** "When I was very young, in my twenties and went for an interview to a Hollywood studio head, it did end up kind of putting his hands all over me in the back of a limo. So I was like pressed up against the door, trying to fight him off - and it was almost as if he treated it like, that's how you act when you're a young woman coming in for an interview..."
Mary Harron Talks Alias Grace, American Psycho: No, not that American Psycho she co-wrote and directed in 2000, but Hollywood Psycho - Harvey Weinstein and other studio predators. Harron is on the line to Arts Express to discuss this mini-series adapted from the Margaret Atwood novel, and based on the true story of Grace Marks, an abused 19th century Irish immigrant servant who was imprisoned for the murder of her Canadian employers. Or did she?
LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE
The filmmaker has much more on her mind as well, including the subversive servant sisterhood back then, and the dramatic convergence of class, gender, class consciousness, and rebellion in resentment of the Canadian upper classes. Harron is also the director of I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, and the upcoming The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion.
Novitiate: A Conversation With Actress Melissa Leo. Delving into her role as the dreaded Mother Superior presiding in a Tennessee convent over aspiring young nuns dealing with their own issues of devotion and sexuality - in this dramatic feature playing out during the 1960s, just as the Catholic Church was undergoing transformations of its own. And likewise Leo going to extremes between playing her ferocious nun, and atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair at nearly the same time in a very different movie - The Most Hated Woman In America.
** "I'm glad the next generation, mine and the one coming up, like we're ready to talk, and we're ready to make change - and I'm very, very excited about that."
Book Corner: Dear Martin - Author Nic Stone On Her Young Adult Novel. The African-American writer phones in to delve into and read from Dear Martin, about a troubled teenager seeking guidance as to how to live and survive in a racist world - by writing a series of imaginary letters to Martin Luther King Jr. Touching on racial profiling, Black Lives Matter, Klan rallies, burning crosses, the Take A Knee Movement, and racial reconciliation.
In The Fade: Diane Kruger Goes Full Antifa
When Western terrorist attacks by mostly Middle Eastern right wing extremists take place, among the shocked responses in the aftermath, is always the perplexed reaction in disbelief, as to why such a presumably meaningless assault could have taken place. Yet like a long lingering elephant in the room that just won't seem to go away, the evidence is in plain sight.
Say for instance, the murder in recent times and in progress, of over a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan alone by the US military and European allies. And a kind of blowback retaliation on their own soil of the perpetrators, that may not even be those original fighters - but perhaps their surviving inconsolable relatives or children determined to seek revenge.
Such is the intriguing metaphorical premise of Fatih Akin's In The Fade (Aus dem Nichts). The German director of Turkish parentage masterfully flips the script, as Hamburg housewife Katja (Diane Kruger) endures the horror of her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan Acar), a legal activist for the local Turkish community, along with her young son being murdered in a racially motivated, anti-immigrant targeted bombing of his office by German white supremacist Neo-Nazis.
The emotionally disintegrating, suicidal widow, overcome by feelings of hopelessness and rage, seeks a revenge in kind against the two accused perpetrators - following their acquittal for lack of irrefutable evidence in court. And what ultimately ensues is not just a stunningly executed thriller, but a brilliant parable for our time.
In other words, the immensely provocative notion of victimization reversal, and the perpetrator as perpetrated. Along with ironically, the accusation that has always been raised against Germans where this movie was made - how could you as a people stand by and do nothing while Hitler annihilated civilians and enemies alike in the millions. Well, perhaps exactly what those leveling charges have been doing since then, without much objection or even acknowledgement raised - and the United States alone having killed and continuing to do so, more than 20 million people in thirty-seven victim nations since World War II.
You go, Diane.
Prairie Miller
Arts Express: Airing on the WBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network and Affiliate Stations.
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