Uncategorized

Bang Rajan: Legend of the Village Warriors, as titles at the beginning and end of the film inform, is the name of a village in central Thailand that held the invading Burmese army at bay for five months during 1765-66. The context of the conflict is that some of Burma’s putative vassal states were refusing […]

A GIANT CORPORATION CONTROLS A PUPPET PRESIDENT IN THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE In 1962, The Manchurian Candidate was released but quickly withdrawn because of a possible adverse impact on the public, which was perceived to be more credulous in those days; the film was reissued in 1988, but the black-and-white format placed the film outside the

SPIKE LEE DEMONSTRATES HOW MONEY CONTROLS AMERICA IN SHE HATE ME Director Spike Lee never ceases to be controversial. His latest, She Hate Me, almost literally joins two stories with an umbilical cord–or cords. The first story unfolds after opening credits in the form of American currency seemingly waving as if they were flags; one

KING ARTHUR REINVENTS A MUDDLED LEGEND Director Antoine Fuqua attempts to set the record straight in his epic film King Arthur. Despite previous accounts that depict his rule as idyllic, a foretaste of the birth of democracy in Britain, the current movie is a prequel to his supposed reign, set in 452. Titles at the

. Perhaps the most startling revelation from Control Room, directed by Jehane Noujaim, is the fact that American bombing unapologetically targeted Al Jazeera filming locations, obviously retaliating against the network’s coverage of news that sought to achieve objectivity by balancing the spin placed on news by the American military press office. The Political Film Society

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 is a propaganda documentary that aims to discredit the judgment and leadership of President George W. Bush by combining facts, often not well known by the American public, and emotions. The facts deal with how Bush was “elected,” his passivity during and immediately after the events of 9/11 (when, we have

ISTROY AN ANTI-WAR FILM? Homer’s The Iliad recounts a fascinating history of the fate of Troy, a city-state north of present-day Istanbul, complete with the intervention of Zeus and other gods, in the mid-12th century bc. The film Troy, directed by Wolfgang Peterson, attempts to recreate the secular events of that siege while humanizing several

THE ALAMO PROVIDES A PARADIGM FOR RETALIATION AGAINST TERRORISM After 9/11, George Bush encouraged members of the film industry to depict subjects that might deal with how Americans might respond to internal threats. The Alamo, directed by Texasphile John Lee Hancock, appears to be one such project, a contemporary remake of the 1960 John Wayne

THE DESPERATION OF IRANIANS PORTRAYED IN CRIMSON GOLD How can a filmmaker suggest the need for reform by making a movie in a repressive regime that has failed to live up to promises to bring about a better life? Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh) has found a way to do so–by recreating a true story, using

The film Proteus is about two men who enjoy each other’s bodily pleasures on Robben Island, South Africa, so the title may at first seem inappropriate. According to a title at the beginning of the film, the proteus was proposed as South Africa’s national flower in 1964; a title at the end informs us that in the