1,457 words
1970’s Halls of Anger is low-budget, tense, sensational, but real. Calvin Lockhart plays Quincy Davis, an ex-basketball star who’s happy teaching in a suburban high school until integration comes and he’s reassigned to a ghetto school, as are several white students. The principal, Boyd Wilkerson (John McLiam), couldn’t care less about his students; he wants more federal money (from integration) and a chance to get elected to the school board. (more…)
1,850 words
Africa. Poor, poor little Africa. See its starvation, poverty, and misery on TV. Don’t you feel sorry for it? Don’t you want to pick it up, kiss it, and make it feel better even as it wets on your hands? Of course you do. Aren’t you a good lemming? Don’t you like to roll over and beg when it’s expected of you? Or even better, give Africa lots of money? Or better still, to give it your heart and soul, clap your hands, and believe in it? (more…)
Illustration by the author
3,732 words
In November of 2009, I had been living in St. Louis for nine years, and my apartment complex was in a suburb bordering the city. It had gone through a rough patch before I signed my lease, cleaning out drug dealers and such. My years there were quiet and orderly. The rent was reasonable, the location a ten-minute drive from my downtown job as a security guard, and the apartment was a cozy one-bedroom. (more…)
1,209 words
Invaders from Mars is a sci-fi film said to encompass all of the paranoia of the 1950s. Director Cameron Menzies realizes this film as the horror of a child trapped in a nightmare. David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), wakened by horrific thunder, looks outside his window and sees a flying saucer land and submerge itself underground. (more…)
1,309 words
I’ve been reviewing Trump movies, and now it’s après moi, le deluge time. I saw The Father a couple of weeks ago in a typically empty theater, and was moved by its study of dementia and bravura acting by an excellent cast. Directed by Florian Zeller and based on his play, The Father tells the story of Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), an elderly man who lives alone in his shadowy apartment. (more…)
3,771 words
The events of January 6 have been called an insurrection, a riot, an assault on democracy — the epitome of white supremacy, revolution, anarchy, elements of a coup d’etat.
One word they haven’t been called is rabble, which is almost a term of honor, and honorable terms aren’t what the state or its servitors want passed on. Honor, you say? Rabble? (more…)
2,392 words
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) wasn’t the first American writer. That was William Hill Brown (no relation), whose The Power of Sympathy (1789) was an epistolary novel imitating Richardson with moral purpose and a satisfying ending of virtue triumphant. Then there was Susanna Rowson. Her Charlotte Temple (1790), was America’s first bestseller, another fine moral tale of a young woman choosing virtue and so (again) triumphing. (more…)
2,365 words
Shiva Naipaul
Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
New York: Penguin, 1982
In 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide. A joke at the time went like this: “Why did Heaven’s Gate kill themselves? They had to keep up with the Joneses.” (more…)
943 words
Jason Blum and Craig Zobel’s The Hunt received mixed reviews regarding its sensational plot, where a group of rich corporate types kidnaps Americans — “deplorable” rednecks — to hunt them down.
The Most Dangerous Game, the 1931 adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same name, is the original source of the “people hunting other people” concept. (more…)
2,542 words
Anthony Burgess
1985
London: Hutchinson, 1978
Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame celebrated thirty years of Nineteen Eighty-Four with his 1985. It is in two parts: a discussion of Orwell and freedom, and a novella updating Winston Smith’s struggle. (more…)
1,307 words
John Seymour
Retrieved From the Future
London: New European Publications, 1996
John Seymour’s Retrieved From the Future depicts a Britain when the oil runs out, caused by the CRASH, when Shiites take over the Middle East and promptly destroy all its oil wells. (more…)
1,123 words
Every movement needs a movie. Liberals have To Kill a Mockingbird, conservatives have Patton, but what about Trump and the deplorables? The movement has anger and followers, but no film — here’s one.
Allegheny Uprising (1939) is a John Wayne and Claire Trevor film based on Jim Smith’s uprising in the Conococheague Valley after the French and Indian War. (more…)