FILIPINO AMERICANS RESPOND TO ASSIMILATIONIST PRESSURES BY TAKING PRIDE IN THEIR CULTURE The plight of Filipinos in Los Angeles is featured in The Debut. The Mercado family is about to celebrate the 18th birthday of their daughter Rose (played by Bernadette Balagtas), so a fiesta is organized. There is an elaborate preparation of coiffure and […]

Do filmviewers need to see another film in which a white man brings black boys to the Promised Land? Paramount Pictures, which produces many films focusing on African Americans, evidently thinks so. Based on a true story, as recounted in Daniel Coyle’s Hardball: A Season in the Projects, the film Hardball focuses on Connor O’Neill

Liam, directed by Stephen Frears, is an English film that focuses on how a precious seven-year-old boy views life as he looks for role models in his long path from childhood to adulthood. Based on Joseph Keown’s novel The Back Crack Boy,the story is set in Liverpool as the Great Depression deepens among the working

COLUMBINE DELAYS A FILM THAT PERHAPS EXPLAINS THE ATMOSPHERE FOR THE MASSACRE O, based on Shakespeare’s Othello with some passages from the Verdi opera, takes place in Palmetto Grove Academy, a prep school in Charleston, South Carolina. The Othello is African American Odin James (played by Mekhi Phifer), a star basketball player on scholarship who

2001 VERSION FAILS TO APE THE SUCCESS OF THE EARLIER PLANET OF THE APES In 1968, Planet of the Apes emerged as one of the most profound films of all times, raising issues about racial discrimination and nuclear war. Now a retake (not a remake) with a roughly similar plot and a unique surprise ending,

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CODDLES PARENTS WHO ABUSE ADOPTED CHILDREN Director Stanley Kubrick wanted filmviewers to leave a cinema with profound questions, not answers. When he started Artificial Intelligence, he again had existential puzzles in mind, but he did not live to finish the project. Steven Spielberg, with whom he communicated about Artificial Intelligence, then took over

FORMULAIC PEARL HARBOR ADMITS TO RACISM, BOMBS A JAPANESE AMERICAN, AND PERPETUATES A MYTH Pearl Harbor has the distinction of having more advance publicity than any film in recent memory, but of course the $140 million project commemorates events exactly sixty years ago and doubtless will be re-released on December 7. Although the trailer may

BLOW  STICKS ITS NOSE INTO THE LIFE OF AN EARLY SUPPLIER FOR THE RECREATIONAL LIBERATION The sexual liberation, which began in California during the 1960s, was accompanied by the recreational liberation. A weed from México brought temporary Nirvana to consumers and vast wealth to kingpins. In the 1970s, however, a powder from Colombia gradually replaced

JOHN BOORMAN ISSUES A WARNING ABOUT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION On December 31, 1999, the government of Panamá took control of the Panamá Canal after eight-five years of American sovereignty over the Canal Zone. A clause in the reversion agreement, negotiated to appease conservative Senators who were otherwise reluctant to ratify the treaty, provides that the

JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD HONORS THE MEMORY OF THE SNIPER OF STALINGRAD When Nazi Germany was at the pinnacle of its power in 1942, the only adversary left on the European continent was the Soviet Union, and the path to German control of the oil-rich Caucasus lay through the city of Stalingrad. Now Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose Seven