Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal (2006) DVD
Sexuality, Age and Attraction: what is moral, when?


Director: Richard Eyre
Starring: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett

A twist and turn film with great acting and a moral message that encompasses age, sex, the double standard and the public, the moral majority who relish an attractive woman gone astray. Notes of a Scandal will bring moments of spontaneous fun, clever insight into human nature and moments of repulsion and anger to those who think sex with a young underage person is wrong, reprehensible without equivocation unless sanctioned by marriage.

In Notes of a Scandal morality is turned upside down, the good and bad dichotomy reversed and reversed again while the Pacific Palisades, California Look Out Point towering above the Will Rogers State Park gets center stage for those intimate quiet moments upon which the film's meaning depends.

A good film for quiet restless moments when something interesting, provocative will quell life's multiple distractions.


Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

BALL DON'T LIE

Brin Hill Director
Writers (WGA):
Matt de la Peña (screenplay) &
Brin Hill (screenplay) ...



This is a quiet tour de force, a film that doesn't awaken you until it reaches its climax and then the lightening rod goes crazy.

Ball Don't Lie is the story of Sticky (Grayson Boucher), a 17 year old white boy who travels from one foster care home to another after suffering the trauma of the premature violent loss of his parental figure.

It is a story of a white boy making it in a black boy world because he has found basketball, a game that he excels at. But with all the bonding on the court, with all the seeming similarity in their life expectancy, the black and white world remain divided. It is this divide so beautifully articulated on the sands of Venice Beach, California beach that brings this film into notoriety and extraordinary excellence.

This is a film that uses real people, not just seasoned actors, and real places and even though in the main it feels like a trite, redo of a redo, by the end of the film you feel elevated to another plane of understanding of the world in which we live.

No small feat.

opens June 5th, 2009

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

Jane Harmen: too attractive to last so long in congress

It is no surprise that an attractive white woman is being attacked not just for being attractive but she is Jewish.
Jewish is not just a religion. It is a source of increasing identification with meaning where by new blogs are springing up to address this special interest group. A corrupt politician is not just potentially corrupt, but Jewish too.
Elliot Spitzer is another case in point. It is being said that his current return to the political scene is too much, too soon. Is this because he is Jewish? His crime was mostly one of personal behavior. Politically he was a whistle blower without protection

How much does prejudice control the political scene? Too much?


Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective

Helen Gurley Brown: The original Carrie Bradshaw

Found in: Books of The Times
April 22, 2009

Written by a Man!
DWIGHT GARNER



This article raises much to be debated. It is rift with prejudice about women, about the uneducated and those who were educated (at great cost and effort in private colleges), and the effect of the women movement on today's second sex.

Helen Gurley Brown author of “Sex and the Single Girl” (1962) and the editor of Coismopolitan for three decades was the first "tough sexy woman" to take public notice and female followers who sought out her teachings because they entertained and made life a little nicer. She helped the "single women" be single without fear of recrimination and she pushed for common sense about issues where common sense was not formerly exercised.

Certainly a woman to be studied and talked about. This book Helen Gurley Brown The original Carrie Bradshaw is well worth a read. I recommend it for selection at your next women's book or study group.



Linda Zises
WBAI Women Collective

Julia: Funny or not, that is the question

Julia is a 2008 drama/thriller film
directed by Erick Zonca with Tilda Swinton


shot in California and Mexico.

The film was inspired by:

* Gloria (film) (1980), a film directed by John Cassavetes
* Gloria (film) (1999), a remake of John Cassavetes' Gloria by Sidney Lumet
* Gloria (TV series) , an All in the Family spin-off



Julia is a confusing film with gender at center stage. The academy award winning actress Tilda Swinton did an outstanding performance in her role as Julia, an attractive alcoholic woman, who in her superficial effort to stop drinking by attending an AA meeting meets up with a scam maker who deals in money for a kidnapped eight to ten year old boy.

What ensues is a series of chase scenes and schemes replete with guns drawn and even used when the moment seemed ripe. This masculine driven behavior is contrasted with Julia's maternal striving that seem harshly hidden in the beginning of the film.

I am not as disturbed by women dressed up in clothes and behavior and general speech and demeanor to seem like men but the lack of any character in the film for me to identify with is a serious problem. I didn't like anyone and I doubt if any viewer could. What I did like was the contrast in life style between the rampant poverty in Mexico , the barren harsh desert and the affluent American life style that is afforded to even the downward mobile citizens.

Men seem to like this film, perhaps they feel titillated by it (as will some woman) because there is a playful element to the interactions.

Putting children into an intensely disturbed adult setting often yields awkward juxtaposition and amusing moments in contrast to the harsh authoritarian rule.
Julia is a case in point.

But
For a film like this to "work" there has to be a reason to care, to feel a positive emotional involvement with someone on screen and that didn't happen. Not for me.

Linda Zises
WBAI Women Collective

"TURNING POINTS" Left Forum

The Left Forum, April 17-19, 2009 conference entitled "Turing Points" was larger than years past due to he change in venue. In the post few years the weekend event was held at Cooper Union. This year the "left" community or those who just want to know piled into Pace University the third and sixth floor to hear "what is going on " and what the alternative media and academicians have to say on current events.

Current events of note abound.

From one session to another three to five men stood on their small podium to discuss the depression (here there is no illusion of a repression or slow down of economic malais) with tentative offerings of an assessment of what use we, not them, can make of the moment and where do we go from here.

Where we go from here is an endless topic with lively criticism of the current policies and forecast of doom and gloom for the "risk and speculation" debt driven world that has dominated the economy known as Capitalism.

The grass roots movements seemed small but notable challenges for the rights of people to get what they think government should provide (food, clothing, shelter and the ability to fulfill their potential) while others debated the forecast of another "Bubble" or the dimensions of the crisis and if the crisis is good, leading towards another kind of economic system or bad, leading to a fascistic society where more members of the ruling elite separate themselves further and further from the crowded working/lower class citizens.

Of course there is still debate on if there is a working class and how will this huge debt be paid and by whom and will China loom large or will 'China come down into the mire of the world economy

It was lively, even enjoyable conference with plenty of books and ideas to take home. But the overall complaint as to why Men must be in the forefront and women so neglected as speakers remains in the minds of those who care about such things. Does gender matter?, was not one of the titles of the more than sixty sessions and vegetarianism was frowned upon as being off the map, irrelevant And if one looked around at the participants at the conference it is easy to see why Vegetarianism hasn't taken hold, at least, not for this group of high thinkers and poor eaters.



Linda zises
WBAI women Collective

FOREVER Heddy Honigmann's 'expressions of lasting love'

What a romantic title, an eye catching approach to a delicate subject, a cemetery in Paris.

I went to Paris, to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. After looking for housing I stepped inside its gates because I was in the vicinity. I thought an hour or so and I would be back on the streets looking for a place to stay.

But cemeteries, even Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn New York were not designed for only the no longer living in this world. They were formerly Parks, places to bring your picnic basket and partake of a family Sunday afternoon meal.

Perre Lachaise kept my interest for the entire day and to see this experience duplicated/preserved through the eyes of a master documentary maker is a rare and precious experience.

This film captures both the emotional moments of those who join in the celebration of life past and those who cherish the quiet world sans cars, where maps to find particular sites are a requisite in this beautiful, emotionally gripping retreat.

I have not been back to Paris in years and years but the sculptural creations in celebrated remembrance of each Nazi Concentration camp lingers in my mind, revisited in memory because they are what the best of Art is all about. To take what is and elevate it to a new configuration, a new memory stacked one upon the other.

That is the genius of Heddy Honigmann. She knows how to take a place, a moment, draw upon her ability to capture the essence as she sees it and create a work of Art with layer upon layer of meaning. The impact is as riveting as the Cemetery itself.

A necessary addition to our human experience.

Forever.

Grave sites of Note:

Jim Morrison
Oscar Wilde
Frederic Chopin
Marcel Proust
Maria Callas
, Guillaume Apollinaire,
Amadeo Modigliani,
Jean-Auguste Ingres,
Georges Méliès,
Yves Montand
Simone Signoret

And
their music,
their art,
their written words
preserved!

APRIL 21st
HOME-VIDEO RELEASE FROM ICARUS FILMS (DVD)


LindaZises
WBAI Women Collective

Cookies & Cream

------------------
Linda

Thank you for a very well written, thought out, and honest review. It is refreshing to see the female point of view on a film like this, and its because you have managed to find the intricate details of the character and the story, where sometimes male critics or reviewers missed it. Its refreshing. Thank you sincerely, for your interest. We will make sure to blog about it at our site, and let the world know about it and your writing. If there are any more films in our catalog that may be suitable to your tastes and sensibilities, we will definitely not hesitate to contact you.

Sincerely,

Princeton
www.onewaytv.blogspot.com

Cookies & Cream: Sex industry with a human twist

Written and Directed by Princeton Holt

Cookies and Cream: Another way of life, other options, other ways of finding independence, financial security and a home life.

Maybe not the American dream home life but a life where shopping is not a financial drain and care of one's body is an art, not an option.

Being a sex worker in America is not quarented work on the fast track to success. But Cookies&Cream and Candy too(Carmen's very young daughter) is a tale where Carmen a young woman, headed for pre-law classes at a local New York, maybe Brooklyn high school, is intercepted by three men on the hunt for another victim, another young woman ripe for the picking.

Camen (Jace Nicole) is their new recruit, their fish plucked out of the mainstream of American life headed for the underground sex world, a successful woman hungered by men(and enjoyed by women) world wide.

A fighter in the real world, Carmen's promoters don't ask her height, her weight, her age. They want to know her roots, her ethnic origin but what does this answer mean? If she said, American Black, Puerto Rican, French, Africans what difference does this label make? "I'm all mixed up", she confesses.

Her parents made no sense to me and her daughter, Candy, was so sad. There is a constant theme of don't cry, don't feel what you really feel. Be false to yourself, be strong, cruel in the moment of potential tenderness.

Love is so thin, so tender that when Carmen walks away from an attempt at honest integrity with a man who seems to like her, not for her body alone but for her personality, her strength of mind and feeling, there is a moment when even I wanted to yell at the screen, cry , cry, cry for us all.

For inquiring minds, for people who might not want to go up on the Web to play voyeur to scenes from the money minded people who proliferate handsomely in the underworld of sex, this film will open your eyes and mind to what it is to be successful in the sex industry. What it means to fail can only be far worse.

This human tragedy unfolds with great acting and musical scores of serious excellence.

We need more films like Cookies & Cream.

One Way or Another Productions

WWW.Cookiesncreammovie.com
A web sight well worth viewing.

LindaZises
WBAI Women Collective

State of Play (2009): An Horror Film

without the traditional horror of bizarre distorted images.

State of Play is a 'twist and turn' thriller about a rising U. S. congressman and an hippy type investigative journalist embroiled in a case of seemingly unrelated, brutal murders. The saga is sprinkled generously with political ideas and Google rich images that identify it as a film designed to make money but to do it with style, with an intent to entertain and to speak to its audience with hopes of a huge largess.

Starring: Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright Penn, Jason Bateman, Helen Mirren, Jeff Daniels, Josh Mostel, Michael Weston, Barry Shabaka Henley, Viola Davis

Screenwriter: Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, Billy Ray

There are films that seem bigger than life. As they unfold the bigger than life images, the sound, the strength of the music and voices and the extraordinary acting seem to rise to a level that is new, different and so engaging the entire real world disappears in the viewing moments. The creation of another fantasy Universe takes over and we forget where we are or why.

This out of life/self experience is even more true for State of Play because we are allowed to see people(actors) who have faces we can recognize and bodies! It isn't just a film with a huge number of heads talking without benefit of shoulders, torso or extremities of note.

As the story unfolds with all the twists and turns of a good tale, there are moments worth laughing at and moments when the horror of today's world is on the enlarged screen and we can't escape even though we may want to. This is a film of today, in content, in the production and expertise of creation It is a film that forces us to examine our own personal prejudices.

From the opening scene we would think, although we may not want to, that this is another black drug addict victim crime with all the preconceived notions that are so very familiar to us all. There is a list of credits and then the film starts and we see how wrong, how painfully wrong we are. This is a film that brings out not the petty black male drug pusher but the white male criminal of today, the white collar "powerful" who know only the moment of their potential self worth, without the ability to cherish those who love, those who understand that we are a people united by the quality of our connection to one another, our ability to procreate with love, not by the size of our net worth.

Once seen the film promises to remain in clear focus for years to come

Opens Friday in theaters everywhere

LindaZises
WBAI Women Collective