Generation Zero Doc Counterpunch Review: Tea Party Cinema A Weak Brew

...Invoking intimidating biblical scriptures that are fused visually with looming tornadoes, rotting fruit, paper money on fire, and a man versus lion beatdown, Generation Zero and its Tea Party animals get down to business on fast forward by blaming the current economic crisis retroactively on Lucifer, Woodstock, Dems, post-hippie yuppies lighting up cigars with burning Ben Franklins, Hollywood, Black Panthers, anti-war protesters and disrespectful post-WWII youth. Which might leave the marginalized left in this country scratching their collective heads while caught between pondering these neo-McCarthyite attacks, and shock that they seem to wield such enormous power over the course of history...

CONTINUE TO READ COUNTERPUNCH REVIEW HERE

Prairie Miller

Mob Rules: Tea Party's High Noon

By Sikivu Hutchinson

...Reveling in nightly PR infusions from the corporate lapdogs of American journalism, the freshly evangelized macho racist right has ensured that its charge of a socialist government expansion is now viewed as a “reasonable” critique of an overhaul that effectively concedes universal coverage to the insurance industry. Mining a deep strain of patriarchal backlash, the Tea Partiers have taken Christian fundamentalists’ language of “moral” panic and used it as a goad to a white nationalist uprising obsessed with the imagery of enslavement...

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of Blackfemlens, a journal of progressive commentary and literature, and the author of the forthcoming book Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, a commentator on Pacifica's Some Of Us Are Brave on KPFK 90.7FM, and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.
Listen to blackfemlens commentaries on Fridays, 6:25pm LA Time, at http://kpfk.org.

From The Women's Desk

The Havana In NY Film Festival: Distinguished guests from the film world in Cuba, with discussion of how movies get made under socialism without commercial imperatives as the driving force, and women both in front of and behind the camera in Cuba.

Also...Redefining Marriage: What's wrong with marriage today, and do we need it.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

A Presentation of The WBAI Women's Collective, Taking Feminism To The Next Level.

Hosts: Eneida DelValle, Joy Rose, Prairie Miller, Alana Free.

Screening Room: Janet Jackson, Shirin Nashat

Janet Jackson on acting as a healing process. The performer turned actress on her latest movie, Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too, and how disappearing into a character with anger management issues, helped her through the tragedy of brother Michael Jackson's death.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

And...Women Without Men: Iranian born NYC based director Shirin Neshat's disturbing, mystical portrayal of the haunting colonialist history Of Iran, as she addresses the hard questions. Including the origins of Middle Eastern rage against the West in the CIA backed destruction of Iranian democracy in 1953. And the dilemma of supporting protests in Iran while warding off the anti-government push by US imperialist wolves at the door.

Arts Magazine Screening Room

Shirtwaist Factory Workers prepare to strike.

Screening Room: The birth of television news and US documentary in radical underground filmmaking, and the misremembering of history. Filmmaker Tom Hurwitz on the legacy and impact of the Great Depression Workers Film And Photo League, the Red Channels purges, and a people's cinema movement born in vacant lots and union halls.

Also...Transplant take-out medical terrorism and recipients resistance uprising, in Repo Men.

And...Stephen Wolf, reads poetry commemorating the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25,1911

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Women Without Men: Rape, Rebellion And Radio In Iran

...Rape, resistance and rebel radio in Iran, and a tormented girl forced into prostitution whose ravaged, anorexic body symbolizes women and a nation alike, plundered and depleted by avaricious forces feeding upon it, both foreign and conspiring from within...

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE

Interview With Director Shirin Nashat about Women Without Men:

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Prairie Miller

Women Without Men will debut at New Directors, New Films on 3/30 and 3/31. The film series runs 3/24 through 4/4 in NYC. More information is at: Newdirectors.org. Women Without Men will open theatrically in LA beginning April 9th, and in NYC in May.

Iran and The Global Struggle for Women

By Sikivu Hutchinson

...As many Middle Eastern activists have noted, U.S. occupation has been a major catalyst for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. However, Gol cautioned, “Islamic fundamentalism hangs on its ‘death to America’” rhetoric as a means of legitimizing and reinforcing nationalism. In some regards, poor people in the region see no other viable alternative to Western imperialism besides Islamic fundamentalism. Tragically, some Iranian feminists and intellectuals also buy into this line. And it is for this reason that Gol faults the activists of the Iranian Green Movement for their failure to challenge its leaders on the issue of nationalism and women’s rights. Global women’s liberation is undermined by cultural binaries that weave a narrative of Western enlightenment versus Middle Eastern fundamentalism... I

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org, a journal of progressive commentary and literature, and the author of the forthcoming book Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, a commentator on Pacifica's Some Of Us Are Brave on KPFK 90.7FM, and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.
Listen to blackfemlens commentaries on Fridays, 6:25pm LA Time, at http://kpfk.org.

Director Fay Ann Lee Talks Falling For Grace

Screening Room. Cinderella In Chinatown: The roots of class consciousness in female folklore, and neighborhood sweatshops in confrontation with divisive step-sisterhood. Director Fay Ann Lee talks the politics and economics of identity in Falling For Grace.

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW HERE

Children Of Invention: A Conversation With Director Tze Chun

Screening Room: Children Of Invention. While the Oscars heaped accolades on the eve of International Women's Day, on movies like Precious and The Blind Side that demonize ghetto mothers living in poverty, Asian American filmmaker Tze Chun in contrast conveys a candid yet compassionate dramatic portrait based on his own childhood with a struggling single undocumented immigrant working mother, under the impact of a brutal social system that could care less. And, while surviving foreclosure, homelessness, worker exploitation and the INS. A conversation with Tze Chun.

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW WITH TZE CHUN HERE

Hitchcock, Nixon And The Taliban

Screening Room: Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art. Locating Hitchcock within the volatile historical currents his day, from the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, spectacle sparring between Nixon, JFK and Khrushchev, television versus radio, cinema versus television, consumerism, and suspect coffee commercials as sinister metaphor, to finally 'fear as commodity' in a catastrophe culture, within what seems like the ultimate reality film noir. And, whose Taliban? In Miscreants Of Talliwood. And more...

LISTEN TO THE FILMMAKER INTERVIEWS HERE

All About Her Mother

Cindy Kleine's Phyllis and Harold, And Actress Jean Simmons: Leading Lady in Her Final Film

By Penelope Andrew
The Huffington Post

Born nine years after Phyllis, the actress Jean Simmons shares some things in common with her....It's another film that tries to make sense of Friedan's feminine mystique--that awful, nagging sense that something in life is missing....

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.

Racial Politics And The Black Image In Hollywood

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Our Weekly, Los Angeles

....Critical darling Precious (directed by African American filmmaker Lee Daniels) and audience favorite The Blind Side have both garnered Oscar nods for portrayals that some Black critics and moviegoers have dubbed condescending and stereotypical. The irony is not lost on novelist Ishmael Reed, author of the forthcoming Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media. In a recent article in the New York Times Reed wrote, “The Blacks who are enraged by Precious have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy...an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is 40 years behind Mississippi”....

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming book Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She writes for Our Weekly, is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, The James Agee Cinema Circle of political criticism, a commentator on Pacifica's KPFK 90.7FM. and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.

Children Of Invention Movie Review: Motherhood Meltdown

...Heartbreak, regret and enormous compassion: The plight of immigrants, foreclosed families, moms and children on their own in an uncaring system and desperately reinventing themselves, and the way workers become hurtfully pitted against one another for survival.

CONTINUE TO READ REVIEW HERE