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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Bully

Bully
I watch it last night...
Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Genre: Family
Rate: Not rate



Bullying is a serious problem, or at least it’s now being recognized as one.  But it’s also a layered issue that can’t simply be summed up by watching the suffering of kids and the gross negligence of school administrators.
The movie opens with a heartbreaking scene of David Long telling how his son Tyler committed suicide because of bullying.  It’s a powerful opening, and it lets the audience know the stakes and urgency of the film’s subject.  We then move on to Alex, a 12-year-old boy in Sioux City, Iowa, who could be the poster child for what a bullied kid looks like.  He’s sweet, but scrawny, nerdy-looking, and socially awkward.  Hirsch takes an unflinching look at how Alex is mistreated, and these scenes take bullying out of the abstract.  We also see how an administrator at Alex’s school is completely useless at stopping bullying if she manages to recognize it all.


But then Hirsch begins to float around to other stories of bullying without ever really giving the individual narratives the attention they deserve.  We spend some time with Shelby, a 16-year-old lesbian living in a small town in Oklahoma.  When she came out, she became not only a target of bullies, but a social pariah to the point where even her teachers would verbally abuse this helpless teen.  It’s a strong opportunity for Hirsch to explore how bullying can expand beyond the schoolyard and into an entire community.  What kind of social attitudes have to exist to cause such widespread cruelty upon a teenager, and can these attitudes ever be changed?  Hirsch doesn’t bother to tackle the issue, and instead he moves to the next bullied child.


We see Ja’meya, a 14-year-old girl in Yazoo County, Mississippi, who brought a gun onto a school bus and threatened her fellow students because she was being bullied (thankfully, no one was injured).  There’s clearly more to her story, but Hirsch has enough footage to make his point: bullying causes drastic and potentially tragic consequences.  Later on, we meet Devon, a young boy who speaks during a town hall meeting held by Tyler Long’s parents.  Hirsch briefly spends some time with Devon, who explains that he was relentlessly bullied until he decided to physically fight back, and then he didn’t get bullied anymore.  So is physical violence the answer?  We don’t know because Hirsch isn’t willing to engage that viewpoint.


Hirsch’s only real argument is how bullying isn’t being treated as a serious issue.  Parents don’t see it, and administrators don’t know how to deal with it.  Some of the documentary’s most powerful scenes involve the aforementioned school administrator whose ineptitude and ignorance is darkly comic.  At one point, she notices two kids fighting on the playground, and she tries to make them shake hands as if that will make everything alright.  One student refuses, and after letting the other kid go, she chastises him for his refusal.  He tries to explain that he’s being relentlessly bullied by the other kid, but she thinks he’s being equally mean because he wouldn’t shake the bully’s hand.  It’s infuriating to watch, and we all know this isn’t an isolated incident.  Administrators and teachers aren’t doing anything, and in some cases, they’re actually make lives worse.


So what can parents and bullied kids do when they’re treated like this?  How do they confront bullies?  How do parents force administrators to actually stop bullying rather than just giving the issue lip service and letting it continue?  Hirsch doesn’t know or he doesn’t care to answer.  Instead, his exploration eventually turns into exploitation.  If we can’t understand the root causes of bullying, and if we don’t know how to stop it, then Hirsch is basically just showing us how kids are tortured by their peers and sometimes commit suicide as a result.


For Bully, a solution is nothing more than a tragedy + devoted parent + Internet connection.  After 11-year-old Ty Smalley committed suicide as a result of bullying, his father Kirk began a campaign on Facebook and then founded the organization Stand for the Silent.  The organization coordinates vigils and tries to raise awareness about bullying.  For Hirsch, awareness is enough.  There’s no concrete proof about how awareness stops bullying (the film’s best advice is when Kirk tells a group of kids that they should befriend those who are being bullied), and Hirsch never shows a direct correlation between awareness and bullying.  The best the movie can do is force people to recognize that bullying is a serious problem, but those who already fail to recognize it are probably not going to see Bully.

The people most likely to see Bully are parents and kids who have been directly affected by bullying.  The movie has nothing for them.  Bully doesn’t tell bullied kids like Alex how they can fight back.  Bully doesn’t tell parents how they can protect their kids and deal with incompetent administrators.  It tells them to go to a website.  Hirsch’s documentary pretends it’s a call to arms, but it’s nothing more than mumbled suggestion to wear a wristband.


You can also join the bully project here
source: collider.com
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Bullied
Still about bully. Don't you know, not only ordinary people like us who had bullied but also some famous people. Here I found some stories about celebrity who were bullied.
#1 Lady Gaga


Back before she was Lady Gaga, people made fun of her for the way she dressed and talked. "I had a very big nose, very curly brown hair and I was overweight. I got made fun of," she said. My how things have changed.
Lady Gaga recently went on “Ellen” and talked about how her high school experience influenced her persona: “I want to create a space for my fans where they can feel free, and they can celebrate. I didn’t fit in at high school, I wanted to be like Boy George and I felt like a freak. So I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with, and they don’t feel alone. It took a long time for me to be OK with myself. But I want my fans to know that it is OK. Sometimes in life you don’t always feel like a winner, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a winner.” Boy George is to bullying as the subway is to homeless people.

#2 Miley Cyrus


Miley Cyrus may have the best of both worlds now, but that was not always the case. IThis Disney star reflected on getting locked in the bathroom in her autobiography, she revealed how she survived her unofficial un-fan club in her pre-teen years growing up in Tennessee.
"These were big, tough girls,” Miley wrote. "I was scrawny and short. They were fully capable of doing me bodily harm." And they seemingly tried to—shoving her into a bathroom during class and locking her inside on one occasion. "I spent what felt like an hour in there, waiting for someone to rescue me, wondering how my life had gotten so messed up," Cyrus wrote of the incident. Plus, there were also instances of verbal abuse, often directed at her "Achy Breaky Heart" singing father, Billy Ray. "Your dad's a one-hit wonder," she recalled one classmate saying. "You'll never amount to anything—just like him."

#3 Demi Lovato


This Demi star was bullied as a kid and now wants to help others in the same situation. “I never really understood why (I was being bullied) until looking back,” Demi told Ellen DeGeneres in an interview. “I had a different lifestyle then everyone else. I want to help with bullying, because there are girls who can’t just up and home-school and focus on their career.” That's what she did, but not everyone's so lucky.

#4 Taylor Swift


Taylor Swift was bullied by her classmates in junior high. Many of them she encountered again once she was famous. This country star gets the last laugh now, since the same kids who picked on her now ask for her autograph. She's a good sport about it, though. “It was bittersweet, because it made me realize that they didn’t remember being mean to me and that I needed to forget about it too. Really, if I hadn’t come home from school miserable every day, maybe I wouldn’t have been so motivated to write songs. I should probably thank them!”

#5 Emma Watson


An Ivy League education proved to be less than magical for Harry Potter star Emma Watson, who reportedly dropped out of Brown University because she was bullied. Fellow students said that Watson was mercilessly taunted at school, with some classmates making comments like “Three points for Gryffindor!” whenever she answered a question in class. The 21-year-old actress and model announced in March that she would be taking a break from Brown, but claimed she was just trying to focus on her acting career. “I will still be working towards my degree… it’s just going to take me a semester or two longer than I thought,” Watson wrote on her website. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Watson is worth an estimated $32 million—so she should be laughing all the way to the bank.

#6 Robert Pattinson


Robert Pattinson can't get the ladies off him now, but he was just another bullied kid before he shot to fame. "I got beaten up by a lot of people when I was younger," the Twilight star said. "I was a bit of an idiot, but I always thought the assaults were unprovoked. I liked to behave like an actor, or how I thought an actor was supposed to be, and that apparently provoked a lot of people into hitting me."
But Pattinson also experienced what it was like to have the shoe on the other foot—both literally and figuratively. "Someone stole my shoelaces once from my shoes," he told The Daily Express in August. "I still wear them and never put laces in them."

#7 Tom Cruise


Tom Cruise turned to Scientology in part due to childhood taunting. Young Tom struggled with reading, which did not escape his peers nor his school, forcing him into remedial classes and on the margin of the social circle. He moved from school to school—15 different ones over 12 years—but the small-for-his-age future actor still had difficulties academically and with his classmates. "Your heart's pounding, you sweat, and you feel like you're going to vomit," Cruise said of being bullied in 2006. "I'm not the biggest guy, I never liked hitting someone, but I know if I don't hit that guy hard he's going to pick on me all year. I go, ‘You better fight.' I just laid it down. I don't like bullies." At age 7, a school psychologist diagnosed him with dyslexia, which led to Cruise rejecting the study of psychiatry and his eventual decision to join the Church of Scientology. But school bullies were not his only problem—the star's father also knocked him down time and time again. "He was a bully and a coward," Cruise told Parade.com of his dad. "He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you."

#8 Brian McFadden


"I was bullied at school because of my weight and because I used to sing in bands. It started to make me very sharp-I had one-line answers to retaliate. I always had it in the back of my mind that they can say what they want, but I'll always have the last laugh."

#9 Taylor Lautner


Another Taylor dealt with the same. “Because I was an actor, when I was in school there was a little bullying going on,” he told Rolling Stone. “Not physical bullying but people making fun of what I do ... I just had to tell myself I can’t let this get to me. This is what I love to do. And I’m going to continue to do it.”

#10 Daniel Radcliffe


“I wasn’t the most popular kid because they wanted to give me a lot of c**p and I wasn’t willing to take it,” the 19-year-old told The Mirror. The young star also said he had a real fight once when he tried helping a kid in school. “I was 14, he was 19. There’d been a bit of animosity between us already and he was being horrible to a kid I knew, so I pulled him off this other bloke and he punched me in the face,” he said.
with some edit
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Fashion Against Bullying [FAB]


I know how they hurt my heart or others who has judge because the way they dressed. And, you know? Sometimes we might have been bullying our self by thinking that we're not perfect, ugly, so d*mn skinny, fat or other.
Let's stop it, it times to get up and be strong to support those who are still suffering in fear silently.
How to contribute? Just take this simple step...
1. Grab any old white T-Shirt
2. Put FAB logo on it, download here
3. Tell us your bully word(s)
4. Upload your look here

Go, take an action!^^
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Get Up!
Have you been bullied? 
If I must answer this question, I'll say "Yes, I have"

I'm not a famous, beauty, smart or popular in school. I really know that I'm ugly, so I just made myself invisible because I know, no one notice me. I have some BBF in school but, one of them always mean to others. She always said that we (me and another BBF) never dress up rightly. She always said that our style isn't match with our ugly face, our hairstyle isn't fit to our messy hair etc.
But, I also known that God is the fairest in this world and I know he never sleep. One day, I was so surprising while she knock my door and ask me to design and make her wedding dress. It was bittersweet, because it made me realize that she didn't remember being so mean to me and that I needed to forget about it too. Yeah, I must forget it. No matter what happened in life being good to people, being good to people is wonderful legacy to leave behind.
So, if you were bullied now. Just wake up and be strong, God isn't sleep! Someday he'll carry you highest than someone who bullied you now. Just believe:)
Some song who maybe can make you stronger...

Someday I'll be big enough so you can't hit me

‘Cause I know one day you’ll be screamin’ my name
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1 comment:

G.NY said...

sure....followed
glad to know you^^