MAY 15, 2025
New Zealand Maori Movie About Family Separation and Land Rights Hard on the heels of recent reports revealing the shocking existence of 1,000-plus unmarked graves of First Nations children at church-run schools in Canada (see: Canada: 751 unmarked graves found at residential school - BBC News), the new movie Cousins – written, directed and starring Maori females – deals with the trauma of family separation of New Zealand’s indigenous Continue Reading...
I have seen a lot of cynical shit when it comes to the way that conservative politicians and media whores manipulate their fucking ignorant followers, from the Cadillac-driving welfare queens to drug hysteria to birtherism and so very much more. But I cannot wrap my head around the exploitation of fear and the selfish hyping of ideological division behind the right-wing campaign against the Covid vaccine. It's nonsensical on a health level and on Continue Reading...
Fox white nationalist (there, I’ve been redundant and repeated myself) Tucker Carlson once called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” managing to be racist, anti-Arab and Islamophobic all at once. Now Carlson is posing as an anti-racist. Funny thing, though. He isn’t out there apologizing for his racism against Iraqis. Then there was that time when Carlson advocated for the odious anti-Semitic “replacement theory” that rich Continue Reading...
It's a pretty great joke that Senator Joe Manchin, putative Democrat, has pulled on the country and, especially, on the people of his state, West Virginia. It's honestly irrelevant at this point whether Manchin actually believes the shit he's shoveling about the need "to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love," as he wrote in his laughably Continue Reading...
Armageddon Then: Candid Doc Brings the War in the Pacific Home Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 feature Apocalypse Now depicted war crimes committed by U.S. troops against Vietnamese people: An unforgettable, operatic, bone chilling chopper air raid attacking a Viet Cong village set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” so a surfer whose name is initialed “LBJ” can ride the gnarly waves there (Ride of the Valkyries - Apocalypse Now (3/8) Movie CLIP Continue Reading...
Every time Israel bombs Gaza into smithereens, it is left to others to try to rebuild. The European Union, Qatar, and even the Biden administration are offering aid. (The US is giving a piddling $150 million; even tiny Qatar is pledging $500 million.) The Greek myths contain the story of Sysyphus, a trickster figure who ambushed Death when it came for him and chained it up. Ares ultimately freed Death, and when Sisyphus died he was Continue Reading...
Once upon a time, a man lived in an area with mosquitoes. No matter what the man did to contain the mosquitoes, the man was bitten. Frustrated by his inability to control the mosquitoes – and feeling humiliated because the mosquitoes were biting him – he sprayed the entire area around his house, killing hundreds of mosquitoes, many of which hadn’t even bitten him. He didn’t really care because they were mosquitoes. But he did justify himself to Continue Reading...
The Great Gravediggers British director Paul Tanter’s droll Stealing Chaplin may be a comedy that will keep audiences laughing from beginning to end, but the other movie it reminds me of is screenwriter Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami. Although the latter is a heavy-hitting drama, the fanciful stories of both Miami and Stealing are loosely inspired by real life events. In the case of the former, following his 1964 championship bout with Sonny Continue Reading...
1. Sometimes I think about all the times that police murdered or beat a Black or brown person and no one was there to record it. It makes me sick to my stomach, as it should every person, as it especially should every white person. I can't get my head around that, and I'm not just talking since the Rodney King video came out 30 years ago, in March 1991, showing a group of Los Angeles police officers beating a Black man, King, who was on Continue Reading...
The new report on 2020 by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that the world’s renewable energy generation capacity increased by an astonishing 10.3% in 2020 despite the global economic slowdown during the coronavirus pandemic. It beats the previous record for an annual increase in this sector by a healthy 50%. The bad news for Americans is that most of this increase took place in Asia, especially China. In this Continue Reading...
A Method to M.C.’s Madness: Expressing Endlessness Robin Lutz’s visually compelling, inventive M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity strikes just the right note of whimsy in exploring the graphic art of a talent known for his sense of the whimsical. Just as his compatriots Bosch, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh, created new ways of seeing with, respectively, surrealistic symbolism, chiaroscuro, photorealist style and Post-Impressionism, the Dutch Continue Reading...
The testimony coming out of the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd has been beyond heartbreaking and beyond enraging. Today, for instance, Floyd's girlfriend revealed on the stand that his pet name for her was "Mama," which is what he called out over and over as he died. It's been this way throughout the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses. Darnella Frazier, now 18 years-old, was 17 when she took the video that Continue Reading...
The spine-chilling attacks on Asian-Americans around the country, in San Francisco, New York, and now most bloodily in Atlanta, are manifestations of a white supremacism that has deep roots in American history. The odious Trump and his minions whipped up hatred by branding the novel coronavirus the “Chinese flu” or “Kung Flu.” He was not doing something new. The coronavirus, of course, came to the United States from Europe. Homo sapiens is a Continue Reading...
There is absolutely no reason to feel guilty or bad because you found comfort in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings during the lockdown early in the coronavirus pandemic. While President Bumblefuck Magoo was prancing around and lying about the severity of the situation while shitting on anyone who would dare ask the federal government to do more, Cuomo was a soothing voice of calm, seemingly honest and straightforward, ready Continue Reading...
The Jackie Robinson of Architecture Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Continue Reading...
