How Democracy Doesn't Work

 

Mussolini: Son Of The Century Review - Spectator Surrealism On Steroids

  

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters..." ~ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks 

 In a ferociously conceived, back to the future insanely embellished cautionary tale, Joe Wright's simultaneously delirious and calculatingly crafted dramatic series based on Antonio Scurati's works and airing on Mubi, Mussolini: Son Of The Century  sidesteps traditional biopic and historical pageantry for something much more - and far less as well.

Reigniting the persona of the notorious Italian fascist dictator and his combo crafty and maniacal seizure of power, actor Luca Marinelli is nothing less than brilliant, terrifying, and somehow a dangerous and daffy buffoon as well. Add to that the early 20th century backdrop bathed in the period coarse brown and tinted hues of early photography back then, and the 'you are there' captive audience point of view - signaling a deliberately conceived hypnotic, repulsive and somehow involuntarily conspiratorial entertainment as well.

And in what will play out as repeated inescapable audience complicity in the ensuing political horrors playing out historically, Mussolini tears through the fourth wall continually to proclaim, once with an in your face scary, seductive lure, 'Follow me - you'll become fascists too.' And like the masses who could not resist his hypnotic charisma, you've become one of them as well, out of spectator on steroids irresistible curiosity's thirst for more. Not to mention, could Mussolini, and Hitler as well, have been inflicted by PTSD maniacal rage and resentment - both wounded in WWI.

But while the mastery of this production is undeniable, conceptual issues loom - and not just related to how the potent dramatic momentum is inevitably diluted by artificially thinning out the repetitive content over the prescribed eight hour series. That narrative padding could have been infused with, say, the actual, tremendously revealing background history of the time - and that flows, not through arbitrary timelines defining the artificially imposed beginning to end style of Hollywood storytelling, but the endless momentum reality of world events. 

And what could have been that driving force giving rise to both that traumatic period in Italy along with the impact on Mussolini in seizing that moment opportunistically - the Russian Revolution. Signifying the influence of that revolution on the subsequent imploding uprisings. Though to grab that powerful moment as his own rather than as an ideological follower, Mussolini chose fascism instead, manipulating those WWI physically and mentally destroyed, bitter veterans with an illusion of power that ironically only he held over their rage, directed to his advantage. Along with the powerful capitalist class, in need of the antidote he can provide to potential social upheaval threatening their existence.

And an offscreen irony never acknowledged in Son Of The Century, the communists who in the end brought the historical proceedings full circle when publicly hanging the executed fascist leader upside down - a significance intimating that presence of that other son of the century surviving elsewhere to this day - Lenin. Though in a further irony, a brewing communist revolution suppressed, not by the fascists, but by the arriving American troops in Italy.

Prairie Miller

We Shall Not Be Moved - Sedentary Cinema At The Oscars

 We Shall Not Be Moved - Sedentary Cinema At The Oscars

Don't expect the usual demeaning caricatures sidelining female elders in this deplorable Mexican international Oscar entry this year, when not monsters on the menu of horror fare. In fact far worse, at least when it comes to that other usual 'out of context cinema' bypassing history in progress all around it.

For starters, the misleading title, whether intentional or not - an insult to the historic US Civil Rights Movement anthem. In other words, in a case of detrimental double meaning, dismissing both popular struggle and the honoring of those who sacrificed enabling those causes as a kind of psychological impairment - embracing collective sedentary amnesia as the path forward instead.

Symbolizing and central to this drama's cynical historical hypothesis, is Socorro (Luisa Huertas), a seemingly senile alcoholic, chain smoking Mexican lawyer. The bitter, bedraggled Socorro is portrayed as psychotically obsessed with finding and murdering the unindicted officer who tortured to death her brother nearly six decades ago during the 1968 student uprising culminating in the Tlatelolco Massacre. And though her family is dismissive of what is portrayed as a toxic mix of geriatric fantasy and dementia, Socorro proceeds on her determined mission. This while soliciting the assistance of local hitmen, when not staging a homicidal dress rehearsal murdering a neighbor's cat. And the rest is history - or rather, not.

Much more a reflection of perhaps pessimistic and derisive younger generations today, the film sets itself squarely, when it comes to the real world all around them, a flinching Mexico bowing beneath the bullying, increasingly imposing threats of the US that began with renaming the Gulf Of Mexico. And which has progressed to internal signaling of that potential invasion of the country, under the pretext of wiping out their neighbor's domestic criminal activity - along with the simultaneous encroaching US occupation of the entire Caribbean with their massive military fleet, and engaged in assassinating alleged fishing boat suspects in the surrounding waters. 

Thus signaling a not unrelated allegory of a film promoting historical passivity and amnesia as the cure, culminating in a cynically rehabilitated Socorro ultimately breaking with the past in creating a funeral pyre out of a symbolic photo of both criminal perpetrators and victims. And likely palatable simultaneously to US movie audiences - that is, the Oscars...

Prairie Miller

 LILLY

"Diving into the glut of superhero-saturated cinema, a workplace feminist slips in...

https://wbai.org/upcoming-program/?id=11944

Alice: Critical Race Theory On Steroids

 

 This time travel, back to the future critical race theory on steroids rebel road movie shakes up that classic looking glass, with sixties uprising blaxploitation fury -  while exhuming the buried history of slavery in this relentlessly self-congratulatory country. And the best action hero so far this year. In other words, Right On.

 As Keke Palmer in a phenomenal portrayal of the designated ultimately rebel slave, traverses centuries back and forth in an uncharted but enlightening quest. And to figure it all out on the way to correcting on her terms, the shameful, unrecognized and unresolved history of slavery and racist  brutality in America.

 And while executive producer Common has not only assembled a hypnotic soundtrack composed along with Patrick Warren, Karrien Riggins, Isaiah Sharkey and Burniss Travis - but steps side and concedes to a female co-star as the main attraction for a change. Along with portraying as a Georgia trucker and flawed guiding light for Alice through the seventies political racial turmoil, again rare on screen, a mutually evolving platonic relationship. Basically Common - just keeps on truckin'.

 

African American director Krystin Ver Linden displays a deep dive youthful vigor and energy taking narratively brave chances on multiple time travel excursions - ultimately connecting slave horrors back then to working class oppression today. And seemingly following her own delivered manifesto instructing in the film herself: 'Doing the right thing is never wrong.'

 

While as valiant postscript, Alice is 'Dedicated to the African Americans who remained enslaved during the Twentieth Century, and to those who remain oppressed world-wide."

 

Prairie Miller

 

 

 

The Unforgivable: Sandra Bullock Surviving Brutal System - And Cop-out Story

 

                         Bullock Goes Full Mao In The Movie              

 

...In the US with its shameful history as the most mass incarcerated country in the world, just hand the Oscar to Bullock for her ex-con's defiant, devastating performance...

Though The Unforgivable may disappoint the mostly male movie critics out there for Sandra Bullock bypassing the usual flirty, sexually degrading roles women are subjected to on screen, her raw and real, stinging performance as a socially and emotionally battered ex-con resonates as a metaphorically take no prisoners performance. This, despite the fact that Bullock and Nora Fingscheidt, a director fiercely committed to her craft, seem to both be struggling against a metaphorically cop-out script that first challenges then cowardly concedes to the cruelty of the existing system.

Bullock commands the proceedings as Ruth, a Seattle woman just released from prison after twenty years behind bars for killing a cop. What led to the incident, was the eviction being staged against Ruth and her young sister Katy, who finding themselves without parents, can no longer pay for the expenses to keep the home. When the sheriff breaks down the door, he is blown away and Katy vanishes into the adoption system. 

And upon Ruth's release, she struggles as both an emotionally broken but fiercely determined woman, to locate her sister - while enduring post-incarceration life as a cop killer pariah just trying to endure and find work. And in remarkable scenes where the dead end brutality of working class existence, whether a slum hotel or fish factory, intertwine with her own. And in no small part signaling the skills of the director, gifted with a keen sense of Italian neo-realism and her own roots in the social realism of the GDR where she was born, in crafting this doomed landscape.

But where the script takes a cowardly detour, is in blinding the reality of the here and now - the mass evictions in a declining economic system, and Seattle as one of the western epicenters revolting against police brutality, poverty and political repression. And if the screenwriters had actually had the courage of conviction to be in tune to what's going down in the real world today rather than opting for the increasingly anachronistic family values Hollywood happy ending, Bullock going full Mao in The Unforgivable would have signified a far more complex dramatic mission than just reuniting a family.

 

Prairie Miller

The Manor: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Or Maybe Not

 

Barbara Hershey turns up in The Manor somewhat as feisty and subversive as her youthful persona in Boxcar Bertha nearly a century ago - a seventy year old reluctantly confined by her family to the nursing home in question, following a mild stroke. Increasingly convinced that there's something sinister going on way beyond just over-medicating the residents to shut them up and keep them docile and compliant, the instinctive rebel in Judith is on the case. Or is she? 

 And that's where this chilling forensic elder care home scrutiny, dubbed here as 'death row' takes a sudden, unpredictable turn into a different sort of horror spree - touching on life under capitalism. And that masterful storyteller, writer/director Axelle Carolyn who originally hails from Brussels, would appear to infuse this gothically shrouded narrative with a lot more than European cinematic sensibility. Say, the increasingly dark descent of US society into economic and psychological decline and desperation.

 

As for Judith's rebel instincts in a confrontation with her fascist leaning, progressively freaky surroundings - though Barbara Hershey in this instance is ultimately no Jack Nicholson, there seems to be a refreshing trend in movies lately, of elderly female action heroes. Last year, for instance, Dianne Wiest stood up as a defiant victim of retirement home physical and emotional abuse along with financial exploitation, in 'I Care A Lot' - while Cicely Tyson, who just passed away earlier this year, risks her life as spunky whistleblower in her nineties, exposing a criminal enterprise holding the elderly hostage tied up in a basement for their monthly social security checks, in Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace. 

 

And getting back to The Manor, though some reactions may range from bewilderment to disappointment regarding Judith's ultimate behavior - and without giving too much away - let's just say that under capitalism, it's inevitably a given that enriching oneself is to the expendable, comparable detriment of others in US society. And which may be said to lend significant, ironically realistic if brutal existential weight, to this otherwise fantasy horror tale.

 

Prairie Miller