The criminalization of sexually abused and exploited ghetto girls in scathing documentary.
CLICK TO READ REVIEW HERE
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
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6/28/08
Sex and the City
Sex in the City is not just for women It for women and men who have a sense of humor and are not afraid to let this emotion triumph even in these dismal, almost terrifying times of economic, political and military unrest.
The unrealistic plot, the flamboyant customs, the ultra high heels that destroy the legs they are designed to show off to their best advantage and the frivolous nature of the interaction of these famous women known to many from their half hour television program of the same name, is worth seeing but only if you take with you a sense of the absurd and the understanding that no one knows better than the creators of this film that what they are seeking and what you are buying is pure fun.
Why not laugh and enjoy this two hour film? I say see it, smile, and then walk home how ever far that might be. That’s the best recipe I can offer to savor the moment precious fun filled experience of Sex in the City without having to contend with another hike in the price of gas, or bread.
Linda Zises
WBAI Women’s Collective
rottentomatoes:vine
witches brew
The unrealistic plot, the flamboyant customs, the ultra high heels that destroy the legs they are designed to show off to their best advantage and the frivolous nature of the interaction of these famous women known to many from their half hour television program of the same name, is worth seeing but only if you take with you a sense of the absurd and the understanding that no one knows better than the creators of this film that what they are seeking and what you are buying is pure fun.
Why not laugh and enjoy this two hour film? I say see it, smile, and then walk home how ever far that might be. That’s the best recipe I can offer to savor the moment precious fun filled experience of Sex in the City without having to contend with another hike in the price of gas, or bread.
Linda Zises
WBAI Women’s Collective
rottentomatoes:vine
witches brew
6/26/08
Lou Reed's Berlin: Director: Julian Schnabel
Synopsis: Over 30 years after the release of Lou Reed's Rock Opera, BERLIN,Julian Schnabel (THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY), took the album to the stage. This film reproduces the concent held at the St. Anna's Warehouse in Brooklyn News York.
Commentary:
Berlin chronicles the love story of desolate lives in divided Berlin where the wall, similar to the Wall now being built by the United
States and Isreal to protect their boundaries, informs on the human cost of construction as reflected in
the emotional wealth that Lou Reed brings to his work
Lou Reed's music is as true today as it was those thirty or so years ago. We heard it with the Blues Project, with Bobby Dylan and the famous visual artist Andy Warhole, who screemed out his difference with the world around him as Lou Reed screams out his music to the listening audience.
In the past we screamed and our screaming, singing and hard work at organizing paid off. Unfortunately today, we are too quiet. The institutionalized world of brutal control has silenced all but a fews of us.
Listen to the sound of Lou Reed and hear the wails the cries, the tears and the underlying feeling that in spite of the trajedy we all experience, makes us feel confident we will prevail.
This production feataures the old and the young alike. It is good be part of and to remember and hear the sound of inspiration being played loudly without distractions of back room scenes and pesonal dialogues with the performers
Performers: Antony, Sharon Jones, and Emmanuelle Seigner (as Caroline, the tale's tragic heroine)
Starring: Lou Reed, Antony, Sharon Jones, Emmanuelle Seigner
Director: Julian Schnabel
Producer: Jon Kilik, Tom Sarig
Composer: Lou Reed
See this documentary/concert. Take a friend, children or go it alone and enjoy the vibration, the electrifying experience of feeling aliv,e invigorated again.
Linda Z
WBAI Womens' Collective
and
Rotten Tomatoes
Vine: Witches Brew
Commentary:
Berlin chronicles the love story of desolate lives in divided Berlin where the wall, similar to the Wall now being built by the United
States and Isreal to protect their boundaries, informs on the human cost of construction as reflected in
the emotional wealth that Lou Reed brings to his work
Lou Reed's music is as true today as it was those thirty or so years ago. We heard it with the Blues Project, with Bobby Dylan and the famous visual artist Andy Warhole, who screemed out his difference with the world around him as Lou Reed screams out his music to the listening audience.
In the past we screamed and our screaming, singing and hard work at organizing paid off. Unfortunately today, we are too quiet. The institutionalized world of brutal control has silenced all but a fews of us.
Listen to the sound of Lou Reed and hear the wails the cries, the tears and the underlying feeling that in spite of the trajedy we all experience, makes us feel confident we will prevail.
This production feataures the old and the young alike. It is good be part of and to remember and hear the sound of inspiration being played loudly without distractions of back room scenes and pesonal dialogues with the performers
Performers: Antony, Sharon Jones, and Emmanuelle Seigner (as Caroline, the tale's tragic heroine)
Starring: Lou Reed, Antony, Sharon Jones, Emmanuelle Seigner
Director: Julian Schnabel
Producer: Jon Kilik, Tom Sarig
Composer: Lou Reed
See this documentary/concert. Take a friend, children or go it alone and enjoy the vibration, the electrifying experience of feeling aliv,e invigorated again.
Linda Z
WBAI Womens' Collective
and
Rotten Tomatoes
Vine: Witches Brew
6/22/08
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
2008
Director: Katrina Browne
The Film Class
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Uri Rosenwaks
by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Of all the ways these two documentary films overlap and echo one another – both deal with women who film their investigations of ancestral involvement in the global slave trade – the most visceral is the moment that each captures on film of the physical recoil against stepping into the still-preserved underground dungeons where slaves were held before shipping.
Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade reports there were 70 “slave forts” on the West African coast between 1769 and 1820 (when the DeWolfe family business was at its height). In the summer of 2001, Browne led a film crew and nine other DeWolfe descendants to two of them – Cape Coast and Elmina – in Ghana. Browne is an Episcopal minister raised in Philadelphia who lived in Berkeley, California when she began this project eight years ago. Her Ghanaian trip was the second leg of a three-week journey starting in Bristol, Rhode Island – the historic DeWolfe family seat, where their mansion Linden Hall is now a museum and descendants often return for the July 4th parade – and proceeded to Cuba, where the DeWolfes owned five sugar plantations that used slave labor and supplied their rum distilleries well after the end of the US Civil War.
On the other side of the African continent, at Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar off Tanzania, Israeli filmmaker Uri Rosenwaks led his filmmaking class – five “Black Bedouin” women from the town of Rahat in the Negev Desert – on a similar pilgrimage in 2005. In southern Israel’s Negev Desert, the Rahat Black Bedouins descend from Africans kidnapped by Arab slavers during the same period but taken east.
The mirroring that occurs within each film and between the two films is frequent. In a stroke of cinematic good fortune, Katrina Browne herself carries the same DeWolfe profile that echoes in every family portrait her film puts on-screen, making somberly visible the legacy she experiences so sharply. The DeWolfe family’s return to Ghana coincided with a massive gathering that aimed to ritually cleanse the area of its slaving past; during one moment when Browne watches a procession of hereditary tribal leaders, she wonders if her ancestors and theirs “did business.” That family business was the largest single slaving enterprise in US history, an elaborate “triangle trade route” involving almost 50 ships, their own bank and distilleries, the Ghanaian and Cuban sites, a Charleston slave auction house and connections in 40 other US cities.
On both African coasts, the holding dungeons that remain are bleak gray stone affairs, squat, dank, thick-walled and half-underground, made for holding hundreds of naked human beings in almost unbelievably tight, dark spaces. And in each place – despite the distance traveled, which has required considerable commitment and overcoming – the visitors must will themselves over the threshold.
Besides celebrating Juneteenth (the date when Texas slaves belatedly got word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) with events all month – the opening reception for Declaration of Independence-signer descendent Brantley Carroll’s photo exhibit, The Whipping Post, a book-signing at Barnes and Noble and related guest talks – Syracuse’s Community Folk Art Center is also observing the second centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. They’ll screen both Traces of the Trade and The Film Class twice this month, on the 18th and 26th, as a double bill – just over two hours combined total viewing time – an inspired change of plans from a single screening of each film on separate dates, so viewers can experience the ways each reflects and deepens the other. Mindful of the symbolism of anniversaries, Katrina Brown premiered her film at Sundance on January 12th of this year, Martin Luther King’s birthday. On June 24th, Traces of the Trade airs nationally on PBS, kicking off the new season of the documentary series, “P.O.V.” So Syracuse gets this film earlier than the rest of the country.
Led by Katrina, the ten DeWolfe descendants use their journey to address questions of forgiveness, self-indulgence, whether reparations mean process or payment, the distinctions between guilt and grief, and the need to follow-up with action in the world once they got home. While some DeWolfes went other routes – supporting reparation lawsuits, for example – Browne took her action to the Episcopal Church’s national gathering, successfully shepherding official church recognition of slaving and current racism and laying groundwork for first steps to respond.
Browne’s project began when her grandmother sent her a small booklet on the family’s history that acknowledged the true foundation of their wealth and social position. In Rosenwaks’ film class – a small project to teach new skills and community involvement to African Bedouin women begun by the Step Forward NGO in a remote, impoverished Israeli city – the process also began with grandmothers when he asked his students what they knew their family history.
Whereas the DeWolfes’ unspoken rule was “never to mention politics, religion or the Negroes,” the Rahat women found they knew next to nothing about their family histories or how they came to reside, largely despised, in the Negev Desert. No less profoundly that the DeWolfes, the Rahat women return from their African trip to confront their mayor, in a filmed interview, about racism toward the Black Bedouin community within his city.
The Film Class includes that encounter, preceded by footage of the role-playing the women engaged in to prepare for interviewing a practiced politician and his nervous aides, and followed by their reactions afterward when the whole class gathers to watch how the interview went – comically in one spot, since one of the film’s producers, playing the mayor, offered an evasive answer in the rehearsal that predicted, almost word for word, what the real mayor then said. So we get to watch these women’s surprised delight when they watch footage of that exchange. In its own way, this sequence expresses the same profound and universal power of cinema that Katrina Browne is aiming for. Schooled in Aristotle’s theory of drama and catharsis making better citizens, Browne - who has experience with a number of projects using film for community outreach - reasoned simply, “These days, people go to the movies.”
*******
This review appeared in the 6/12/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that have not enjoyed a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North premieres nationally on PBS as the season opener for the documentary series P.O.V. on Tuesday, June 24 at 10 p.m., after which the DVD is available on-line from PBS. The Film Class is available on DVD now from ruthfilms.com.
2008
Director: Katrina Browne
The Film Class
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Uri Rosenwaks
by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Of all the ways these two documentary films overlap and echo one another – both deal with women who film their investigations of ancestral involvement in the global slave trade – the most visceral is the moment that each captures on film of the physical recoil against stepping into the still-preserved underground dungeons where slaves were held before shipping.
Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade reports there were 70 “slave forts” on the West African coast between 1769 and 1820 (when the DeWolfe family business was at its height). In the summer of 2001, Browne led a film crew and nine other DeWolfe descendants to two of them – Cape Coast and Elmina – in Ghana. Browne is an Episcopal minister raised in Philadelphia who lived in Berkeley, California when she began this project eight years ago. Her Ghanaian trip was the second leg of a three-week journey starting in Bristol, Rhode Island – the historic DeWolfe family seat, where their mansion Linden Hall is now a museum and descendants often return for the July 4th parade – and proceeded to Cuba, where the DeWolfes owned five sugar plantations that used slave labor and supplied their rum distilleries well after the end of the US Civil War.
On the other side of the African continent, at Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar off Tanzania, Israeli filmmaker Uri Rosenwaks led his filmmaking class – five “Black Bedouin” women from the town of Rahat in the Negev Desert – on a similar pilgrimage in 2005. In southern Israel’s Negev Desert, the Rahat Black Bedouins descend from Africans kidnapped by Arab slavers during the same period but taken east.
The mirroring that occurs within each film and between the two films is frequent. In a stroke of cinematic good fortune, Katrina Browne herself carries the same DeWolfe profile that echoes in every family portrait her film puts on-screen, making somberly visible the legacy she experiences so sharply. The DeWolfe family’s return to Ghana coincided with a massive gathering that aimed to ritually cleanse the area of its slaving past; during one moment when Browne watches a procession of hereditary tribal leaders, she wonders if her ancestors and theirs “did business.” That family business was the largest single slaving enterprise in US history, an elaborate “triangle trade route” involving almost 50 ships, their own bank and distilleries, the Ghanaian and Cuban sites, a Charleston slave auction house and connections in 40 other US cities.
On both African coasts, the holding dungeons that remain are bleak gray stone affairs, squat, dank, thick-walled and half-underground, made for holding hundreds of naked human beings in almost unbelievably tight, dark spaces. And in each place – despite the distance traveled, which has required considerable commitment and overcoming – the visitors must will themselves over the threshold.
Besides celebrating Juneteenth (the date when Texas slaves belatedly got word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) with events all month – the opening reception for Declaration of Independence-signer descendent Brantley Carroll’s photo exhibit, The Whipping Post, a book-signing at Barnes and Noble and related guest talks – Syracuse’s Community Folk Art Center is also observing the second centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. They’ll screen both Traces of the Trade and The Film Class twice this month, on the 18th and 26th, as a double bill – just over two hours combined total viewing time – an inspired change of plans from a single screening of each film on separate dates, so viewers can experience the ways each reflects and deepens the other. Mindful of the symbolism of anniversaries, Katrina Brown premiered her film at Sundance on January 12th of this year, Martin Luther King’s birthday. On June 24th, Traces of the Trade airs nationally on PBS, kicking off the new season of the documentary series, “P.O.V.” So Syracuse gets this film earlier than the rest of the country.
Led by Katrina, the ten DeWolfe descendants use their journey to address questions of forgiveness, self-indulgence, whether reparations mean process or payment, the distinctions between guilt and grief, and the need to follow-up with action in the world once they got home. While some DeWolfes went other routes – supporting reparation lawsuits, for example – Browne took her action to the Episcopal Church’s national gathering, successfully shepherding official church recognition of slaving and current racism and laying groundwork for first steps to respond.
Browne’s project began when her grandmother sent her a small booklet on the family’s history that acknowledged the true foundation of their wealth and social position. In Rosenwaks’ film class – a small project to teach new skills and community involvement to African Bedouin women begun by the Step Forward NGO in a remote, impoverished Israeli city – the process also began with grandmothers when he asked his students what they knew their family history.
Whereas the DeWolfes’ unspoken rule was “never to mention politics, religion or the Negroes,” the Rahat women found they knew next to nothing about their family histories or how they came to reside, largely despised, in the Negev Desert. No less profoundly that the DeWolfes, the Rahat women return from their African trip to confront their mayor, in a filmed interview, about racism toward the Black Bedouin community within his city.
The Film Class includes that encounter, preceded by footage of the role-playing the women engaged in to prepare for interviewing a practiced politician and his nervous aides, and followed by their reactions afterward when the whole class gathers to watch how the interview went – comically in one spot, since one of the film’s producers, playing the mayor, offered an evasive answer in the rehearsal that predicted, almost word for word, what the real mayor then said. So we get to watch these women’s surprised delight when they watch footage of that exchange. In its own way, this sequence expresses the same profound and universal power of cinema that Katrina Browne is aiming for. Schooled in Aristotle’s theory of drama and catharsis making better citizens, Browne - who has experience with a number of projects using film for community outreach - reasoned simply, “These days, people go to the movies.”
*******
This review appeared in the 6/12/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that have not enjoyed a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North premieres nationally on PBS as the season opener for the documentary series P.O.V. on Tuesday, June 24 at 10 p.m., after which the DVD is available on-line from PBS. The Film Class is available on DVD now from ruthfilms.com.
6/20/08
The Last Mistress
Catherine Breillat
(french with english subtitles)
Cast:
:La Vellini (Asia Argento)
Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou)
Hermangarde ( Roxane Mesquida)
PLOT:
The age-old battle of the sexes is once again brought to the screen in this film about two woman(rivals) and a man who can not escape the shackles of a mistress La Vellini, whose power over men triumphs over common sense of intellegual/economic desires. Based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 19th Century novel.
COMMENTARY:
Cold , detached, empty
too many extended silences
too many moments of vacuous eyes, staring into an invisible camera
too little tension
too much that is bad
rather than good, loving, credible
too many cliches
too much exposed of La Vellini's perfectly formed full bosom and too long a shot of Hermangarde's perfectly formed midriff (like a piece of fine sculpture) . But haven't we seen all that before?
This film lacks energy
conflict, tension
It lack compelling
emotion that goes forward and takes us with it or gets deeper and deeper into an original plot. There is no original plot, not for those who saw Valmont (Dangerous Liaisons) or Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
What is the point of "The Last Mistress"?
When the bodies disengage what is left?
No off spring to cherish, to continue the vacuous life portrayed, There are no ideas or scenes to be remembered.
Pleasurable to a point, but that point was just like the love between husband and wife, lost in the progression of an ordinary life even amid the flamboyance in dress and surroundings of the very wealthy.
The costumes are beautiful, the recreation of opulence with the wealth of color, texture, decor is awesome. But there wasn't enough substance, even with the a ten year love affair (replete with child born, died. the couple , consumed by death, agony) because we don't really feel. It doesn't seem genuine to the viewer and it wasn't real enough to help unite the couple.......or so it seems while Ryno de Marigny gives his version of the past events that inform on his present life.
This is a classic case when telling is not enough. Show us the action, the passion, the moment and then we can known and belief and feel as we hope to do when we go to see a film, particularly a French one..
All that great costume and decor for naught
Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
and
Rotten Tomatoes :Witches Brew
(french with english subtitles)
Cast:
:La Vellini (Asia Argento)
Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou)
Hermangarde ( Roxane Mesquida)
PLOT:
The age-old battle of the sexes is once again brought to the screen in this film about two woman(rivals) and a man who can not escape the shackles of a mistress La Vellini, whose power over men triumphs over common sense of intellegual/economic desires. Based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 19th Century novel.
COMMENTARY:
Cold , detached, empty
too many extended silences
too many moments of vacuous eyes, staring into an invisible camera
too little tension
too much that is bad
rather than good, loving, credible
too many cliches
too much exposed of La Vellini's perfectly formed full bosom and too long a shot of Hermangarde's perfectly formed midriff (like a piece of fine sculpture) . But haven't we seen all that before?
This film lacks energy
conflict, tension
It lack compelling
emotion that goes forward and takes us with it or gets deeper and deeper into an original plot. There is no original plot, not for those who saw Valmont (Dangerous Liaisons) or Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
What is the point of "The Last Mistress"?
When the bodies disengage what is left?
No off spring to cherish, to continue the vacuous life portrayed, There are no ideas or scenes to be remembered.
Pleasurable to a point, but that point was just like the love between husband and wife, lost in the progression of an ordinary life even amid the flamboyance in dress and surroundings of the very wealthy.
The costumes are beautiful, the recreation of opulence with the wealth of color, texture, decor is awesome. But there wasn't enough substance, even with the a ten year love affair (replete with child born, died. the couple , consumed by death, agony) because we don't really feel. It doesn't seem genuine to the viewer and it wasn't real enough to help unite the couple.......or so it seems while Ryno de Marigny gives his version of the past events that inform on his present life.
This is a classic case when telling is not enough. Show us the action, the passion, the moment and then we can known and belief and feel as we hope to do when we go to see a film, particularly a French one..
All that great costume and decor for naught
Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
and
Rotten Tomatoes :Witches Brew
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