Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

 Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

Written & Directed by John Waters

This could be looked at as a clever witty fun violent comedy romp. It certainly scores in that. It is a terrific, very fast paced entertainment but it’s deeper than that. It has youth rebellion, but more. The violence is a lot of fun, but there are consequences and deaths. There is really something else going on here. 
 
  The setup is simple enough. Fading Hollywood movie star Honey Whitlock, played by Melanie Griffith, is in Baltimore for the premiere of one of her movies. The scene is infiltrated by the Demented crew, disguised as the worker staff at the premiere; waiters, etc. They kidnap her and force her to act in their underground movie.
  “Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented, the director tells her as she sits bound and taped up in a chair in the gang’s old movie house hidaway. The colorful crew and cast introduce themselves. Each has a tattoo of the name of  a legionary, off mainstream, or maverick, director hero. Cecil’s is Premminger. The crew, Warhol, Peckinpah, Anger and others. This establishes that these outlaw film crew terrorists are products of the influence of movies. It is the movies, by highly successful internationally renowned filmmakers that have made them what they are.

They proceed in shooting their movie with the captive Honey. Lots of other movie reference stuff familiar to most movie fans goes on, plus more inside production material that would delight anyone who has worked on mainstream movie or TV productions. There is a tone of revenge flick. They attack movie related events and eventually a big production of a Forest Gump sequel as armed outsiders righteously enraged at being left out riding in on a high horse of disgust at the entire bloated big money system and the boring redundant products it continuously spews forth.

“Death to mainstream cinema!” cries former mainstream tool Honey who, after some resistance, has become a convert by way of passage through a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Honey, now one of them, is attacking the very thing that created her. She is along with the others who are attacking what has made them, through manipulation of their consciousness, but leaving them confused wannabe outsiders without any of the success of Honey the movie star.

  The movie is filled with really great movie connected locations and set pieces, including a very funny scene in a porn theater among the wankers and the climax at a drive-in movie theater.
  The viewer can easily be pulled into the revolutionary fervor of the lovable outsider terrorist crew. Aren’t we all movie lovers? But are we not movie haters too? We love the products that we love but hate some other stuff with a vengeance. We know it’s a big eliete money game that we aren't a part of no matter how strong our wannabe dreams might be. We know it’s just another enormous global big business but one that we are more hypnotically sucked into. We know how powerful it is, akin to That Ol’ Time Religion which it has been partly responsible for replacing. We feel how it has implanted and distorted much of what makes us human, our ideas of what love is, what success is, what is right and wrong. We can resent that and are enraged within at how we have been manipulated by this outside and out of our control power, even if we are not consciously aware of that manipulation and the resulting rage. Yet we can’t turn away and continue to feed in the endless streaming of big budget products. We are addicted to the dopamine thrill of the 2 million dollar action scene and the empathy we feel for the coming together of the play-acting yet completely convincing lovers. We watch people interacting with their “Friends” while we, in viewing isolation, have no friends. We know we love it, and are constantly told we ought to so that we bury rage at it all within us. This is the rage that can reemerge in self-hatred knowing that we can never measure up or really be involved. We are just enslaved consumer couch potatoes.

Cecil B DeMented and John Water knows all this. He is the one, the unique individual who more than any of the others came up out of us, out of the deep filthy underground our fandom and rage and breached that gated community. Yet the movie shows it all to be a suicide mission. A åfailed attempt to fight fire with fire.
“Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented. Indeed!

There is also a real story fictionalized, hidden in plain sight in this great and culturally astute movie. Patricia Hearst has a small acting role in it but her real life story parallels that of the Honey Whitlock character. Patricia Hearst was a princess of the ruling class and kidnaped in 1974. She sooned joined that ragtag band of revolutionaries biting the hand that created her, either a converted revolutionary or a victim of coercion, the Stockholm Syndrome. She participated in bank robbery until her eventual capture.

In view of this the Cecil B Demented crew is also revelied as a unhealthy personality cult following their leader into destruction or others and themselves. There is even a long scene where Cecil demands that they all submit to being branded with his initials. Was Keith Raniere (NXIVM) influenced by this movie? The same demand for control and submission in his cult many years after the movie was released particularly stands out, the branding of the DOS sex slaves.  

Cecil B Demented is a great movie.

                            

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!)

================


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.

=============

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.

American Anarchist (2016)

American Anarchist (2016)
“Written” and directed by Charlie Siskel

This documentary is a portrait of William Powell who in 1970, at age 19, wrote a book called The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
The Anarchist’s Cookbook is an manual of revolution, how to make bombs and stuff like that. I’m not exactly sure what is all in it having never read or owned a copy.

The movie is made by Charlie Siskel. Documentaries are funny. If a filmmaker points a camera at someone and asks them questions, and edits all that together, the filmmaker gets to take credit as having written the movie. That seems pretty strange to me, especially in a situation like this where the subject, Powell, does most all the talking, yet he doesn’t even share the writing credit. Who came up with these rules? Powell’s wife also appears some in the movie.

William Powell is a very good talker. The delight of the film is getting to hear what he has to say. He handles Siskel’s interrogations with patient brilliance. Siskel keeps trying to corner him, to rattle him, to get some doc cinema gold with some kind of outrageous or angry reaction. He fails with the cool, thoughtful, and articulate Powell. Where Siskel keeps attempting to give Powell enough rope to get whatever he is looking for, he ends up defeated, hanging himself, as a hack documentary maker thinking he is on some scoop with a ruthless outlaw.
Yet Siskel was more or less fair in the way he edited most of the movie. We do get to see what a wonderful man Powell became, whatever one thinks of his writing 48 years ago.

William Powell, who died on July 11, 2016 at the age of 66 three months before the movie was released, spent his life as an educator of children with special needs. He spent his life working outside the USA. Siskel does spend some screen time telling us about this aspect of Powell’s life.

Even though Powell, as far back at 1976, regretted writing the book and stated that it should be put out of print, Siskel interrogates him bringing up that the book was in possession of the Columbine High School kid killers and others headline sensational killers. This gets to be a bit much with the implication that somehow Powell is responsible in association for the actions to these lost killers. Powells is very good at handling this stating that he was not aware that these people had the book. He says how could he be? He was living out of the USA and not one to investigate on the internet mass shootings. Siskel keeps up with this kind of stuff taking it to a ridiculous extreme at the very end when he attempts to compare Powell to Gavrilo Princip the man who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914 which somehow started WWI. Apparently Siskel is very proud of this moment. After he asks this he gives us the movie’s final shot with Powell sitting there a bit stunned at this silly implication and trying to think of a measured response. But what I saw at that moment was how a documentary maker can manipulate footage via editing to make his point, except this time it just doesn’t work because by that time we have looked into the eyes and heard the measured responses for 2 hours of a very good and decent man who clearly spent his entire life helping people, children, less fortunate than he.
Did Powell pay for his sins of free speech other than this interrogation by Siskel? He and his wife say that he did. Although very qualified in his teaching field of labor, when the employer institutions found out about the book, sometimes though anonymous sources, he was not hired at job after job. This is regrettable, most likely the children he could have worked with are the ones who suffered most from this.

But there is an association between Powell, the Columbine killers and other kid killers who may have had the book. Powell was bullied in schools as a child and sexually abused by an administrator. By the time he was 19 and inspired by the righteous and popular rebelliousness of youth at the time, he channeled his rage into that movement and produced the book.
So Powell did not create himself any more than school killers do? They are all a result of the bullying and injustice of school systems and the abuse of children that often happens there either institutionally or peer bullying, or both in the situation of young Powell. Powell was a bright boy and not a violent person. His reaction to the abuse, coupled with governmental injustice and the Vietnam war, was to call for revolution and write a book not act out violently.

The movie also implies that the Anarchist Cookbook is the only source of this type of information. It has never been so. Powell got some of his stuff from government pamphlets.  And although we see brief footage of Abbie Hoffman from Vietnam protest, the revolution is imminent days, there is no mention of his book that covers a lot of the same material and more and was released at the same time, Steal This Book. Meanwhile this type of bomb building information and everything else in these books has been available on the internet for a least 20 years.

American Anarchist is worth watching.
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It is currently playing on Netflix