Maria Full Of Grace

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

I have a few thoughts on the movie. First off to respond to your note on the religious symbolism on the film, I didn’t take notice of it at all. As of today just getting out of class I learned that the film “cover” had to do with something about Catholicism. As I am not catholic I totally missed that part. I did think that there was religious symbolism in the cover, just not in the catholic interpretation. The hand that was holding the pellet, I thought that was the hand of god. I thought the pellet symbolized baby Jesus. And I know that that main character Maria represents Mary. Therefore, the cover symbolizes the incident where god inserted baby Jesus into Mary. As for the religious icons in the background I wasn’t paying too close attention to the background to see that. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in the background for me to take notice of. There wasn’t anything like a purple monkey eating a snow cone in the background when the main characters were performing, so I mostly kept my eyes on the main characters.

Another small thought on the movie is how it depicted the American drug dealers. The movie depicted them as uncaring, selfish, M.O.E. (money over everything) types. They did not care about the welfare of Lucy. They cut her body up to get the drugs out of her. I believe through the American drug dealers the movie comments on the bad side to capitalism. The capitalist system is mostly motivated by profit. People get into a business (whether legal or illegal) to make a profit. Usually when chasing profits some capitalist do not take into account negative externalities, or the bad affects that there business actions have on other people. The American drug dealers are businessmen who are all about the bottom line of profit and are not sympathetic to what their actions are doing to their workers (mules). They do not try to make Lucy, Maria, and Blanca feel comfortable while they are in America. The guys are pretty rude and crass to them. That is why Blanca and Maria ran away from them so abruptly. The American drug dealers could have lost all the smuggled drugs and would have had to wait longer for another shipment.

Also, I did see the movie before but I didn’t know Don Orlando was a real person. That was very interesting to find out. All in all it is a straight movie. I like that is so “real.” It shows real life situations that actually happen, and those types of movies are good to see.