Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/film/page/2/)
We are the beneficiaries of the most advanced audiovisual systems ever known, capable of moving our emotions, challenging our ideas, and opening our imaginations. Is it right that the most technologically sophisticated and financially expensive products of this system are entertainments like the Batman movies, designed to deliver their gratifications not to the mind but to the gut?
A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen.
When people working for a good cause turn in directions that aren’t good—or might even be bad—do their virtuous intentions outweigh the unintended side effects of their activities? How far can the ethical standards of activists and philanthropists be trusted when people worship capitalism as blindly as many Americans do today?
In Darkness, Poland’s nominee and a finalist for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, immediately plunges the viewer into an unrelenting world of thuggery and mass murder in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The film, The Forgotten Bomb, is a stark reminder of how we, as a people, have betrayed our trust in God and, for sixty-six years, have instead placed our trust in a nuclear idol.
The Tree of Life is a brilliant achievement in almost all respects, bringing the eternal and the everyday, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, and the physical and the metaphysical into graceful convergences that are awesome to behold.
When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s documentary A Lot Like You premier at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, one of my first responses to this moving and complex film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. The film brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.
My low opinion of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist values is even lower now that I’ve sat through Atlas Shrugged, an adventure in tedium that would surely have disappointed Rand, a lifelong movie fan.
A look at some adventurous films that acknowledge the gap between art and actuality, and try to bridge it by allowing real people with authentic emotions and experiences into their stories. A review of TINY FURNITURE, IFC Films, 2010; PUTTY HILL, Cinema Guild, 2010; and ON THE BOWERY, Milestone Film and Video, 1957.
Don’t race to the top, look to the grassroots for the future health of our schools.
GRACE PALEY: COLLECTED SHORTS, Lilly Rivlin Productions, 2010
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
Oliver Stone has provided a great antidote to mainstream U.S. media coverage of Latin America with his latest film, “South of the Border.”