Review: The Girl in the Cafe

For those of you who do not know, there is a blog out there doing a fascinating social/blogging experiment.  The Girl in the Cafe is both a good move and a fantastic website run by a Londonite named Ingrid.  She has an experiment going where she sends the movie, The Girl in the Cafe, to bloggers around the world and asks then to review it.  I recommend you check out her website (which is also in my links) as she rocks.

On to the movie review.  I really liked it.  It has the premise that if one believes in something, one should take a stand for it.  In the movie, a man who works for the British government and has absolutely no life meets a woman in a cafe.  He is nothing but work, this man.  She has no work.  He decides, what the heck, he has nothing to lose, and invites her to the G8 conference in Iceland with him. 

This is where things get interesting, but also a little heavy and technical.  They have a lot of conversations, in cafe’s interestingly, about world poverty.  Sometimes, they are a little overly technical and heavy handed.  However, I can see why they were included, as this is a movie that is trying to get a message across. 

My favorite scene in the movie is when they are talking about the infant death rate due to extreme poverty.  There is a long row of tables with lights on them, and it is closing time in the cafe.  As they talk about how one infant in the world dies every three second from poverty, the waitress turns off the lights, walking around each table to do so.  The row of lights looks endless.  You slowly come to realize that the waitress is taking about three seconds to turn off each light.  You look at them, you count them, and you realize how many children died because they had nothing while you were sitting in the comfort of your house watching a movie. 

The girl, gets more and more interested in the man’s work, and she starts taking a stand, saying that she thinks taking a stand is her responsibility, and the man agrees with what she thinks, but her methods cause him a lot of trouble.  A good movie, in all.  As I said, it is really enjoyable and it really makes you think about the extreme poverty that so many people in the world experience daily.