jakob13 Reviews

Exterminate All the Brutes (2021)

Exterminate is not Peck's finest hour

[2/10 · 12 April 2021]

'Exterminate All the Brutes', a title lifted from Joseph Conrad's much quoted 'Heart of Darkness', seemed so promising. Sorry to say, it disappoints. It is as ddry as a university lecturers endlessly droning on during a class that encourages yawns and looking at the clock until the hour ends.

As a series of four, it is hardly exciting.

Raoul Peck is our don; he is in and out of the camera's eye; his voice is everywhere.

He as he says is interested in 'understanding', not condemning. And you can be sure, this grand piety is everything that is condemnatory. Slavery, exploitation, extermination are everything to condemn, for sure.

White supremacy rules 'uber alles'; its essence springs from capitalism that has the ability to redefine and find an afterlife.

From Marx and Engels (Peck shot an excellent 'Young Marx') through Lenin, Trotsky, Galiano, Che, Samir Amin so name a few the red thread weaves a pattern not unfamiliar, yet for Americans and many others, the critique is dulled to the point it hardly ruffles the Puritan way of life of capitalism, a challenge to the order of how things are and ought to be, examples to the contrary.

Public intellectuals anchors to reality have abdicated responsibilty; they have become talking heads on television full of vacuous opinions, vomiting the tritest of the obvious. Individualism pushed to extremes.

On the other anti-European has its mirror image in Said's 'orientalism' or Ian Buruma's 'occidentalism' or Pankash Mishra's writings on Tagore and East Asian writers.

Anyway Peck slices the onion his four part documentary enlightens. (HBO Max offer them only at set dates and times, in English or Spanish. Why?) Despite Peck's flaws, it is worth viewing.

The Sicilian (1987)

Puso's romanicism fails to satisfy

[3/10 · 20 February 2021]

Eric Hobsbawn deemed Salvatore Guiliani a "social bandit". Francesco Rosi' neorealistic documentary is an exercise in eonomic, political and social, in perspective with diminishing lines flowing into infinity in shapes of stunted trees, huge rocks and burnt earth of an eternal Sicily. It is a setting of a feudal Sicily, seeming unchanged yet churning with the molten fire of Mount Etna rady to spew its flames and anger. It is the Sicily of Guiseppi di Lampadeusa. Cimino's "The Sicialian", Salvatore Guiliani is based on Mario Puso's novel; it has the feel of "The Godfather", a grand romance of violence brought forth from thr loins of the peasantry, hungry for the fallow hectares of seigniorial estates, a thirst not slaked since the 15 century. Land and bread a powerful call for action that in postwar Sicily the Communist Party gave voice to. Guiliani, a bandit, violent, charismatic, heard the same siren can, but he was a social reactionary who allied himself with the landowners, the dons, the clergy whp feared him but kneww he served their purposes, whilst scheming to betray Guiliani when the peasantry and the Communists were put down. Puso's Guiliani is a crude Lord Byron, hardly the the mystical Emiliano Zapata. And yet his name was known everywhere in Sicily, in Italy and beyond. And perhaps it is today, but we cannot say so for sure. A sexual toy of the landed aristocracy, handsome and highly sexual, but a play thing for the forces that abhor change and an attack of age old privileges. We cannot expect more from the excellent cast, talented though they may be, could not rescue a faulty script.

The Animal Protection Documentary (2016)

Earning merit through compasssion and universal soldity with all sentient beings

[9/10 · 5 April 2020]

'The Animal Protection Documentary' opens with a song of farewell and departure and by extension of death, a sentiment shared by many animal rescuers and lovers when the animals they saved die. Today in a world overshadowed by a life threatening pandemic COVID-19, it might be sad the documentary speaks to our condition. Wrong. Chan Chi Wah's film is strong and life affirming. The lens he looks through is inspired by the teacc]hing and philosophy of the Venerable Hong Yee. A dharma named monk, once called Lee She Tong, who preached universal protection of all sentient beings with compassion and humility. A belief rooted in behavior in accord with the universe. vision of world solidarity. This vision of world solidarity as translated by Master Yee inducted the most common of men and women with a sense of one's own humanity that makes life feel large and with merit. Chan Chi Wah is a man of protean energy: he wears many hats-Royal Fellow, social anthologist, businessman, award-winning film maker, publisher, producer. "Animal Protection Documentary' is about animal rescuing in Singapore where Chan lives. Its import is not parochial but universal in message. For the ideas it conveys speaks to every corner in our world where animals are rescued and loved, in good times and bad. I am thinking of Aunty Betty an elderly rescuer and carer who can hardly walk who cares for strays with food and love. Or Mrs. Lee who runs Metaccat and places rescued cats in homes. And of course the monasteries who offer sanctuary to cats, rabbits, dogs and sundry other abandoned animals. And the nameless army of animal rescuers and lovers who pay for medical expenses for say Henry an abandoned cat with a kidney disease or is HIV+; and then there are the animals animals abused, made blind or mistreated a d so on. The sad story is that in 2015 86 percent of abandoned or stray animals in Singapore are destroyed. 'The Animal Documentary' is a lesson in human decency and deserve the widest distribution possible.

Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears (2020)

Masalaama Phyrne Fischer

[3/10 · 15 March 2020]

'Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears' is a haunted house with obvious clues, and a good 15 minutes or slightly more than an episode of ITV's 'Miss Fishers Murders', a three season series filmed in Australia. She's a mod girl', as the Japanese called the modern woman of the 1920P Phryne Fischer is a female detective, a daredevil who has the wherewithal to do as she likes; she's titled. She embodies the independent woman; she is what Virginia Woolf dreamt of in 'A room of her own'--wealth and free to thumb her nose at the establishment, bed men she finds to her liking, but won't marry. She dresses to the nines; expensive clothing, drives her own Rolls, is a seasoned pilot and outwits men many of whom are dull, be they of her class or of the police or military. She embodies what Susan Sontag might call high camp. The script is obvious and and full of stereotypes...and she is a female Indiana Jones of sorts. The pace of the story is at times fast when there is action and then slows down to a ho hum a rhythm when it turns to the banal. For fans of Miss Fisher, the 1 hour 42 minute film may please...and after the murderer meets his end...there is a hope that a sequel is in the wings. I found it a yawn.

Les Misérables (2019)

A brilliant film with social implications, worthy of Hugo's les miserables without the romance

[19 January 2020]

'Les miserables' a 2019 film is not favored to win the Oscar for best foreign film. Yet, it's a first-rate film of life in Parisiaann suburbs, in the him or housing estates or projects, where a heteroclite mixture of races and nationalities and the rejects of France's colonial empire. Conditions are mean and miserable; it's a dog-eat-dog world. Here the criminal and not-so criminal and Muslsims of a messianic bent thrive and live. The story line is simple: a small town police man is transferred to Paris. Assigned to a three-man team, made up of a sadistic squad leader Chris who glories in his name as 'pink pig', a provocative nom de guerre, since he and Gwanda, a Fraco0 Sengalese born and raised in the housing estate, and the new recruit Ruiz, whom cynical Chris baptizes as Greaser owing to greasy hair. Director Ladj Ly from Mali directed and co-wrote this highly drawn and thrillingly violent film, which not for the fain hearted. The film pulsates with vibrant social observation and a reality that few American filmmakers in the Hollywood studios might not sanction. In a way Ly has drawn on the fairytale of a country mouse who visits his city cousin and finds a world of imminent dangers. The milieux is ugly rough and Darwinian: conditions are of neglect and indifference where police and criminal harass a seemingly hapless and helpless humanity, living in tall towers where elevators don't work; where groceries are deliver by basket and rope to inhabitants on higher floors , young and not so young, by brawn and sweat.Walls are covered with graffiti in French and Arabic and African tongues. 'Les miserables' open in time of utter exuberance in 2018 when France again won the World Cup 20 years after the stunning victory of 1998. National fever and solidarity are at its heights. And then everything in the housing estate falls apart. The young boys , mostly black and Muslim and very tech savvy (a drone plays a major part in the story); they are not only street smart, but know the ins and out of social media. In a way they are free spirits, street wise and old before their age, as they play games among discarded furniture and unwanted items; they're Peter Pan and his lost boys; they live in a Neverland of social rejection and existential squalor. Issa a young lad who is wonderfully acted by Issa Perica is the glue of the film. The tragedy commences by his stealing a lion cub, Danny, from a Roma or Gypsy circus that has come to town. And from that flows the story: we see the police of three who rule the roost, but not with deals with the 'margroulli' of low life among the Franco Africans, North or West African who exploit and harass almost at will. Ly ha evoked a wonderful kaleidoscope of corruption and utter disregard for the law but the ones the criminals and police throw up for influence. The mixture is explosive, a time bomb waiting to go off. And yet, the police don't come out with guns blazing as Americans cops do, shot first ask questions later. Rather, they rely on intimidation, rough housing manners and violent language; they use mace liberally or batons brazen, ballsy behavior. Like the German realist films of the 1930s-'Three Penny Opera' or 'M'-the collusion of the police with the underworld is open and suspect as each try not to overstep boundaries; it's a live and live world. The young and know they've been had by a systems that very much works against them. And like everyone they accept it until the day, the proverbial shait hits the fan. And here Ly is a true social realist who evokes the spirit of a jacquerie, an explosion, that should remind the American audience on this the 91 birthday of Martin Luther King, the wreak and havoc of the worms that turn. Here it's Issa and his gang who wage a guerrilla war against the exploiters and the police in a seemingly Gotterdammerung'. Ly direction and camerawork are worthy of praise and deserve the wherewithal to put his immense talent to work.

Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

A biitersweet tale as Homeless finds a home.

[8/10 · 2 November 2019]

Adapting Jonathan Lethem novels for the scrren, Edward Norton's Ivy League pettigree is put to good use, in adapting the script with Lethem for the screen. 'Homeless Brooklyn' is highly entertaining, although a mishmash of themes that are loose threads of a sprawling story, albeit well told.Norton as Lionel Essrog, aflawed hero with Tertz Syndrome, yet endowed with perfect pitch of a memory that forget nothing; a restless mind that stitches together a murder with mumbled clues. Set in Brooklyn in the 1950s, in a New York that Robert Moses is transforming a New York that feeds his autocratic inclination, as the power ebhind the throne. The indiscriminate use of eminent domain, to class and ethnic cleansing the working poor, the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, without providing them with places to go. The villain is Moses (or Moe) Randolph, a not so veiled character that is modeled on Robert Moses, and played well by Alec Baldwin. Murder, greed, sibling rivalry and trachery, mafia-like tactics, adultery, corruption, tape, jazz, taut racial relation, resistance from below and the stone=willed determination of Norton to solve the disparate pieces of this puzzle that is 'Homeless Brooklyn'. A sure fire cast with cameos by Cherry Jones, Wilhem Dafoe, Gugu Mbata-Raw, Michael Kenneth and the splendid Bruce Willis. 144 minutes fly by at a fast clip. Brooklyn or what appears to be Brooklyn is well used as a back ground. 'Homeless Brooklyn' speaks to the politics of our day, nonetheless the moral of justice is frayed in a jagged pattern. The camera is a good eye in capturing the narrative in close ups, medium and wide shorts.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

A failed fairy tale..a yawn

[3/10 · 8 September 2019]

Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'...is a descent into the land of make believe. Much publicized. A rich gate and thousands of film viewers reviews. Above all, as the title implies as conceived and realized by Tarantino: it's a fairy tale, with gratuitous violence and much nostalgia of a Hollywood of the 1960s, with cultural references in music and ambiance that are hardly exhilarating or unsettling. It's a buddy film: Leonardo DiCaprio and an aging Brad Pitt. (A good pairing that deserves a better film.) If 'Once Upon ... has a political subtext: it's violent America in Vietnam and gun violence that never cease, even today, to claim victims. The film is a simplistic and condescending nod to Clint Eastwood's decaying and depressing career until he went to Italy to star in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. It's magical realism in the way Brad Pitt and even DiCaprio meet and give the Manson Gang a lesson they won't forget. The film lacks palpable anger and is scatter shoot in emotions, especcally a weepy and self-pitying DiCaprio. Technically Tarantino knows how to make a film, but it's hardly a major film. Al Pacino turns in a wonderful cameo as a sterotypical Hollywood Jewish producer who Anglicizes the pronunciation of his name and has a non Jewish wife.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019)

Investigative at is best

[9/10 · 18 August 2019]

Seasoned Danish jinvestigative journalist Mads Brugger has the soul of a cultural anthropologist, as 'Cold Case Hammerskjold'bears witness. Accompanying Swedish private investigator Goran Bjorkdahl, in whose possession is a 'bullet' riden metal plate he suspects belonged to the airplane in which UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold was shot down and died. Brugger's documentary is an exercise in re-engaggin with the past to elucidate the events and leads pointing to Hammerskjold's death on 18 September 1961, as he going to meet Moise Tchombe leader of the copper and mineral rich province of the newly independent Congo (ex Belge), in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambi To me, then a schoolboy in Africa, the documentary conjures up vivid memory of the heady days of decolonization and dashed hopes from the grips of colonial powers. For we never doubted that the black hand of the US, UK, Belgium and South Africa had something to Hammerksjold's demise, directly or through its hired hands or secret ops. The assassination of Hammerskjold is story synonymous with villainy. Bjorkdahl's investigation of this cold case is ongoing in the Congo.Brugger's script is dissection of a cultural and political ethos that breaks down a complex picture in to manageable and credible detail, for a wider lens of the killing of a UN secretary general. Hammerskjold the man's 'Markings', a best seller, is replete with hope and poetry, but he had a cold eye for the darkness in the heart of men. He had high hopes that once liberated from the shackles of colonialism, the newly independent could purpose freely the interests of their country and people. This conceit was an anathema for colonial powers who reluctantly let their colonies one by one go, peacefully or through war. In other words, Hammerskjold was a dangerous man who had to be stopped. Brugger, ably assisted by Bjorkdahl, tries to role play, even to thee point of wearing white clothing, to appear like the head of the South African 'Commander' who leader a secret mercenary entity--the South African Institute of Maritime Research. SAIMR engaged in endless bag of bag, inimical tricks. Like underground runner roots, SAIMR engaged in assassination, guerilla warfare, biological and medical tricks, including suspicion of spreading HIV among black Africans to eradicate them. The pair discover the name of the Belgium who shot down Hammerskjold, the role of the CIA, British MI6 and South African secret services whose SAIRM may have been an arm of the British black arts. AS such, even some evidenc presented to SA's Truth and Reconciliation panel proved too hot to consider, hence in the case of SAIRM biologist Daphne Friel's murder, was soundly ignored. Brugger and Bjorkdhaal did something obvious: they interviewed Zambian blacks who had memories of Hamerskjold plane shot down. Something which the powers that be ignored, as they had had when their colonized subjects were once chose to ignore or see or hear, less than human they! And Brugger unravels his approach bu hiring two black secretaries, whom he questions about his work and approach. Two women of intelligence who question serious his asssertions. And, moreover respects, a neat tour de force. After six years on the ground, Brugger wraps up his findings as Bjorkdhal like the will of the wisp tries to track down SAIMR's biologial in the interior of the Congo. This unusal film deerves to be seen and as the death of Hammerskjold discloses revisit a sad chapter in African history, and the refusal of the US and colonial Europe to cast aside their loss of identity as imeprialists.

Song of Freedom (1936)

An embarrassing find to watch in 21 century.

[5/10 · 11 August 2019]

The City University of New York or CUNY TV is offering a summer program of 1930s British film. Many have not withstood the hands of time. And among thee films 'Song of Freedom' with the towering talent that was Paul Robeson.Contrary to his own country America, with an exception or two, the British had a very soft spot for Robeson. And he appeared as hero and strong roles in UK cinema. 'Song of Freedom is no exception. The scenario, however, is replete, for audiences today, with racial stereotypes of the Africans or Blacks who are less than noble savages, but base savages, superstitious and living in a world that is lost in the shadows of long gone past. The conceit fits colonial and imperialist thinking of the times. Robeson is Paul Zanga, born in the UK,; his parents have fled their homeland lest they be killed by a cabal headed by a witch doctor and elders, wedded tp traditions that defy the modern (read European) mind,yet obviously bacdwards. What makes this film of interesting is the full acceptance of Robeson and his wife as as equals; there's friendship and one might add love;. He works on the docks, proud he is of his working class roots. And he has a talent for singing. 'Discovered' by an Italian impresario, Fame shines on Paul Zanga as stage actor and serious musician. And yet on the edge of fame, the Metropolitan Opera, the itch of discovery his roots is offered by a British lord. Robeson gives up all to return to his people as their king. Hostilely received,, he expresses a will to bring to his benighted people the blessings of modern civilisation...medicine, education and so on. Rebuffed to the point of being wounded, he prevails by recalling a song that proves he's the her to the throne. The film is not with its buffoons: one a black valet and an Italian, shameful souvenirs of ethnic stereotypes found in US cinema of the times. In a way Robeson wouldn't have taken the role if he didn't, methinks, it had a positive character full of dignity and racial pride. Still, viewing it today, the discomfit if not embarrassment overwhelms. Technically, the film is well shot, but history has made it an example of what not to make.

The Lavender Scare (2017)

urage...gri and determination

[7/10 · 8 June 2019]

'The Lavender Scare' comes out in a small, art cinema in Greenwich Village (where else during 50 anniversary of Stonewall?). Almost 70 years ago the red and lavender scare broke out on the American body political. The US broke out in a fever that saw a Red (Soviet) agent under one's bed; and an easy targets for blackmail as Eisenhower announced to a joint session of the Houses of Congress, were homosexuals, perverts and other odd sexual birds. And this began a 'scandal time', as the playwright Lillian Hellman succinctly named it. The FBI ruthlessly ferreted out, in the thousands, 'deviants', who were forced to resign, not to make waves as they were forced from the government force. The Red scare attacked the State Department, mainly for losing China; but the larger blood letting in the diplomatic corps fell on homosexuals (male or female) ; the scientific community wasn't spared, nor the economic branches of the economy nor the postal services and, of course, the military. They adopted quietism as a defense as they tried to go on with their lives. The more frail psychologically took to suicide. These victims faded into the woodwork. The documentary has historical footage and interviews of victims now in the twilight of life; they created new lives. And since the 1960s breathing easier thanks to Gay Liberation and the shifting in social attitudes of the large society. Still, those cashiered out of governmental service never had status 'rectified' until teh Clinton presidency. Many by then had died, nursing a a deep hurt. The narrative comes to life with the 'grandfather of the gay movement' in the person of Franklin E. Kameny, Harvard Ph.D. in astromy. He had dreams of being an astronaut, but the 'thought police' quashed that. But Dr. Kameny was made of different mettle; he refused to take this bitter medicine that kept him from a life-time in astronomy. Two feet planted firmly on the ground, steeled in determination, he challenged the government: he wrote letters, seized the courts, wrote newspapers, and never denied he was a homosexual. And then he joined the Mattachine Society, and founded the Washington Chapter, infusing it with grit and determination. At first few in number, he drew up models of conduct: white shirts, ties and suits for men aznd dresses and pumps for women. Why? His idea was to show that homsexual looked and acted like everyone else, but their love desire was the same sex. And this on the eve of the tumultuous '60s and war in Vietnam and revlution ins sexual behavior. Pining the tail on the government's donkey, he and a handful of Mattachine poicketed the White House, calling for recignition and scotching the dread 'Lander rules' that automatically axes government employees. The Mattachine Society, under Kameny, vocal and never slack in his determination in his belief that if the government had to come to him by changing rules and attitude. During the Vietnam War say the Mattachine Society provided a way out of the draft, as many young homosexual came out in numbers, therby being rejected by draft boards. After Stonewall, and coming out decade before AIDS, the newly liberated younger, 'hipper' gays criticized the Mattachine Society as throwbacks. But Kameny kept to his goal in couseling and fighting for purging of records and restoring dignity to thos wilfully fired by the uS government services. A long, uphill struggle under Clinton signed a proclamation. And the gay movement got sense in recignizing the determined struggle of Kameny before and after Stonewall. And the crowning achievement came under obama when Franklin Kameny was welcomed in the Oval Officc. Truly after almost 60 years..it was a moment that showed if the prohet wont' come to the mountain, the mountain would come to the prophet. (He died at the age of 86 in 2011, as resolutely in his opinions as he was as a newly minted Harvard Ph.D., who never denied ot himself, his parents nor in his life that he was a homosexual. A man of boldness and coyrage who carried on the good fight.

Pasolini (2014)

A lifeless, pretentious film

[2/10 · 31 May 2019]

Abel Ferrara's 2014 film 'Pasolini' is flat as a pancake. The script is an idea cooked up by Ferrar himself and writer Maurizio Baucci. Poor Wilem Dafoe, an excellent actor with a wide range, has the thankless role of Pasolini, a flat, cardboard character. Ferara's trademark is provocation: in 'Pasolini' his use of sex, for whicch Pasolini used, like Moravia as an assault on the bourgoisie, the elite, government and the church, is an exercise in werisome boredom, and seems lacking in the political punch in Pasolini's films--be they the romp in 'Arabian Nights', 'Decameron' or 'Canerbury Tales'. What does come across is Defoe as a Pasolini in his last days on earth. Ferrar engages in metaphysical double talk, and the political side of the writer, film maker and engaged militant is downplayed like a pencil ground down to a stub. 'Salo oe a 100 Days of Sodom' beca,e a cause celebre for its content as an attack on the staate and the church and its supporters, at a time of extreme political angst. In the 1970s, the Red Brigades engaged in assassinations, roberries, the murder of Aldo Moro, a scoundral time of when the left and the general feeling sensed the rebirth of fascism, which had to be stopped. 'Salo' is a bold reference to the 10 days of Mussolini's Republic before he was captured by the partisans and hanged along with his mistress, thereby ending the long reign of fascism in Italy. Ferrara engages in a cerberal and metaphysical rendering of Pasolini. And yet he is true to Pasolini as a sexual predator of young, working class youth, in a way, albeiit unexpressed, is a very upper class, famous writer who exploits the lower classes for his pleasure. (In a way a trophe one finds in Tennesse Williams' 'Suddenly Last Summer'0. And Pasolini is horribly beaten and murdered by the young men he exploited sexually, who at heart are homophobic, resent being used as a sexual object, and what's more exhibit fascist behavior. Although not mentioned: Pasolini's 'Medea' with Maria Callas as Medea; the opening scenes of this film are memorable for the great actress Callas was, declaiming the opening lines in classicla Greek of Euripides play. That lacuna is made up by the voice of Callas singing a well-known aria from 'Barber of Sevile'. Ferara use of music offers no criticism to more a plodding narrative along. The censors may have held the 2014 film back owing to prudish standards, but 'Pasolini' is hardly aemorable film. And yet, 2019 is the half-century anniversary of Stonewall, so the film may get an audience that may be disappointed.

Sauvage / Wild (2018)

Looking for love in all the wrong places.

[8/10 · 17 April 2019]

In 2008, United Artists released Francois Truffaut's 'The Wild Child'; a film about a child, around 12, roaming the forests in 1789, untamed and wild, unable to speak any human tongue, as though he emerged from the dawn of time. Camille Vidal-Naquet' 'Sauvage' or 'Wild' brought back to mind the Truffaut film. In Vidal-Naquet's protagonist Leo, 22, is a male prostitute, poorly educated, who lives by his wits in the street, on the highways, the bridge selling his body. His 'love' is Abd, a boxer of sorts, bi-sexual who protects hims; nonetheless Abd is looking for a port in a storm, an older man, who can pleasure him and make life comfortable for him. Leo is by inclination homosexual, who looks to please and to be coddled. His trysts are graphic, described in strikingly vivid colors rarely seen out of porno picture house, be oral or anal intercourse, or submitting to a giant dildo until he bleeds or a sadomasochistic trick. Or being beaten; eating poorly...a vagabond life, relieved by sex for money. Living on the street, with other male prostitutes, he smokes crack, marijuana, drops meth. He tags team with others for a menage-a-trois, goes along with petty thievery. His health suffers: from asthma, early signs of TB, decaying teeth. With a touch of irony, 'Sauvage' opens with a man we take for a doctor examining a naked Leo., and suddenly he is masturbating him; we are witnessing play acting for money. Saying this, thanks to a good health care system that does take good care of Leo when his health suffer. And then Leo finds an older man, in his 50s, who offers him a stable life, a home and no money worries in St. Jerome, Canada. A safe haven in a stormy life. And just as they are at the airport, Leo bolts and make his way back to the forest, and as the sunlight filters through the leafy grren shade of the trees, mother earth receives her body as he drifts off to sleep, as he finds Vidal-Naquet uses her camera as an voyeur, an eye that records and espy the second oldest trade of the world. as Leo finds refuge to his feral nature. We are in a dog-eat-dog world, where the so-called straight world find refuge in kinky sex, degradation and living out fantasy. 'Sauvage' skates on the edge off 'cinema verite'. It's not a film forthe faint of heart. Yet, Vidal-Naquet deserves praise for treating a slice of life that deserves treatment.

Paragraph 175 (2000)

Yes, it can still happen here today

[8/10 · 6 April 2019]

The Second German Reich penal law criminalized relations between the same sex, in Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code. The Nazis firmed it up, and it remain on the book until 1966 in East Germany and 1967 in West Germany. A half-century after the defeat of Nazi Germany, historian Klaus Mueller searched out survivors of Nazi prisons. Few were alive or willing to tell their story, and those that did, to varying degrees told of the horrors and joys of being gay in Nazi and Weimar Germany and thereafter. One survived the death camp at Mathausen for more thab 8 years; another released early from prison joined the Wehrmacht, so he could be among men, although he refrained from sexual relations. Still another spoke chillingly of a singing forest: there the Nazi torturers hung homosexuals handcuffed to trees, where they were beaten or died slowly of a painful crucifixion. A Frenchman from occupied Alsace rounded up went to a cavalry where his torturers shove wooden sticks up his anis, and even in his 70s he suffered and bled from his wounds that wouldn't heal. The seemingly more cheerful, a German Jew, survived the war hardly unscathed. His Protestant relatives hid him, but he was bold as brass and full of courage, even donning a Hitler Youth uniform to rescue a young lover, who at the last moment couldn't leave his family to a horrible death that he shared at Auschwitz. The film opens with his 'cheery' retelling that under the bombing of Berlin, he had sex with a German soldier as they held each other for dear life fearful that death awaited them. He ended up in Palestine post war, fought for Israel and in 1979 returned to Germany to work with the small Jewish community there. And yet, like all survivors, or many perhaps, a happy face drowned out the unthinkable memories of Nazis, starvation, inhuman treatment and sheer sadism. Homosexuals, especially Christians, became human guinea pigs: operations, castration and worse. A lone lesbian, safely in Britain tells of her 'miraclous' escape. Lesbians were, according to Nazi philosophy, were recuperable vessels, for their eggs, when impregnated, could furnish Aryan children for the Third Reich. The defeat of Whilhelmian Germany in 1917, open up forces of liberation and repression. Weimar Berlin became the Mecca of homosexuality and free sex; it also bred the extreme right that rebelled against defeat and licenctiousness. The 1997 film 'Bent' provides a vivid tableau of Gay Berlin. On the other hand, Hilter's Brown Shirt headed by the homosexual Ernst Roehm, led a group of thugs killing homosexuals, Communists Socialists and anyone opposed to Hitler's Nazi Party. Visconti's 'The Damned', in a deeply intense segment, shows the 'Night of the Long Knives', the massacre of Roehm and his homosexual horde. The five or six witness in Paragraph 175 are now dead, but their words resound with a heaviness of a history that seems forgotten. But has the persecution of homosexuals stopped. Recently the Sultan of Brunei has revived Shaaria law, calling for beheading or sutting off of limbs for those that engage in same sex relations. ISIS were no different where they held power. And the rise of the Alt Right and revival of Fascism have enough example of murders, bombings and the like. So, the page of history in many ways has flipped backwards, it seems, in spite of Gay Liberation, soon to celebrate the 50 anniversary of The Stonewall Rebellion. Mueller's film lies in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It should be seen often and in schools and public venues, the more especially since humans sense of history is drenched in amnesia.

The Invisibles (2017)

A film that speaks to our condition today

[8/10 · 9 March 2019]

Josef Goebbels declared Berlin Berlin Judenfrein, cleared of Jews in the fourth year of WWII. And yet 1700 or perhaps more remained, went under ground and survived, thanks to native intelligence and the good Germans who protected them as best as they could. Director Claus Raefle's camera follows four survivors, some alive at the time of production. With a savvy crosscutting of newsreels of the early 40s Berlin, recreation of life clandestinely in the open and interviews with the survivors add a depth of understanding and immediacy of Hitler's race war against German Jews. The narrative is gripping and grim, but uncompromisingly forthright. Time has hardly softened the film's import, for today we see in the media horror stories of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan and sorry to say Israel in the Palestinian occupied territories. We saw in Rwanda and Kosovo., Iraq and Syria, Libya... The novel Gore Vidal spoke of historical amnesia, a truth that is ignored, as events 80 years ago, let alone five years ago seem so distant. Forgetfulness or historical amnesia is a heavy legacy for as Santayana famously said, if you learn nothing from history you're fated to repeat it.

China (1943)

A gem of a film

[7/10 · 6 February 2019]

Dusted off from long time in the vault, John Farrell's 'China' surprises. Allan Ladd plays a cynical, war profiteer, a part well chosen for him. He sells to the highest bidder: the Imperial Japanese waging war against the Nationalist troops, short of money, but not in men. And then there's doe eyed Loretta Young, born and bred in China and with missionary fervor remains in China to aid and assist her students, refugees. William Bendix as Ladd's side kick has a tender heart and is a sucker for an abandoned baby. But the surprise are the Asian actors...Korean Philip Ahn, Chinese Richard Loo and Victor Sen Yung and Marion Quon, among others, who usually plays small parts in Chan Chin films. Here, in 'China', at war, they have strong roles who force at the end of a barrel of a gun, to do as they want in their fight against the invading Japanese. They are forceful, intelligent and well able to fight with the Americans playing as it turns out to be in the background. Amazing? In a way, our allies in the fight against Japanese militarism, but in the US declared by act of Congress as a 'cursed minority', restricted in immigration, forced to live in ghettos quaintly known as 'China towns',centers of opium dens, intrigue and possibly engaged in white slavery. All the prejudice aside, 'China' is an exception. The Chinese characters speak good, standard ordinary English and are robust in character and know what they want to free China from Japanese aggression. Of course, Ladd has a change in heart, helps the Chinese to entrap Japanese troops. And in that he's ennobled by his sacrifice for all that's good and pure in America; he finds love in Young, and Bendix remains true to his heart. It's a pity, it is not shown on the television or in cinema clubs.

The Wall (II) (2017)

Cat and mouse

[7/10 · 2 January 2019]

'The Wall', in simple terms, is a nail biter. A three man film, two Americans snipers and the disembodied voice of an Iraqi 'juba' or marksman. Director Doug Liman has a steady hand in overseeing the camera in close ups, long shots, and using the windy, an arid stretch of Iraq desert. Dwain Worell has cleverly written a script that conveys a situation that conveys tight wound up spring of anxiety and tension on a battle field. A wonderful Aaron-Johnson is Isaac, who has signed up for yet another tour in Iraq, to expiate his guilt for a fallen comrade that his bullet killed; John Cena, Shane offers a moment of humor in a serious shootout with a wily sniper who has already killed a team of workers laying pipe to convey Iraq's oil for export. And then there is the Iraqi who unseen, in a game of killing the snipers. Shane is quickly put out of action early on. And here the drama builds up as Isaac wounded, behind a crumbling wall, with a thirst and hunger, hit in the knee he cannot staunch loss of blood. 'The Wall's' psychological development take the high ground as the Iraqi psyches Isaac out. He's well educated and taunts a poorly educated Isaac, to the point of reciting Edgar Allan Poe, a macabre detail. Isaac manages to contact headquarters for medical evacuation, only to discover the Iraqi knows his name and has been in radio contact with it, to his bitter frustration. Meanwhile as the conversation between the two continue, Isaac finally locates where the Iraqi is hidden. He pushes the shaky wall until it collapse, then shots, as two Medevac helicopters come to rescue him and recover Shane's body. And as they lift off the ground, shots ring out, causing the machines and crew and Isaac to crash and be killed. And the sniper lives to kill another day. The Iraqi, a school teacher whose school was destroyed when the Americans invaded Iraq. The killing of innocent lives has pushed this educator to take to the Iraqi underground resistance to the invader (and yet we cannot be sure his doing this out of attachment to Islam). And the eternal quest he asks Isaac why he was in Iraq and why he has returned? He even tells him that the war is over, a rather paramount judgment. Over all, 'The Wall' may be seen as a testament to an invasion that has gone wrong, and an even handed understanding of why the Iraqis opposed the American invasion.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Flourishing in a rising economic universe of Singapore and decline of the West

[10/10 · 20 August 2018]

Jon M. Chu's 'Crazy Rich Asians', based on Kevin Kwang's best selling book, is highly enjoyable and amusing. Reviews saw a Jane Austen 'Pride and Prejudice' influence. For Old Time Radio mavens the film echoes 'Our Gal Sunday': an never ending saga of an orphan girl from a mining town in the West, who marries a rich British lord. To me, it strangely recalled Viscontini's 'The Leopard'. Kwan's novel (one of a trilogy) is affected by, at the same time, melancholia and an appreciation of wealth, good food, drink and the special privileges of money obtains. And of course, in spite of false perceptions of what is Chinese, 'Crazy Rich Asians' has a touch of Cinderella. Whites, Malays, Indians matter little in Kwan's universe. It is the the description of an edifice of the financial center that the Chinese immigrants have turned Singapore into, as a Crown Colony and more importantly under the guidance of Lee Kwang Yew and his People's Action Party, that lifted a poor The West called a 'Tiger economy'. 'Crazy Rich Asians', at a gallop, embellishes, without a blush of exaggeration, the opportunities and the authority and immunity from mundane society taboos, but not Confucian hierarchy, the prerogatives of staus and rank, and in the case of the Youngs, to the manor born. In a way Kwan whose own world he describes with tongue in cheek perhaps, is what China and Singapore and Korea and India represents as power and wealth have shifted from the West to the East. 'Crazy Rich Asians', the story line is done with a light, farsical hand. It is film that well uses the underused talent of the Chinese diaspora. And we know how the denouement will work out. The film will goose interest in high fashion, as it will whet your appetite for Chinese, Peranankan and Malay cuisine. And more importantly, juice up tourism to Singapore. 'Crazy Rich Asians' leaves out the majority of Singaporeans who eke out a living on the lower end of the economic scale. It's the world of the 1 percent, with its excessive habits and the mindlessness of its children. The US and Chinese America is not well viewed, to say the least. For the hero love conquers over all, but we know he has not completely rejected the wealth and the privileges of the class and benefits of the super rich. And all though the object of his love is low born, she's an economist at New York University, who speaks Mandarin and is a whiz in game theory, and therefore, she will fit in the world of the manor. Saying this, take the film at your stride, it's a jolly, rollicking roller coaster ride in an over the hill, paradise of the rich.

Shock and Awe (2017)

Good investigative reporting doesn't always get it justice!

[6/10 · 15 July 2018]

Investigative reporting, until the advent of the Trump administration, has had a bad odor since Bush's invasion of Iraq. Rob Reiner's 'Shock and Awe', based on a true story, has given it new life, and is an antidote to Trump's shouting at the drop of a hat 'fake news' or the psycho babble Rupert Murdoch's Fox News serves up daily as distortions of truth and dollops of propaganda. If you're looking for the glamor and excitement of 'All the President's Men', you won't find it here. What, however, you'll find is the shoe and leather craft of investigative reporting, and why hard facts and the truth matter. 9/11 fed the hungry mouth of blind nationalism; it colored reporting, as well as it stoked the flames of revenge. Bush went to war in Afghanistan to avenge 9/11, to quash Al Qaeda and capture and kill Osama ben Laden. But he and his vice president Cheney and close advisors had another war on their mind, a war in Iraq to topple a tooth dictator Saddam Hussein and bring the fruits of US democracy to Iraqi. Rob Reiner has made a solid film of how the main stream media fell for the propaganda Bush & co fed the press and TV news. And yet, one news outlet Knight Ridder News Service didn't. And Reiner's script writer Joey Hartstone tells it as it was, cleverly andwith strong feeling and with a pen planted in reality. The film opens on two planes: John Landry (Woody Harrelson) partakes in a war game for journalists and what they should do if captured by terrorists; this before 9/11...as though it were game of Cowboys and Indians. The real drama begins of Willie Lewis (a strong Luke Tennie), a paraplegic, owing to an IED in Iraq, who wheels himself into a Congressional hearing on the Iraq War; he begins by fingering beads of data on the war to the Congressmen here assembled who look at him benignly, as a young man who signed up after 9/11 to serve his country, and then turns the tables on them and asks 'how did this happen?'And then we get into the quick of the story. Two persistent reporters Landry and Warren Strobel (James Marsden) tirelessly ply their craft to get at the truth. Rob Reiner plays the Knight Ridder managing editor John Wolcott, ably aided by a veteran journalist with 43 years of war behind him Joe Galloway, played by Tommy Lee Jones with spit and vinegar to season the relentlessness to get at the truth why Iraq? And they do it with a dedication that commands our respect, although at the time, many did not think so. As a news service Knight Ridder News served 30 odd newspapers, each one of which could choose to print or not what it got on the news wire. And in the case of the war, and here 'The Philadelphia Inquirer', a paper of heft chose not to. Nonetheless, 'Shock and Awe' deftly uses TV footage from C-Span, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, mainly to bring to our eye and ear the machinations of the Bush White House to hoodwink the US public and the world that lying pays in pursuing an Iraq War that remains opened ended in 2018. It also use headlines from the 'Washington Post', especially 'The New York Times', whose Michael Gordon and especially Judith Miller spread the Bush line on the war, that no one but Knight Ridder challenged. Equally important is the method Wolcott encouraged of talking to the little people in the government to ferret out and build a case that Bush & co. were lying through their teeth; how they perverted intelligence, killed the career Of 5 star general Colin Powell who made a fool of himself at the UN Security Council hawking aluminum tubes as proof of Hussein's travelling nuclear arsenal. The sad tale is that everyone drank the Gatorade, but Knight Ritter. Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich and Margo Moore are not taken in by the Bush lies. Equally interesting as background you see the unnamed heroes and heroines who came forward to connect the dots of this woeful story of lies, deceptions and made up facts. Ultimately, it was the disgraced Judith Miller whose words end the fil that 'Knight Ridder' was the only one that got it right'. 'Shock and Awe' probably won't do well at the box office, but it should be seen by journalism classes and school children as a learning tool of how truth matters. Reiner is a seasoned film maker and he know how to use close up, darkened room restaurants, long shoots to create a strong story line. He doesn't use 'Shock and Awe' to make us weep, but as a cautionary tale that vigilance and an informed citizenry is the price of liberty and freedom of the press.

The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)

The spy who never came in from the cold

[7/10 · 4 July 2018]

Ben Lewin has brought Nicholas Dawidoff 1994 biography about the mysterious Moe Berg. And Moe Berg remained a mystery until he died. Here's food for thought: when you think of Jews in baseball Moe Berg's name doesn't easily come to mind. Hank Grrenberg, yes. Sandy Kofax, for sure. Not Moe Berg who played for the Boston Red Sox during the 20s and the 30s. 'The Catcher was a Spy' is a conventional film with a fascinating 'hero': a polyglot, a polymath, born of Eastern Europeans Jews who settled in Harlem. And yet, Berg, played by a charming Paul Rudd who like his character celebrates tight lip secrecy. It is to Rudd's credit to have learned smatterings of six or seven languages to give body to his character who know many, many more. Berg graduated summa laude from Princeton when few Jews could attend. A lawyer from Columbia law who passed the bar before he finished his degree. Yet baseball was his life as was spying. The script writers give short shift to the spy Berg when he went to Japan with an all-star team that included Babe Ruth. We get the idea Berg dresses up as a Japanese in full kimono, armed with a camera films from the roof of a hospital Tokyo Harbor which had a dual use as a military facility. It would have taken too much to explain the prewar politics and the role of Japan invading Manchuria, testing America's and European empires' turf in Asia. So, although Berg was acting on behalf of a rudimentary US spy agency, Lewin's script white washes it as an act of a patriot. There is a 'love' story, but beneath the surface the film there is a flaw, a 'moral flaw' for the time. Was Berg queer? Probably. A scene of a night visit to the waterfront frequented by men, and non reputable bars frequented soley by men. Now to the film: Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS, predecessor to the CIA, recruits Berg after Pearl Harbor. Donovan asks him if he's queer. And without a beat, Rudd replies, 'I know how to keep secrets'; to which Donovan replies, I don't care wo a man f--ks, I'm only interested if he's wants us to win the war'. Berg's assignment is to kill Werner Heisenberg, father of the German nuclear bomb. And here the film takes wings...and a high moment of the 'Catcher was a Spy' is when Rudd and Strong play mental chess, to fathom have the Germans the bomb. And here we see Berg has a dialectical frame of mind, he's willing to spare Heisenberg for an answer that Germany's nuclear project is not very advanced. (Heisenberg is the object of an award winning play "Copenhagen' that infers Heisenberg purposefully delayed Hitler's plans for a nuclear weapon.) The camera turns all over the place Japan, Italy, New York and Switzerland. Long shots, close shots, it runs the full alphabet of film making. Rudd speaks his languages fairly well with a good accent, but slips briefly when it comes to French. There is nothing dramatically wrong, but the film never plumbs the secretive Moe Berg. At the end we are told Berg never married and spent time in libraries. And yet he never left the CIAin mind and spirit and died the loner he was.

Hitler's Hollywood (2017)

When Germany challenged Hollywood

[8/10 · 20 April 2018]

In 105 minutes Ruediger Suchsland's 'Hitler's Hollywood' provides a startling retrospective of German cinema under the skillfull hand of Hitler's propaganda mage who was Josef Goebbels. As Reichminister for Propaganda and National Enlightenemnt, he had total control of cinema, radio, press and theatre. Evil genius that he was, he had a deep intuitive understanding of mass psychology, and in 'Hitler's Hollywood' we see a large swathe of Nazi controlled films from 1933-to 1945, when the first Oscar winner Emil Jannings was in the midst of staring in a film. With great intelligence, we also see how the Nazis through talented film makers out did Hollywood in romantic comedies, musicales and extolling the 'virtues' of the 'master race' in physical beauty. And yet, the dark eyed Swedish singer Zarah Leander appeared in musicales with military themes, or the German penchant for exotic Slavs or Gypsies. And yet, her career in post war Europe, there she was with a number one hit 'Wunderbar', sung in English. Her sultry, deep throat voice still even today has not lost its mystery and allure. [See, YouTune]. Hans Detlef Sierck's 'La Habanera' made her a star and a household name. Sierck remade himself after the war, and much lionised in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk. There he was the masterly eye behind luscious romantic films like 'Magnificent Obsession' and 'All Heaven Allows'. He honed his technique at the Ufa Studios and theatre, and the influence of Goebbels ideas found its way in Hollywood, perhaps. Popular singers like Hans Albers who sang of and longed for the South Seas, transitioned to a postwar career without a hiccup. Suchsland does make a seamless cloth of Nazi cinema from the 1930s to the change of fortunes of defeat in Russia and the collapse of the Third Reich. Films became more realistic, less romantic and cotton candy. One thing remained a red thread: anti-Semitism. 'Jud Suess' by Van Harlan, with his wife, Krista Soederbaum, is an infamous anti-Semitic film that pulls no punches as an odious film, yet one extolling Nazi pathological hatred of Jews. And, he, too, survived the war, and continued to make film until his death in West Germany. Goebbels understood 'soft power', and German films flooded European markets as they did in America's ethnic picture houses that spoke to 'benign' anti-Semitism that flourished in Europe and the US. Even Ingrid Bergman as an ingenue appeared in a German film before she left for Hollywood. Suchsland script alludes to her guilt, which maght have been, and he repurchasing her guilt by playing Isle in 'Casablanca'? A reviewer cannot do justice to 'Hitler's Hollywood' but strongly suggest you go see it, and visually and emotionally and intellectually absorb the dazzling cross section of 'Hitler's Hollywood'. And this documentary is a cautionary tale of techniques that used today. 'Caveat emptor!'

Baba Joon (2015)

A family drama in a silent land whose secret is ignored

[5/10 · 19 April 2018]

Yuval Delshad's 'Baba Joon' is remarkable on several levels. One is it is mainly in Farsi, with some Hebrew. Two, it is a family drama, which in itself may not be worthy of our intention. Yet, it is. And three it is the secret the silent land won't divulge. A family of Iranian Jews are transplanted to southern Israel, and there they continue the traditional family business of raising turkeys, a back breaking struggle in the torrid desert heat (of the Negev?}. A father Itzhak wants his only son Moti to carry on the family trade. His aaged father cannot, and soon Itzhak's heir has to be prepared to carry on the family's trade that has roots in Iran. Moti rebels; he is clever with things mechanical. So the stage is set for a generational battle.du Belly's poem 'the Oak and the Reed'. If Itzhak does not been to the changing times, he runs of risk of losing his soon and his wife. Encouraged by his traditional father, who hands him his strap, to beat the boy into submission, Itzhak comes to understand he will lose his son, but save his own pride. It is equally notable that yea these many years, three generation live in Israel, Farsi or Persian remains the daily language, in a community mainly composed of Iranians who claim the 'Right to Return', to Israel. TV tapes of Iranian programs are played and replayed. And Moti sings of Isphan to his grandfather who holds on to nostalgia of his native land. And then there is the silence of the land, endless plains of uninhabited, empty land. A landscape that awaits its master painter to behold and capture its silent beauty. And yet, there is a fly in the ointment. On the way back to his farm, Itzhak's truck breaks down by an abandon house, in an arid, countryside. And the abandon dwelling has signs of scarring from a battle. And we have to ask, surely there was a village here before, but where are its inhabitants. They were more likely Palestinians or Bedouins that the Israeli army chased off the land, for Jewish immigrants. Where are they? So the land that Itzhak and his community dwell on is the result of ethnic cleansing. And that is something we have to keep in mind in this award winning film.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Death of Stalin is weak tea amusing, and a failure to achieve irony or comedy

[2/10 · 27 March 2018]

Armando Iannuccis' 'Death of Stalin' does work as slapstick, although it has elements of broad humor, absurd situation, and violent actions. Now does it satisfy as a comedy of errors as it explores the scramble for power after the death of Josef Stalin, who ruled the USSR with an iron fist from the death of Lenin until a cerebral hemorrhage fell him in March 1953. Iannucci's script relates a series of events made ridiculous by any number of faux pas throughout. Which raises the question: is Stalin's demise and the jockeying to replace him by his lieutenants--Malenkov, Bulganin, Molotov, Khrushchev and the hated Beria--a subject for opera buffa? Such a treatment minimize, nay makes light of the large shadow that Stalin cast at home and abroad, as well the US' response of a cold wra, witch hunts (a page form Stalin's own playbook) and implanting military bases to hem in the Soviet Union, developing a powerful nuclear arsenal, engagin him hot and cold wars to defeat Communism? 'The Death of Stalin' strains credulity. It brings to mind the simplistic B films Hollywood made and it does ignore the radio and television dramas that fanned a mindless anti-Communism that alas exists. tody. Jeffrey Tambour as a feckless Malenkov; Michael Palin, a fretful Molotov; Paul Chahidi as a silent Bulganin; and Steve Buschemi as a Krushchev with a high tone and reedy voice strain credulity as a man who outwitted his rivals and took Stalain's place. (Can this be the man who denounced Stalin's excesses at the 20th Party Congress? or the force man who banged his shoe at a UN General Assembly or frighten the green JFK when they met in Vienna?) As for Kaganovich and Mikoyan they have no real voice at all.Only Simon Russel Beale as the feared KGB boss Lavrenti Beria breathes life into his role: a man who embodies the fear of a reign of terror, canny and plotting to remove all his rivals by firing squad, and who clever by half, hoists his own petard by mock trial and summary execution. If anything, the chaos following Stalin's death is more apt to Donald Trump's White House.

Love, Simon (2018)

Simeon's Blue

[2/10 · 25 March 2018]

Hollywood may have made technological strides in film making, but 'Love, Simon" is a hoary reminder of the teen romances of the 'Date with Judy' kind. It is a fairy tale (no pun intended) of coming out unwillingly in suburban South California. Simon find his 'true love' on a gay chat site, then is outed and voila the drama? Everything about the film is cotton candy and jelly beans. Simon and friends live in an upper class community; big houses, automobiles. Obviously they belong to the bracket that nears the one percent. No one seems to work. The high school is something that no inner city kid will ever know. We are among the privileged: well feed, sparkling white teeth, clean duds and soap clean hands. Simon's bed room is well appointed, something a homeless family of five would die for. Everyone is understanding, everyone smiles, and Simon's world is peachy clean, in a world--almost nirvana. But for the outing which is treated so delicately and oh, too, too in a noble and upper income manner, denies the reality of the lower class gays who struggle against discrimination, rejection by family, condemned by religion, despite the more 'tolerant' America that when political winds shift, is readily to brand them as deviants and worse. But we wouldn't know this from Simon's world. The film pleases, it goes without saying in a time of Trump and an America on the slide. Any distraction is worth the high price of admission with huge tubs of popcorn. 'Love, Simon' is so saccharine, even the middle age audiences and seniors sigh and smile and nod knowingly to each other. Give me my money back!

The Young Karl Marx (2017)

Marx Thinks as does Engels...a glorious collaboratopn

[9/10 · 25 February 2018]

Rauol Peck has never shied away from difficult subjects: Lamumba and James Baldwin. Now, he has taken on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 'Young Karl Marx'. This film won't earn him much in the US, a country which has done much to suppress Marx's thoughts and has waged a ferocious campaign to emasculate its own Communist Party and wither on the vine democratic socialism. Marxism is taught drily and negatively on university campuses today, as a failure and a foil to triumphant global capitalism. Peck's film , splendid in the use of the camera, capturing as it does, the ravages of early industrialization in the textile mill the Engels owned in Manchester, the miserable condition of workers, child labor, misery of the cannon fodder that fed what Blake called 'Satanic mills', and the general impoverishment of the laboring class. In Germany, in Prussia, the reign of the feudal king who exercises the rights of a feudal lord with it heavy burden on the peasantry, but in whose university slowly burns revolutionary thought that await the flame to blaze, and in Guizot's France tightly held on a leash any attempt other than fancy theories to arouse the people as they did in 1789. Americans find in general history tiresome, being a society open to the future where the past counts little. They little tolerance for grand theory or discussions, fiery public meetings, respectful exchanges of ideas that command our attention, but mostly in the mouths of demagogues. Like the majority of Americans, they have little tolerance for philosophical discussions, and abstractions bore them no end. The millions that in slavery and wage slavery that built capitalism count for little. So, Peck's 'Young Marx' plunges into the tense, tight theories of Socialist theory of romantics and materialists in the first half of the 19 century, that left its mark even today in the 21 century. Peck's camera and his principal actors August Diehl as the spirited Marx and Stefan Kornaske ass his life long partner and collaborator in struggle as Engels, wage serious battle against Proudhon and Wietling and Bakounin for example, against the Young Hegelians, against Bauer and Feuerbach and Rugge ..names that have some resonance today, and are best read of say in the works of GDH Cole or Wilson's 'To the Finland Station'. Argumentation and debate were fierce, and Marx suffered fools not gladly, nor did Engels who had a smoother manner. Marx and Engels love and turning the other cheek in the fight for the working class whom they saw as the future, and a spearhead of equality that even today's America fear seek through the courts to weaken further so that the the coupon clipeers and the ruling finace capitalists can fully have their way and increase profits and political power and control globally in the full expression of raw exploitation. Marx insisted that 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it'; they have put theory on its head, but he and Engels turn it around and put it on its feet. And the fruit of their theoretical struggle and intimate knowledge of the material conditions of the working class came to fruition in the writing (jointly) of the 'Communist Manifesto' that signaled the outbreak of revolution. So on top of the moment were this pair that the Revolutions of 1848 broke only weeks later, sweeping away the vestiges of feudalism in the German Holy Roman Empire, and spurred the national struggle throughout an industrializing Europe. The 'Manifesto' is wonderfully written and still hold water today, despite attacks...even in our age of reaction. 'The Young Marx' is in three languages: German, French and English. Peck has assembled a first rate cast and with flair and much artistry conveyed the passions of the young Marx and Engels. Peck's film hasn't a wide distribution, alas. And yet, in the small art house I saw it, the 100 seats were fully occupied, by people of all ages and 'middle class' conditions. The film reviewers on the whole have sort to express impatience in seeing the 'Young Marx",making large yawns and little effort to understand Peck's cinematic vocation in tackling Marx and Engels' thinking and activism. At the end Peck has footage of how wide and vast Marx's influence is: May 1968 in France, Vietnam War protest in the USA, Lumumba, and Mandela, for example. When Marx died Engels tribute sums his life up: Marx didn't die, he ceased to think.

This Gun for Hire (1942)

Wartime works miracles

[6/10 · 16 December 2017]

Graham Greene's entertainment 'This Gun for Hire', in the hands of script writers Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett, becomes an cog in the U.S. against fascism. The narrative is transposed from the intrigues of pre-world war two Europe to California. Director Frank Tuttle's is fast moving. It is film noir in its early childhood. We're in 1942, a few months after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl harbor. The narrative moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles, in the early days massive removal of Japanese from principally California, Oregon and Washington, to internment camps. 'This gun for hire' is a tale of murder and political mayhem, of corporate greed and treason. The film is notable for Alan Ladd's first major feature film, and a strong performance it is. He's Philip Raven, a hired killer who performs his craft with a stone-cold sober aplomb. Not a crease in his brow, an ice stare and a voice which betrays no inner emption or doubt. He is betrayed and set up for a fall by the msn who hired his gun. And so in true Greene fashion, Raven is both hunted and hunter, seeking revenge. Although Ladd is given third billing, he is more than ably supported by Veronica Lake as a night club performer who fascinates by her unsentimental singing and her tricks as a quick-handed magician. And although there is a chemistry between her and Raven, it is without romantic passion. That is workman-like indicated by Robert Preston as the police man who is after Ladd. Laid Cregar is oleaginous and slippery as a craven eel who works for the Alvin Brewster who is eager to sell a poison gas formula to the Japanese. The storyline is not difficult to see how everything turns out. Good triumphs, the good fight won;t be poisoned by the gas an American chemist has created; Raven pays for his crime but has redeemed himself by unmasking the internal enemies. In hindsight, three-quarters a century after the film first flashed across the screen, it is easy to see Maltz (one of the Hollywood 10) and Burnett worked in tandem to come up with a script that exposed corruption, greed and in wartime, shone light on pre-war behavior of capitalists who put individual interest before national good in dealing with fascists like Hitler of the Japanese militarists, Franco or Mussolini. And what's more in wartime had not lost that habit. 'This gun for hire' turned Ladd into a major star. It was made for half a million and grossed $12 million. Curiously, in spite of its obviousness, the film has not lost the salt of low-keyed narrative, the darkness of ambiance, and a no nonsense school of film making. And Lake is eye fetching and holds her own.