The 32nd Pan African Film & Arts Festival, America’s largest Black-themed filmfest, took place Feb. 7 – Feb. 19 in Los Angeles. During Black History Month PAFF annually screens movies ranging from Hollywood studio productions and Hallmark Channel TV-movies to indies, foreign films, documentaries, low budget productions, shorts, animation, etc. Films span the spectrum from Oscar nominees to hard-to-find gems from Africa, the Caribbean, America Continue Reading...

I'm a born contrarian. I look at conventional wisdom, the orthodox point of view, and try to detect the flaws in it. I'm generally suspicious of group-think, and I prescribe to what Charles Bukowski once said. If you have two lines of people, one with 100 people in it and one with two people, always get in the short line. I have worked directly in technology for 30 years, give or take, primarily in editorial or technical writing positions. I Continue Reading...

Out-group homogeneity effect There is a concept that social psychologists refer to as out-group homogeneity effect. We perceive members of our own group to be relatively heterogeneous, i.e. we see variation. Everyone else, so-called “out-group members”, however, seem relatively homogeneous In other words, we tend to think of our group as a mosaic and people from other groups as monotone. People really do see more variation in Continue Reading...

Nonfiction Creature Feature: He’s Alive!   You don’t have to be a horror fan to enjoy Thomas Hamilton’s documentary Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster (I’m not and I did). The 90-minute nonfiction biopic has all of the conventional hallmarks of a well-made movie history doc. Of course, there are copious clips ranging from Karloff’s classics, including in the role the British actor was best known for, as Frankenstein’s monster in Continue Reading...

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...

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 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...

An Apartheid Era South African Film Noir-ish Movie 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 Continue Reading...