Small Axe (2020)

Small Axe (2020)
Directed by Steve McQueen

This is a series of five films set within London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
It is a wholesome series that trough true stories demonstrates how progressive change is really achieved.
“Freedom is a Constant Struggle” was a slogan on a political button from the 1960s.
This is the truth. Real change is not going to come from electing a new president, that might help, but it is not the revolution, not the force behind real change.

Change comes from people banding together, organizing, and finding a way through for themselves while at the same time putting pressure on the local and national power structures.
The New Deal didn’t come out of FDR and thin air. It was the manifestation of decades of struggle of union organizers and socialist activists. This is how change is made.

This very fine cycle of films shows how people struggle and make change, one story at a time.
(And we get to go to a really cool party too!)

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Mangrove 

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

In 1970, in the Notting Hill section of London, Frank(Shaun Parke) opened a restaurant called Mangrove. He only wants to have a nice restaurant but from the start he is faced with
harassment, raids by racist cops.
The community rallies and holds a demonstration that is attacked by a police riot.
There is a trial and the people learn how to defend themselves.
Powerful courtroom drama at the end.

Lovers Rock
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Steve MCQueen and Courttia Newland

This is an 1980s house party. We see the audio-DJ equipment being moved into the house. The women cook. The rug is rolled up, all the preparations for a house party.
The movie is like being in a party in the past that you were not really invited to but can attend invisibly, a fly on the wall and flying through the party room. People hook up some successfully, some not, just like real life.
Groovy 80s reggae/dub music soundtrack.

++++++++++++



Red, White, and Blue
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Steve MCQueen and Courttia Newland

This one brings up a lot of questions. It is based on a true story of Leroy Logan (played by John Boyega) . A young black man with another career who becomes a policeman. He has seen his father abused by cops when he was younger. He intends to change the institution of the police force from within. His father doesn’t want him to become a cop. He hates them for a good reason. The son, Leroy Logan, excels during training.
But he is the object of racism within the force. Can a black man change this institutional racism from within?
The story ends before the question is answered.

(This is being written a week for the Righwing, racist, Pro-Trump assult of the Capatol building. It is coming out that many of those participating are involved with law enforcement, cops from out of town who traveled to DC for this event. Fascist elements are embedded into the police and the military. This is a serious problem.)

+++++++++++++++

Alex Wheatle
Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

Sheyi Cole plays Alex Wheatle. Alex is an orphan or abandoned child who is abused, hit, misunderstood,  by the big white orphan home momma. He keeps running into trouble. Looking for something, a parent, a leader, he drifts into a bad crowd.
He discovers music, black struggle and poetic expression. But he’s lucky because trouble leads him to a wise mentor that shows him just what he needs.  

+++++++++++++++

Education

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

Kingsley (played by Kenyah Sandy) is a 12 year old school boy who is having trouble in school. There is a scene early on of the children taking turns reading aloud in class and Kingsley not being able to do so. (This writer knows personally how horrible an experience like that is in a grade school classroom.)
Kingsley is given standardized intelligence tests by the school system and it is determined that he is to be transferred to a “special needs school” which is really a school where they warehouse children unwanted by the system.

But these are movies of struggle that lead to solutions, at least for the particular problem if not to a grand ultimate revolution to make everything magically better. There are community groups of West Indian organizers who want to do something about the racist seperation, the giving up on finding a way to educate, that is only the path to a low wage menial labor, and dead end life.

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These films are partly financed and presented in the USA on Amazon Prime. There is a sort of irony in this ruthless, powerful, and exploitative corporation bringing us this type of motion picture material that we need, if we need any at all.
This is another institution that will have to be forced to change from the bottom, the warehouse workers, up.
Moving picture production is a very expensive art form and the money comes from money which is very often saturated with the blood and sweat of those who brought it to the investors.
Freedom IS a Constant Struggle.

Crisis in Six Scenes

Crisis in Six Scenes

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

It has been a very long time since I watched a Woody Allen product.
Apparently I was never a big fan to begin with. None of the older movies were particularly favorites or anything and I just don’t watch as many movies as a lot of people. I still don’t understand how people have the time to apparently see all the movies plus endless hours of continuing series stories that have been popular for the past decade.
But I have access to Amazon Prime on this lovely large TV we have now and had read about Crisis and how bad it was and was curious enough to have a look, at least for a half hour. I’m often up for a good trainwreck involving a privileged celebrity. That’s part of the game isn’t it?

The series is set in the 1960s. I had read, I thought, that Miley Cyrus played a hippie who comes and disrupts a middle class family's home and life. That didn’t sound particularly interesting to me, but it turns out to be much more than that. She plays a revolutionary on the run and needing to hide out. With this situation the series ends up having a great deal of left wing political content as she converts the woman of the house, and Woody Allen’s character’s spouse, played by Elaine May, to the cause of revolution as well as their soon to be married grandson.

I was surprised by this. I had never thought of Woody Allen as being particularly political just a wealthy class filmmaker lacking these enormous concerns. But here there is a lot of political content, the need for revolution to set things right. This might be a another reason that the series was so disliked. And the revolution people are all more or less sympathetic characters with free rein to state their case. This is an oddy in popular entertainment, always has been and I certainly didn’t expect it from the pen of Woody Allen.

But is it good? Is it “funny”.
Well, ultimately as the thing gets going it is.
The final two 23 minutes episodes in the brief 6 part series are really quite funny and clever, even a bit suspenseful. I laughed.

There is something else unique and groundbreaking about this. Has there ever been a series written, directed and starring an 80 year old? The other lead Elaine May who plays his younger wife, is 85!!!
This alone makes it a unique product.

There is another mid-octogenarian starring in a series with Rita Moreno on the Netflix reboot of One Day At a Time. But that show is so old school, complete with annoying laugh track, that I can’t watch it. The one I saw wasn’t very good.