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 even the portrayal of Blacks in “The Jeffersons”

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

A BRITISH “LIEUTENANT CALLEY” ORDERS A MASSACRE OF INNOCENTS IN SOUTH CAROLINA The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich, provides much insight into what the American Revolutionary War was all about and why participants lined up on opposite sides. The action takes place in South Carolina, beginning in 1776; though there is some effort to provide

A GLADIATOR FINDS VIETNAM ON THE DANUBE In the year 167 a.d., the first full-scale barbarian attack on Rome destroyed aqueducts and irrigation conduits, but the army of emperor Marcus Aurelius repelled the invaders. In 176, Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus entered Rome after a campaign north of the Alps in which they were

A FRENCH FAMILY & A UKRAINIAN ATHLETE ESCAPE FROM SOVIET HORRORS Immediately after World War II, unemployment in France was extremely high. In an effort to lure Russian émigrés back to the homeland, the Soviet Union promised employment, food, shelter, and amnesty, and some naïve Russians returned. The fate of one such Russian and his

DID SPAIN CONQUER MÉXICO SPIRITUALLY? Credits at the end of the Mexican film The Other Conquest (La Otra Conquista) tell us that the movie is about events during the first years of the Spanish conquest of México—from the arrival of Don Hernán Cortés (1519) to the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe (1531). Written and

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT STEREOTYPES ARABS—AND AMERICANS, TOO The imperatives of foreign policy clash with the desires for justice in Rules of Engagement, directed by William Friedkin from a story by former Navy Secretary James Webb, whose nostalgia for the Cold War appears unquenched. In 1968, during a battle in a Vietnamese jungle, Terry L. Childers

THE SKULLS WARNS THAT YALE MAY RULE AMERICA Who runs America? Although academic answers to this question vary from a power elite of some sort to a large set of organized interests who check one another, Hollywood’s frequent answer has consistently been that a secret clique runs the country. In The Skulls, we learn from

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES FOCUSES ON UNWANTED CHILDREN The fate of unwanted children is usually left out of debates on abortion. Not so in The Cider House Rules, directed by Lasse Hallström. The film takes place in the 1940s, beginning at an orphanage in St. Clouds, Maine, where illegitimate children live until infertile couples arrive