Lady Low - You Say You Don't Love Me

 WOW! the BUZZCOCKS song given a beautiful interpretation by LA based dj and chanteuse....... Lady Low!

REEL DEAL: Moves that Matter review: THE BUTLER director Lee Daniels

The Butler dir Lee Daniel

As the nation is still reeling from the after effects of  the verdict in the Trayvon Martin trial and is coming to terms with the realization that racial profiling creates a huge risk for youth of color and is part of the jim crow that Michele Alexanders writes about in her book THE NEW JIM CROW( http://newjimcrow.com/), Lee Daniels 

steps up and answers back to the false reality projected by the award-winning film THE HELP about the lives of blacks in the South.

The Butler is based on the true life story of Eugene Allen. He worked at the White House as a staff member from 1952 to 1986, rising from “pantry boy” to the highest staff position of chief butler. It is written by Danny Strong, best known as  Jonathan Levinson, his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and for writing HBO award winner Recount. His resourceful script covers the legacy of slavery and the impact of emancipation on black Americans as they became part of the US underclass and today are still stigmatized by the mental branding of slave culture.  Strong documents the rise from slavery to the complicated race relations that exist today even with a black President in the White House.

Using a docudrama form, Daniel’s raises the stakes in myth dispelling through truth telling as he has paints the ancestral history of plantation life and the master-landowner ability to both depersonalize and sexualize the “negro” and the

exploitation of a human being for his/her own use. We see early on how casual the power over life and death is implemented. We see the making of what some would call an “Uncle Tom” when a field “nigga” is brought into the home as a “house nigga” as Vanessa Redgrave brings to life a patrician, benevolent, racist plantation mistress.

Forest Whitaker plays Eugene Allen with the subservient demeanor of the good negro. Daniel’s uses the life of Allen as a fictionalized template to show how blacks have been treated by white people. By being invisible under the smile and “yes sir” in the same way Booker Wright in the documentary Booker's World showed us in the deep South

Allen is all service and no opinion at the White House.  He knows his place as do the other black butlers including Cuba Gooding, Jr, who lights up every frame he is in, and Lenny Kravitz.  He brings this same contained inner life to the world of his family. Oprah Winfrey

plays his booze loving, flirtatious but tenacious, family- loving, black matriarch with two sons to raise in Washington D.C. where race rules are still played out but with less transparency than in the Deep South.  

The Butler moves back and forth between Allen’s professional life – his rise in the butler hierarchy through a succession of presidents including JFK, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan (and the delicious, audience-pleasing game of who is playing who by stars such as Robin Williams, James Marsden, John Cusack, Alan Rickman, Liev Schreiber and some of their wives including an anorexic Nancy Reagan played with what must have been an inner hoot by Jane Fonda and Minka Kelly

as a disturbingly real Jackie Kennedy) – and his home life with a loving but bored wife and two sons.

Daniels, with great skill, seamlessly moves through critical arch of historical moments by bringing alive through vivid actor portraits and archival footage the Kennedy and King assassinations, the rise of black power and Malcolm X.  A timeline when his sons were coming of age. His oldest son finds himself becoming a freedom rider and eventually a Black Panther follower. The son's politics are in direct opposition to the choices his father made to survive and provide for his family. As this tension flares up, it does not overtake the thematic movement of The Butler.  This father/son relationship is what roots the film in a narrative tradition rather than documentary storytelling and opens the door for millions of ordinary people to enjoy and find those parts of this specific story that triggers their own experiences.

This is popular culture making at its best.

How documentaries can change the world. Last year at Sundance I wrote about Kirby Dick's excellent expose on sexual abuse WITHIN the military. The  Invisible War shook up the Pentagon almost immediately when the doc was first released. It is a must see. Today it still is reverberating in Congress. Take a look at this Committee hearing on one of the latest sex abuse scandal by soldiers on soldiers 
http://www.c-span.org/Events/House-Cmte-Investigates-Sexual-Misconduct-at-Lackland-AFB/10737437506-1/

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God

Director Alex Gibney

­

After watching Kirby Dick's Academy Award nominated TWIST OF FAITH (2005) about the sexual abuse by a Roman Catholic priest and how despite his victims, now adults, speaking bitter truths publicly, he got away with it. The priest wound up in Ireland leading tourist pilgrimages. By happenstance I was sitting next to the principle accuser and his wife in a small theater at Sundance when it premiered, I did not know who this couple was but I will never forget his trembling and her comforting him during the screening.

All of the victims were adolescent boys.

Kirby used the term pedophile and I was curious to know if any distinction could be made between prepubescent and pubescent children. I remembered the book and movie Lolita, the Roman Polanski scandal and the outrage when Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin.

I discoverer there were other words but rarely used : hebephilia , adult sexual desire for 11-14 year olds; ephebophilia adult sexual desire for 15-19 year olds. I was convinced that both pedophilia and hebephilia were not the same as homosexual desire. I was troubled by ephebophilia given the different age of consent laws state and world-wide. Popular culture treats the sexuality of teenagers differently. What I did know is that issues of abuse and authority did not level the field when it came to coercion and seduction. Sex education is sorely lacking in public school education in almost every state. Teens are targeted by marketing campings selling life style product frequently laced with explicit erotic underpinnings.

I knew it was a very difficult subject to get people to discuss So when I went to see Maxima I thought I would be in for more tragic abuse stories.

But Gibney had another agenda. It was dangerous.

He wanted to expose the institution and its leaders who protected the perpetrators and had little concern for the victims. He exposes systemic cover up of priests from the Bishop level and exposes the Pope Benedict XVI , the current Pope, as being the person, in his previous Vatican position, who oversaw all cases of sexual molestation of children world-wide. We learn of how Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) and head of the Propagation of the Faith , put avoiding scandal over dealing directly with the abuse of power and the lasting damage done to the victims We lean of the failed programs to treat Priests .. not through mental health treatment but through prayer and meditation. Ratzinger thought he could solve the problem by declaring homosexuals unfit for priesthood. He instituted a homo-hunt in seminaries around the world Using stereotype criteria to identify homosexual to boot out. His assumption that all religious who were homosexual could not honor a vow of celebarcy, unlike heterosexual men defied factual statistic. The perpetration of girls was not addressed directly.

It is shocking to see! Protecting the priest and the institution took precedent over protecting the perpetrated and truth and fairness. His principal subjects are two very different priest one Father John C. Lawrence

  who ran a Catholic boarding school for deaf children, and the second the head of a Mexican Religious order which also ran schools for the deaf. The four abused deaf people now adults and their 20 year long fight to be heard .When charges of sexual abuse, their prodigious fund rising abilities made them protected at the highest levels of the Vatican.

Gibney has always been interested in showing the relationship between abuse of power and the protection money buys. Gibney's documentaries at their core deal with the abuse of power,coercion and the power of money. Enron (The Smartest Men in the Room), the Washington DC Lobbyist Jack Abramoff (Casino Jack and the United States of Money) and Elliot Spitzer (Client 9 The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spritzer ) all centered on the abuse of money lubricated power. In Client 9, Gibney showed how Wall Street power and money was behind the fall of Elliot Spritzer. How Wall Street operatives exploited his consenting adult indiscretions to stop his investigations of financial irregularities that had become normal every day practice on Wall Street.

Shockingly he also makes the link between than Bishop Timothy Dolan now Cardinal Dolan of NYC in his own cover up of sexual abuse and the attempt to stifle charges. We learn of the Servants of the Paraclete, who treat wayward priests and whose founder once declared "there is no cure for pedophilia."

To his credit Gibney does have an adult Catholic priest in a committed homosexual relationship talk of the power of coming out to enrich his spirituality and sense of purpose. Roman Catholics will be disturbed by what is revealed. But I was reminded of the Pharisees who turned against Jesus to protect their own wealth and political relationships with the powers that be. Jesus the story goes sweep them out of the Temple. Like wall street in its undoing of Spitzer, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God points the Catholic Church as a human, not spiritually run institution .. and it seems to be­ calling for a broom brigade to help DEAF POWER clean house.

Mea Maxima Culpa : Silence in teh House of God trailer 

(cc) jim fouratt 10.22.12

a version of this review appeared in WestView News