So in order to best cover all bases, progressive film critics tend to consider three categories of assessment, rather than two: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The first two are self-explanatory. And the third category is reserved for movies that may have been impressively put together, but there's just something offensively anti-humanistic about them.
Stay tuned......
Monday, December 13, 2010
Johnny Depp: Tonto Si, Pancho Villa No?
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.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Texas Refuses to Pay ‘Machete’ Producers
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
Saturday, December 11, 2010
JACC Awards 2010 Discussion On The Air
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
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sally Hawkins Talks Female Ford Plant Struggles, In Made In Dagenham
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Beyond The Sacrificial Good Woman: Black Feminism And Freethought
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
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE
Prairie Miller
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
South Of The Border: Oliver Stone's Revolutionary Road Movie
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
Monday, June 21, 2010
South Of The Border: A Dissenting Opinion
When Things Go South
The Left Embraces Oliver Stone’s Newest Film
By Summer Gray and Noah ZweigDissidentvoices.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 HERENoah 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.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Generation Zero Doc Review: Tea Party Cinema A Weak Brew
...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...
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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
***THE ANTI-OSCARS***: THE BEST POLITICAL FILMS 2009
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Political Film: The Coca Cola Case
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. More information about The Coca-Cola Case is HERE....
Political Film: Derivatives Come To The Movies
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
Monday, February 15, 2010
Avatar: Same Old Hollywood Product, Or Something New?
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.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
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.
- 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
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.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Racial Politics And The Black Image In Hollywood
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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
JACC Anti-Oscars Discussed On The Air!
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.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Peace On Earth 2010
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.