ESSENTIAL" Stephen Maing’s 's Crime + Punishment" asks Is there such a thing as a "Good Cop ?"

ESSENTIAL" Stephen Maing’s 's Crime + Punishment" : asks Is there such a thing as a "Good Cop?" Meet 12 NYC police officers who prove yes ..despite their union and the Brass and a Mayor who speaks loud but appears to fear the police and their Union. The difference between the Mayor's pontifications and actual police practice instituted at the highest level is shocking, The Mayor says as does the Police Chief that police officers have no arrest quotas,,, but in fact they have do and this is what prompted these 12 cops to step forward saying they were refusing to play the quota game. Mostly of color, mostly men that represent the groups most subjected to profiling. Although their LGBT community is named as a. community targeted (mostly those of color and those who are gender variant), no one from GOAL the LGBT police organization stepped forward to join or support the 12. I would like to know why! The 12 speak of how they were/are subjected to discipline and punishment because of their refusal to respect a forbidden quota system,. Shocking, yes! The 12 are asking for the public to support change. Please go see this important documentary that comes at a time as a result of the Obama and Bush administrations the militarizing of local police forces and providing weapons of war to use in local communities is rampant. Personally, I want peace officers to make our streets safe, not acting as soldiers of war. I am speaking up based on what I learned from this documentary, I hope you will too,

NYPD Sergeant Edwin Raymond in Crime + Punishment

Photo: Courtesy of Mud Horse Pictures
ESSENTIAL

Stephen Maing’s Crime + Punishment asks is there such a thing as a "Good Cop ?" Meet 12 NYC police officers who prove yes ..despite their union and the Brass on Top and a Mayor who is all talk and......

Meet the 12 Brave cops still on duty who came forward and said NO, we will not follow the demands of the BRASS make an arrest to fulfill a quota demand,,, and hear what happened to them as a result. We need more cops that see themselves as peacemakers and community protectors rather than "shoot-to-kill" "soldiers"  trained in militia tactics. The Police Union and the Police Academy should be demanding training in peacekeeping and defending cops who see them sleeves as peacemakers and community protectors,

Go to the IFC in NYC where over the weekend the officers and the filmmakers will be doing Q&A's,,,,, citizens have to support these cops by speaking up I stand with the New York 12... go ..remember these are not actors playing cops ..these 11 men and a woman are REAL COPS, Trust me ...no matter what experiences you have had with police officers  (and i have many negative ones ) this film will introduce you to "good cops"

Meet the cops and the director in this Times Talk..... and please repost.

If you have HULU this is a HULU original documentary and premiered on HULU  on August 24 (note you can get a  FREE HULU trial subscription online)

Can't wait : Remember Florence Foster jenkins ? Rumor has it she was as gorunded in reality as Trump..but she was funny, he is dangerous.,. Marguerite - Trailer

She believed she was a great singer .. she was the only one ! An an American comic opera see through a French filter  Oh My .! opens March 11th

Film maker Barbara Hammer and Reel Deal: Movies that Matter's Jim Fouratt talk BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Blue Is the Warmest Color director Abdellatif Kechiche

Given the raging storm over the explicit lesbian sex scenes after winning the Golden Palm this year at Cannes and hearing how differently men and most women see the film, I asked Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer (photo: jackie rudin (cc) )

to share her insights . Hammer, a Westbeth resident is a feminist film director, world-renowned for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995),History Lessons, (2000) in addition to award winning narrative experimental shots and features

JF: Blue is about the sexual awakening of a high school student spellbound by a blue haired female artist in Lille, a mid-sized city in France (think Atlanta). Based on Julie Maroh’s French language controversial, award winning, graphic novel Blue Angles (just published in English),Blue is not pornographic. It is shocking because even in our sex-saturated culture, heterosexual sexual coupling is standard in almost every contemporary narrative film. Lesbian sex has been hidden except in the world of male fantasy and the porn that fuels it. In Blue, it is full frame, intimate, seemingly real and highly erotic, if still from a male point of view. While the bodies rolling around are not as graphic as rumored, Blue is much more than sweaty bodies.

Abdellatif Kechiche is a director of note. His Secret of the Grain had me convinced that these were real working class people and not actors. Yet in fact, it was a narrative not a document. His Black Venus seemed to me to fetishize an African woman put on display in 19 century Paris. In Blue, he replicates high school student interaction and the sometimes thoughtless group. He captures the closeness of outsider gay teens and their secret world of clubs, friendship, and survival tactics. The subtle class differences of the bourgeois artist and the ripe, besotted student threads the storytelling. The actual French title is in fact Adele Chapter 1 and 2, the beginning of a journey into adulthood, not an end.

In France, it is taken for granted that teenagers have sex and the age of consent is realistic unlike the puritanical anti-sex religious right policing here. See it with eyes wide open!

Barbara Hammer:  

The sex? Whew!  Blow me away!  Sex like you've never seen it in 70 mm, spanking galore, red-hot butts, and pussy licks.

The plot? Young girl falls in love with older girl and suffers break-up drama later when dismissed for another.  Original story!

 However, the depiction of class difference was superb.

The structure? Crowd interludes put in place to predictably follow hardcore sex or cat fights.  After all, where can you go after gorgeous body scenery but to the mass of humanity on the street?  But who does not love young supple nude bodies. And then, the setting: who does not love Paris?

The acting? Amazing work by Adele Exarchopoulo with the Louise Brooks mouth.

The composition? The depiction of bodies choreographed like paintings.  Strong work here!

The cinematography? Gorgeous three shot reflection scene of Kerchiche opening the film to the kind of sex cinema I love with the camera right there between the participants.  No doorway voyeur shots here.  Still, leaving the film I felt like I had watched soft-core French pornography.  I always think sex is a wonderful part of our lives but I missed seeing other desires like the drive to create, to play, to study, hey, even to think.

What film am I talking about?  Blue is the Warmest Color by Abdellatif Kerchiche starring Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos.    The breakout film that won the Pale D’or at Cannes is a groundbreaking luscious portrait of young sex?  Now, please, could we have a graphic display of those of us still lusty in our seventies?

I hope I haven’t dissuaded you from seeing this “Kiss, kiss, sunlight through the lips” sumptuous dining film.  You will never see spaghetti eaten like this again!

12 years a slave

12 Years a Slave dir Steve McQueen

Brit Steve McQueen is the toast of the film press at the moment.  However, I think he has stunted critical thinking by his aesthetical choices in this important film. His very clean and bloodless representation of the horror story of slavery in the US allows the viewer to actually distance herself from the visceral and

emotional impact of the true story of a freed slave living in upstate NY in the 1850s.  The slave was convinced by two foppish, bounty hunters into returning to the South where his former owners, a vile racist family, Michael Fassbinder and Sarah Poulson claim him as their property.

Like his previous work, Hunger, and Shame, this film reflects McQueen's obsessive fascination with power, pain, and suffering.

It is true we have seen slavery spectacles from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind told from the white society point of view and little effort to authentically represent a slave's point of view. Critics are speaking of McQueen's cool, perfectly performed, exquisitely landscaped (and it is) as the great breakthrough in authentic storytelling. McQueen, as he has in previous works, shows us, almost as an intellectual conceit, the cool depiction of pain as if he were the Marquis de Sade watching the vile, yet ordinary, cruel racism of the Southern white ruling class is the norm rather than the exception. In theory yes, but aesthetically, no. McQueen cannot get out of his well-known art world installation sensibility; aesthetics trump reality. What both Quentin Tarantino and Lee Daniels understand is that real life people feel. This creates tension and allows empathy. They both fuse feeling with insight while McQueen stays in the post-modern mind-body disconnect. His actors all rise to the level of the angry script including a revelatory mirror held up by Alfre Woodard to Clarence Thomas tokenism. 

McQueen's distancing construction of the horror and suffering through his artist's eye and intellect simply lacks heart. Yes audiences will react in harrow but only as set up response, not in the kind of devastation art can invoke. Too bad because this angry script by John Ridley in the right hands could.