From The Women's Desk: Ellis Island: Blueprint For Guantanamo?

The Case of Claudia Jones: Black, Communist And Female, And Buried Twice.
Incarcerated without due process on Ellis Island in 1948 along with countless other political prisoners for their leftist views, the eminent forgotten journalist and activist was eventually sent into exile in the UK.
A conversation with Left Of Karl Marx author Carole Boyce Davies, with a spotlight on the Jones burial site next to Karl Marx, and a tale of two political exiles in the UK.
Also....Workers Of The World Divide? Class Struggle Vs. Identity Politics.
And....The Wedding Gift: The History Of US Slavery From A Woman's Perspective. Vanessa Cooper in a conversation with writer Marlen Bodden.

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American Radical: The Trials Of Norman Finkelstein

Screening Room. The Self-Hating Jew: Fact Or Fallacy? While Barak Obama and Bill Cosby are praised for scorn towards black ghetto residents for being poor, Norman Finkelstein is charged with anti-semitism for denouncing wealthy Holocaust profiteers and Israel. What gives? A conversation with the controversial scholar, social critic and author of Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, about his documentary: American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.

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Lourdes: Lyrical, Absurd, Dark And Mystifying

Always profoundly empathetic, even when at its darkest, while weighing religious passion, mortality, erotic obsessions, heartbreak, hope, desperation and devastation, all part of that both euphoric and absurd experience comprising the human condition.

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

The Arts Magazine Screening Room: Creation

The Theory Of Natural Selection And The Origin Of Charles Darwin.

A look at the Darwin biopic, Creation, and conversations with Charles Darwin's great great-grandson Randal Keynes, author of the biography Annie's Box on which the film is based, and actor Paul Bettany, who stars as the conflicted scientist. And how Darwin was a product of evolution himself, in terms of the converging politics and economics of his 19th century historical moment that made his revolutionary discovery possible.

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Toe To Toe Movie Review

 

Escaping "bad people" from the ghettos makes everyone happy,

 

A film by Emily Abt

This is the story of two girls, Tosha and Jesse, who attend  a competitive Washington, D.C., prep school. Tosha is a fiercely determined African American scholarship student from Anacostia, one of Washington's poorest areas, while Jesse is a privileged, but troubled, white girl from Bethesda, who deals with promiscuous tendencies that pull her toward self-destruction.  Toe to Toe is the story of their friendship that incorporates many common prejudices and tries to get beyond them.  Sadly, one prejudice remains: to be poor is to be brutish, quasi human, almost mindless with little impulse control over immature angry impulses.

I don't expect men, nor young teenage boys to embrace this film  I don't think it has the prejudicial ingredients to make it into the main stream American culture that wants to see white people "helping"  the poor, fat,  black, supposedly mean, stupid, lazy denizens who haven't made it into the White House. ( as the recent and much too much applauded film Precious does) But my hesitation in recommending this film is the elevation of Princeton as a college over Howard where I think a healthier overall environment ensues and the clothes worn by the actors was too nice, too expensive.

This is a film where  the poor seem angry at each other making life hell for everyone in their environment which is the unfounded prevalent idea of what ghetto life in America is like today.  Putting family without community back into the picture of ghetto life doesn't give a true picture of what it is like to live in the "inner city".

What I enjoyed about Toe to Toe is its insistence on being about teenage kids being teenage kids, not miniature adults.  I liked the detail of how isolated very wealthy people can be. The film captured how too much money seems to interfere with intimacy and healthy people interactions while the black girl is overwhelmed by family and unwanted people intrusions in the intimacy of her personal space.

What holds these girls together is how both are trying to survive in their own worlds where they are outcasts;  one because she is smarter or rather a better student then her cohorts, the other because she is wealthier than her school mates and lives essentially without a stay-at-home mother.(unfortunately women don't rise above the ugly fray of prejudice in this film)

Both girls suffer silently but eventually form a friendship that fosters their mutual growth.  Just seeing/hearing  the black girl telling the white-soon-to-be friend, "you haven't done anything for me", was a wake up moment well worth the price of admission.

Even though Toe to Toe was obviously contrived,  there was something so raw and seemingly real about the production  that I felt drawn to the experience.

Rather than waiting for it to end, I wished it could go on and on.

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective

Remembering Jennifer Jones and a Perfect Afternoon at the Movies

By Penelope Andrew

Jennifer Jones in The Song Of Bernadette [1943]

Given her unusual beauty and extraordinary talent, it is tragic that her rich body of work is so unfamiliar to audiences today. The dearth of profiles and obituaries that appeared after her death on December 17, 2009 is heartbreaking. It may also be true that the actress with a dramatic range enabling her to play an enchanting ghost of a girl who becomes an artist's muse in The Portrait of Jennie with equal ease as Gustave Flaubert's shallow yet fiery adulteress in Madame Bovary is simply too difficult to capture in words.

Jennifer Jones always defied easy analysis, so much the better for us to simply surrender to the films themselves....

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Penelope Andrew, a NYC-based writer who contributes to The Huffington Post and Critical Women on Film, is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle. A certified psychoanalytic psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, she maintains a private psychotherapy practice in NYC.

The Arts Magazine Screening Room: Cine Manifest

Rural Radical Roots In Movies, And the Birth Of The Cine Manifest Marxist Film Collective.

A conversation with Cine Manifest filmmaker John Hanson, director of Western Coal, Prairie Trilogy: Rebel Earth, Prairie Fire, Survivor, and Northern Lights. And, other highlights of the current Cine Manifest Retrospective in NY.

Also, Empire Burlesque rebel cabaret music, by Jamie Smith.

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