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.
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.
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:
It's October, which means scary movie marathons are underway in living rooms and movie theaters across the country. Since the release of Nosferatu in 1922 to present day, horror films remain widely popular among audiences. All art reflects the social, political and economic conditions around it, and at its best, the horror genre allows us to work out our collective fears and anxieties about the world. I've found that horror flicks provoke some of the most interesting discussions, often serving as a springboard for exploring bigger political and social questions. Along those lines, this is the first of three horror movies I'll look at over the month of October in Fight Back! News.
Highlights the need for a alliance between the working class and the Black liberation movement
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.
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.
I went into Eli Roth's The Green Inferno with very low expectations. Boasting the tagline, “No good deed goes unpunished,” this 2015 horror film follows the gory demise of a group of college student activists from the U.S. who get captured, tortured and eaten by a cannibalistic tribe in the Amazon rainforest.
The minute I read the first sentence of the opening crawl – “Luke Skywalker has vanished” – I knew I was watching Star Wars again. Indeed, Episode VII: The Force Awakens, delivered the goods that fans of the original trilogy craved out of the extremely underwhelming prequel movies. Director J.J. Abrams mixed a potent cocktail of original storytelling, proven plot elements, dynamic new characters and familiar actors (Harrison Ford giving his best performance in 25 years). Over the film's 135-minute runtime, I felt the same childhood sense of awe and excitement that I experienced as a seven year-old watching the original films for the first time.
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.
