rright now at FIM FORUM ...important . how we look does depend on who takes and who selects the the image , think Michael Brown and the difference between the pictures the media printed , the cops showed and his family owns ..Who took the picture matters
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Watch: Music Icon David Byrne Looks Back During ‘Stop Making Sense’ Q&A | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
Jonathan Demme's Taking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, was my drug of choice during the plague years of the 80's . It played frequently at the long gone 8th St Payhouse ( one more Village culture temple swallowed hoe by the voracious behemoth NYU) and I woud just slip in when ever I felt too overwhealned with the dying of my friends, Iwoud sit there and just be with the Taking Heads .. and like a mantra in motion i would find repite from the storm. The Heads were a downtown band and thought they had become world successful they remained to me the kids on the bock I liked. So when the Sound and Fury movie festival at lincoln Center programed it wiyh David in conversation I was for a moment in Heaven,
Watch: Music Icon David Byrne Looks Back During ‘Stop Making Sense’ Q&A | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
Watch: Music Icon David Byrne Looks Back During ‘Stop Making Sense’ Q&A | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel | Film | theguardian.com
I have aways been reluctant to blame artists for the polices of their government. I remember well the disconnect between Johnson and me and the current disconnect between Obama and what I believe in .... but I also think there is a time when the artists themseves MUST step up and actively in voice and practice say NOT IN MY NAME , It happened n South Africa, ..it is now now time for artists to say NO to funding from the Government inside and outside of Israel. And time for all artists to say NO to performing inside . Silence means complicity. Yes bottom line it is that simple, I remember going to South Africa to report on the end of the Artist Boycott just when Mandela was being released fron jail. remember hearing him speak in a little white church from where if you looked outside the window you coud see the island he had been imprisoned in. I remember going to Sun City (yes Sun City) to interview Dali Tambo (son of Oliver Tambo) and going with him to the black casino that was part of the complex for the first AIDS benefit concert in South Africa . I remember vividly the almost all black audience stood up and screamed wildly Mama Kia Mama Kia ( i think that's the spelling) when this Dusty Springfield-ish slightly butch blond took the stage and stood there as the room went wild for a good 20 minutes because she had stood up at the peak of her career and said NOT IN MY NAME and was "blacklisted:." the smile on her face radiated her joy at the end of apartheid and the fact she new she had made a the right choice as a white South African. And when she sang it seemed every singe person in the room knew the words to her blacklisted songs. the night was full of back AND white artist who had done the same thing, It seems the time is right for what director Ken loach is calling for ....
Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel | Film | theguardian.com
Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel | Film | theguardian.com
Sunday, August 24, 2014
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (CC available: en,es,r...
ONE of the most important documentaries of the Digita Age ,A tragic lesson in the conflict between privatizing of pubic funded information for profit and the fight for an open internet with equal access for all . This is the essential issue in the fight for net neutrality that is being led by Columbia University Professor and candidate for NYS Lt Governor Tim Wu and why I am voting for the Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu in the Democratic primary /9/2014 ,,,, and you should too ...Please share, Please vote !
Friday, August 22, 2014
Barely Legal Pawn, feat. Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Julia Louis-Dreyfus
funny ,,, when taented actors have fun ...this is about the emmys
Love is Strange public chat w/ DIr Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias, John li...
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has been hosting a series of free, first come first seated pubic conversations hosted by Fim Society's Eugene Hernandez ... they are are a wonderful way for the film going pubic to understand the gestation of a film and ask questions , HBO underwrites this program .. the inside Unported is small and their is no VIP section ...so people o people up an hour before the scheduled time. The Love is Strange conversation is particularly interesting because Director Ira Sachs taks about how he works with actors and the actor tak about how they worked with him . Alfred Molina who stars with John Lithgow was absente in body only as much of the conversation included references to him My question is the second one,
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
SECOND OPINION: Laetrile At Sloan Kettering director Eric Merola
SECOND OPINION: Laetrile At Sloan Kettering director Eric Merola
I always wondered what happened to laetrile the apricot seed based cancer treatment that many people felt offered hope to cancer victims. I remembered the denouncements of quackery etc. Second Opinion is the shocking tale of the repression of the actual scientific research that the leading cancer treatment hospital in the US did in the early '70's; the the fate of an honorable whistle-blower who tried to tell the truth. Eric Merola lets science maverick and writer Ralph W. Moss, Ph.d tell the story he lived. Moss was hired by Sloan Kettering to be their Communications Director, His job was to spin the news about the work Sloan-Kettering was doing on Cancer research. He became friendly with one of their top researchers and the oldest scientist on-staff Dr. Kanematusi Sugiura
a co-inventor of chemotherapy who was conducting a very traditional data backed study of the efficacy of laetrile in cancer treatment.
At first, Sloan-Kettering executives were supportive of the study and wanted to tell the medical and scientific community this good news.
But politics and profit cut them off as they were about to testify at a federal hearing.
This is the crux of this very absorbing scientific mystery tale. Included in the telling is the role the John Birch Society (the grandfather to today's Tea Party ) played, the pharmaceutical industry's machinations (laetrile cost $75 and chemotherapy averaged at the time $75,000). How Moss with his left wing 60's politics hooked up with Science for the People after he was fired and how a small collective of anonymous scientists .some of whom were employed by Sloan Kettering. They published a journal called SECOND OPINION which published all of Dr Sugiura research work on Laetrile. The group has remained anonymous except for one who did speak publicly for the documentary, Westview's own Alex Pruchnicki M.D., How small a word we live in! … Fascinating material that is as relevant today as it was then
Q&A • "Second Opinion: Laetrile At Sloan-Kettering" • Ralph W. Moss & Eric Merola
Q&A • "Second Opinion: Laetrile At Sloan-Kettering" • Ralph W. Moss & Eric Merola
Sunday, August 17, 2014
They would not let me in ... but here it is for all of us who like both of these artists .. John Waters has a pubic chit chat with Isabee Huppert at lincon Center Film Society soire at the Walter Reed Theater ,,
John Waters has a pubic chit chat with isabelle-huppert
Rumor has it that the afterparty was mobbed with japinesse students from a class in film theory taught by someone in attnendace and it was shut down because a parent was upset about a chid's curfew .. that 's is what I heard .. no idea not being there if this was true
John Waters has a pubic chit chat with isabelle-huppert
Rumor has it that the afterparty was mobbed with japinesse students from a class in film theory taught by someone in attnendace and it was shut down because a parent was upset about a chid's curfew .. that 's is what I heard .. no idea not being there if this was true
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
LOVE IS STRANGE ...... A Village Affair reel deal review
LOVE IS STRANGE Director Ira Sacks
Not since My Cousin Eileen (1955), Echos of Silence (1963) and Next Stop Greenwich Village (1976) has there been such an authentic narrative film that captures the NOW of Greenwich Village in the way that Ira Sacks and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias have done in this poignant and hilarious tale of what happens when two men who have lived together longer than anyone can remember (39 years) decide that now that they can they will get married. Ben is a Catholic school music teacher (Alfred Molina) and George (John Lithgow) a painter. They do. And all hell breaks out. What Sacks has done is to show that changing the law does not make everything perfect for gay people. Ben is immediately fired when they get back from their honeymoon. The Roman Catholic Church will not have an openly gay teacher no matter how good the teacher is with their impressionable students. Now they can no longer afford their apartment so they give it up and face the reality of Greenwich Village today: finding an affordable place to rent. To the rescue comes their multi-generation circle of friends who agree to put them up until they find a new living space. Not together, but separately. Ben and George suddenly are old waifs at the mercy of their friends lifestyles and vice versa. This is where the comedic aspects of the story lives. While Hillary may have said it takes a Village I don't think she was thinking of this Greenwich Village of friends who come to Ben and Georges rescue. Kate, a successful writer (Marisa Tomei ) and her husband Elliott (Darren Burrows) invite George to share their teenage son's (Charlie Tahan) room. It has a bunk bed. And it is here in how with a their good intentions the reality of disruption becomes the source of comedy rather than melodrama. Sacks proved in his underrated Hollywood film Married life (see it) he knows like Robert Altman the humor in life's ordinary crisis. I would have said that Tomei (who grew up in Greenwich Village) steals the film, but I can't because fellow actors, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, fearlessly make Ben and George into real, complicated, identifiable, characters ..in the same way Sean Penn did in Harvey Milk. Nice that we see on the screen gay men whose love and relationship endures. That gay relationships, like opposite sex ones can last a lifetime.
Sacks recenty was honored with the coveted VISIONARY award at New Fest 2014
Sacks recenty was honored with the coveted VISIONARY award at New Fest 2014
watch
Ira Sachs acceptance speech after receiving NEW FEST visonary award
Watch :intimate dscussion of the film at lincoln center with director Ira Saxhs, actors Marisa Tomei , John lithgow moderated by Eugene Hernandez. Mine is the second question,
Watch :intimate dscussion of the film at lincoln center with director Ira Saxhs, actors Marisa Tomei , John lithgow moderated by Eugene Hernandez. Mine is the second question,
COMING UP ROSES,,, Elliot Smith lives forever
No one ever really dies any more if they are famous.
Elliott Smith was a cult artist until he appeared on the Academy Awards singing a song he had written that was nominated as best song of the year. He seemed so frail as 300,000 000 people around the world watch. He transcended from indie rock poet to world class artist. He died either at his own hand or in a love, junkie spat and became iconic forever. Here he is is again alive as a digital memory that you can sleep with if you so desire ( that is the operative word still.)
Monday, August 11, 2014
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal REVIEW: the Aggressives dir: Daniel peddle
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal: Movies that Matter review
The Aggressives dir: Daniel peddle
Now available free on hulu vod.
Daniel Peddle’s The Aggressives is a deep look at bodies born female who choose to express their gender in a very masculine representation.
It is the only film picked up at the SXSW, a mini Sundance of sorts, in Austin, Texas. It turned away crowds at queer venues everywhere, including SRO at New York’s New Fest, San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay film festival and Outfest in L.A. Programmers apparently misjudged the potential audience for this provocative peek inside the black, lesbian, butch-identified culture invisible to most of the white world.
The intense interest in gender expression, particularly in the academic world where there has been a shift from a focus on gay and lesbian identity to one on queer and trans-identity, makes the film particularly timely.
The Aggressives documents the lives of six very different women, each of whom identifies herself with the concept of aggressives. The street word “Ag” is a term popular among women of color to describe females very much in touch with their masculinity. Historically, the words used to describe such women have been butch, passing woman, bulldagger, bull dyke, and stud. “Ag” has joined this corner of the language of gender expression as a positive word that these women use to communicate both empowerment and community.
The portraits presented in this film break down the media stereotypes about the women these words are used to describe. The world they inhabit received a fair amount of above-ground coverage in the wake of the media reporting of the murder of 15 year old Sakia Gunn in Newark, New Jersey in May 2003. Gunn, who friends described as an “AG" ,” was murdered after she went to the defense of her girlfriend who was being hassled by two black men cruising the city’s downtown streets in the early morning hours.
Gunn and her girlfriend had just returned from a night of socializing on the Hudson River waterfront in the West Village, a gathering place frequented at night predominantly by black gay, lesbian, and trans-teens. The turnout of more than a thousand black teenage lesbians in butch/ femme pairings, sporting rainbow doo-rags, necklaces, and hair braids, at Gunn’s funeral in Newark was an eloquent testimony to these women’s willingness to be out and visible.
Daniel Peddle is an NYU film graduate and also holds a degree in anthropology in addition to being a children’s book author. Since he came upon the late night scene at the end of Christopher Street while scouting for talent (Peddle has also been much sought after as a casting director for “real people” models by a fashion industry fascinated by the culture he discovered) he knew he had stumbled upon a world he did not know. A slim, fashionable street-attired, white man, raised in the south, Peddle spent five years gaining the trust and confidence of the multi-racial community he found at the river.
The film’s representation is principally black, though he sensitively includes Asian and Latina aggressives and their femme girlfriends. Audiences everywhere can see a world of gender expression that is almost Genet-like, with heightened femme and butch identities. Significantly, the “Ags” identify as female despite their amazing expression of masculine gender in hair, clothes, names, and role-playing.
Peddle takes his camera inside a Newark contest hall where the best “Ag” is to be chosen. The gender presentation would confuse even those most sensitive to varieties of masculine and feminine expression. These “men” are stunning in their strutting of female masculinity, with the swagger and self-confidence of seductive Olympians. The film offers a clear perspective on butch women who express their female masculinity gender while remaining identified as lesbians, rather than living a male identity in presentation or through medical intervention.
Men, in particular, will also learn much from how these aggressives treat the women they love. Peddle realistically shows expression of male braggadocio, but there is none of the dismissive and sometimes violent behavior some men express towards women they desire. It is important for these images to be seen on the screen, and not only by those who identify with femme/butch gender expression. It would be a loss if this film were simply placed in a niche.
The film does not exploit its subjects. Instead, like Jennie Livingston’s 1991 Paris is Burning, and David LaChapelle’s more recent Rize, it humanizes people who are either invisible or stigmatized and marginalized in the media. Not only is Peddle’s film provocative with its revelations about gender expression, it is also full of humor and warmth with which any sensitive individual can identify.
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal: Movies that Matter SUNSET EDGE, LOVE IS STRANGE, LUCY, SECOND OPINION, THE DOG, HUNDRED FOOT WALK
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal: Movies that Matter
August 2014 (pubished Westview News August 1s 2014)
In or out of Greenwich Village August it is either the dog days of summer or the time to vacation with a good book or feel-good movie. That is how it use to be. But no more now that the Oscar campaigning has seeped into August. We can thank our neighbor ubre-Producer Harvey Weinstein for moving the starting line.
First up two very different but intriguing programs :
The Rural Route Film Festival: At the Museum of the Moving image in Queens is the The Rural Route Film Festival (Aug 8-10th). Founded 12 years ago, The Rural Route Film Festival was created to highlight works that deal with unique people and places outside of the bustle of the city. Taking in a Rural Route program is like choosing the road less travelled, and learning something new about our constantly amazing world. Content consists of top quality, cutting edge contemporary and archival work from sources both local and far, far away. Their films tackle some of the most important topics of the day including global warming/environmental arena and life sustainability symposium.”
First up two very different but intriguing programs :
The Rural Route Film Festival: At the Museum of the Moving image in Queens is the The Rural Route Film Festival (Aug 8-10th). Founded 12 years ago, The Rural Route Film Festival was created to highlight works that deal with unique people and places outside of the bustle of the city. Taking in a Rural Route program is like choosing the road less travelled, and learning something new about our constantly amazing world. Content consists of top quality, cutting edge contemporary and archival work from sources both local and far, far away. Their films tackle some of the most important topics of the day including global warming/environmental arena and life sustainability symposium.”
| Watch the trailer for this year's program: http://youtu.be/-BNSgg9KXD8 |
A stand out this year is SUNSET EDGE a new film from Villager Daniel Peddle best known for his groundbreaking documentary The Aggressives (on the boundaries of gender expression and identity among black self-identified lesbians who called themselves “aggressives”) is the title of Peddle's documentary.He spent 5 years on the Hudson Park Trust piers gaining the trust from the FIERCE youth community of color. As a Southern white gay male it took time. The results were remarkable and opened the door to a world most people never knew existed.
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal: review RGE AGGRESSIVES
Jim Fouratt's Reel Deal: review RGE AGGRESSIVES
SOUND and VISION Up at lincoln Center the annual SOUND and VISION series brings together an eclectic mix of music films and documentaries from around the world and a program of live music. I recommend : (Films) Tosca's Kiss, Mateo, Pulp (the brit smartypants band), Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (David Byrne at Q&A) Message in Music: Senegal in Transition In live performances including EUROPE IN 8 BITS, GlASS GHOST -lYTE and two FREE performances: Heroes of American Root From the Historical Film Archives and The 78 project movie /live recording session.
LETS GO TO THE MOVIES:
SUNSET EDGE director Daniel Peddle
If Flannery O'Connor were to have conjured up a compassionate horror story and set it in North Carolina, SUNSET EDGE could very well be her multi-layered dream. Four teens (locally cast actors) who live in a trailer park rummage through the debris found in an abandoned house. A house they had grown up seeing fall into decay.
Their rummaging releases more than they anticipated and takes us the viewer into a memory and landscape that endows a genre film with an intensity of human experience that elevates it from simply a scary tale into an exciting, visual exploration of loss, family and unresolved issues. Peddle, having grown up in the North Carolina, brings a personal insight and integrity to his storytelling often absent from the genre. Southern Gothic horror has never been so sweet not so subtle. Sunset Edge captures in visual poetry the coming of adolescence age reminiscent of Winter's Bone.
LOVE IS STRANGE Director Ira Sacks
Not since My Cousin Eileen (1955), Echos of Silence (1963) and Next Stop Greenwich Village (1976) has there been such an authentic narrative film that captures the NOW of Greenwich Village in the way that Ira Sacks and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias have done in this poignant and hilarious tale of what happens when two men who have lived together longer than anyone can remember (39 years) decide that now that they can they will get married. Ben is a Catholic school music teacher (Alfred Molina) and George (John Lithgow) a painter. They do. And all hell breaks out. What Sacks has done is to show that changing the law does not make everything perfect for gay people. Ben is immediately fired when they get back from their honeymoon. The Roman Catholic Church will not have an openly gay teacher no matter how good the teacher is with their impressionable students. Now they can no longer afford their apartment so they give it up and face the reality of Greenwich Village today: finding an affordable place to rent. To the rescue comes their multi-generation circle of friends who agree to put them up until they find a new living space. Not together, but separately. Ben and George suddenly are old waifs at the mercy of their friends lifestyles and vice versa. This is where the comedic aspects of the story lives. While Hillary may have said it takes a Village I don't think she was thinking of this Greenwich Village of friends who come to Ben and Georges rescue. Kate, a successful writer (Marisa Tomei ) and her husband Elliott (Darren Burrows) invite George to share their teenage son's (Charlie Tahan) room. It has a bunk bed. And it is here in how with a their good intentions the reality of disruption becomes the source of comedy rather than melodrama. Sacks proved in his underrated Hollywood film Married life (see it) he knows like Robert Altman the humor in life's ordinary crisis. I would have said that Tomei (who grew up in Greenwich Village) steals the film, but I can't because fellow actors, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, fearlessly make Ben and George into real, complicated, identifiable, characters ..in the same way Sean Penn did in Harvey Milk. Nice that we see on the screen gay men over that endures. That gay relationships, like opposite sex ones can last a ifetime.
and love can survived over a lifetime. Sacks recenty was honored with the coveted VISIONARY award y New Fest.
SECOND OPINION: Laetrile At Sloan Kettering director Eric Merola
In a sentence Dr. Suiguira's studies showed while laetrile was not a cure, laetrile did in fact slow down growth and prevent new cancer tumors
At first, Sloan-Kettering executives were supportive of the study and wanted to tell the medical and scientific community this good news.
But politics and profit cut them off as they were about to testify at a federal hearing.
This is the crux of this very absorbing scientific mystery tale. Included in the telling is the role the John Birch Society (the grandfather to today's Tea Party ) played, the pharmaceutical industry's machinations (laetrile cost $75 and chemotherapy averaged at the time $75,000). How Moss with his left wing 60's politics hooked up with the Science for the People after he was fired and how a small collective of anonymous scientist ..some of whom were employed by Sloan Kettering punished a journal called SECOND OPINION which punished Dr Sugiura research work. The group has remained anonymous except for one who did speak publicly for the documentary, Westview's own Alex Pruchnicki M.D., How small a word we live in! … Fascinating material that is as relevant today as it was then
Q&A • "Second Opinion: Laetrile At Sloan-Kettering" • Ralph W. Moss & Eric Merola
Q&A • "Second Opinion: Laetrile At Sloan-Kettering" • Ralph W. Moss & Eric Merola
Warning:
THE DOG directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren.
The DOG traler
Berg and Keraudren bring their B-movie sensibility to what they purport is the true story behind the Al Pacino character in the award winning Dog Day Afternoon. Unfortunately the directors lost control of their film when they succumbed to the self aggrandizement of John Wojtowicz and his mad rantings. Sort of on a par with Berg's Teen Mother TV series What could have been an insightful look at a sociopath in lust sinks to a surface portrait of a disturbed family worthy of a reality talk show.Too bad here was a great subject and a moment in the public awareness of gay life that could have been meaningful. It never goes beyond TMZ sensibility. See Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino's insight is heads and shoulders above THE DOG.
http://youtu.be/npe6yTYmTiM
Furst a couple of recommended "summer movies"
LUCY director Luc Bresson
Lucy Trailer
Starring the Westbeth raised Scarlett Johansson is just about the best of the summer movies that breeds pleasure without dumbing you down. A smart action film that has a very human, if punkish, action hero in Scarlett Johansson's LUCY. Imagine a super-action hero whose muscle is her brain rather than brawn!
Lucy Trailer
Starring the Westbeth raised Scarlett Johansson is just about the best of the summer movies that breeds pleasure without dumbing you down. A smart action film that has a very human, if punkish, action hero in Scarlett Johansson's LUCY. Imagine a super-action hero whose muscle is her brain rather than brawn!
THE HUNDRED FOOT JOURNEY director Lasse Hallstrom
Executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Spielberg picked Cider House Rules director Lasse Hallstrom to bring Richard C. Morais international best seller to the screen, While if feels almost 30's romantic comedy familiar, Hallstrom has plopped his film down in some of the most gorgeous countryside of France and top loaded this resturant business rivalry/love story with the likes of Helen Mirren (Madame Mallory) and well known Indian actor Om Puri a (Papa) as two widowed restaurant owners as well as their young chiefs who fall in love US born Manish Dayal, and the delightful natural beauty and talented french actress Charlotte Le Bon. (Mood Indigo). The tragic backstory for each owner fades away as Madame Mallory watches a new restaurant being born across a hundred foot wide road.Hers is a Michelin 1 star hi-end French cuisine eatery and the new restaurant is run by an Indian family in exile complete with theatrical bollywood decor and energetic Indian contemporary music. She will have nothing to do with this vulgar challenge to her haute casuine and does everthing to stimie its succes. But the young chiefs have a different idea. The delightful Le Bon, a non-hollywood beaty as ony french cinena can create and the young indian chief with dreams of being a master of French cusine break theought the barriers of rivary set by their elders and role model how love respects no boudries. (If ony I could get the grandfathers of Israe and Paestime ro watch this movie and break bread together.)
(cc jim fouratt nyc 7.27/2014)
feedback:
reeldealmovies@gmail.com,
editor@westviewnews.org
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