Category Archives: news
Mumia Abu-Jamal Talks To “Smiley and West”
Powerful interviews with Stephen Vittoria and with Mumia. I especially liked Mumia’s comments about Black America post-Obama.
“The Dark Knight Returns,” Parts One and Two…….
Why Didn’t Tonto Just Kill The Lone Ranger?
I have to confess that I’ve watched a lot of “The Lone Ranger” in the last month or so, including and especially the two original-cast movies. To justify this, I keep thinking of why Tonto is so helpful. Is it because he gets to beat up white people? Is it because, in my mind, he kills the Lone Ranger in the end when he realizes the white-eyes will take all his people’s land? Would he like that in the 21st century a white boy who is using the one-drop rule to an extreme will be playing him this year? Tonto speaks to me, but not in broken English.
Publicity Hound? (Sorry, I Couldn’t Resist :))
Of course, the superhero-rescues-animal gold standard is still saving a cat stuck in a tree… 🙂
Still Waiting For…….
Congrats To…….
….. “The Spook Who Sat By The Door,” because it made the National Film Registry!
I learned this while watching “Black Orpheus,” which seems appropriate for some reason…..
MY “Person Of The Year”………
…..is Time magazine’s first runner-up. (And look at her lifetime achievement award.) Why pick Obama? Just lazy? A guaranteed way to sell the magazine at the nation’s 7-11s and supermarkets? The bliss white boys at newsweeklies feel being right next to power and documenting its every sneeze before retiring and teaching two days a week for six figures at an Ivy League school? Or an instance of whites attempting to educate other whites about the “new” America. Yawn……
FEBRUARY 5th UPDATE:
“Cheers” Moves To Ireland?
Great idea! Boy, I miss the days watching “Cheers” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” 🙂
Comicbook Mini-Review: “Django Unchained” No. 1
Django Unchained, No. 1.
By Quentin Tarantino. With Art by R.M. Guera with Jason Latour.
Vertigo/DC Comics.
32 pp. $3.99.
On a good day of comicbook reading, it all just comes together–the tone, the rhythm, the art, the story. Vertigo once again shows the care it takes with its projects with this first issue. Knowing that Tarantino gave permission to use his entire, unedited script fills this undertaking with intrigue. Not only is it a way to get more bang for my buck, adaptation-wise, but it allows me to see his full vision in a way we won’t on-screen.
And filled with bangs it is, as slavery becomes freedom and freedom becomes two-gun employment. The price of freedom is bullets, and bounty hunting with no sympathy for the hunted inspires a sense of pleasure. Call Tarantino an exploitation filmmaker; he won’t give a crap. If he’s exploiting my need to see, and want, the bloody revenge that’s coming, then so be it. Guera’s and Jason Latour’s lines are a little thin for my tastes; I wanted more background and atmosphere than they provided. (Maybe John Paul Leon can do the next Vertigo Western?) But, like the script, they up the dramatic ante beautifully.
This comicbook has me positively salivating for the movie, and for the next three Vertigo installments.
Drums in the Global Village 