Films that portray the way in which ordinary people have a right to choose public policies and can bring about political change by making officeholders accountable to the people.
WORKERS ARE DEHUMANIZED AND DISCARDED IN HUMAN RESOURCES Tension between the imperatives of business and the dispensability of workers in the current era of economic globalization is featured in Human Resources, a French film (Ressources humaines) directed by Laurent Cantet. Frank (played by Jalil Lespert), a business school student in Paris, returns home for the […]
ABBIE HOFFMAN’S REPUTATION IS VINDICATED IN STEAL THIS MOVIE! Founder of the Yippies in the 1960s, Abbie Hoffman is sympathetically portrayed in the biopic Steal This Movie!, produced and directed by Robert Greenwald. Early in the film, Abbie (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) is registering African Americans to vote in Mississippi in 1965, only to receive
SUNSHINE NOMINATED FOR AWARDS ON DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS “Politics has made a mess of our lives.” These words sum up the three-hour-long saga Sunshine, a film about five generations of a Jewish family in Hungary named Sonnenschein (German for “sunshine”) over the past one hundred or so years that has some parallels with Alex
THE HURRICANE RECEIVES THE FIRST POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY NOMINATION FOR 2000 Thanks to two Northwestern University professors, a substantial number of men have been released from death row in Illinois because they were wrongfully convicted. In The Hurricane, director Norman Jewison brings to the screen the book Lazarus and the Hurricane: The Untold Story of
SALVADORANS FALL INTO TRAPS SET BY SOCIAL WORKERS IN EAST OF HOPE STREET As the film begins, we are informed that 73,000 persons are under the care of Child and Family Services, a County of Los Angeles agency. As the film proceeds, we see some of the 73,000 as well as a few social workers
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THE INSIDER EXPOSES HOW “60 MINUTES” BOWED TO 30 PIECES OF SILVER Publicity about The Insider stresses the courage of a whistleblowing research scientist, formerly employed by a tobacco company, who in 1995 exposed the fact that cigarettes have been altered in recent decades to enhance their addictivity. As a result of his testimony, there
DEMOCRATIC VALUES ARE CHALLENGED AS FIGHT CLUB TURNS INTO PROJECT MAYHEM Fight Club appears to be a sequel to Clockwork Orange (1971) for the yuppie X Generation, half of whom see their parents get a divorce and are fatherless teenagers. (The word “clockwork” is in the script!) Jack (played by Edward Norton) narrates the film,
NATURALLY NATIVE SHOWS THE PLIGHT AND HOPE OF AMERICA’S NATIVE PEOPLES Early films depicting the aboriginal inhabitants of North America showed them killed with single bullets by cowboys. From the 1960s, Native Americans have been portrayed with more sensitivity, though from the eyes of Caucasians. At last in Naturally Native, we have an opportunity for
AMERICAN WAR CRIMES AGAINST IRAQ EXPOSED IN THREE KINGS If war is hell, then going AWOL must be a relief. Not so in Three Kings (originally called “Spoils of War”), directed by David O. Russell, who also developed the screenplay after eighteen months of research about the waning days of Operation Desert Storm. At the
In contrast, Enemy of the State demonstrates in depth how terrorism and other high crimes can be fought, using the technology of electronic eavesdropping, communication satellites, and computer hacking, thus making privacy obsolete. Although most filmviewers will doubtless assume that the high-tech gadgetry is yet another Hollywood fantasy of director Tony Scott (of Crimson Tide
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