Newsletter

COMIC BOOK ANALOGIES TEACH TOLERANCE IN X-2: X-MEN UNITED X2: X-Men United, directed by Bryan Singer, takes many of the famous comic book characters into the White House. One of the taglines is “First, they were fighting for acceptance. Now, they’re battling for survival.” A voiceover at the beginning reminds filmviewers that evolution has produced […]

A COMMUNIST TERRORIST LOVES THE DANCER UPSTAIRS, BUT SO DOES HIS POLICE PURSUER Directed by John Malkovich, The Dancer Upstairs is a complex political mystery story based on the hunt for Abimael Guzmán, the founder of Perú’s Sendero Luminoso, in the 1980s. (The film’s title, thus, calls attention to a literary subplot piled onto the

LILJA 4-EVER EXPOSES THE TEENAGE WHITE SLAVE TRADE Last year, the Political Film Society nominated Tricky Life as best film exposé for showing how the white slave trade operates between Uruguay and Spain. An even grimmer picture of the white slave trade, this time from Estonia to Sweden, is found in Lilja 4-Ever, directed by

TWO FILMS PERSONALIZE THE “WAR ON DRUGS” When A Man Apart begins, Sean Vetter (played by Vin Diesel) informs us that the border between México and the United States is 5,000 miles long, separated by a 15 foot fence, yet an average of 20 tons of cocaine goes across monthly into the world’s largest market

THE CINEMATIC HEAD OF STATE IS AN UNDISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN Colin Powell is undoubtedly the only African American today who can gain his party’s nomination for president; he can credibly run a campaign about real problems with commonsense solutions, and he may have an excellent chance of winning. A Hollywood screenplay in which a Black might

SOME JEWS ESCAPE THE HOLOCAUST, OTHERS STAY BEHIND The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) focused on Italian Jews who thought they would be exempt from the Nazi’s “final solution.” The same naïve attitude returns this year in two recent films, Nowhere in Africa and All My Loved Ones. In Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika),

A 21ST CENTURY RAMBO STOPS ETHNIC CLEANSING IN TEARS OF THE SUN Tears of the Sun, directed by Antoine Fuqua, is about a rescue operation in Nigeria. A news broadcast begins the film, reporting that a civil war has broken out, with the Moslem North engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Christian South, following the

THE SOUTH RISES AGAIN IN GODS AND GENERALS, WITH LINCOLN AS VILLAIN A prequel of Gettysburg (1993), the recently released film Gods and Generals, directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, is a semi-docudrama that tries to ape the novel (and film) Gone with the Wind but succeeds only in providing nearly four hours of transparent propaganda.

DARK BLUE BOLDLY DEMONSTRATES WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE LAPD Sometimes described as a paramilitary organization, the Los Angeles Police Department has several geographic divisions and often establishes special units in which officers are given autonomous authority apart from other police, developing their own headquarters, jargon, logos, radio frequencies, rituals, and slogans, with no direct supervision.

THE POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY GIVES FOUR AWARDS FOR 2002 Members of the Political Film Society have voted for to recognize outstanding achievements in raising political consciousness among feature films for 2002 to the following: DEMOCRACY                     U Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, director) EXPOSÉ                               Ararat (Atom Egoyan) HUMAN RIGHTS             John Q. (Nick Cassavetes, director) PEACE                                  The