Hairspray

At it's heart, Hairspray is truly a feel good movie. Set in the 1960s, it's a musical that gets your feet tapping and your body grooving. I mean, seriously, who can resist good old 60's music (heres looking at your emo-punks, death metalists and hip-hoppers).

Portraying the fight of a young, short and rather stout girl, as she fights to dance in on a TV show, while at the same time championing the rights of African Americans. She eventually wins the day and gets her man. (Honestly, don't most stories end like that anyway?) Thus, at heart it's a feel good movie about a girl, rising against all odds to save the day.

But looking deeper and you realize that it was more then that. It was about not being afraid to be different. It was about daring to stand up for your rights as a human being. It was about equality among men and women.

Even then you could see some of the differences in thinking about then and now. In one scene, they were protesting against segregation and they held up ply-boards that read "Integration not segregation" and "TV is black and white".

I would like to point to the phrase "TV is black and white". I mean even the African Americans then were calling themselves black. They were in fact promoting the segregation by stating quite clearly that there is a difference. Compare this with the current situation, where people are increasingly working towards being color blind. We are Singaporeans. Not Chinese, Malay or Indian. In America, they are Americans, not black, whites or yellow. Even this segregation along international lines might be blurred in the future with the increasingly globalization of the planet.

Irrelevant aside:

Friend A : Why did they have to have John Travolta in there?!

Me : Probably to have a throw back to his days in Saturday Night Fever and the disco era

Friend A : Well, yah. But did he have to be that fat?!

Me : Well someone had to pass the genes to the daughter. The dad was too thin for that.

Friend A : Ok, I give you that, but why couldn't he have been cast as the father?!

Me : ...

Answers on the back of a hairspray bottle. :P