JAMES AGEE CINEMA CIRCLE

**The Year In Movies 2011: The James Agee Cinema Circle On Arts Express Radio

2012-01-05T11:07:00.005-05:00

**The Year In Movies 2011: The James Agee Cinema Circle Political Perspective. It's no accident that all the film groups voting yearly for awards seem to come up with the same monotonous results. The dirty little secret of Hollywood is that awards are as calculated and predetermined as any lobbyist peddling influences in Congress. And here to disclose this reality and more from the unique perspective of the JACC Critics Chapter, is Arts Express Radio mystery guest, The Unrepentant Marxist.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

**Music From The Barricades: The Arts Express Best Of The Net Hotspot pick from the Occupy Movement for this week. Plus, Best People's Soundtrack of 2011.

Stay tuned for continuing features of Arts Express: Expression In The Arts. Airing On WBAI Radio's Pacifica Network and Affiliate Stations, including WPRR: Public Reality Radio. And if you'd like to Express yourself too, you can write to: ArtsExpressradio@gmail.com

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2011

2012-01-03T12:33:00.039-05:00

IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT

THE TRUMBO: The Award For BEST PROGRESSIVE DRAMATIC FEATURES is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.

3 BACKYARDS

ALBERT NOBBS

THE CONSPIRATOR

DRIVE

50/50

THE LINCOLN LAWYER

MEET MONICA VELOUR

THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED

PUNCTURE

REPO CHICK

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

THE GARFIELD: The Award for BEST ACTORS is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

GEORGE CLOONEY: THE DESCENDANTS

JOSEPH GORDON LEVITT: 50/50

LOU TAYLOR PUCCI: THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED

KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESSES. Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

GLENN CLOSE: ALBERT NOBBS

DANAI GURIRA: 3 BACKYARDS
MARGARITA LEVIEVA: THE LINCOLN LAWYER

JANET MCTEER: ALBERT NOBBS

KATIE O'GRADY: RID OF ME

ROBIN WRIGHT: THE CONSPIRATOR

THE RENOIR: The Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILMS is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, "Grand Illusion."

CATERPILLAR

THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED

THE GILLO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILMS is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

THE OLD SCHOOL OF CAPITALISM

THE IRON CROWS

LE HAVRE

POETRY

THE TIME THAT REMAINS

WHEN WE LEAVE

ZERO BRIDGE

THE DZIGA: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARIES is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."

THE BIG FIX

THE BIG UNEASY

THE BILL HICKS STORY

DAMN!

THE LAST MOUNTAIN
PLASTIC PLANET

THE PRICE OF SEX

PROJECT NIM

RED SHIRLEY

SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL

UNDER THE BOARDWALK

WOMEN ART REVOLUTION

YOU BETCHA

THE BOUND FOR GLORY AWARD: The Award for BEST ANTI-CAPITALIST FILMS is named after the 1976 Hal Ashby directed biopic about Woody Guthrie, played by the late David Carradine.

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN

THE BIG FIX

THE BIG UNEASY

CHASING MADOFF

CRIME AFTER CRIME

FARMAGEDDON

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

IF A TREE FALLS

THE LAST MOUNTAIN
MOTHERLAND

THE MAN NOBODY KNEW

MARGIN CALL

THE OLD SCHOOL OF CAPITALISM

THE PRICE OF SEX

PROGRAMMING THE NATION

PUNCTURE

REPO CHICK

LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.

ALBERT NOBBS

CRIME AFTER CRIME
THE HEDGEHOG
THE HELP

MEEK'S CUTOFF

MOZART'S SISTER

RED SHIRLEY

RID OF ME

SHEHERAZADE: TELL ME A STORY

SNOWFLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN
WHEN WE LEAVE

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

ZERO BRIDGE

OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in movies this year.

3 BACKYARDS
ALBERT NOBBS

THE HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER

ILLEGAL

THE INHERITORS

THE LAST MOUNTAIN

PIECE OF THE PIE

RED SHIRLEY

THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movies that best express the people of color experience, in light of their historically demeaning portrayals in films.

3 BACKYARDS

THE HELP

PARIAH

THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in movies

AMIGO
EVEN THE RAIN

IF A TREE FALLS

PIECE OF THE PIE

THE OLD SCHOOL OF CAPITALISM

THE SERGEI: The Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT OR ACTIVISM is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."

DARYL HANNAH

THE LAWSON: The Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILMS this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.

CATERPILLAR

THE DEBT

SARAH'S KEY

THE MODERN TIMES: The Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRES is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

PIECE OF THE PIE

REPO CHICK

THE ORSON: The Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Films is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.
BACK OF THE BUS
THE CLIENT LIST

RED SQUAD
TRIANGLE FIRE [JAMILA WIGNOT]

THE PASOLINI: The Award for Best PRO-GAY Films is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales" in the 1970s.

PARIAH
TOAST

COURAGE IN FILMAKING::
THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT

ELIA KAZAN HALL OF SHAME 2011: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year is named after director Elia Kazan, who was Hollywood’s 'King Rat.' Kazan not only informed on accused radicals to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he took out a New York Times ad justifying his self-serving treachery.

*The Elia Kazan Hall Of Shame represents the 'don't tell me to shut up' sidebar contribution of individual members, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the entire Circle. Also, members may be objecting to particular characters in a film, and not the entire movie.

Atlas Shrugged: A Tea Party directed and funded production taunting the status quo with a Greed Is Fabulous mantra - and laced with topsy turvy Marxism extolling robber barons in mass rebellion.

Hollywood's Odious Icons of 2011: J. Edgar and The Iron Lady's faux feminist, Margaret Thatcher.

Melancholia: One Percent self-indulgent navel-gazing.

Page One: Disingenuous infomercial disguised as doc spins the NY Times.

Potiche: Anti-labor Sarkozy era cynical revisionism, in which French capitalist trophy wife Catherine Deneuve takes over as head of the union of her spouse's company.

There Be Dragons: Opus Dei funds and restages the Spanish Civil War, with Franco's fascists in league with the Catholic Church as the good guys this time around.

Snuff Movie Bad Taste Award: Hilary and company in dazzled spectator mode, assembled for a bizarre photo op at the premiere of the Osama Bin Laden Navy Seals action thriller. Popcorn and Jawbreakers, anyone?

Pariah Vs. Precious: Authentic Tale Vs. Poverty Porn

2012-01-03T12:10:00.005-05:00

Courtesy of Noah Zwieg

'...A movie about a Black teenage girl struggling with her identity, who suffers verbal abuse from her mother and struggles to fit in with her peers, is currently getting a strong Oscar buzz. No, the movie is not “Precious 2” it is “Pariah,” the story of a teenage lesbian coming to grips with her identity. Fortunately, “Pariah” differs with “Precious” in several key ways, making this offering a markedly better standout.'

READ NEWSONE FOR BLACK AMERICA ARTICLE HERE

Atlas Shrugged: Who Is Dagney Taggart, And Why Does She Hate The Workingclass?

2011-04-23T20:38:00.011-04:00

...Atlas Shrugged taunts the status quo with a combo Greed Is Fabulous mantra, laced with topsy turvy Marxism extolling robber barons in mass rebellion. And with a right wing feminazi head honcho presiding over a railroad empire, who nevertheless dresses like she just exited modeling school. But in the end, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged seems to be serving up nothing more than lots of hokey capitalist wishful thinking, disclaimer free zone super-wealthy diatribes, and pretentious political yakety yak...

READ ATLAS SHRUGGED MOVIE REVIEW HERE

...The rich man’s “strike” portrayed in the film would be a blessing for working people today. If, like the “great men” in the film, today’s rich of the world walked away from their banks, factories, mines and oil wells, for whatever reason, this would be no problem for the working class. We pump the oil, work the cash registers, do the hours in the plants, cook the food, invent things, create works of art, design computer programs, build buildings and do all else that produces society’s wealth.

We could easily own and operate society without the leeches at the top because they contribute nothing, merely owning what is collectively produced. Our message to all billionaires who would rally behind Rand’s fictional John Galt and give up their supposed greatness in protest is, “Good riddance!”

We simply don’t need the rich...

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

MOVIES TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2011

2011-04-20T12:04:00.000-04:00

JANUARY-APRIL 2011

JANUARY

The Time That Remains
Plastic Planet
Repo Chick
A Useful Life
Johnny Mad Dog*
When We Leave

FEBRUARY

Even The Rain*
Zero Bridge: Louis Proyect Commentary
Unknown
Red Shirley
Back Of The Bus
Triangle Fire

MARCH

The Lincoln Lawyer
3 Backyards*
The Music Never Stopped
Illegal
Six, Seven, Eight
Paul
Miral
Service Entrance
Mozart's Sister
The Human Resources Manager

APRIL

THE CONSPIRATOR
MEEK'S CUTOFF*
AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY
ARMADILLO
THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD
SUPER
THE BANG BANG CLUB
ATLAS SHRUGGED

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2010

2011-03-30T20:06:00.002-04:00

THE TRUMBO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURES is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.
CASINO JACK
CONVICTION
JONAH HEX
MACHETE
PRINCE OF BROADWAY
PRINCESS KAIULANI
THE COMPANY MEN
THE PERFECT GAME
THE TROTSKY
WOMEN WITHOUT MEN

THE GARFIELD: The Award for BEST ACTORS is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

PRINCE ADU: PRINCE OF BROADWAY
JAY BARUCHEL: THE TROTSKY
TOMMY LEWIS: RED HILL
ANTHONY MACKIE: NIGHT CATCHES US
KEVIN SPACEY: CASINO JACK
DANNY TREJO: MACHETE

KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESSES. Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.
JESSICA ALBA, MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ: MACHETE
SALLY HAWKINS: MADE IN DAGENHAM
Q'ORIANKA KILCHER: PRINCESS KAIULANI
NOOMI RAPACE: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
HILARY SWANK: CONVICTION
SHABNAM TALOUI: WOMEN WITHOUT MEN
YAHIMA TORRES: BLACK VENUS

THE RENOIR: The Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILMS is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, "Grand Illusion."

AMERICAN RADICAL: THE TRIALS OF NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

DRY LAND
GREEN ZONE
JONAH HEX
RACHEL
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA: DANIEL ELLSBERG AND THE PENTAGON PAPERS

THE GILLO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILMS is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

ALTIPLANO
BUDRUS
VIDEOCRACY
WOMEN WITHOUT MEN

THE DZIGA: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARIES is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."
CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY
GASLAND
LAST TRAIN HOME
NESHOBA
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
THE OATH
THE TILLMAN STORY
WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE

THE BOUND FOR GLORY AWARD: The Award for BEST ANTI-CAPITALIST FILMS is named after the 1976 Hal Ashby directed biopic about Woody Guthrie, played by the late David Carradine.
ALL GOOD THINGS
DAYBREAKERS
EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES
FLOORED
INSIDE JOB
REPO MEN
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
THE JONESES
WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.

AGORA
CHILDREN OF INVENTION
CONVICTION
FAIR GAME
LOVELY, STILL
MODERN LOVE IS AUTOMATIC
PRINCESS KAIULANI
QUEST FOR HONOR
SALT OF THIS SEA
WOMAN REBEL

OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in movies this year.

BIUTIFUL
HOLY ROLLERS
MADE IN DAGENHAM
PRINCE OF BROADWAY
SAVING GRACE
THE COMPANY MEN
THE PERFECT GAME
WASTELAND

THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movies that best express the people of color experience, in light of their historically demeaning portrayals in films.

BLACK VENUS
FOR COLORED GIRLS
NIGHT CATCHES US

THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in movies

MACHETE
OUTSIDE THE LAW
RED HILL

THE SERGEI: The Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."

LENA HORNE [posthumous]: [6/30/17- 5/9/10] As an anti-racist activist, she refused to appear before racially segregated US Army audiences in WW2 Italy. Horne was also branded a 'communist sympathizer' because of her association with Paul Robeson and her progressive political beliefs, which led her to be blacklisted in the 1950s. Lena Horne passed away on Mothers Day at the age of 92.

THE LAWSON: The Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILMS this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.

A FILM UNFINISHED
ARMY OF CRIME
VINCERE

THE MODERN TIMES: The Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRES is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

DOUBLE TAKE

OSS 117, LOST IN RIO
PUNCHING THE CLOWN
RARE EXPORTS
THE TROTSKY

THE ORSON: The Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Films is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.

EXTERMINATORS
IF GOD IS WILLING AND THE CREEK DON'T RISE
PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME

THE PASOLINI: The Award for Best PRO-GAY Films is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales" in the 1970s.

HOWL
I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

BEST MOVIE LINE: 'We Will Kill The American Disease.' - The Expendables

COURAGE IN FILM CRITICISM: Armond White: For publicly standing up to the studios and prevailing, regarding refusal to admit him to press screenings of Greenberg because of previous negative reviews of director Noah Baumbach's films.

ELIA KAZAN HALL OF SHAME 2010: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year is named after director Elia Kazan, who was Hollywood’s 'King Rat.' Kazan not only informed on accused radicals to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he took out a New York Times ad justifying his self-serving treachery.

*The Elia Kazan Hall Of Shame represents the 'don't tell me to shut up' sidebar contribution of individual members, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the entire Circle. Also, members may be objecting to particular characters in a film, and not the entire movie.

GENERATION ZERO
HARRY BROWN
THE EXPENDABLES
THE FIGHTER
THE GHOST WRITER
TRUE GRIT
WINTER'S BONE: [THE MASSES ARE MORONS. AKA POVERTY PORN]: In other words, do actors really have to look so dumb and stumble over their words or behave primitively in the extreme, when impersonating proletarians in movies?]

JACC Best Of The Net Hotspot: Courage In Street Theater

2011-03-26T13:44:00.007-04:00

UK UNCUT: Half A Million Strong Mass Occupation of Top Secret Targets, 3/26/11

Visit UK Uncut

Visit US Uncut

Resistance Films

Johnny Depp: Tonto Si, Pancho Villa No?

2010-12-13T16:58:00.006-05:00

Johnny Depp has been approached to play the legendary Mexican hero Pancho Villa but the RANGO star has second thoughts on playing the famous revolutionary.

Online sites reported that Serbian director Emir Kusturica is helming a movie on the Mexican Robin Hood with Johnny Depp taking on the role and Salma Hayek co-starring. However, during a press conference for his animated film RANGO on Saturday, Johnny Depp revealed the project "is up in the air," for him as he is facing a "dilemma" in playing one of the "great heroes of Mexico". While he admires his friend and filmmaker Kusturica, he feels he is not the right choice to play the leader of the 1910 Mexican revolution. "I feel like it should be played by a Mexican not some mug from Kentucky. I feel very strongly about that."

CONTINUE READING CINEMOVIE ARTICLE HERE

On The Other Hand....

Johnny Depp rides Into The Unknown As Tonto In Remake Of The Lone Ranger

...There is also potential controversy in the role of Tonto itself. The original character, with his pidgin English, has long been seen by many Native Americans as an insult. Later versions of the character – in comic strips and the 1981 film Legend of the Lone Ranger – gave Tonto more depth, making him an equal partner of the Lone Ranger. However, it still might irritate some that Tonto will be played by a white actor, mirroring the controversial practice of many early films that put Native Americans characters on screen but did not use Native American actors to play them....

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Noah Zweig
JACC News Desk

"It is a sad and beautiful world." -Roberto Benigni
"Yeah, it's a sad and beautiful world, buddy." Tom Waits, Down By Law (Jarmusch,1986)

Noah is working on a dissertation tentatively entitled The Cultural and Media Politics of the Bolivarian Revolution. The project analyzes state-backed film and TV productions in Venezuela under the government of Hugo Chávez. He has an essay, "Foregrounding Public Cinema and Rural Audiences: the USDA Motion Picture Service as Cinematic Modernism, 1908-1938," in the forthcoming (fall 2009) issue of The Journal of Popular Film and Television. His interests include Latin American national cinemas, critical globalization studies, and critical cultural policy studies. Noah received a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA. In addition to academic work, he has served as an AmeriCorps VISTA member in East Los Angeles.

Texas Refuses to Pay ‘Machete’ Producers

2010-12-12T22:02:00.005-05:00

WSJ Washington Wire

By Russell Gold

Let’s get this out of the way first: Robert De Niro looks nothing like Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Or Sen. John Cornyn. Or any other Texas politician we can think of.

However, Mr. De Niro’s portrayal of the fictional Sen. John McLaughlin in Machete, an B movie shoot-’em-up released in September, has apparently made some folks in Austin upset.

The Texas Film Commission says it will refuse to pay $1.75 million in state incentives to the movie’s producers citing a state law that allows the state to refuse to pay incentives for “content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion.”

But what exactly is the “negative” portrayal the governor’s staff object to? Most commentators assume it is Sen. McLaughlin’s character, a virulently anti-immigration politician whose faux ad supports an “electrified border fence” and pledges “no amnesty for parasites.”

Or is it the fact that at the end of the movie, the main character – an ex-Mexican federal police officer played by Danny Trejo – gets legal status? This is after he leads a group of Mexican immigrants in a confrontation with border vigilantes.

Calls to the Texas Film Commission were forwarded to Gov. Perry’s press office. Katherine Cesinger, the governor’s spokeswoman, said the letter to the filmmakers didn’t specify why the movie ran afoul of the “negative” portrayal criteria. “The totality of the project is what the office takes a look at,” she said.

In this era of states hemorrhaging red ink, will others follow Texas’s lead and play film critic, only handing out incentives to Hollywood for movies and television shows that meet certain content guidelines? The Motion Picture Association of America told The Wall Street Journal this summer that no other state reviews the content of films before awarding subsidies.

At any rate, the loss of $1.75 million won’t bankrupt the aptly named Troublemaker Studios, the production company that made the film. The production budget was $10.5 million and it’s domestic gross was $26.6 million, according to website Box Office Mojo.

One big winner: Machete and Troublemaker Studios. The movie has yet to be released on DVD and, as they say, all publicity is good publicity.

Machete was distributed by 20th Century Fox, which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.

Noah Zweig
JACC News Desk

JACC Awards 2010 Discussion On The Air

2010-12-11T01:03:00.000-05:00

Woman Rebel: Maoist Female Guerrillas In Nepal - Small Screen, Big Picture

What do Hugo Chavez, Sylvester Stallone, Jack Abramoff, Charlie Chaplin, Norman Finkelstein, Dalton Trumbo, Evo Morales and Elia Kazan have in common? The James Agee Cinema Circle Awards 2010, of course. Tune in to Arts Express Radio on WBAI Radio in NY for a look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly in movies this year, with Prairie Miller and special guest film commentary provided by Louis Proyect, alias The Unrepentant Marxist.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Sally Hawkins Talks Female Ford Plant Struggles, In Made In Dagenham

2010-11-11T14:53:00.004-05:00

Screening Women: Female Images Inscribed In History. A conversation with British actress Sally Hawkins, investigating the striking UK Ford Plant women machinists who made history in Made In Dagenham.

Beyond The Sacrificial Good Woman: Black Feminism And Freethought

2010-10-30T10:26:00.001-04:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the 1997 film The Apostle Robert Duvall plays a white Southern Christian fundamentalist preacher and murderer on the lam seeking redemption. The film is literally cluttered with images of devout blacks, from black women swaying in the breeze at a big tent church revival to a particularly indelible church scene of dozens of black men chanting “Jesus” in rapturous response to Duvall’s pulpit-pounding call. I found The Apostle perversely fascinating because it trotted out this totally revisionist romanticized narrative of black obeisance to yet another charismatic but flawed white renegade savior figure in Louisiana (where, contrary to Hollywood flim-flammery, most of the congregations are racially segregated). These popular fantasies of black religiosity always seem to revolve around images of good, matronly black women eternally quivering with a strategic “Amen” or “can I get a witness;” subject to break out into a Blues Brothers back flip down the church aisle at any moment.

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of Blackfemlens, a journal of progressive commentary and literature, and the author of the upcoming Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America from Infidel Books. She is member of the James Agee 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.

Inside Job: Director Charles Ferguson Interview

2010-10-30T10:19:00.001-04:00

The unusual insider looking out perspective of corporate player turned filmmaker Charles Ferguson, about what exactly makes the Wall Street wheels go round and how it all spun out of control. And, during this at time contentious exchange, exactly how objective an insider may or may not be.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE

Prairie Miller

South Of The Border: Oliver Stone's Revolutionary Road Movie

2010-06-22T22:12:00.005-04:00

VENEZUALAN PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ AND CRISTINA FERNANDEZ, PRESIDENT OF ARGENTINA: TIME FOR REVOLUTION

The movie opens with three dorks from Fox discussing Hugo Chavez’s “drug problem”, which is described as starting his mornings with cocoa. You can’t make this shit up.
The movie consists of footage from television and old newsreels, largely intended to demonstrate the willingness of the media to serve State Department ambitions, as well as interviews with key Latin American leaders. It dawned on me during Oliver Stone’s sit-down with Ecuador’s Rafael Correa that I have never seen him interviewed on American television, nor were Argentina’s Kirchners, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, or Cuba’s Raul Castro ever given a moment on “Sixty Minutes” or any other news show. By allowing them to speak for themselves, Stone breaks a news embargo that is almost as vicious as that Cuba faces on the economic front....

CONTNUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

Louis Proyect
The Unrepentant Marxist

South Of The Border: A Dissenting Opinion

2010-06-21T20:40:00.000-04:00

When Things Go South

The Left Embraces Oliver Stone’s Newest Film

By Summer Gray and Noah Zweig
Dissidentvoices.org

Much of the U.S. left is atwitter about Oliver Stone’s latest film, South of the Border (2009): an eighty-minute-long travelogue/documentary about Latin America’s left-ward shift in the last decade. Those sympathetic to the counter-hegemonic tides of change in the region appear to have embraced what they characterize as Stone’s valiant journalism against liberal and right wing critics....

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

Noah Zweig is a member of the James Agee Cinema Circle

Summer Gray and Noah Zweig are graduate students at UC Santa Barbara in Sociology and Film and Media Studies.

Generation Zero Doc Review: Tea Party Cinema A Weak Brew

2010-03-25T15:24:00.007-04:00

...Invoking intimidating biblical scriptures that are fused visually with looming tornadoes, rotting fruit, paper money on fire, and a man versus lion beatdown, Generation Zero and its tea Party animals get down to business on fast forward by blaming the current economic crisis retroactively on Lucifer, Woodstock, Dems, post-hippie yuppies lighting up cigars with burning Ben Franklins, Hollywood, Black Panthers, anti-war protesters and disrespectful post-WWII youth. Which might leave the marginalized left in this country scratching their collective heads while caught between pondering these neo-McCarthyite attacks, and shock that they seem to wield such enormous power over the course of history...

CONTINUE TO READ COUNTERPUNCH REVIEW HERE

Mob Rules: Tea Party's High Noon

By Sikivu Hutchinson

...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 HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of Blackfemlens, 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 James Agee Cinema Circle, 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.

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS 2009

2010-03-24T14:10:00.010-04:00

AMERICAN VIOLET

AVATAR

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

THE MESSENGER

UP IN THE AIR

GEORGE CLOONEY: UP IN THE AIR

BEN FOSTER: THE MESSENGER

WOODY HARRELSON: THE MESSENGER

ALGENIS PEREZ SOTO: SUGAR

NICOLE BEHARIE: AMERICAN VIOLET

MELANIE LAURENT: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

SAMANTHA MORTON: THE MESSENGER

RENE ZELLWEGER: MY ONE AND ONLY

THE RENOIR: The Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILMS is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, "Grand Illusion."

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

THE MESSENGER

THE GILLO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILMS is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX

EVERLASTING MOMENTS

LEMON TREE

SERAPHINE

THE WEDDING SONG

AMERICAN CASINO

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

END OF POVERTY

GOOD HAIR

YOO-HOO MRS. GOLDBERG

LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.

AMERICAN VIOLET

AMREEKA

LEMON TREE

SUNSHINE CLEANING

OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in movies this year.

AMREEKA

BIG FAN

EVERLASTING MOMENTS

SUGAR

SUNSHINE CLEANING

UP IN THE AIR

THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movies that best express the people of color in light of the historically demeaning portrayal in films.

AMERCIAN VIOLET

AMREEKA

AVATAR

THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in movies.

AVATAR

THE BAADER MENIHOF COMPLEX

EVERLASTING MOMENTS

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

KEN LOACH for class conscious moviemaking and activism

EMMA THOMPSON for movement building against sex trafficking

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

THE WHITE RIBBON

THE MODERN TIMES: The Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRES is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

BRUNO

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

DRAG ME TO HELL

THE GOLDEN BOYS

PONTYPOOL

UP IN THE AIR

WHATEVER WORKS

GREY GARDENS

TATTOED UNDER FIRE

BRUNO

WHATEVER WORKS

BEST MOVIE LINE:

I Love You Because...'I LOVE THE WAY YOU FIGHT FOR WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN.' - A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL

COURAGE IN FILM CRITICISM: ROGER FRIEDMAN SUES TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FOR CRITIC ABUSE.

ELIA KAZAN HALL OF SHAME 2009: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year is named after director Elia Kazan, who was Hollywood’s 'King Rat.' Kazan not only informed on accused radicals to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he took out a New York Times ad justifying his self-serving treachery.

THE HURT LOCKER: A kind of 'Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb' - but for real, this thriller is basically about a military explosives expert in Baghdad who gets a huge rush out of his job, and he's not kidding. Which is to say that The Hurt Locker and its war is fun mantra - move over videogames and those second hand vicarious homicidal thrills - is just about as irresponsible as can be. Quick fix US military danger junkies go at it with Iraqis who range mostly from predators to ingrates, and not a single word about how or why we ended up there. The Hurt Locker: War is never having to say you're sorry.

PRECIOUS: Baby Mama Dearest minus the coat hangers and Hollywood mansion, this bad parenting ghetto horror movie boasts exceptional performances, but is social pornography at its worst, festering in racial self-loathing and class contempt, while oblivious to a system that ignores its neediest. And one of a number of subliminal anti-choice movies this year including Disgrace, that promote the incest and gang rape motherhood option versus abortion. The Bad Mommy Oscar goes to Mo'Nique.

PRECIOUS: If this film were a poor 'white trash' family/community, it wouldn't have received the applause that it did. The point is that it promotes prejudice against blacks, fat women, unmarried women, less educated women and a whole lot more. That it is successful screams out for another film from the same neighborhood where the family is kept above the fray of stereotyping, by a strong unmarried mother.

PRECIOUS, DISGRACE, JAZZ IN THE DIAMOND DISTRICT: Anti-Choice moviemaking, with absence of any option of abortion while promoting mandatory motherhood as the result of rape/incest/pedophilia, gang rape and date rape respectively.

ANTICHRIST: The cinematic equivalent of nails down a chalkboard. Pretentious pornography, satanic sex, and Willem Dafoe as an artsy New Age femocidal sexorcist.

DEADGIRL: Again the theme is vile sexual violence to women. In this case, the woman is dead and the men can do what they like with her And they do. This film brings out the worst of male fantasies towards women, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

SPINNING INTO BUTTER: Blaming the Black man for concocting a fantasy known as American racism.

Political Film: The Coca Cola Case

2010-03-23T22:31:00.001-04:00

The Coca Cola Case

The truth that refreshes

By Billy Wharton

“Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola,” Bob Dylan sang in 1971, “Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!” After forty years of corporate globalization, Dylan would be hard pressed to find a place that isn’t the land of Coca-Cola. Multinationals have torn up the globe converting the repression of workers into cheap labor and free trade agreements into new market opportunities all in the name of ever-increasing profit margins. Left in their wake are legacies of environmental destruction, corrupt governments and employer violence. This process is precisely what a documentary currently making the rounds in campus political circles, by German Gutierrez and Carmen Garcia’s entitled “The Cola-Case,” aims to expose.

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

More information about The Coca-Cola Case is HERE....

Political Film: Derivatives Come To The Movies

2010-03-23T21:35:00.001-04:00

Ellen Brown is the author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. She can be reached through her website.

Will Hollywood Go the Way of Enron?
Derivatives Come to the Movies

By Ellen Brown

As if attacks from paparazzi and star-crazed fans weren’t enough, Hollywood stars may soon have a literal price put on their heads by investors in the Cantor Exchange, a real-money trading platform where people can bet on the gross profits of upcoming movies. Sales of The Dark Knight skyrocketed after Heath Ledger died unexpectedly, and so did sales after the deaths of Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Will greed-driven investors now be laying in wait for the stars of movies they have bet on?

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

The Birth Of The Workers Film Movement

2010-03-23T21:31:00.004-04:00

Shirtwaist Factory Workers prepare to strike.

Screening Room: The birth of television news and US documentary in radical underground filmmaking, and the misremembering of history. Filmmaker Tom Hurwitz on the legacy and impact of the Great Depression Workers Film And Photo League, the Red Channels purges, and a people's cinema movement born in vacant lots and union halls.

Also...Transplant take-out medical terrorism and recipients resistance uprising, in Repo Men.

And...Stephen Wolf, reads poetry commemorating the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25,1911

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Avatar: Same Old Hollywood Product, Or Something New?

2010-02-15T09:47:00.000-05:00

By Joe Giambrone

...The overwhelming success of Avatar with audiences has actually given me some hope (not the plastic Obama brand of “hope” as substitute for moral policies). It is impossible to not get it. It is impossible to not accept that moral questions remain when people decide to take from others and to demonize them in order to achieve their desired “facts on the ground.”

Avatar is a timeless story, mythic, allegorical, and yet grounded to our actual history and to our current events. Perhaps art can go beyond imitating life and progress up to nudging it just a little in a better direction....

CONTINUE READING ARTICLE HERE

Joe Giambrone is the editor of The Political Film Blog. He hopes to hit an iceberg and sink just a fraction of the depth James Cameron has plummeted. Send political/film articles to: polfilmblog at gmail.com.

Israeli Wall Protesters Take On Avatar

2010-02-13T23:35:00.002-05:00

They equated their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film. Israel says the wall is needed for its security. Palestinians consider it a land grab.

AP & Reuters
Published: 00:00 February 14, 2010

Palestinians, Israelis and foreign activists dressed as characters from the movie Avatar campaign against the Israeli wall during a protest in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah on Friday.
Image Credit: Reuters

Image 1 of 2: 1 2

Occupied Jerusalem: Palestinian protesters have added a colourful twist to demonstrations against Israel's wall, painting themselves blue and posing as characters from the hit film Avatar.

The demonstrators also donned long hair and loinclothes on Friday for the weekly protest against the wall near the village of Bilin.

They equated their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film. Israel says the wall is needed for its security. Palestinians consider it a land grab.

Symbolic

The protests have become a symbol of opposition. They often end in clashes with Israeli security forces involving stones and tear gas.

The "Avatar" protest comes a day after the Israeli government began rerouting the wall to eat up less of the Palestinian village.

Palestinian officials say tracks have been laid down for a modified route near the village of Bilin. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter before official confirmation.

The Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government two and a half years ago to modify the route around Bilin.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank on Friday as he tried to stab them, an army spokeswoman said.

The man, identified by locals as 41-year-old Fayez Faraj, was wounded in the Hebron shooting and taken to an Israeli hospital, where he died.

Locals said Faraj, a father of 10, had worked in a shoe factory. Television footage showed a small yellow cutting blade lying next to his body.

A large Palestinian city where several hundred Jewish colonists live with an Israeli military garrison to protect them, Hebron has seen frequent violence.

Racial Politics And The Black Image In Hollywood

2010-02-12T12:02:00.005-05:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Our Weekly, Los Angeles

....Critical darling Precious (directed by African American filmmaker Lee Daniels) and audience favorite The Blind Side have both garnered Oscar nods for portrayals that some Black critics and moviegoers have dubbed condescending and stereotypical. The irony is not lost on novelist Ishmael Reed, author of the forthcoming Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media. In a recent article in the New York Times Reed wrote, “The Blacks who are enraged by Precious have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy...an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is 40 years behind Mississippi”....

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming book Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She writes for Our Weekly, is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, The James Agee Cinema Circle, a commentator on Pacifica's KPFK 90.7FM. and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.

JACC Anti-Oscars Discussed On The Air!

2010-01-19T11:04:00.003-05:00

And Janet Napolitano is still in the news. And she will not live her phrase down. She can speak of context, being misquoted, you name it. She said it. It is on her.

Today I listened to WBAI's The Arts Magazine which focused on Marx At The Movies today. Click here for WBAI archives and it is under 2:00 p.m. for today's broadcasts. I wish WBAI would keep their programs up longer than 89 days (it is no longer even 90).

It was a very entertaining hour. The blacklist was discussed included Karen Morley who was blacklisted for refusing to answer McCarthyism questions. She went on to run for office on the American Labor Party's ticket in 1954.

Louis Proyect was the guest for the first half hour. C.I. includes Mr. Proyect in the Iraq snapshots from time to time. This was my first time hearing Mr. Proyect on the radio and I found him to be a very entertaining guest and wondered why I -- with all my hours and hours and hours of listening to Pacifica Radio had not heard him before?

They addressed the James Cameron film. Gilad Atzmon reviewed the film at Dissident Voice ("A Humanist Call from Mt. Hollywood"). I did disagree with the call thatThe Hurt Locker has no point of view. I would suggest they both go back and watch again. But that is fine, we can disagree. And we agreed on "King Rat" at least. Elia Kazan. I cannot draw a line between the man and his art, sorry. I think he did a despicable thing (naming names, etc.) and really did not believe that there was any comeback from that.Click here for Mr. Proyect's view of 2009 in films.

A woman was the guest for the second half hour and they spoke more about the blacklist in that section and also had a lively discussion on how (badly) mothers were portrayed in 2009.

Ruth's Report

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

An excellent show. I was driving into NYC, and could concentrate on it. Packed with good info, wished I had been able to write down all the movie titles you mentioned, you presented an excellent context for the reviews. Congrats.

B. Aziz

Peace On Earth 2010

2010-01-01T13:17:00.006-05:00

A friend sent me this, I had never heard of this 1939 anti-war cartoon by MGM.
Bill Meyer, JACC

Peace On Earth (1939) Christmas Classic MGM Cartoon. World War II Academy Award Nominee for Best Short Subject (Cartoon), 1940. Originally Released on December 09, 1939.

CLICK TO WATCH CARTOON HERE

On Christmas Eve, two squirrel children ask their grandfather what men are. He describes them, then narrates the story of how humanity destroyed itself by war, as chilling scenes of armed conflict play on the screen. After the last human dies, the animals take their war implements and build homes from them, to live forever in peace.

Peace on Earth is a one-reel 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon short directed by Hugh Harman, about a post-apocalyptic world populated only by animals. The only cartoon ever nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize! It was broadcast in the US just after Germany had pre-emptively invaded Poland, a protest against Bush-Iraq-style pre-emptive wars, and before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor and thus entered WWII.

At first glance this looks like just another typically Disney-esque cartoons featuring cute animals, but once you see those battle scenes you can see that it is so much more than that. This is an anti-war tale with well animated battle scenes that are scary as anything else that has been seen on the silver screen. Those scenes are very unsettling and tapped into the fears that many people held as Europe was at war with itself.

This film was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for an animated short feature (it lost to Disneys "The Ugly Duckling") and was also, according to Hugh Harmon, nominated for the 1940 Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately the 1940 Nobel Prizes were cancelled because of World War II, so it did not win or lose that award.

Fifteen years before this release, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were employees of Walt Disney - in Kansas City. Disneys first animation studio was in that Midwestern city and it was, ultimately, a failure. Following the companys demise -- and with dreams of becoming a live-action director - Walt headed west. After shuffling around Los Angeles for a while, Disney realized that his best prospect for making a living was the cartoon business.

World War II was barely four months old when Peace landed on theater screens. Given the fact that a mood of patriotism and sacrifice was soon to grip the United States, the cartoons unapologetically anti-war stance is surprising. In the short, woodland creatures elebrate the Christmas season.

Two squirrel children stumble over the lyric peace on earth/good will to men because they have no idea what men are. Grampa squirrel explains that all of the men are gone; they succumbed to the fever of war and annihilated one another. Woodland creatures rebuild civilization and mourn their loss.

Cinema 2009: James Agee Circle Member Bill Meyer Weighs In

2010-01-01T13:00:00.007-05:00

New Films Use Humor To Make Sharp Points: Capitalism: A Love Story, The Time that Remains, The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Informant

Powerful Films Progressives Will Want To See: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Creation, City of Life and Death, The Front Line, Jean Charles, Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, Max Manus,
Moloch Tropical, Balibo

Toronto International Film Festival: Film Festival Faces Controversy On Israel Boycott: Covered, Israel films from Tel Aviv

A Revealing Documentary About Iran: Interview With Mehran Tamadon, Director Of Bassidji

Chicago International Film Festival: Few Happy Endings, But Much Food For Thought: Looking for Eric, Don't Let Me Drown, Fish Tank, Rain, Backyard, Precious, Antichrist, Mississippi Damned, Daniel and Anna, Kanikosen, Videocracy, Cooking History, The Messenger

Race And Politics In Movies: Obama, Precious And The Blind Side

2009-12-28T21:04:00.003-05:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the darkness of any given movie theatre, from Main Street USA to MLK Boulevard, they surround us: white America’s Hollywood objects of desire, playing romance and adventure in full amnesiac bloom. They taunt and entice, radiating spunk and derring-do in the face of strenuous man-hunting, universe-saving, dragon slaying and average hardworking Americana family-hood. Missing from the studio green light rosters are the tales of the ambitious, play by the rules black girls and boys newly-minted in the job market and beat down by underemployment. The ones who are initiated into adulthood on reverse discrimination screeds heralding the white working class as the last acceptably dumped on “minority.” The ones who are promised that the legions of Talented Tenth blacks armed with college degrees will level institutional racism. The ones who must quietly “absent” themselves from their resumes as white convicted felons, cashing in on their birthright, waltz through corporate doors.

A recent New York Times article on black college grads’ struggle to find jobs should be sobering for anyone with the deluded belief that Obama’s Talented Tenth magic will rub off on them. According to the Times, some black college grads, fearing that they will forever be consigned to fast food fryers or professional irrelevance, are changing their names from Rashida to Heidi, Omari to Chip (or Barack to Barry). Staggering black unemployment rates five percent above the national average have made black job applicants desperate to preempt racist discrimination by potential employers. In some instances, graduates of historically black colleges and universities have deleted all reference to their tenure and omitted mentions of involvement in ethnically suspect groups.

These trends point to the larger paradox of black invisibility. The Congressional Black Caucuses’ (CBC) futile White House lobby for targeted initiatives to address black unemployment underscores the divide between the image of black assimilation suggested by the hyper-telegenic Obama family and the reality of post-Jim Crow segregation. Jockeying for a white norm, blacks must effectively water themselves down, evacuate their social histories and memorialized sense of self and accomplishment. Racist death threats against Obama, coon/welfare mother cheat references on AOL news posts and Fox News fueled tea party insurgencies offer a steady avalanche of evidence that representations of blackness remain fixed in the white mainstream mind.

Indeed, the current crop of mainstream film narratives about blackness, from the blockbuster white woman’s burden romp The Blind Side to the lurid ghetto pathology of Precious—offer powerful affirmation of the seductive lure and redemptive powers of whiteness. Released in an era where the rhetoric of post-racialism has reached surreal fever pitch, both films are essentially bookended portraits of the perils of being an orphaned black child in a dysfunctional racial “subculture.” The character Precious initially achieves agency by fantasizing herself thin, “pretty” and white, while Blind Side protagonist Michael Oher escapes the “Moynihanian” churn of black poverty into the healing arms and tough love of a benevolent white mistress, or, rather, adoptive mama. Although Precious gets props for spotlighting the subjectivity of a non-traditional black female protagonist, it does nothing to disrupt patriarchal assumptions about black femininity or challenge the masculinist culture of violence that underlies Precious’ sexual abuse by her father. The unrelenting bleakness and solipsistic vacuum of Precious’ swaggering welfare mother’s den in the projects effectively lets the dominant culture off the hook. Lacking historical context or socioeconomic critique of the complicity of racist sexist social institutions, these films offer comforting retrograde portrayals of good and evil, where transformation of individual circumstance is the bellwether for social change.

Ultimately, these triumphal human spirit over adversity morality plays go down well with prevailing conservative bromides of bootstraps enterprise and white (or, in the case of Precious, light-skinned black) patronage. Popular culture messages such as these also bolster Obama’s trickle down doctrine of “benign” ghetto neglect. Bailing Wall Street and his corporate cronies out to mega-billions while kicking the CBC to the curb, Obama has symbolically wagged his finger and reminded us hardheaded Negroes once again that he never promised black America any kind of Rose Garden.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for Pacifica Sister Station Sister KPFK 90.7FM. She is a member of The Women Film Critics Circle and The James Agee Political Cinema Circle.

Capitalism, A Love Story: Workers Of The World, Unite!

2009-09-30T10:15:00.001-04:00

By Ed Rampell

The release of a new Moore doc is a major media event. Indeed, shortly before his latest work was released, the Oscar and Cannes winner appeared on Jay Leno’s revamped NBC-TV program and on Sept. 23 (the day it opened in L.A. and New York) was a guest on Larry King’s CNN gabfest, and scheduled to visit Bill Maher’s ”Real Time” HBO show at the end of the week. What other nonfiction cineaste has such ballyhoo heft and can say that?

The good news is that Capitalism, A Love Story is another Michael Moore instant classic, and in his considerable, 20-year-long oeuvre – which spurred revitalization of the documentary as an art form, as well as an entertainment medium -- is second in quality and power only to his 2004 masterpiece, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Premiering almost exactly a year after the financial meltdown, Capitalism, A Love Story has all of the usual suspects and ingredients of that film formula which makes Moore’s movie magic. It has the tongue and cheeky characteristic that has spread to TV parodies of news exemplified by the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert brand of topical comedy. Capitalism opens with security camera footage of real bank robberies – what better metaphor for bank bailouts and other debacles? (As well as a playful rumination on the nature of cinema verite by a practitioner of the documentary art form.) Then there are clips from other films – one on ancient Rome, another from an instructional piece on free enterprise, and hilarious “what would Jesus do” bits.

Capitalism features some insider exposes and incisive investigative reporting – another hallmark of Moore’s filmmaking technique -- which in Sicko exposed healthcare insurance scams, and in Fahrenheit revealed the battlefield costs of the so-called “cakewalk” in Iraq. The quintessential ingredient in Moore’s motion picture recipe has been his own proletarian persona, which works because like many movie fat men, he’s funny, and unlike most U.S. leftists, he is literally a son of the industrial proletariat. There’s lots about his boyhood at Flint, Michigan, where both his father and uncle worked on GM assembly lines, mass producing cars in some bygone autotopia, once upon a time before America was de-industrialized, downsized, outsourced and union busted.

Of course, there are the usual Moore merry prankster stunts – 20 years after Roger and Me, GM throws the prodigal proletarian son out of their HQ yet again. But correct me if I’m wrong: Moore’s current Wall Street shenanigans seem like replays of the escapades on his 1990s’ TV Nation and The Awful Truth television series, when he and Crackers, the corporate crime fighting chicken, confronted white collar criminals. While droll, Capitalism’s tomfoolery never rises to Sicko’s audacious, inventive level of Moore trying to bring a boatload of ailing Ground Zero survivors to the one place under U.S. jurisdiction that guarantees universal medical care: Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are imprisoned. (He transports them to Castro’s Cuba instead, where socialism provides free healthcare to all.) Nor does Moore’s return to the scene of the crime in the Financial District in Capitalism match the sheer panache of his dispatching actors clad as Salem witch-hunters to the home of Pres. Bill Clinton’s grand inquisitor, Kenneth Starr (now ensconced, god help us, at Pepperdine!) during the multi-million dollar probe of the Monica Lewd-insky scandal and impeachment imbroglio.

Capitalism, A Love Story has its share of talking head notables – social critic Wally Shawn (of My Dinner With Andre fame), Catholic clergymen who denounce the capitalist system for its sinfulness, etc. But, more importantly and at the core of Moore’s movie method, is his putting the so-called “forgotten man” (and woman) front and center, giving them a prominent platform to tell their heartbreaking, gut wrenching stories of an America where uncontrolled greed has run amok, laying waste to the common people. (Moore defines capitalism as “legalized greed.”) Just as Roger and Me presented out-of-work autoworkers, including down on their luck Flint residents reduced to catching, skinning, eating and selling rabbits to survive in the wake of the economic cataclysm that destroyed their once thriving city. Here, in Capitalism, are Americans being evicted, including a family farmer close to snapping. As one victim of the capitalist system says onscreen: “There’s gotta be a rebellion between the people who it all and people who have nothing.”

This compassion is the heart and soul of Moore’s movies, and indeed, of the man who dared denounce Pres. Bush as the Iraq War started on live TV during his Oscar acceptance speech for 2002’s Bowling at Columbine. In Capitalism Moore raises serious points about the free market, pondering why a so-called democracy allows so many dictatorial practices in the workplace. (Jean-Luc Godard once asked why one boss has more power than 100 workers.) Moore also rails against America’s disparity in wealth, wondering what’s democratic – and Christian – about 1% of the population owning as much as the “bottom” 95% of the people.

Moore calls for an end to capitalism, but stops short of advocating revolution. He does not claim to have an economic blueprint to save us from unbridled greed and economic collapse, but he, more than any other popular artist and entertainer is asking the questions that need to be asked. Moore is a bellwether – his Fahrenheit preceded public disenchantment with Bush’s ill-fated war, while in Sicko he anticipated the healthcare debate we’re now having. Who knows where, a few years after his brilliant, must see Capitalism, the public debate will be at. Meanwhile, it’s interesting and amusing to note that the name of Godard’s next movie is Socialisme.

Ed Rampell
LA Journal

Film historian and critic Ed Rampell was named after CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College. After graduating, Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, where he reported on the nuclear free and independent Pacific movement for “20/20,” Reuters, AP, Radio Australia, NewsWeek, etc. He went on to co-write “The Finger” column for New Times L.A. and has written for many other publications, including Variety, Mother Jones, The Nation, Islands, L.A. Times, L.A. Daily News, Written By, The Progressive, The Guardian, The Financial Times, AlterNet, etc.

Rampell appears in the 2005 Australian documentary “Hula Girls, Imagining Paradise.” He co-authored two books on Pacific Island politics, as well as two film histories: “Made In Paradise, Hollywood’s Films of Hawaii and the South Seas” and “Pearl Harbor in the Movies.” Rampell is the sole author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States.” He is a co-founder of the James Agee Cinema Circle: [politicalfilmcritics.blogspot.com].

2008 JACC AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED

2009-02-16T15:08:00.012-05:00

Ed Rampell Talks Progies On Burt Cohen's Roadside Radio Show: CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

RELIGULOUS: Recipient of The James Agee Cinema Circle Modern Times Award for Best Progressive Satire, is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's Modern Times and 1940's The Great Dictator. Religulous shares the award this year with War, Inc.

The Progies are the “Anti-Oscars” annually awarded by the James Agee Cinema Circle – an international group of left movie critics and historians -- for the Best Progressive Films and Filmmakers of conscience and consciousness.

1. THE TRUMBO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.

MILK

2. THE GARFIELD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTOR is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

SEAN PENN (MILK)

3. KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESS. Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

MELISSA LEO (FROZEN RIVER)

4. THE RENOIR: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece "Grand Illusion."

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

5. THE GILLO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

6. THE DZIGA: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."

TROUBLE THE WATER

7. ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Named after brutally slain young actress, Adrienne Shelly. For the movie this year most opposing violence against women.

CHANGELING

8. LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies

FROZEN RIVER

9. OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in a movie this year.

BATTLE IN SEATTLE

10. THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movie that best expresses the people of color in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of them in films.

TROUBLE THE WATER

11. THE BRANDO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FILM ACTIVIST is named after Marlon Brando, who starred in movies such as the Black power-themed "Burn!" and 1987's anti-apartheid "A Dry White Season," and championed underdogs like the American Indian Movement offscreen.

SEAN PENN

12. THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in a movie.

CHE

14. THE SERGEI: The Progie Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."

PAUL NEWMAN

15. THE LAWSON: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.

DEFIANCE

16. THE MODERN TIMES: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRE is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

TIE:

RELIGULOUS

WAR, INC.

17. THE ORSON: The Progie Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Film is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.

THE REAL GREAT DEBATERS

18. THE LORENTZ: The Progie Award for Best ENVIRONMENTALIST film is named after Pare Lorentz, who directed the Depression era classic documentaries "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River."

WALL-E

19. THE PASOLINI: The Progie Award for Best PRO-GAY RIGHTS Film is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales" in the 1970S

MILK

20. THE LENNON: The Progie Award for Best Progressive MUSICAL OR FILM ABOUT MUSIC is named after peace activist and musician John Lennon, who co-starred in the 1967 satire "How I Won the War" and the 2006 doc "The U.S. vs. John Lennon."

CADILLAC RECORDS

ELIA KAZAN HALL OF SHAME 2008: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE: For its reinforcement of the status quo on mass-es and un-Critic-call levels. And for its colonialist mentality, including refusal to honor or recognize for awards the Indian co-director Tandan Loveleen, and for not compensating the still impoverished Indian children playing impoverished Indian children in Slumdog Millionaire, while the movie amasses millions in profits.

CHE: Patronizing and exploitive artsy distortion of the real life and struggle of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. Cultural imperialism, alive and well at the movies.

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED: A premeditated act of promotional propaganda masquerading as a balanced documentary. And in the service of exonerating - with a creative genius defense - the noted fugitive from justice filmmaker's rape of a drugged child.

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES: Orthodox family values in fake free spirit female coed Columbine comeuppance clothing. Or in other words, a woman's place is in the delivery room. Not exactly a road movie, but certainly an anti-abortion mandatory teen motherhood guilt trip. All that's missing are the pamphlet tables in the theater lobbies.

HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES: A movie that might have been more aptly titled, Sexually Desirable When Drugged, the film allows lewd elderly director Vadim Glowna to star himself as molester and rapist of a series of nude adolescent slumbering sex slaves, in what may or may not be a fantasy brothel for necrophiliacs. Nothing less than a romanticized and lusty aesthetic portrayal of date rape.

DOUBT: African American mom confesses that she doesn't mind if her son is being molested by a pedophile priest, as long as he gets to graduate. Will all the mothers in the audience who have ever heard such an idea even hinted at from the lips of a fellow female parent, please raise your hands.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON: For those black mammies still showing up on the screen, even when they're men. Include Hounddog, Nights In Rodanthe, The Secret Life Of Bees, and Miracle At St. Anna.

AN AMERICAN CAROL: Hyper-reactionary rant. And cast member John Voight, a once fine actor, for backing the insupportable Rudolph Giuliani, the left-baiter at the GOP convention, for president.

AND.....

Military recruitment ads in theaters and on television.

Rick Warren's video on his church's website the week of Dec. 21st.

Mel Gibson, for his un-repented anti-Semitism.

The JACC Anti-Oscars Take LA By Storm

2009-02-10T22:40:00.003-05:00

JACC Member Lisa Collins Screens Film At Oscar Micheaux Event In NYC

2009-02-02T00:24:00.005-05:00

The Columbia University School of the Arts Film Program, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and University Seminars on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation at Columbia University are presenting a landmark film event, Faded Glory: Oscar Micheaux And The Pre-War Black Independent Cinema. The series takes place February 6th and 7th, and conferences are free and open to the public.

This unique presentation will focus on the work by the influential African-American filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. Newly discovered prints and materials will be shown and discussed for the the first time ever by speakers at this conference. The Film Society at Lincoln Center will screen Micheaux's movies in conjunction with the conference.

A special event will be the presentation by Lisa Collins of her work-in-progress film short, Oscar's Comeback, on Friday February 6th at 3:45pm at Columbia's Schermerhorn Hall, Room 501. It's a sly, complex non-fiction feature set in rural South Dakota about a small, all-white town celebrating its most famous ‘native’ son - black, controversial early 1900s film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. Lisa is a member of The Women Film Critics Circle and the James Agee Cinema Circle, and she produced this film in collaboration with Mark Schwartzburt. A more extensive bio of Lisa Collins is below.

Lisa and Mark (center) shooting on location in Gregory, South Dakota

Professors and film critics and scholars from Columbia University, Yale University, University of Puerto Rico, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Emory University, Duke University, CUNY Graduate Center, Brooklyn College, Northwestern and more, will appear.

It has been more than fifteen years since the last conference on Micheaux's work, and a new generation of critical thinking and writing has since emerged. The full daytime conferences and evening screening schedule, and a full list of presenters, can be viewed at http://arts.columbia.edu.

Tickets for the screenings are available through the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The venues are: Columbia University Campus, Broadway and 116th Street, Schermerhorn Hall Room 501, and Saturday, February 7th, at The Film Society, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza. For all public inquiries, please contact SoAevents@columbia.edu

* Brooklyn-native, Lisa Collins earned her MFA in Screenwriting & Directing from Columbia University Film School, with a BA from Yale University in American Studies & Photography. She’s developing several feature projects and a TV pilot.

An all-round media-maker, Lisa is Sr. Editor/Sr. Segment Producer for Hollywood.com and Hollywood.com TV. Lisa wrote, directed and has produced two shorts: Miss Ruby's House, a mockumentary, which played in festivals across the country; and Tree Shade, a surreal black comedy that garnered the Gold Medal for Best Alternative Film at the Student Academy Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Top honors include: a DGA East Coast Filmmaker award, Best American short at Avignon’s Film Festival, Polo Ralph Lauren Award, and two Rockefeller Foundation nominations. When broadcast, her film headlined PBS’s “Reel New York” series.

With a sharp eye for filmmaking, Lisa has been invited to speak at universities, museums and on panels about her film work; as well she’s been asked to serve on various film juries for festivals and grant fellowships. She also served as a teaching assistant at Columbia University, and has mentored other students. Lisa is a member of the James Agee Cinema Circle and the Women Film Critics Circle.

Lisa Collins was named by Filmmaker Magazine: 'One of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.' She was invited to workshop her feature-length script, The Grass Is Greener at the Sundance Writers, Filmmakers and Producers Labs, respectively. The project was also invited to participate in the IFFM / IFP’s No Borders Feature Project program.

Currently, Lisa is in post-production with Oscar’s Comeback. She is director/producer on the film with co-director/producer Mark Schwartzburt for Right on Time Productions. So far, the film-in-progress was awarded a prestigious NYSCA grant and two South Dakota Humanities Council grants, with Women Make Movies as its fiscal sponsor. In April 2007, the documentary’s 'presentation trailer' was invited to screen as part of a special program, Creatively Speaking, at BAM. In spring 2008 at Tribeca All Access Awards, Oscar’s Comeback won 2nd Top Prize for Creative Promise (Honorable Mention). Shortly thereafter, it was invited to screen at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

JACC Nominations Announced On WBAI Radio

2009-01-29T17:04:00.006-05:00

TAKE-OUT: Nominated for OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD, for the most positive and inspiring workingclass images in a movie, and also for THE GILLO for Best Progressive Foreign Language Film, named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo who lensed the 1960s classics, The Battle of Algiers and Burn! TAKE-OUT signifies a commendable new direction in US filmmaking, in long overdue recognition of the multicultural reality of this country, as a foreign language film entry about the United States.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW

The JACC Progie nominations, also known as *THE ANTI-OSCARS* were presented with commentary on Pacifica Radio's WBAI Arts Magazine in NY 99.5 FM at 2pm, on 1/27/09 and archived at WBAI.org. The winners will be announced in mid-February on Air America Radio, just prior to and in oppositon to the Academy Awards.

Bill Meyer Debriefing On The Anti-Oscars: The 2008 Progie Nominations

2009-01-20T10:09:00.014-05:00

PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND:

Buried History Of US Labor Struggles
Hidden In Plain Sight

The newly formed James Agee Cinema Circle has announced this year’s nominations for the Progie Awards honoring the best in progressive cinema. The group is named after the noted playwright, author and longtime writer for The Nation, James Agee, and is charged with advancing the awareness of progressive cinema. Members include such names as Ed Rampell (Progressive Hollywood), Prairie Miller (WBAI Radio), Gerald Horne (Houston University), Victor Navasky (The Nation), Paul Buhle (Brown University) and many other noted writers. Hidden In Plain Sight

Rampell premiered the Progies in an article that first appeared last year in The Progressive magazine. This year’s nominees, submitted by the members of the James Agee Cinema Circle, were announced by Rampell on the Thom Hartmann radio show.

The 20 categories are named after prominent names in the film world. Awards include Best Progressive Film, named after Dalton Trumbo, noted victim of the Hollywood blacklist; Best Progressive Activist named after Marlon Brando; Sergei award (after the great Soviet director Eisenstein) for Best Lifetime Achievement; Renoir (after Jean Renoir) for the best anti-war Film; and several other appropriately named awards.

LUDLOW MASSACRE MONUMENT
From Profit Motive And The Whispering Wind
*OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD* Nominee

Some of the films nominated for progressive awards this year include “Milk,” “Che,” “The Visitor,” “Waltz With Bashir,” “Battle In Seattle” and “Wendy and Lucy” for Best Picture. The nominees recognize artistry and commitment to progressive ideas in the film industry. Phil Donahue’s “Body of War,” the Katrina documentary “Trouble the Water,” and popular films such as “Gran Torino,” “The Changeling,” “Frost/Nixon,” “War, Inc.,” and “Wall-E” all received nods from the progressive writers.

Winners will be announced on the Hartmann show one week before the Feb. 22 Academy Awards.

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

Bill Meyer writes about progressive cinema for the People’s Weekly World and is a member of the James Agee Cinema Circle.

JACC Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal

2009-01-09T17:24:00.004-05:00

LOVELEEN TANDAN

Dear Friends of Women Filmmakers,

The SLUMDOG brouhaha has reached today's Wall Street Journal, with a few quotes from/references to yours truly, especially this:

"After the 2009 Golden Globe nominations were announced in December, a Chicago film critic launched an online campaign to question the governing Hollywood Foreign Press Association about why Ms. Tandan had not been nominated for best director along with Mr. Boyle. "If she's co-director during the filmmaking and marketing process, why isn't she co-nominee when the awards are passed out?" says campaign organizer Jan Lisa Huttner."

"Ms. Huttner hasn't dropped her effort. She says her real mission (with Oscar nominations coming Jan. 22) is to spotlight how rare it is for female directors to be in the awards race. Only three women have been nominated for best director Golden Globes (Barbara Streisand won for "Yentl"), and three have been nominated in that category at the Oscars, with no winners."

"Ms. Tandan's link to Hollywood has been as a casting director. Director Mira Nair hired the New Delhi native to fill the sprawling cast of her 2000 film "Monsoon Wedding" and recommended her to Mr. Boyle. "She is hugely responsible for the foundation of 'Slumdog,' " says Ms. Nair. "Once you trust that it is authentic, you can go with the pop quality of it. She had the nose for it."

CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE ARTICLE

Jan Lisa Huttner
JUF News/Fund for Women Artists
& Managing Editor of FILMS FOR TWO
www.films42.com
www.TheHotPinkPen.com
Chicago Film Critics Association
James Agee Cinema Circle
Women Film Critics Circle

The next International SWAN Day (Support Women Artists Now) will be on Saturday, March 28, 2009! Read all about it at: www.SwanDay.org

Grand Theft Auto: The Underbelly of Cadillac Records

2009-01-08T16:34:00.002-05:00

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Midway through the recently released Cadillac Records, director Darnell Martin’s film on the groundbreaking record label Chess Records, Martin depicts rock pioneer Chuck Berry unleashing his signature “Sweet Little Sixteen” guitar riffs against scenes of surfing revelry. Berry’s song was notoriously pilfered by the Beach Boys in their song “Surfin’ USA,” a homage to white California youth subculture. Chewed up and spat out by an imperialist marketing machine, Berry’s music becomes yet another Jim Crow soundtrack for Americana pleasure. The first African American female to direct a studio film, Martin’s take on the Chess saga breathes new life into the all too familiar history of gifted black musicians ripped off by a white record promoter. Chronicling the rise of Chess artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Berry, Little Walter and Etta James, Martin highlights their struggle to gain just compensation and recognition in a culture whose appetite for “black music” would ripen into a multi-million dollar industry during the 1950s. The avarice of record company owner Leonard Chess, who amassed a fortune from the music of these artists, paying them off with Cadillac cars and shady contracts, is a vivid reminder of the plantation ethos that drives American pop music.

It’s no revelation to say that white appropriation of African American derived music and idioms has been a cornerstone of mainstream American cultural identity, yet Martin’s film throws the question of consumption, commerce and the capitalist subtext of white pleasure into vivid relief. In the film young white women flock to black guitar players at segregated concerts, parading their relative racial and sexual freedom, oblivious to the consequences for black men. For white Americana, the rise of 1950s rock and R&B transformed racial otherness into a more mainstream adventure, a resort vacation into unexplored vistas of self-discovery that even white consumers with a few cents for a 45 record could take. White postwar prosperity and suburbanization made blackness all the more appealing because of its transgressive potential. As long as actual black people remained “out there,” in segregated urban ghettos and rural communities, black cultural production would continue to be a seductive bromide. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act paved the way to white suburbia and ignited a car culture that was baptized in the sounds of rock and R&B. As suburban white flight exacerbated residential segregation, black music became the commodity of choice for a new generation of young white consumers. Yet in the film, scene after scene of crushing poverty, racist police abuse and public humiliation endured by Waters and company underscores the parasitic relationship between white consumption and spatial apartheid. For scores of white record buyers and musicians, classics such as Wolf and Willie Dixon’s “Backdoor Man” and Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” would become standards, while segregated black spectators would grow up watching Hollywood scenes of white romance and redemption against the backdrop of black music.

Like Motown, Stax Records and other black-dominated labels, the work of the Chess artists established a new language for white self-invention while foregrounding the disparity between white and black postwar opportunities. The parallels between this history and the commodification of hip hop are compelling. As hip hop has spanned the globe netting mega millions for white corporations it has become another metaphor for imperialist exploitation of black America. Though Berry ultimately won song writing credit on Surfin’ USA after a threatened lawsuit, the film leaves us with the image of the hip swiveling Elvis Presley; his legacy and global empire forged on the backs of African American geniuses unknown and unrecognized in American music history.

Sikivu Hutchinson is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor of blackfemlens.org, an online journal of feminist criticism. She is also on KPFK Radio's Beneath The Surface in Los Angeles, a member of the Women Film Critics Circle, the James Agee Cinema Circle, and a contributor to The WBAI Radio Womens Show in New York City.

Mumia Abu-Jamal On Eartha Kitt: Artist And Political Martyr

2009-01-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

EARTHA KITT (1928-2008)

By Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia.org

For generations, the name, Eartha Kitt, was synonymous with sexy, sultry, and outspoken.

In an industry where careers can sometimes be measured in minutes, Eartha Kitt was the real thing, for quite a while; dancer, singer, actress, and on occasion, a comedian.

Since the tender age of 14, she worked the stage, and for nearly 7 decades, she left her indelible imprint by her work on the big screen, TV, and on recordings.

On Jan. 26, 1928 she was born in South Carolina as Eartha Mae Kitt.

She danced, sang, and acted her way into the hearts of millions.

In 1968, she dared speak out against the Vietnam War, when the war was raging at it's hottest, and was both blacklisted and hounded for doing so. That's because she spoke at a photo op at the White House in the face of First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson (wife of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson). For daring to speak her mind at the heart of the empire, and for denouncing an Imperial war, the media and the state tried to 'disappear' her. She had to go abroad to find her freedom of speech, where she remained for nearly a decade.

For those who want to see her as a seductive chanteuse, the 1958 film, St. Louis Blues, starring Nat King Cole, Ruby Dee, Pearl Bailey and the gospel great, Mahalia Jackson, is a great source. For a slightly comic turn, see her as an amorous entrepreneurial cougar on the hunt for a young Eddie Murphy in the 1992 film Boomerang starring Halle Berry as the principal love interest.

Although she was known as the quintessential sex kitten for her acting, her public outspokenness came at quite a cost. Her comings, goings, doings and sayings were tracked by both the FBI and the CIA.

She moved through life with an intelligence, wit and nerve that made her distinctive and unforgettable.

Eartha Mae Kitt was 80.

--(c) '08 maj

[Source:African Arts and Letters, eds, Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Phila., PA: Running Press, 2004.]
==============

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!

Audio of most of Mumia's essays are at: http://www.prisonradio.org

PLEASE CONTACT:
International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone - 215-476-8812/ Fax - 215-476-6180
E-mail - icffmaj@aol.com
Web - www.freemumia.com
AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!

Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370

WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN *NOT* REST!!

Subscribe: mumiacolumns-subscribe@topica.com
Read: http://topica.com/lists/mumiacolumns/read
Subscribe ICFFMAJ email updates list by e-mailing
icffmaj@aol.com!

[Check out Mumia's latest: *WE WANT FREEDOM:
A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from South
End Press (http://www.southendpress.org); Ph.
#1-800-533-8478.]

THE 2008 PROGIES NOMINEES FOR BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURES

2008-12-29T22:02:00.000-05:00

1. THE TRUMBO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.

BATTLE IN SEATTLE
CHE
MILK
THE VISITOR
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
WENDY AND LUCY

2. THE GARFIELD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTOR is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

JOSH BROLIN (W.)
BENICIO DEL TORO (CHE)
RICHARD JENKINS (THE VISITOR)
FRANK LANGELLA (FROST/NIXON)
SEAN PENN (MILK)

3. KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESS. Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

SALLY HAWKINS (HAPPY-GO-LUCKY)
ANGELINA JOLIE (CHANGELING)
MELISSA LEO (FROZEN RIVER)
MICHELLE WILLIAMS (WENDY AND LUCY)
KATE WINSLET (REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, THE READER)

4. THE RENOIR: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece "Grand Illusion."

BODY OF WAR
THE LUCKY ONES
STOP-LOSS
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
WAR, INC.

5. THE GILLO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

CHE
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
TAKE OUT [Shih-Ching Tsou]
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION

6. THE DZIGA: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."

BODY OF WAR
RELIGULOUS
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
TROUBLE THE WATER
TRUMBO

7. ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Named after brutally slain young actress, Adrienne Shelly. For the movie this year most opposing violence against women.

BEFORE THE RAIN
CHANGELING
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS
GRAN TORINO
PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL

8. LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.

CHANGELING
FROZEN RIVER
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
TROUBLE THE WATER

9. OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in a movie this year.

BATTLE IN SEATTLE
THE GARDEN
KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL
PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND
TAKE OUT [Shih-Ching Tsou]
THE WRESTLER

10. THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movie that best expresses the people of color in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of them in films.

BALLAST
CADILLAC RECORDS
EXILES
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA
TROUBLE THE WATER

11. THE BRANDO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FILM ACTIVIST is named after Marlon Brando, who starred in movies such as the Black power-themed "Burn!" and 1987's anti-apartheid "A Dry White Season," and championed underdogs like the American Indian Movement offscreen.

JOHN CUSACK
DANNY GLOVER
ROBERT GREENWALD
SPIKE LEE
SEAN PENN

12. THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in a movie.

BATTLE IN SEATTLE
CHE
CHICAGO 10
DEFIANCE
HUNGER

14. THE SERGEI: The Progie Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."

HARRY BELAFONTE
JEAN-LUC GODARD
DANNY GLOVER
KEN LOACH
PAUL NEWMAN

15. THE LAWSON: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.

BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS
DEFIANCE
GOOD
THE READER
VALKYRIE

16. THE MODERN TIMES: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRE is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

FROST/NIXON
RELIGULOUS
W.
WALL-E
WAR, INC.

17. THE ORSON: The Progie Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Film is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.

FIELDS OF FUEL
THE REAL GREAT DEBATERS
A TIME TO STIR
24 CITY
WINGS OF DEFEAT

18. THE LORENTZ: The Progie Award for Best ENVIRONMENTALIST film is named after Pare Lorentz, who directed the Depression era classic documentaries "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River."

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
FLOW: FOR LOVE OF WATER
THE GARDEN
THE HAPPENING
WALL-E

19. THE PASOLINI: The Progie Award for Best PRO-GAY RIGHTS Film is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales" in the 1970s.

CHRIS & DON
MILK
NO REGRET
SAVE ME
THE SECRETS

20. THE LENNON: The Progie Award for Best Progressive MUSICAL OR FILM ABOUT MUSIC is named after peace activist and musician John Lennon, who co-starred in the 1967 satire "How I Won the War" and the 2006 doc "The U.S. vs. John Lennon."

ANITA O'DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER
CADILLAC RECORDS
THE GITS
PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE
WAR DANCE

PROGIE NOMINEES ANNOUNCED ON THOM HARTMANN’S SHOW

2008-12-28T21:55:00.000-05:00

Dalton Trumbo

Click to Listen to the Radio Segment Here

West Coast Contact: Ed Rampell

Phone: (626)284-6954

Cell: (626)429-7343

Email: edrampell@charter.net

East Coast Contact: James Agee Cinema Circle

Email: ProgressiveCritics@gmail.com

Website: http://politicalfilmcritics.blogspot.com/

PROGIE NOMINEES ANNOUNCED ON THOM HARTMANN’S SHOW

The Awards Honor Outstanding Movies of Conscience and Consciousness

Los Angeles, Dec. 28, 2008 – The James Agee Cinema Circle have announced the nominees for the 2008 “Progie” Awards at 11:00 a.m. (PST), December 29th on Thom Hartmann’s Air America radio program. The Progies recognize features, documentaries and filmmakers for their outstanding achievement in promoting human rights and providing a voice for people of color, women, the working class, immigrants, gays, the environment and against war, censorship and political repression.

The Progies are awarded in several categories, including: THE RENOIR: The Progie Award for Best Anti-war Film, named after the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, director of 1937’s anti-militarism masterpiece “Grand Illusion.” THE BRANDO: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Film Activist, named after Marlon Brando, champion of Native peoples and other underdogs. THE DZIGA: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Documentary, named after Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, director of 1929’s “The Man With the Movie Camera.” THE TRUMBO: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Picture, named after screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who broke the Blacklist in 1960 by receiving screen credit for “Spartacus.”

The Progies premiered last December, when The Progressive Magazine published online an article recognizing films for their political consciousness, conscience and content (see: http://www.progressive.org/mag_rampell122607.) This inspired the creation of an international association of leftist film critics, reviewers, historians and scholars dedicated to spotlighting Hollywood, indie and foreign progressive pictures -- the James Agee Cinema Circle, named after the onetime film critic for Time and The Nation.

JACC participants include: Dan Bessie, culture critic and son of one of the Hollywood Ten; Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, co-authors of “Radical Hollywood”; Gerald Horne, author of “The Final Victim of the Blacklist” and “Class Struggle in Hollywood”; Bill Meyer, People’s Weekly World reviewer; Luis Reyes, co-author of “Hispanics in Hollywood”; Jack Shaheen, author of “Reel Bad Arabs” and “Guilty”; etc.

The 2008 election year was a rich period for progressive pictures, such as Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling”, Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon”, Oliver Stone’s “W.”, Michael Moore’s “Slacker Uprising”, Steven Soderbergh’s “Che”, Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River”, etc. For a comparable period in Hollywood history one must go back to 1940 and 1941, when Best Picture Oscar nominees included: “The Grapes of Wrath”, “The Great Dictator”, “The Philadelphia Story”, “Citizen Kane” and “How Green Was My Valley.”

The results of the James Agee Cinema Circle democratic vote for Progie nominees have been announced December 29, 2008. Following a second vote the Progie Award winners will be announced in early February 2009, prior to the Academy Awards ceremony.

L.A.-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell, author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States”, and WBAI film critic Prairie Miller, producer of “The WBAI Arts Magazine” on N.Y.’s Pacifica Radio affiliate, are available for interviews, as are other JACC participants.

Speak Of Me As I Am: Old Man Robeson Keeps Rolling Along

2008-12-25T20:12:00.000-05:00

Written By: Ed Rampell http://www.losangelesjournal.com/new/articles-view-17-728

2008 has been a year of progressive biopics, bringing Che Guevara, Harvey Milk and Richard Nixon back to life on the screen (lauding the first two, reviling the latter). Add to this distinguished company Speak Of Me As I Am, a leftist bio-play starring the stirring K.B. Solomon in an inspiring one-man show about Paul Robeson that is perfect for the holiday season. The son of a slave, Robeson was a Renaissance Man, an all-star athlete at Rutgers who earned a law degree and went on to become an actor (his most famous role was as a character of the Renaissance, Othello, from whom the play’s title is taken), singer and probably most importantly, a pro-Communist Black militant who stood up to “whitey,” be he a Southern racist or German fascist.

The first act of Speak Of Me As I Am tells much of Robeson’s story through film clips, songs performed live accompanied by a pianist and cellist and most of all by Solomon’s commanding presence. We see how Robeson went from all-American to “un-American,” the star of stage, screen and concert hall’s annual salary of $100,000 reduced to $2,000 per year when he was blacklisted during the HUAC-McCarthy era. Accused of being a Communist, Robeson was denied the right to perform at home, and his passport was seized by the State Department, preventing the internationally acclaimed celebrity from accepting the numerous gigs he was offered abroad. Although the play doesn’t mention it, one of Robeson’s greatest “crimes” was declaring during the Cold War that African-Americans wouldn’t fight for the USA against the Soviet Union, about 20 years before another Black activist, Muhammad Ali, refused to serve in Vietnam because no Viet Cong had ever called him the N-word.

Robeson died in the 1970s, and for today’s generation, the closest they’ll come to “meeting” this extraordinary man is through this show written and produced by Solomon and Krys Howard. Solomon’s performance is a marvel not to be missed. The towering basso profundo opera singer has the icon’s stature, mannerisms and smile down, and his mellifluous voice is a delight that sometimes had the audience singing along to numbers such as I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night. Deftly cutting from the spoken to the sung word to tell Robeson’s saga, Solomon’s renditions of classics like Porgy’s Plenty of Nothing, The House I Live In, Danny Boy and but of course, Robeson’s signature tune, Old Man River, shall have you tapping your tootsies and perhaps tearing up, as your inner self is transported heavenward. It’s almost as if this life force, who tirelessly stood up for the “little people” against injustice, has come back to life.

Indeed, this is the premise of Speak Of Me As I Am – Robeson returns from heaven (where Solomon wittily observes he can’t find J. Edgar Hoover or Joe McCarthy) to tell his story. In particular, Robeson seeks to redeem himself against charges that he was unpatriotic, insisting that he was a real American in the revolutionary tradition of 1776, fighting for truth, justice and the democratic way. The play glosses over Robeson’s relationship with the Communist Party and Soviet Union, which he was accused of being a stooge of. Indeed, during a visit to the USSR Robeson did confront the Stalinists over the imprisonment of an artist or intellectual, whom I believe was Jewish.

This incident is powerful ammunition against those who denigrate Robeson as a Stalin apologist, and could be incorporated into act II. In this much shorter second act, which seems to be a work in progress, the modern day Robeson comments on today’s recession and the election of America’s first Black president.

I called Speak Of Me As I Am a one-man show, but in fact the play makes clever use of an enchained Black mannequin onstage, so that at times it almost feels like a cast of two. Photos of famous radicals and infamous reactionaries, from Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas and John Brown to Hoover, McCarthy and Harry Truman, also decorate the set and are also put to good use.

Speak Of Me As I Am joins the illustrious company of Che, Milk and Frost/Nixon, as well as the play Marx in Soho by the people’s historian, Howard Zinn, as a work of art that brings great personalities and issues vividly back to life. This is one of the greatest things art can do. By the end of Speak Of Me As I Am, you too will feel that Robeson and Solomon have got the whole wide world in their hands. Don’t miss this life affirming theatrical experience, which will be performed from time to time in 2009 as Solomon and Howard seek to bring Robeson’s thrilling story to a theatre near you.

For more info contact (310)398-7192 or Email: peggylee.kennedy@gmail.com.

BBC Radio4 Interview with Reynold Humphries for Ayn Rand Programme

2008-11-26T15:54:00.000-05:00

Monday, 8 September 2008

Why was Ayn Rand chosen to be a “friendly witness” at the HUAC hearings?
There are several reasons, concerning Rand personally, the situation in Hollywood and the international situation. Rand was born in Russia and left the country in 1926 when she was 21. Thus her testimony is meant to have the aura of truth, although one can be sceptical, inasmuch as she never set foot in the SU again. I would argue that her remarks are purely ideological and have nothing to do with knowledge of the terrain. If, for instance, I were asked to comment on life in the region of Britian where I was born and raised, I would hesitate to do so: I have not lived there since 1972 and things evolve. As far as the international situation goes, her background brings grist to the mill of HUAC: she can stoke the fires of the Cold War, so to speak. If we must not lose from sight the fact that Hollywood did not appreciate the testimony of the “friendly witnesses” for washing dirty linen in public, the background was nevertheless favourable to the Hearings. Rand was member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, set up in April 1944 as an explicit rejection of what their manifesto called “crackpots and Communists”. The fact that the war was still on and the MPA made no mention of America’s fascist enemies did not go down well within the film community and the MPA was denounced as unpatriotic. The MPA was created by the most conservative figures in the industry as a reaction to the setting up of the Screen Writers’ Guild in the 1930s. Most of the members of the MPA worked for the highly conservative studio MGM but the real reason was ideological: the MPA rejected the very idea of a union which they saw as demeaning to them as artists. However, the SWG had attracted some 750 members, the vast majority of Hollywood’s writers, going from Communists through radicals and liberals to impeccable conservatives such as Charles Brackett. However, the impetus for the union came from Communists with whose struggle for recognition most writers were in agreement. Writers had no say over the definitive form given to their scripts and it was the final victory of the SWG that gave them certain rights they had never had before. Hence the indignation over the MPA’s claims and the massive rejection by Hollywood. Rand, however, could be counted on to excoriate anything remotely contaminated by the collective, such as unions.
I understand that Rand originally planned to testify about two movies, Song of Russia and The Best Years of Our Lives. Why were these films of significance in this context?
Song of Russia was part of a sort of sub-genre of the war movie: films made to glorify the Soviet war effort and to promote understanding between Russians and Americans. This was obviously anathema to Rand. The other films are Mission to Moscow, The North Star and Days of Glory. Song of Russia has been described by film historian Bernard Dick, who is critical but sympathetic to the plight of the Hollywood Ten (the “unfriendly witnesses during the Hearings of October 1947), as a “Stalinist tract”, but this comes over in the film more as a hymn of praise to the Soviet people. Mission to Moscow, however, is a paean of praise to Stalin himself and aroused much fury on both Left and Right. North Star is a genuinely pro-Bolshevik film that extols the ordinary men and women, peasants and soldiers, who defended the Revolution and their homeland against Nazism. Strangely enough it did not draw the same flak as the other two films, perhaps because it concentrated more on the fight against Nazism than on the supposed joys of Bolshevism. Days of Glory similarly praises Soviet courage and sense of sacrifice. For the record, it was written by Casey Robinson, one of the first members of the MPA. The film is never mentioned as pro-Communist propaganda, for the simple reason that it was not written by a Communist. All the films were made in 1943-4. Rand denounced Song of Russia as pro-Communist propaganda, by which she meant: “I use the term to mean that Communist propaganda is anything which gives a good impression of Communism as a way of life. Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda”. Rand evoked the fact that the film shows “happy little children”, adding: “They are not homeless children in rags, such as I have seen in Russia”. Let us, for the sake of argument, accept this testimony as accurate. If we return to the US and 1933, the film Wild Boys of the Road, a Warner Bros. production, shows homeless children in rags roaming the length and breadth of America during the Depression, searching desperately for food and lodgings and stealing in order to survive. Rand would probably also call this pro-Communist propaganda but the film puts things in a somewhat different perspective. The Best Years of Our Lives is an even more complex matter. Briefly, we could say that the film would arouse Rand’s suspicion on the grounds that it denounces bankers for refusing returning veterans loans to buy homes on the grounds that they have no collateral. Within a short time, however, veterans were no longer a source of concern and were either denounced for complaining about their lot or simply forgotten. This was repeated during the war in Vietnam and veterans returning from Iraq are never mentioned, despite their appalling psychological problems. Rand is notorious for a pamphlet she had published by the MPA which listed a series of “Don’ts”: “Don’t smear the free-enterprise system” “Don’t deify the ‘Common Man’” “Don’t glorify the collective” “Don’t glorify failure” “Don’t smear success” “Don’t smear industrialists” I should point out, as others have before me, that pillorying bankers was frequent in Hollywood movies. An excellent example is Capra’s American Madness (1932), and Capra was a conservative. In 1941 he directed Meet John Doe. One character is a fascist businessman with a private army who dresses up like a cross between Mussolini and the Gestapo. And while we’re on the question of bankers and banking, it is not irrelevant to point to the current economic crisis, in particular the subprimes crisis where hundreds of billions of $ in taxpayers’ money are being used to bail out private banks which have speculated. So ordinary Americans will now pay for the criminal activities of those who have already destroyed homes, jobs and savings. The same thing is happening with the nationalisation of Freddie Mac and Fannie May. An official report estimates at six and a half million the number of foreclosures in the US by 2012. The same thing is starting to take place in Britain. This, too, is part of the legacy of Ayn Rand. I might add that one of her greatest admirers is Alan Greenspan, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank and therefore responsible for allowing to exist the conditions leading to the subprimes crisis. In The Best Years Wyler also put his finger on something that rankled with the witch hunters in 1947. One of the heroes is a soldier who has lost his hands and he and his war comrades are approached in a bar by a man who deplores what has happened to the soldier. He adds that the US fought the wrong enemy. In other words, the US should have been on Hitler’s side against Stalin. One of the veterans knocks him down. This scene exists to highlight a fact which HUAC preferred to repress: the pro-fascist stance adopted throughout the 1930s by certain categories of American, notable businessmen anxious to do business with Nazi Germany, Southern racists such as HUAC member John Rankin (one of the country’s most notorious anti-Semites) and much of Hollywood itself. We must remember that Communists, liberals and many conservatives united in the fight against fascism, a unity compromised fatally by the Communist Party’s support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. So getting Rand to testify about this film might have brought to the surface things that the Right preferred to keep under wraps. After all, for most Americans, the war was too fresh in their minds to transform Nazi Germany into a stalwart ally and the SU into a monstrous enemy.
When it came to her testimony, why did Rand only talk about Song of Russia?
I think I have more or less answered that question now. HUAC was essentially concerned with pro-Soviet propaganda, which is hardly the case with The Best Years.
Rand apparently asked to be allowed to give additional testimony at a later date in order that she might be able to talk about The Best Years of Our Lives, as had been her original intention. Why did this not happen?
This is news to me, so I can only speculate. HUAC interrupted the Hearings suddenly and unexpectedly prior to having called to testify everyone on their list. By the time HUAC returned to Hollywood in February 1951, the tactics had changed radically. Gone were the accusations bandied about of films being pro-Communist propaganda. Now the accent was on the “worldwide Communist conspiracy”, aided and abetted by the Soviet Atom bomb, the victory of Communism in China, and the Korean war. And then, of course, there were the accusations made by Senator McCarthy in February 1950. Moreover, Hollywood, under pressure from the Wall Street banks and the Chamber of Commerce, had set up the blacklist in November 1947 and everyone was running scared. Thanks to the files of the FBI, HUAC had a list of every person who had ever joined the CP in Hollywood. If you were on the list, you either collaborated and named the names of former comrades, or you took the Fifth Amendment and refused to speak. In which case you were blacklisted. So The Best Years was an anachronism in the eyes of HUAC by 1951, especially as nobody involved with the film was a Communist or an ex-Communist.
Rand later spoke of the HUAC in disparaging terms. Did she feel it wasn’t sufficiently forceful?
HUAC could hardly be accused of that! However, it is possible that in Rand’s eyes the purpose of the Hearings of 1947 had been abandoned for something else. As I have said, the question of pro-Communist propaganda in films made during the war was no longer the order of the day; now something else was needed to incite voters to hate. Indeed, there is an extraordinary exchange between Congressman Walter of HUAC and friendly witness Clifford Odets, the well-known playwright and former Communist, who testified in May 1952. Here is what was said: Walter: “Isn’t the screening [by studio executives] so thorough it would be an utter impossibility to slant a picture?” Odets: “You are right. There is nothing less possible in Hollywood”. This flew totally in the face of what HUAC was trying so unconvincingly to prove in 1947, but for Rand nothing had changed: any attack on free-enterprise was Communist inspired, so The Best Years of Our Lives was also a form of Communist propaganda. Her view on communist influence in film and elsewhere was summarised as follows: “The principle of free speech requires ... that we do not pass laws forbidding Communists to speak. But the principle of free speech does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense”.
The exchange between Walter and Odets is a partial reply to that. Friendly witness, writer Richard Collins, openly stated in an exchange when testifying in 1951 that nobody ever put Red propaganda into a film. Communists were hardly being paid to overthrow capitalism. Rand’s statement is ludicrous but it is one shared by other witch hunters, then and now. Listeners should also know that Hollywood did not immediately acquiesce in the setting up of a blacklist. The most powerful studio boss, Louis B. Mayer (whose employees had set up the MPA!), was opposed to it, as was Harry Cohn of Columbia (and liberal independents such as Doré Schary and Samuel Goldwyn who produced The Best Years). Both Mayer and Cohn cited the very argument of free enterprise that obsessed Rand: they were businessmen, their studios were privately owned, they had the right to hire and fire whom they wanted and produce the films they chose. They also made clear what Walter knew and what Odets confirmed: nothing a studio boss disliked would ever get on the screen if it was too obvious, such as calling for the need to create unions, still something that rankled after the defeat of the studios by the SWG. It needed the pressure of their bankers to make them change their minds about setting up a blacklist. It’s ironic that Rand should defend free speech for Communists, as they were denied this right by HUAC in both 1947 and the Hearings of 1951-3. At the time of the first Hearings, many commentators, particularly in the press, denounced the unfair treatment meted out to the Hollywood Ten: whereas Rand and her friends were allowed to say what they liked for as long as they liked and smear their opponents, the “unfriendly witnesses” were cut off as soon as they did not reply “yes” or “no”. As we have already seen, no genuinely left-wing ideas would be tolerated by the studio bosses. It is a sad comment on the mentality of the period that Hollywood’s Communists considered it a victory for change when negroes could be shown in ways that were not inherently demeaning. I might add here that the most left-wing films written and directed by Communists were a number of films noirs made in the years between the two Hearings. On example is The Asphalt Jungle, written by Communist Ben Maddow and directed by John Huston, co-founder with William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives) of the Committee for the First Amendment. Rand’s own contribution to Hollywood, her script for The Fountainhead (directed in 1948 by fellow MPA member King Vidor and starring “friendly witness” Gary Cooper), contains an interesting contradiction, where reality triumphs over Rand’s fantasies concerning individualism. Architect Howard Roark blows up the building he has designed but whose construction betrays his artistic and aesthetic values. He is found not guilty by a jury after justifying his act on the grounds of his individual rights. Now a jury is not a simple aggregate of individuals: they deliver a collective verdict. So Rand’s ideology of the individual versus society finds itself in a bind: without such a collective verdict justice cannot function.

Extra material (which I did not have the occasion to use)
1) Rand opposed to taxes 2) Rand considered that a free nation (according to her own definition) had the right to invade an enslaved nation (again, according to her criteria). Leaving aside the fact that Nazi Germany used similar arguments in the 1930s, one can note that she would happily invade Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran – to mention the most obvious - irrespective of international law. 3) Let us not forget that General Douglas McArthur went out of his way to praise the fighting spirit of the Soviets, well aware that their terrible suffering was helping the US by pinning down vast numbers of German troops in the SU. 4) One Cold War specialist has estimated that, without the Soviet resistance within their homeland, another 1 million US soldiers would have been needed to liberate Europe. A similar figure has been suggested if the US had decided to invade Japan, instead of dropping the Bomb. 5) Mr. Wood (HUAC): “Do you think that it was to our advantage or to our disadvantage to keep Russia in this war, at the time this picture was made?” Miss Rand: “That has absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing”.

Hollywood Flexes Its Political Muscle In 2008 Election

2008-11-23T09:29:00.000-05:00

By Ed Rampell, Columnist
Posted: 11/16/2008 12:00:00 AM PST
DailyNews.com

HOLLYWOOD played a role on the electoral stage in the Nov. 4 election in three primary ways.

First, as the ATM for campaigns.

"L.A. is a great stop for people running for high office to come to fundraisers," said President Nixon's former White House counsel, John Dean.

Second, for celebrity endorsements, which attract press and crowds. Take, for example, September's star-studded Beverly Hills Barack Obama bash headlined by Barbra Streisand. "The View's" Elisabeth Hasselbeck introduced vice presidential contender/hockey mom Sarah Palin at an October rally, while Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Samuel L. Jackson used their star power against California's Proposition 8.

The third way in which Tinseltown influences voters is by using its mass-communications skills for campaigns, candidates and causes.

But did Hollywood really change the election?

It tried. In the months before the Nov. 4 election, Hollywood debuted several political movies. Kevin Costner's get-out-the-vote fable "Swing Vote" debuted in August and was followed in September by Michael Moore's documentary about his 2004, 60-city voter registration drive, "Slacker Uprising."

As the presidential race rediscovered terms that almost vanished from America's political lexicon, including "working class," Charlize Theron, Ray Liotta and Woody Harrelson co-starred in "Battle in Seattle." This September release dramatizes 1999's anti-globalization mass strike
pitting organized labor and eco-activists against riot police and the World Trade Organization.

Shortly before the election, Oliver Stone's biopic of George W. Bush, "W." was released. James Cromwell, who plays George H.W. Bush in the film, said its impact in the election is "a very hard question to answer .... People don't vote on the basis of a film."

Maybe not, but politics was very much in fashion in film this year.

HBO comic Bill Maher's polemically incorrect "Religulous" ridiculed religion even as the evangelical Palin was being nominated for GOP vice president. The documentary by "Borat" director Larry Charles earned $12 million-plus since Oct. 3 and is a nonbeliever's frontal assault on the religious right.

The John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign called Obama a "socialist" while Steven Soderbergh's epic about the world's most famous socialist, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was screened Nov. 1 at AFI's filmfest in Hollywood.

The movie goes into limited release Dec. 12. Actor Benicio Del Toro depicts the revolutionary icon in "Che," a masterpiece of political filmmaking emerging just as capitalism faces disasters.

Meanwhile, under the guise of investigating a 1929 child-abduction case, Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, may have reminded moviegoers of the Bush regime's legacy of civil liberties violations via the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The small screen - television - rang up its own victories with political satire scoring huge ratings.

Tina Fey's flawless impersonation of Republican vice presidential candidate Palin on "Saturday Night Live" might have saved America from four years of Palin.

Social networking sites, blogs and videos also impacted campaigns, as the Internet got into the political act.

In person, Palin touted small-town "real America," but online the "Mayberry" and "Happy Days" votes went to the other team.

To endorse Obama, movie director Ron Howard donned his Opie duds and reunited with Andy Griffith in a skit that went viral. In the same video, Howard sported his Richie Cunningham letterman sweater and talked up Obama with the Fonz.

Guerrilla producer/director Robert Greenwald regularly skewered McCain online, exposing his politically expedient "doubletalk express," wealth and medical history in shorts on YouTube.

Greenwald calls movies "an activist tool." His Brave New Films presented Moore's "Slacker Uprising" online for free.

In that documentary, the Oscar-winner tossed ramen and clean underwear to students pledging to vote. Republicans charged Moore with bribery, while genre spoofer David Zucker ("Airplane!" and "Naked Gun") excoriates him in "An American Carol," starring Kevin Farley as an unpatriotic Moore-like documentarian who wants to outlaw July 4.

"An American Carol" repeatedly derides documentaries as inferior to features, but five weeks after its release, the low-budget "Carol" scored merely $7 million at the box office. (By comparison, Moore's 2004 "Fahrenheit 9/11" earned $250 million.)

"Carol" co-stars ex-anti-establishment actors Dennis Hopper, James Woods and Jon Voight, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor as an antiwar activist in 1978's "Coming Home."

To be sure, audiences generally buy more tickets to escapist flicks than socially conscious ones. In five weeks "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" made more than $88 million, outearning "Battle in Seattle" 412-to-1. Still, the outcome of the vote indicates cinema and other mass mediums do more than passively reflect America; they actively contributed to the outcome.

Despite celeb endorsers and deep pockets, Proposition 8 won - maybe because there was no big screen pro-gay movie, like 2005's "Brokeback Mountain," during the election cycle. Sean Penn's "Milk," about California's first openly gay elected official, opens in December - too late to impact Proposition 8.

But the fact that so many of 2008's topical movies leaned left proves political power grows out of the barrel of a camera lens.

L.A.-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell is the author of "Progressive Hollywood."

Hollywood And The CIA

2008-11-15T12:07:00.000-05:00

An Offer They Couldn't Refuse: Spies Like Us....Body Of Lies

'The spy may have come in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott

The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films, but no
one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy involvement.
Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate

Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with
spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war
tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came
to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of
the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and
Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always
wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much
the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact,
the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of
deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.

The model for this is the defence department's "open" but barely
publicised relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades,
has offered film-makers advice, manpower and even hardware -
including aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it
asks for in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look
good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a character based
on a real-life soldier who had also been a child rapist lost that
part of his backstory when he came to the screen.

No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US
armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public
domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie
business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare,
that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would
collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading
up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the
agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover
operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood
connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were
preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but
invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the
former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency
were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run
studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they
hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the
head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early
1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the
CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed
to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad.
Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several
film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their
movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the
States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham
Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adaptation of his Vietnam-set
novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for
America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's
dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of
American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling
consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British
journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose
moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part
on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale.
How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded
director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even
offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George
Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated
version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only
in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the
tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood
nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting
scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is
done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the
film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a
thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of
Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers
to perform tasks for their old employer.

So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its
2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent).
Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was
invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red
October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently,
when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was
happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of
headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben
Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he
repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.

The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less
action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The
Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the
story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus
Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to
supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet
occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly,
as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of
al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon -
who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons reaching the
Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would
"put aside the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had 9/11".

Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to
offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul
Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very
senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg
College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate
professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist
present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that
Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The
Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the
shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the
film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the
truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh
emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered
"very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one
was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content - EVER." The
journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to
discuss the matter further.

So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's
worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's
activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to
be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore
was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be
an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama
in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega.
According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old
friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US
counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had
been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding
in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of
Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing
against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts
of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own
government's money laundering."

At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
working on another project. He was travelling back to California
when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a call she says has been
excised from phone records. She told CNN she was "terribly alarmed"
because he was speaking as though he were under duress. She was sure
"someone was in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy
DeVore heard from her husband.

A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation mounted.
Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating CIA involvement.
DeVore was presumed dead, but there was no body, and no end to the
questions. Lo and behold, just nine days after the LA Times reported
the case, DeVore's body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer,
in 12 feet of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope
Valley Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace
valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US
military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for
conspiracy theorists.

The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death
to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative
conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had
fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the
highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain:
DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing
from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long
trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed
up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood
private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of
DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the
same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the
highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible
damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how
come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy
highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a
conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled
by De Vore's death.

Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about the role it
plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound transparency too
seriously. After all, what use is a covert agency that does not act
covertly, even if some of its activities are public? And if it is
still not open about the truth of events decades ago, many of which
have spilled into the public domain accidently, how can we be sure it
is telling the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come
in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.

Posted courtesy of Louis Proyect
ProgressiveCritics@gmail.com

JAMES AGEE CINEMA CIRCLE

**The Year In Movies 2011: The James Agee Cinema Circle On Arts Express Radio

***THE ANTI-OSCARS***: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2011

Pariah Vs. Precious: Authentic Tale Vs. Poverty Porn

Atlas Shrugged: Who Is Dagney Taggart, And Why Does She Hate The Workingclass?

MOVIES TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2011

***THE ANTI-OSCARS***: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2010

JACC Best Of The Net Hotspot: Courage In Street Theater

Johnny Depp: Tonto Si, Pancho Villa No?

Texas Refuses to Pay ‘Machete’ Producers

JACC Awards 2010 Discussion On The Air

Sally Hawkins Talks Female Ford Plant Struggles, In Made In Dagenham

Beyond The Sacrificial Good Woman: Black Feminism And Freethought

Inside Job: Director Charles Ferguson Interview

South Of The Border: Oliver Stone's Revolutionary Road Movie

South Of The Border: A Dissenting Opinion

Generation Zero Doc Review: Tea Party Cinema A Weak Brew

***THE ANTI-OSCARS***: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS 2009

Political Film: The Coca Cola Case

The Coca Cola Case

The truth that refreshes

Political Film: Derivatives Come To The Movies

The Birth Of The Workers Film Movement

Avatar: Same Old Hollywood Product, Or Something New?

Israeli Wall Protesters Take On Avatar

They equated their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film. Israel says the wall is needed for its security. Palestinians consider it a land grab.

Racial Politics And The Black Image In Hollywood

JACC Anti-Oscars Discussed On The Air!

Peace On Earth 2010

Cinema 2009: James Agee Circle Member Bill Meyer Weighs In

Race And Politics In Movies: Obama, Precious And The Blind Side

Capitalism, A Love Story: Workers Of The World, Unite!

2008 JACC AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

BATTLE IN SEATTLE

DEFIANCE

The JACC Anti-Oscars Take LA By Storm

JACC Member Lisa Collins Screens Film At Oscar Micheaux Event In NYC

JACC Nominations Announced On WBAI Radio

Bill Meyer Debriefing On The *Anti-Oscars*: The 2008 Progie Nominations

JACC Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal

Grand Theft Auto: The Underbelly of Cadillac Records

Mumia Abu-Jamal On Eartha Kitt: Artist And Political Martyr

**THE 2008 PROGIES NOMINEES FOR BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURES**

PROGIE NOMINEES ANNOUNCED ON THOM HARTMANN’S SHOW

Dalton Trumbo

Click to Listen to the Radio Segment Here

West Coast Contact: Ed Rampell

Phone: (626)284-6954

PROGIE NOMINEES ANNOUNCED ON THOM HARTMANN’S SHOW

The Awards Honor Outstanding Movies of Conscience and Consciousness

Speak Of Me As I Am: Old Man Robeson Keeps Rolling Along

BBC Radio4 Interview with Reynold Humphries for Ayn Rand Programme

Hollywood Flexes Its Political Muscle In 2008 Election

Hollywood And The CIA

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2011

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2010

THE ANTI-OSCARS: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS 2009

Bill Meyer Debriefing On The Anti-Oscars: The 2008 Progie Nominations

THE 2008 PROGIES NOMINEES FOR BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURES