Cabin in the Woods (2011)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.filmofilia.com/)

Ridiculous horror movie that simply uses various cliches from other - better - movies: Running Man, Time Machine, Evil Dead, Battle Royale, et al, and then proceeds to parody them as if that is enough to compensate for the rampant lack of imagination on show.

This is meta-horror at its worst in never presenting anything truly scary to move or involve us in the central character’s plight. This lack of basic humanity is not satisfactorily replaced by weak humor, wooden acting and a feeble script. The tacit admission that most makers of horror movies possess nothing left to offer the world is the real horror here.

(Image: http://www.filmofilia.com/)

Horror movies have gone up their own fundaments ever since the clever trope of the Blair Witch Project told us horror movies had no more to say about the human condition. The characterization is as weak as the style is strong. All the characters speak the same idiom as if they were the robotic facets of a single person and, no matter what happens, the style remains the same; increasing the monotony of the occurrences and the blandness of the special effects.

The propitiatory nature of White culture would have been a fine theme in this themeless, plotting-by-numbers nonsense that now makes little sense because the filmmakers here have no real idea of either the manner nor the purpose of sacrifice.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Superman - The Movie (1978) [Special Edition]

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://www.virginmedia.com)

Slick and classy White supremacist propaganda given verisimilitude by impressive special effects (SFX) and first-class acting. The plot holes hardly matter here as the fulfillment aspect of the melodrama is more than enticing enough to help us overlook them.

Where the film really scores is in having special effects that serve the story rather than the other way round. Foregrounding the love story between Superman and Lois Lane offers the audience an emotional hook to accept what is visually always going to be ridiculous: A White man prancing around in public in a skintight leotard.

Yet there is still time for deftly-introduced humor - just in case you start taking it all a little too seriously. Margot KIDDER and Christopher REEVE understand this perfectly and neatly walk the tightrope of the absurdity of the situation and the common Western feminine longing to lie in the arms of a super man. Their chemistry is palpable; making the love story moving because they never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the SFX whose non-CGI nature makes it easier for the actors to play off what they are actually experiencing.

Special kudos needs to be given for REEVE managing to play two contrasting roles so convincingly, yet with enough humor to help us forget that it is obvious that Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent are one and the same. For the male audience, this dichotomy represents the masculine desire to be more assertive, virile and masculine than men ever feel they are.

The political aspects of the film are underplayed but represent a northern European sense of Christian morality; positing the White Hollywood notion that Superman’s birth planet, Krypton, is ruled by English-speaking Whites whose God-like demeanor is really a simple parallel to that of White Anglo-Saxon America.

Yet again we are confronted with a White baby Jesus bequeathed to Earth to help save mankind from itself. (Mankind here being White America; the Earth being the United States [US] - in US movies aliens rarely land elsewhere.)

Although Superman is virtually-indestructible and non-martyred, the movie’s self-reinforcing Catholic notion of Original Sin does not reflect Native-American nor Black America but only the White portion of it: 'Truth, justice and the American Way' as defined solely by and for Whites. The absence of Black characters confirms this.

Easily the best adaptation of the Superman stories that there will ever be, whose two-and-a-half hour length simply whizzes by. And one of the best superhoero films Hollywood will ever be involved in.

---

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Wrong Man (1956)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.hitchcockwiki.com)

To Kill a Mockingbird for Whites, this is a fascinating depiction of something prevalent in Black experience: The transference of guilt; resulting in being accused of wrongdoing simply because of ones appearance.

A system that is fixed against any real belief in the idea that one is innocent-until-proven-guilty is brilliantly-evoked - especially in the eventual madness of one of the characters who feels they can no longer do anything to change their fate that is being dictated by the hostility of others. Depression, schizophrenia and paranoia are often the result - as here.

(Image: http://themovieprojector.blogspot.co.uk)

As in Kafka’s The Trial, justice only exists in the sense of a lottery whose rules are never clear nor consistent. That the police are less interested in justice than they are in securing a conviction is well-presented and convincing. Unlike Kafka, however, the central character here is normal and ordinary and could never be accused of being in any way responsible for his predicament.

(Image: http://themetropolistimes.com)

The performances are flawless from all concerned, especially the brilliant Vera MILES. Henry FONDA is also perfect in the Noble Negro of the man who knows that whatever he does, he will be found guilty.

Technically, it is highly-appropriate that this true story is shot as if it were a documentary; serving to make it all the more chilling as we realize that this could happen to anyone. The police procedural aspect of the plotting also serves this purpose well, as does the director - Alfred Hitchcock’s - trademark lack of emotive storytelling ability - which only really surfaces because of the often lyrical musical soundtrack.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Cockfighter [Born to Kill] (1974)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD: 1st-Generation Copy

(Image: http://www.nova-cinema.org/)

Strangely-affecting portrait of a man who cannot find redemption from his personal flaws - particularly a big mouth that leads him to take a vow of silence for most of the film’s length. Filled with dead-pan humor, this is a tale of guy who lets his actions speak louder than his words yet, since he is a cockfighter, you constantly wonder what his actions really mean.

Oddly-enough, many women are drawn to him no matter his cruelty to them or to his many cockerels – who serve to visually-express the purposeless violence within him. As a narrative and a description of the paradoxical White attitude of love for animals (that is often non existent for other human beings); combined with a sadistic willingness to visit painful deaths upon those same animals (in the interests of sport and gambling), this movie has few equals. Here is the conflict at the very heart of a White culture which decided, centuries ago, that gold is more important than love, sex or self-respect. Quite an impressive indictment of the many failings of White manhood.

(Image: http://bombsite.com/)

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

WHITE LIES:Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.com/)

An amusingly anecdotal treatment of White supremacy from a White supremacist struggling - Racists Anonymous-like - with the twin poles of a contradiction: Loyalty to Justice or loyalty to irrationality. That such a group as RA does not exist proves the thesis of this work: That White culture is endemically supremacist and that all Whites are born with unearned privileges that few - if any - ever renounce. The price of this for Whites is shame and guilt coupled with murderous anger when the affirmative action that is racism is revealed as being such.

An easy-to-read journey through one White man’s experience of his own geneticist angst and his realization that Whites have no culture other than one defined by what it is not. Although the book itself is part of the wider struggle to free Blacks from the shackles of a hateful White culture it offers few solutions that would help Whites to stop thinking of themselves as Whites and transcend their own narcissistic obsession with the view that skin pigmentation determines character.

The book implicitly and consistently makes the point that phenotypism is solely a problem for Whites - as pedophilia is only a problem for the pedophile; rape only a problem for the rapist - and that blaming the victim is how Whites deal with their problems when their guilt, anger and shame become too much to bear.

Where the book goes wrong is in assuming that Whites are unaware or unconscious of the material benefits of White racism - they know very well; hence, their continual angry attempts at denial to hide the shame and the guilt of their unearned benefits. That Whites do not have to live their lives without worrying about the color of their skin does not mean that they are not keenly aware of its value in a White supremacist culture like that of the West.

Despite continually claiming - throughout - that this is a book about white denial the denial is present here also. That there is no such thing as unconscious White racism is obvious from the numerous examples cited here and yet the author still uses the term “unconscious White racism” to justify his own. A clever yet simultaneously sad commentary on the state of White academia in the United States.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Black Jacobins (1938)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	Book

(www.amazon.com)

Fantastic and superbly-written book about the only successful slave revolt in history that shows just what Blacks can do given the right circumstances and leadership.

This book that gets right to the heart of why Whites approved of African slavery for 500 years. Without the guilt and shame of a typical White historian this is an eidetic view of the challenges posed by White supremacy - then and now; exposing the real reasons for the abolition of racial slavery: Free trade is more profitable than mercantilism since one can then sell to the highest bidder and not just ones own government. As well as the fact the British government’s jealousy of the French making more money than they at the traffic in human misery that the possession of India meant the British need no longer indulge in.

Humanitarianism is absent from this account since a humanitarian country would obviously never have become involved in racial slavery in the first place. The book then comes to the obvious conclusion that White history books simply lie about the ethical role of Whites in the emancipation of African slaves.

What makes this book so readable is the precision with which the writer effectively skewers White politics as quintessentially White supremacist with humor, wit and irony.

The mixture of fear and envy Whites have for the exotic is stressed here through their repeated claim that anything foreign is inferior while being embraced to fund the English (17th century) and French (18th century) revolutions. A supreme irony of history is that both these bids for freedom and statements of the inalienable rights of Man were made possible by a bourgeoisie made rich from African slavery. The moral contradictions of White culture today stem from such institutions as the writer here makes many links between the past and the present.

That the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself never simultaneously abolished the various European empires and the White racism that drove them on is a telling legacy that remains with us to this very day.

---

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

CIVILIZATION OR BARBARISM: An Authentic Anthropology (1981)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(http://www.amazon.com)

Impressive, if overly-scholarly work of Afro-centrism; successfully countering the European tendency to speak of civilization as somehow an inherently White characteristic and invention.

Specifically, the book counters the claim made by White Egyptologists since 1830 that ancient Egypt was a White civilization that somehow was not actually in Africa a view that arose to attempt a scientific justification for White imperialism in Africa and the racial exploitation that went along with it. The book thus necessarily charts the movement from an exclusively European Egyptology toward an African one.

The book’s major flaw is that the author conflates the concept of Race with Phenotype - as Whites do - and does not understand why modern biology tries to avoid racial classification because it was misused in the past by White supremacists to justify White supremacy.

However, the author (Cheikh Anta Diop) also shows that Greek civilization owes a substantial debt to Egyptian ideas and accomplishments and that, as Greek ideas of civilization influenced Europe, Egyptian ideas influenced Greece. Scientific racists try to assert that humans became intelligent and civilized only after they left Africa, that Homo sapiens sapiens (The Wisest of the Wise) is indigenous to Europe, but this does not explain the achievements of ancient Egypt, great Zimbabwe nor the Songhay empire.

Unlike most White history and archaeological texts, this book foregrounds its political zeal to abolish the self-defeating obsessions of White supremacy and replace them with a more objective look at the past. One that vindicates Blacks as full members of the human race while never falling into the racial propagandist traps to which White hagiography aspires and simultaneously spends a great deal of time denying. This book is a truly metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political work about the past that few White histories are or ever could be.

This is a rather scholarly and often obscurantist text that is sadly Marxist-influenced. Yet it nails White supremacy and its desire to claim everything worthwhile was invented by Whites right on the head.

---

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Negro in the Making of America (1964) [Third Edition: Revised, Updated & Expanded]

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.com/)

Despite being a massive necessary corrective for the common White attitude that Blacks are among us but part of us, this book has something of the House Negro about it.

The author never mentions that the Black troops who fought in the US Civil War were only allowed to be officered by Whites and were segregated from White troops. Here, there is the sense that Blacks have to earn their rights to full citizenship when Whites have rarely had to do this. This issue is not fully explored in the attempt to vindicate human rights when no such vindication is required by virtue of both E Pluribus Unum and the opening of the US Declaration of Independence; namely, that all men are created equal. Thus, Whites have effectively claimed that rights are granted at birth, unless you are Black (Nigger), Jewish (Kyke) or Italian (Dago).

This approach falls into the White trap of assuming that any discussion of Blacks is a discussion of something that is a problem for Whites. The problem of White supremacy is seen differently by the beneficiaries of it and those who are victimized by it, such that the problem is never clearly defined. As Judaism was the Jewish Question to the White supremacist National Socialists, so Blacks were the Negro Problem for the White supremacist United States.

The fact that the book is based on the naive political premiss that Whites understanding Black achievements will make them less racist, proves how little the author understands Whites and their deliberate creation of Institutionally-Racist cultures. In such cultures, intergroup harmony is simply as impossible as Whites wish it to be.

Historically accurate (albeit dully academic) yet delighting in unproven absurdities like 'discrimination against the Negro antedated the need for his labor' when White supremacy has always been used to justify racial slavery. Or, that Whites have 'psychological needs that could be resolved in some measure by holding view of others' when this is not specific to racial slavery.

Being written by a White, the book takes the implicitly legalistic and White approach that racial slavery was legal and so morality can be given short shrift. There is no real sense of the emptiness of White culture that it feels the need to overturn principles it claims are cherished when it comes to non-Whites. Here, White supremacy is presented as though it were some kind of anomaly when in reality it is part-and-parcel of the wider White culture. Big-picture thinking is not part of the remit of this book, hence its lack of perspective and insight; preferring, instead, to drown in a mass of scholarly detail in order to evade the wider truth about the essential degeneracy of Whites.

Benjamin Quarles – White a man who knows his subject but does not understand it.

What the book gets right is the rich and varied contribution to US culture that is beloved the world over along with much of the depth and scope of the White response to the presence of those they fundamentally dislike. Yet Blacks still assimilated and, thereby, transformed the culture in which they lived; largely without becoming a part of the problem of White supremacy.

More than anything, however, this book is aimed at the general reader and avoids, therefore, being a dry-as-dust academic exercise; bringing the history it details vigorously to life.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

TROPIC OF CHAOS: (2011)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	Book

(www.amazon.com)

Ignorant and self-regarding as only a White could be: The author clams that anthropogenic climate change will cause wars - which smacks of blaming the victim rather than the victimizer.

This writer just loves the sound of his own voice. He conflates Cause with Effect by avoiding stating that water loss is an effect of 100s of years of colonialism, skewed markets bases upon economic exploitation and state-subsidized welfarism for business interests.

This book is White supremacist claptrap since it largely avoids blaming White supremacists for Global Warming or the White-dominated World Bank & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - who destroy entire economies with neo-liberal orthodoxy to create new, short-lived markets for Whites.

---

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included. All other rights reserved.