Talk:The Gods Must Be Crazy

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: I agree.  This film portrays the "simple" Bushmen as the smart ones, and the "advanced" citizens of modern society as being out of touch with reality. --Ericdn (talk) 10:36, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: True. The movie does a good job at showing just how crazy our so-called civilization actually is (greed, violence, taking children as hostages, squabbling over imaginary lines on a map, ...). Most of the time N!xau seems to be the only person who acts based on common sense. --Lennier1 (talk) 14:11, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

text: This is an inoffensive film. The overseas critics who panned the film for being racist and/or offensive are in fact the ignorant and intolerant ones.  The film is a work of fiction, and doesn't pretend to be a documentary. Of course the Bushmen knew of "civilised" people, but the premise of the film is that they do not.  What is wrong with that? Very many films are based on one or more suspensions of fact or even logic. The film makes everyone look stupid- except for the Bushmen.  We are surely civilised enough to laugh with- and sometimes at- others, without taking offense.  The critics are, I suspect, mostly influenced by the fact that this film was made by a South African.JohnC (talk) 09:11, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: ""The film is a work of fiction, and doesn't pretend to be a documentary."" It has a very clear documentary feel to it in the beginning, complete with narrator explaining what bushmen are like -- neglecting to mention the bad sides of living in such a society, or the unfortunate little fact that in reality they all live in reservations, living a life that's completely different from what is portrayed in the film. The film then goes on to play the "Stupid, naïve Negro" stereotype for all it's worth. It does couple this with the satirical view of modern society, but I still perfectly well understand the accusations of racism. If I was a bushman, I'd probably feel rather offended if my ancestors were portrayed as a bunch of hippies on an eternal camping trip. --Safe-Keeper (talk) 09:36, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You do realize that those portraying Bushmen are actual Bushmen, right?  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 17:10, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Offensive

message: 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)
replies: text: If you think that the Juǀʼhoansi had "no need for money" then you are sadly ignorant of the real state of affairs for the San people since the 1960s.  Check out N!ai, the story of a !Kung Woman (the movie itself, not the article on the movie) or some of the relevent works by Richard Lee.  Anyway, talk page comments should be limited to discussion of how to edit Wikipedia articles and not the topic themselves.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 19:37, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Ungwatsi...

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: In hopes of improvement...

message: 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)
thread_title:  Sigmund Freud 

message: 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)
replies: text: However, "fairly obvious" means that you are synthesizing information. — Val42 02:45, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Cargo Cults

message: 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)
thread_title: No longer accurate?

message: I highly doubt Xi was pronounced [gi] - unless gi was the Afrikaans spelling of his name? kwami (talk) 13:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The X in linguistic phonology is a dubios letter.  It is used to represent a sound that can't be quite (precisely) represented in the standard phonological ways.  I.e. it doesn't stand for the "X" sound as in the English word "exit" but in linguistics acts more like the x,y,z variables in Algebra.  It means a non-directly translated sound.  I don't see an argument here, but rather a misconception of why there are two spellings of the same name. The Xi is the linguistic way, and the 'gi' would be the English (language, I mean) way of trying to identify a near sound to the correct equivilent of its actual usage.  Hope that clarifies things, for you.  165.138.95.59 (talk) 16:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps Kwami is more doubtful because of the information at Juǀʼhoan language regarding the language's orthography. — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 17:59, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  pronunciation 

message: Isn't that simply the non-fictional African country of Burundi? Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:12, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No. The flags displayed in the cabinet room where the assassination attempt took place are actually the national flag of Zaïre and the presidential flag of Zaïre. I lived there in the early 1980s, and recognised them immediately. Ptilinopus (talk) 10:34, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Burani? 

message: In the reception section, the article claims that the film holds a 95% certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Whereas, the page on Rotten Tomatoes lacks any critique or ratings. Is there something I am missing here?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.235.159.23 (talk) 15:47, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably not, but I've never visited Rotten Tomatoes. — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 17:04, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reception/Rotten Tomatoes 

message: Would this film be suitable for :Category:Children's films? I've seen this film, and to me it seems to quite family-friendly. I mean, even children would laugh at some of the scenes in this film, and there is hardly anything that will offend children. PRProgRock (talk) 15:14, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Children? 

message: This article has sections that are too short and is missing important information on the film's production which needs to be added to the article. The article's reception section is way too short and needs reviews from notable critics added to it, information on the film's DVD releases also needs to be added to the article as well. All of these additions need to occur for this article to meet wikipiedia's standards of a well developed article.--Paleface Jack (talk) 18:06, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing Information and Expansion