire point of the movie. The movie is illustrating the absurdity of what we think of as civilization by looking at civilization from the point of view of a more innocent person. Val42 03:38, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually you got a point--King of the Dancehall 17:38, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Wait, how could you not be a bushman yet? That's like saying I'm not a tribeman yet

• I assume he means yet in the sense of however, not already. "I'm not a Bushman; however, this movie seems offensive." --Metropolitan90 06:33, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

• Yeah, thanks for the funny ??s and imagine a comma, troll. BabuBhatt 06:05, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Topics to discuss in article if they can be properly verified & sourced

1. The Gods Must Be Crazy is the most financially successful African film of all time.
2. The original film and the first sequel were actually South African productions, but were released as Botswanan productions in order to avoid the international boycott of South Africa. (How did the filmmakers get away with that?)
3. The original film and the first sequel are the only films listed in the Internet Movie Database as productions from Botswana. This is easily verifiable but requires the previous topic to put it in context. [1]
4. The original film did not go on general release in the USA until 4 years after its original release. I wonder why that was. Similarly, I wonder why they would have delayed 4 years after producing The Gods Must Be Crazy II to release it; I'd think they would have released it in other countries a short time after the original had been played out in that country. --Metropolitan90 06:33, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
5. Actually the original film was "Animals are beautiful people" and the bushman already appears there. I believe that actually the "The Gods must be crazy" serie came from the idea of making a follow up to the first film and play with the idea of the lasting effect of a film crew onto a group of people completely unaware of the rest of the world. The films are beautifully made and the personnages are all loveable.

[edit] Ungwatsi...

From what I've heard on Talk:Click consonant, the so-named dialect doesn't exist. What language were the Bushmen really speaking??

And BTW, from IMDb, the only films to ever use that language (if it ever existed) have been the entire Gods series. Are there any linguistic experts on Wikipedia who know what language it was? --Slgrandson 19:09, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

The bushmen in A Far Off Place seem to be speaking the same or similar language. --72.211.129.101 21:12, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In hopes of improvement...

Beginning tomorrow (the morning of my Barbados trip), this will undergo a peer review stage (see above). I've sown the seeds of improving it to featured status, so please help me out in my task. --Slgrandson 19:09, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

To assit you in improvement relative to the theme of the movie, please check out http://andaman.org/BOOK/text.htm for extensive, scholarly treatment of what it means to be primitive. To me, the most important sequence in the movie is the bushman's encounter with the cobra where the narrator explains that primitive people lack the concept of "good and evil", having instead a concept of "useful or not presently useful". Again, to me, this is a profound philosophical statement that supasses Eve's encounter with the "fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in that it gives a viable alternative. Eve's problem IMO was not that she disobeyed, but that she perceived the fruit as "good", thus introducing its opposite, "evil" The Bushman troop likewise perceived the Coca-Cola bottle as "good" but soon rejected it as "evil"--not something "not presently useful" but of no further use at all. People of the Deer (published in 1952, revised in 1975) by Canadian author Farley Mowat explores the same theme, of a primitive people's introduction to "good" in the form of "goods", commercial goods, but in this case with with an evil outcome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Deer

Lee 08:12, 16 September 2006 (UTC)pawyilee

[edit] Sigmund Freud

I do believe that this film made an interesting connection between the psychotherapist Sigmund Freud and the theme of love. Andrew Steyn, a microbiologist, lives near the Kalahari (an extremely hot part of South Africa); he spends most of his time in away from the rest of the world in isolation and studying animal waste. All the sudden he is asked to make a trip with his car (otherwise known as the anti -Christ), to pick up a schoolteacher. The trip there is interesting. His breaks are blown, the door is broken, and he has to stop to open gates while the rest of the car keeps going because if he stops it he can't start it up again. You can imagine that the woman (Kate) doesn't like this on the trip back. He proves to be very clumsy around woman. He calls it an “Interesting Phenomenon”, and also refers to it as a Freudian syndrome. As we all know Sigmund Freud was a well known psychiatrist who believed that neurotic behavior links to unusual problems from your past. Since he is isolated from the rest of the world studying animals all day that could be part of the problem, he hasn't been around a woman that long in his life. He ends up falling in love with her at the end of the movie after he falls and breaks one of her tables. I think the theme of love in this movie is very much alive and was one of the main points the director is trying to make. I wrote this because I just watched the movie and I have to write up an essay on it for my class. Although mine is on the clash of cultures, I noticed that there is nothing up here on the theme of love in the movie even though it was one of the main points (as it is in about 95% of films). So I decided to put it up here. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Annette dea (talk • contribs) 00:30, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Cargo Cults

Why does it say "citation needed" after the reference to New Guinean cargo cults? What's to cite here? I think the similarities between this movie and the cargo cults are fairly obvious to anyone who's familiar with both. Keep in mind, of course, that the article doesn't say that the movie story is BASED on the cargo cults, merely that it is SIMILAR to them. That's incontrovertibly true, so it doesn't need to be cited, nor COULD it be, save for a link to the Cargo Cult article--already provided. Chalkieperfect 19:29, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

However, "fairly obvious" means that you are synthesizing information. — Val42 02:45, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No longer accurate?

Re this statement: "It should also be noted that the films' depictions of the Bushmen, even if they were accurate in the 1980s (also a source of debate), are clearly no longer accurate." If it's accurate for the 1980s, it's accurate for the 1980s. The phrase "no longer accurate" doesn't make sense.--Mkweingart (talk) 23:45, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

There are a couple places within the first 15 minutes of the movie where there are what looks like metal cans or buckets in the background. I am not courageous enough to state this on the main page as I am not certain due to the poor quality of the video I saw. --Tim Legg, January 20, 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.54.34.34 (talk) 01:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] pronunciation

I highly doubt Xi was pronounced [gi] - unless gi was the Afrikaans spelling of his name? kwami (talk) 13:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)