Warning: Major spoilers for They Cloned Tyrone They Cloned Tyrone is a peculiar little science fiction movie set in the Glen, a fictional poor Black community existing in the South. It follows the life of the protagonist Fontaine, a drug dealer without any particular flair or personality.

The Glen is rife with poverty, inequality and unfairness. For an individual not well versed in political theory, these problems might seem interpersonal or individualistic. For a Marxist-Leninist, this could only be described as one thing: national oppression.

Now you may ask: is the movie operating from a Marxist-Leninist ideology? I say most likely not. But any film that portrays racism as a social evil rather than an individual problem will usually address some aspects of national oppression. But before we can analyze the movie, we must understand what national oppression is. That means we have to understand the Marxist definition of a nation.

For a Marxist, a nation isn’t simply what’s recognized on the map or by some political body. A nation is determined by scientific and historical characteristics and can exist without having a state or even a particularly strong national consciousness. In Marxism and the National Question, J.V. Stalin defines a nation as a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

According to Marxist-Leninist theory, advanced by the well-known U.S. communist Harry Haywood, “Geographically, the Negroes are scattered throughout the United States, but almost one-third of their number (five million) are still massed in the Black Belt area… Any serious examination will show that the Negro population of the Black Belt is tied together by myriad internal bonds, by all facets and agencies of modern capitalism, has all the prerequisites for existence as a nation. (Harry Haywood, The Negro Nation Chapter 7).

The Glen itself is a representation of a community within an oppressed nation. Eventually they develop a national consciousness and begin to struggle for liberation. Before they can begin to struggle for change, however, the protagonists need an inciting incident – something that makes them aware of the social evils existing within the Glen.

The protagonists of the film – Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles – are three individuals trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence existing within the Glen.

The inciting incident of the movie is the death of Fontaine. He is shot and killed by a rival drug lord after confronting Slick Charles, a pimp, about the drug money Slick owes him. After dying, his consciousness is uploaded into the body of a clone that looks exactly the same. Fontaine doesn’t even know that his original body was murdered yesterday. When the drug dealer returns to Slick Charles demanding the money, Slick explains to him that he died yesterday. After Slick Charles and Yo-Yo, an aspiring journalist who is a sex worker under Charles’ management, prove to Fontaine that he did in fact die, he begins investigating what happened to his former self.

The three unlikely detectives discover details about a conspiracy happening in the Glen, and their continued investigation leads them to realize a sort of mind control drug is being injected into everyday items in their city.

The three heroes attend the local chicken joint because they believe it holds the clues to their mystery. They discover a white powder that makes people laugh is being injected into the food at the Got Damn Fried Chicken fast food place. A kind of mind numbing chemical is also active in the 2Clean Perm Cream used for straightening hair in the local salons. That same mind-controlling drug is also being used in the church, this time inside the grape juice.

These scenes are the great accomplishment of the movie and Juel Taylor’s greatest success within the entire film. There may not be a secret government organization secreting chemicals into these products in real life, but it’s because they don’t have to. Taylor masterfully manipulates hyperbole and the absurdity of this conspiracy to highlight how these products are a representation for the mechanisms used to contribute to Black impoverishment.

All three of these commodities are examples of the psychological and social tools of oppression used to control Black people and prevent our national consciousness from developing.

The fried chicken represents the effects of obesity and poor health due to the lack of sustainable and healthy food in Black communities. For poor Black workers, who experience more than their fair share exploitation, cooking full meals or affording nutritious ingredients isn’t always a reality. It’s why there remains a disparity in Black health rates, and why things like the COVID-19 pandemic more severely impacted Black communities than white ones.

The hair products serve as a way to dull the senses of Black people, in particular Black women, in the community, to dull their consciousness and control their minds. This is a metaphor for the way national oppression forces Eurocentric beauty standards on Black women and speaks to the higher requirements for beauty and womanhood placed on Black women in general. The catchphrase “straighter is greater” is used in a commercial that takes place during the film about the hair product, straight hair being a metaphor for assimilation into white beauty standards.

The most radical part of the movie is its criticism of the contemporary Black church. The grape juice is just one part of the movie’s satire on modern Black Christianity’s tendency to convince African American communities to accept their oppression. The pastor even tells churchgoers to not worry about possible eviction, rising rent, and bills and just focus and worry about God. They end up discovering the conspiracy has an underground laboratory inside of the church.

All of these locations are ordinary. From the outside, they may seem harmless or mundane. But now that our protagonists are conscious of the conspiracy, and aware that there is an external force working to sabotage and undermine the people of the Glen, they start to become conscious of the dangers that seemed like everyday parts of the Glen before.

This is a wonderful representation of national oppression and national liberation. The United States of America has purposely and meticulously created a political system that is unfair and unjust for Black people. At first, people accept that system as normal; they see it as the way their community has always been. But when circumstances change and the aggression and cruelty of the empire are exposed, some members of the community begin to develop a national consciousness. They start to understand the reasons behind their oppression and the sinister undertones behind the at times seemingly benign or mundane features of the system.

In the movie, Black communities are oppressed and treated like colonized nations so that government officials can find a way to assimilate Black people into being totally white. In real life, Black communities are oppressed so that the ruling class – the monopoly capitalists, politicians, and wealthiest property owners – can extract “super-profits” from the Black community.

Harry Haywood theorized that imperialists don’t just oppress Black people due to hatred and bias, although those do play major roles in the system of oppression that exist. The imperialists in our country do it to super-exploit the African American community, meaning that they can pay African Americans lower wages, use us as a way to perpetuate the drug trade in the U.S., and devote less resources into Black community’s public infrastructure, schooling and livelihoods.

This system gives a massive payout to the 1% of this country, while also acting as an obstacle to unity between the Black and white working class. Due to the stereotypes, bias and terrible conditions foisted upon Black communities, the elites get to pay everyone less and blame the oppressed for the reason why living conditions in this country are awful.

After discovering even more shocking truths about the Glen, including discovering that Slick is also a clone, one of the leaders of the conspiracy confronts the protagonists and reveals the Glen is being used as a scientific experiment. He threatens to murder Yo-Yo, Fontaine and Slick unless they return to their regular lives.

After an initial moment of despair, Fontaine and Slick unite the community to save Yo-Yo, after she is captured and imprisoned by the Institute for trying to expose the conspiracy to the press. Through trickery and clever planning, the Glen community leads a rebellion against the conspiracy with their community members.

The characters in They Cloned Tyrone don’t just accept defeat. They analyze their conditions and develop a plan to defeat their oppressors. Unlike They Cloned Tyrone, a single individual rebellion won’t defeat our oppressors. The monopoly capitalist class, the true rulers of our society, rule the African American Nation in the Black Belt South openly. They actively work to destroy these liberation movements and inhibit the development of the Black Nation, as well as the Chicano Nation, indigenous peoples, and other oppressed nationalities in the U.S.

The most important similarity between the movie and real life, however, is that the oppressed communities can fight back. We can win the struggle against our oppressors. Instead of organizing a quiet conspiracy, we need to build a mass movement that can win victories for the national liberation movement. We need to fight to institute community control of the police across the nation. And we need to fight to overthrow the monopoly-capitalist class for once and for all, so all oppressed communities, fictional or otherwise, can be set free.

#UnitedStates #Movies #movieReview

A dozen cities throughout the United States, from New York City to Miami, to Chicago to Tucson, will host livestreaming events of the movie.

“It is imperative that activists in the United States show solidarity with the people of Venezuela, who have been tirelessly resisting illegal actions by the United States against their country for over a decade,” said Tom Burke, organizational secretary with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. “We have been part of the Free Alex Saab Committee since its inception, and we will be watching the film here in Grand Rapids, Michigan to express our unity with the Bolivarian Republic and its people, and to demand the release of their heroic diplomat.”

Alex Saab was illegally arrested, tortured and imprisoned simply for securing funds, food items and medicine for the people of Venezuela to continue to thrive. For over a decade, the United States has tried to wreak havoc on Venezuela through multilateral sanctions (even during COVID), attempted destabilization efforts, and even assassination attempts – all tactics that have failed miserably and which Venezuela has overcome, in large part thanks to the work of patriotic Venezuelans like Alex Saab.

By putting Saab on trial, the United States has gone against international and U.S. laws alike. International law clearly states that diplomats cannot be extradited, arrested and imprisoned by foreign governments, especially for made-up charges such as the one against Alex Saab. The United States is clearly an empire on its last legs, and it is lashing out with all tools in its arsenal, trying not to lose its grasp on global hegemony, which it sees slipping from its fingers.

We demand the U.S. government stop all attacks on Venezuela, its people, and its representatives! Free Alex Saab!

#MiamiFL #AntiwarMovement #Venezuela #Movies #HandsOffVenezuela #AlexSaab #Americas

Los Angeles, CA – On March 31, 1995, 23-year-old Chicana icon Selena Quintanilla was murdered by her employee Yolanda Saldivar. 25 years later, on December 4, 2020, Selena: The Series premiered on Netflix. Selena is indisputably one of the most important and influential Chicanas in the past 100 years. Executive producer for the series was eldest Quintanilla daughter Suzette; it was co-produced by Chicana Christian Serratos, who stars as Selena in the series.

A father’s dream

Selena’s parents Marcella and Abraham Quintanilla met around 1961 in Yakima, Washington and, after giving birth to their first child AB Quintanilla, moved to Lake Jackson, Texas. The series portrays the heavy-handed role of Abraham Quintanilla and his own aspirations of leading a life dedicated to music. Beginning with teaching son AB how to play guitar, and after hearing Selena sing (at the age of eight), Quintanilla would also teach his daughter Suzette how to play drums. They would start a band named Southern Pearl and would play inside of the Quintanilla restaurant PapaGayo’s.

After the U.S. economic depression of 1983, the Quintanilla’s lost their restaurant. Forced to move, they took refuge at one of Quintanilla’s brother’s homes in Corpus Christi, Texas. The series delves deeper into Abraham Quintanilla’s own struggle between joining the working class or pursuing his love of music. In the series, Henry Quintanilla (Abraham’s brother) tells him about an available truck-driving position. Abraham’s response is, “I’ll drive a truck, as long as it doesn’t interfere with band practice.”

Countless examples throughout the series shine a light on the fact that Abraham Quintanilla loves music and was going to pursue a career in music at all cost. Unable to find success with his own band Los Dinos, he turned his attention to his own children and in particular AB Quintanilla, who he groomed to be the Selena y Los Dinos songwriter, and to daughter Selena who led the band.

Many opinions have been cast against the series and its focus on Abraham and AB Quintanilla. The truth is much of part one of Selena: The Series follows the young life of Selena, between ages eight and 20. Selena was just a child, under the direction of her parents, her older brother AB, and older sister Suzette. Killed at age 23, Selena would never be given the opportunity to gain control over her own career.

The Chicano Question

Despite the word “Chicano” never being used in the series, it was the context of her life. Selena’s career was galvanized when the Quintanilla’s discovered the best market for them was a Chicano, Mexican, Central American, and Spanish-speaking audience. First was with Tejano music – exclusively Chicano, this genre was invented in Texas – then by taking their music to Matamoros, México, when Selena was only 16 years old.

Having only really sung in Spanish but realizing she would have to speak the language conversationally, Selena embarked on a mission to become more fluent. As most Chicanos are also faced with a similar question in their lives, the series attempts to draw this connection. Chicanos do not just originate from Mexican Americans; they can also be of various other roots, like Central American.

A brief nod to Chicana Linda Ronstadt’s mariachi album is made when they are all in a car and from the speakers Ronstadt is heard singing Tú, Sólo Tú. Selena would cover the song in 1995 and it would be the first Spanish song release after her death.

The first-ever Chicana musician signed onto the EMI record label, the brand was challenged with trying to market a Tejano musician like Selena. They slashed her band’s name and portrayed her as a “worldly” musician, of an ambiguous nature. Racism and tokenism ensued and a scene in the series shone a light on this during the record label’s listening party. Capitalism always has a difficult time monetizing off Chicanos, but at the bare minimum they recognize Chicanismo sells.

Chicanas Christian Serratos and Madison Taylor Baez

One of the most cringeworthy critiques observed from people regarding Selena: The Series is that Serratos looks nothing like Selena. In an interview, Suzette Quintanilla said, “I felt really bad for Christian because not only would she have to portray Selena, but she would also have to portray J-Lo as Selena.” Abraham Quintanilla in the same interview said that people protested at their Corpus Christi office when Jennifer Lopez was cast to play as Selena, only two years after Selena was murdered. “They were upset that we cast a Puerto Rican to play Selena,” said Quintanilla.

Madison Taylor Baez is a Chicana from Los Angeles and in interviews, she admits she did not know who Selena was. Baez said her parents found the casting call for the film and jumped on it. As soon as they found out Baez had gotten the part, they immersed her in Selena history. “I identify a lot with Selena because I too am Latina, and I too had to learn Spanish, and I too would love to be a singer,” said Baez in an interview.

But no one is publicly bashing Baez for her portrayal as young Selena. The brunt of the criticisms has been on Serratos. Serratos is half Italian and half Chicana, a Pasadena, California native, and uses her mother’s Chicano last name as opposed to her father’s Italian one.

Important for Aztlan, important to the world

It's true, no one will ever look or be just like Selena. No one will ever sound like Selena. And no one will ever be able to come close to the significance Selena had for little Chicanitas like myself who grew up wanting to sing, dance, and look just like her. Selena continues to be one of the biggest role models for Latinas and people around the world.

Honoring her Chicana roots, but also always giving a shout-out to the Black Belt South, no one else has been able to effortlessly do as Selena did. An example of this is portrayed in the series when Selena kept wanting to do covers of Jody Watley’s songs. Selena’s last concert was in San Antonio and she opened her show with a disco medley. The songs were I Will Survive, Funkytown, Last Dance, The Hustle and On the Radio- songs originally performed by Black musicians. During her final concert, Selena would also be accompanied by Black, male backup singers.

I also have shared in singing to Selena songs with Black people who were from Texas. If you are from Texas, no matter who you are, you have heard of Selena at least once.

2020 was a significant year for Chicanos. From the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, the 25th year after Selena’s death, to the release of this series. A whole new generation of Selena fans will come of this, and many of whom will be Baez’s age. I recently gave birth to my own Chicanita who will grow up in the Chicano nation of Aztlan. She too, will grow up listening to Selena and dancing to her songs. Maybe the 50th year after Selena’s passing will mean another Selena movie or series. Another project will pull at all of the heartstrings and make all of our hearts once again go Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.

#LosAngelesCA #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #Music #Selena

Jacksonville, FL – I'm not sure how we'll look back at film in the 2010s. Much of it already seems like a blur, leaving me asking questions like, “Was that the Batman movie with Ben Affleck or Christian Bale?” or “Which of the five Spider-Man and five Star Wars movies did you like the best?”

To put it another way, how are we supposed to really evaluate the 21 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies theatrically released in this decade? Even Marvel movies represent only about half of the total comic book-related films produced in the 2010s. It’s just disorienting.

It's mostly the product of monopoly capitalism. Fewer giant corporations own most of the franchises and intellectual properties today than even ten years ago. In pursuit of profit, studios fall back on less risky, tried-and-true bankable stories and franchises. To that end, we’ve seen an explosion of sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, spinoffs and more in the last ten years.

We end up in absurd situations where Sony remakes Spider-Man every couple of years for no other reason than to stop their franchise rights from lapsing back to Marvel (owned by Disney). Now 20th Century Fox's Alien Queen is technically a Disney princess. Even movies that completely bombed in theaters but developed a cult following on home video, like Blade Runner, get treated like major franchises.

The other factor driving all of this is the Great Recession. For most of us, the economy never recovered from the 2008 crisis. All capitalism can offer us anymore – especially my generation – is this fake, totally banal nostalgia for a past that supposedly didn't suck so much (it did; we were just kids). In Capitalist America, you might not have the money to see a doctor, but you can watch Gargoyles, or Lizzy Maguire, or a brand new Star Wars TV show on Disney+ for $6.99 per month.

It’s appropriate that the 1980s weighed so heavy on pop culture this decade. We continue to live in the hangover of Reaganomics, and the billionaire reality-TV psychopath who came to encompass the greediest excesses of that era now sits in the White House. Rest assured, a similarly exhausting wave of 90s cultural nostalgia is on the horizon for the 2020s. Let’s hope that it’s limited to movies and music and not politics or economics.

As less of us went to the movies in the aftermath of the recession, Hollywood increasingly came to rely on overseas audiences for ticket sales. This lends itself to studios producing bigger blockbusters, which are heavy on special effects and colorful characters but lighter on dialogue and story – since the latter, of course, has to get translated.

But it wasn't just blockbusters. Even the supposedly 'high-brow' cinema adored by the rich and famous mostly sucked. Take a look at this decade’s Oscar winners and nominees: The King's Speech - a sendup to the British crown? The Artist - a silent film no one saw? Argo - thinly disguised propaganda for war with Iran? Birdman - an eye-rolling 'love letter' to rich yuppies in New York? All of these movies won Oscars for ‘Best Picture.’ Even on the off-chance that you saw them, does anybody really think these movies had anything important or lasting to say about the world?

All that said, the 2010s wasn't all cynical garbage. There were plenty of outstanding movies, including many not on my list. But in the interests of cutting through the haze, I've highlighted 20 movies from the last ten years that stood out:

1. Free State of Jones (2016) - This isn't just the best Civil War movie ever – it's a revolutionary manifesto for organizing in the South. I wrote a full review back in 2016 for Fight Back!, which you can read here. 2. Sorry to Bother You (2018) - It’s the most pro-union, anti-capitalist movie made in the U.S. in several decades, delivering an original story and a legendary sci-fi plot twist worthy. Sorry to Bother You isn’t just great political art. It perfectly speaks to the struggles facing the working-class youth of today in an age dominated by monopoly corporations like Amazon and flooded with social media, low wages, high rent and soul-crushing jobs.

3. It Follows (2014) - Solidly one of the five best horror films I've seen, ever. Perfectly captures the dreadful inevitability of a nightmare.

4. Arrival (2016) - The most aspirational sci-fi film of the decade, and one that lays out Nietzsche's problem of the eternal recurrence in a hopeful way. Arrival left me believing that humanity has a chance to stop our impending climate and war-driven apocalypse and live better than we ever have.

5. Lincoln (2012) - Staggering and important portrayal of the political fight to abolish slavery in the United States. All the better because it's not an insipid biopic like the title might suggest.

6. The First Purge (2018) - The apex for the best original franchise to emerge from the 2010s. Every couple of years, The Purge series offered the most biting and timely political commentary at the movies or on television. With its Black working-class protagonists battling for survival against rich neo-Nazis, The First Purge, technically the fourth installment, represented the series at its most class-conscious.

7. Inception (2010) - I cooled on all of Christopher Nolan's movies over the last decade except for this one. Truly an exceptional mind-thriller that stunningly represents the way we perceive and construct ideas.

8. First Reformed (2018) - What does it mean to accept that the capitalist system we live under will lead to certain doom for humanity and the earth, but also to set aside that terrible realization enough to do something about it? How do you stave off nihilistic despair and embrace a positive vision worth fighting for? Those questions asked in First Reformed bring to mind Huey Newton’s writing about ‘reactionary suicide’ and ‘revolutionary suicide’ – something the film explores beautifully.

9. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) - Without a doubt the best comic book movie of the decade. It's hard to even remember it's animated and not live-action.

10. Get Out (2017) - Jordan Peele was the source of some of the best comedy in the 2010s, but he also penned the perfect horror movie about racism and wealthy liberals – one that I suspect will go down as an all-time great in the genre. Get Out has forever raised the bar for socially conscious horror films.

11. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - A rare sequel/reboot I didn't think we needed, but we did. Visually unparalleled, electrifying and revolutionary.

12. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - Just a cut above practically every film in the Star Wars series. This is a movie that grapples seriously with guerrilla warfare and gives desperately needed texture to the Rebel Alliance

13. Django Unchained (2012) - Tarantino's first and last great film of the decade, set in the antebellum U.S. South.

14. El Libertador (2014) - Ignore that Netflix series. This staggering film about South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar’s life is unparalleled. You can see the mark of the late great Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who helped finance the movie, all over it.

15. 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets (2015) - Having organized in 2014 to win justice for Jordan Davis, the 17-year-old African American murdered in his car for playing rap music, I'm still floored by Marc Silver’s documentary on racist vigilante murder in Jacksonville, Florida. You can read my full review on Fight Back! News here. 16. Carlos (2010) - The Godfather trilogy of 1970s Marxist guerrillas.

17. Vox Lux (2018)- An underrated neoliberal dystopia about the fascist impulses of our popular culture, rooted right here in modern-day USA.

18. Ex Machina (2014) - Truly insidious sci-fi horror that will only become more terrifying as we progress further down the automation and robotics rabbit hole.

19. Inside Out (2015) - Delightful, insightful and soul-enriching for both young and old. It left an unforgettable mark on me like no Pixar movie has since I was a kid.

20. Nightcrawler (2014) - Diabolical look at the twisted capitalist ethos that pervades television media in this country. Go to your local news Facebook comments section if you think Nightcrawler is just fiction.

#JacksonvilleFL #Editorials #Opinion #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #2019 #MarvelCinematicUniverse

Jacksonville, FL – It’s tempting to say the outrageous moral panic and woke-scolding over Joker made it a less effective movie. Tempting but wrong. What really undid this Scorsese-esque ‘supervillain’ film was the rampant over-production of comic book movies (and television shows) in the last three decades.

Put it another way, how many times have we seen the Bruce Wayne origin story? The five corporations that own almost all media – and creative intellectual properties – in the United States have run dry on ideas, content instead to retool stories from the past with proven records as cash cows. Batman and its associated universe are just among the most heavily exploited.

The problem with over-mining intellectual properties and franchises is that, like real mines, eventually there’s nothing left to dig up. We’ve seen it all before, especially after Fox’s ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Gotham series, which ran for five seasons.

Joker had liberal commentators and Twitter personalities in an uproar months before its release. A full-blown moral panic ensued, with many warning that the film catered to right-wing misogynists and mass shooters in-the-making. Some predicted violence at movie theaters. It’s worth noting that the Republican Party made the same type of argument – that violent movies, video games and music cause mass shootings – after the El Paso massacre this summer by a Trump-inspired white supremacist.

As it turns out, Joker isn’t a right-wing mass shooter manifesto at all. Its class politics are remarkably left-wing, especially when compared to the dozen or so Batman movies over the last 30 years. The problem with Joker is that for all its build up, it’s just not a very compelling film.

Batman has always existed as a comic book character for the right wing. Bruce Wayne, a billionaire industrialist, vows to avenge his parents’ murder by a ‘street thug’ by donning a spandex bat-suit and waging a ‘war on crime’ as a vigilante. His only superpower is his outrageous wealth, which allows him to build a veritable arsenal and conceal his identity.

Even the framing is right wing: Gotham – a composite of New York City and Chicago invented by D.C. Comics – is full of costumed criminals, freaks and weirdos, all with fantastical motives and vague backstories. These ‘supervillains’ see their plans foiled by the billionaire vigilante Batman, acting in alliance with ‘good cops’ in the city’s otherwise corrupt police force, like Commissioner Jim Gordon.

Here’s what Joker gets right: In 30 years of Batman on screen, this is the sole movie to portray Gotham as a real city divided into classes – not just caricatures of ‘good heroes’ and ‘bad criminals.’

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a severely disturbed man working as a clown-for-hire, bringing in just enough money to take care of his aging mother. Emaciated and mentally ill, he makes it through the week thanks to a cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs and counseling sessions at a publicly funded clinic. He’s no working class hero, but it’s stunning to see a Batman movie center on someone who isn’t obscenely wealthy.

Joker’s class politics don’t start or end with Fleck. Immediately we’re shown a Gotham quite different from Tim Burton’s gothic playground or Christopher Nolan’s gritty war-zone. It’s 1980. The sanitation workers are on strike. Unemployment and poverty run high. Right-wing billionaire Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce/Batman and a stand-in for Ed Koch, is running for mayor on a platform of tax breaks for the rich and austerity for the working class.

Life takes a rough turn for Fleck. In about 20 minutes of film, he gets mugged, loses his job, and bombs his first night doing stand-up at a comedy club. When Gotham’s right-wing city officials cut funding for public health care, Fleck can no longer afford his medication or counseling sessions. The inciting incident for his transformation into the titular Joker happens on a subway. Three drunk Wall Street bankers are harassing a woman. When they turn their aggression on Fleck, clad in clown makeup, he shoots and kills all three.

Joker makes an interesting point on class perspectives for anyone familiar with earlier Batman films. The corporate-owned media brings on Wayne and other spokesmen, to denounce the violence committed against their fellow one-percenters. Wayne takes the opportunity to ridicule poor people as “clowns,” too lazy to make something of themselves. His comments incite anger across Gotham’s working class, who see no great tragedy in the bankers’ deaths at all. They pour onto the streets in protest, with some ironically donning clown masks.

Fleck’s Joker may be the focus of this movie, but you don’t come away from it calling him a hero, as many pre-game detractors claimed. He’s quite clearly insane and dangerous, at one point breaking into the apartment of a Black single mother based on a hallucinated relationship between the two. The movement we see on the streets of Gotham didn’t start with Fleck’s Joker, nor does he lead it in any discernible way.

Instead, Joker does what every other Batman movie in the last 30 years has miserably failed at doing. It shows us characters whose actions are shaped by larger social and economic conditions; not stereotypes who do things “just because.”

But old habits die hard. After the Joker is arrested on live TV, a riot ensues. We already know what’s coming next long before Thomas and Martha Wayne, with their little son Bruce in tow, step into that fateful alley where they will be murdered. Yes, for the 11th time across films and TV episodes in the last 30 years, we get treated to yet another re-enactment of Batman’s origin story. This time, it’s carried out by a protester seemingly unleashed by the Joker.

Time is a flat circle for Batman movies. For all the ways Joker breaks the stale formula in character development and indicting Gotham’s billionaire class, we end up right back at the same place Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises took us. The masses are once again an anarchic force prone to criminality. Thomas Wayne is no hero, but neither is the Joker. Offering no other solution, Joker leaves us with a sense that it will take some third force – a more just, more compassionate billionaire, perhaps young Bruce – to set all this madness straight.

Joaquin Phoenix is now the fifth actor to portray the Joker in a theatrically released film over the last 30 years. When Heath Ledger did the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), it was a sharp contrast from Jack Nicholson’s portrayal 19 years earlier. Nicholson’s Joker was a 1930s chain-smoking mobster. Ledger’s Joker, by contrast, was a deranged product of the War on Terror: an insurgency commander, badly scarred from combat and intimately familiar with explosives, who waged warfare on Gotham’s authorities, both militarily and through symbols.

Phoenix draws his character from the headlines too – now mass shooters instead of terrorists – and has all the unsettling twitches and laughter we expect. It just feels played out at this point. We’ve had Al Capone-Joker (Nicholson), clown-prince Joker (Mark Hamil), terrorist-Joker (Ledger), theatrical-Joker (Cameron Monaghan), laughable white rapper Joker (Jared Leto) and more.

Just before the film’s third act, there’s a scene where Phoenix, clad in clown makeup and the iconic purple suit, dances on a set of stairs while Gary Glitter’s Rock n Roll Part 2 plays. For a second, you can see the glimmer of a genuine ‘moment’ of cinema genius... but all too appropriately, a bumbling set of cops interrupt the scene and it’s gone. This movie wants so badly to be game-changing, edgy and provocative, but it’s trafficking on dog-eared imagery and unclear messaging.

I don’t think Joker glorifies its main character the way some allege, nor do I think the movie is dangerous. But we’re also too far through the looking glass in capitalist America to have a compelling story told about the ‘clown prince of crime’. Phoenix is a fine actor, but nothing in Joker remotely compares to the real larger-than-life supervillains on TV every night in the age of Trump.

#JacksonvilleFL #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #altright #Joker #movieReview

Jacksonville, FL – In 2018, I saw fewer movies in theaters than any time since age 3 or 4. It wasn’t just because the high price of tickets and snacks practically requires taking out a small loan. There’s a real lack of original storytelling in American films – especially horror and science fiction – and I’ve gotten tired of countless remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, sequels to prequels, and so on.

It wasn’t all bad. 2018 gave us some solid films worth watching, and I’ll highlight a few of my favorites, admittedly, mostly sci-fi and horror, below. But in general, Hollywood continues to cannibalize its past successes (and failures) in search of more profit rather than telling unique stories. Movies look better than they did 30 years ago, but they’re generally worse – and they’re over-produced as hell.

Before looking at some of the year’s best, it’s worth considering why movies in the U.S. seem stale and less original. American cinema is experiencing the classic contradictions at work in every capitalist market: a trend towards monopoly and a crisis of overproduction. In the last decade, we’ve seen media and entertainment become even more concentrated in four giant corporations, expressed most recently in Disney buying up Fox in 2018. As movie and television production companies get gobbled up by larger entities, so do their intellectual properties (franchises, series, characters). This is a recipe for remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and everything in-between as new owners try to squeeze more profit out of old ideas.

Adaptations from existing material are nothing new. From the dawn of major motion pictures, producers have mined classic novels and literature for material to adapt for the big screen. Starting in the 1970s, Hollywood saw an explosion of movies “based on a true story” – an often dubious claim that nevertheless proves profitable today. But this process has come full-circle in the 21st century, producing outrageous situations like five separate Spider-Man film series, themselves adaptations of a comic book, spanning eight movies by three studios in the last 16 years – costing (and earning) many billions of dollars.

Film researcher Stephen Follows found that sequels and prequels accounted for nearly one-third of the top 100 grossing movies in 2017 – about three times the level of ten years ago. The number of remakes and reboots have declined since its peak in 2006, but only because sequels to the original remakes have taken their place. Profit-hungry studios see existing brands and franchises as safe bets, hoping that nostalgia for a bygone time before the Great Recession, before the ‘War on Terror,’ before Trump (childhood in the case of the coveted 18-35 age demographic) will move asses into theater seats.

My top movies of 2018

It’s fitting, then, that the best film I saw this year was Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. It’s the most pro-union, anti-capitalist movie made in the U.S. in several decades, and it’s an original story that features a sci-fi twist worthy of the Twilight Zone’s best episodes. But Sorry to Bother You isn’t just great political art. It perfectly speaks to the struggles facing the working class youth of today in an age dominated by monopoly corporations like Amazon and flooded with social media, low wages, high rent, and soul-crushing jobs. I want to screen it for a union movie night this year with some of my Teamster brothers.

Staying on sci-fi, Annihilation told a story remarkably derivative of an old Soviet film, Stalker- just with more action. But while Stalker grappled with profound and disturbing changes taking place in the 1980s USSR, Annihilation mostly looks cool. It’s hard to know what, if anything, the writers (novel or screenplay) wanted to say as a military team of five women, led by Natalie Portman, explore a disturbing extraterrestrial ‘zone’ created when a meteor hits Florida.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One at least directs its anger at corporate America, even though it’s probably the worst offender on this list in terms of unoriginality. Most of the film takes place in a video game world choked full of characters and references to classic Steven Spielberg movies. The game is a virtual reality simulator, which players use to escape the grim, dystopian poverty and hopelessness of the real world. Beneath the pop culture naval-gazing, it delivers a timely message about the internet: There’s no escape from the misery of capitalism, and there’s no substitute for real-world struggle.

Shifting gears, I’m really tired of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Black Panther made a lot of best-of lists, but whichever side you came down on the whole T’Challa/Killmonger debate, the story still wasn’t that interesting. Avengers: Infinity War was a huge action-packed spectacle… that you won’t really understand if you haven’t watched at least a dozen MCU movies over the last decade. Venom, produced by Sony outside the MCU, wasn’t exactly original but it stood out as a back-to-basics superhero movie from a simpler time (i.e. 20 years ago). I enjoyed seeing the hulking alien anti-hero take down a scumbag Silicon Valley CEO clearly modeled after Elon Musk, and apparently so did Chinese audiences, who turned Venom into a socialist meme online.

The biggest surprise of the year was how much I enjoyed Solo: A Star Wars Story. Ironically, the Star Wars movies most dependent on nostalgia for the originals ( Rogue One) have turned out much better than the new episodes in the series. They feature poor and working class characters at the lead and explore the social texture of the Star Wars universe – something the originals mostly skipped.

In horror, the handful of decent flicks this year also capitalized on nostalgia rather than breaking new ground. Summer of ‘84 pushed the retro-style of Netflix’s Stranger Things series in a different direction, offering a terrifying look at suburban crime “right next door” and police in the 80s. The Halloween sequel/reboot hit enough right notes to breathe enough life into a long-dead franchise for one last scare. Netflix’s Bird Box, which took the internet by storm in December, basically just recycled the concept of M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening - and admittedly, it did a lot better with the material. Unsane was an entertaining gimmick thriller, filmed entirely on an iPhone, that basically remade last year’s A Cure for Wellness, which itself was a glorified remake of Shutter Island, which itself was a remake of...

Two final movies worth mentioning that exceeded my expectations:

Hereditary was marketed as “the scariest movie since The Exorcist” – like I haven’t heard that one before. But while there are call-backs to Rosemary’s Baby and 2015’s The Witch, the film tells a genuinely disturbing story about untreated multi-generational mental illness and religious fanaticism.

With so many outstanding films to his name, Spike Lee is probably one of the ten best directors in American cinema. But his recent string of questionable films led me to expect Black Klansman, his newest effort, to really blow it. The film, loosely “based on a true story,” centers on the first African American officer in the Colorado Spring police department, who spearheads an undercover campaign to take down the city’s violent Ku Klux Klan chapter. Knowing that white supremacists and police forces are often joined at the hip – if not in their membership, certainly in their willingness to brutalize Black people – I wrote it off as slight-of-hand pro-cop propaganda. Parts of the true story are exaggerated, and the politics are messy, but overall the film worked, especially in light of 2017’s deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.

Overall, I’d call 2018 one of the weakest years for movies in recent memory. But for socialists, organizers and activists, it’s worth keeping up with the big movies, music and TV shows. Films like Sorry to Bother You are rare, but they’re great jumping-off points for important discussions about capitalism, unions and the working class.

#JacksonvilleFL #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #horrorMovies #SorryToBotherYou

Fort Lauderdale, FL – Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has never been one to hold his tongue or shy away from even the most powerful figures. His films and articles often offer illuminating and entertaining critiques of American society, economics, and politics. Fahrenheit 11/9 is no exception. Moore’s newest film takes viewers on an exciting yet terrifying ride through the current American political landscape, and ends by placing viewers behind the wheel.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is 90-minute indictment of American political and economic institutions. It starts by demonstrating the obvious: Trump is a racist, homophobic, misogynist who loves big bombs and explosions almost as much as he loves diving into his morning Big Mac. From there, Moore launches into a critical examination of how this man came to be president of the United States and what this means for our future.

The film provides blood-boiling audio recordings of the major media moguls (from MSNBC, CNN, to FOX) in which they explain how any press on Trump was good for their bottom dollar. The one-percenters who control the entire mainstream media are filmed admitting that Trump was great for ratings, so they gave him thousands of hours of free screen time. And Trump (having produced and starred in TV shows himself) knew how to play those media companies like fiddles in order to win.

Moore also dives into the Democratic Party’s undeniably anti-democratic decision to snatch the primaries from social democrat Bernie Sanders. The movie mocks Hillary Clinton’s inability to relate to average people and admonishes her entire party for their smugness in assuming they were entitled to the presidency.

The film is ripe with traditional Michael Moore humor, awkward interviews and encounters, and satisfying, over-the-top tricks being played against those who deserve it most. But coupled with these comical scenes and antics is the somber reality the movie is trying to convey: the entire system is not only rigged against us, but is actually killing us. And it’s up to us to stop it.

Perhaps the most tragic part of Fahrenheit 11/9 is Moore’s close examination of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. He conducts interviews and provides government data which show that the governor of Michigan knowingly poisoned the people of Flint when he made the decision to switch their water supply from Lake Huron to the toxic Flint River. Yet neither establishment Democrats (including President Obama) nor Republicans investigated the governor for committing this crime, and both parties dismissed claims that the water was (and still is) toxic. Moore shows us that the poisoning of Flint’s water was not a mistake or an oversite: it was biological warfare against the people of Flint.

Despite the grim realities Moore illustrates for us, he places hope in average people fighting back against the system. He highlights the teachers’ strikes that took place in states across the country in the last year and how they were able to win their demands by not giving in to the typical divide-and-conquer tactics of the state. He also shows the rise in leftists and socialists running for local and state offices and the growing number of high school students taking part in activism. The film ends by concluding that the only way to ‘fix’ this rotten system is to burn the whole thing down and start over again. And that is a job for we, the people.

#FortLauderdaleFL #US #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #MichaelMoore #Trump #DonaldTrump

Chicago, IL — First of all, this movie took me back to my childhood love of fantastic tales of adventure and romance. So, for me, it was great entertainment made possible by cinematic art at its finest. It was a movie sprung from the pages of a comic book, moving pictures full of enchanting moments of musical chants, poetry flowing through panoramic scenes of spectacular beauty enhanced by the liquid murmurs of water falls. Most importantly, Black Panthe r is a movie endowed with the presence of Black African folk reflecting their social reality as dreams by way of rituals embellished by the contest of battles, dance and song.

Yet Black Panther is more than a fairy tale holding us spellbound, caught in a fantasy free from the controls of reality. It is also an expression of the authors’ confused knowledge of Black people and their struggles for freedom. I am referring here to the notion that we must be freed by someone or something outside of ourselves, for it is a mistaken notion that overlooks the great revolutionary traditions of our people from the slave revolts to the present. What we propose to do here is not to review this movie from the standpoint of its mistaken notions of Black liberation, because then we would miss the message that comes in the unfolding of a great story full of all the drama and excitement of a great adventure.

The movie portrays an advanced Black civilization that hid itself from the world, from a civilization that enslaved Black people and maintained itself with brute force. A world wracked with human suffering, with poverty and wars. Yet in its midst it harbored a utopian society of Black people who managed to evolve into an advanced technological civilization while staying rooted in their ancient tribal traditions and culture. Hence, there is no class oppression, no crimes that spring from poverty, no real social unrest necessitating the need for jails and prisons. No class struggle, but definitely royal intrigue and cloak and dagger treachery. There is, for the most part, non-antagonistic social inequality between the king and his subjects and between men and women. Women are duty bound to defend the kingdom, so they are warriors and guardians of the throne. However, these ennobling roles given to women do not overcome the sexist overtones inherit in a clearly male-dominated culture. Because of these contradictions the leading women characters, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Shuri (Letitia Wright) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) emerge as exceptional sheros in not only defending the kingdom but also in saving it.

The conflict, or basic contradiction, that drives this screenplay is that despite all the cloaking devices for concealing themselves and staying isolated from the rest of the world, the people of Wakanda are forced to interact with this outside world and in doing so they become infected or contaminated by it. The culture and folkways of Wakanda are designed to make the people immune to the outside world, but it’s not 100%, so they have a spy network to make sure their secret power, which is a powerful natural resource peculiar to their homeland, is not revealed. Because, in the hands of the greed-driven “colonizers” of the outside world, the world could be destroyed.

As it turns out this whole notion of isolation is delusional (see the movie if you want to know how and why). Without going into details of the story let us just say the people of Wakanda are as human as the people of the outside world when it comes to passions such as love, hate, jealousy and fear. The storyline of the movie is driven by these same human passions.

The antagonist is on a mission of revenge because his father was murdered. He has been forced to live among Black people in the U.S. as one of them. He hates the bondage he sees his people in and he hates the Black Panther King of Wakanda (Chadwick Boseman) for doing nothing about it, for not using the superior force of their civilization to destroy/conquer the colonizers and set Black people free. To make this happen, the antagonist, Eric Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) sets out to overthrow the Panther King and, when he does, he immediately attempts to unleash war on the outside world with the openly stated objective of freeing all Black people. Kilmonger, the hero as villain, does not steal the show but he does give it substance, meaning and relevance to the plight of Black folk as an oppressed people. I imagined how telling it would have been to have a Kilmonger challenger to Obama while he was in the White House or to the aspiring Black capitalists who see only business opportunities in our misery. Oh well, imagination can be silly.

I hate when people tell me how a movie ends or give me a full account of plot and episodes. I won’t do to you what I wouldn’t want done to me. Suffice it to say that the basic conflict between Wakanda and the outside world is resolved, and the tale ends well.

Like we said starting out this is great entertainment and basically a movie for children. But as a grown up I enjoyed it as well. The movie gave me an opportunity to return to my childhood and in doing so reminded me that as a child I rarely saw Black people filling up the screen with heroic deeds, instilling in me a sense of pride and self-worth. As a child, the feelings I got were from Black folk on the silver screen were too often feelings of shame and self-loathing. However, there were some moments of pride with Black actors and entertainers like Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Danridge, Harry Bellefonte, Bill Robinson and a host of others. Although Black Panther is a great movie, we as a people were not waiting for this movie to give us pride and self-worth, for we have always given these things to ourselves in art, in life and in our persistent struggles for Black liberation.

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #AfricanAmerican #BlackLiberation #BalckPanther

Second, I think I saw a record low number of dramas and traditional ‘Oscar-bait’ films. All this goes to say is that there were plenty of terrific films I didn’t get around to seeing in 2017, and I’d encourage you to post your favorites in the comments section.

Get Me Roger Stone - A fascinating and weirdly cathartic look at one of the right-wing political operatives behind Trump’s style of politics. Roger Stone’s role in the 2016 election is exaggerated – no doubt a product of his shameless self-promotion – but this Netflix documentary captures the nefarious strain of right-wing politics that runs in a straight line from Nixon through Reagan and into Trump, reminding us this era we live in didn’t start with Pepe memes or inflammatory tweets.

Kong: Skull Island - For all of the crappy reboots that Hollywood churned out over the last decade in search of profit, this was genuinely enjoyable. Set at the tail end of the U.S. war on Vietnam, Skull Island reimagines a washed-up franchise as a statement about the insane brutality of imperialism – made possible by a terrific over-the-top performance by Samuel L. Jackson.

It- I saw It in a neighborhood Florida theater just hours before Hurricane Irma – then a category 5 storm – made landfall. I’m sure this magnified the feeling of dread already present in Stephen King’s tale of killer clowns, which I never found that scary on its own. But It works on another level as a Stranger Things- style coming of age story about conquering fear through solidarity and friendship.

Split- To put it mildly, M Night Shyamalan’s movies have a mixed record. Split ranks up there with his best work, introducing us to a truly menacing villain and providing two jaw-dropping plot twists. It’s especially rewarding for fans of Unbreakable, M Night’s gritty take on comic book stories from the early 2000s.

Logan- The only traditional superhero movie worth a damn in 2017. In a market oversaturated with mindless blockbuster action movies – from the pro-World War I revisionism of Wonder Woman to Marvel and D.C.’s never-ending glorification of billionaires – Logan stands out as a surprisingly meditative and nuanced entry into the X-Men series. Released amid Trump’s refugee ban and brutal crackdown on immigrant families, the image of Wolverine helping a Mexican and Central American kids across the border to find shelter couldn’t be more welcome.

It Comes at Night- File under “Movies with deceptive trailers.” This slow-burn horror story looked like another artsy zombie flick. Instead we got a paranoid survivalist thriller with a lot to say about Trump’s refugee ban and the rise of xenophobia in the U.S. Even folks who don’t like scary movies can enjoy It Comes at Night, which is more eerie than terrifying. That said, I’d make sure to watch it with a couple of people. It’s the kind of movie you’ll want to talk about as soon as it ends – and probably watch again.

The Florida Project- There’s something deeply disturbing about the extreme poverty that surrounds Walt Disney World’s theme parks and luxury resorts in Orlando, Florida. That’s the subject of The Florida Project, a documentary-style look at the struggles of poor and working-class families in central Florida. Set in the cheap motels and poor neighborhoods around Disney and told from the perspective of children, it’s one of the year’s most visually striking and unsettling films – especially for an Orlando native like me.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi- Following in the vein of last year’s Rogue One, this latest installment in the 40-year-old sci-fi franchise brings terrific class politics to the table. As one reviewer put it, the film breaks from most previous Star Wars movies by taking a stand in the class war on the side of the oppressed, attacking wealthy arms dealers, aristocratic religious dogma, and out-and-out fascists in the process. Ordinary poor and working people, especially women, are the heroes, facing insurmountable odds resisting the First Order. It’s a film that takes a lot of risks, most of which pay off.

Alien: Covenant- One of the most thought-provoking science fiction stories I’ve seen in years. All of the classic monsters of the Alien series, along with a couple new creatures, return to terrify a crew of colonists on a far-off planet. But unlike this year’s uninspired Blade Runner sequel, Covenant builds on the best elements of the previous films while posing serious questions about the contradictions of technology in a capitalist system.

Get Out- Horror movies had a pretty outstanding year, but none stood taller than Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The story centers on a young Black man who goes to visit his white girlfriend’s wealthy parents in upstate New York. Revealing the subtle (and not-so-subtle) racism of rich white liberals for the horror it is, Peele’s film strikes a balance between bone-chilling terror and clever social commentary that never feels cartoonish or heavy-handed.

#JacksonvilleFL #Movies

Chicago, IL – All progressives, anti-imperialists and socialists should see the film A Taxi Driver. This Jang Hoon movie, starring Song Kang-ho as Kim Man-seob and Thomas Kretschmann as Jürgen Hinzpeter, tells the story of the May, 1980 uprising in Gwangju against the extreme right-wing military coup led by General Chun Doo-hwan.

The coup was organized right after the assassination of Park Chung-hee, the fascist dictator of U.S.-occupied southern Korea. Park was shot to death Oct. 26, 1979 at the Blue House presidential palace by Kim Jae-kyu, director of the feared KCIA secret police. Many hoped that Park's assassination would mark the end of the fascist Yushin era, but these hopes were dashed by General Chun's anti-democratic coup.

The student movement and militant young workers were ready and met the declaration of martial law with resistance on the streets across U.S.-occupied southern Korea. The mass uprising in Gwangju began on May 18, after puppet army troops massacred pro-democracy Chonnam University students who were demonstrating against martial law. The masses of people disarmed the cops and the soldiers and seized control of the city. Basic services, like public transportation, bakeries and gas stations, were run for free. Reporters from the city's newspaper published the truth about the coup and the army massacre. Food was distributed for free.

Song Kang-ho's character, a working class single dad, behind on his rent, drives a taxi in Seoul. He's an army vet, and deeply suspicious of the student activists due to his indoctrination during his time in the military. He steals another cabbie's fare, a German journalist who is trying to make it to Gwangju around the army's blockade. What Song's character sees in Gwangju changes his mind. He is given free food and free gas by the people's movement, and witnesses firsthand the puppet army shooting people down in the streets. He decides to help Gwangju cabbies evacuate wounded protesters to the hospital, which is still in the hands of the people. At the hospital, he begins to understand the true scope of what the puppet military has done: 3000 civilians murdered in a city of 730,000.

A Taxi Driver portrays the fascist military as the scumbags they are and glorifies the selfless spirit of the masses that was born in the struggle. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to the reactionary trash Hollywood cranks out. Please try to see this amazing movie!

#ChicagoIL #Movies #ATaxiDriver

Houston, TX – During the last elections, Hillary Clinton, who used a sort of bourgeois ‘feminism’ to sell reactionary ideas to the public. Since then, there have been a number of films, such as Wonder Woman, that use images of powerful women to promote a pro-war capitalist agenda. Atomic Blonde is the latest of this genre, which stars Charlize Theron as a kind of female James Bond, who fights communist leaders in the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany to help the British Intelligence and the CIA stage their famous 1989 coup d’état.

The film is set in 1989 in Berlin right before the counter-revolutionary coup against the socialist government of East Germany. The film reproduces a common theme of Cold War anti-communist propaganda, which makes communists look like impersonal monsters, while portraying the imperialists as heroic. Each communist in the film is portrayed as violent, monstrous and lacking in subjectivity, while the hero of the film, British intelligence agent Lorraine Broughton, is portrayed as clever and intelligent. The plot of the film is extremely simplistic, and is centered around her mission to retrieve a list, the details of which are never revealed. The film mobilizes some very aesthetically pleasant imagery and music to deaden our senses to anti-communist ideas that this film is promoting.

Throughout the film, we see agent Lorraine murdering communists, who are depicted as dangerous and beast-like. The film creates a one dimensional good guy/bad guy framework, where the imperialists are the good guys who help save Germany from communists, who are depicted as the bad people.

Atomic Blonde is full of stereotypes about socialism, and particularly East Germany. Although West and East Germany are geographically in the same climate, the West is always depicted as full of light and having a nice climate, while East Germany is depicted as dark and depressing. They don't show the homeless people in West Germany who died during cold winters as a result of capitalism, nor the well-fed people in East Germany who had free healthcare and universal education. Instead, the film depicts the socialist German Democratic Republic as a kind of hell, while depicting West Germany as 'free' and 'democratic.' We don't learn about the heroic anti-fascists in East Germany, and the post-socialist persecution of them. In short, there is no context that would allow the spectator to make a critical analysis of socialism in the German Democratic Republic, which was not a perfect society but most certainly not the type of hell depicted in Atomic Blonde.

The film is interlaced with bourgeois newsreels from that period, which show anti-communist protesters in both West and East Germany, with the commentators celebrating their 'resistance.' In Atomic Blonde, the British Intelligence agent Lorraine Broughton helps counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the socialist government of the German Democratic Republic. Having not grown up in that period, I was amazed at how similar this is with our current times, in which the capitalist-controlled media continually shows right-wing protesters in Venezuela who are trying to bring down the democratically elected government of Nicolas Madura.

The worst part about Atomic Blonde is that the film portrays a powerful, independent woman, but all her independence and power is bound up with her job as an agent of British intelligence. She is a female James Bond who can fight, but all the people she fights and kills are communists, who were working to create a society with women's liberation on its agenda. Indeed, the German Democratic Republic was a society where women held important positions in the government, and there was a strong climate in East Germany of fighting against sexism. Atomic Blonde is a film about a woman who does the job of the capitalists to fight against a society that made significant gains for women.

#HoustonTX #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #Capitalism #feminism

Houston, TX – In the last six months, there have been a few really good pro-Black films: Moonlight, Get Out, and Sleight. The most recent addition to the list of Black Lives Matter era films is director Benny Boom's All Eyez on Me, a movie that chronicles the life of rapper Tupac Shakur. Unlike some films about famous rappers such as Get Rich or Die Trying (50-Cent) and 8 Mile(Eminem), All Eyez on Me has a strong focus on the political dimension of Tupac's music. It also gives a beautiful portrait of his life and the incredible passion with which he made great hip hop music.

The film begins with a voiceover giving a stirring speech about the fight against racist discrimination and the struggle for Black liberation. After the opening credits, it starts with a scene of a Black Panther rally, in which we see Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, being released from prison after doing time for her political activities. The first few scenes highlight his mother’s political commitment in the Black Panther Party, and also focus on his stepfather’s role in the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) organization. There is an interesting scene, in which Tupac is attending a class about African-American history taught by his stepfather Mutulu Shakur at the Republic of New Afrika school. He tells the youth, “You must be willing to live for something, and you must be willing to die for something.” The film then follows the way that Tupac put this principle into action by committing his life to making socially-conscious hip hop music.

Throughout the film, All Eyez on Me tries to draw a historical continuity between the Black Liberation Movement of the sixties and Tupac's music of the nineties. There is one scene in which Tupac's mother states that her son is a new Black leader and that his music is a new movement for the liberation of Black people. In the film, Tupac continually emphasizes how his music can allow oppressed people a voice to directly discuss their struggles and empower them to resist against this oppression. There is one scene in which Tupac stands up against the owners of Interscope Records because they demand he tone down his music to make it more marketable (particularly criticizing his song Brenda’s Got a Baby). Director Benny Boom depicts Tupac as someone who put his principles before money and fame, with the intent of inspiring change through his music.

The film also shows how the FBI will go to great lengths to silence revolutionaries who fight for the liberation of oppressed people. In the first part of the film, there is a scene in which Tupac's father is on the front of a newspaper as a wanted man, and his mother is harassed and followed by FBI agents. There is a scene in which his home is raided by the FBI, who arrest his father for his political activities and bring about false charges against him. I found this scene to be disturbing, as it reminded me of my fellow comrades in the anti-war movement who had their homes raided by the FBI in 2010 and continue to face political repression. The film emphasizes the terrible brutality of the FBI agents and the police.

Once Tupac is famous, his mother warns him that the state will go to great lengths to silence him, both through direct repression and through promoting a destructive lifestyle. Throughout the film, we see the police harassing Tupac, we follow him in prison and witness the crimes that the police commit against him, and see how the bourgeois media continually tried to ruin his career. The film tries to show how Tupac stood by his principles and remained a good person even when many were trying to destroy him.

All Eyez on Me gives a very accurate depiction of his life, his path to becoming a successful rapper, and the struggles he faced throughout his life. Demetrius Shipp Jr. does a great job acting as Tupac, and even resembles him – some scenes it looks as if Tupac had risen back from the dead. All Eyez on Me is a must-see for everyone, whether one is a Tupac fan or not.

#HoustonTX #Movies #TupacShakur

Every December, I put together my list of top 10 movies for the year. Usually I've missed a couple that would probably make the list, and this year is no different – The Birth of a Nation; Snowden and Weiner, to name three. Nevertheless, here's my Top 10 of 2016:

10. Captain America: Civil War - Crossover superhero blockbusters are almost out of steam, suffering from what Marx called a crisis of over-production. Somehow the third Captain America installment managed to stay afloat by introducing a new Spider-Man (not a joke) and Black Panther, whose solo movie became one of 2017's most anticipated.

9. The Conjuring 2 - The scares don't feel as fresh this time around, but I know I'm not the only one who enjoyed the film's latent critique of Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady inflicted far more horrors on working families than the movie's demonic nun ever could, and the film's focus on the haunting of a working class single-mother household in 1980s Britain drives this point home.

8. Green Room - This survival thriller about a punk band hunted by neo-Nazis seemed a little too real in a year marked by the rise of white nationalist groups connected to the Trump phenomenon... and that's exactly what made it an effective horror flick.

7. ARQ - Netflix killed it in 2016 with the best original content of any channel or platform in the game. While TV series like the Get Down; Stranger Things and 3% stood tall, ARQ delivered the year's best original sci-fi movie. It draws on the best elements of Primer; Edge of Tomorrow, and the Mockingjay Part 1 while packing a punch all on its own merits.

6. Money Monster - It's rare to walk into a movie you know nothing about anymore – and even rarer to discover you're watching a sharp anti-Wall Street political thriller. To put it another way, you won't find many blockbusters that explain imperialism this well, linking together stock market crashes, poverty in the U.S. and a South African mine workers strike.

5. 10 Cloverfield Lane - Sharing only a title, this survival thriller far surpasses JJ Abrams' very flawed 2008 found-footage blockbuster, Cloverfield. On one hand, it keeps the stakes high with genuine curveball plot twists instead of gimmicks. But the film also works as a surprisingly uplifting allegory about domestic abuse and the struggles that survivors face.

4. Deadpool - Talk about flipping the script. Comedy trailers have a well-deserved reputation for showing us all the best parts of otherwise unfunny movies (see Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer for details). Deadpool's trailer, in contrast, made a surprisingly clever and original superhero film look like a shameless cash-grab full of migraine-inducing nerd comedy and hipster cynicism. Another reminder that I should have stopped doubting Ryan Reynolds after Buried in 2010.

3. The Purge: Election Year- I almost couldn't believe a major studio financed this movie. The third installment of the Purge series, which gets better with every installment, contains the most revolutionary politics I've seen in a blockbuster horror flick. Trump's 2016 win renders the film's sequel-teasing ending all the more terrifying.

2. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - One of the few examples of a prequel improving the entire series. It shows us the struggle against the Empire from the perspective of ordinary people and rank-and-file fighters – something missing from all other Star Wars films – and its dark political underpinnings make the very first film, A New Hope, much more compelling.

1. Free State of Jones - I wrote a full review for Fight Back! earlier in the year. It's as much a work of revolutionary political theory as it is a historical civil war drama. One of the most important films of the last 25 years.

#JacksonvilleFL #Opinion #Movies

No film captured the reputation of 'the scariest movie ever' like The Exorcist. Almost 43 years after its release, William Friedkin's Oscar-nominated tale of demon possession remains notorious for its spinning heads, archaic rituals and neon-green projectile vomit. When the film was released in 1973, it gained a near-mythic reputation among religious audiences who condemned it as evil and blasphemous. I even remember my very religious sixth-grade English teacher warning our entire class in 2001 to avoid 'that movie' because she claimed that a-friend-of-a-friend became possessed after watching it.

The Exorcist still shocks and disturbs, although not because of scares or gore. We've seen the same story played out far too many times in sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs for the events on-screen to terrify like it did in 1973. For viewers in 2016, the most unsettling part of The Exorcist is the profoundly conservative politics and backwards social vision at the film's center. It's a right-wing call to return to 'old-time religion', with its medieval attitudes towards gender, its rebuke of science and its blatant class inequalities.

There are two main stories in The Exorcist, which intersect for the film's climax. The first focuses on Reagan, the tween daughter of a wealthy Hollywood actress, who has trouble adjusting after her mother, Chris MacNeil, moves them both to Washington D.C. to take a role in a major film. Bored and isolated in their new house, Reagan passes the time playing with Ouija boards, talking to imaginary friends, and disrupting her mother's raucous house parties. But it isn't long before Reagan's temperament takes a dark turn. She has violent outbursts. She screams unprovoked profanity-laced insults at her mother and others. Inexplicable cuts and abscesses start showing up on her body. Disturbed and concerned for her daughter, Chris starts looking for an explanation – first from doctors and psychiatrists, then from priests and religious clergy.

Extremely retrograde views on women and gender roles abound in The Exorcist, most clearly seen through the character of Chris. For one, she's a single mother who left Reagan's estranged father to pursue her acting career. Chris screams profanity at him over the phone for everyone to hear, Reagan included. She's casually dating producer Burke Dennings, much to the dislike of her daughter. Even the film's central plot point – the demon possession – happens during Reagan's long afternoons home alone while Chris works. The Exorcist falls into the tired sexist troupe of blaming single working mothers for the problems that befall their children. The movie not-so-subtly suggests that women like Chris put their families through literal hell if they pursue their careers or show too much independence.

The film's other storyline follows Father Karras, a Catholic priest and part-time psychiatrist on staff at Georgetown University. Karras is the most interesting character in The Exorcist, in part because his working class background contrasts with every other character (wealthy Hollywood stars, powerful religious clergy, buffoonish cops, etc.) When he became a priest, Karras took a vow of poverty and gave up the large salary he could have earned as a professional psychiatrist. When his impoverished immigrant mother falls ill and he can't afford decent medical care for her, Karras becomes wracked with guilt over joining the priesthood.

By contrast, Chris can easily afford taking Reagan to every doctor and psychiatrist in D.C. They all perform expensive – and sometimes disturbing – medical tests to determine what's wrong with Reagan. Between clumsy needle insertions, invasive surgery, literal bloodletting and ominous machines, the medical procedures play like torture scenes. But it's all for naught. Reagan's problem, according to The Exorcist, is spiritual, not psychological, and modern medicine or psychiatry have no answers. These strong anti-science overtones bring to mind the litany of right-wing pseudo-science we still hear regarding women's reproductive health, stem cells and vaccines.

With scientific solutions discredited, an increasingly desperate Chris seeks out Father Karras and begs him to perform an exorcism on her daughter. Catholic church leaders eventually agree and send in Father Merrin, a well-seasoned demon hunter, to carry out the ritual alongside Karras.

While the titular exorcism makes for wonderful drama, it's also where the film goes completely off the rails. Possessed Reagan taunts Karras and exploits the guilt he feels from his mother's death. When the frail Father Merrin dies from a heart attack mid-exorcism, Karras gives himself to the devil in Reagan's place. In a last act of desperation, Karras – now possessed – jumps from Reagan's second-story bedroom window, which kills himself and the devil in the process. Leaving aside the question of suicide as a mortal sin in Catholicism, The Exorcist wants us to see Karras' sacrifice as a spiritual victory over evil, in which a doubting priest regains his faith. But something just doesn't add up.

First of all, there's nothing particularly spiritual about Karras' internal struggle. His guilt has very real economic roots in the class inequalities of U.S. capitalism. Mrs. Karras, a first generation Greek immigrant living in dire poverty, cannot afford the care she needs in a for-profit health care system. This real-life nightmare persists in the U.S. today, in which 28.5 million people have no health insurance. When Mrs. Karras dies in a criminally underfunded public ward, her son blames himself for not having the money to pay her medical bills.

On the other hand, we see Chris spend tens of thousands of dollars on medical professionals, tests and procedures for Reagan. Even a fraction of this money would have saved Mrs. Karras' life. Nevertheless, it's Karras who literally internalizes the evil of a system that denies sick people health care. His misplaced guilt even leads him to commit suicide in hopes of finding redemption. Economic inequality remains ever-present throughout the film, but The Exorcist ignores class warfare in lieu of spiritual warfare – and it leads to some bizarre conclusions.

In a sense, The Exorcist was 'ahead of its time'. Hindsight is 20/20, but if studios had made the film a decade later and downplayed the heavy Catholic themes, right-wing evangelical audiences would probably have flocked to see it. After all, the worldview promoted by The Exorcist falls comfortably in line with the reactionary policies promoted by another Reagan, along with conservative evangelical con-men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stirs up many of the same demons in 2016, let's hope a strong people's movement can exorcise them once and for all.

While The Exorcist still holds up as a strong drama, I don't think it's a particularly scary or shocking horror film. More recent movies, like James Wan's two Conjuring films, explore similar territory with much better politics and even better scares.

#UnitedStates #Movies #horrorMovies

It's hard to imagine a movie like Free State of Jones coming out at a better time. A little over a year ago, a white supremacist murdered nine Black members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, drawing inspiration from the Confederate States of America (CSA) and the KKK. In response, activists battled to tear down the Confederate flag from state buildings and won. All of this took place exactly 150 years after the end of the Civil War.

Along with the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter movement against police crimes and Donald Trump's openly racist presidential campaign, people have no choice but to confront the ugly past of the U.S. in 2016. Free State of Jones does just that and more.

Slavery movies abound in Hollywood, especially in recent years ( Django Unchained, 12 Years A Slave). I've also sat through my fair share of Civil War movies, which range from classics ( Glory, Gettysburg) to almost unwatchable ( Gods & Generals, Cold Mountain).

Free State of Jones, however, goes beyond any film I've seen about the era. It dares to look at the Civil War, slavery and Reconstruction in terms of class, capitalism, and the unfinished democratic revolution in the South. While it's outstanding on its own merits, the real value of Free State of Jones is its portrayal of poor white farmers forming a alliance with Black slaves to rebel again their shared oppressors – the rich, white plantation class.

Based on the true story of a people's rebellion in Jones County, Mississippi against the Confederacy during the Civil War, Free State of Jones follows Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), who deserts the army after his nephew dies in battle. Like most of the soldiers in the Confederate Army, Knight is a dirt-poor farmer who owns no slaves. When the CSA passes a law exempting owners of 20 slaves or more from fighting, Knight and others realize they are dying on the battlefield to protect the wealth of the rich plantation owners.

“We're fighting for honor,” says one Confederate soldier to Knight in an early scene.

“Well I'm glad you're fighting for honor,” shoots back Knight, sarcastically. “Because I'd hate to be fighting for cotton.”

Hunted by Confederate officers and forced to hide in a swamp nearby his home, Knight meets a community of runaway slaves. Together, they form a people's army of freed slaves and white deserters that wages a guerrilla war against Confederate troops. Eventually they take over three counties in southern Mississippi and secede from the CSA. The new territory is declared the 'Free State of Jones', which is ruled by a set of socialistic principles like “No man should be poor so another man can get rich” and equality among people regardless of race.

First off, Free State of Jones is an incredible war film. It opens with a sobering, stomach-churning battle scene that ranks alongside Saving Private Ryan and Glory. Later in the film, electrifying images of the Jones County people's army battling Confederate troops and raiding plantations etch themselves into your mind. That said, this is unlike other 'war' movies – and frankly most movies, period. Free State of Jones examines war in terms of class and leads us to draw some revolutionary conclusions about our own battles today.

Class struggle is central to Free State of Jones. Knight doesn't desert the Confederate army because he feels bad about slavery or has a moral crisis. He deserts because he realizes his class – poor white farmers – is dying so the ruling class of rich plantation owners can stay rich. The Confederate army forcibly takes crops and supplies from poor farmers, literally leaving them starving. On the other hand, they leave the big plantations to continue making profits from cotton. These poor white farmers don't own slaves. In fact, the wealthy slave-owners are taking over their farms to consolidate their wealth. And even though both classes have white skin, the poor are the only ones fighting and dying on the battlefield.

This is what class consciousness looks like. Knight and the other poor whites realize that they have nothing in common with the Confederate ruling class, despite their white skin. They realize that its actually in their class interest to join with Black slaves and rebel against their shared enemy. It's a alliance between the two groups based on genuine, shared class interests – not abstract appeals to morality – and it proves extremely powerful.

In the early stages of the rebellion, several white deserters continue to cling to racist attitudes. One scene shows a white soldier trying to stop a runaway slave from eating a pig the camp roasted, calling him the n-word and more. The runaway slave defiantly takes his plate of food anyway. Knight then points out to the white soldier that while Blacks worked as slaves, the whites were the ones actually willing to die for the plantation owners. It leaves the white soldier – along with the onlookers – speechless as many consider their own place in the plantation system for the first time.

I suspect this is why critics, especially liberals, have attacked the film since its release. We've watched countless Hollywood movies where wealthy white characters see slavery or racism first-hand and find it so morally repugnant, they turn against it (12 Years A Slave and even to some extent, Glory). It's a perfect message for wealthy liberals to promote because it absolves them from questions of class.

But Free State of Jones makes the argument that the white working class has a material class interest in supporting Black liberation. It shows that class solidarity, not long academic debates or appeals to morality, can and does break down the racist attitudes held by poor whites. That's a message bound to frighten the wealthy.

Free State of Jones breaks new ground in another way too. It's the first modern film to cover the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. This is one of the movie's strongest points, especially considering the only other major film to do so was D.W. Griffith's racist black-and-white film The Birth of a Nation(1915). Seeing as it covers the 12 years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, one could accuse it of cramming too much history into the final 40 minutes. However, director Gary Ross accurately hits the major aspects of political and economic life in the South during the period, rushed though it may be.

The film portrays the plantation owners returning to power under President Andrew Johnson, ending the democratic revolution in the South, and recreating the slave system by another name. Knight and several freedmen read a newspaper together in one scene that explains Johnson's reversal of Union General William T. Sherman's Field Order #15, which promised all slaves “40 acres and a mule.” A montage of a major plantation in Jones County after the war, showing the same supposedly free Black people working in the cotton fields, accompanies a subtitle, “One year after 'Emancipation'.”

When the Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens and other progressive legislators, deploy federal troops into the South to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, we see the rise of Black political organizations, like the Union League. This period, known as Radical Reconstruction saw some of the most revolutionary changes in U.S. history, including South Carolina electing a majority-Black legislature. In the film, we see African Americans continuing to organize, lead marches and register freedmen to vote.

Of course, the social transformation brought by Radical Reconstruction didn't last. Northern bankers regained control of the Republican Party and joined with the old southern landowners to restore 'business as usual’. In 1877, Congress agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for Rutherford B. Hayes, a corrupt Republican oligarch, becoming president after a narrow election. Effectively this condemned African Americans to oppression and death by the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings and Jim Crow laws.

Free State of Jones ends on this flat, depressing note. Knight, defeated, agrees with his wife (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to move north and escape the restoration of Dixie.

“It's not your fault we lost this war,” she says to Knight.

You won't leave the theater feeling triumphant, but no one should. The battles lost in Reconstruction are part of a larger war still going on in the U.S. today. African Americans continue to face a system of national oppression in the South and racist discrimination across the entire country. What are these police murders of Black men and women if not modern day lynchings, complete with phony trials and not-guilty verdicts? A film like Free State of Jones could not be true to the history and have a happy ending.

There are issues with the film, of course. Intermittently, the main story cuts to brief 'flash-forward' scenes of Knight's grandson on trial in Mississippi for violating the state's racist miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage. The scenes come out of nowhere and frankly add very little to the story.

Many have also criticized the film as another example of Hollywood falling back on the old 'white savior' trope ( Dances With Wolves, Avatar). While Knight is unquestionably the main character, the film focuses on him to draw out a class analysis of the Civil War. Free State of Jones examines Knight's life in order to highlight the material class interest that poor white farmers had in uniting with Black slaves against the plantation system. I imagine it will make a great accompaniment piece to The Birth of a Nation, the upcoming film about Nat Turner's rebellion.

In a year where billionaire Donald Trump uses openly racist populism to attract support from white workers, Free State of Jones is a welcome breath of fresh air. I suspect union workers and organizers, especially in the South, will find the film useful as a tool for teaching white coworkers about racism, national oppression and the need for a united front to defeat capitalism.

#UnitedStates #Movies #FreeStateOfJones

Chicago, IL – The Free State of Jones is a movie, now playing in Chicago, that portrays the story of how poor white farmers and slaves rebelled against the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861-65. This movie was directed by Gary Ross and written by Leonard Hartman and Gary Ross. It’s about two and a half hours long.

Although this movie is based on the historical fact that there was rebellion in the South against the Slave-Holders’ rebellion that created the Confederate States of America it is still fiction, a work of art. Yet it is a compelling story of a heroic effort by slaves and poor white dirt farmers to create the Free State of Jones in the heart of the Confederate South: a state where there were no slaves and everyone had the right to harvest what they sowed.

Let me start with a simple quote from Ms. Dorothy Burnworth, a fifth grade history teacher, who said to her students: “Do not believe the myth that Robert E. Lee and the Confederates were chivalrous gentlemen fighting to preserve Southern honor. They were traitors to the Union, fighting to preserve slaves.”

And that is precisely the message this movie begins with. Newton Knight, a poor white farmer in the Confederate army, discovers that if you own 20 slaves you will be discharged to go home to your family. That was Knight’s moment of truth when it became clear to him that he was fighting so rich white slave holders could stay in power.

Karl Marx, in a letter to President Lincoln in 1864, called the Confederate Slave-Holders’ Rebellion a “general holy crusade of Property against Labor.”

In the South that meant 4 million slaves and 5 million white peasants (small farmers) who did not own slaves were all under the oppressive iron heel of 300,000 slave holding plantation owners.

One of the most radical measures take during the Civil War was the breaking up of the large plantations and re-dividing the land between the freed slaves and poor farmers. Black people at this time were promised 40 acres and a mule. Shortly after President Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, President Johnson, gave the plantation owners their land back, provided they swore allegiance to the Union. This so-called redemption measure laid the material basis for the counter-revolution buttressed by KKK terrorism which in one fell sweep made Black people perhaps the largest landless peasant population in the world.

The Civil War then was more than just a falling out between Northern industrial capitalists and the agrarian slave-holding capitalists of the South, for its revolutionary side was that it was also the uprising of Black slaves and many poor white farmers who seized the time to strike a revolutionary blow for freedom.

I strongly recommend that everyone see this movie because what it is really about is the unfinished democratic revolution the Civil War started. We are still living in the counter-revolution, post-Civil War era where there is still a general crusade of property against labor, and where Black folk, through mass incarceration are still being re-enslaved and denied that most fundamental right of citizenship, the right to vote.

Now like then, we need the united organized struggle of Black, brown and white workers to finish the democratic revolution the Civil War started. The reason why the battle for democracy in the South and the nation was lost is because the U.S. government refused to totally abolish slavery and address its devastating effects socially, economically and politically on Black people as an oppressed nation within this republic.

The U.S. government is still refusing to address the democratic and revolutionary demands of the Black liberation movement and the working class movement. Before we can advance and finish what was started by the Civil War we must break the resistance of the 1% to the democratic demands of the people’s movement.

#ChicagoIL #Opinion #Movies #FreeStateOfJones #matthewMcconaughey

When I saw the trailer back in September, I figured it was just a horror movie rehash of the racist cannibal exploitation films of the 1980s. Much to my surprise, it's not. Director Eli Roth desperately tries to offer a subversive critique of Western 'slacktavism' (think Kony 2012). Ultimately though, The Green Inferno ends up perpetuating the same old racist stereotypes about indigenous people, and it promotes a dangerous cynicism about student activism as a whole.

The Green Inferno consists of two acts: the setup and the bloodbath. In the setup, we're introduced to Justine (played to perfection by Lorenza Izzo), an affluent college student in New York City whose father works at the United Nations. Justine becomes involved with a social justice activist group focused on stopping the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in South America. The group embarks on a trip to Peru to prevent a giant multinational corporation from bulldozing a remote part of the rainforest, which is home to an isolated indigenous tribe.

The students disrupt the corporation's plans by tying themselves to trees and live-streaming the action over social media. But they barely get a chance to celebrate before their plan crashes and the surviving activists are taken prisoner by the tribe. From there, the film descends into the bloodiest carnage I've ever seen on film.

Roth really outdoes himself in terms of visceral gore and jaw-dropping visuals. That's really saying something too, considering Roth's envelope-pushing horror past (Cabin Fever [2002], Hostel [2005]). The Green Inferno was so gory that, upon finishing the film, I literally took Pepto-Bismol to settle my stomach. But for as unsettling as I found the film's violence, there's something even more disturbing at work here.

To its credit, The Green Infernodoes a number of things well. The film never lets us forget that corporations pose the primary threat to the environment and indigenous people, even amid the bloodbath of the film's second act. However, Roth never articulates a defense of the land rights of indigenous people or the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. In fact, The Green Inferno undermines those very rights with its racist portrayal of indigenous people. It reminds me of the racist European lies about indigenous cannibalism in Africa and South America used by the ruling class to justify colonialism.

As mentioned above, the film presents itself as a critique of Western non-profit activism and social media 'slacktavism'. The students' entire trip to Peru reeks of a condescending 'Western savior complex' towards indigenous people, instead of genuine international solidarity. True to form, the film's big plot twist reveals that another logging corporation actually bankrolled the whole trip, using the students' naiveté to stop their rivals from acquiring land rights in the Amazon. Most of the students are too busy counting up likes and retweets on their social media accounts to care, and the few that do explain it away as a 'necessary evil'.

Roth's writing may border on cheesy at times, but its not exactly off-base on this point. Almost four years ago, the 'Kony 2012' viral video, produced by the non-profit Invisible Children, took the internet by storm with its record-breaking 100 million views on YouTube. Today, it's plainly obvious that the U.S. State Department used its emotionally charged portrayal of the Ugandan civil war to justify the 2011 military intervention in the region, which continues to this day.

However, even while making these valid criticisms, the film's lack of political clarity plunges it into cynicism. Roth never offers an alternative to the chauvinistic 'slacktavism' of the main characters, even though plenty exist. Student activists in the U.S. have a long history of striking blows against imperialist oppression using tactics far more principled and effective than what's shown in The Green Inferno. For instance, Palestinian solidarity activists on campuses across the U.S. have led the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel's apartheid regime, taking a page from the playbook of anti-apartheid student activists in the 80s. Other groups, like Students for a Democratic Society, have mobilized students to oppose imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.

This kind of one-sided cynicism is bad for the movement. It's hard to imagine someone leaving The Green Inferno excited and charged up to do more campus organizing and student activism. Especially to the uninitiated, the film leads us to believe that all student activism in the U.S. is naïve and misguided at best, chauvinistic and racist at worst. And that's flat-out false. We need more student activists fighting imperialism, not fewer.

From the outset, he faced criticism from indigenous rights groups, like Survival International, for his racist portrayal of natives. Roth shot most of The Green Inferno in Peru from 2013-2014, using an actual remote indigenous tribe for the film's production. According to producers, the tribe's elders received the screenplay, watched the film Cannibal Holocaust on a projector, and gave their blessing to appear in the film as actors. It's as though Roth thought that by taking these extra steps, his film was somehow less exploitative.

In this sense, the closer analogy to The Green Inferno isn't 80s cannibal flicks but rather Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella. Conrad, a Belgian, ostensibly wrote his book as a criticism of colonialism in Africa. However, as the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe pointed out, Conrad's racist and dehumanizing portrayals of Africans in the novel undermined the weak – and Eurocentric – critique of colonialism he attempted to make.

Roth has dismissed criticism of his film's racist portrayal of indigenous people as “simply absurd,” and he claims the real targets of the film are multinational corporations. However, the confused and deeply cynical politics of The Green Inferno actually help imperialist destruction rather than undermining it. Like Conrad, Roth lacks an aggressive anti-imperialist lens to view the world, and in its vacuum, the same old politics of oppression find their way inside.

Frankly, Roth should learn from his mentor and fellow director, Quentin Tarantino. Last year, Tarantino drew the outrage of racists across the U.S. for his outspoken support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement against police crimes. If Roth is serious about opposing the destruction of indigenous people by Western multinational corporations, he should offer principled support to activist groups supporting the rights of indigenous people, both in the U.S. and abroad. But The Green Inferno is not the way to do it.

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Fans and critics have spent the last month deconstructing everything about The Force Awakens, and its politics are no exception. Unlike Star Trek's overwhelmingly progressive vision of a communist future, the Star Wars series has always had more muddled political content. While the original trilogy pitted a group of self-described rebels against a literal Empire, several critics speculated that the films fed into the anti-Soviet Cold War politics of U.S. politicians in the 70s and 80s. Even the class composition of the rebel forces – former royalty (Princess Leia), deposed religious aristocrats (the Jedi), criminal smugglers (Han Solo), and union-busters (Lando Calrissian) – raises questions of how progressive the rebellion actually is.

In some ways, the prequel trilogy's story of the 'fall of the Old Republic' and the rise of the Empire tried to remedy this by incorporating a major galactic trade dispute and political crisis into the story. Released in 2005 amid growing opposition to the war in Iraq, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith's anti-Bush message is about as subtle as James Cameron's Avatar. But the prequels serve as a crucial reminder to progressives that a good political message can't make up for terrible production, bad acting, sloppy writing, and cringe-worthy dialogue.

The Force Awakens is actually an improvement on the previous installments in the series in this regard. Taking place 30 years after the last film ( Return of the Jedi), the story's main villain is a right-wing paramilitary outfit called the First Order, made up of the most reactionary remnants of the fallen Galactic Empire. With their Nazi-style black uniforms, demagoguery, continued use of 'stormtroopers' to enforce their rule, and penchant for inter-planetary genocide, the First Order is decidedly fascist. They're particularly timely and frightening given the rise of far-right forces in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The new set of heroes introduced in the film are also stark improvements over their counterparts in the preceding films. In the original trilogy, the only significant Black character was Lando Calrissian, an anti-union capitalist who betrays his friends to the Empire. But in The Force Awakens, we meet Finn, a Black stormtrooper who refuses to fight for the First Order and becomes a leader in the resistance. Similarly, the film's badass female lead character, Rey, comes from an impoverished background and quickly learns to use the Force in fighting the First Order – a sharp contrast to Princess Leia's royal pedigree and her passivity throughout most of the original trilogy.

While there are a lot of positive aspects to The Force Awakens, the film is by no means perfect. The prequel films got bogged down by its overwrought parliamentary politics and tedious trade disputes. As if in response to these common fan criticisms, J.J. Abrams makes the opposite mistake by giving us too little information about the Star Wars universe after the fall of the Empire. State power in the galaxy, we are told, lies in a new Republic government, which the First Order seeks to overthrow. How and more importantly why a 'rebellion' continues to exist in this context is perplexing, and its relationship to the Republic goes largely unexplained. Hopefully future installments can tell an equally tight story while also fleshing out the political dynamics of the Star Wars universe.

There's no doubt that The Force Awakens is the best Star Wars film in last 35 years, when The Empire Strikes Back – commonly regarded as the best film in the series – was released. With its return-to-form storytelling and genuinely enjoyable characters, old and new, it revived a great but struggling sci-fi series for 21st century audiences.

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Houston, TX – Jay Roach’s new movie, Trumbo, is an excellent film about the American communist screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo. The film is a biography of Trumbo’s life, his political commitments and the severe repression he faced during the U.S. government’s blacklisting campaign of Hollywood leftists in the 1950s. Unlike most Hollywood films, Trumbo paints communists in a very favorable light, showing that they were committed to the fight for social justice and the struggle to improve the lives of working people.

The film focuses particularly on the work of American communists in Los Angeles during the Cold War. It has a brief scene at the beginning that shows some of the work that communists did with artist unions in Hollywood and their attempts to organize the film industry, particularly with the Screenwriters Guild.

Spoiler alert. The rest of this article refers to specific events in the film.

The film begins with Dalton Trumbo at a film premier for which he wrote the screenplay. They show an anti-Communist newsreel, causing audience members to mistreat and discriminate against Trumbo – one person throws a glass of wine in his face and calls him a ‘traitor.’

The film highlights the incredible pain the anti-communist crusade caused Trumbo’s family and friends. It shows communists as warm, friendly people who really care about the needs of others, and who want to make the world a better place. Yet, because of anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joe McCarthy and others, they face hostility wherever they go.

One scene was particularly charming, in which Trumbo’s daughter asks him, “Am I a communist?” to which he responds, “If you see a fellow classmate at school who doesn’t have anything to eat, what do you do? Do you help him, or do you charge him a loan?” She responds, “I would share my lunch with him.” Trumbo warmly responds with a smile, “Then you’re a communist.” In the film, his daughter becomes a committed political activist in the civil rights movement, finding deep inspiration in her father’s communist political commitment.

The film quickly progresses with the birth of the Cold War and the expansion of the House of Un-American Activities, and the Hollywood blacklists. Trumbo and his comrades, all who are screenwriters and part of a communist-led screenwriters’ guild in Hollywood, come under severe attack. They are subpoenaed and required to testify in front of an anti-communist judge.

Trumbo and his comrade Arlen wittily defend themselves and refuse to admit to committing any crime. Despite an intense campaign with the slogan, “Free the Hollywood 10” they are blacklisted, and both spend two years in prison, after being charged with ‘contempt of court.’

The film then focuses on their lives after imprisonment and the incredible difficulty they faced as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. Trumbo and his family have to sell their home and live in difficult financial conditions, receiving threats from their neighbors (they find “Get out” painted in red in their backyard). They are unable to find work with any producer, all who express anti-communist fears and thus refuse to employ them. As a result, they were forced to write scripts for producers for lower compensation, and could not attach their name to any of their screenplays.

Trumbo is particularly relevant today in its depiction of political repression of communists, given that repression is a growing reality today. Cases like those of Rasmea Odeh, Simon Trinidad, the Anti-War 23 (which includes the communists of Freedom Road Socialist Organization), along with thousands of instances of repression faced by Arabs and Muslims illustrate the need to build a broad united front that can push back against these attacks on our democratic rights.

The film’s message is clearly a denunciation of FBI repression of activists and shows communists are progressive fighters for the improvement of humanity. A good film for the holidays that accurately depicts American left-wing history, Trumbo is a great film, with good actors, cinematography and a fantastic screenplay.

#HoustonTX #Movies #Trumbo

**Spoiler alert: This review is full of spoilers**

This summer moviegoers have an opportunity to witness the thrill ride that is Mad Max: Fury Road. Fury Road is a modern continuance of iconoclast George Miller’s epic post-apocalyptic trilogy from the 1970s and 80s featuring the dark and distant hero Max Rockatansky.

As a fan of the original Mad Max films starring Mel Gibson, before he became an idiot, it was an easy step forward to become a fan of Fury Road. An easy step for sure, but not a foregone conclusion. Fury Road is very gritty, contains minimal dialogue, lacks background and is one non-stop car chase – not the typical ingredients for a social commentary. My first impression was to be unconvinced of its genius, but I soon let Fury Road’s art and nuances mesmerize me.

Critics have responded enthusiastically to the film’s nostalgia, its theatrics, its raw emotion and intensity, and its social commentary. The film has been described as a shift of gravity away from the leading male role of Max, portrayed by Tom Hardy to the film’s leading female role of Furiosa, portrayed by Charlize Theron. Aside from the very conscious decision George Miller made to promote feminist ideals within the film, the plot still pushes a broader social commentary.

In Fury Road the post-apocalyptic world is a desolate, barren wasteland left ruined by nuclear or chemical warfare, famine, drought, climate change, or all the above. The only hope for mankind is the Citadel where an autocratic mutant king, Immortan Joe, has complete control over the world’s natural resources. The Citadel is mountainy fortress where Immortan Joe has sole access to the world’s only known fresh water source. He floods his destitute subjects with water daily through a gushing duct system for one single moment where they can fill their buckets and then fight over the runoff. He shuts off the water valves and then tells his subjects to never become addicted to water.

Fury Road’s protagonist is Furiosa, a female road warrior, who at first appears to be a trusted lieutenant of Immortan Joe. Her mission is to drive what is referred to as the war machine. The war machine is a tanker with a series of axels and dual engines. Furiosa is to lead a mission with some other road warriors in supporting vehicles. She is sent to her mission with both Immortan Joe’s praise and an adoring crowd. As soon as she is outside the Citadel, Furiosa purposely goes off course.

In the post-apocalyptic society humans are resources just like oil and water. Immortan Joe possesses scores of human beings and the most prized of those possessions are his wives. Virtual sex slaves, Immortan Joe’s wives are also referred to as breeders as their offspring is also his exclusive property. Furiosa has rescued Immortan Joe’s five young wives from bondage as she diverts her mission to bring them to freedom. As you can imagine, Immortan Joe is enraged with Furiosa’s coup and the remainder of the film is Furiosa’s escape and Immortan Joe’s pursuit.

Max Rockatansky returns to his role as the wild animal of the wasteland who decides to join with Furiosa to repel Immortan Joe’s legions of war machines and road warriors. At first Max does so for his own self-preservation, but soon he does so for his own catharsis. If you are familiar with the original Mad Max films then you will understand Max’s back-story. Max lost his family to violence and now runs on revenge and redemption just like the war machines run on guzzle-ine or gasoline. The interaction between Furiosa and Max is deep and piercing. When they communicate it’s as if they are looking into each other’s souls. Furiosa, much like Max, is raw emotion and even acknowledges that her own act of humanity is motivated by redemption.

The young wives of Immortan Joe have been captives for most of their lives and are helpless without Furiosa and Max. Some on the left view this is a deviation from the feminist construct, but I disagree. The wives are physically helpless because they have been isolated from the outside world locked in a dungeon-like vault by Immortan Joe. However, the wives do have an attribute that is extremely important. It’s clear that Furiosa didn’t rescue them merely out of feminist solidarity, but because they are quite knowledgeable. Sometime during their captivity the wives became self-aware of their plight; not only that they are slaves and their captor is a tyrant, but also crave justice for humanity in this post-apocalyptic feudal word. They also know the truth behind Immortan Joe: he is neither king nor god but, as one wife put it, a very old man. The revelation is dangerous for Immortan Joe and his power hold over the Citadel. Immortan Joe’s legions are willing to die for him because they have been led to believe that their self-sacrifice will honor him and he is god. He promises them eternal glory and they readily accept.

The film reaches its climax when Furiosa is told that there is no escape from Immortan Joe unless they continue through an endless sea of desert. Furiosa breaks down in defeat, but they do not give up. They come to terms and prepare to ride through the scorching wasteland. Max then intervenes and informs the group that they must go back and race Immortan Joe and his legions to the Citadel. The Citadel has water and vegetation – it can sustain precious life!

In the modern U.S. we sit at the citadel of imperial capitalism which tips the balance of resources toward Immortan Joe. Of course, Immortan Joe is just a fictional villain who is more easily identified with Twister Sister’s Dee Snyder than a modern oil baron or conservative politician, but his archetype is very real and very sinister. The battle over patriarchy is just as real as the battle over natural resources.

In patriarchal society men are not just the sole leaders and decision makers, but also control the opposite gender. If you don’t think this is the case today in the U.S. you haven’t been paying attention! War on contraception in Colorado, the largest most sweeping abortion restrictions in several states have been legislated in just the last four years, and the lack of paid maternal leave is a punch line on late night television. Immortan Joe is very much in control over the opposite gender, though he doesn’t need to lock women up in a vault – he instead locks them up in legislative bondage.

Today’s natural resources are under scrutiny as the extraction of oil and the scarcity of fresh water are causing worldwide famine. Fresh water is facing global depletion and the U.S. is not immune. The continued process of oil extraction is a major cause of fresh water depletion. Privatization of fresh water around the globe has placed over 170 million people at the mercy of private corporations for life sustaining water. Immortan Joe knows that natural resources under private control increase the power and profits of the few.

With the cost of many lives, Furiosa and Max return to the Citadel with Immortan Joe’s lifeless body strapped to the hood of their war machine. The subjects, the legions and the slaves see that their god is nothing more than a selfish man. They turn on the water and lift Furiosa and the four remaining wives to victory. Furiosa looks around for Max and sees him disappearing in the crowd. They look at each other and Max sees that Furiosa has found her redemption, but for Max there is only eternal striving. Max is gone and the film ends.

The more I think about Fury Road the more I get mad and want to quit running from the modern day Immortan Joes. Fury Road asks its audience to turn back toward the citadel and open the flood gates to all the people. The world cannot change until the people control the citadel.

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