Today, filmmaker Robert Altman died at the age of 81. Altman is one of cinema’s most important directors. Outspoken, passionate, and visionary, Altman’s fims-including “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville.” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” and “The Player”-are just some of the hallmark films Altman directed. Never willing to dance with the Hollywood system […]

I’m not a David Brooks fan and generally avoid reading him, but today I did. His column “The Heyday of Snobbery” is about how uppity liberals love Sacha Baron Cohen because his Borat character makes it easy for us to look down at Red America. Cohen finds cheap laughs, according to Brooks, by validating our […]

Today is the final day to weigh on this issue. It is imperative. Please check out the Common Cause site and their Protect Net Neutrality campaign.
And to learn more about the historical context that set all this in motion, including Bill Clinton’s onerous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was a $72 billion boondoggle […]

Bill Moyers, a journalist’s journalist, once noted:
A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.
The Oklahoma born Texas raised Moyers, currently the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, has spent more than five decades honing his craft. Moyers worked in both […]

When in 2003 the Pentagon screened Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s brilliant film “The Battle of Algiers,” the Washington Post reported that a Pentagon flier promoting the screening read as follows:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. … Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. […]

In the recently released “The Last King of Scotland” Forest Whitaker-one of cinema’s best and underrated actors-does indeed give a great performance as the brutal 1970s Uganda dictator Idi Amin. If you didn’t know that already you can pick-up any paper promoting this movie and you will see review after review declaring Whitaker as a […]

…If you want it. Coming on the heels of the news that more than 665,000 Iraqis have lost their lives due to the invasion and occupation of their homeland, the responsibility weighs even heavier on all our shoulders to end the war now. In my most recent post I discussed the fine documentary The […]

In the provactive new documentry The U.S. vs John Lennon, Gore Vidal ends the film with these words:
Lennon sang about love and peace and “represented life, and that is admirable,” he says. “And Mr. Nixon, and Mr. Bush, represent death. And that is a bad thing.”

It is, indeed, a bad thing. Lennon, who became […]

In 1970, the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci filmed one of Italian literature’s masterpieces, Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist. The lead character Marcello Clerici-played by the wonderful French actor Jean-Louis Trintiginat-is a coward and an opportunist who will do anything possible to “belong” and accepted as “normal” in Fascist Italy. One of the tasks Clerici is asked […]