Greg Palast: BIG EASY TO BIG EMPTY:

Grag Palast’s work is seldom shown in the United States. His film Big Easy To Big Empty is not even listed on Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB)
He is not a particularly popular writer, filmmaker, political commentator but he is an essential addition to an informed knowledge base for those who want to be informed. Known for his work on Democracy, the Bush debacles and many other issues, he is not knowN for his latest work, a documentary entitled Big Easy To Big Empty. It is a short documentary on want happened and continues to happen in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina.


It is a worthwhile film not just to inform on the Government’s failure to act before and after the Katrina and Rita disasters but to be able to predict the future because New Orleans will one day explode and the source of that explosion is chronicled in GrEg Palast’s work.

The people in New Orleans are angry. They see with intense clarity what is planned for them; their expulsion by the overflowing Mississippi capitalized on by those with the money to continue building their empires to attrack those with money to be spent and lost without evidence of its existence. (Donald Trump, Bill Gates but not Magic Mountain. He has already been sent packing with his plans in tow)

Throwing away money is only a small part of the source of rage the former inhabitants are reacting to. They are not stupid, nor naive and they are being given guns for little money and no evidence of established need required. They are being ostracized from their former homes without legitimate cause and they are being passed over when it comes to who will rebuild the City. Certainly the hands that will do the work will not be those of color, not if the present administration has its way.


While the natives of New Orleans don’t like to hear or use the work Government we the onlookers can and must. Because the meeting of the enemy head on is something I never envisioned possible until this weekend when I arrived in New Orleans and talked to the people and listened to them speak and saw their tears, their pain, their humanity crying out to be heard.

Greg Palast gives the viewer an insight into the horror of the broken levees that should have been kept to apple pie order. He presents the escape routes that were up and ready to run prior to the disaster and the insistence of the Government to ignore them. Greg Palast documentary is a must see, an insight into the future, into what youth is being reared on so that whey they strike we know what side they and we are on.



Linda Zises

New Orleans Levees: Mending Walls

On April 11 the Vagina Monologues created a V-day celebration that in fact lasted two days. It wasn’t just another Madison Square Garden event or a photo opportunity to show where someone like Oprah Winfrey spends her tax deducible dollars. This was a convening of women from around the world to bring attention to the depressed condition of New Orleans, once the music capital of the world. Today New Orleans is the murder capital of the United State with the fear of the angry children with guns ever present. And every four months another gun show comes to town distributing their goods for $50 each, to be bought by anyone, no credentials required.


This antediluvian New Orleans is palatable with its fear, rage and insidious depression at the United States Government’s failure to secure in working order the essential levees that kept the water out of the city in years past. This compounded with the Government's apparent subsequent lack of interest or intent to restore New Orleans to even the barest minimum of days past has created an atmosphere that is sad or angry depending on whom you speak to, when. Underlying the depression is the fear from loss of homes, neighborhoods, and a way of life enjoyed by millions of Black people living outside of the city proper.

For me this city looks like I imagine Cuba before Castor with its huge money making casinos at the center of the city and its ever looming skyscraper hotels to accommodate those who have never seen nor ever intend to see the likes of the New Orleans Ninth Ward.

This is a city ripe for Revolution where loss of livelihood prevails, where a promise for a better life is not even brought into the fore. This is a city where “Government” is a word not to be spoken, where hope has sunk deeper then the deluge that caused the holocaust, where the guns preventing people from coming into the city to help the afflicted and guns keeping the afflicted at the mercy of nature will forever be drawn, pointed at the innocent victims of hurricane Katrina and the subsequent hurricane Rita.


This weekend, even with the American Airlines cancellation of thousand of air flights, women from around the world came into town with their flaming pink and red colors, their spirit of nurturing, helping, feeling and just being there for this afflicted city.
Their purpose: to bring back the Super-doom, to reclaim it and divest it of the memory of five days of starvation without water, hygiene, hope, where thousand died and dead bodies were brought out to the curb deposited by the trash receptacles would be erased forever. To erase this memory, the women from the Vagina Monologues set about creating an artful healing environment with the Vagina monologue warriors leading the way, with hair salons, and prayer centers, with massages, and healing teas, all free, and with so much more of what we know, about bringing life back into the lifeless, bringing hope, fun, music and dance to rekindle the soul.


As the houses emptied of the New Orleans people so did the love, the pervasiveness of the music, Jazz originated and grew and flourished in the past, is seldom heard . And the quiet that now covers the city is mirrored in the lack of the scrabble of squirrels up the backside of trees and the paucity of birds singing gently in the sky.


There will come a time when this city will be rebuilt but what all seem to fear is who will prevail. Will it be the music of a human voice, or the sound of the slot machines and money exchanging hands while all too many beg for the spare change. Who will do the building? Will the black men be brought into the economic recovery or will they be marginalized as I saw while I was here. Will they, the former workers in New Orleans, be replaced by immigrants? That is the ever present question.

Thank you, Eve Ensler and the Vagina Monologues for bringing the plight of New Orleans in 2008 to the attention of the World, for saying people do matter and life is a precious commodity, even the life of a woman, a young girl who will never become president of the United States or an ambassador in the government’s administration.
Let us use this spirit of hope to bring about a change for the better, not for the already wealthy few.

Maybe one day the birds will again sing in Louis Armstrong park where even the homeless will be able to enjoy life and the mentally ill not feel dumped.
Maybe we are all mentally ill, dumped by the powers that be. But we need not let others do to us what we foresee in the not too distant future.


If ever a place was ripe for revolution, it’s here, in New Orleans.


Congratulations, Vagina Monologues on a job well done.
And thank you Eve Ensler for your inspiration



Linda Zises

Mending Walls: Robert Frost

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

STOP: child pornography in mainstream films:

There continues to be a trend of showing all, even on television where women are half dressed, acting as sexy as the industry will tolerate and worse. This trend is carrying over into film and our tolerance for the infringement on the natural processes of maturation is ever expanding.

STOP

It is difficult enough without the intervention of adult retrospective memories and voyeuristic strivings to come of age, to discover the world of sex, of being desired and wanted not for who you are but for what you promise to be.

Home economics may not be pushing girls to stay at home and strive to be good wives but the film industry is taking over by putting into the forefront of becoming, the need to deal with sexuality without benefit of a relationship to smooth the way into adulthood. Pornography for boys, interferes with their ability to relate to their age appropriate mates and pornography in film wreaking havoc on these poor girls who act the part without even knowing what it is all about.
Stop child pornography. Stop using children to educate, to entertain.
Let our children be children.
For the sake of future generations, desist from commodification of our children. Allow them to grow up without telling them what their sexuality is all about. and without making money from their natural maturation.

So says,
me.


Linda Zises

Water Lilies: young love in search of a relationship

Water Lilies
Celine Sciamma

Koch Lorber Films
Unrated for viewers: R for the actors.





Water Lilies is about three 15 (or younger) year old teenager girls, all of them just at about the same psychological stage of budding sexuality, who meet at the swimming pool during those long summer days when children are meant to fend for themselves and parents, adults cease to exist.


Water Lilies is a film for whom? Not for children, not for teenagers who would find it cold, calculating dispassionate tale about what they are supposed to feel, do and think once sexuality becomes a part of their everyday life.
I think this movie is for men, for those who want to look at what is considered a problem for young teenages: the loss of their virginity, finding their sexual identity.
Are all girls first homosexuals before becoming heterosexual as Celine Sciamma suggests?

This theme of young relationships goes far to present sexuality without benefit of human relations to sustain this new ingredient in a young girl’s life It is becoming so common it is almost trendy. Water Lilies seems to focus more on informing men about girls rather than in finding something to cherish, to love and identify with in the character’s presented plight. That is also true of Juno, where it wasn’t the relationship that was paramount but rather the result of going outside of the box, no pun intended, with the result of an unwanted pregnancy. For whom will the theme of a girl’s emerging sexuality have sufficient meaning and depth to ensure importance or will it deteriorate into just another semi pornographic moment?

Water Lilies does show tremendous talent and for a first effort it is outstanding. I hope the next film by this talented film maker will embrace a subject worth seeing, done with a delicate touch. and a wealth of human interaction without resorting to explicit sexuality recreated by underage children for the pleasure of their adult audience.
For a short (14 minutes) superb film on the same subject, I recommend MAN. But who watches short films? Maybe you.


Linda Zises

The Fall: Tarsem Singh

Plot:
Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is a broken man in more ways than one: Unable to walk after a fall from a horse in a movie stunt gone awry, his girlfriend ran off with the movie's leading man and he is hospitalized in 1915 in a Los Angeles hospital feeling very sorry for himself.
He launches on a plan to end his life that features befriending a five year old girl(Catinca Untaru) with his ability to tell epic stories In exchange for the continued telling of his elaborate tale, he bribes her to steal lethal pills to be used for his ultimate demise.

Commentary:
This is the work of a master film maker. The elaborate story told to the child uses 18 countries as the location for the footage. The scenes are beautiful, the story alittle too complicated for me but what stands out the most is the underlying immorality of the plot itself.

Imagine this selfish man devising a plan to use a five year old girl as an assistant in the act of his suicide when he is the very person with whom she has developed a loving relationship that sustains and softens her isolation during her own protracted period of hospitalization.


Image the ruination of her life once she comes of age and realises what she has done. The hours of therapy, if she is lucky, to free herself of guilt, to free herself of love for this cruel man. Imagine her struggle to come to terms with what he was really like and to grasp the significance of his evil, self centered uncaring nature!

This is a horror film with an agenda that is so callous towards the emotional life of a child that it made me recoil. Yet, it might just be part of the general misuse of children in the film industry, a trend I hope will one day be reversed.


Linda Zises

children in feature films

Two films are about to be released that feature children as main characters: The remake of The Red Balloon and the Fall.

It is interesting that there are labor laws that restrict chikldren under fourteen years of age from working at blue collar jobs and yet we sit through films where the children, young children are put to work for our entertainment.

What is this all about? In both of the above films the children are not even teenagers and yet they are on the screen shot after shot, working.
Is anyone else upset about this phenomenon?

Linda Zises

ladies film club: introduction

The ladies film club is for those women who are reticent about writing and yet they have a significant input in the film industry with their dollars spent in support of the industry.

The ladies film club is also a place to meander and write without having to stick to a specific format. It is hoped that the films seen will function as a jumping off point for discussions of women's issues
This second agenda of the Ladies film club differs from the blogs that review films such as Criticalwomen on film.
Rather than being a conveyer of information, it is hoped that the ladiesfimclub will generate discussion among many women who want to explore the ideas triggered by films and documentaries. To particpate it is not necessary to see the film or documentary.

Example of current themes might be
violence in films
sex and the child
women exploited in films
the need for documentary films.


In anticipation of a lively discourse

Linda Zises
founder