A Jail Break Against the Draft
On my way down to spend a week in the Mojave desert I queued up Edward Abby‘s Desert Solitaire on …
Tag Archives: Movies
Night Train to Lisbon — A Movie of Resistance and Memory
It’s always mildly astonishing to me how different people respond so differently to a movie or a novel. What one …
The Trench — Being Young at the Battle of the Somme, July, 1916
The Trench, a 1991 British film by William Boyd, almost accomplishes what a serious anti-war film should do — make …
Omar – Love and Betrayal in an Occupied Land
Let’s do a thought experiment about a movie. In it, an occupying army has a stranglehold on the local populace. …
The Garment Jungle — Old School Union Organizing
The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU, has a fabled name in labor and progressive circles, once one of …
The Missing Picture – Oscar Nominee from Cambodia
Update: Too bad, The Missing Picture, a powerful, engaging film about the Cambodian genocide did not win Best Foreign Film …
Chico — War in Croatia, and the World
Though war movies and novels are overwhelmingly about large nation-state wars occasionally one breaks through about the smaller scale national …
Blue Valentine — Don’t Open this
I got off my regular movie beat of war, its causes, outcomes and human behavior this past weekend and landed …
Her — A Good Evening Squandered
Count me as among those who found Her, the new movie by Spike Jonze, very very borrrrring. By an hour …
Blue is the Longest Color
Abdellatif Kechiche, director of the fine 2007 film Secret of the Grain, about working class immigrants in the French fishing …
The Dentist as Observer – in Egypt
Alaa al Aswany, author of the remarkable novel, “The Yacoubian Building,” from which a very good 2006 film was made, …
Walter Mitty, Super Hero
Arghh! I am one of those apparently odd people who think that if an idea is developed for one medium …