Newsletter

CASTRO’S HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD EXPOSED IN BEFORE NIGHT FALLS Before Night Falls gives filmviewers a unique opportunity to get an inside look at Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Director Julian Schnabel (nominated by the Political Film Society in 1996 for directing Basquiat), exposes the contradictions of the Castro regime in a bio-pic about acclaimed […]

MULTICULTURAL LOS ANGELES FETED AT THANKSGIVING Thanksgiving is an odd American holiday. A nation composed of immigrants from around the world expects to sit down to a dinner table with an extended family to consume a strange combination of relatively bland foods–roast turkey and dressing with sweet and mashed potatoes—made palatable by the addition of

KIPPUR TAKES FILMVIEWERS TO THE BATTLEFIELD DEAD AND WOUNDED On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur Day. In Kippur, director Amos Weinraub Gitai provides an autobiographical account of a small portion of the war. He focuses on two reserve soldiers, Weinraub (played by Liron Levo) and Ruso (played by Tomer

TWO FILMS DEPICT BLACK ACCOMMODATION TO WHITE POWER When the major networks announced sitcom line-ups for fall 1999, not a single minority person was cast, though minor networks featured “The PJs” and “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” both filled with Black stereotypes. In Bamboozled, Director Spike Lee delivers a riposte to the networks, critiquing

THE CONTENDER REPLAYS THE CLINTON TAPES When President Clinton was asked whether he had an extramarital affair, was the question itself proper? This is the conundrum subliminally posed in The Contender, written and directed by Rod Lurie, who has improved greatly from the misspelled and misfired Deterence (2000) by cloning the classic Advise and Consent

THE “WAR ON POVERTY” WORKS IN ENGLAND In Ratcatcher, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, Jr., who also plays an acting role in the film, presents a vivid picture of the working class slums in Glasgow with a very different slant from Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe (1999). Before World War II, sociologists used to think

REMEMBER THE TITANS WARNS THE SUPREME COURT NOT TO RESEGREGATE AMERICA Although the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional in 1954, some 500 of the 1,500 school districts in the United States had done nothing to integrate enrollment by 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled that immediate integration was required. In 1971, Alexandria,

PARIS SHORTCHANGES CHILDREN TO “SAVE” THE FRENCH ECONOMY During the 1990s, French unemployment hit 10 percent. The province of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (the same province featured in the recently released Humanité) had an unemployment rate of 33 percent, but government agencies turned a deaf ear to the social consequences, according to the fact-based story in Ça commence

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

AN UNLIKELY PEACE ACTIVIST EMERGES IN BELFAST The Titanic was built and launched in Belfast, only later to run into an iceberg. The paradigm of a sinking ship with many lost lives due to irresponsible behavior by those at the helm is perhaps one way of understanding the conflict in Northern Ireland over the last