Ladies Film Club

37 Mafia suspects take a hit. or do they?

2011-11-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Loanshaking and gambling on trial!

http://mafiatoday.com/gambino-family/37-suspects-rounded-up-in-major-bust-involving-gambling-loan-sharking-rings/

The audacity of the State has no bounds. First they claim without evidence nor citation of fact that the 37 people indicted are part of he Mafia. But I doubt this. It is like those they claim to be Terrorists or Communist or whatever is in vogue at any particular time in history.

In this case there is just a lumping together of all 37 people and voila. Mafia indicted along with their 37 champions.

For what?

Loansharking and Gambling?

But this is the basis, the foundation of the Capitalist Economic system. Capitalism is born from, and survives and thrives on loansharking and gambling. And the Capitalist' gamble lost! The states were high and still are. Bankruptcies, foreclosures, eradication of IRAs and savings. The collapse of entire countries~ The list is endless. And it doesn't stop.

We are encouraged every day to spend, to barrow, to gamble, to play the lottery; for what? For capitalism to survive.

Making money from money is the essence of Capitalism "Making your money grow" is it's motto.

Capitalism frowns on the distribution of wealth and goods. It calls those who receive lazy, unsophisticated......... a drain on the system. The entitlement programs are not considered part of Capitalism. They are deemed a necessary evil required for the perpetuation of Capitalism. (To my way of thinking Medicaid, unemployment insurance are like the band aids that cover the evidence while the sores fester.)

This trial of the 37 self appointed CEO of the 99 percent can bring to light the hypocrisy of the rulers, the champions of law and order while putting Capitalism on trial.

Linda Zises
from Chicago

OWS: Just getting started

2011-10-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

It isn't the outside, the rain, sleet or cold weather that will drive the movement of OWS into the dustbin of history because it is a youth driven movement without God on their side, nor media or money.

It is a movement of the young who see the future as hopeless, with debt that far exceed their ability to gain financial stability. The more educated, and most are educated, the greater their debt.

Sooner rather than later the OWS will wake up to the problem with the Universities that make debt a graduation nightmere while the schools amass huge futunes in tax free real estate at the expense of culture, of history of places that hold memories more rich than the education that schools offer to those of their chosing.

The OWS movement will also wake up to the reality of their political power. They will form their own political party, the 99 per cent party and they will not have to go through the arduous process of trying to gain acceptance on the ballot for their party, their platform, a voice on radio, telvision. They won't have to debate anyone because there is no debate with crooks, liars and mouth pieces who have destroyed the fabric of life for millions upon millions of people, countries....the world

The OWS will go to the polls in numbers almost unheard of in this great country, and they will offer up their candidates for Prsident of the United States, and it will be Anon for President and Wiki for Vice President and the 99% will wear masks when forced to speak. Anyone wearing the mask will satisfy the need for public discourse. The 99% will run on a platform of full transparency and democratic participation and human need above greed. And work?

They articulate a way to distribute goods, life sustaining necessities without making the sole method of income distribution the almighty "work" that professed character building trait deemed mandatory for the 99%. Work will be a luxury as it is for the one per cent. What people won't do. machines will.

And the OWS will write-in their candidates for President and Vice President. If you have ever tried to write in a candidate you know this is a long arduous process that will impend if not bring to a premature end a day of voting on the aloted line for the corporate delivered candidates of no one's particular choice.

Come rain or shine, sleet, or winter cold,
the work of the OWS is but just begun. If only they have the vision to do what must be done.

That is my dream

Linda Zises
recent Chcago resident

Winter: A premature end to Occupy Chicago:

2011-10-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

Chicago has recently passed an ordinance limiting the amount of glass allowed in home construction.

Down the street from me is a newly constructed glass guzzling home that clearly pushes the ordinance limits.

Why the need for inordinate amount of glass and why the huge, mansion homes which look more like museums than intimate family hovels.

The answer lies in the dreaded inevitable prospect of the looming winter.(excessive money aside)

Chicago has endured the windy part of its legacy with some discomfort but the recent blizzard which for the first time in Chicago history caused the schools to close is still fresh on the resident's minds. In addition to the wind and the snow that makes walking hazardous is the ever present cold preserved by Lake Michigan which is the root cause of the excessive heat in summer and cold in winter; the opposite of an ocean that keeps weather moderate.(of course global warming contributes its fair share of projected and real discomfort)

What this translates into on the every day mundane life expectancy is the inability to get up in the winter cold days, and an even greater inability to go outside. Jogging will be a distant memory and bike riders will be few to none for almost 6 months.

This explains why the house, no matter how big, how conversant with the great beyond through it's mammoth use of glass, becomes for one and all, a jail. A $15 million Jail. You gotta love it!

As a rule I am not one to hibernate as I learned people do here in winter but I will be held up in my home with the rest of the Chicago residents when the brutal weather hits for long endless dark days. And that is why I had my windows cleaned. To be able to be locked inside while feeling in contact with the great cruel Chicago Environs.

And that is why there is no need to use force to end the Occupy Chicago movement or the OWS denizens; winter weather will bring the troops back to their warm abodes, or so it is hoped or rather forecast.
This is where planning count.

Preparing for the not so distant future.

Linda Zises
recent Chicago resident

occupy wall street: report from Chicago

2011-10-05T18:17:00.001-07:00

Occupy Wall Street : Poster Man

the crowd is growing. the police are mulling about and the government agents are engaging the protesters with their ill disguised clothes. But this is a beginning. I couldn't figure out where people would sleep; there is little space between the Federal Reserve Bank and the protesters.

I offer a quote we might all want to keep in mind during these still warm enough days for outside happenings

"Liberation is an act of simultaneous conscious awakening and direct action, a concrete engagement with Reality guided by a freed Consciousness, a massive collective labour of love that conjoins praxis and theory; it's a spiral in which labour struggles and political struggles fuel and nourish each other to turn in a widening rising helix. As that helix turns, it brings in more people into its process, sculpting an expansion of the liberated community outwards and higher. David McNally's article paints a picture of how this took place in Egypt and anchors it to the work of other prominent revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who had a lot to say about the revolutionary moment, and its process."

The picture above is of a man who wasn't on Wall Street but in Chicago. He worked hard to get his outfit just right, the red tie and black shirt. His red and black hair didn't make it into the photo but it was great! And his Mask is outstanding, as was his attitude; gentle, determined and.........all that is needed to go the mile.

Linda Zises
a recent chicago resident

RAPT : The monetary value of love

2011-07-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Lucas Belvaux

Wednesday, July 6 at Film Forum --2 week engagement

“.......based on the 1978 kidnapping of the French industrialist/playboy, Baron Edouard-Jean Empain. In RAPT, the victim spends a harrowing nine weeks in the hands of a criminal band, but the experience proves less life-threatening than the scandalous revelations of his secret life -- uncovered by the tabloids in the course of these events."

Commentary

I did not experience the unfolding of this tabloid perfect, gossip juicy sexual/political scandal in real life time which might have heightened the impact of the drama.

As a fresh viewer to the unfolding scandal I became enmeshed in an emotional struggle. On the one hand I wanted to remain sympathetic to the unshaven, filthy man/victim as he deteriorated in the course of his torture experience including the brutal chopping off of his finger without apparent benefit of surgical procedures. It was a struggle not to appreciate the torment of his family; his wife, daughters, mother who rightfully acquired the address of Madam with her dignified posture and demeanor.

The collateral damage to those who bore his name and blood line inflicted by this kidnapping certainly should not be endured by anyone.
However, I was simultaneously confronted with the reality of how obscene the wealth and status of privilege was for this French man who hoodwinked those who knew him best into thinking he was what he wasn’t and wasn’t what he was.

The juxerposition of two scenes brought my emotional dilemma to the fore. In the first scene we are looking at the barren, seemingly mildewed room, where a TV is turned on while the victim eats. This scene is immediately followed by the sight of The Family eating in their more than opulent dining room with the TV on, and again functioning as a distraction to the immediate task of eating.

From the one visual scene to the other the contrast said it all. Who is right in this kidnapping event? And what is justice, Injustice?

In our world where the wealthy appear to be free to act, flaunting their immorally with impunity, isn’t their wealth the real culprit, the enemy of us all?

Rapt brings this reality into clear focus. It messes with our seemingly instinctual reactions. It shows the extent to which we are conditioned to feel and it forces us to reassess what is right, what is wrong and to what extent we, the viewers, have become the mindless victims manipulated with strong music, great acting and a message which maybe in another arena we would never embrace.

What more can be asked of a great, a meaningful provocative and entertaining film?
except
that it be shown again and again to remind us who the enemy really is.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Wisconsin leads the way!

2011-02-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

I went to school in Wisconsin- four years at the University in Madison where it is colder than I ever imagined cold could be.

The people of the State are not unusually sophisticated. They are like most mid westerners, concerned about their families. They don't have the time nor inclination to read the New York Times from cover to cover or to think about politics in detail. That is why they elect representatives, to represent their interests, the interests that they assume their politicians who live next door to them share and want to see realized.

In up state Wisconsin it is so cold that often the parents of school age children do not go to social functions or even to P.T.A. meetings. They allow teachers to teacher and administrators to administer a Democratic academically sound curriculum.

It is unimaginable that the foundation of their lives, their values of democracy, of taking care of the middle class, of having feelings for and about other people are not being respected. To see their politicians with
Scott Walker at the forefront of this malaise is not only abhorrent to the Wisconsin citizen, it is unthinkable. And although Wisconsin is a Republican State each person seems to remember the great Governor at the turn of the last Century, Lafayette who brought to life the idea that Republican/Democrat means nothing. It is the middle class, the financial emotional wealth of the State that must be realized and maintained, a lesson Scott Walker has yet to learn.

150 thousand strong took over the Capitol last weekend. Next weekend, there will be more and then more and more. And banning the Pizza from Egypt won't stop the Wisconsin citizens from protecting the exercise of their Democratic process. This struggle isn't about which Party rules, it is about middle class values, the right to discuss, negotiate, bargain. Wisconsin isn't a Monarchy/Plutocracy , not yet.

Keep up the good, the great work, Wisconsin. .
Change, it is a coming
even to the U.S.A.

Linda Zises
Reporter at lage

Black Atheists And The Values Wars

2011-02-23T12:34:00.000-08:00

NEW BOOK ON
BLACK ATHEISTS
AND THE VALUES WARS
Press Release For Immediate Release
Infidel Books Announces:

AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE THE POOREST AND THE MOST RELIGIOUS GROUP IN THE NATION

87% OF BLACK WOMEN ARE REGULAR CHURCHGOERS

THE BIBLE IS THE MOST READ BOOK IN BLACK AMERICA

IS THE BLACK CHURCH MORALLY CORRUPT?

DOES ORGANIZED RELIGION BETRAY BLACK WOMEN?

DOES BLACK AMERICA'S BIBLE OBSESSION HURT BLACK ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT?

MORAL COMBAT: BLACK ATHEISTS, GENDER POLITICS, AND THE VALUES WARS
By Sikivu Hutchinson

The word atheism elicits shock, dread, anger, and revulsion among most African Americans. They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies.

Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examinesthe hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice.

In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. As the first African American woman to publish a book on atheism, she places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism.

RELIGION DISPATCHES INTERVIEW WITH SIKIVU HUTCHINSON
About the Author

Sikivu Hutchinson is a writer and senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women's studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, Free Inquiry and American Atheist Magazine. She is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

NOW AVAILABLE AT CREATESPACE.COM

Sikivu Hutchinson is available for interviews and speaking engagements, contact: shutch2396@aol.com

SPRING BOOKSIGNINGS & APPEARANCES: MARCH 3, INTERFAITH VOICES; MARCH 20, CENTER FOR INQUIRY, LOS ANGELES & COSTA MESA; MARCH 23, USC, LIFESTYLE & DESIGN CENTER; APRIL 3, REVOLUTION BOOKS, L.A.; APRIL 16, IHS, NYC; APRIL 28, UNIV. OF S. ALABAMA; MAY 13, ESO WON BOOKS, L.A.;

Planned Parenthood and the Rape of American Women

2011-02-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.

Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?

It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.

In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s telegram...
MORE@ http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2011/02/planned-parenthood-and-rape-of-american.html

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books).

Obama: An American Magician Extraordinaire!

2011-02-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

If Obama didn't exist, would there be a Tea Party?

If we didn't have a President hell bent on spending money with a guarantee that the money spent would instantly or almost instantly, disappear because it would be devoured by the wealthy who already have more than they know what to do with and thus do nothing, or to a war/national security/spying effort that produces bullets which, when used, disappear, or tear gas or other armaments so dangerous that their intended use is unconscionable and counter productive, and a spy network that couldn't see a full blown Egyptian Revolution in progress even though it was inaugurated with the recent textile strike by thousands( wasn't it the Iron building fire that started the U.S. on Labor Unions?)

Obama gives Federal money, the people's money, to the banks without charging interest; the very crooks who know better than anyone how to make money disappear, how to "go bankrupt" along with corporations too big to fail and we, the workers watch that money disappear, no longer in circulation. Like magic, it disappears before our very eyes.

The next Obama magical feat will be to disappear the
targeted social security money( that is probably already eaten up by the ever-hungry, clandestinely,)
the middle class,
the workers.
We'll all become slaves of the State
the poor, that pathetic segment of the American population that is in need; always hungry enough to become whatever the Magician wants us to be.

With Obama at the helm,
(the American/corporate driven, owned manipulated Supreme King anointed by God, be He/She Christian, Muslin or Jewish supported, financed by those who make money while they sleep and reap restful anxiety free life styles marred only with the occasion ripple the slightly ahead of their time Tea Party engenders as they capitalizing on the alleged poverty of Government and when they insist on bringing to the fore their "creative" solutions-- the only contradiction being their mandate to keep Government out of everything except, of course, a woman's body)
WE Will Win!!!!!

Are you ready?

Have you hidden your Gold in your backyard, bought your own generator, created a secure cache of guns, ammunition? Have you bought into a religion of your choice and talked to your children to prepare them for better days here on Earth and in Heaven; mostly the latter? Have you?
And what about the bomb shelter your late relatives built? Is it up to date, ready for use?
Be assured. It can't be long now. Obama will get the Job done.

We are on the brink of the second. a Real American Revolution!

Only the young can stop us now.
Or can they?

Linda Zises
reporter at large

Channel 5 Football: Black vs. White

2011-01-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

Sunday afternoon football: Fox Channel 5 does is again.

Watching The Redskins vs. the Giants' Sunday afternoon football game January 2, 2011 brought to the sports hungry-public an experience in watching the rudiments of prejudice unfolding.

If I didn't know better, viewing this sports event would have seened like a battle between the all Black team, the Redskins, against the all White team, the Giants, dominated by quarterback (no space between Manning who is White.

During the entire two hours of my viewing I saw only Caucasian faces in full prolonged frontal view while the few Black men shown on the screen were presented in profiles.

There was one view of a line of several Black men sitting on the bench, with an underlying impression that these men were lazy. All were Redskin team players. In contrast, no Giant player was presented sitting down. The Giant team players and coaches were seen standing, talking, making the game look like an active, energy-driven sports event..

And the pictures that appeared on the screen made it seem as if the officials, the coaches, and the referees were predominantly White men. If this is true, this reenforces the notion of insidious prejuduce not just in the filming of the game, but in the game itself.

The Fox channel 5 presentation, containing the deliberate one-sided filming of the game, is an example of insidious prejudice, a way of subliminal influence on people without their full awareness of what is being done to them.

This view of the bad Black Redskins vs. the good White Giants team is pure fantasy, a creation of virtual Fox reality.

The only real element in this Sunday afternoon football game filming was the prejudice that Fox brought to the viewing public without restraint.

Linda Zises

Manifest Destiny Revivalism

2010-08-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

During the 19th century, the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States was one of “God-ordained” expansionism. African slaves, indigenous peoples, Mexican nationals and other “non-Europeans” were deemed aliens and enemy combatants, anathema to the democratizing force of America. Using that “old time religion” to shepherd the flock on the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington Glenn Beck’s “Divine Destiny” revival deftly mines this history. Beck’s decision to hold the event on the March on Washington anniversary has elicited outrage amongst civil rights organizations who accuse him and the radical right of hijacking the legacy of the civil rights movement. Reeking of sulfur, hubris and the visionary charlatanism of 1920s revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson, Beck claimed that the Divine Destiny event will provide “an inspiring look at the role faith played in the founding of America and the role it will play again in its destiny.”

Decrying the cultural primitivism and backwardness of the Muslim world, twenty first century Christian zealots seeking to preserve human rights as the province of white supremacy continue to put the lie to American exceptionalism. Over the past week the Islamphobic vitriol of demagogues like Beck, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have paid off in cold blood. The recent stabbing of a Muslim cabdriver in New York and the hate attack against a Fresno, California Islamic center (by an organization calling itself the American Nationalist Brotherhood), are the tragic but all too predictable results of the nationalist chest beating that masquerades as empathy for the victims of 9/11.

In a climate in which the militant right wants to dismantle civil rights freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, Beck’s evocation of “divine destiny” is all of a piece. Throughout American history, recourse to the transparent word of God has always been the last refuge of scoundrels wielding the Bible and the bayonet as protections from the ungovernable hoard. Thus, it is fitting that this naked evocation of the language and legacy of Manifest Destiny comes during a period when the right has launched a campaign to repeal the 1868 14th amendment, which was originally initiated to confer citizenship onto freed African slaves. As Kevin Alexander Gray writes in Counterpunch, “in the Reconstruction period, as now, racism and white supremacy loomed large in public debate. Back then, opponents of the amendment talked about ‘public morality’ being threatened by people ‘unfit for the responsibilities of American citizenship.’’ Now the self-appointed defenders of public morality have come full circle, drunk on a cocktail of xenophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria and jingoism.

Vaulting ahead of the pack, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, one of the staunchest critics of the 14th amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship, introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009 into the House. The statute would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented women, stripping away yet another civil right that ostensibly distinguishes the U.S. from fascist governments. Smith’s legislation is a reminder of the connection between slavery and expansionism. In the 1840s, the concept of manifest destiny was used to justify the U.S.’ brutal occupation of Mexican territory. Cultural propaganda demonizing and dehumanizing indigenous Mexican populations provided American imperialism with the aura of moral righteousness. Commenting on the U.S.-Mexico War, it was no less than “radical” poet Walt Whitman who stated: "What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!"

Back in the good old days of docile slaves and vanquished savages, there were no ambiguities about who deserved to be accorded rights. God ordained the universality of European American experience, civilization and moral worth. Non-white peoples either submitted to the Enlightenment principles and values of the culturally superior West or were extinguished. States rights were citizens’ last vestige of protection from the trespasses of big government. So it is no mystery then why the ideology of 19th century expansionism and evangelical Christian revivalism has gained fresh currency amongst a “reloading” white nationalist insurgency. As the freshly inked graffiti on the vandalized Islamic Center in Fresno proclaimed, “Wake up America, the Enemy is here.”

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

The Milk of Sorrow: "The Frightened Tit"

2010-08-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

By Claudia Llosa, the film stars Magaly Solier as Fausta,

Plot: Our heroine Fausta (translated, means a girl who is full of fear) suffers from "The Milk of Sorrow" (which is, in the Peruvian-indigenous tradition, an illness), suffers from the desease she believes is transmitted through the breast milk of women who were raped in the Shining Path’s war of terror in Peru. The film begins with scenes from the death of her Mother followed by her obtaining sleep-in work in a wealthy home in Lima.

The plot and narrative are half the story. Providing a view into Peru from the vantages of both its very wealthy and its very poor is the other half. There is endemic cruelty, callousness at both extremes: a rampant lack of sensitivity among all parties. This even-handed expose is what helps to make The Milk of Sorrow a great film, a politically irrefutable statement.

Personally I would be depressed if I had to live the lonely life of the wealthy woman whose life is propelled by her drive for general recognition. The paucity of people in her life to meet her innate human need to be loved, wanted/needed, appreciated propels her onward and forward to the stage where she sings to so many people who when lumped together in the audience look like specks of confetti. No wonder she is depressed, detached and addicted to pills to stay "healthy".

But equally depressed and depressing is the depiction of the poor woman, Fausta, who suffers from the Peruvians illness the Milk Of Sorrow. the spoiled, Beast Milk – milk contaminated during the violent acts of Rape (during the 1980 Shining Path’s war of terror) that resulted in her birth.

The insensitivity to Fausta, the now grown woman with a potentially ripe vagina of her own and the weight of her mother's dead body that must be buried, is overwhelming horrifying partly because of the emotional cruelty heaped upon her by a community that refuses to empathize with the demands her poverty places upon her.

The juxtaposition of the her cousin's wedding festival and all that it entails with the wealthy woman's onstage performance is augmented with the internal contrast of the wedding versus Fausta's pressing need to bury her mother.

First, the mother's body is stored under a bed on top of which is the bridal gown for the plump, happy, soon-to-be-wed cousin and then, what was to be a grave for Fausta's mother's body to be buried in, becomes a watering hole for the delight and fun of the overheated travelers.

In every aspect the film Director offers the scenes as internal contrasts to each other. This is not an easy feat to achieve. Claudia LLosa's success is what makes this film so special.

Even the terrain, the pictures of what Peru looks like, are presented with such severity of difference from the daily needs for a gardener because of the wealth of flowers, plants, and trees versus the striking lack of anything other than the brown dust in the hot, arid world in which Fausta lives

There is nothing to cry about in this film. It is too serious, too depressing for tears. Maybe that is why it didn't win the 2009 Oscar award for best film or best foreign language film It was too real, it's message too clear. The obvious conclusion being that Socialism, where the class distinctions are less severe is the only real solution for a better world.

Winner:
2009 Berlin Film Festival Top Award ; The Golden Bear

Opens August 27th
New York City
Village Cinema

Altiplano: A Black Madonna revealed! 2009

2010-08-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

Directors:
Peter Brosens
Jessica Hope Woodworth

Writers:
Jessica Hope Woodworth
Peter Brosens

Cast: (Credited cast)
Magaly Solier ... Saturnina
Jasmin Tabatabai ... Grace
Olivier Gourmet ... Max

The icon of Western culture is very tangible in this intense reality drama,Altiplano, set in rural Peru. The scenery, the depiction of the terrain, the intimate understanding of Peru's native people: the clothes they wear, and their holiday and wedding and funeral services, give understanding of unique groups of people. This is the focus of the film's narrative. The antagonist is the threat to their existence by the on-slought of corporate forces robbing the resources of their land and compromsing the peoples health.

The story is all the more compelling because of the music. It brought goose bumps to my skin, as it rose up to fill my ears, my senses with its power, its beauty.

Altiplano will bring a new world experience into your cultural life and bring out the fighter within you. Save the past. Save the native Peruvian life style, embrace the forces of the young soon to be married girl as she becomes a modern day Joan of Arc, a symbolic Virgin Mary, a hero for millions world wide who cherish the world they live in and don't want to give it up for the sake of the almighty dollar.

Altiplano is an interesting film for those who love films. It tells an unusual story punctuated with beautiful scenery and wonderful music. What else can you ask for?

Opens this Friday at New York’s Village East Cinema.

CATFISH: A love story about you, me and the Internet

2010-08-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Five years ago, before Facebook and Twitter, and before cell phones came into the hands of ordinary people who want to be “connected”, Catfish could not have been made. Before animation was reintroduced into the tent-pole films of today, Catfish would have been something less than it is.

The plot is a simple take on man meets girl/woman:
Megan, Abby’s older sister, and Nev, age 24, meet on the internet. Abby is an eight year old girl who does drawings of Nev’s photographs. Megan and Nev talk intimately on their cell phones and form a strong emotional bond without ever actually meeting.

When they go face to face the film turns from the ordinary to the extraordinary. It is when the inner life of an emotionally repressed woman, Abby's mother Angela, comes to the fore despite the lack of imaginative strivings of her seemingly practical-minded husband who hasn’t a clue about his wife - how she thinks, feels, nor how she spends her time when she is not tending to his needs and the special needs of their children.

The image of Angela sitting in a chair looking at Nev, the film’s hero - her smile, her love, the very fiber of her emotional wealth, so tangible - is heart wrenching.

Oh..............

when the beauty within is perceived........that is what makes this documentary so compelling, so beautiful, so extraordinary.

For me Angela is a hero extraordinaire!

Catfish opens this fall. Watch for it!

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Boxing Helena DVD 1993: Sex/longing/love

2010-08-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

Boxing Helena 1993
Written and directed by
Jennifer Chambers Lynch

Plot:

A surgeon becomes obsessed with the seductive woman he once had an affair with. Refusing to accept that she has moved on, he amputates her limbs and holds her captive in his mansion. Is he crazy, or is this his fantasy based on a strong love and an inability to express it?

My Opinion:

Only a woman would be so brutally honest in the presentation of the basic sexual/self-worth fantasies and fears experienced by men and woman.

For a man it is his sexual performance that plagues his self-concept, and premature ejeculation is a potent hindrence to his self-concept. If not remedied it is certain to become a strong basis for bizarre fantasies and constant concern.

For a woman her basic fear is that she is only a sexual object rather than appreciated for being a woman with self-worth stronger than her appearance.

In Boxing Helena both of these fears get brought into prominence with a heavy dose of fantasy, nightmare and, ultimately, love that binds both of these fears together. In the end, mature love triumphs over all else.

I can’t imagine this film as it played on public television, denuded of its explicit sexually/sensually rich scenes. For me, watching an uncut version, the experience was funny at times, beautiful often and rewarding in its imaginative unfolding.

I strongly recommend the uncut version. If cut for a general television viewing audience, the film would be just so-so.

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio
Ladisfilmclub

Angels and Innocents: By Sikivu Hutchinson

2010-08-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

I have a vivid memory of the first time I became aware that children could die. It was early evening in the leisurely dusk of summer, and after eating with my mother at a local coffee shop, we passed by a newspaper vending machine outside. A child victim, kidnapped, murdered and disposed of like garbage, stared ominously out at me from the front page of the paper in grainy black and white. I remember my sense of horror when my mother told me that the child, who was approximately my age, would never see his parents again. Associating death with old people, I was stupefied by this seeming contradiction. Although raised heretically in a secular household, I had been corrupted by the prayer-saturated social universe of waxen blue-eyed Jesus’ plastered on my friends’ living room walls. Alone in my bed that night, I wondered how “God” could have countenanced such unspeakable evil.

Decades later there is an aching space where this child’s life would have been, his personhood “frozen” at abduction. Violent death by homicide at an early age is a grim reality for many youth of color. Gangsta rap romanticizes it and dishes it up for the voyeurism of white suburbia. Mainstream media ignores it or relegates it to social pathology. Every semester when I ask my students if they’ve had a young friend or relative die violently at least half will raise their hands. Their tattoos, notebooks and Sidekick phones are filled with vibrant mementoes for the dead. It is not necessary to go to Iraq, Afghanistan or some other theatre of American imperialism to experience the devastation that the killing fields of disposable youth inflicts. Yet, God takes care of children and fools, or so the shopworn saying goes. In the midst of sudden death there is refuge in the belief that the Cecil B. De Mille epic doomsayer of the Old Testament must have a special place in his heart for this tender constituency. Pied Piper religionists pat children on the head and whisper into their dewy ears that the murder of an innocent child is part of some grand design. They dish up the concept of divine providence like hard candy. They lure sweet-toothed youth with a ready “antidote” to the quandary of trying to make sense out of the senselessness and randomness of evil. The Wynken, Blynken and Nod bedtime story of grand design is chased down with the simple carrot of eternal reward for slain innocents. The inexplicable is assimilated. Senseless evil, evil that befalls the good and stalks the innocent, is legitimized as part of the divine’s hardscrabble boot camp for the living.

If it can be understood, it isn’t God, said Augustine. In ambiguity then, prayer is the great equalizer and potential redeemer. As American children we grow up with recurring images of kneeling girls and boys, hands clasped solemnly in prayer. These images propagandize faith as a normal, natural phenomenon. The magic bullet of prayer is trotted out as an escape hatch from the small indignity to the unspeakably cruel act of wild-oats-sewing youth. Bad kids pray obsessively for forgiveness. Good kids pray strategically in crisp starched pajamas for family members, friends, and Fido to be delivered to the top of God’s check list. Sinful thoughts can be defused by requesting a special audience with God. Good thoughts can be “deposited” into one’s virtual piggy bank of moral worth.. CONT. http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/08/angels-and-innocents.html

The Sicilian Girl; Director Marco Amenta, Altiplano; Writers / Directors BROSENS & WOODWORTH,

2010-07-31T05:42:00.000-07:00

And Virgin Women

We haven’t traveled far from the ideology of the virginal woman with a fiery spirit who turns the world around to meet the moral imperative as she sees it. Although the setting of each film is radically different, the similarities are striking: societal evils are the villain; combatted by our hero, the young woman of marital age with love strong in her heart, thwarted on the precipice of marital fulfillment. With all their bottled up sexual energy demanding an outlet, these women come to the screen with a force that is compelling in its strength and intriguing in its source: the woman who has since time immemorial been prayed to, as she sits on high in our minds, our hearts; she is our fantasy companion, our helper, our conscience.

She is the Virgin Mother, The spiritual Mother of us all.

It helps to have had a juvenile acquaintance with this fantasy figure, that seemingly requisite brainwashing with all the appeal of glitter and funny looking men dressed in long skirted garments or masks to accent the separation of the real from the super-normal experience informed by our senses. But even with all of that religiosity put to the side, one can not help but be sympathetic to the cause these women champion. The Sicilian Girl goes after the Italian Mafia. In Altiplano, the evils of mercury exposure from drilling in Peru that destroys the indiginous population is the villain. In both films the women speak for the masses against the forces of evil and in both films the women give their lives and become Joan of Arc, the Virginal figure who promises hope in a hopeless world of needless, senseless destruction.

Both films are beautifully photographed, which is a delight. The music in Altiplano is breathtaking, thrilling, sending goosebumps up and down my spine; the plot was very confusing (even the short film synopsis is difficult to follow) but after a while it didn’t matter that there was little to hang on to. There was a dignity, an emotional force that informed on the sorrowful loss of times forever gone and painfully mourned.

Does this mean that like the suicide bombers, the terrorists of today, we should think of giving our lives for a cause we truly embrace?
I hope not. Youth is too precious to be wasted on the decadence and cruel immorality of elders.

THE SICILIAN GIRL Opens Wed, August 4 at Film Forum

ALTIPLANO Opens August 20 at Village East in N.Y.C.

Prospect Park Geese elimination: saga explored

2010-07-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

As I sat on the lawn looking out over the all too quiet water amid all
too few people by the Prospect Park lake, I remembered a time not so
many years ago when there were plenty of Geese, although I didn't know
they were Geese, and plenty of children throwing bread into the water.

And there were boats, with turning blades in the water, cleaning up
the lake, it was said, of green algae.

I remember that scene. It played out over and over maybe for a year
and then I started to see the Geese coming out of the water to graze.
Graze on the grass (there were no algae anymore) until the grass was
gone and brown dirt took its place with nothing to impede its erosion
into the lake.

And then the tragic day when the solution to the Geese and their
"destructive" eating needs and ways came to the fore and the people
learned that the Geese were gone, exterminated which, given our not so
distant knowledge of peoples exterminated with the same gas, the same
lack of individuality respected, well................
this does not
make for good public relations and with the Audubon Society not
stepping up to the plate to say, "no, don't do it,"
well....................

It is all very ugly. Dare I say stupid; lacking in foresight?

Yes.

for more on this subject visit:
http://washingtonsquarepark.wordpress.com

PRINCETON HOLT'S Cookies & Cream and Uptown on DVD

2010-07-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

Two films, Cookies & Cream, and Uptown were released on DVD July 21st. .Attached are the press releases. Links to stores, availability, theatrical screenings can be found at the official websites:
www.cookiesncreammovie.com and www.uptownfilm.com

Both films reviewed below. Again, I find these films compelling in their use of technics that brought scenes into a casual immediacy difficult to capture in larger than life films.

Paper Man (DVD) revisited: and Saturday night TV viewing

2010-07-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

The banality of Saturday night television viewing even with the insertion of multiple cable programs seems designed to make the viewing audience forget what life is all about. Comedy with an edge, with a theme that in some way or other resonates with the daily experience of its viewers is far better than the slapstick on the edge of not funny but rather boring films that predominate the nightly selections.

Even the multiple scenes of blood splattered on faces or the transcendence of animals to escape the perils of earthy denizens as provided in HBO’s True Blood is an improvement over the English comedy films that I could never and still can’t laugh at or with.

I don’t know what would satisfy my need to feel connected. I seem to be getting more and more on the periphery of life’s experience that others appear to be part of but I think it’s more to the point that we are all sitting waiting for something to happen albeit, another deastrous hurricane, an abrupt change in the stock market, another bubble burst, a return to or a drastic deviation from what we once took for granted(both would be traumatic).

These are the chaotic times, not so unfamiliar to generations that came before us but no one taught us, prepared us for how to deal with these turbulent days. We are spoiled Americans who seem for the most part to assume food is there for us to eat, the weather will follow a predictable pattern, the seeds of life ever after are laid firmly for us and we assume their presence; but all of that serenity, all of the foundation of our security seems to be eroded and only on the ever expanding television screen does life go on as if there is nothing else except what we know, have known and expect to know regardless of the defiance of an inescapable reality.

Maybe the youth of today will teach us how to live without work, how to fill our days without feeling the emptiness that twins with idleness, how to make a film for general consumption that reflects the emptiness of our hands that have so little value in the creative process of our lives.

We make nothing, we do little, we wait to be called up for what we don’t want to know about or listen to, the sound of man-less drones as they further the cause that we don’t support and never will.

See Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney' Paper Man (DVD)
starring Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow, Hunter Parrish and be assured that the future of television viewing and film sellection might one day speak to you and me about us.

Commentary by
Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

The New York Philharmonic: Andrey Boreyo. conductor

2010-07-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

The New York Philharmonic performed a free concert in Prospect Park's Long Meadow Ball fields where sheep once grazed.

The evenings program included

Tchaikovsky, Polonaise from "Eugene Onegin"

Bernstein, Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"

Prokofiev, Selections from "Romeo and Juliet"

Each selection had the theme of love and violent death and the program ended on a similar note with colorful red, white, some green or almost blue fireworks projected in multiply patterns simulating the sound of gun shots in their assent to the heavens above.

The concert used a state-of-the-art sound system with a wireless broadcast network and 24 15-foot speaker towers that brought clarity and beauty to the professionally executed music heard by thousands of lounging spectators.

The sound quality was extraordinary!

Of course there was a reason for The New York Philharmonic' selection of love and violent vibrant death onto the serenity of domestic/environmentally rich Brooklyn park bliss but what inspired this program was not disclosed.

I sat in the midst of my YogaSole school friends
happy that in Brooklyn partying with yoga students and teachers is not an unusual event. At YogaSole there is an inclusion without rancor, a generosity that precludes the intellectual substance of the concert's theme.

We are friends, not lovers, not violent but Yogis getting together for a night in the park where trees are again the winners. The shade and lower temperatures they afford reaffirmed our commitment to think green while we cherish the extensive nature that exists in our backyards as much as we cherish the production of excellence in art; even in these violent times when War hovers over us.

It sure beats the sound of helicopters or jets or even subways underground that shake rattle and roll throughout the Borough.

Thank you to all the many sponsors for making this night possible and thank you YogaSole for making this evening another special moment to remember.

Linda Zises
criticalwomen.net

DNA and the Banality of Evil: By Sikivu Hutchinson

2010-07-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

The intersection of Figueroa and Slauson in South Los Angeles is an unremarkable one, a mundane swath fronting a gas station, an old train right of way, and a Harbor freeway overpass. It is the site of a spate of serial murders committed during a ten year period by serial rapist and murderer Chester Dwayne Turner. Like the Grim Sleeper serial killer, Turner, aka the South Side Slayer, stalked South L.A. from 1987 to 1998 in pursuit of African American female victims. Until DNA evidence revealed Turner's identity in 2004, his background fit the banal profile of the misogynist sexual predator operating right under the nose of local law enforcement. He was a “cipher” who bounced in and out of menial jobs; unstable, irresponsible, abusive towards and financially dependent on the women in his life. While Turner was an obvious miscreant, Lonnie David Franklin, the recently arrested suspect in the Grim Sleeper murders, was a bit more complex. Neighbors have described him as a stable, congenial Mr. Fix-It type whose only known “quirks” were “issues” with women (including, apparently, showing off nude pictures he’d taken of and underwear he’d collected from various women) and a nebulous criminal record.

Franklin’s street was not far from my own, in a generally quiet well-kept area of single family homes that lazy mainstream media hacks are fond of dismissing as “gritty” and crime-ridden. Franklin’s arrest was made possible through the decades’ long struggle for visibility waged by the victims’ families and community activists like Margaret Prescod, who founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders in the 1980s. The LAPD’s identification of the serial murder pattern was first reported in a 2008 article by white LA.Weekly journalist Christine Pelisek, who dubbed the killer the “Grim Sleeper.” Shortly after Franklin’s arrest Pelisek stated that she'd been deluged with film and TV queries about the case. Pelisek’s comments on the budding media interest are telling. As of this date, there have been no TV movies on the South Side slayer case nor, for that matter, any mainstream dramatic treatment on serial murders of black women. Given this disparity it is not difficult to see a big budget Nancy Grace-style treatment with Pelisek at the center. Because Franklin and Turner are black male killers of black women it is safe to say that there will be no cable-ready film made psychoanalyzing their childhoods, no Lifetime channel melodrama on the lives and last days of their victims trumpeted in flashy national billboard campaigns, and no pathos inspiring media blitz chronicling the anguish that these murders elicited in South L.A. communities.

Rather, what has captivated much of the mainstream media is not the hide-in-plain-sight atrocity of a prolific killer of black women puttering innocuously about his well-maintained single family home, but the 21st century “marvel” of familial DNA . Without the familial DNA piece it’s doubtful there would be any continuing national coverage of the story. Sensing a national angle and an easy way of redeeming its image as a print relic repository for the white Westside, the L.A. Times has outdone itself with daily coverage on the case’s DNA trail. Mainstream media fixation on the DNA evidence has eclipsed focus on the victims’ families as well as consideration of the case’s double-edged implications for communities of color in the U.S.

According to Brandeis law professor Jeffrey Rosen, “African-Americans represent about 13 percent of the United States population but 40 percent of the people convicted of felonies every year.” The wholesale over-incarceration of African American communities means that many African Americans are related to someone who has been convicted of a felony. Right wing pundits and champions of unregulated familial DNA use would argue that since blacks are committing a disproportionate number of felonies they have every right to be subjected to the heightened scrutiny of DNA profiling. Yet national data on sentencing indicates African Americans are over six times more likely to be convicted of and harshly sentenced for felonies than are whites who commit similar crimes. The proposed expansion of California’s DNA database to include the DNA of arrestees—the database is currently comprised of DNA from convicted felons—would further criminalize blacks and Latinos. Unchecked law enforcement use of familial DNA is almost certain to be a bellwether of civil liberties infringement for innocent people of color.

The initial marginalization of both the South Side Slayer and the Grim Sleeper cases were brutal testimony to the devalued lives of women of color in the mainstream media regime. With the arrest of Franklin, the grieving families of Janecia Peters, Valerie McCorvey, Princess Berthomieux, Alicia Anderson, Lachrica Jefferson, Mary Lowe, Bernita Sparks, Barbara Ware, Thomas Steele, Henrietta Wright and Debra Jackson might be able to achieve some degree of closure. In the ultimate yet uniquely American irony, science has fleetingly “humanized” the lives of victims deemed expendable by the media regime. Yet uncritical embrace of familial DNA will potentially reinforce the very disenfranchising conditions that allow a vicious predator like the Grim Sleeper to “sleep” for two decades.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Alamar: González-Rubio: Before BP Oil Destruction

2010-07-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

"By photographing and developing a story based on the current relation between man and his habitat in Chinchorro (Mexico), I portray my love for this region and the admiration and respect I have towards the lives of its fishermen." (written before the BP oil spill)

Alamar is a rich compelling documentary film that captures life in the Gulf of Mexico before the modern day encroachment from tourists, (luxury hotels with all their destruction and a long pier for cruise ship docking that cut into the longest coral reef on the planet.) oil and the like.

The film takes us on the long trip from urban Mexico to this remote fishing town and onto the water, into the water via scuba diving and into the house built on stilts in the water where a seemingly normal life ensues. Normal, living on top of water, no land around and a little boy with his father and grandfather spending their time eating at a table, reading books, checking the weather, writing with paper and colored pencils while spending the majority of the day at sea; fishing, unloading the fish into another ship, watching the dismantling of the fish into eatible bits of what we call food, fit for a King or Queen.

and then it is night and the hammock is the only place to sleep, covered with netting to keep the bugs away; repose is full, relaxing, in tune with the movement of the stilt house and that is a way of life that will be removed from our earth, from the people who want nothing more than to join with nature and enjoy what is there to be enjoyed, cherished and complied with.

Alas this film will be a relic, a testimony to times past. Although there is no tragic moments in this film, the film itself reflect a tragedy of unknown proportion.

NOTE:
In 1996 UNESCO declared Banco Chinchorro, the main location where the documentary takes place, a National Reserve of the Biosphere.

How sad, How Poignant. How beautifully captured. Alamar!

González-Rubio’s , Alamar, will open theatrically in New York City at Film Forum on July 14th, courtesy of Film Movement.

Linda Zises
wbai radio
criticalwomen.net

FIRST ENCOUNTER : FICTION

2010-07-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

I know. I know from the moment the door opens I will be entering a world and that fist impression will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I am twenty-two years old. I have met the man who i want to be my husband, the father of my children. Although I haven't told him this, there is a silent understanding, not yet officially breached.

He has invited me to his former home, the home of his parents. I will be entering their abode with all the foreboding of budding youth, hope, future, stretched out before me.

I am shaking, and the world is turning oh so slightly, spinning in time to the beating of my heart, the pounding in my temples from freight.

Richard stands seemingly disconcerted beside me. He is humming softly to himself as we wait for the answer to his incessant knocking, the sound of a man saying, open up, I belong here. This is my home.

He forgot his keys.

Of all days to forget his keys, the day he is bringing me, his maybe "intended" into the family fold for the first time.

That all-important meeting of the people, his people, them and me.

The door handle moves. Richard turns towards me, his eyes peering slightly over the top of my head.

"Nervous?" he asks.

I think I am about to faint. Am I nervous?

My mouth is dry, my lips feel as if they haven't moved in hours, or is it days.

I am standing next to Richard with his close proximity as my sole support. Am I nervous?

I smile slowly, letting the pull of my feelings force the opening of my lips as I am about to lie, to say "Oh no," in that nonchalant, almost coquettish gesture I've used so often. But I know this time I would never be believed.

Richard sees me struggle and laughs.

"Don't worry, ma petite," he says. "You'll get through it. After all, think of the many years I survived with them".

'That isn't the point,' my internal self rebels against his attempt to soften my edges, to calm me down. You might have survived them but what if... what if they hate me, what if they have no other intention for the rest of their lives than to devote themselves to my destruction, to our destruction, of rendering you and me asunder, finito, gone and done forever and ever...

Oh, can this be happening to me! I moan on and on, internally wishing, hoping this moment would end and somehow it would just be me and Richard alone and then

I hear a lock unlock and a second lock unlock and the door opens and two people, not one, but both of them stand before us.

They are in the doorway, we are still outside

and they said in unison

"Welcome to our home" and they kiss me, they kiss me "hello."

And Richard says, "I warned you."

Linda Zises

[blackfemlens] Pink Princesses, Blue Commandos

2010-06-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

My daughter is no princess. Loud, assertive, and headstrong, she would just as soon as stomp on a castle drawbridge with her big size six feet than pine coyly from it, twirling a dainty lock of hair waiting for a Ken doll suitor. Yet the multi-billion dollar media marketing regime is poised to shoehorn her 2 year-old self into being one. As any parent with eyes and a pulse knows, a trip to Americana’s favorite non-unionized big box retailers is a crash course in the enduring power of gender segregation. Trundling through the “girls’” toys aisle, maneuvering the explosion of pink frilliness, one expects to bump into June Cleaver or Donna Reed. Baby dolls, play ovens, play houses, strollers, dress-up kits, make-up and the ubiquitous princess accessories, addle the senses. Around the corner in the boys’ commando-in-training section, trucks, balls, science kits, building sets, Legos, blocks, action figures, guns and other rough n’ tuff paraphernalia signal a return to the jungle of discovery, adventure, violence and enterprise.

In the ostensibly secular democratic West, this surfeit of consumer options represents “choice,” rather than cultural indoctrination. Parents can just vote with their pocketbooks and not buy these products. Unlike in the fundamentalist monolithically gender repressive Middle East little American girls certainly aren’t programmed to be subservient. Women in power broker positions abound and capitalist consumption is politically "neutral."

Indeed, proponents of shattered glass ceilings point to recent job data that suggest American women are actually making bigger employment gains than are men. The decline of the construction and manufacturing industries has severely limited men’s job opportunities. Coupled with the higher proportion of women in four year colleges, American women would seem to be making out like gangbusters.

There are serious flaws in this premise. First, the gender wage gap shows no signs of narrowing. According to the Center for American Progress, women are the primary breadwinners in over 1/3rd of American families. Women are still relegated to the lowest paying service industry jobs in child care, clerical work, domestic work, and teaching. And black women, who are more likely to be single working parents than are women of other ethnicities, remain at the bottom of the gender wage ladder. Secondly, and most egregiously, the new job data fail to account for the double and triple burden of women’s work. Regardless of whether they are custodians or corporate execs, women continue to be saddled with the majority of child care, housework and adult caregiving. The minute a working mother hits the door down time and breathing space are sacrificed for an array of cleaning, parenting, cooking and counseling duties. Sacrifice is a woman’s creed and to-die-for duty. And it is this message that the big box retailers’ flotilla of pink baby dolls, strollers, play houses, et al. are designed to instill in little sacrificial princesses in training.

The ubiquity of this social programming inspired two British women to start the Pink Stinks campaign, which targets retailers who market gender segregating toys and accessories. Yet the flip side of pink stinks is the dominion of blue. When my students presented a workshop on gender stereotypes in retailing to a group of their peers, the sole male participant commented that he had been targeted for not conforming to the model of “hard” masculinity because he liked to do hair. For young men, any activity that is remotely associated with caring or nurturing is feminine and therefore “gay.” As feminist writer Derrick McMahon notes in his article “Boys and Baby Dolls:” “Boys who wish to play with baby dolls are seen as punks, sissies, and weak…parents are quick to tell little boys that they have no business playing with baby dolls.” While young girls who “crossover” and express interest in traditionally masculine pursuits like car maintenance or science are tolerated as tom boys going through a phase, boys are punished with the heterosexist stigma of being less “manly.”

The consequences of this are exemplified by the epidemic of black male homicide. Trained to be hard, swaggering, aggressive and indifferent to the value of each others’ lives as mere “niggas,” young black males are inured to the violence they inflict upon each other. What would it mean then for the future of African American communities if there were a paradigm shift, and boys were raised to be caring and nurturing? Biological determinists argue that boys gravitate to cars and guns because they are genetically hard wired to do so. In her groundbreaking book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot debunks this assumption through painstaking analysis of scientific studies on alleged innate sex differences. She argues that there is “little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains” and that adult perceptions of gender difference strongly influence children’s behavior.

As my daughter begins to navigate the minefield of gender norms and expectations she’ll be constantly told what is proper for a girl. She’ll be hounded by peers, adults, the media and organized religion to be sexually desirable to men on the one hand and chaste and virginal on the other. In a nation of liberated “post-feminist” women, she’ll be propagandized with the contradictory message that romancing kitchenware, cooing after baby dolls, and being a precious, sweet “daddy’s angel” are the keys to fulfillment. And as a third generation feminist she’ll be ably equipped with her loud mouth and big feet to storm the drawbridge of gender conformity.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Yoga on the Great Lawn:New York City 10,000 strong

2010-06-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

So this is what women's liberation looks like, I thought, sitting on the grass of the great law in New York City along with more than 10,000 mostly women awaiting the start of a yoga class followed by a drumming session.

It hadn't rained yet and on the stage was this pot-bellied man sporting a huge Afro, fully clothed with a huge beard that hid everything except his eyes. Clearly, he did not fit in. But neither did the images projected onto a larger-than-life screen viewed by the assembled many and by the helicopter circling overhead, images of first a man's head and then a woman's projected without benefit of neck or a hint of shoulder. How un-yogish can you get!

But the women didn't seem to mind or notice. The audience of thousands did what Yogini's do. They focused, ignored what didn't belong, and had a good time. They sat in groups, teacher and students all mixed up talking, looking at their fellow yoga practitioners.

It would be hard to find a more strikingly beautiful group of woman anywhere in the world; and on full display, clad mostly in spaghetti-strap tank tops and tight Lycra pants. Only the privileged members of the "work crew" were told to wear the uniform: grey, knee-length pants and light blue tops which covered everything (which in this place, at this setting, was less than "in the spirit"). Tank tops would have been more appropriate.

The Cooperate stage show seemed to go on endlessly while the audience awaited their fate. To go on or cancel and promise a "Rain date".
A compromise was struck.

A little Yoga - downward facing dog, plank, upward facing dog, mountain pose, hands to heart in prayer to whatever or whomever, and the sound of a long long long OHMMMMMMMMMMMM filled the Lawn and entered into the minds and hearts of all.

The benefit of being seen in public without having to "cover up" and without fear of man's stares are extras to the benefits of Yoga, the spiritual, physical, emotional discipline that women are embracing world wide.

This day's event is the result, almost the culmination of a new Woman's Liberation Movement and I'm loving it!

Next onward to California's Love Fest
then back to New York for a promised Rain Date.

Maybe this time it will be 20,000 strong and more.

Linda Zises
Criticalwomen.net
WBAI Radio

The Milk of Sorrow: "The Frightened Tit"

2010-06-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

Claudia Llosa's hotly debated film with strong political/social content. When compared to the Oscar 2009 winner of the Best Film (Slumdog Millionaire), the Milk of Sorrow shines as a star far above all others.

Beautifully written and Expertly Directed.

By Claudia Llosa, the film stars Magaly Solier as Fausta,

Plot: Our heroine Fausta (translated, means a girl who is full of fear) suffers from "The Milk of Sorrow" (which is, in the Peruvian-indigenous tradition, an illness), suffers from the desease she believes is transmitted through the breast milk of women who were raped in the Shining Path’s war of terror in Peru. The film begins with scenes from the death of her Mother followed by her obtaining sleep-in work in a wealthy home in Lima.

The plot and narrative are half the story. Providing a view into Peru from the vantages of both its very wealthy and its very poor is the other half. There is endemic cruelty, callousness at both extremes: a rampant lack of sensitivity among all parties. This even-handed expose is what helps to make The Milk of Sorrow a great film, a politically irrefutable statement.

Personally I would be depressed if I had to live the lonely life of the wealthy woman whose life is propelled by her drive for general recognition. The paucity of people in her life to meet her innate human need to be loved, wanted/needed, appreciated propels her onward and forward to the stage where she sings to so many people who when lumped together in the audience look like specks of confetti. No wonder she is depressed, detached and addicted to pills to stay "healthy".

But equally depressed and depressing is the depiction of the poor woman, Fausta, who suffers from the Peruvians illness the Milk Of Sorrow. the spoiled, Beast Milk – milk contaminated during the violent acts of Rape (during the 1980 Shining Path’s war of terror) that resulted in her birth.

The insensitivity to Fausta, the now grown woman with a potentially ripe vagina of her own and the weight of her mother's dead body that must be buried, is overwhelming horrifying partly because of the emotional cruelty heaped upon her by a community that refuses to empathize with the demands her poverty places upon her.

The juxtaposition of the her cousin's wedding festival and all that it entails with the wealthy woman's onstage performance is augmented with the internal contrast of the wedding versus Fausta's pressing need to bury her mother.

First, the mother's body is stored under a bed on top of which is the bridal gown for the plump, happy, soon-to-be-wed cousin and then, what was to be a grave for Fausta's mother's body to be buried in, becomes a watering hole for the delight and fun of the overheated travelers.

In every aspect the film Director offers the scenes as internal contrasts to each other. This is not an easy feat to achieve. Claudia LLosa's success is what makes this film so special.

Even the terrain, the pictures of what Peru looks like, are presented with such severity of difference from the daily needs for a gardener because of the wealth of flowers, plants, and trees versus the striking lack of anything other than the brown dust in the hot, arid world in which Fausta lives

There is nothing to cry about in this film. It is too serious, too depressing for tears. Maybe that is why it didn't win the 2009 Oscar award for best film or best foreign language film It was too real, it's message too clear. The obvious conclusion being that Socialism, where the class distinctions are less severe is the only real solution for a better world.

Winner:
2009 Berlin Film Festival Top Award ; The Golden Bear

Opens August 27th
New York City
Village Cinema

The Disappearance of Alice Creed: terror flick with a taste of humor

2010-06-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Director: J. Blakeson

Producer: Adrian Sturges

Composer: Marc Canham

Cast:
Gemma Arterton
Martin Compston
Eddoe Marsan
Exras need not appy

A thriller turned into an almost comedy and the triumph of women over the minds and brawn of the stronger men in their lives. It might be difficul to find a man to enjoy the turns and twists of this solid thriller but women seemed unanimous in their enjoyment of The Disappearane of Alice Creed.

This is a violent film and yet it is funny, light hearted almost not believable but in the fun of it all, these otherwise important details don't seem to matter. Of the three cast members Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton) got the worst of the nudity and violence that rippled throughout the film because she is tied and gagged for most of the scenes. Her seemingly endless screams and squairming body would stay with me long after the film ended if they hadn't been upstaged by the most compelling innovative sounds, the music of composer Marc Canham that thundering with Dolby clarity filling the theater to capacity.

And then the silence, the long protracted moments of no music, just action and the men's voices and I knew then I was in the presence of genius. The genius of great music composers who know what to play when and when not to. Music that doesn't talk to emotions either present or anticipated but the use of deep bass tones like mellow velvet vibrations and other unidentifiable instruments that enhance and augment the thematic needs of every filmed moment.

Marc Canham, the composer, comes from a Game background so perfect for this film because basically The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a game of cat and mouse with many a playful gesture mixed with a deadly foray into the minds and methods of professional crooks, ex cons and the seedy sort that inhabits our immediate environment.

Thete was a tangible feel of humanity, of likeable features even in the crooks turned kidnappers. Surprsingly Alice, the victim was the weakest , least likable person on screen; (poorly cast; I thought her too old for the part). She was cruel, one dimensional, and pehpas less than a seasoned actor. But that didn't dampen my applause.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is fun, playful, memorable.

Enjoy!

MINE: Contested ownership of Canine

2010-06-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

MINE examines how we treat animals as an extension of how we view and treat each other.

Place: New Orleans post Katrina: uninhabited by man and beast

Subject: the new owners of the animals rescued from the hurricane
disaster and the owners who come back to claim "their own".

Director/producer: Animal Defence League

Trailer: http://www.minethemovie.com/trailer

An enjoyable, compelling view of humans and their animals. It highlights the best, the most loving aspect of our human nature.

Hailed by the New York Times as “Smart, sincere and affecting”.

Irresistible!

Released On DVD

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door:* Black Atheists, Urban America

2010-06-11T12:48:00.001-07:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Late Saturday afternoon, like clockwork, the street corner preachers on Crenshaw and King Boulevard in South Los Angeles take to the “stage.” Decked out in flowing robes and dreadlocks, they fulminate into their mikes about the universe, God’s will and “unnatural” homosexuals to a motley audience waiting for the next express bus. Members of the Black Israelites, they are part of a long tradition of performative religiosity in urban African American communities. This particular corner of black America is a hotbed of social commerce. Kids who’ve just gotten out of school mingle jubilantly as pedestrians flow past fast food places, mom and pop retailers, street vendors and Jehovah’s Witness’ hawking Watchtower magazines. The Israelites have become a fixture of this street corner’s otherwise shifting tableaux. Exclusively male and virulently sexist and homophobic, they are tolerated in some African American communities in part because of the lingering visceral and misguided appeal of Black nationalism.

While the Israelites’ millennialist “racial uplift” ethos ostensibly fits right in to the bustle of this prominent South L.A. street, other belief systems are not as easily assimilated. Since 2006, the L.A.-based street philosopher Jeffrey “P Funk” Mitchell has been documenting his conversations with everyday folk on questions of atheism and faith. Using the handle “Atheist Walking,” Mitchell also conducts free-ranging inquiries into Christianity’s contradictions with a rolling video camera and a satirically raised eyebrow. Adopting the role of the bemused urban flaneur, ala the commentator- pedestrian immortalized by French poet Charles Baudelaire, he delves into “atheist spirituality,” biblical literalism and the paradoxes of faith. Mitchell is a member of the L.A.-based Black Skeptics, a group that was formed earlier this year to provide an outlet and platform for secular humanist African Americans. The Skeptics are part of a small but growing segment of African Americans who are searching for humanist alternatives to organized religion. In May, the Washington DC Center for Inquiry’s first annual African Americans for Humanism conference drew over fifty participants. Chat groups and websites like the Black Atheists of America have sprung up to accommodate the longing for community amongst non-theist African Americans who feel marginalized in a sea of black hyper-religiosity. Organizations such as the Institute for Humanist Studies cultivate African American secularist scholarship and advocacy.

With over 85% of African Americans professing religious belief, black religiosity is a formidable influence. Racial segregation, the historical role of the Black Church, and African American social conformity reinforce Christianity’s powerful hold on black communities. Indeed, I was recently told that I’d been deemed an unsuitable culmination speaker for a bourgie philanthropic organization’s young women mentees because of my decidedly unladylike public atheism (Perhaps the Israelite’s Old Testament shout-out to silent prostrate women would be more acceptable). Proper role models for impressionable black youth are, at the very least, skillful church lady pretenders with ornate hats in tow. Secular organizations that seek to build humanist community with a predominantly African American base and social justice world view are challenged by the association of charitable giving, philanthropy, poverty work and education with faith-based communities. For many, successfully emulating the strong social and cultural networks that have sustained church congregations is an elusive goal.

And then, there is the deep and abiding desire for belief in the supernatural, the ineffable faith-passion that propels some through the trauma of racial indignities and personal crisis. Yet, humanism asks why we should cede enlightenment and the potential for restoration to the supernatural. Humanism challenges the implication that the sublimity of the natural world, and our connection to those that we love, admire and respect, is somehow impoverished without a divine creator. In one of his bus stop monologues, Mitchell comments, “I want people to look at each other with the same reverence that they look at God and realize that ‘we’ did this, we made this happen.” The “we” represents will, agency, and motive force; qualities that many believers would attribute to God as omniscient architect and overseer. Non-believers are compelled to ask whether individual actions (for good or ill) are determined by God, or whether human beings simply act on their own volition in a universe overseen by God. Since time immemorial, non-believers have questioned whether God exercises control over those who commit evil acts or whether hell is the only “medium” for justice. By refusing to invest supernatural forces with divine authority over human affairs, humanism emphasizes human responsibility for the outcome of our pursuits. Morality is defined by just deeds, fairness, equality and respect for difference; not by how blusteringly one claims to adhere to “Godly” principles.

However, in communities that are plagued with double digit unemployment and a sense of cultural devaluation, notions of self-sufficiency and ultimate human agency may be perceived as demoralizing if not dangerously radical. As a child preacher steeped in the fiery oratory of the Black Church, writer James Baldwin recounted his growing cynicism about spreading “the gospel.” Lamenting the grip of religion on poor blacks, Baldwin said, “When I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to…tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize.” In Baldwin’s view organized religion’s requirement that believers suspend disbelief and submit to “God’s will” is a liability for working class African Americans. Religious dogma anesthetizes as it bonds, a dangerous combination in an era in which the proliferation of storefront churches in urban black communities is a symptom of economic underdevelopment.

Echoing Baldwin, Chicago-based Education professor and atheist Kamau Rashid argues that “Freethought is an extension and expression of the struggle that African Americans have waged for self-determination. In fact it represents a heightened phase of such a struggle wherein one of the final stages of ‘conceptual incarceration,’ the belief in a God or gods, is discarded for a belief in the human potential, for a belief in ourselves.”

And why, in a heritage steeped in the revolutionary thought of such dirty outlaw skeptics as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, A. Philip Randolph, James Forman and Alice Walker, would this be so viscerally frightening?

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org, a member of the Black Skeptics Group and the author of the forthcoming book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

*With apologies to Bob Dylan

Aging, Cancer, Genes: Science for All

2010-06-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

"A lot of people think we're biologically programmed to die, but the truth is that we're biologically programmed for survival" - Dr. Robert Kane Pappas

So why do we get old and die? Why do some people get cancer and others don't?

I. "Treatment: The Difficulties of Making a Cancer Drug" - Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker Magazine May 17, 2010

II. To Age or not to Age, a documentary by Doctor Robert Kane Pappas to be released on July 16, 2010

III. Dr Stanislaw Burzynski The Movie. Director: Eric Merola. Winner of the "Humanitarian Vision" award at the Newport Beach Festival

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski the Movie reveals the results of the doctor's treatments administered to paying, hopeful patients and his seemingly endless battles against the FDA. The film might have been called: Dr. Burzynski Has the Answers'

At the heart of the matter as presented in these three popular efforts to communicate with us, the laymen of the world, and the potential or actual financial backers of the endless quest to Know, is the question Why: Why Cancer, Why Age?

For the Drug industry, as discussed in the New Yorker Magazine, the question is answered with an indirect reference to the chemical makeup of the human body. If only we can find the right chemicals, the right cocktail, the problem of Cancer containment, then cure, will be solved. This is a long, expensive, exacting endeavor the fruits of which are a long way from realization. But the scientists are on their way, sort of. And the total cost to date is well beyond our collective imagination.

There are literally millions of known chemicals and many of them are being tested - going through the mandated protocols from phrase I to phase 2, then phase 3. All remedies seem to have failed to pass all three phases but hope has not died, not yet.

The outstanding question is what is the cause of Cancer - without knowing the cause can a solution ever be found? Is it the chemical composition of the body that causes cancer, and if so, isn't the emotional component as much responsible for our chemical composition as the physical mechanisms that cancer infests. Maybe it isn't an injection of the "right chemical" that is needed but someone who addresses our emotional problems with the intent of achieving mental health and stability with subsequent alteration in our chemical makeup. The Psychoanalysts of the world could possibly be in competition with the invasive substance that the scientists want to inject.

Dr. Burzynski has another idea that he has been investigating through injections into live subjects who want desperately to be cured. He thinks and acts upon the belief that the cause of Cancer is in the genes. It is our Genetic makeup that causes cancer and with the right injection of a substance to alter our genes our cancer can be controlled and eliminated or put into remission.

In effect he is refocusing our attention away from the millions of chemicals known to man and onto the chemicals that would alter genes. But....he hasn't gone through the phase 1 or 2, or 3 of the mandated process established by "legitimate" medicine, with the unfortunate result that he is constantly brought to account by the legal profession (and FDA) for his treatment method and administration and his results.

His results are not perfect - far from it - but he claims to have cured enough people with his efforts that the Federal Government (FDA) wants to shut him down for fear that..........well, that is yet to be revealed. Maybe just cutting corners (and costs) is the crime for which he has been harassed.

But what does Cancer have to do with Age and Aging? Dr. Pappas has convincing evidence that aging, that threat and reality of our bodies ever changing, does not have to be. What causes aging, he asks - a question we had hitherto decided was answered by life observed, lived and then ended most commonly before the age of 100. But Dr. Pappas says that we should live on and convinces those who watch his documentary To Age or Not to Age that aging is not normal.

Not normal! What I see and experience every day is not in sync with reality. Wow. How does he get to this conclusion?

Genes: That is the answer. He goes beyond the theory that if we consume fewer calories per day during our life time, our time on earth will be greatly elongated, our healthy life span will be seemingly endless. Beyond food means that the cause of aging is not just what we eat or fail to eat. He says the cause is in the Genes.

My observations (I am a complete layperson), based on my friends and acquaintances, are that the descendants of slaves in the southern United States come from a long-living and healthy lineage. In fact the slaves didn't just live longer than their owners, which is well documented, but the slaves and their descendants who are the parents of those in my age range outlive their children by a significant statistical margin. If Aging was just a matter of genes this could not be the case.

In summary, based on my limited observations:

The first generation were slaves
They lived the longest (discounting those murdered)
The second generation were black share croppers, small farm owners who worked the land and ate food that was unprocessed by corporations. They lived as long or almost as long as their parents.
The third generation were the children who came up North to seek fame and fortune - or just fortune enough to secure food, shelter and clothing without land of their own; they enjoyed a significantly shorter life span than their genetic inheritance would have predicted. Indeed, they often died before their parents.

Conclusion: emotional, physical factors not related solely to genes might be a significant cause of life span.

Genes are not a stand-alone cause for cancer or aging. Then why are we being exposed to gene analysis or given the rudiments of cost and future possible research for cancer at this time? What is going on? Coincidence or...... what is the Cause.

We seem to be bombarded with so much more information about the world, the Universe, the foundations of life in a test tube and the ability to replicate what had once been thought of as God giveth, and God taketh away, that there is an ever widening gap in applicable knowledge. Knowledge that will improve our lives and the lives of those we love and care for. Too much information seems to bread ignorance

This is the dilemma that confronts us every day. What food to eat, what clothes to buy, what cloth to touch our skin, what to drink, which water to avoid, which juice is okay and which is too sugary... is sugar bad or is it corn syrup or should both be avoided. These are some of the easy unanswered questions. Imagine having to think about, to live with, the uncertainty of which treatment to select, which doctor to see, which theory to bring to bear on our desire to continue to live... if living at all cost is what we want. Now there is the potential question of when should I die, should I register for prevention because I have the Gene or don't.

Chemical, emotional, physical, germ, infection, virus, bacterium, genes and more genes and the list goes on and on....

No wonder people choose to die rather than live in terrifying uncertainty.

See the films, read the New Yorker Magazine and feel like you are not alone because.........that's one truth that is indisputable: we are all in this together.

TO AGE OR NOT TO AGE
Opening July 16, 2010

Dr. Burzynski The Movie
available on DVD

Mother and Child: Now playing in New York theaters

2010-06-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives) and executive producer Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel)

“MOTHER AND CHILD”

Opens Friday, May 7th in NY at the Landmark Sunshine and Lincoln Plaza Theaters

Starring
Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington
Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits

with
Shareeka Epps, Cherry Jones, S. Epatha Merkerson, Amy Brenneman, David Morse, Marc Blucas, Elizabeth Pena

plot: Three women's lives share a common core: they have all been profoundly affected by adoption.

Mother and Child opened on May 7th to coincide with the great Mother's day recognition/celebration events that bode only good, kind and charitable warmth on women who assume the role of Mother.

While the phrase "happy mother's day" is repeated often throughout the day from even strangers to women they think might be a mother the phrase reemphasizes our fantasy notions of mothers which is even more potent when combined with "mother and child" Almost like the idealac Madonna recreated in all those perceived to be mothers, an image that is more destructive to human relations than supportive of women as real, complex vital contributors to society.

In Mother and Child the Mother is difficult to like and the child is adopted; Not of the mother's loins.
And the men........they are quietly supportive or not, in contrast to the role that men of this generation of new fathers are assuming.

To experience our fantasies crumble, delivered with brilliant actors and unusal clarity with attention to minute details is an experience that is essential for sorely needed change.

My mother was not a likable, lovable person. But she was my mother and as an adult I embraced her as such. If the fantasy of the mother had never existed, to accept my mother as she was wouldn't have been as difficult nor painful

And that is why I recommend this film. See Mother and Child and reunite with reality

Life During Wartime: To Forgive or Forget?

2010-06-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2009 / WINNER – BEST SCREENPLAY
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009
TELLURIDE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2009
BOSTON INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL 2010

Directed By Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling, Happiness, Palindromes)

Starring: Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens, Michael Lerner, Chris Marquette, Charlotte Rampling, Dylan Riley Snyder and Michael Kenneth Williams

Extraordinary acting! A brilliant Plot: A mature Todd Solondz brings the theme of Happiness into a fuller, ever more intense film about Sex, Crime and the "ideal" Family Life.

Plot:
Separated from her incarcerated husband Bill (Ciarán Hinds), Trish (Allison Janney) is about to be married again. Bill is a pedophile, so Trish couldn't be more excited to have Harvey (Michael Lerner), a “normal” father figure for her two sons. But when Bill is released from prison and the boys finally meet their future stepdad, the family is forced to decide whether to forgive or to forget.

There is so much happening in this intellectual exploration of our prejudices, our frailties that cloud our preceptions and make our decisions often not in tune with our best interest nor of those we care about. At the heart of the film is that all important question of fatherhood, what does it mean to be a father, what does it mean for a man and for his son.
This identity issue looms large while the crimes that the father commits seems often trivial to the lies that surround and permeate us all. But who is the Father.

There is strong evidence throughout this film that the personal father with whom we immediate associate to "father" also refers to Israel, the Fatherland where the same criminality issue felt and experienced for this country that murders, bulldozes homes and has striped life as we know it from huge number of people in the Middle East is the Father exposed in Life During Wartime with all the complexity of feeling/thought/duplicity/longing for a better person /country to embrace.

Pedophilia is a crime. The crime's of the paroled men are multiple. Crime crime crime but even for a criminal there is a humanity and that is the point...to look at our committed lies politically and personally: Do we forget? Do we forgive? And if we forget, will we ever remember again.

Life During Wartime uses brilliant human interactions to carry it's message and there were many moments when I felt certain this film would be one of my favorites of all times but

As with so much of politics, it lack an emotional device to pull me in or get me involved in a primitive non intellectual way and that unfortunately is the life blood of the film viewing experience.

To forgive or forget: that is the question because you can not forgive what you have forgotten.
Life During Wartime is a film you won't want to forget.

Opens theatrically in NY on 7/23

The Solitary Man: middle age woes

2010-06-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

Brian Koppelman
David Levien

A car magnate watches his personal and professional life hit the skids because of his business and romantic indiscretions.

Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Mary-Louise Parker and Jenna Fischer

Alone, "talking to your bed at night"; the other side of the bell-shaped U-curve, Michael Douglas, along with Susan Sarandon and Danny DeVito, bring to the screen the ups and downs of a once successful man as he strives to maintain his distinguished position as a "respected" member of society while all the measures of his valued worth crumble.

This is not an easy film to watch. Detailing the loss of vitality in a man who seems unable to adapt to his changed self - the lack of integrity, the unscrupulous behavior, particularly sexually - even the great Michael Douglas loses his appeal in this portrayal of the middle-aged man in our midst.

While the dialogue is consistently strong, the plot construction and scene transitions fail to work at a high level . Overall, the film might not hold the viewer's attention but it does address a serious problem for those who are fortunate enough to live into old age.

For a look at life without that sexy youthful appeal, see The Solitary Man.

Now playing in New York City theaters.

Israeli Assault: To Cover up or Expose. That is the question!

2010-06-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

By Yvonne Ridley
edited by Linda Zises

June 01, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --

How many of you remember the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro way back in October 1985?

Four members of the Palestine Liberation Front took control of the liner off Egypt as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said.

It was a bungled operation in which the hijackers killed disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and then threw his body overboard.

The incident created headlines around the world and polarized people over the Palestinian cause.

It also prompted the law makers to create new legislation making it an international crime for anyone to take a ship by force.

And this is the reason for the brief history lesson - under article 3 of the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process.

The treaty necessarily adopts a strict approach. One cannot attack a ship and then claim self-defence if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence.

In other words, according to international law, the actions of the Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the habit of boarding ships by force.

Any rights to self defence in such dramatic circumstances rests purely with the passengers and crew on board. Under international maritime law you are legally entitled to resist unlawful capture, abduction and detention.

What those on board the Freedom Flotilla did was perfectly legal. I believe they acted with great courage in the face of heavily armed IDF commandos, while others might have thought their actions reckless.

Several people paid the ultimate price for their international right to resist.

What will you, what will the World do now?

"Glow in the Dark Penis" revisited:

2010-05-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

"Glow in the Dark Penis" a tag/hook, a phrase which appeared years ago on the blog "criticalwomen of film' still attracts "hits"; Internet surfers from around the world; 111 to 116 countries/territories per month are repeatedly registered on the Google scale. At the core of this statistical success is the experience of the hidden desires of those who suffer from guilt; the so called "pervert".

It is a brilliant phrase because it uses the word penis - which is one of those trigger internet suffer words - coupled with the word Dark which denotes hidden/ forbidden secretive sexual thoughts. In short, it appeals to those steeped in guilt

Guilt: How strange, how powerful it is!

It's source can be either: Heinous acts of destruction (murder) or acts or ideations of construction (sex) or anything that makes us feel "bad'.

Did the Ancient Greeks experience guilt? Most likely not.

In the caveman times, was guilt a prevalent emotion? Not likely.

Today almost every adult feels guilt from one source or another and our children are inheriting this crippling emotion as well.

Common sources of quilt:

i didn't separate out the metal cans from the newspapers,
I help pay for the next generation of Drones or the nuclear bomb dropped on civilians or
I killed a man because I was told to..........
I killed a man and I don't know why....
or did I dream it,
imagine it.

I want/crave a man's penis in my mouth.
I want to taste his semen
I want to get into that woman's pants
I want to live..........
without pain
and I can't.

I am guilty because I think about suicide all the time.
I think about masturbating, then I do it
to feel better
but it makes me feel guilty
which is worse.

I killed a man
I watched him die
I saw his blood
it was real,
I saw life flow from his limbs
I am guilty

I killed a child
he was running
i said
I think I said "stop"
but he didn't

I banged open the door
a private space
exposed:
A home
their home
my gun held just so
my fingers worked without thought
I am a killer
A hero

My flesh littered with tattoos
indisputable though revocable
evidence
I am guilty

Yet to be charged
I punish myself
everyday

I live in hell
in silence
in eternal
Agony

Freud said Americans substitute aggression for sex. What he meant is that the processes for guilt-formation and the struggles that this emotion poses are substantially confined to Aggressive acts in this country as opposed to the illness from sexual ideation experienced in the Europe of his lifetime.

Although I think this is changing what has happened is an entire industry propelled by an undertone of religious indignation that is infiltrating the "Women's liberation" movement; a worldwide prohibition against sexual strivings which is ever increasing in its visibility and its wealth of ideas, actions identified as worthy of reprimand/prohibition.

What happens, and we see/hear it in the news to the point that it no longer surprises even the most virtuous among us, is the very people who talk the talk do not act in accordance to the good 'clean" life.

They are and have always been the repressed but repression does not work. The repressed ideas become an energy block, like a huge onslaught of fast moving water stopped at the point of urgent egress it must find an outlet.

We block our human nature to conform to a pathological state of purity.

Into this mix of gratifying both the aggressive drive and the sexual drive is the ever growing sex trade, pornography and all those trigger words that makes a blog, a web page garner notice.

Is this a problem?

Or is pornography a solution, an answer to pathological fallout from War?

Should it be legalized along with Pot and Liquor and masturbation?

"Tell me, Daddy, what did you do in the army? What did you see?" are questions that are seldom answered and for good reason.

Although we know this, my point is that there is a relationship between this obvious omission of communication and the proliferation, the need for pornography to ease our pain.

That is the human condition, our living hell.

Our experience of ever increasing and more urgent feelings of quilt.

The Killer Inside Me: Interesting but............?

2010-05-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Michael Winterbottom

Based on a novel by pulp writer Jim Thompson:

An idyllic West Texas town in the early 1950’s:
handsome, charming, unassuming small town sheriff's deputy, Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) has difficulty juggling his long-term girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson) and a prostitute named Joyce (Jessica Alba). His siopathic tendencies steer him and us, his audience towards an unusual finale.

Does it matter to you if the basis of a file is right, true to its depiction of the potential for human behavior? That is the underling question posed by this film, a difficult one to answer.

There is no question that emotion, such as anger, can trigger behavior that seems to defy intelligent mediation. We have all experienced going from an identified feeling to an action we would later regret. Can this happen with the intellectual/emotional experience of "Love" or is it more to the point that the experience of the sexual orgasm is what triggers an unconscious or preconscious reaction? In this film, The Killer Inside Me this is an essential question because it is the basis of the plot, the foundation of the story.

If the latter is what holds true and the former not, then this raises the question of authenticity - not an easy one to answer, but important nonetheless.

I don't know about seeing the film on a large screen. I recommend The Killer Inside Me be seen, at home, on DVD.

Release date: June 18th
The film will be available simultaneously on VOD

Finding Bliss: pornography in the making

2010-05-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

Cast: Leelee Sobieski, Matthew Davis, Donnamarie Recco, Denise Richards

FINDING BLISS, a romantic comedy that explores the adult film industry through the eyes of an idealistic 25 year-old award-winning film school grad, Jody Balaban (LEELEE SOBIESKI).

With sex as the landscape and pornography the issue to be explored, punctuated with visual images that manage to stay on the date-flick side of the divide, it is hard to imagine how this film will not make back the money spent on its creation.

An interesting film that addresses issues rarely spoken about even in those private moments when "the girls" get together: the fear of inability to perform is not limited to men, not in this country, this century. It is a universal fear but women rarely admit to feelings traditionally attributed to men. In Finding Bliss this curtain of silence is lifted and the "good girl", the Virgin of choice, is exposed as a frightened child trying to survive in an adult world.

The film is compelling in content but is amateurish in construction and weak in acting. There is so much good and so much lacking in this film that I recommend it with strong reservations.

Hopefully writer/director Julie Davis will learn more about filmmaking before she attempts to bring her compelling and important ideas onto the screen again.

Release Date: June 4th, 2010 (limited)

Paper Man: funny/poignant, one of the year's best

2010-05-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

Written and Directed by: Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney

Cast: Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone, Lisa Kudrow, Kieran Culkin

Comedic Drama

Richard (Jeff Daniels), a failed middle-aged novelist quirky in his immaturity as contrasted to his wife (Lisa Kudrow), a physician who embodies the ultra-successful adult persona.

Richard embarks on a month-long trip to Long Island's pristine winter setting, a self imposed solitude, to lift his "writer's block". During his stay, he rides around on a child-size bike, a symbol of the child persona that engulfs this 50+ year-old man. While on a trip to town Richard befriends, and hires as his babysitter, Abby (Emma Stone) - a 17 year-old victim of childhood trauma that has left her accepting a masochistic male companion even though or rather because he degrades and hurts her.

The comedic element is mostly based on the contract between Richard and others. Richard relies heavily on his imaginary friend, a costumed superhero known as Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds) whom no one other than Richard sees, but his wife knows about. Abby's equivolent "super man" is a fellow ex-"loony bin" friend who follows her everywhere.

Given the details of the plot it is difficult to anticipate that this usual older man/very young girl scenario is a film worth seeing. But this film is very much worth seeing because the dialogue and the hook, an extinct bird, are so compelling that it raises the film into the realm of Great.

Paper Man's extinct bird is America, a country which has outgrown its 'super power of the world' status and along with it the comic book character Superman or Captain Excellent. Richard's problems and our problem are twofold: In a society that has no factories, that makes no thing, what do we do with our Hands? What can we make - Origami, slice up fish, sofas out of books.............nothing of substance, of inherent worth. We are insubstantial people and what we manufacture is unhappiness and we, the denizens of this once productive, thriving super power America are becoming extinct, like the bird.

The political/emotional impact of Paper Man is immense. We are all victims - of the fallout from the cell phones/computers, all means of non communication communication. We don't even type on a substantial Corona typewriter anymore. We tap delicately on our computers, barely touching the keyboard.

The imagery is endless, delivered in the most delightful, funny interactions that resonated deeply.

It all felt so real, as if I was involved in the scene right there with the messy eating of a Lobster, the slicing up of the Fluke, the making of a sofa out of unsold books that otherwise would have remained in unopened boxes for ever and ever, and the arguments between husband and wife.... I've been there, i heard them, I've had them.

I see an average of 7 to 10 films a week, standard for today's film reviewer. But Paper Man was so rich in detail, so compelling a film that I saw it twice within three days. What else can I say?

PAPER MAN opened Friday, April 23rd

Expendable Lives,

2010-05-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Distorted Images: The Murder of Aiayanna Jones

By Sikivu Hutchinson

When a little white girl goes missing, online news, supermarket tabloids and cable network stations bombard us with up-to-the-minute dispatches on the crime, the victim, her shattered family and anguished community. When a little black girl is murdered in cold blood by a big city police department it is up to the community and those who care about social justice to ensure that the case doesn’t fade into the national obscurity that is usually reserved for the lives of people of color. The recent execution of 7 year-old Aiyanna Jones by the Detroit Police Department during a raid while she was sleeping in her home is the kind of atrocity that makes many people of color view the police as an occupying army. According to news reports, the Detroit Police were conducting a raid that was being filmed for an A&E reality show. Searching for a suspect who lived in another apartment unit, officers fired into the home from outside, then lobbed a grenade into the house, killing little Aiyanna.

By exercising a so-called “no knock” policy in poor neighborhoods, the Detroit Police’s criminal disregard for human life and the civil liberties of people of color have kept the community under siege. According to Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, the Detroit Police have been under a federal consent decree but continue to use military style raids that terrorize citizens in its poorest neighborhoods.

Of course, deeply ingrained racist stereotypes and biases against people of color are a major factor in racial profiling and police misconduct. Disturbingly, Aiyanna’s murder also comes in the wake of a recent CNN study about the impact of skin color bias on young children. CNN presented the findings of Margaret Beale Spencer, a psychologist who utilized the same “doll test” technique as that of psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in 1947. The Clarks’ research documented the destructive impact of racism on black children’s self-image and was used in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education suit....CONT.http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/05/expendable-lives-distorted-images.html

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org. She is working on a book entitled Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Atheism Question.

John Rabe: an enemy of many becomes a hero of some

2010-05-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Florian Gallenberger

John Rabe is an old-fashioned war melodrama replete with all the horrors that "sane "people do to those they deem their enemy.

In 1937 John Rabe, "The Good German of Nanking." was a middle-aged, business man, a self proclaimed Nazi who worked tirelessly to save thousands of civilian Chinese from the Rape of Nanking. He achieved this goal by assisting thousands of Chinese civilians to enter the sprawling International Safety Zone
Estimates go as high as 250,000.

This historical event and the heroism of Rabe, the self proclaimed Nazi, doesn't register much outside of Germany,

Rabe appears to have no understanding of the nature of the Japanese menace or of the Nazi party he belongs to. But when evil rears its head, he cannot in good conscience betray the trust his workers have placed in him.

One of the most startling images here is Rabe's brainstorm to use a giant Nazi flag to deflect Japanese bombers away from desperate civilians crammed into the Siemens grounds. The idea of anyone using a Nazi flag for protection from aggressors is certainly new to World War II movies! the other is the sight of human heads on a wooden ledge, the participatory evidence of a competition to see who could accumulate the most number: the image of blood dripping from multiple heads and necks is one I won't forget.

A 134-minute film, with a clear message. Sometimes, under extreme circumstances, people do the right thing.

Currently P\laying in a limited number of theaters.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON, directed by Stéphane Brizé

2010-05-19T07:02:00.000-07:00

French: subtitles

Cast: Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain

A construction worker whose life is embedded in deep and satisfying emotional ties to his family; wife, son, elderly father, meets a school teacher Mademoiselle Chambon, whose emotional ties are defined by her love, her involvement in the arts: music, writing, reading, painting, teaching.

Each steps into the other's world.

Brick by brick the Director builds the plot, life built one brick on top of another. With delicate, deliberate perfection
we are shown/told the 'Direct Object' of the film is life. The choices we make and don't.

A quiet, compelling love story for those who don't need to be told what we already know but can't accept, not without a struggle.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON, is a gem, an intense provocative moment so unlike an American film experience.

For those in search of a film based on philosophical inquiry that forces the viewer to think, to digest, and feel more connected with others, I highly recommend MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON.

Film open at New York's Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and at the Cinema Village in New York on May 28, followed by a nationwide release to select cities.

HEARTBREAKER (L’ARNACOEUR): ENJOYABLE!

2010-05-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

director: Pascal Chaumeil.

romantic comedy

Cast: Vanessa Paradis (Girl on the Bridge, The Key)
Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Paris, Russian Dolls). Alex (Duris), Julie Ferrier, François Damiens

Plot: 'Professinal' heartbreakers at work

fun
clever
turns and twists
brillliantly delivered
each character filled with moments of enjoyment
even when apparant failure seems inevitable.

the ending is expected but how the Director gets from one moment to the next is pure pleasure

without anyone getting seriously hurt, without regret at the Heartbreakers success in encouraging the end of one relationship after another, this film achieves its goal........with consumate fun and frivolous delight....... it entertains.

French: subtitled

Sat May 15, Bklyn Peace Fair: Fr. Roy Bourgeois, Keynote Speaker

2010-05-16T07:10:00.000-07:00

It is no surprise that people are turning more and more to the fundamentalist religions at this turning point in world wide economic malaise as the thought of when will War end has been replaced by, so this is the way it is, and will be.

Against this fatalistic posture are those who attended the Peace Fair, those who believe that small incremental actions by committed people will eventually lead to a change that we want and feel must come to be. This understanding adds an imperative in the fight against the symptoms of endless aggression and brings back to our conscience human discourse, verbal communication as an essential vehicle for co-existence.

Those who attended the Peace Fair were compelled by the believe/conviction that the chosen course of our Government has to end or it will end all of us.

Most notable was the absence of fear of police intervention/harassment or potential time spent in jail.

This experience reaffirmed our united hope and effort to keep free speak a right, rather than a Saturday afternoon luxury

What a pleasure!

Obama Drops by NYC Police Headquarters

2010-05-14T04:14:00.000-07:00

(A friendly casual visit from the President of the United States:
I doubt that, do you?)

Lifted from the New York Post Newspaper

By MURRAY WEISS, Criminal Justice Editor

Last Updated: 7:58 PM, May 13, 2010

Obama is the second President to visit. In 2002, President George W. Bush similarly thanked the NYPD in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

"I just wanted to stop by say, Thank you," Obama began during a 10-minute visit to the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center....

"I know you folks are busy, but I just wanted to come by and say thank you. I was telling the mayor and the commissioner that ...."

Commentary:
At approximately 4:15 yesterday afternoon I was trying to make my way to 120 Wall Street where the WBAI office is located and the usual few minutes was much more than that. Lower Manhattan was closed off to everyone except those stationed to protect the President. For seemingly endless blocks stretching for miles the street appeared empty and this Casual visit of "I just wanted to come by and say thank you" was a night mere of formality and financial strain on a City already in compromised financial condition; two presidential helicopters, accompanied by several overhead helicopter to stationed to protect, thousands of police, motor cycles, limousines, police cars and unmarked cars and unmarked people punctuated with traffic cops at every step of the four block trip from subway to Wall street.

And who does he see.......the police. This is not a visit to thank the street ventures, the Vietnam Vets who were the identifiers of the car which was the object of terror. Those men disappear, again the invisible people of the city who make the city safe, who feed us, provide umbrellas and sun glasses and scarf and gloves to keep us warm when we rush out of the house improperly prepared for the versatile New York City weather.

If Obama had come to the City and said, I want to thank the police but first I want to thank the real heroes of the day, the men who didn't mess up the entire operation of terror control then I would have overlooked the inconvenience his trip meant to millions of New Yorkers trying to make their way to a second job or to their personal space of choice on Thursday after regular working hours.

The similarity in the mess up from failing to identify the potential threat, to the failure to immediately implement identification of the suspect, to finding the suspect on a PLAN! with doors closed ready to take off.........what did happen to the security the City is paying for instead of paying for education, health care etc.. The similarities in the ineptitude of the law enforcement army that is thrown in our faces everyday is staggering. But more than that this incidnt should put a dent in the ever growing movement of the 911 Truth seekers.
It is the incompetence of those we trust to protect us that is glaring in this incident and that is the real reason Obama came to New York City to say thank you. He is telling the public, reassuring us all that we are in safe hands just as George Bush did in 2002 because he knows that we aren't. All the money in the world can't stop a terrorist attack when done with minute attention to detail and money to effect the act.

The only real way to stop terrorism is to stop acting the part.

Killing is not the way to achieve peace

MOTHER AND CHILD

2010-05-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

WOMEN WITHOUT MEN Shirin Neshat

2010-05-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Plot: The 1953 Iranian Coup that brought the Shah into power as told through the eyes of four women

Cast:
Pegah Ferydoni
Anita Shahrzad
Shabnam Tolouei
Orsi Toth

One of the many challenges facing Shirin Neshat in her directorship of Women Without Men is how to sell to an American and European audience an interesting engrossing story that is also an historical film that both explains the unique Iranian culture and shows the super power involvement that resulted in years upon years of violence; lack of freedom, and lack of democratic governance.

The main focus of this film is the 1953 Coup supported by the British and the CIA when the Shah took full control of the country including its army. The Coup shifted the Iranian society from a once democratic society to a type of dictatorship, severely monitoring the people through his secret police called Savak recruited from the rank and file of the neighbors /friends of ordinary citizens.

I remember as a child the images televised of the Shah riding into Iran to secure his power. He was so obviously old. I thought, why is the U.S.A. bringing him into power. Why him? That question remains........even today.

To determine answers to this question and many others Shirin Neshat uses women to bring Iran into the minds and hearts of movie goers is such a gentle way that says so much.

As Shirin Neshat says:

"This film is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran - from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009."

Shirin Neshat raises the question of the veil, (chador) presenting it both as a symbol of liberation and of repression; When i see the women in my neighborhood wearing the veil I am in awe of their courage to dress so differently from others and yet, I fear the reason a women wears this garment has more to do with the dictates of her husband, of her religious/country of origin than with the image she wants to present to the outside world

In Women Without Men the garden (filmed/photographed with beautiful colors, textures) "is treated as a space of exile, refuge, oasis, where one can feel safe and secure" in contrast to the black and white scenes of street protest where "color is purposely drained, to give a sort of archival quality to the picture".

Thankfully there is no ambiguity about the theme of this film: politics through the eyes of women, the women who assert themselves into the streets, the voice, the mass presence of those Iranians who want what we here in America once enjoyed seemingly without restraint.

This is the power for change in Iran. Maybe a lesson, a way of life we will one day assume as our own

Women Without Men is a beautiful informative entertaining film that will live on as one of the pivotal moments in film

Fathers and their daughters: when love turns sour

2010-05-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

The May 3rd issue of the New Yorker Magazine has a compelling story written by Janet Malcolm, reporter at large."Iphigenia in Forest Hills (New York)
Anatomy of a Murder trial.

The accused is Mazoltuv Borukhova a 35 year old Physician, a very attractive small thin woman with extraordinary long flowing black hair and a face, a physical demeanor that conveys confidence, competence, compassion and unfaltering courage to meet whatever challenge the trial and beyond might bring to her life. Her destiny is in the hands of lawyers, a not impartial judge, witnesses, the jurors, none of whom seem to understand her and most of whom were convinced of her guilt before the trial began.

Janet Malcolm chose to focus on the travesty of justice afforded Mazoltuv, a fascinating emotionally draining story of seemingly unlimited scope. I chose to examine the particulars, as presented by Janet to see how this crime, whoever committed it was compelled by circumstances that forced the issue. The child's father, the former husband, had to be stopped. But why?

This true story emerges from the tightly knit ethnic group of Jewish people known as the iphigenia Jews identified by their distinctive clothes, distinctive way of life. They have strict rules seldom broken that encompass how the men and women relate to one another in public ( they don't hold hands nor show any display of physical contact). They are intensely private people living within their group(cult). Imagine the trauma afforded this ethnic group when one of their own is murdered. Murdered in plain sight of his young, four year old daughter whom he was meeting to take from her mother to his home for parental visitation. The crime was unthinkable. The public exposure of ways and customs of this cult, unbearable.

There is a long and ugly history of fathers who sexually abuse their daughters. In the film An Americian Haunting 2006 , reviewed below, the underlying theme is the sexual deflowering of the budding teenage daughter who then goes crazy with all the hysteronics that horror flicks champion. What was less than appealing to a mature adience, the horror flick excitement, was more than made up for by the performance of Sissy Spasak who played the suffering Mother with such perfection that she left no doubt in my mind that I know this mother, I know her and so do we all. She is fully aware of her husband's night time sexual escapades, her husband's nightly assault on their daughter and chooses to look away thus by omission allowing him to abuse the one person she wanted to protect. There is an ending to this situation. The father dies. He dies and the film ends. The symptom vanishes covered up by all the right phrases, sentiments apologies. But the problem remains. Fathers who express their love for their daughter through unacceptable sexually compelled acts of physical violation. that is the issue, the problem that remains taboo, almost unspeakable.

A third exposure of this theme is the recently shown film (on Cable)The Color of Rain. The husband, a judge by profession who gets a young heroin addict pregnant and she has the baby which he then takes as his own. He makes of the baby's mother, a weekly babysitter for which the mother must pay with sexual favors that she can't afford to deny. Not if she wants to see her daughter, to spend time with her.

In this case the young girl becomes a hero of sorts. She doesn't go to the police as Mazoltuv tried to do And she doesn't arrange for anyone to be killed. She is not a doctor, she is a street person, without professional credentials and she does what she has to do to save her daughter. She kills her. She takes a pillow and weeping quietly, she suficates her baby daughter into the quiet more tolerable hereafter.

What does Mazoltuv do? That question can not be satisfactorily answer because the fact of her husband repeatedly playing with their daughter's vagina did not get the attention such a crime by a grown professional man, whatever his religion or occupation, deserves or rather must have.
And further........

The item which proved to me beyond a doubt that Mazoltuv was not guilty of sanctioning the murder of her husband in pain sight of her daughter and friends was the one detail in the trial no one could explain.

Why did Mazoltuv fail to hear the gun shots when her husand was shot and killd? The gun had its silencer in place for the first shot but then the silencer was dislodged and the next two shots were heard by people far from the crime scene. Only Mazoltuv who was right there, bending over her estranged hsuband's body did not hear them. This detail Mazoltuv insisted on, never vied from. It remains to this day immutable.
"I did not hear the gun shots"

Why?
Have you ever walked down the street or better yet been on a subway platform and there is a loud jingle of metal as an item falls to the ground albeit a cell phone or a key ring with keys affixed. You are walking behind the sound and it pierces your ears and yet the culprit of the sound, the person whose keys or cell phone it is doesn't hear the clatter. Does hear it!
You pick the item up and return it to its rightful owner and they are momentarily confused. They didn't know the item was out of their possession,

But how could they not know, you ask. Because.....they didn't expect it. They had no reason to listen for it and they were sufficiently engaged in other matters to not hear it and certainly even if something got through to their oratory faculty, they didn't associate the sound with anything that they might be concerned with. They had more important things to hear and think about then the sound of the metal hitting the pavement or the sound of a gun shot going off somewhere in their vicinity. In this case Mazoltuv was involved with her daughter and husband as they formed a momentary bond, swinging the child between them, laughing, enjoying once again that special moment of being together. She didn't hear the gun shots because she didn't exect them and she didn't expect them because she had nothing to do with the arrangements that led to her estranged husband's demise.

The beginningof this trial, the end and everything in between does not make a pretty story. It is not just the trial that is so dreadful but the ultimate result with Mazltuv found guilty as an accomplish to the murder, her daughter at large surrounded by a paucity of love and understanding and women everywhere being given the message once again that if and when your husband or an uncle sexually assaults your child and you complain;
Beware
Your actions might lead to a life time of incarceration or worse.

Linda Zises

[blackfemlens] The Usual Suspects: Arizona and the Black/Latino Divide

2010-04-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

As soon as Arizona’s fascist anti-immigrant SB1070 legislation passed, black civil rights leaders from Jesse Jackson to California Assembly member Karen Bass roundly condemned it. The toxic national climate couldn’t be more primed for this law. In recent months, the high octane atmosphere of jingoistic racism, xenophobia and Manifest Destiny posturing amongst white zealots and the legislators who shill for them has become standard order. Now that the nation is in an uproar over SB1070, civil rights coalitions have begun trying to mobilize African American opposition to the Bill by linking black social justice activism with the immigrant rights movement.

However, when it comes to immigration rights and reform, there is a pronounced disconnect between black leadership and average black folk. In the L.A. African American Conservative Examiner respondents expressed support for SB1070. One believed that if similar laws were enacted in California it would be a deterrent to attacks on African Americans by Mexican immigrants. On the liberal to moderate The Grio website some black posters sounded off about bearing the brunt of racial discrimination, yet saw little connection between their experiences and an authoritarian crackdown on Arizonans of color under the legislation. Living elbow to elbow with Latinos in the same socioeconomically depressed communities, black anxiety over interracial violence and social/demographic usurpation by Latinos in the low wage job sector has intensified. In cities where black and Latino day laborers compete for construction and home improvement jobs, white hiring preferences for Latinos have ignited controversy over racist stereotypes about lazy blacks versus hardworking Mexicans. In Los Angeles communities where predominantly black neighborhood schools have become majority Latino, social and classroom segregation between the two groups is a hard reality. The prevalence of Latino anti-black prejudice, ranging from “pigmentocracy” bias to caricaturing blacks as backward and “ghetto,” is a recurring complaint among some African American youth. Further, the perception that Latino organizations don’t support African American activism around such issues as racial profiling and police brutality has long fueled mainstream black wariness of black/Latino coalition building.

It is little wonder then that during last month’s Washington D.C. immigration reform protests there was a notable dearth of black participation. According to the online magazine The Root, immigrants of African descent purportedly don’t participate in immigrant rights activism because of class differences with Latin American immigrants. African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants who come to the U.S. legally on H1-B or student visas may perceive immigration reform as a “Latino phenomenon.” Seeking professional careers, many don’t identify with the socioeconomic desperation that motivates undocumented Latin American workers and families to come to the U.S.

Homegrown black support for or ambivalence about the Arizona law is symptomatic of a deep vein of frustration, anger, cultural resentment and xenophobia. Study after study indicates that African Americans are the most residentially segregated, suffer the greatest discrimination in job application and employment and are amongst the biggest recipients of predatory mortgage loans. Fifty-six years after Brown v. Board there is greater social isolation between African Americans and whites in comparison to other racial groups. And white backlash to Obama’s election continues to illustrate the intractability of post-Jim Crow racism.

Because of the legacies of slavery and racial apartheid, the word “nigger” is still the universal signifier for dehumanization and otherness. For this reason, black liberation resistance has always been based on the struggle for recognition of both African American humanity and the basic right to citizenship. So there has always been a visceral yearning amongst black folk to wake up one morning and not be the ultimate other. A yearning to truly be considered a “native” son or daughter in a global empire based on forced African American immigration.

For many working class African Americans who see the gains of the civil rights era smoldering in the ashes of staggering unemployment, incarceration and high school drop-out rates, the plight of recently arrived undocumented immigrants does not register as a cause for solidarity. Ignorant of the bloody history of European imperial conquest of the Southwest, African Americans selectively lap up the white nationalist “taking back our country” swill at their peril. Creating a pure police state to "protect" (white) citizens from government coddled illegals and welfare leeches is part of the same old divide and conquer dynamic that allows the way white elites profit from illegal immigrant labor and low wage black labor to go unexamined.

Recently, a white Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate called for the state’s driver license exam to be given in English because, "If you want to live here, (you need to) learn it." This nativist attempt to secure the borders of the new Confederacy is a harbinger of public policy that hearkens back to the literacy tests, poll taxes and other disfranchising regimes of Jim Crow. Word to ambivalent black folk—the narrative of nationhood, when spun by white supremacists, will never include you, no matter how Anglo your sur (read, slave) name or how “un-inflected” your English is. In the lynch mob mentality of some law enforcement, SB1070’s mandate for investigation with “reasonable suspicion” will always mean you.

Harry Brown: A Man with a Mission!

2010-04-29T05:14:00.000-07:00

Daniel Barber
Starring: Michael Caine (born 1933) Veteran Actor of Note.
and Emily Mortimer, Charlie Creed-Miles.

Plot Vigilante justice: London City streets clean up.......... for the moment!

Michael Caine's stellar performance is the high point of the film, Harry Brown. The low point is everything else. This is a film that humbles us all by its omission of the names, identity, history of those Harry Brown(Michael Caine) chooses to murder in cold blood because they are interfering in the enjoyment of his less than idyllic life style.

His vigilante solution to the social problems of the London youth who are unemployed permanently due to lack of jobs and poor education and the strength of the English caste system(although they don't call it that) reduces us all to infinitesimal specks in this densely populated, colossally huge World.

It is frightening to think that any major film company would spend over 100 million dollars to put on the screen a film of this dubious quality and anticipate a profit. I know this vigilante type behavior has been sanctioned with the bombing of Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Drone plans but there is still something grotesque in the shooting in cold blood without due process and hopefully there always will be.

This display of random killing without personal provocation earns my award for "shame on you" films that should never have been made.

Warning: This film might incite dangerous/unacceptable/anti-social behavior in those Under 21 and those particularly prone to mimicry

Debunking the Myth of a Colorblind France

2010-04-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

By Sounia Johnson

In the early 1930’s many African American artists fled to Paris in order to escape racial inequalities and the constant oppression and dehumanization they experienced in the United States. “ Liberty, Fraternity and Equality,” a motto celebrating freedom that traces its roots in the French Revolution, attracted many African American expatriates such as James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, who found acceptance in what they perceived as a generous France -- liberal, receptive and a champion of social equality and civil rights.

Unexpectedly, a different reality was observed by world renowned American essayist James Baldwin. Baldwin witnessed the deep hatred toward and unequal treatment of French North Africans. Baldwin pledged his support of Algerians (referring to them as Paris’s niggers) while vehemently opposing the way the white French would treat minorities, thereby debunking the notion of colorblind liberal France.

It is thus not surprising that the widely held belief of a romanticized France does not hold any credibility for the many disenfranchised North Africans whose voices are consistently marginalized. The recent 2005 riots in France’s most underprivileged cities have been the result of ongoing racial and ethnic tensions. These tensions have highlighted the profound disconnect between the French Republic and overwhelmingly disenfranchised French Muslim youth, who are frustrated with being constantly marginalized as radical Muslim thugs, and not being given equal treatment as their white French counterparts.

Circumscribed access to education for the French-Magrehbi youth who mostly reside in insalubrious conditions housed in HLMs (Habitations De Loyer Modéré), commonly referred to as subsidized low-rent housing located in heavily Pan-African suburbs, is reflective of an unprecedented ghettoization not found anywhere else in Europe. These developments mirror housing projects found in American’s most underserved urban areas. The high unemployment rate— which in turns leads to juvenile delinquency amongst a frustrated urban youth— has led many young Muslims to fall prey to religious radicalism, with all the negative political implications this entails for France and the war against terrorism.

The problems are endless but are rooted in the fact that the French-Maghrebi youth cannot find sustainable employment due to lack of formal education and immeasurable social ills that have plagued and paralyzed young French North Africans into a dark abyss with no hope in sight...CONTINUED http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/04/debunking-myth-of-colorblind-france.html
Sounia Johnson is a French Algerian Los Angeles based correspondent for the North African Journal. Her perspectives on racism in France, as well as issues related to French-North African relations in Europe and French-Algerian life stand peerless. Follow this clever, adroit young writer.

Rage: Sally Potter Does it Again!

2010-04-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

"SALLY POTTER’S “RAGE” NOMINATED FOR BEST DRAMA
IN THE 14th ANNUAL WEBBY AWARDS "

This is wonderful news. Rage is a film with little action but there is something so riveting about the performance of several characters talking into the screen, telling their story, one actor at a time.

The technique is similar to Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre
and the result is as memorable.

It was a rainy day at the library when I sat down to watch this film I thought I would see some at the library and the rest at home but that didn't happen. I sat in that uncomfortable wooden chair from beginning to end and later when I reviewed the film with a wealth of accolades I was told by a seasoned reviewer, Jeffrey Lions that he didn't like it. Not enough action.

Well, it was enough action for me and for the Webby Awards. And hopefully it will be enough action for you as well.

The star-studded line-up of actors includes Jude Law, Judi Dench, Dianne Wiest, John Leguizamo, Simon Abkarian and Steve Buscemi,

See it on DVD or watch for it in theaters. It might enjoy a return showing

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio
Criticalwomen.net

Repost of original review

Rage Sally Potter DVD

RAGE
Sally Potter Director/Writer (Orlando, 1992)

A young blogger at a New York fashion house shoots behind-the-scenes interviews on his cell-phone. In viewing the footage the audience is confronted with the process of marketing products, the brutal rise to the top in a sucessful company, and the use of perfumes to hide us from ourselves.

Commentary:
From the moment the film started I knew it was written by a woman because I identified with the method of writing, the typing, going back and forth to correct what was put up on the screen. This process drew me into the film and its theme of public versus private; of being famous and being invisible was a profound message. This is such a woman's issue, wanting to be seen, to be sexy and attractive while simultaneously wanting to be Invisible, to be "safe".

I loved the peeling of the onion layers approach to the plot, the change in the characters to reveal not the "I" but the "me" as they confront a moment of trauma, of inevitable reality with the death of one of their own.

I felt drawn to the story, the frightening look at fashion, at manipulation of words to promote a scent. A scent, a perfume for children! Is there nothing sacred, nothing pure, nothing of worth left now that the Internet captures the moment formerly private and sends it out into the Universe of the unknown.

I am not a script writer nor a film director but if I were I would want to have created this film.

Rage: As a film it works. As a live drama on Broadway it will also be tauted as great.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

AGORA: The Rise of Christiantity While Rome Burns: and Women?

2010-04-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

I don't remember when last religious furor by the holier than thou rise of Christianity was brought to the screen in a more powerful, convincing scene after scene to capture the horrific times of the end of the Roman Empire.

Alejandro Amenabar directs a powerful cast in a timely rendition of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Agora stars Rachel Whisz, Max Minghella and Oscar Isaac.

In a familiar view of what might happen again, this time in our own midst we are given an intimate rich view of the little known philosopher/scientist Hypatia whose legendary discoveries took 1200 years for the rest of human kind to embrace as Truth.

This unusual and compelling rendition of a subject we might not have known as it is put forth by Aejandro Amernabar is punctuated by the extraordinarily powerful acting that Rachel Weisz brings to the screen.

The final moments of Hypatia's life were so beautifully executed that this moment alone makes the film, Agora worth seeing.

Tigar Next Door: powerful documentary

2010-04-20T03:32:00.000-07:00

Camilla Calamandre Director producer

Tigar Next Door is a documentary I found almost impossible to watch even though I know it is true. Can Man and Aminal live together is a question that comes to the fore with this detailed exploration of man with tigar in a civilized setting.

Stories of Man in the Animal's world are and have been numerous, particularly fasinating to the young. But Tigar next Door is not for the young. It is heart wrenching, powerful struggle to continue to house and care for Tigars in our personal space. hard to imagine but Tigars are the intimate relatives of our feline house pets (who also have never been fully domesticated but they are small so I guess it doesn't it's okay to breed them and sell them to hopeful prespective parents.
The scene which really upset me more than all others was that of the Tigars' skins being thrown, discarded into a heap, a pile like all those bodies the Nazti's desposed of in the same dehumnized callous fashion ie. one upon the other.

It was at that point, that image, that I knew this is not a film for me. But it is an important film, important that we explore the atrocities that we, members of this civilized country, put forth day after day without comment.

Director Camilla Calamandrei videotaping in the evidence storeroom at the US Fish and Wildlife office in Springfield, Illinois. Pelts, hides, skulls, gallbladders and other body parts were collected as evidence in a 18 month under cover investigation that led to the conviction of 16 men who were buying, selling and killing unwanted pet tigers and lions and then selling their meat and body parts. Photo Credit: Diane Zander.

DVD Release date: April 20th

Linda Zises

WBAI RAdio

Criticalwomen.net

LIFE DURING WARTIME: Sex, Fear and the loss of a Father

2010-04-19T00:51:00.001-07:00

LIFE DURING WARTIME

Directed By Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling, Happiness, Palindromes)

Starring: Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens, Michael Lerner, Chris Marquette, Charlotte Rampling, Dylan Riley Snyder and Michael Kenneth Williams

Opens theatrically in NY on 7/23

Extraordinary acting!

There is so much happening in this intellectual exploration of our prejudices, our frailties that cloud our preceptions and make our decisions often not in tune with our best interest nor of those we care about. At the heart of the film is that all important question of fatherhood, what does it mean to be a father, what does it mean for a man and for his son.
This identity issue looms large while the crimes that the father commits seems often trivial to the lies that surround and permeate us all. But who is the Father.

tere is strong evidence throughout this film that the personal father with whom we immediate associate to "father" also refers to Israel, the Fatherland where the same criminality issue felt and experienced for this country that murders, bulldozes homes and has striped life as we know it from huge number of people in the Middle East is the Father exposed in Life During Wartime with all the complexity of feeling/thought/duplicity/longing for a better person /country to embrace.

Pedophilia is a crime. The crime's of the paroled men are multiple. Crime crime crime but even for a criminal there is a humanity and that is the point...to look at our committed lies politically and personally: Do we forget? Do we forgive? And if we forget, will we ever remember again.

Life During Wartime uses brilliant human interactions to carry it's message and there were many moments when I felt certain this film would be one of my favorites of all times but

As with so much of politics, it lack an emotional device to pull me in or get me involved in a primitive non intellectual way and that unfortunately is the life blood of the film viewing experience.

The last line delivered by the 13 year old boy in contrast to the issue of his father being a photovoltaic stays with you long after the film ends ",,,,,,,,,I just want my father"

Don't we all.

An American Haunting (2006): A Horror!

2010-04-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

Director: Courtney Solomon.

Screenplay: Courtney Solomon, from Brent Monahan’s book.

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D’Arcy, Rachel Hurd-Wood

On Cable TV: and DVD in your local library

it wasn't a box office success, it didn't make millions upon millions or billions of dollars but then again, it wasn't made for the financial success. This film tells a story an unspeakable story about a teenage girl deflowered by her natural father while her mother looks away with that holier, over burdened wife demeanor we all know too well.

An American Haunting takes a very serious problem of epidemic proportion that due to societal constraints refuses to see people, all people as sexual beings and thus far has failed to bring the issue of rape of the teenage girl into clear focus.

Is this what An American Haunting is really about?

I have read one review after another in which there is a vague reference to the subject of this film. Just as this horror film is an indirect approach to the problem of Rape and Incest of the adolescent teenage American girl, this oblique approach is mirrored in the film's reception,

An American Haunting gives us many wonderful moment of horror film delight punctuated with the absurd to help the viewer realize Corey Solomon is making fun of, filming a satirical statement on the Horror film genre. You know Solomon isn't entirely serious when you see the melting of candle wax done to the musical theatrics of a dramatic all important moment which it was not or the race between a full grown horse who is carrying two adult size passengers and a free range yellow eyed ferocious looking wolf, and the horse wins.

You know when the black women(1800s Tennessee slaves) come into the sanctuary of the Bell home(even the name Bell has the significance of a wake up call) with their lips sealed while they present the evidence, a white sheet with young Betsy's unmistakable virginal blood in full view.

You know then that this isn't a funny film, or a frivolous one made for the hungry teenager wanting a date flick that everyone can enjoy. You know before the sniveling husband/father dies that you want him to die and maybe you even wish the silent seemingly pain stricken mother will soon follow in his wake.

This is a film to be brought to our attention again and again. Teenage rape, the man who just "has a thing for virgins" as Sheri Curry(lead singer in The Runaways) said of her rapist, has been allowed to roam free too long, destroying the emotional/sexual life of millions of young girls who have been silenced by family, friends and ultimately by societal pressures and the uneven hand of the Law.

An American Haunting, a masterpiece of deception that went too far. No one seems to have understood nor asked why two seasoned great actors, Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland would agree to act in an horror film. Now you know.

If I had a young daughter I would drag her. if need be, yelling and screaming like Betsy in the film, to see An American Haunting because someone has to lead the way to full disclosure. Why not let film do it for us.

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio
Criticalwomen.net

Naked or Nude? Museum of Modern Art: "The Artist is Present,"

2010-04-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Artist: Marina Abramovic

Exhibition features 38 live totally naked/nude performers intermixed with photographs and videos and other Art forms.

Did you see the Subway Ads for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)? Did you look at the Ad and turn away because it is an Ad and is in the subway and there is so much being put in front of your face when you just want to get to where you want to get to without having to absorb this event, movie, t.v. show concert or Bud or Pepsi or whatever appears from week to week.
If you are like me and want to shut my eyes because I haven't recovered fully from a too short night's sleep and I don't want to go where I am headed then you didn't respond to the Ad the way the MoMA would have wanted. But don't stop there!

Friday nights are free, compliments of Target Stores, their give back to the community through Art at MoMA and I recommend you see the current exhibit.

It is art taken to yet another new level, consistent with the world in which we live where reality and virtual reality mesh into indistinguishable sights and where there is so much stimulation to absorb that we don't interact anymore. We don't touch. We sit across wide tables and stare at one another or reach out to slap one another. We step over the remains, human remains thrown into a pile as in France in the Catacomb and we look not down at the dried out Tibia bones but up at the dancing woman, the man with consternation upon his face both reflective of how we avoid the horror in our world, that we have created albeit often inadvertently.
,
The exhibit has been made possible by the Young museum activists and the viewers were young; the gray hairs or obviously died hair to mask the gray rather than make a statement on hair style were few and far between.

This is an exhibit that shows us how advanced our technological development has come that we can not readily discern the difference between real and not real. We are forced (for art's sake) to walk between two naked women and somehow viewer after viewer does this without physical contact with them and without looking into their faces, seeing their eyes, discerning their feelings towards one another. We become invisible in the process of walking between them because they somehow are invisable to us. How can this be? Two naked women standing almost touching us and we do not see them as we pass between them?

It is the incredible power of this artist that she has made us part of her statement, forced us to be even though we, with the power of foresight, might not want to be part of the problem.

What else can we ask from art than to be included into the work, to force us to see our reality differently yet as an united problem

This is an exhibit with power, with tremendous emotional impact. It has all the ingredients that art should, must have to live on.

Linda Zises

Ladiesfilmclub@blogspot.com
WBAI Radio
Crticalwomen.net

Murder in Times Square: Harbinger of days to come?

2010-04-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday/Monday A.M.
Commentary by

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Fact:
"During those "bad old days," annual murder rates (in Times Sqaure) were well into the thousands. In 1975, the city reported 1,631 murders. The rate climbed steadily through the next two decades, reaching 2,007 murders in 1993. Last year, by comparison, the number was 471".

The murder rate isn't in the thousands anymore and culture of fear has been quieted by the overwhelming presence of police seemingly everywhere within the theater district.

Mega glamorous neon signs and moving video cameras larger than the human imagination have replaced the porno shops and sleaze bars and even the smoke filled chess club is gone.

Before the 1990's when the Queen of England still owned/controlled the Times Square Real Estate her absentee ownership became a problem
for the mecca of world culture. But today, all is cleaned up. Sort of............

As with all make overs they are only skin deep at best. And with the increase of anger towards the failing economy where else for the young to vent their spleen, to let out the pressure of their future dreams gone sour than in the heart of the financial/cultural world. The Times Square pedestrian mall seems a perfect place to stage a scene, to make a point, to be heard.

Computer giants hunger for more. This time it's Apple

2010-04-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

good article on Apple's latest PR job and greed.

http://www.genjipress.com/2010/04/bad-apple-dept.html

Discussion : The Religious Left: Where is it?

2010-04-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 12, 2010
Where's the Religious Left?

By Sikivu Hutchinson

The intersection between the black civil rights movement legacy and religiosity has produced a curious schism in African American communities. While the African American electorate remains politically liberal it is socially conservative on so-called values issues like same sex marriage, government vouchers for private schools and (to a lesser extent) abortion. The 2008 debate over same-sex marriage in California underscored this tension. After the passage of Proposition 8 some same sex marriage advocates scapegoated African Americans. Initial news reports from the Los Angeles Times and CNN touted up to 70 percent African American support for Prop 8. Branded as moral hypocrites, blacks who supported the measure were accused of betraying their commitment to civil rights. After the dust settled from the election season, the oft-cited statistic of overwhelming black support of Prop 8 was refuted by a study by Fernando Guerra from Loyola Marymount University.

Despite this timely corrective, opposition to same-sex marriage among African Americans has remained relatively solid. The religiosity of African Americans and long-standing black hostility towards designating gay rights as a civil right has made same-sex marriage a third rail issue among many straight Christian and Muslim African Americans. During the campaign, progressive political analysts of color often drew parallels between prohibitions of interracial marriage prior to the 1967 Loving vs. the State of Virginia anti-miscegenation ruling and prohibitions of same-sex marriage. For the most part these analogies were rejected because of the belief among African Americans that discrimination against gays and lesbians is not comparable to racial discrimination. Proponents of this view point to the absence of Jim Crow laws expressly barring gays and lesbians from housing, education, employment and other major sectors of public life. Some go even further, arguing that homosexuality is a European “aberration,” imposed upon people of African descent post-diaspora.

Unacknowledged homophobia within African American communities, coupled with biblical literalism, make Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) African Americans largely invisible. Moreover, the perception among some African Americans that white gays have opportunistically appropriated the civil rights mantle exacerbates black suspicion of the LGBT community. In this charged climate it is often difficult to assess the legitimacy of grievances about conflating anti-gay discrimination with racial discrimination.

Yet the fact remains that scores of LGBT worshippers and closeted church officials pack Black Churches every Sunday and worship elbow to elbow with their straight brethren. And these very same congregants see their families, relationships and right to love marginalized if not demeaned in biblical scripture and in the homophobic rhetoric of “fellowship” that some congregations promote. During and after the election season, a few progressive black ministers and church figures—most notably the Reverend Eric Lee, the Southern California head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—spoke out in opposition to Proposition 8. But their viewpoints were not widely aired, and the general impression of black hostility to same sex marriage solidified in the public mind.

The failure of black religious progressives to critique the destructive role that fundamentalist religiosity plays in contemporary skirmishes around civil rights points to a moral crisis. When it comes to “values” issues in the U.S. the most visible and vocal constituency is the attack dog army of the Religious Right. Unfortunately, national politics has not yet produced a vigorous counterpart to the Religious Right on the Left. According to writer Frederick Clarkson, the Religious Right has been so successful because it has mobilized a broad Christian constituency around electoral politics. Since there is no comparable organized coalition on the “Religious Left” the Religious Right has been able to singlehandedly define, frame, and distort the debate about the role of religion in the so-called “public common.”

This leadership vacuum has allowed the Religious Right to hijack public discourse around “values” issues and fetishize morality from an ultra-conservative stance. The absence of “counter-voices” has eclipsed secular-religious coalitions such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Perhaps the most pernicious Religious Right strategy has been its appropriation of the language of civil rights in its campaigns against choice, church-state separation and gay rights. In this regard, black religious progressives could play a vital role in shifting the terms of debate from the shrill reactionary anti-civil rights agenda of the Religious Right to a more social justice-oriented compass. Proposition 8 backers such as the rightist Mormon Church were able to exploit the absence of moral leadership on the Religious Left by appealing to the most conservative elements of both the black and Latino communities.

In this regard, the absence of high profile national mobilization among the left-leaning faith community is not an insignificant point, because it effectively allows the Religious Right to assume the moral high ground on public policy. Perhaps the only figure with national stature on the “religious left” who has been consistently vocal in his opposition to fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy has been Jimmy Carter. Clearly, if a comparable coalition existed on the Left the Religious Right’s moral and political influence on such issues as abortion, same sex marriage, stem cell research and intelligent design would be balanced by dissenting forces. That such a coalition does not exist underscores the bankruptcy of organized religion’s monopoly on morality and moral principle.

2010-04-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

"Where is the Religious Left?": Another point of view

..................In my Opinion...................

The cause of the rise of the religious right is two fold
When G.W. Bush came into office (power) his first and foremost agenda item was the religious right:. to bring religion back into the government and to do it by paying real money for social services to religious groups to be funneled to their members.(Pres. Obama has continued this agenda)

Additionally, the fuel that keeps this fire burning comes from the economy. To not link up the real issue of a looming permanent and ever worsening economy which cries out for "someone" to blame is to take the sails out of a movement that has the fanatical strength of desperate people unable to recognize when their cause is being addressed because they are so caught up in pain they need to be soothed(by an all loving/caring God) and told that once the enemy is removed they will be able to recapture their lost past ie the glories of the Tea Party Movement

But this return to the simple, less government, more God position will never happen and that is the source of the appeal to the emotionally driven religious right that focuses on the here after over what happens in our life times.

And against this strength, any group or people who do not cater to the fanatical will pale in comparison. They can't rise to the occasion because they are impeded by sanity and reality. But that can change. Poverty can do serious damage to the status quo.

The question is, which movement takes over first, the religious right or the revolutionary left,,,,,,,,,both recognize the same enemy. The Capitalist driven Government.

In my opinion Isolating the problem in terms of Black versus non Black is self defeating. We need Identity politics within the mass movement. Right now there is no discernible movement. But the buds are there.

Linda Zises

Linda
I've written a book chapter addressing G.W.Bush's role in the emergence of the Religious Right via his faith-based initiative agenda, etc., but I am also interested in the complicity in and involvement of black religious "leaders" in that agenda.

Historically there has been this misperception that Afr-Am religious leaders are progressive/civil rights aligned, when many of their positions on so-called values issues are actually closer to the fundamentalist Religious Right (RR) (as evidenced by the same-sex marriage debate, equating abortion with/genocide, the status of black women in the church, separation of church/state, school prayer, etc.

Hence, the overriding issue is the absence of a visible national progressive moral "vanguard" that could counter the moralistic propaganda and activism of the RR on the high octane "values" issues which they've used to hijack public discourse.

Sikivu Hutchinson

City of Your Final Destination: 2008 Opens April 16 in New York City: Cinemas Paris Theatre.

2010-04-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

Directed by: James Ivory

Women Rock!

Plot: Based on Peter Cameron's 2002 novel and adapted by Ruth Jhabvala, the story follows a young American academic, who attempts to persuade the reluctant heirs of a celebrated Uruguayan novelist to allow him to write an authorized biography of the writer.

Excellent Acting! Well worth seeing this film twice to appreciate the skill, the extraordinary talent of:
Anthony Hopkins who portrays the writer's brother and Laura Linney who plays the writer's widow. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Omar Metwally, Alexandra Maria Lara, Norma Aleandro and Hiroyuki Sanada

In this world of state of the art productions the City of Your Final Destination falls into the category of perfect. It is brilliantly photographed, with studied perfection of scenes and execution of perfected film techniques. The acting is compelling, magnificent at times with every jester, every word, every nuances just right.

It isn't just Anthony Hopkins who is the king of acting in this film. The women are really strong in their ability to perform which highlights the rolls of strength that they bring to the screen. They are hard to forget even after the film has ended

What this film captures is the intellectual mind but the content, the plot is weak. I really didn't connect with anyone emotionally. There wasn't a character on the screen that I cared about as a person, as someone I would want to know more about.
I think F. Scott Fitzgerald's' The Great Gatsby did it better but that is in line with the film itself. Siting an intellectual reference to review and critique a film is not ordinarily something I would do.
But here I am in the spirit of the film itself, not appealing to an emotional reaction but to an intellectual one

if you want to see a film that excels in every aspect except in achieving emotional connections I recommend, City of You Final Destination. This is one film where women triumph over men.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio
Criticalwomen.net

Madison Square Garden Job Fair: Outside looking In

2010-04-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

New York Career Fair in Partnership with AARP April 12, 2010

Offers four hours to be seen, to give your card to whomever(if you have one) and learn first
hand the paucity of jobs for mostly middle aged BLACK Americans.
What a horror!

The real unemployment scene unfolds with the wrap around the block lines that don't let up and upbeat music blasting to escort the hopefuls into the huge sport's arena.
Resumes in tow and dressed to impressed these men and women form the bedrock of what is wrong with America

We are on the downward spiral of financial disaster; the disappearance of the middle class, with no cure in sight for what ails this country and many countries worldwide.

Today it is a job fair that brings hopeful/desperate people together. Tomorrow it will be bread lines.

Recruiters of Note
Army,
Navy
Air force
National Guard

They didn't include Prison Guards. Not this time

Keep the upbeat music blasting ............
Even though,
No Game today
at Madison Square Gardens.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio
criticalwomen.net

UPTOWN: join the converstation

2010-04-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

UPTWON
Brian Ackley

Stars:
Chris Riquinha, Meissa Hampton, Derek MAllister, Deirdre Herlihy

Uptown feels like a conversation, a long drawn out story between an husband and wife at the point where the honeymoon is over and reality sets in. In this case it is the husband who has grown estranged from his wife and poses the question to her, what to do now.

In the process of their exploration and decision making the husband and wife bring to light the preciousness of intimacy; how difficult it is to establish, and how difficult to maintain. This conversation is a necessary component of any meaningful relationship due to the onslaught of too much outside stimulation and devices for communication that don't require human face to face or voice to voice contact.

It isn't just the new devices , this computer included, and the cell phones and ipod and ipad's but the wealth of information that keeps growing is so time consuming that we just don't have time. Even if we are among the many without daily employment time seems to be shrinking rather than expanding in this modern technologically driven ever expanding world. Simply stated there is no room to just be. And the effort to be with someone else is getting to be close to impossible. Watching children with their parent's while the parent is on the cell phone is one of the most painful sights that gives credence to the importance of this film

Watching Uptown brings us all back to what it means to be human; to feel, to think, to interact in a direct meaningful way without props, without all that noise, a way of being with one another that if lost renders us dramatically less than human

This is a film that reaffirms who we are and what we need from one another..........A subject well worth focusing on.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Uptown will have its East Coast Premiere on Wednesday night, June 2nd, 2010, at 8:15pm, at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC as part of the 2010 NewFilmmakers NY Spring Series.

A Manhattan Moment

2010-04-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

1972
I am standing on the sidewalk between West 87th street and 88th street
I am on the corner talking to a man in a wheel chair.
I know this man
He is wearing a bright blue shirt,
silk, obviously expensive
surrounded by people all seeming to want to be with him,
to be
The One

He is holding court
I suddenly become the center of his attention
I am standing with my baby in his carriage next to me
engaged in conversation about nothing
but there is something happening between us
a strong bestial pull
an hypnotic moment fraught with danger

I see this man often
on subway cars
being pushed through one car after another
he is dirty then, pathetic
deliberately so

I feel movement by my side,
my hand suddenly empty.
I turn to look at my baby
He is gone
Gone!

I look down the street
He is being pushed away from me
I scream
I am screaming without knowing anything but fear
terror "My baby
that's my baby" I scream running after the man,
the carriage
"My baby"

People are moving to the side as I run
I grab hold of the carriage handle
the man is gone
the world is quiet except for my beating heart

I keep walking with my baby,
I turn the corner on West 87th street
It's okay I keep telling myself,
It's okay
nothing happened
It's okay

We cross West End Ave. at 87th street
and stop in front of 565
I pause for a moment
long enough for the doorman to open the door

We are in the lobby
my baby and me
we are safe........

for the moment

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio

Skyline Books: OBIT

2010-04-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

The End of the Road

It isn't easy being a book fanatic, needing to browse the shelves when all else is not well in your life. New York City used to be a haven for used book lovers/seekers and I am counted among the "possessed". I admit it. I am addicted to books

So as is my custom, being at work and feeling the uncomfortable effects of a stomach ache, something that I just want to forget about so I can go on with my life unimpeded by physical discomfort, I walked over to my local used book store that has served my personal purpose for years upon years and then some.

Being distracted by nature and by circumstances today, I went down 19th street to find the store. it wasn't there. I searched up and down the street with fear looming as I failed to find My store. But all was not lost. With great gusto I remembered the store was in fact not to be found on 19th street but on 18th street and headed over to my place of potential recovery with light steps, ignoring the looming trepidation that now contributed to my already compromised stomach.

And sure enough, I was right. There was the store, with its distinctive awning, "Skyline Books".
When I got right in front of it my worst fears were confirmed,
Closed. Out of Business. "Skyline Books" Gone.

This obituary is written for the Store, for all of my fellow city travelers who frequent used books stores and for an entire population of people yet to be born who will never know the medicinal value of browsing because one by one used book stores are disappearing, even from the Mecca of cultural education, New York City streets.

A moment of silence, please.

Linda Zises
Alex Steinberg
WBAI Radio

Handsome Harry : When fear triumphs courage

2010-04-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

Director Bette Gordon
Cast: Jamey Sheridan, Steve Buscemi, Mariann Mayberry, John Savage, Aidan Quinn, Campbell Scott, Titus Welliver, Karen Young.

Handsome Harry is a full blown political/emotional film that puts a human face and cost to the anti gay prejudice that haunts us even today. It does it with the heavy hand of the anti Vietnam era: both events, gays in the military and the Vietnam war endured because people were as scared to speak out against the war in Vietnam as they were to speak out against public opinion and the military official policy on gays in the military.

To see the consequences of these societal ills brought into the focus of a mystery unfolding made the film's 94 minutes seem like an entire Universe. It was intense time punctuated by the post script that states that the film is dedicated to one man but it could have been/should have been dedicated to two men and all the men who suffer because of their love for one another.

The film unravels through a long road trip in search of Marine buddies from 30 years ago. This trip affords the viewer insight into what happens to white American boys we send over seas. The distortions of their lives, the pain from war and wear and tear on the psyche that this country does to people in the military is put into clear relief through the road trip theatrical device.

The dialogue is very clever, short crisp, inviting and the love scenes are so powerful; the underplay of the visual while enhancing the emotional element of making love really works in the three sexual scenes. Beautiful colors, motions in sharp contrast to what comes before and what follows these precious physcial moments.

This is a film that should go to the top of he charts, a film that had me crying even before the end.

Don't see it only for the tears but for the strength of great film making. It isn't perfect but it is so very powerful.

Open April 16th
Lina Zises
WBAI Radio
criticalwomen.net

Who do you Love: Beware! Black woman on screen

2010-04-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

Jerry Zaks Director

Megalyn Echikunwoke-cast

as Ivy Mills/Etta James

Did you see Cadillac Records (2008) the award winning film featuring the Chess brothers or rather Leonard Chess (Phil was omitted) the legendary two who joined the black world of Chicago blues and rock-N-roll using their money, their guts and energy to bring sharecropper music into public light and delight?

If not, you have a second chance because another film has been made with the same historical characters, and the same theme but the play with history is different. Phil is a real person in Who do you Love and Leonard has "an extra marital affair with a black woman ivy Mills. Who in the real world is Etta James and she has not died of a drug overdose or anything else.

When was the last time you saw a beautiful black women on screen who was alive, healthy, loved and not a drug addict, alcoholic or a sex symbol of one vacuous sort or another. The 2004 film Cat Woman received one to two star ratings. It starred the beautiful, Halle Berry and she is anything but a half alive drug addict or incurable alcoholic. Her long legs and great body exude the kind of power any mother would be happy to have their children see. And Many did.

In Who do you Love Ivy Mills dies of a drug overdose. We see her sing one song, we are given a rear view shot of her beautiful body alive and then an image of her dead lying on the hotel bed. Not someone I would like my children to see and emulate.

She is the problem in the film. Was she Leonard's mistress? Michael Chess says No and he is the son of the great Leonard Chess. Why is Etta James/Ivy Mills so controversial? Is the image of a black woman with a white man so charged, is it the image of Leonard being less than pure the issue, or is the sight of an attractive powerful black woman deemed unacceptable to the paying public? Whatever it is, the image of an attractive black woman is a film industry problem.

That said,
Of course I enjoyed the film. It was great acting, good looking people seemingly having a good time without bloodshed; a lot of laughs and high energy. And a mix of black and white Jewish blood; what else can I, a New Yorker, ask for. This is the real deal. This is life as I know it.

Have a good time. Isn't that what film is all about...
entertainment

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

black women in film?

2010-04-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

Disfiguring Images Revisited

By Sikivu Hutchinson*

On Friday nights, after the clamor of the school day dies down and the kid-driven euphoria of the weekend mounts, a simple trip to the video store in search of a children’s DVD can resemble a cultural minefield. While feature length DVD's of Barbie, imperiled princesses, anthropomorphized ponies with flowing hair and big blue eyes, and Europeanized Japanese characters abound, cartoon or dramatic depictions that center on girl of color protagonists are, not surprisingly, absent from the shelves.* The lack is a reminder of how little progress has been made in the tween/teen film industry, despite the widespread mantra that youth multiculturalism in advertising and programming is “hot,” and a colorblind standard is the norm.

To be a girl of color and a media consumer is to be positioned as perpetual voyeur. Media savvy, deluged with the latest fashion and glamour news on pop singers and fifteen minutes of fame movie stars, girls of color negotiate a morass of cultural products that supposedly promote “affirming” themes for tween/teen girlhood. In this era of tween/teen consumer sophistication, the narrative of the empowered heroine predominates. One of the more shopworn examples of this empowerment narrative is represented by the scrappy white heroine, alà the protagonist of the movie musical hit Hairspray, set in 1960s Baltimore. The scrappy white heroine is a time honored tradition in literature, mainstream movie melodrama and teen flicks. She is generally an outsider of sorts; either in appearance, class station or both. She fearlessly treads where the more self-absorbed won’t deign to venture, breaking curfew, defying the strict Christian mores of her straight-laced family and/or most daringly, consorting with the denizens of black communities. For this heroine racial otherness is an adventure, a resort vacation into heretofore unexplored vistas of self-discovery. As always in these kinds of scenarios blackness holds special appeal for the white outsider because of its transgressive potential. Black music, black dance styles, black lingo—are all ripe territories for vigorous Euro mining and imitation. The exploration of these hackneyed themes via the travails of a white female protagonist struggling with her own “outsider” status in the thin, blond-worshipping, relatively privileged world of middle class Baltimore has its precursor in literature like Norman Mailer’s infamous 1950s “White Negro” shtick and the global appropriation of hip hop by white consumers.

In Hairspray, the white female protagonist’s spiritual journey officially takes off when she is sent to detention and discovers that it is merely a showcase for “funky” black dance shenanigans. The blacks, of course, are just waiting to corrupt an impressionable young white thing like her. Much of the film’s visual spark lies in its near obsessive focus on Tracy’s bright-eyed bushy tailed exuberance over her dalliances with forbidden fruit.

What are young black female viewers to make of these portrayals? While my elementary school-aged nieces loved the singing, dancing and pageantry of the film, they are old enough (with some prompting), to grasp the relevance of all the black students in the film being confined to detention. Disciplinary action at any age is a harsh and ever present reality for black children, one that satirical movie portrayals of frolicking black youth can’t obliterate. Since images of unruly black children abound in American culture, featuring a group of black teens dancing in a classroom with no teacher in evidence is just another slice of comic relief for most mainstream audiences.

When presented with evidence of their irrelevance, children of color make the painful adjustment to misidentification. Socialized with white beauty norms, consuming and misidentifying with whiteness becomes an intimate part of the young female viewer’s experience of visual “pleasure.” Countervailing images of black, Latino and Asian femininity are available in literature (and to a much lesser extent in alternative film by artists of color) but are insidiously measured against the gold standard of white femininity. In fact, a revisitation of the 1954 Kenneth and Mamie Clark “doll test” by a young filmmaker named Kiri Davis found that black children still identified white or lighter skinned dolls as being “nice,” while darker-skinned dolls were still rejected as being “bad.” Davis’ widely acclaimed 2007documentary on black female teen self-identity, “A Girl Like Me,” is a welcome antidote to depictions of black female hyper sexuality...
http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/04/unbearable-whiteness-of-tweenteen-film.html

The Soloist: 2009 A self made man. An American

2010-04-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey, Jr., Catherine Keener, Tom Hollander, Lisa Gay Hamilton

The Soloist is about the real-life musical prodigy Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, who dropped out of Julliard and society after experiencing mental/emotional problems and became a homeless musician. Journalist Steve Lopez discovers Nathaniel playing his violin on the streets. A unique friendship is formed, and a film is made.

The film is set on Los Angeles streets, that are home to over 90,000 adults. The warm weather makes Los Angeles ideal for those who live on the fringes of society, where food, clothing and a roof over their heads is a luxury that they acquire through various means, often free, as give aways.

The plot is driven by two men, one firmly entrenched as a productive member of society, the other living on the fringes where a good night's sleep is achieved in an indentation on a public sidewalk where blankets and cloth of indistinguishable sorts form his nightly spot of repose.

The men meet serendipitously and seem drawn to one another in a human- non understandable way that keeps developing as they each use the other to obtain what they want but never really thought they could get.

Steve Lopez achieves notoriety as a reported replete with the black tie dinner setting to receive a journalism award and Nathan earns more than two strings he needs to complete his violin. He is given a Cello.

Although the men interact in bumpy ways, often lacking in understanding of one another which appears to be a deliberate attempt by the Director to teach the audience how society has no cure for what ails those who "drop out", their friendship, their human good feelings for one another triumphs without sacrificing the integrity of their mutual place in life. There is not a resolution of the drop out coming into the main stream Los Angeles life and this is a relief. it allows the viewer to see a human side to those who in New York are kept invisible. It allows for the homeless to maintain their own humanity/dignity even though they are poor, dirty, smelly and act in ways incomprehensible to those who have the time, money and interest to go to the movies.

The Soloist will follow you unto the streets, have you looking for the invisible people. Maybe in the fullness of time the economy will plummet further but for now, this is the bottom of our economic system.

See it, The Soloist, on Cale TV

Linda Zsies
WBAI Radio

Boy in the Stripped Pajamas: DVD 2008

2010-04-01T22:21:00.000-07:00

Mark Herman: Director

Plot: Set during World War II, a story seen through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commandant at a concentration camp, whose forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence has startling and unexpected consequences.

Cast:
Vera Farmiga, David Thewlis

Just when I thought I had seen all the World War II sob story films that I ever wanted to see, there is one more well worth the time, the effort. Boy in the Stripped Pajamas is a film so gripping that once it ends the impact of the experience remains in the mind and heart of those who have children and those who don't.

What is striking about the film is the contrast between the world in which the parents live and the world that the child inhabits, albeit in the same house, in the same environment.

The gap between the generation is so striking and yet, watching the film it seems very natural, very understandable but upon thinking about it long after the DVD ended I realized that nothing really made sense. How could there be such profound misunderstanding between well meaning adults and their off springs.
As baffling as it was in retrospect, while I saw the film it all seemed natural; a statement of life during war time where the bizarre becomes the norm

This is a family film in the true sense of the concept, not a feel good film but a film that offers something for everyone who sees it. A poignant film that needs no music to inform on feelings present or anticipated.

I strongly recommend this quiet masterpiece.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Nixon/Frost on Cable TV now!

2010-03-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

Ron Howard: Director

With Frank Langella,Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell

This film has been talked about on channel 13 Charlie Rose and talked about in the press and talked about and talked about so why see it?

I saw the original TV Frost/Nixon interview. I remember ex-President Nixon and where I was when I saw him, live on TV resigning the Presidency. Why go back there again?

Because this is the guts of history, the moment when we can see into the wheels that turn to create the quality of our lives and here we have another expose on the President and on how television works or fails to work and a close up focused on an intensely lonely man who we all hated because we had notmet up with the likes of George W Bush.

At the hands of Ron Howard, Director and Peter Morgan writer Nixon appears as a tragic historical figure for whom one could almost feel sorry if he had not destroyed so much of what people were taught to believe.

Maybe Nixon did us all a big favor. He appears to epitomize the home grown boy, right out of our everyday life. Just by being Nixon: corrupt, monomaniacal, devious, liar, manipulator.

With these presidents as our hero how can we raise our children to be nothing like Nixon or George W Bush or all the other corrupt politicians who people our World. Their lack of compromise, their failure to invoke the power of negotiation, or attempt to work within the legal boundaries of the system is legendary.

See Nixon suffer. Watch him squirm, watch his face distort with emotion that no one ever thought he had.

Frank Lanella's acting is superb!

Of course you will see this film. The only question is, at what age should children see it.

Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Sikivu Hutchinson: Mob Rules: Tea Party's High Noon

2010-03-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

...Reveling in nightly PR infusions from the corporate lapdogs of American journalism, the freshly evangelized macho racist right has ensured that its charge of a socialist government expansion is now viewed as a “reasonable” critique of an overhaul that effectively concedes universal coverage to the insurance industry. Mining a deep strain of patriarchal backlash, the Tea Partiers have taken Christian fundamentalists’ language of “moral” panic and used it as a goad to a white nationalist uprising obsessed with the imagery of enslavement...

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE at
http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/03/mob-rules-tea-partys-high-noon.html

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org, a journal of progressive commentary and literature, and the author of the forthcoming book Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, a commentator on Pacifica's Some Of Us Are Brave on KPFK 90.7FM, and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.
Listen to blackfemlens commentaries on Fridays, 6:25pm LA Time, at http://kpfk.org.

Henry Menahem: Examination of an Obituary

2010-03-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

"Jewelry Store Clerk, Slain in Robbery"

DATE: Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010, 12:20 p.m.

LOCATION: 962 Madison Ave., Upper East Side, Manhattan.
The police say the robber who killed 71-year-old jewelry store clerk Henry Menahem Wednesday dumped a Fabrege-style egg in the trash as he fled with $1 million in gems and expensive necklace.."

"The New York Post reported that the suspect entered R.S. Durant Jewelers at lunchtime, brandished a 9 mm pistol and threw two bags at Menahem and a second clerk. They refused to fill the bags."

On the upper East Side, Madison Avenue jewelry stores do not have clerks.

They have employees. Clerks are people who do the paper work, menial tasks that usually deal with paper. But Henry Menahem was a 71 years old man who worked as a salesperson, an employee at a fancy Jewelry store on the upper east side of Manhattans and to refer to him as a clerk is an insult.

71 years old man. What is this all about? Why is he not retired?

If there was any bad feeling, any kind of degrading experience going on in this jewelry store this 71 year old man could have stayed away. He would not have been at the R.S. Durant jewelery store on the day of the robbery.

But there he was, already in possession of his medical insurance from the federal government and social security and maybe, if his employees had been generous, a pension check awaited his retirement.
We will never know the mind set of this financial arrangement because the newspapers which provided the readers with the "information" did not interview the establishment owners to learn and convey to us why this 71 year old man was still working at their store and what the arrangement would have been upon his retirement.

Evidently, Henry, known affectionately by those close to him as Hank, was asked to put the store's merchandise in the bags that the assailant held out to him. Hank refused.

A clerk refused to turn over the merchandise. Who is this man? Who is the employer?

In a jewelry store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan located in a part of town where even the clothing stores which house merchandise far less valuable than the multimillion dollar jewelry store, R.S. Durant, station a guard at the door to protect....... You know him. He is the man who contracts out his life to protect the store and its contents with his Life if need be in exchange for a given amount of money.
That in itself is strange. I can't imagine any money that can compensate for the loss of human life, no matter how common a practice this might be.

We don't know why, but we know that the man appointed to save Henry's life did not do so and as there was no mention of his absence in the article it is safe to conclude, he was not supposed to be there, not paid to guard the R. S. Durant jewelry store. I wonder if the assailant knew that as well.

Why did Henry refuse to comply with the request?
That mystery defies all possibility that Henry thought of himself as a "clerk". If I am a clerk there is sufficient separation between me and my work that upon request made for compliance at gun point I would have handed over whatever the assailant wanted. I would not have thought twice about releasing a set of papers or anything the content of which would have been deemed well beyond my level of comprehension or possible personal possession.

Upon denying the request /demand Henry was shot in the chest, bled profusely and died. The assailant left the store dropping a Fabrege-style jeweled egg into the common trash bin on the street, The egg's worth, well over one million dollars.

So....... in addition to the highly prejudicial articles that appeared in the newspapers void of the human interviews with employer, wife, children grandchildren or friends and neighbors etc. (for which, given the mind set of the reporters is probably a good thing) we know....

There was no guard stationed in the store at the time of the robbery
Henry did not think of himself as a clerk but as an employee.
His opinion of himself at work seems to be shared by his employer because they kept him on the job 6 years after the customary or legal retirement age.
Why Henry was working at the Jewelry store that day is not know and without asking those who do know, we can not know the answer.
But
from our personal experience we know that
if the employer, the owner of the store had been shot dead while trying to defend his precious commodity, his multi million dollars worth of Jewelry this story would go on and on with the fullness of detail, interviews, tears, that would make everyone in the fullness of time tired of reading about it.
Fortunately
Henry's closest friends and family were spared that obsession with the 'truth'

The contrast between Henry giving his life to save his employer's jewelry and the failure of the employer to value Henry's life enough to place a guard in the store at all times to protect him forces the question; who is the stores' owner who values his wealth over people's lives. And who was Henry Menahem?

Henry appears to have been a devoted man, devoted to his menial job and most likely to his family. He lived by the creed of "thou shall not steal".

One can assume, he had self respect, the very sense of self respect that the New York Post and the New York Daily News undermined in their tabloid articles when they referred to Henry as a clerk. He was not a clerk. Henry was a loyal employee, a salesman in a high class, high powered Madison Ave upper east side of Manhattan establishment who gave his life for the possessions of another man. if Henry had complied and said, "here, take it", and filled the opened bags as requested, would he have gained financial reward or remuneration? We don't know, and unfortunately, we never will.

Henry Menahem is likened to a hero as in a Green tragedy. A man who is loyal to a fault, a man who lives by values we should all embrace, a man who seemed to go to work for more reasons than to make whatever little bit of money employees in our society earn.

Henry Menahem doomed by your own intractable virtues which we all strive for but seldom achieve.

May you rest in peace.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

Black Infidels: Humanism and African American Social Thought

2010-03-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

excerpt from The New Humanist Magazine, A Publication of Harvard's Humanist Chaplaincy

During a talk show discussion on relationships last year, radio personality and self-proclaimed dating guru Steve Harvey charged that atheists had no moral values. Anyone who didn't believe in God was an "idiot," he said, and women should steer clear of these rogue blasphemers at all costs. While atheist websites were abuzz with condemnations of Harvey, his tirade went unchallenged by mainstream African American media. Yet his view reflects conventional wisdom about African American communities and faith. Namely, that African Americans are so unquestioningly religious that having any other viewpoint is grounds for "revocation" of one's race credentials. With churches on every corner, religious idioms seamlessly woven into everyday black speech, faith-based license plates ubiquitous in black neighborhoods and black celebs thanking Jesus at every awards event, how could it be otherwise? According to a 2008 Pew Research Forum study, African Americans are indeed the most "consistently" religious ethnic group in the U.S. However, black Humanist scholars like Norm Allen, Executive Director of African Americans for Humanism, and Anthony Pinn, Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at Rice University, point to another tradition. Both have critiqued the exclusion of Humanist influence from appraisals of African American social thought and civil rights resistance. Whilst acknowledging the key role African American Christian ideology played in black liberation, these scholars believe it is also crucial to highlight the influence of Humanist principles of rationalism, social justice, skepticism and freethought...

Read more at www.thenewhumanism.org

Toe to Toe An improvement over Precious!

2010-03-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

Ejecting "bad people" from the ghettos makes everyone happy,

A film by Emily Abt

This is the story of two girls, Tosha and Jesse, who attend a competitive Washington, D.C., prep school. Tosha is a fiercely determined African American scholarship student from Anacostia, one of Washington's poorest areas, while Jesse is a privileged, but troubled, white girl from Bethesda, who deals with promiscuous tendencies that pull her toward self-destruction. Toe to Toe is the story of their friendship that incorporates many common prejudices and tries to get beyond them. Sadly, one prejudice remains: to be poor is to be brutish, quasi human, almost mindless with little impulse control over immature angry impulses.

I don't expect men, nor young teenage boys to embrace this film I don't think it has the prejudicial ingredients to make it into the main stream American culture that wants to see white people "helping" the poor, fat, black, supposedly mean, stupid, lazy denizens who haven't made it into the White House. (as the recent and much too much applauded film Precious does) But my hesitation in recommending this film is the elevation of Princeton as a college over Howard where I think a healthier overall environment ensues and the clothes worn by the actors were too nice, too expensive.

This is a film where the poor seem angry at each other making life hell for everyone in their environment which is the unfounded prevalent idea of what ghetto life in America is like today. Putting family without community back into the picture of ghetto life doesn't give a true picture of what it is like to live in the "inner city".

What I enjoyed about Toe to Toe is its insistence on being about teenage kids being teenage kids, not miniature adults. I liked the detail of how isolated very wealthy people can be. The film captured how too much money seems to interfere with intimacy and healthy people interactions while the black girl is overwhelmed by family and unwanted people intrusions in the intimacy of her personal space.

What holds these girls together is how both are trying to survive in their own worlds where they are outcasts; one because she is smarter or rather a better student then her cohorts, the other because she is wealthier than her school mates and lives essentially without a stay-at-home mother.(unfortunately women don't rise above the ugly fray of prejudice in this film)

Both girls suffer silently but eventually form a friendship that fosters their mutual growth. Just seeing/hearing the black girl telling the white-soon-to-be friend, "you haven't done anything for me", was a wake up moment well worth the price of admission.

Even though Toe to Toe was obviously contrived, there was something so raw and seemingly real about the production that I felt drawn to the experience.

Rather than waiting for it to end, I wished it could go on and on.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

WON: Abortion on Demand

2010-03-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

With the recent passage of the "health care bill" that has a parade of congratulations coming forth from mostly men, the red flag has been waved and women throughout the country are now free to act, act on their own behalf.

Wellness Clinics for women to include:

-abortion specialist instruction manuals to be written and put up on the Internet
-hands on practical abortion tutorial sessions with live subjects, given by seasoned practitioners

-a nation wide effort to have every mother/daughter of age and grandmother sign up for inclusion (voluntary or paid positions) in their local wellness clinics.

Without hope of Federal monies, without State endorsement, women must take matters into their own hands. Act now. Sponsor get togethers in your home. Let the dialogue ring out.

We will Abort,
On demand!
No questions asked.

(WON) Now!

who's body?

OURS

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

Greenberg: Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh

2010-03-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

107 minutes

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans,Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Messina, Brie Larson, Juno Temple

Theatrical Trailer Link: http://filminfocus.com/video/greenberg___the_trailer

In this drama of coming of age by over aged teenage acting people who live in the unattached world of being "afloat" or living off of others because.........the viewer is exposed to cute phrases that last no longer than the length of the film. Ben Stiller is the star and although he is appealing in a Woody Allen sort of way this appeal does not last the duration of the film

Maybe Greenberg would have been an enjoyable radio program where images would be avoided. and the power of the dialogue could have prevailed. But the dialogue is not profound, as it would have been in a Henry James novel where James compares European ways to those of New York. In Greenberg the dialogue sounds shallow, the sight of Ben Stiller gets so over done that the film is one long(too long) look at this actor Even though he has the agility of a kangaroo and seemed interesting at first in the fullness of the film's longevity, he grows less interesting, less worth the time and effort that film viewing requires.

What is striking about the film is the lack of commitment the Stiller's character, Roger Greenberg, demonstrates with his lack of interest in being a productive member of society, or a solid member of a relationship be it to his best friend or a female lover.
He takes endless abuse from those who continue to be in the regulated world of involvement because he is alive, thriving off of his wealthy brother and able to acquire thoughts of a continued existence without the down to earth understanding that without money survival for most people is not possible.

Greenberg is too wealthy, too absorbed in his life and sitting in the theater that same lack of involvement in film making seeps through. The lack of beauty in the sets, the lack of variety in the images projected on the screen, the lack of connection is irritating more than anything else.

How much time is spent on the close up of Ben Stiller? Well, whatever it is, it is too much. No one person can hold my interest for that long no matter how great an actor they might be. And maybe that is the point of the film. To show how in this world that is changing so dramatically, that is falling apart with threats of annihilation coming at us from many different fronts, Roger Greenberg can manage to create a niche for himself where he does nothing, cares about nothing, and projects nothing for himself in the days, years to come. His lack of interest/involvement is contagious.

Greenberg: What a disappointment, or is it?

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

poetry by linda z

2010-03-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

I

How silent the earth is
how hot the sun
cool the moon

how quiet you are
rocking back and forth
to the beat of another
an invisible force

I see it through your closed eyes
I smell it in your weak breath

is this what it means to be
old,
so
so
old?

II

you said, yes
I heard you say
yes, and again
I heard,
yes
and give me more
and i said
maybe
if
and you said
then maybe not yes
maybe no
and I said
no ifs
no maybes
just
yes, yes
and then
only then
maybe
no

III
Divorce

when you came home
I thought good
you are home

you sat down in your chair
the cushioned high back
winged chair
while i wiped dry another dish
another tear from my reddened sore eyes

I heard,
you heard our baby
crying in his crib and I thought
no,
not again

I stood by the kitchen sink
the shape knife posed
the carrots,
always so difficult to slice
lying on the wooden board
straight, orange chubby sticks

and the cries got louder
and louder
he wasn't playing this time
nor calling out because
because

I slammed the knife down on the carrot
I did it again and again
while
you sat in the chair
your back to me, to him

that's when I knew
it was over

IV
Kitty Cat Candy

that morning when I
awoke to the sound,
to the feel of your purr,
your claws kneading into
my scalp

I pushed you off of me

your head resisted,
your forehead nuzzled deep into my neck
onto my cheek
your cold nose wet, always wet
pushed onward
your mouth opened
a split second, and
your sharp teeth
gnawed onto the flesh of my nose

instant pain!

remind me

why I paid
$75 dollars
for a cat I could have found for free
on the street

the ones who know how
and eat and sleep
and act like a cat,
aloof

V

Left

she died
she wanted to die
she said, it was the quality of life
there was nothing more

nothing left
except

thoughts

images of her
of me
of her and me
and
what would she do if
or why did she do that
and that
and not that

58 years
and 15 more of memories,
of things,
evaporating

VI

never!
that's what I said
what I meant
when I ran down the street
away

never
i uttered into the
air, the sky
the world
around
and around

never
not now
not later
not ever
just
never
ever
forever

but why?

The Runaways:

2010-03-13T05:41:00.000-08:00

Directed and Written by

Floria Sigismondi

Featuring Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning. In Theaters On March 19th

From a POPS post:

"ANAHEIM, California — For the first time in almost a quarter of a century, former Runaways Joan Jett and Cherie Currie appeared onstage together to bang out the seminal girl-band staple "Cherry Bomb."

Topping her hour-plus show Saturday night with the Blackhearts, Jett surprised the Sun Theatre crowd by introducing her childhood friend and ex-bandmate, who emerged in basic black instead of her once-trademark lingerie. Each appearing considerably younger than her 40 years, the ladies tore through the 1976 number like two sex-craved, rebellious teenagers born again — Currie singing and Jett playing guitar as though they were seducing and serenading each other. The song ended with Currie bowing at Jett's feet and the two sharing a hug and kiss.

"I was in the moment — I wasn't flashing back," Jett said afterward. "I was enjoying watching Cherie have fun, and I was having fun."

WBAI Interview:
http://archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/100310_110001wed11amtoNoon.MP3

The Runaways is a film about rock and roll stars, Cherie Curry and Joan Jett, their trip to the top of the charts as teenagers, their fall from fame as adults. Well for Cherie anyway. Joan continues to be world famous with her energy, creativity and love of the art of musical performance

WBAI Women's Collective live interview focused on Cherie, the woman who at 15 years of age managed without benefit of a sponsor, a parent, a guiding hand to quit, to end her participation in the Runaways at the height of their success.
A moment of survival, of personal strength and commitment to life.
This courageous stand against the group with whom she had lived, worked, slept and taken endless amount of drugs ended because she took control of her life for the sake of her health and possible longevity. She said "No" and she meant it

She took a stand against her continued participation in the Runaways and in the process she established a drug free home for her son, a 19 year old musician and herself, filled with activities that commence at 6 A. M. every morning. Tell me, is that Ungodly hour the epitome of health or what?

Linda Zises
wbai Radio

Henry Menahem: Examination of an Obituary:

2010-03-13T05:12:00.000-08:00

Henry Menahem, Jewelry Store Clerk, Slain in Robbery

DATE: Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010, 12:20 p.m
LOCATION: 962 Madison Ave., Upper East Side, Manhattan.
The police say the robber who killed 71-year-old jewelry store clerk Henry Menahem Wednesday dumped a Fabrege-style egg in the trash as he fled with $1 million in gems and expensive necklace.."

Did you see this or a similar one in the New York Daily News?

"The New York Post reported that the suspect entered R.S. Durant Jewelers at lunchtime, brandished a 9 mm pistol and threw two bags at Menahem and a second clerk. They refused to fill the bags."

On the upper East Side, Madison Avenue jewelry stores do not have clerks.

They have employees. Clerks are people who do the paper work, menial tasks that usually deal with paper. But Henry.... was a 71 years old man who worked as a salesperson, an employee at a fancy Jewelry store on the upper east side of Manhattans and to refer to him as a clerk is an insult.

71 years old man. What is this all about? Why is he not retired?

If there was any bad feeling, any kind of degrading experience going on in this jewelry store this 71 year old man could have stayed away, not been at the R.S. Durant jewelery store on the day of the robbery.

But there he was, already in possession of his medical insurance from the federal government and social security and maybe, if his employees had been generous, a pension check awaited his retirement
We will never know the mind set of this financial arrangement because the newspapers which provided the readers with the "information" did not interview the establishment owners to learn and convey to us why this 71 year old man was still working at their store and what the arrangement would have been upon his retirement.

Evidently, Henry, known affectionately by those close to him as Hank, was asked to put the store's merchandise the bags that the assailant held out to him. Hank refused.

This is the point where my eyes stopped reading;
A clerk refused to turn over the merchandise. Who is this man? Who is the employer?

In a jewelry store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan located in a part of town where even the clothing stores which house merchandise far less valuable than the multimillion dollar jewelry store, R.S. Durant, station a guard at the door to protect....... You know him. He is the man who contracts out his life to protect the store and its contents with his Life if need be in exchange for a given amount of money.
That in itself is strange. I can't imagine any money that can compensate for the loss of human life, no matter how common a practice this might be.

We don't know why, but we know that the man appointed to save Henry's life did not do so and as there was no mention of his absence in the article it is safe to conclude, he was not supposed to be there, not paid to guard the R. S. Durant jewelry store. I wonder if the assailant knew that as well.

Why did Henry refuse to comply with the request?
That mystery defies all possibility that Henry thought of himself as a "clerk". If i am a clerk there is sufficient separation between me and my work that upon request made for compliance at gun point I would have handed over whatever the assailant wanted. I would not have thought twice about releasing a set of papers or anything the content of which would have been deemed well beyond my level of comprehension or possible personal possession.

Upon denying the request /demand Henry was shot in the chest, bled profusely and died. The assailant left the store dropping a Fabrege-style jeweled egg into the common trash bin on the street, The egg's worth, well over one million dollars.

So....... in addition to the highly prejudicial articles that appeared in the newspapers void of the human interviews with employer, wife, children grandchildren or friends and neighbors etc. (for which, given the mind set of the reporters is probably a good thing) we know.............

There was no guard stationed in the store at the time of the robbery
Henry did not think of himself as a clerk but as an employee.
His opinion of himself at work seems to be shared by his employer because they kept him on the job 6 years after the customary or legal retirement age
Chancres are Henry was not at the store because of the financial remuneration. Why he was there is not know and without asking those who do know, we can not know the answer.
But
we do know from our personal experience that
if the employer, the owner of the store had been shot dead while trying to defend his precious commodity, his multi million dollars worth of Jewelry this story would go on and on with the fullness of detail, interviews, tears, that would make everyone in the fullness of time tired of reading about it.
Fortunately
Henry's closest friends and family were spared that obsession with the 'truth'

The contrast between Henry giving his life to save his employer's jewelry and the failure of the employer to value Henry's life enough to place a guard in the store at all times to protect him forces the question, who is the stores' owner who values his wealth over people's lives. And who was Henry Menahem?

That he was loved, dearly, is a give. Any man who displays such loyalty has earned deep everlasting love.

Henry appears to have been a devoted man, devoted to his menial job and most likely to his family. He lived by the creed of "thou shall not steal".

One can assume, he had self respect, the very sense of self respect that the Post and the New York Daily News undermined in their tabloid articles when they referred to Henry as a clerk. He was not a clerk. Henry was a loyal employee, a salesman in a high class, high powered Madison Ave upper east side of Manhattan establishment who gave his life for the possessions of another man. if Henry had complied and said, "here, take it", and filled the opened bags as requested, would he have gained financial reward or remuneration? We don't know, and unfortunately, we never will.

Henry Menahem is a hero, consistent with the Green tragedy. A man who is loyal to a fault, a man who lives by values we should all embrace, a man who seemed to go to work for more reasons than to make whatever little bit of money employees in our society earn.

Henry Menahem, a tragic/hero doomed by your own intractable virtues which we all strive for but seldom achieve.

May you rest in peace.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

My Name is Khan and I am not a Terrorist: an historic cinematic moment

2010-03-01T12:11:00.003-08:00

Arindam Chaudhuri

Some people watch television to relax. i watch Bollywood films. There is an interesting display of dancing, excellent use of color, really smoothing music and the actors appear from film to film: something akin to meeting old friends all dressed up in new clothes.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down in my favorite recliner, for the three hour entertainment of chose, My Name is Khan and I am not a Terrorist, and there is no music, no dancing, no light almost simplistic comedic moments. Instead there is a film with all my friends dressed in European or traditional clothes but the film had a message, a message I am not certain I wanted to hear.
Don't go to America. Don't get on that plane. Stay home

This message was punctuated with scenes from airport security and scenes from United States jails that reminded me of the horror of living in third world countries where humanity is painfully absent. Is this really the Bollywood image of America, i had to ask, with my eyes half closed to the torture afforded my actor friends.

Yes, things have changed. Even in India and this film My Name Is Khan and I am not a Terrorist is making more money in a shorter period of time than any film that came before it, or so I have been told.

What prompted the film is the ill treatment afforded the lead actor, "The week’s big story was Shahrukh Khan's interrogation in the USA".
The mega superstar when he came to the United States, was detained for two hours with his name not registering as anyone special, just another Muslin. He never left the airport but got on a return flight to India. It was an ordeal that brought reality into clear focus. Don't go to America. It is worse than living here in our country where dead bodies lie on the streets and the homeless rate is fifty per cent of the population.

Is this what has happened to the image of America: the home of the brave, the free, the wealthy, void of random detention, or crippling prejudice; a place where everyone is welcomed?

If you don't see any other Bollywood film this year or next, I recommend you see this one.

On DVD

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

religion: love, hope, and dispair springs eternal

2010-02-04T16:08:00.000-08:00

LOURDES:
Jessica Hausner

The historical bases for the film:

The Pilgrimages

Following the reports that Our Lady of Lourdes had appeared to Bernadette Soubirous on a total of eighteen occasions, Lourdes has developed into a major place of Christian pilgrimage and of alleged miraculous healings. The 150th Jubilee of the first apparition took place on 11 February 2008 with an outdoor mass attended by approximately 45,000 pilgrims.

It is the joint seat of the diocese of Tarbes-et-Lourdes and is the largest pilgrimage site in France.

As much as some might want to think the activity depicted in the film is an event of the past, it is alive and well and flourishing in the midst of Lourdes, the site where wishes come to the fore and hope springs eternal.

The film
A cross between Thomas Mann's Book, The Magic Mountain and Bill Maher's film 'Religulous' brings the technical expertise of this noted film director into focus. It is slow moving, few words, bizarre behavior with great characters extremely well acted but in the end.......we learn what some of us already knew, there is no God and dessert is more important than the contemplation of the strange and mysterious ways God is reputed to act.

The scenery makes a trip to Lourdes inevitable given the means, the ways of the people seem understandable in context and weird, almost crazy in the light of logical assessment. It is a beautiful film, a little too long, but then aren't all traditional religious events, too long.

When you need to reconnect to the past, to simple extraordinary beauty, to a plot that brings us together to remember where we come from and why we are who we are, I recommend Jessica Hausner's Lourdes

Linda Z
Wbai Women's Collective

STORM

2009-10-16T04:22:00.001-07:00

Hans-Christian Schmid

The Hague, the court, the events that lead to trial and beyond.

Women are the heroes in Storm.

They are the ones with the intelligence, the moral fiber, the strength to face life and fear and conquer the elements that hold people back from doing what is right. Women speak out, they cry quietly but scream when the moment becomes unbearable. it is the men who give up living(commit suicide) who suffer in this seemingly real court scene; the men who do the dirty compromises behind the scenes, the men who impede the quality of life from moving on rather than in the wrong direction for all the wrong reasons.

This is the story of what happens when rape became an official crime at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague along with deportation and later killing of dozens of Bosnian-Muslim civilians.

From the moment the film begins there is one almost expected incident after another. Very little variance to this compelling story and yet the viewer is frozen in the moment because it feels so true, so real, so deeply upsetting.

The acting, the timing, the slow movement add to the atmosphere of real trauma, one after another.

Storm is a pensive film that creates for the viewer the life, the fears of people who live seemingly far from us and yet they are us; our mother, our child, our family.

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

BAD Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans

2009-10-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog

There is something about re-doing a successful film that allows the director to be more relaxed with his product. Knowing that the fundamentals of the film are firm, the director can play with the product, have fun rather than agonizing about details that might not matter in the fullness of the film experience.

Bad Lieutenant is just such a film. Werner Herzog seems to have seen the original film and thought, I can do this better. And he has

He is having fun with his actors, (Nicolas Cage in particular) with the plot, with the material and this emotional mind set results in a gem of a film

Can you be a man without a big black gun affixed to your body? Do fish dream, do sharks, do you? And who is to blame for the financial political malaise that plaque us today?

Laugh with this film; relax, enjoy and have fun as Bad Lieutenant Port of Call plays with you, with me, with the serious issues of our time (including Katrina post flood). Herzog creates for the viewer a moment of enjoyment while gruesome death, murder, destruction and utter mayhem reign.

The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call portrays neither the Bad nor the Good. What more do we need to know about survival in this downward quality of life that has no end in sight.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

New York Film Festival 2009

2009-10-11T05:50:00.001-07:00

There are so many wonderful films being offered this year by the New York Film Festival, that rather than write an individual, long and too wordy review for each, I will list the films which I enjoyed and cherished and you can decide which one(s) to see when and where. (I was unable to see all films offered during the festival)

A particular note of praise:
This year the New York Film Festival seems to feature more films where the leading actor is a woman. And more women film directors than ever before. Woman are wonderful filmmakers, so why not let us be seen, be heard.

Thank you for allowing the best of our gender to come into prominence.

Mother
Bong Joon-Ho and Kim Hye-Ja and Won Bin South Korea
A mother and grown son bring home the meaning of who is a "murderer". Is it a special kind of person or is this a human trait with which we learn to live, hopefully, not always with a super abundance. of crippling guilt.

Lebanon: Samuel Maoz
Again the massacre in Lebanon by the Israeli Army. It you thought Waltz with Bashir was a compelling film, this film offers the voice of the stereotypical Jewish man within the confining Tank that protects them while they witness and partake in the murder of helpless civilians. Here guilt informs heavily on the film's narrative.

Antichrist: Lars von Trier
I am not religious which means that the meaning of the film, the intent that informed on the blood, the horror of how a man and woman relate to one another to emerge with the man triumphant was an experience I would not choose to have a second time. Was this a worth while film? I don't know.
Film already scheduled for public consumption. Check IFC listings

Life During Wartime: Todd Sokondz
I loved Todd Sokondz' film "Happiness" and I think this film is as good even though much of the impact of its theme is a redo.
The specific details differ from one film to the other, the father /son quasi sexual relationship so shocking in Happiness is brought back to life and the over all feeling of the son(s) remain intact ......I just want my father.

There is something beyond the labels we put on adults that resonates with children, our children: something so profoundly simply that in the confusion of becoming, we forget what is important.

Thankfully, our children don't

The Art of the Steal Don Argott's documentary
Takes a look at the controversial dealings over the Barnes Foundation's multi-billion dollar collection of rare artwork, which became the center of numerous litigations and questionable deals after his death in 1951.

A film worth seeing even though it seems to go on and on. What is missing is the human element, the view from the public who might now be robbed of the entire experience of "going to the Barnes", particularly if you herald from New York City.

What is offered instead is an overwhelming experience of ART as each frame has an artistic assemblage much as each of Dr. Barnes' works are put into a context that "makes sense" to the art viewer. Phillip Glass music added to this art/film experience of political, money hungry, art lovers struggle to survive intact.

White Material: Claire Denis
There is something magical with Claire Denis films. ... Chocolat / Chocolate (1988) was superb and this film is well worth seeing. The struggle of being a strong, independent woman is so tangibly depicted. One wonders if this is her personal struggle to survive and rise into fame and fortune as a woman film producer in a male dominated competitive endeavor.

Kanikosen a film by SABU
Japanese crab ship where the essence of revolution comes to the screen.

This film is at the top of my list.

It brings to life an underwater world where life is very intense and human interactions are funny, painful and profound.

Min Ye: Souleymane Casse, Mali/France
I don't have to understand every film to appreciate the effort, the experience of entering into an unfamiliar world where nothing makes sense to me. The questions that plagued me in this sand, stone world, the background of the film are such elementary concerns as

Where did their food come from, where did they sleep, defecate. Where was the water to drink with which to bath. The sound of the wind blowing was very effective and the clothes....now I understand the importance of the Hijab, or Veil (Burqah, Chador), to protect not from the sun as much as from the endless blowing sand. Sand hills and dales, sand slopes and tunnels. Sand without seeming definition but the actors knew where to go, what hill was where, what valley was within their reach.

The plot: the origins of Egyptian national identity. If I knew more about Egypt before I saw the film I would have had a different, a richer experience.

Many more films of note were offered at the New York Film Festival this year. they are all offered within a three week period and by the end of the festival fatigue triumphed.

Spread over time, the wealth of entertainment will keep New Yorkers rich with noteworthy films when they come to local theaters

The NY Film Festival 2009 runs through 10/11. More information about the NY Film Festival is online at: FilmLinc.com

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

Rage Sally Potter DVD

2009-10-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

2009-08-22T05:26:00.000-07:00

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX An Oscar 2009 winner!

Director: Uli Edel (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Christiane F)

A Cast of Stars:
Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others, The Good Shepard), Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run), Johanna Wokalek (Aimee and Jaguar) and Bruno Ganz (The Reader, Downfall). The film is directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Christiane F) and was written and produced by Bernd Eichinger (2005 Academy Award nominee Downfall), based on the book by and in consultation with Stefan Aust.

PLOT: A lengthy history of the far-left terrorist group that shocked Germany from 1968 onwards. Their search is for a life we can all embrace, their method is what we instinctively reject.

Guilt is not on the side of violation of law and order in this film. The guilty are those who make the laws, who enforce the law in this conflict ridden post WWII Germany. The war of the concerned courageous citizens, is unrelenting as the viewer watches the interactions of the group who go into banks to rob and into buildings to bomb, to steal, to plunder what they need to further their "cause".

Their cause is to bring to the attention their agenda of Stop the War in Vietnam, stop killing innocent citizens. But what do they embrace?

There is an invisible line between those who kill and those who don't. A gun is not requisite equipment in every one's wardrobe. This makes the free wielding of this object of murder, in a seemingly quiet domestic environment disturbing, not easy to understand. But then, that is the point of the film; To bring to our attention the thoughts, the ways of Revolutionaries who we might not know and can't understand. After the full experience of two and a half hours of The Beeder Meinhof Complex, one can not continue to think we are all knowing, all caring, all right.

This is not a summer evening's casual date flick. It is a provocative and brilliant creation that will remain in the viewers mind.

Whether or not we want to remember, we will.

LindaZises
WBAI Women's Collective

AMERICAN CASINO: SUB-PRIME MORTGAGES MADE SIMPLE?

2009-08-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

Leslie and Andrew Cockburn

I went to see American Casino with all the anticipatory urgency that this complicated subject of mortgages gone awry and left feeling even more confused. Only now I am certain I will never understand the world of finance that has seriously diminished the quality of my life and destroyed the lives of many I know and have heard about.

Why:

For starters, the film makers never defined the sub-prime mortgage. An entire film/documentary based on a term without defining it. Or maybe the definition was there, amid all those words and ideas and talking heads(no simple graphs) but I didn't get it. So I asked a knowledgeable friend. What is sub-prime because I can't find anything that is sub(meaning less) in the mortgages.

The words left out told the story. They are sub-prime interest rate mortgages meaning that if the prime or the set mortgage rate is 5% the borrower is offered a mortgage at 4% or one interest rate point less than the going rate.
Great. I now know that the variable rate mortgage and the sub-prime interest rate mortgage or not one and the same instrument.

A veritable rate mortgage is one that every few years gets reset dependent on..........well, that is not defined What factors do and what factors don't get counted. When the cost of living goes up does the veritable rate when calculated three years later go down or does it go up with the rest of the bills I have to pay? Is this the reason why I can't pay my mortgage or is it the hidden costs that the seller didn't tell me about when I bought the mortgage.

This is just some of the elementary definitions that the documentary assumed the viewer knows.

Then there is the problem of what happens to my money. For instance, if I buy a mortgage I am giving a set sum of money that is then bundled with other money and sold over and over again. This way I don't know who owes my mortgage. And neither does anyone else.
I understand, because of this film that each sale means someone makes money from my original purchase and I understand that many clever people, people who don't have to be told the difference between the sub-prime rate and the veritable rate mortgage, can and do bet on my inability to pay back my mortgage.

I am not without some knowledge of finance. I remember when my parents bought the car and paid car payments and if or when they failed to pay the car payments, the car was repossessed. This applied to furniture as well.

I remember thinking about this and realized that the "down payment" was usually sufficient to pay for the cost of the car or the dining room table and every payment made by my parents was profit for the seller. I understand that every payment I DO NOT make on my mortgage is profit to the seller and the buyer, neither of whom I know or ever will.

Is this what is still going on with mortgages today? Going on without laws to curb the practice?

When "the men" come with the foreclosure and I ask, where is the mortgage, the papers to verify who actually owns my house and they can't produce the owner, then how can they take back what they can't prove is theirs? Or when they auction my house, who are they auctioning it for? The bank? But the Bank doesn't have the mortgage papers. Or does it. And are the mortgage papers different from the ownership documents?

These are questions worth full exploration but unfortunately the authors of this film were so intent on exposing the key players that they forgot about you and me, the buyers of their product.

American Casino reinforces the now well understood reality that the power elite who are deemed crooks,(not in jail but free range in all the high places in Government) are operating American Financial Casino(s) without the American public or the world financial complex aware of what they are involved in.

I understand that the poor, the black, the upper striving people of color were for a single moment called "stupid"in the film because they got caught in this night-mere of fulfilling the "American dream" that they might never have had if it hadn't been for ex-president Bush calling the ownership of a home of one's own an American goal; a fantasy to strive towards. I understand that the makers of this film had no idea who their audience is and to put a group of people on the screen to show the devastating impact of this scandal without presenting the fundamentals borders on........... an act of intellectual snobbery.

That said, many will talk about American Casino. And if you should ask, what is it really all about, be prepared to feel once again how "stupid" you and I really are. But then again maybe there is something good to be said about being stupid. We are in good ethical, upstanding citizen company suffering from the fall out of financial giants.

Linda ZISES
WBAI Women's Collective

What's The Matter With Kansas?

2009-08-07T08:56:00.001-07:00

Joe Winston's
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS is a documentary, (loosely based on the Thomas Frank book of the same name) on the verge of being released to an audience who may not know what is on the minds of the people who are forming a proto fascist movement in the United States.

We are afforded a close up view of the people's home life, their pains, failures and the source of what makes them smile involuntarily.

What drives the masses who stampeded upon the abortion doctor, the great courageous Dr. George Tiller and who is making the life of today's politicians a living night mere as they go to "the community" to be heard, to discuss the new health care reforms and are met with the Pacifica Radio WBAI style disruption by mobs of "loose canons" who question if in fact Obama is an American citizen. It isn't the American flag on the lapel that bothers the likes of the Kansas City denizens who are being pushed off of their land(still) and drowned in a flat, barren environment of the Mid West. It is the pressing issue of abortion,
God's will and Obama who is now their enemy, the Devil in our midst.

This is what we learn from the documentary What's the matter with Kansas. A lesson that will defy your ability to curb your sympathy but curb it we must or be consumed by the likes of violent vigilantes in all the wrong places.

See it when it comes out, be horrified, be informed.

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

ADAM: Max Meyer breaks with tradition.

2009-07-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

stars:
Hugh Dancy, Rose Byre, Frankie Faison, Mark Linn-Baker with Amy Iring and Peter Gallagher.

Hold on to your hat, secure your seat belt, the film "Adam" breaks with tradition. Imagine a main stream film, Fox Searchlight films where the women are Not the essentially irrelevant characters who appear when a need to show the otherwise perfect man mess up because of Her, the Bad one , the woman otherwise kept out of the viewer's awareness.

In Adam the women are the driving message vehicles opposing the men who have so much trouble making it in this world.

The pivotal moment is encapsulated in the concept of "the lie": the big lie, the little lie. In this film "the lie" is one and the same. When untruth is celebrated all bets are off, is the unspoken message that cries out to the viewers loud and clear.

Lies of omission (secretive extra marital affairs) and lies of convenience and lies in business, financial irregularities seem to hold equal weight in this less than exciting film.

Adam is message driven, without benefit of a hint at character change. That is not to be confused with change of behavior. Behavior, the human ability to learn, is amply shown, is actually the overt message of the film. But in this day and age with all the technological advancement in film making, with all the great ways of telling a compelling story, Adam falls so short of interesting that the audience was restless and even I had trouble crying at the film's end.

The one outstanding moment was the on scream appearance of Amy Irving. Her professional achievement was on a par with the reigning Queen of film, Meryl Streep. Too bad she was given a minor role. Imagine if the film had used a "mature" woman rather than a young, lost soul to carry the message forward?

Adam, is a lesson in not to lie, not to omit, not to manipulate and to be emotionally honest. A lesson none of us in today's world will learn no matter how much we believe in its importance.

It just ain't real.

Linda Zises
Criticalwomen@blogspot.com
WBAI Women's Collective

A Memory Revisited:

2009-07-06T06:21:00.000-07:00

Have we forgotten Raymond Velez from the Bronx, the politician the then New York City Mayor Ed Koch called "the poverty pimp". Have we forgotten that Espada Jr. has a history, a decade of being elected on the Democratic ticket because... that is where the votes are and once elected to the State Senate, switching to the Republican side because... that is where the money is?

I met Raymond Velez in early 1970's. He was a short, full breasted, wider than tall man, whose head sat on his shoulders without apparent need of a neck.
He presided with his arms wide perched on a dais awaiting the moment when his voice, his pearls of wisdom would be heard on air. Radio at its finest.

I was working for the City of New York and had, at his insistence, written a grant proposal. I was also pregnant, in my ninth month when Raymond sent his "boys " to my New York City office to learn the fate of our effort to get him more federal money.
I had my feet slightly raised as I sat in my desk chair His "boys" surrounded me. When the fatal piece of paper upon which a rejection of our request for money was plainly stated and read aloud by me, the assembled men erupted into fierce yelling, complaining, gesturing. I sat up, uncomfortably erect or as erect as I could given my physical state and said, ""It's not my fault". When that failed to calm the clamor in the room, I became more agitated. That's when i pulled rank. "Get out of my office"", I yelled "Out, Out!" and as I stood up with great difficulty the men dispersed. All except one. He was a slender man who stood quietly while his fellow travelers ran away.
"From where I come, men don't treat pregnant women this way" he said. Please, let me drive you home".
I did.
It was a quiet trip, no words seemed necessary in the wake of so many That was on a Friday. On Monday morning January 3, in the beginning moments of a fierce snow storm, I delivered my second son.

Linda Z(ises)
criticalwomen@blogspot.com

A Walk to Beautiful: DVD

2009-06-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

Director/Producer Mary Olive Smith

An Engel Entertainment production in association with NOVA
Filmed in Ethiopia

The setting is beautiful, breathtaking. the hardship endured by the native women excruciating to see, to learn about and their illness is unimaginable for those who have never seen it nor smelled an incontinent woman

Imagine being a five to ten year old girl, married. Imagine getting pregnant and giving birth at 13 or 14 years of age. Imagine being in labor not for 24 hours but for a week because the birthing canal is too small to enable the fetus passage. Imagine the damage to your body, the puncture of the thin wall between the birthing canal and the blather.

Imagine the reversal of all you know about and feel about being toilet trained, about being part of a civilized, loving nurturing community. Imagine being ostracized, having to live in a separate space from everyone, Imagine being totally alone, rejected, at thirteen, fourteen years of age. That is the plight ,the central premise of the film Walk to Beautiful:. a six mile or more lonely walk in search of help.

But it isn't only in Ethiopia. I was a social worker in Sunset Park Brooklyn when a young woman's 's brother brought her to my office. Everyone in the vicinity ran from where we sat, she by the side of my desk.

The brother said, everything in the house is ruined. Every chair, the sofa. she can't go outside and we can't live with her in the house. The smell coming from her person was overpowering.
But it wasn't the first time I had smelled the sustained odor of urine.

The hallway in the then poverty stricken Harlem were my training ground for walking up and down the long flight of stairs with that order filling my nostrils. But I learned, as did my fellow workers, to breath without smelling, without gaging or being overly repulsed. Even the smell of feces is a human order. We are not as clean nor sweet as we might like to think

As she sat by my desk one of the fellow workers started to wash the floor near us with strong smelling ammonia which i found more distasteful than her odor and i experienced the commotion that her very presence brought to the fore. with trepidation.

How could I help her? I racked my brain to find something to say, My task was to decathex the embarrassment of her condition to allow this distraught adult brother to take her to the hospital for help. She was convinced her condition was beyond medical intervention.

From the depth of my personal ignorance I looked at her and I thought, sex. Tell me about your sex life i said. Have you had sex, did you enjoy it. And her face lit up. We were two woman sitting next to each other, one the surviver of two normal child births , the other a long suffering victim of a sexual event beyond her control What we had in common was our state of being a woman. And in that moment of our shared essence she found the courage to seek help.

Brooklyn is an ugly industrialized city. We have so much civilized help available and so much knowledge of what to do, when, but the pathos that this woman instilled in me, albeit many many years ago is part of my knowledge base, my understanding of the travails of womanhood that I thankfully do not have to endure.

That doesn't mean that we should live in ignorance. This film must be seen, must be part of our experience our knowledge of the perils of being adults because there is such a compelling base for empathy that it enriches our consciousness, the core of our being.

I recommend this beautiful, compelling, documentary and encourage everyone to imagine the odor, the horror with which each afflicted woman and those close to her must endure.

Linda Z
WFCC
WBAIWomen's Collective

UPTOWN: a Brian Ackley film

2009-06-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

Stars:
Chris Riquinha, Meissa Hampton, Derek MAllister, Deirdre Herlihy

This film feels like a conversation, a long drawn out story with an ending tacked on that is less than credible. The problem with the film is the role in which the woman finds herself, listening to a husband who has grown estranged within the short year and a half of their marriage. However, at the request of her husband, she puts on hold, or maybe ends her new friendship because...well, that is the unanswered question.

Uptown is about the preciousness of intimacy; how it is so difficult to establish, so hard to maintain. We are living in an overcrowded world where pleasure comes only occasionally directly from those we see, live with and talk to on a phone. With the internet, the tech messages, the music blasting while we try to connect, connecting is what we need most but are most likely to fail at.

True to the problems of today. True to life. This film goes on and on when maybe we want to turn away, look elsewhere but that is exactly what we do in life and shouldn't.

Watching Uptown might brings us all back to what it means to be human; to feel, to think, without props, without all that noise.

Linda zises
WBAI Women's Collective

Father's Day 2009

2009-06-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

1

you stand as tall and straight as I remember
you sit hunched over the chess board
but you don't laugh anymore.

and your partners
the ones who'd line up watching, waiting their turn

you were the guru of the park, the chess player supreme. Have you lost your knack,
the brilliance of you calm mind.

Has the world around you changed because the world changes or are you the catalyst
I wonder as you approach, slowly, looking quietly at me, assessing the damage of a year's time

you approach wearing a cap, you never wore a cap, not all of last summer when you came home with me
and we laughed seemingly all night about nothing and everything

you stand in front of me, now, your head slightly bent to look at me eye to eye and I smell you
so loud, so clearly, so unmistakably.

Oh, I say the sound of shock or is it pity permeating the air around us.

You are homeless.

11

I don't want fame nor fortune
I want to fade into the background, of time, of life
I want to see, without being seen
I want to be invisible and I am

I am
until that light goes off
rage, anger come to the fore
and I explode

In a moment of uncontrollable essence, I am
who
I am
who I don't want to be

I am
the product of my parents; my mother who knew only anger/rage/discipline to a fault
my father with his sharp biting mind and withdrawn presence
I am no different
only modified

111

Barren
void of a vehicle to offer
my wealth/
my wisdom/
my stories

where do I place the knowledge of my
forefathers
the knowledge of my life
as it pulls me ever forward into
a bodiless entity
a whiff of wanton black smoke
ascending

1V

I've said it all before
I said
come play with me
but I didn't mean it
I said walk softly on tip toe
but i didn't know what tip toe meant

I said that I love you
but I didn't understand
that love is a feeling
indestructible
because
I don't

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

The Stoning of Soraya M

2009-06-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

Cyrus Nowrasteh

Cyrus Nowrasteh’s film, “The Stoning of Soraya M,” is the story of the stoning of an innocent woman because her husband of twenty years wanted to have another wife, a child bride 14 years old.

Judging from the name of the film I would have turned away, and said, I know things are bad for women in the world where religious fundamentalism is the rule of the land. But something made me take the leap of faith and watch as Soraya M. is killed, murdered by the people she grew up with; her friends, her family, her neighbors. and her own children.

The landscape consisted of a barren view of a primitive town, all authentic. built on dirt and stones. Stones everywhere, all sizes, shapes, gathered by male children for use in the bloody execution.

Soraya M's her father was forced to join with the rule of the town's people, her father asked to throw the first stone. With stone like stoic expressions, her children were also told to throw the second, the third stone. Later they brought down in tears.

The lone voice of her Aunt as she tried to defy the powers of the town's governing body and failed was heard throughout the film. Her effort applauded, her failure to save her neice a sorriful but predictable outcome

Whenthe film ended, the tears were pouring uncontrollably from my eyes. My identification with Soraya more than I had expected.

Maybe we don't stone women to death in this country but we don't embrace the woman who tries to leave her husband, her marriage, when he doesn't agree to her demand for change.

This is an important film, a film to force us to re-evaluate from whence we came and how far we have or have not come in all these many years.

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX An Oscar 2009 winner!

2009-06-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Director: Uli Edel (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Christiane F)

A Cast of Stars:
Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others, The Good Shepard), Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run), Johanna Wokalek (Aimee and Jaguar) and Bruno Ganz (The Reader, Downfall). The film is directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Christiane F) and was written and produced by Bernd Eichinger (2005 Academy Award nominee Downfall), based on the book by and in consultation with Stefan Aust.

PLOT: A lengthy history of the far-left terrorist group that shocked Germany from 1968 onwards. Their search is for a life we can all embrace, their method is what we instinctively reject.

Guilt is not on the side of violation of law and order in this film. The guilty are those who make the laws, who enforce the law in this conflict ridden post WWII Germany. The war of the concerned courageous citizens, is unrelenting as the viewer watches the interactions of the group who go into banks to rob and into buildings to bomb, to steal, to plunder what they need to further their "cause".

Their cause is to bring to the attention their agenda of Stop the War in Vietnam, stop killing innocent citizens. But what do they embrace?

There is an invisible line between those who kill and those who don't. A gun is not requisite equipment in every one's wardrobe. This makes the free wielding of this object of murder, in a seemingly quiet domestic environment disturbing, not easy to understand. But then, that is the point of the film; To bring to our attention the thoughts, the ways of Revolutionaries who we might not know and can't understand. After the full experience of two and a half hours of The Beeder Meinhof Complex, one can not continue to think we are all knowing, all caring, all right.

This is not a summer evening's casual date flick. It is a provocative and brilliant creation that will remain in the viewers mind.

Whether or not we want to remember, we will.

LindaZises
WBAI Women's Collective
Criticalwomen@blogspot.com

AWAY WE GO: Cast/crew of many and Commentary

2009-06-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

At the Top of the Heap,

Directed by Sam Mendes.
With John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Carmen Ejogo.

Commentary: This is an-on-the road and in-the-air film;
the journey of an expectant couple as they travel the U.S. in search of the perfect place to put down roots and raise their family. Along the way, they have misadventures and find fresh connections with an assortment of relatives and old friends who just might help them discover "home" on their own terms for the first time.

For me the introduction of the main couple as being of "mixed" race was not very important. "The black women wasn't very black. Was she?"

(fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy wuzzy, was he?)

Many asked pointed questions on content, on photo shoots, that seemed out of character and without apparent purpose, during the Sam Mendes's Q&A surprise appearance at last night's showing of Away We Go.
For me the most telling photo shot was of two women in a bathtub without benefit of a view of the tub nor the women's bodies. Just heads talking at a weird angle.

Sam Mendes answered with curt, unapologetic comments that spoke louder than what he said, more defensive than intelligent.

It isn't just that this film lacks clarity in detail as much as the disappointment in a film less than Great done by a Great film maker.

Sam Mendes is guilty of trying to multi-task, of doing Revolutionary Road and AwayWeGo in overlapping sequences and this doesn't work in life, nor in film.

His cast is competent, with noteworthy performance by the minor characters rather than the stars. Done by another director, this attempt at vacuous new age comedy wouldn't make it to the main screen audience.

What is pointedly missing is any reference to gay marriages, to gay couples who are getting married, or not: all who are fighting for the right to do so; This couple would have been appropriate since the new age couple on screen did not want to join the ranks of the married. The omission of gays on screen compromised the scope, the content of the film and suggested that maybe homophobia is not dead, not on the screen even with this rich army of workers/craft persons of note.

Maybe one film at a time is a better way to go even if you are the great Sam Mendes

When you know your film might not be a financial success, you repay the cast and crew with an appearance in the credits. Here goes. (as presented on screen)

Actors
John Krasinski Burt
Maya Rudolph Verona
Allison Janney Lily
Jim Gaffigan Lowell
Jeff Daniels Jerry
Catherine O'Hara Gloria
Carmen Ejogo Grace
Melanie Lynskey Munch
Chris Messina Tom
Paul Schneider Courtney
Maggie Gyllenhaal LN
Josh Hamilton Roderick
Tory Woody Carrie

PLOT
Writers
Dave Eggers Screenplay

Producers
Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda Executive Producer
Pippa Harris Executive Producer
Edward Saxon Producer
Sam Mendes Producer
Marc Turtletaub Producer
Peter Saraf Producer

Camera, Film & Tape
Carlos Omar Guerra 1st Assistant A-Camera
Sebastian Almeida 2nd Assistant A-Camera
Francois Duhamel Still Photographer
Edward Rodriguez 1st Assistant B-Camera
Debbie Stampfle 2nd Assistant B-Camera
Joe Gawler Digital Intermediate Colorist (New York) (Deluxe)
John Potter (III) Video Master Colorist (New York) (Deluxe)
Steven Bodner Jr Dailies Colorist (New York) (Deluxe)
Jeff Hocken Dailies Project Manager (New York) (Deluxe)
Kevin Krout Dailies Colorist Assist (New York) (Deluxe)
Tod Boyle 2nd Assistant Camera (Colorado)
Ed Nessen Additional 1st Assistant Camera (Arizona)
Meg Kettell Additional 2nd Assistant Camera (Arizona)
Stephen Whitcomb Camera Loader (Arizona)
Sarah Sher Twenty-four Frame Playback (Arizona)
April Ruane Crowley Camera Loader (Florida)
David Pultz Color Timer
Ellen Kuras Director of Photography
Patrick Capone 2nd Unit Director of Photography (Arizona) (Florida)
Peter Agliata B Camera Operator
Chris Norr Additional B Camera Operator (Arizona)
Josh Zientarski Additional Video Assist (Arizona)

Editors
Janet Gaynor (III) 1st Assistant Editor
Jen Choi Editorial Assistant
James Cohen (II) Assistant Editor (Film Dailies)
Andrew Buckland (II) Assistant Editor (Film Dailies)
Sarah Flack Editor

Casting
Ellen Lewis Casting
Debra Zane Casting
Megan Rafferty Casting Associate (Ellen Lewis Casting)
Geoffrey Miclat Casting Associate (Ellen Lewis Casting)
Tannis Vallely Casting Associate (Debra Zane Casting)
Shayna Markowitz Casting Assistant (Debra Zane Casting)
Grant Wilfley Extras Casting
Melissa Braun Extras Casting Associate
Helen McCready Extras Casting (Arizona) (Helen Wheels Productions)
Lori S. Wyman Extras Casting (Florida)

Executives
Matthew Plouffe Creative Executive
David Gerson Studio Executive (Focus Features)

Production Management
Jayne-Ann Tenggren Script Supervisor
David Bausch Production Supervisor
Jennifer Lane (IV) Post-Production Supervisor
Alexis Wiscomb Post-Production Supervisor
Pamela Bertini 1st Assistant Production Coordinator
Sarah Crofts Location Assistant
Justin Rosini Location Assistant
Demian Resnick Location Assistant
Kate Eisemann Location Assistant
Cathy Jeffries Production Manager (Visual Effects/Mr. X Inc.)
Jesh Krishna Murthy Project Manager (Visual Effects/Mr. X Inc.)
Brooke C. Johnson Production Supervisor (Colorado)
Kelly Helstrom Production Supervisor (Arizona)
Denton Hanna Location Scout (Arizona)
Elayne Schneiderman Production Supervisor (Florida)
Julie Ann Grasso Assistant Production Coordinator (Florida)
Chelsey Cary Assistant Production Coordinator (Florida)
Jeff Rollason Location Assistant (Florida)
Marcel Pinkowski Location Assistant (Florida)
Leah Sokolowsky Location Scout (Florida)
Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda Unit Production Manager
Anita Sum Production Coordinator
Lisa Matsukawa Production Coordinator (Arizona)
Lisa A. Martin Production Coordinator (Florida)
Bernie Cassar Production Coordinator (Leesburg)
Timothy Bird (II) 1st Assistant Director
Jennifer Truelove 2nd Assistant Director
matthew mason 2nd 2nd Assistant Director
Keith A. Jones Additional 1st Assistant Director (Arizona)
Tyson Bidner Location Manager
Kat Donahue Assistant Location Manager
Michael Grosky Assistant Location Manager
Jean Chien Location Manager (Colorado)
Jean Chien Location Manager (Arizona)
Jason Sallee Assistant Location Manager (Phoenix)
Jennifer Radzikowski Location Manager (Florida)
Sandra Woodward Assistant Location Manager (Florida)
Susanne Ragnarsson Assistant Location Manager (Florida)
John Garrett (III) Assistant Location Manager (Florida)

Art Department
Rachel Short Model Builder
Kelly Solomon Art Department Coordinator
Erica Torres Art Department Production Assistant
Katherine M. Szilagyi Assistant Set Decorator
Chris Vogt Lead Dresser
Ruth Deleon On Set Dresser
Robert Vogt Set Dresser
Kelly Canfield Set Dresser
Kevin Mahon Set Dresser
Richard Oeser Set Dresser
Alexander Gorodetsky Head Painter
Christopher Weiser Paint Foreman
Victor Morales Scenic Artist
Steve Rosenzweig Scenic Artist
George Kousoulides Scenic Artist
Quang Nguyen Scenic Artist
Jennifer Buturla Scenic Artist
Amy Safhay Head Greensman
Ginny Walsh Greens Foreman
Gregg Singer Leadman (Arizona)
Rosa Palomo Art Department (Florida)
Nicholas Scott Assistant Art Director (Florida)
Nel Hernandez Art Department Production Assistant (Florida)
Karen Virgin Buyer (Florida)
Elizabeth Boller Art Department Coordinator (Florida)
Frank A. Raffa Jr Lead Dresser (Florida)
Emilio Saez Set Dresser (Florida)
Orlando Castro Set Dresser (Florida)
Jeremy Read Set Dresser (Florida)
Michael Calabrese Set Dresser (Florida)
Michael D. Fitzgerald Set Dresser (Florida)
Chris Alicea Jr On-Set Dresser (Florida)
Julian Mercado Painter (Florida)
Jeffrey Harris (II) Painter (Florida)
Cary Whitaker Greensman (Florida)
Robert Welch (II) Greensman (Florida)
Ben F. Lowe III Greensman (Leesburg)
John Balling Head Scenic Artist (Florida)
Lucy Weber Scenic Painter (Florida)
Dean F. Janik Scenic Artist (Florida)
Henry Dunn Art Director
Charles E. McCarry Assistant Art Director
Miguel Lopez-Castillo Assistant Art Director
Lauren Fitzsimmons Assistant Art Director
Jess Gonchor Production Designer
Lydia Marks Set Decorator
Sarah Sprawls Assistant Set Decorator (Arizona)
Kevin Kropp Assistant Set Decorator (Florida)

Wardrobe, Hair & Makeup
Timothy R. McKelvey Set Costume Supervisor
Janna Notick Key Costumer
Sandi Figueroa Key Costumer
Askia Won-Ling Jacob Key Costumer
Trenee Clayton Set Costumer
Adam Watt Costume Production Assistant
Mary Aaron Key Makeup
Judi Cooper-Sealy Department Head Hair Stylist
Beatrice DeAlba Department Head Hair Stylist
Belinda Anderson Key Hair Stylist
Joseph Cigliano Set Costumer (Arizona)
Maggie McFarland Additional Costumer (Arizona)
Jeffrey Sacino Additional Hair Stylist (Arizona)
Dana Vargas Additional Hair Stylist (Arizona)
Lynette Bernay Key Costumer (Florida)
Heather Holmes Set Costumer (Florida)
Carolyn Finlayson Seamstress (Florida)
Sahar Halabi Costume Assistant (Florida)
Carol Raskin-Smalling Additional Hair Stylist (Florida)
Caridad Collazo Additional Hair Stylist (Florida)
Gunnar Swanson Additional Hair Stylist (Florida)
John Dunn Costume Designer
Sharon Globerson Assistant Costume Designer
Michele Paris Department Head Make-up Artist
Felice Diamond Makeup Artist (Florida)

Sound
Scott Millan Rerecording Mixer
Paul Hsu Rerecording Mixer
Brian Wittle Boom Operator
Branka Mrkic-Tana Dialogue Editor
Ruth Hernandez (II) ADR Editor
Marissa Littlefield ADR Editor
Jamie Baker Foley Editor
George A. Lara Foley Mixer (C5, Inc.)
Marko Costanzo Foley Artist (C5, Inc.)
Mark Desimone ADR Mixer (Soundtrack F/T)
Bobby Johanson ADR Mixer (Sound One Corp.)
David Boulton (III) ADR Mixer (Sound One Corp.)
Michael Miller (XIII) ADR Mixer (P.O.P. Sound)
Beauxregard Neylon ADR Recordist (Soundtrack F/T)
Mike Howells ADR Recordist (Sound One Corp.)
Brian Gallagher ADR Recordist (Sound One Corp.)
Courtney Bishop ADR Recordist (P.O.P. Sound)
Sondra James ADR Voice Casting (Soundtrack F/T)
Mike Poppleton Assistant Sound Editor
Dave Corcoran Apprentice Sound Editor
Paul Hsu Supervising Sound Editor
Benjamin Patrick Production Sound Mixer
Bret Johnson Mix Technician
Bob Chefalas Mix Technician
Paul Banks Tirone Mix Technician
Dan Wesson Sound Utility
Nicolas Carbone Additional Sound Utility

Music
Alexi Murdoch Music
Christine Bergren Music Legal and Clearances
Jim Dunbar Music Coordinator
Guy Fletcher Song ("The Good Times")
Alexi Murdoch Song ("All My Days")
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer ("All My Days")
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Blue Mind”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Blue Mind”)
Roger Odell Song (“Night Birds”)
William Sharpe Song (“Night Birds”)
Shakatak Song Performer (“Night Birds”)
Endless Boogie Song (“Steak Rock”)
Endless Boogie Song Performer (“Steak Rock”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Song For You”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Song for You”)
Antonio Vivaldi Song (“The Four Seasons Spring Violin Concerto In E. Allegro”)
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Song Performer (“The Four Seasons Spring Violin Concerto In E. Allegro”)
Gabriel Francisco Song (“Sin Tu Amor”)
Gabriel Francisco Song Performer (“Sin Tu Amor”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Towards The Sun”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Towards The Sun”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Breathe”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Breathe”)
Liquid Mind Song Performer (“Teach Me To Whisper")
Vashti Bunyan Song (“Diamond Day”)
The Stranglers Song Performer (“Golden Brown”)
Jean-Jaques Burnel Song (“Golden Brown”)
Hugh Cornwell Song (“Golden Brown”)
Jet Black Song (“Golden Brown”)
Dave Greenfield Song (“Golden Brown”)
George Harrison Song (“What Is Life”)
George Harrison Song Performer (“What Is Life”)
Richard Rodgers Song (“So Long, Farewell”)
Oscar Hammerstein II Song (“So Long, Farewell”)
Robert Brammer Song (“H.A.P.P.Y.”)
Winston Hislop Song (“H.A.P.P.Y.”)
Clint Eastwood Song Performer (“H.A.P.P.Y.”)
Winston Hislop Song Performer (“H.A.P.P.Y.”)
Shelton Brooks Song (“Some Of These Days”)
Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks Song Performer (“Some of These Days”)
Bob Dylan Song (“Meet Me In The Morning”)
Bob Dylan Song Performer (“Meet Me In The Morning”)
Noel Gonzales Song (“Hercules Theme”)

Song Performer (“Hercules Theme”)
Lou Reed Song (“Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ ”)
The Velvet Underground Song Performer (“Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ ”)
Sylvia Gordon Song (“Let’s Finish (Sinden remix)”)
Deantoni Parks Song (“Let’s Finish (Sinden remix)”)
Graeme Sinden Song (“Let’s Finish (Sinden remix)”)
Kudu Song Performer (“Let’s Finish (Sinden remix)”)
Bob Dylan Song (“Mr. Tambourine Man”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Wait”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Wait”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“The Ragged Sea”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“The Ragged Sea”)
Alexi Murdoch Song (“Orange Sky”)
Alexi Murdoch Song Performer (“Orange Sky”)
Randall Poster Music Supervisor
Annette Kudrak Music Editor (C5, Inc.)

Choreography
Cynthia Onrubia Choreographer
Harrison Beal Assistant Choreographer

Visual Effects & Animation
Robert J. Scupp Special Effects Coordinator
Edward A. Ioffreda Graphic Designer
Sarah McMurdo Visual Effects Producer (Mr. X Inc.)
Daniel Mizuguchi Sequence Lead (Mr. X Inc.)
Matt Glover Visual Effects Coordinator (Mr. X Inc.)
Aaron Weintraub Pipeline Supervisor (Mr. X Inc.)
Thai Son Doan Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Mathieu Archambault Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Barb Benoit Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Danny Duchesneau Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Dominik Bochenski Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Andrew Nguyen Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Wayne Brinton Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Kevin Quatman Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Rob Del Ciancio Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Marco Polsinelli Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Sebastien Veilleux Digital Compositor (Mr. X Inc.)
Hubert Chan 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Chris De Souza 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Jason Edwardh 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Jason Gougeon 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Jessica Nolet 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Matt Ralph 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Dominic Remane 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Jim Su 3-D Artist (Mr. X Inc.)
Isabelle Langlois Digital Effects Producer (Mr. X Inc.)
Sarah Barber Visual Effects Coordinator (Mr. X Inc.)
cheyenne bloomfield Visual Effects Producer (Mr. X Inc.)
Glenn Allen Visual Effects Producer (Brainstorm Digital)
Richard Friedlander Visual Effects Producer (Brainstorm Digital)
Dan Cayer Digital Compositor (Brainstorm Digital)
Ella Boliver Digital Compositor (Brainstorm Digital)
Jacob Robinson Digital Intermediate Editor (New York) (Deluxe)
Darrell R. Smith Digital Intermediate Coordinator (New York) (Deluxe)
Jonathan Sanden Digital Intermediate Assistant (New York) (Deluxe)
Jack Lewars Digital Intermediate Assistant (New York) (Deluxe)
Chris Mackenzie Smoke Artist (New York) (Deluxe)
Markus Janner Scanner & Recorder (New York) (Deluxe)
Duck Grossberg Data Wrangler (New York) (Deluxe)
Molle DeBartolo QC Lead (New York) (Deluxe)
David Chai Engineer (New York) (Deluxe)
Tim Mullen Engineer (New York) (Deluxe)
Bruce E. Merlin Special Effects Coordinator (Florida)
Dennis Berardi Visual Effects Supervisor (Mr. X Inc.)
Eric J. Robertson Visual Effects Supervisor (Brainstorm Digital)
Matt Schofield Digital Matte Painter (Mr. X Inc.)

Physical Effects
Ricou Browning Stunt Coordinator (Water Safety)

Engineering, Electrical & Grips
John Nadeau Chief Lighting Technician
Tom Potoskie Best Boy Electric
Sean McCardell Rigging Best Boy Electric
Jim Ferris Genny Operator
John Gilgar Base Camp Genny Operator
Bruce Jordan Rigging Grip
Michael Gallart Shop Electric
Patrick Fontana (II) Shop Electric
David Knoblock Electric (Arizona)
Cory R. Starr Electric (Arizona)
Gary Ryan Best Boy Electric (Florida)
Gary Hirt Genny Operator (Florida)
Reynaldo Guimet Electric (Florida)
James Seckel Electric (Florida)
Nicolas Donadio Electric (Florida)
Scott L. Gordon (II) Rigging Electric (Florida)
Raymond Orraca Rigging Electric (Florida)
Earl Perque Jr Rigging Grip (Florida)
Todd E. Wood Rigging Grip (Florida)
Jorge Parra Rigging Grip (Florida)
William F. Boone III Rigging Grip (Leesburg)
Dennis Gamiello Key Grip
Matt Stelling Key Grip (Colorado)
Edward W. Lowry Dolly Grip
Ben Kanegson B Dolly Grip (Florida)
Brendan Quinlan Best Boy Grip
Anthony Gamiello (II) Best Boy Rigging Grip
Mitch Stelling Best Boy Grip (Colorado)
Marty Miller Best Boy Grip (Arizona)
Matthew J. Errico Best Boy Grip (Florida)
Danny Mallory Best Boy Grip (Leesburg)
Jamie Klein Best Boy Rigging Grip (Florida)
Glen Engels Grip
Christopher Gamiello Grip
Richard Dowgin Key Construction Grip
Alonso Parra Grip (Arizona)
Jay Coolidge Grip (Arizona)
Keith Karidis Grip (Arizona)
Michael P. Fredrickson Grip (Arizona)
Fred Gibson Grip (Arizona)
Chris Estrada Grip (Florida)
Chris Young (II) Grip (Florida)
Marvin J. Haven Grip (Leesburg)
Bill Losh Grip (Leesburg)
John E. Mulier Grip (Leesburg)
Chris Lombardozzi Rigging Gaffer
Kai Morbey Rigging Best Boy (Florida)

Construction
Martin Bernstein Construction Coordinator
Mike Melchiorre Construction Foreman
Isaac Cohen Shop Craftsman
David Hill (II) Shop Craftsman
James Harris (IV) Construction Coordinator (Florida)
James P. Crapser Construction Foreman (Florida)
Doug Winters Carpenter (Florida)
John R. Salemi Construction Electrician (Florida)
Paul A. Burnett Construction Production Assistant (Florida)

Publicity
Rob Harris Unit Publicist

Accounting
Ginny Reilly 1st Assistant Accountant
Kelly O Bier 2nd Assistant Accountant
Sara Gagliardi 2nd 2nd Assistant Accountant
Patricia Porter Payroll Accountant
Diana Ascher Post-Production Accountant
Trevanna Post Post-Production Accountant
Maureen Higgins 1st Assistant Accountant (Arizona)
Alonzo Nevarez Payroll Accountant (Arizona)
Marc Siegel Accounting Clerk (Arizona)
Jamie Horwitz 1st Assistant Accountant (Florida)
Vicki Pearlman 2nd Assistant Accountant (Florida)
Leena Ogle Payroll Accountant (Florida)
Alex Puma Accounting Clerk (Florida)
Mike Phillips (IX) Head Physical Production & Finance (Big Beach)
Richard Mancuso Production Accountant

Craft Services
Gregory Cuozzo Chef (Gourmet to U)
Anthony Torre Chef (Gourmet to U)
Peter Marschark Craft Services Chef (J&P Craft)
Jason Acevedo Craft Services Chef (J&P Craft)
Joseph Decongilio Craft Services Chef (J&P Craft)
Savanna Johnson Craft Service (Colorado)
Marie Randall Craft Service (Arizona)
Buddy Devingo Caterer (Florida)
Carmen Devingo Catering Assistant (Florida)
Marc H. Katz Craft Service (Florida)
Mack McKelvey Craft Service Assistant (Florida)
Derek Dion Craft Service Assistant (Florida)
Matthew Kelley Craft Service Assistant (Leesburg)

Props
Graylan Franklin Assistant Props (Florida)
Brian Luehring Gang Boss (Florida)
Daniel Stacy Prop Maker (Florida)
Dennis J. Harris Prop Maker (Florida)
William Bricker Prop Maker (Florida)
Michael Charboneau (II) Prop Maker (Florida)
Paul Damien Prop Maker (Florida)
Brian P. Harris Prop Maker (Florida)
Tom Allen (IV) Property Master
Eric Cheripka Assistant Property Master
Ann L. Edgeworth Assistant Property Master
Keith Mosca Assistant Property Master (Arizona)
Shawn W. Logue Assistant Property Master (Florida)
Kim Pierce Assistant Property Master (Florida)

Legal
Jackie Eckhouse Legal Services

Consultants & Advisors
Jerome Butler Dialect Coach
Andy Potvin Dolby Sound Consultant

Below The Line
Daniele Melia Assistant (to Mr Saraf)
Justin Bell Assistant (to Mr Saxon)
Eric Papa Assistant (Ms Winkler Ioffreda)
Julie Blumenthal Assistant (to Mr Mendes)
Scott Foster (II) Key Set Production Assistant
Dan Gloeckner Set Production Assistant
Nick Schepisi Set Production Assistant
Dana Zolli Set Production Assistant
Michelle Dianne Mehn Set Production Assistant
Jose Tejada (II) Parking Coordinator
David Laurentin Parking Coordinator
Kristopher Keefe Transportation Captain
Kevin Keefe Transportation Co-Captain
Dennis O'Grady Driver
Mark Whittaker Driver
Richard Presutti Driver
Douville Junot Driver
Robert Lansing Driver
Gary O Connell Driver
Chris Defeo Driver
Laurie Gershon Product Placement
Dennis Steele Transportation Captain (Colorado)
Stephen H. Davenport Picture Car Driver (Colorado)
Todd Helman Driver (Colorado)
Georgia Cox Film Runner (Colorado)
Dan Romero (II) Transportation Coordinator (Arizona)
Jim Alfonso Transportation Captain (Arizona)
Hal W. Gibson Driver Captain (Arizona)
Curtis Randoll Driver (Arizona)
Charlie Carpenter Driver (Arizona)
Leonard Suppes Driver (Arizona)
Wesley S. Bloom Driver (Arizona)
Rick Currens Driver (Arizona)
Steve Wagner Driver (Arizona)
Fred Davis Driver (Arizona)
Monty Lira Driver (Arizona)
Lee Nashold Driver (Arizona)
David Teasley Driver (Arizona)
Steven W. Polon Driver (Arizona)
Steve Buring Driver (Arizona)
Robert Chookhachian Driver (Arizona)
Rick Purdy Driver (Arizona)
Elmer Malits Driver (Arizona)
Sidney Highsmith Driver (Arizona)
Lynn Ashby Driver (Arizona)
John Schramm Driver (Arizona)
Pat Larkin Driver (Arizona)
Seville Michelle Anastos Key Office Production Assistant (Florida)
Benjamin Velez Production Intern (Florida)
Mario Xavier Set Production Assistant (Florida)
Daniel C. Garcia Set Production Assistant (Florida)
Justin Browning Marine Coordinator (Florida)
Jon Bergholz (II) Transportation Captain (Florida)
Danny P. Taylor Transportation Co-Captain (Florida)
Rodney Thorpe Driver (Florida)
Craig Hofstrand Driver (Florida)
Danny Dusch Driver (Florida)
David Hamilton (II) Driver (Florida)
David Bostic Driver (Florida)
Pirty Lee Jackson Driver (Florida)
Manuel Cuevas Driver (Florida)
Michael Ware Driver (Florida)
Vincent King Driver (Florida)
Richard Andresen Driver (Florida)
Robert R. Grandin Driver (Florida)
Adam Cincannon Driver (Florida)
Joe T. Griffin Driver (Florida)
Antonio M. Galindo Sr Driver (Florida)
Vickie Robison Driver (Florida)
Cara Sachse Driver (Florida)
Michael Cannestro Driver (Florida)
Ron Parsell Driver (Florida)
Patricia Mathis Driver (Florida)
Robert E. Byrd Driver (Florida)
Anthony Abbruzzese Driver (Florida)
Larry Craig Driver (Florida)
John H. Stephens Driver (Florida)
Jack Belcher Driver (Florida)
Garvin Adams Driver (Florida)
David Zydorski Driver (Florida)
Don Baer Driver (Florida)
Randy Warbritton Driver (Florida)
Leslie M. Hughes Driver (Florida)
Freddy Figueredo Set Medic (Florida)
Lisa Bullard Set Medic (Florida)
Frank Fernandez (II) Driver (Florida)
Vivian Enfinger Set Medic (Leesburg)
kamen velkovsky Location Production Assistant
Safia Siad Production Assistant (Mr. X Inc.)
Tommy Gervais Production Assistant (Mr. X Inc.)
Keith Price Set Production Assistant (Colorado)
Erica Mckee Production Assistant (Florida)
Adam Gonzales Production Assistant (Florida)
Brian Burger Location Production Assistant (Florida)
Benjamin Velez Location Production Assistant (Florida)
Mishelle Laborde Transportation Production Assistant (Florida)

Other Crew
Ashley Kravitz Clearance Services (Ashley, Inc.)
Emma Wiking Music Clearances
David Vodicka Music Clearances

Worldwide Distributors
Svensk Filmindustri (SF) Theatrical Distributor (Scandinavia)
Focus Features Theatrical Distributor
A-Film Distribution (Netherlands) Theatrical Distributor (Belgium and Netherlands)
Hollywood Classic Entertainment (Czech Republic) Theatrical Distributor (Czech Republic)
Odeon S.A. (Greece) Theatrical Distributor (Greece)
BIM Distribuzione Distribution Rights (Italy)
Senator Filmverleih Distribution Rights (Germany)
Mars Distribution Distribution Rights (France)
Paradise Film Distribution Company (Russia) Distribution Rights (Russia)
Serenity Entertainment International Distribution Rights (Taiwan)
Ascot Elite Entertainment Group Distribution Rights (Switzerland)
ProRom Distribution Rights (Romania)

Other Companies
C5, Inc. Post-Production Sound Editorial Facility
Pop Sound ADR Record Facility
Sound One ADR Recorder Facility
Soundtrack Group ADR Recording Facilities
AON/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Provider
Sloss Law Office Legal Services Provider
Ashley, Inc. Clearance Services Provider
Grant Wilfley Casting Extras Casting
Debra Zane Casting Casting Services
Gourmet To U Catering Services
J & P Craft Craft Services
Mr. X Inc. Digital Visual Effects Provider
Brainstorm Digital Additional Visual Effects Provider
Deluxe Digital Intermediate Provider
li
Pivotal Post
Wayno s Catering
Starr Pass Catering
Scarlet Letters
T
HD Avids Provider

Catering Services Provider (Phoenix)

Catering Services Provider (Tuscon)

Main and End Titles

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

The Baby Formula: Food for Thought

2009-06-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

Director: Alison Reid
Writer Richard Beattie
starring:
Angela Vint, Megan Fahlenbock, Rosemary Dunsmore, Roger Dunn, Jessica Booker

Genre: Comedy

Plot: two women elect to have babies without insertion of a man's sperm. It is all "x" chromosomes.

Commentary: when men are not involved in the reproduction of the species, when sperm is artificial then the consequences remain unknown for years, generations to come.

What are we doing messing with the DNA and RNA, the foundation of human life.

This is the frightening question that looms quietly but intensely in this film, with the genre tag of "Comedy". All the love displayed, the personalities that support this abnormal construction of human life, is a sad commentary on our collective inability to think of consequences to seemingly banal events.

For me, these women, pregnant without benefit of a man's sperm exemplify science gone awry.

Is this a film worth seeing? You decide. It represents a slim line between the horror film of today and this award wining "comedic" entertainment.

Release date July 10, 2009

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

UNDER OUR SKIN

2009-05-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

a documentary film by Andy Abrahams Wilson

It takes more than a subject that begs to be known to create a documentary worth spending time and money to see.

This documentary, UNDER OUR SKIN is a case in point. The subject is riveting but it can be presented in a myriad ways given our present state of technological vehicles for comunication. So why pick the documentary with all the seemingly requisite ingredients, that in this case, do not bring to life the plight of human susceptibility to the ever growing incidence of Lyme disease.

There is a robotic nature to this film making it somewhat less than enjoyable. The narrator's voice is drone like, lulling the viewer into a quasi comatose state. The images of the afflicted people, the feature of this documentary appear inserted into the script without creativity, without regard to the artistry of documentary creation. This is a sorry state when the issue of Lyme disease, it's failure to attract national attention looms so large.

Perhaps the next go around for this inportant subject will produce more gripping results.

Opens July 10,2009
New YOrk City IFC Center

Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective
criticalwomen@blogspot.com