BOSTON LEGAL: Season 5 (2008)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://beccaklaver.blogspot.co.uk)

Some of the actors are acting slightly out of character for this final season to make it even more fun for the viewer than usual. The writers have run out of ideas for places to take these carefully-crafted personalities, so are going out with a bang rather than with a whimper - the performers being determined to do likewise.

Of course, it is always better to go out on top (&, indeed, over-the-top) rather than await the slow inevitable decline that is to come to William SHATNER’s character with his diagnosed Alzheimer’s.

Returning to the ideas and situations of the first season, especially the endemic White supremacy and sexism of the two central characters; getting worse as they age.

Yet, SHATNER has become even more of a likable teddy bear than before, who gets women to sleep with him more by making them feel pity - or overpowering them with his wealth - than with any solid, gentlemanly virtues. The two central characters suffer an inability to make a commitment to another human being – except each other – and this is a good way for the series to explore the poor quality of male-to-male relationships in the West. Male bonding is usually treated ironically, as if it were a guilty secret that should be hidden in case anyone should think the men concerned are gay. Yet, when all is said and done, they are the one true love of each other’s lives.

This theme of masculinity-in-crisis is the basis for the whole shows’ relentless – and often satirical - critique of contemporary (2008) social mores and a legal system bloated with christianized legislation that is neither logical nor just. The former is more emphasized here than ever before and the two principals obvious chemistry aids this endeavor; while partly sidelining the other, equally interesting, characterizations.

This abbreviated final season wraps up the series as a whole as best as can be expected despite the many plot cul-de-sacs created along the way.

That a show centering on the shenanigans of a gun-toting White supremacist and an emotionally-retarded neurotic – both of whom are irretrievably sexist – can be so addictively enjoyable is testament to both the high quality of the writing and the superlative nature of the acting.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.co.uk) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Victim

(1962)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://rowereviews.weebly.com)

Well-scripted and gripping recapitulation of all the hoary old excuses for legally discriminating against homosexual males – particularly the domino theory that decriminalizing homosexuality would lead to a sexual free-for-all. This movie is also a fascinating presentation of a gay demi-monde created, in the bad old days, by making sodomy a criminal offence in the United Kingdom.

As you would expect with such issues, it is not the gay men who have the problem but the homophobes. The sexual hypocrisy on display from intolerant pseudo-heterosexuals is as galling as it is revelatory of their own sexual hang-ups.

(http://rowereviews.weebly.com)

The central issue here is, of course, who is the real victim? The man who fancies other men sexually; the gay suffering blackmail for sleeping with other men; or, the culture that feels threatened by the sexual choices of the unliked. The film additionally imbues itself with a sense of the creeping loneliness of those who have been convinced that they are somehow corrupt because their behavior is (or was) a crime – especially among the older actors. Homosexuality, itself, is not the cause of this loneliness; rather it is society’s openly expressed hatred of it.

Interestingly, the gays shown here are quite noticeably classless and lacking in snobbery, since homosexuality cuts across social divisions. Yet, the heterosexuals are not as visibly civilized in anything like the same way.

Technically, the film photographs very well. The muscular direction and mobile camerawork help pull you into the action at every point. The characters are varied and well played with an balanced sprinkling of those in favor of free choice in sexual matters (so long as no one is harmed) and those against. Stark black-and-white photography self explains why it can be so dramatically effective for grittily realistic, kitchen-sink type dramas. The paradox is that without the distractions of color photography the character’s look becomes less important than who they are; focussing the audience’s attention more on the story and less on mere appearance. This is that rare film where every aspect links firmly to the main theme: Sexual intolerance and erotic fear.

That perennial English rose Sylvia SYMS graces the film with aplomb and plays the beard wife of a barrister with homosexual leanings Dirk BOGARDE with great dignity and restrained intensity. BOGARDE himself fully understands the emotional quandary of a man who lives the kind of double life that the actor himself would know from first hand experience – as does that old ham supporting player Dennis PRICE. (The latter spent much of his career paying off blackmailers like his character does here - and for the same reason.) This is a film whose themes spill over into real life: The homosexual actors in it are so committed to the premise and, in a sense, not really acting at all but pouring out their true selves onto the screen. A movie that emotionally violates the fourth wall with consistent and pointed impunity.

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Copyright © 2014 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.

Blind Flight

(2003)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://www.sundancechannel.com)

Strangely-comic and well-acted look at the incarceration of two foolish White Westerners; working in a known danger area (The Lebanon) taken hostage. Too naïve to understand that in modern war, no adults are innocent, so both the armed and the unarmed alike are all in harm’s way.

The movie focuses more on the stress of both captors and captives, along with the bizarre politics of claiming the West will not appease terrorists when the West, itself, has masochistically created the very terrorism it claims is asking to be appeased. (There is no example in history of terrorists getting what they want and then asking for more.)

A more personal than political film but, that meager context notwithstanding, the similarities between the British occupation of Northern Ireland and Western interference in the Middle East are well made.

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Copyright © 2014 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.

Economics without Illusions

Rating: 60%

(http://www.amazon.com)

Also Known As:

Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism

Year:

2010

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Non-fiction

Author:

Joseph Heath

Best Performances:

None.

Premiss:

Why profit isn’t all bad & the free market isn’t all good.

Themes:

Political Correctness | White culture | White guilt | White supremacy

Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:

Unknown.

Review Format:

Book

The usual White claims about rational actors in economic theories created by Whites, that inevitably fail to adequately-account for the often-irrational manner in which Whites allocate economic resources; inevitably leading to recurrent economic recessions. That White lunatics are not seen as trying to take over the asylum is itself a delusion.

Although the style is breezy and likably non-academic, Austrian Economics offers a better understanding of human economic processes because it encompasses human nature rather than denying its existence. Yet, the book does make the attempt to critique the desire to make Economics a hard science by failing to take the very human nature economists claim to be describing into account.

Thus, economists claim that when one of their favorite theories does not explain the behavior created by the social policies they advocate, they rarely claim their theories are at fault. Instead, it is the agents (ie, ordinary people) who were being irrational. In this, modern, Western economics has much in common with Soviet psychiatry view that political dissidents were schizophrenic.

Despite the in-love-with-sound-of-his-own-voice style, the author manages to convey - albeit in too many words and in too many overly-involved examples - the mere ideology behind much modern economic theory and practice. The lack of economic literacy in the West is staggering given the high reported rates of educational achievement prevalent there but, again, this is down to believing ideology is better than the experience-backed common sense of the author’s non-fallacious SWOT analysis of Capitalism.

A fine Economics primer, but not an in-depth discussion.

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Copyright (c) 2014 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.

Class of 1999

(1989)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://theggtmc.blogspot.co.uk)

Moulding Young Minds

Whites, terrified their children are fast turning into feral animals (ie, Blacks), recruit robots to instill discipline in gang-controlled schools in the near future. The dearth of Black students reveals the White suburban-ghetto nightmare (& White fantasies of living in better neighborhods than anyone else) this movie attempts to exploit in claiming that even the police are frightened to go into school districts.

An absurd, politically-contextless premiss, that would have been more effective done as a comedy, here serves merely to present us a with a regularly-occurring dose of screen violence and well-done action set-pieces, alongside the waste of considerable screen talent: Pam GRIER, Stacy KEACH & Malcolm McDOWELL.

The characterization is abysmal and the actors have little more to mouthe than trite clichés amid all the drug-fuelled mayhem. If...., Terminator or Bowling for Columbine it is not.

One wonders if there will ever be schools as we know them today in the future since they are attended by adolescents who clearly do not wish to be there so will lose their all-important socialization function.

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Copyright © 2014 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.

Shoah

(1985)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://blog.hiperformance.it)

Lengthy, engrossing, emotionally exhausting - yet life affirming - look at White supremacy’s worst. Survivors are witnesses telling their stories; strengthening their will to ensure it never happens again. Germans being keen to destroy their criminal traces proves the need of such testimony; making the past the present – not history, but a living essence.

(http://wildeagle.blog.tiscali.it)

The Shoah inevitably sprang from Western culture’s belief that civilization is only possible if mind and emotion are separated - since both are said to be in destructive conflict; allowing mass murder without thought and genocide without emotion. The Holocaust is not an aberration of the emotional repressions of the West, but an inevitable consequence of them. Racial fears are taken as read, so no formal extermination document exists; entailing euphemisms like Final Solution.

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Copyright © 2014 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.

Iron Man

(2008)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://scribblesscriptsandsuch.blogspot.co.uk)

Interestingly politically-correct story of US hegemony faking solutions to political problems by military means. Yet, the terrorism shown here is too sophisticated to be defeated by pretend precision carpet bombing.

There is just enough humor to raise it above the usual cardboard superhero nonsense, primarily because of Robert DOWNEY’s delightfully undercutting his own role as a born again arm’s dealer. He effectively distracts us from the film’s fetishizing the very weapons’ it pretends to abhor. Gwyneth PALTROW is miscast in a role that Amy ADAMS would have attacked with greater relish and comedic skill.

The hippie dream of arms’ manufacturers turning their “swords into plowshares” is not taken too seriously as this never rises to the giddy heights of Batman Begins, Spiderman 2 or RoboCop, but it is all good clean fun nonetheless.

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Copyright © 2014 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.

Leopard

(1963)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	DVD

(www.amaninthehouse.com)

The More Things Change…

Fine film about a culture in transition necessarily going through a political revolution. The fact that the new aristocracy (the nouveau riche & parvenu middle-class) will be much the same as the old is subtly evoked in what is - essentially - a three-hour political essay.

The eponymous leopard is a man whose strength comes from accepting the fact of inevitable transformation (adapt or die) and from making the best of it. He does this despite the fact that the changes will not necessarily be all to his advantage or that of his family's. however, he knows that fighting the inevitability of change will not stop such adjustments from happening – in fact it makes them more unpleasantly likely - and is, therefore, a waste of time. After all, acknowledgement of any social upheaval is the only way to ensure that the more things change, the more they remain the same. In any case, here, after centuries of cousin marriage, the aristocratic gene pool is so depleted that an injection of new blood becomes all but essential to ensure its survival, as such.

(www.amaninthehouse.com)

Burt LANCASTER, Alain DELON and Claudia CARDINALE are their usual excellent selves and the film is certainly beautiful to look at but, perhaps, a tad too long for its own good.

(www.amaninthehouse.com)

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Copyright © 2014 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 Whine

(2013)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(www.amazon.com)

A Study of First-World Problems

Amusing satire on the triviality of non-Black culture and its inherent lack of perspective on life.

To White people, all problems are equally important no matter how unimportant they actually are. This allows Whites to pretend their problems are always the most important no matter how unimportant they actually are. And to pretend that life-&-death issues are an everyday occurrence comparable to, say, the Holocaust, racial slavery and the War on Terror. This White sense of entitlement is precisely designed to evade such important issues by foregrounding White inconsequentialities on the assumption that suffering is the basis of a sense of human authenticity and that privileged Whites suffer just as much as everyone else - especially when they do not.

Inevitably, since the book itself was written by a White who benefits from the very culture he criticizes, others need not assume that he is serious about undermining the world that gave him his relatively-comfortable life; rendering the book’s critique a lot of simple-minded liberal fun, but in now way a call to revolution - unlike, say, the works of Tim Wise.

Ultimately, all White Whines come down to the same thing: Whites not getting what they want, when they want it, all the time. Control freakery is designed to filter-out all the unpleasant stuff about life; leaving only the trivial to be incensed about. A culture predicated on the notion that you are whom others think you are, so better put on the best show: Whites imagining themselves to be individuals and everyone else to be lumpenproletariat. A spoiled child stamping its foot in temper-tantrum frustration would know better.

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Copyright © 2014 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.