Special to Canadian Dimension

This Divided State Directed by Steven Greenstreet Minority Films 2005; 88 minutes (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension Magazine, May/June 2006 Issue

The Winnipeg General Strike as a musical? I must admit to having had mixed feelings about the project when I learned about it. The drama and scale of the confrontation create immense artistic possibilities, of course — but also present just as many challenges. I’ve taught the history of the strike for many years and have always been frustrated at the difficulties of conveying to students the drama and importance of these six weeks in the spring of 1919. Academic treatments and documentaries have often been of little help, as they saw the strike a mere episode (a helpful or unhelpful one, depending on one’s politics) on the road to modern liberal democracy. (Keep reading…)

Special to Canadian Dimension

How does Steven Spielberg’s Munich relate to Hamas’ recent electoral victory? Israel presents this organization as the epitome of Palestinian terrorism. This caricature could lead Washington to deny aid to the Palestinian people (Keep reading…)

Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 7, 2006

“Brokeback Mountain” has been cited by critics as a breakthrough movie about gays. With a well-established director (Ang Lee is straight, as are the two male leads) and backing by Paramount studios, it achieved a much higher profile than the average gay film. Such films actually arrive with some frequency today in theaters geared to independent film. If you go to netflix.com and search on “gay,” you will discover that there are over 500 films in this category. But most of them are fairly obscure, including the great lesbian crime film “Bound” by the Wachowski brothers who went on to make the Matrix flicks. I should of course mention that the lesbian killers in “Bound” lived happily ever after, an outcome that Paramount might find too risky to portray–especially when it comes to gay men. (Keep reading…)

Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 15, 2006

Recently on the Maxism list I moderate, where all my film reviews are initially posted, there was a discussion about the Symbionese Liberation Army. There was a consensus that this terrorist group of the mid-1970s was completely disconnected with the broader radical movement, even more so than the Weather Underground. There was even a suggestion that the SLA was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the FBI created to wreak havoc on the left. (Keep reading…)

Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 2, 2006

Warning: This film review will reveal the surprise ending of Woody Allen’s latest film. (Keep reading…)

www.marxmail.org on December 18, 2004

Despite Screenwriter John Logan and Director Martin Scorsese’s best intentions, “The Aviator” is very much like the “Spruce Goose” of the film’s climax: a lumbering, ill-conceived mess. Since they apparently didn’t understand the true story of the white elephant seaplane that is represented as a soaring engineering achievement, it should come as no surprise that they would get nearly everything else wrong about Howard Hughes. Not only do they truncate the biography of this paradigm of American capitalism, leaving out the tawdry details of his dealings with the CIA and his various corporate crimes throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s; they also airbrush and prettify his earlier life to the point where it amounts to a lie. (Keep reading…)

World Socialist Web Site

from: World Socialist Web Sight

I include two lists below. The first contains what in my opinion were the best films shown in a cinema in the US in 2005 (although, in some cases, this might have meant only a limited run in New York and Los Angeles, for example). The second list includes films that I saw in 2005, at film festivals, for example, which I thought significant but which have not yet received a showing in an American movie theater. (Keep reading…)

http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/epalestine

Imagine if we were in a parallel universe in which Hollywood gave Arabs and Muslims a fair shake. Here are ten films (all based on true stories) that are just waiting for Spielberg’s magic. (Keep reading…)

World Socialist Web Site, 24 December 2005

Syriana, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, based on See No Evil by Robert Baer (Keep reading…)