Arts Magazine Screening Room

Lily Tomlin On Call. The irreverent and unconventionally female comic phones in to the Arts Magazine with reflections on her numerous personas counting that nosy bill collector Ernestine and The Incredible Shrinking Woman; memories of Robert Altman on Nashville; the influence of her Detroit workingclass roots on her unique brand of humor; and how her characters change with the changing social issues through time.

And... A conversation with Ethiopian born Sankofa director and Howard University Professor Haile Gerima, delving into an African filmmaker's perspective on race and class in African American cinema.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

TCM Film Fest 2010: Screen Goddesses Rule

Bette Davis: 'Getting Old Ain't For Sissies.'

By Penelope Andrew
Huffington Post

"I AM BIG, IT'S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL."
----Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard

...Osborne remarked that classic films such as All About Eve were made to be seen on a large screen, but lamented that they seldom are. He enticed the audience with the April film festival by naming some of the classic films and actors who will be seen "three stories high" just as they were when the films debuted. Bette Davis, Sanders, and the All About Eve cast which also featured Celeste Holm, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill (soon to become Davis' fourth and last husband), Marilyn Monroe (in one of her earliest credited roles), and the irrepressible, superb character actress Thelma Ritter did not disappoint and obviously remain giants of the silver screen to the enthusiastic, 2010 New York audience.

CONTINUE TO READ ARTICLE HERE

Like Casablanca (1942), All About Eve (1950) is one of those classic films one can watch over and over again without ever falling out of love with it. Part of its splendor is to be found in a “truly bravura performance by its star, Bette Davis, as a theatrical diva whose temper tantrums towards others are as much fun to watch as are her savage misgivings about herself,” wrote Kenneth L. Geist back in 2000 in a New York Times review of a book devoted entirely to the subject of the film....

CONTINUE TO READ PART II 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. Penelope Andrew is reporting from the Turner Classics Movies Film Festival in LA for The Huffington Post.

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.