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HAWAI`I, THAIS, AMERICANS, AND AUSTRALIANS ARE TRASHED IN BROKEDOWN PALACE Summer is rarely a time for release of serious films with explicit political agendas. A possible exception might have been Brokedown Palace, directed by Jonathan Kaplan, whose films have been twice nominated by the Political Film Society. This film, however, appears to have started with […]

NIXON IS LAMPOONED; HIS SECRETS ARE EXPOSED BY FEMALE FORREST GUMPS Who was the “deep throat” who informed Washington Post reporters the secrets about Watergate? Who caused the 18½ minute gap in President Richard Nixon’s tapes? Since nobody in Washington is likely to divulge the answers any time soon, the puzzles are fair game for

A more chilling treatment of domestic terrorism can be found in this year’s Pariah, which goes beyond lastyear’s American History X in showing how skinhead gangs operate. We are not surprised to learn that the gang members are obsessed with sex, and filmviewers see the brutality of their sexual encounters, which are heterosexual simulations of

How extensive is terrorism inside the United States? The film Arlington Road, directed by Mark Pellington, poses this question through the words of Michael Faraday (played by Jeff Bridges), a widowed Professor of George Washington University, who lectures to students that most political assassinations and bombings are pinned to a single person even though logic

ITALIANS RE-FIGHT WORLD WAR II IN FILM Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, more than a decade before Hitler. That he made the trains run on time was quite enough to inspire praise from ordinary Italians, but for the Americans and British living in Florence one might imagine that a lack of

In Cookie’s Fortune, director Robert Altman takes us to Holly Springs, Mississippi (a town halfway between Memphis and Tupelo) for a mystery caper. Although filmviewers and two of the actors know who is responsible for a death, the police do not, but the real mysteries are wrapped up in the Faulknerian characters, their foibles, and

Life, directed by Ted Demme, presents a different Mississippi—where black men are imprisoned whether guilty or otherwise. Different except in one fascinating respect—Ned Beatty is again cast as an unprejudiced white prison superintendent. The film focuses on two inmates of a prison farm, played by Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, New Yorkers in Mississippi to

The School of Flesh, the English translation of the film L’Ecole de la Chair, is based on a novel not yet translated into English by Yukio Mishima, whose gay proclivities came to an end though suicide in 1970. The film, released in France in 1998 and shoehorned into art theatres in the United States in

In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth is played by Judi Dench, who won an Oscar® for best supporting actress. The premise of the film is much less serious than Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen, namely, that Shakespeare must have written love sonnets and the play Romeo and Juliet because he was himself in

Many films have been made about Queen Elizabeth. Our images have perhaps already been shaped by the portrayal of Bette Davis, who made the queen out to be almost a tough Lesbian. Along comes sensitive Cate Blanchett, who shows how an unprepared not-so-virgin princess achieved maturity as a queen through bitter experience. In Shekhar Kapur’s