Helen Mirren Rock Good in 1975 Sexist Interview

Helen Mirren with Michael Parkinson hurling back 

Topple the Patriarchy!

Who said that expression is dead! Young people were Googling it to find out what it means cuz they know most of the Hollywood establishment does!

Jill Soloway to Emmys: ‘Topple the Patriarchy!’ https://t.co/XDbAyzbMaD via @vulture

— Moira Sullivan (@annakarinaland) September 20, 2016

"Libera Nos" by Federica Di Giacomo --Best Orizzonti Film - La Biennale di Venezia

"Libera Nos" by Federica Di Giacomo BEST ORIZZONTI FILM 2016

In Rome there is a special course for priests who conduct exorcisms, part of the extraordinary documentary at the Venice Film Festival - "Libera Nos" by Federica Di Giacomo, shown in the Orizzonti section. The course is held at an educational institute - "Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum" in "Auditorium Giovanni Paulo II".

Without any voiceover, Federica filmed a dozen Italians who were possessed and cleansed by priests Padre Cataldo and Padre Carmine in a non-invasive and innovative documentary style that is not for a second anything but authentic.. She teaches documentary film in various schools and graduated in anthropology from the University of Florence.

Women were behind the script - Di Giacomo and Andrea Sanguigni, photography Greta De Lazzaris and Carlo Sisalli, and editing Aline Hervé and Edoardo Morabito'


True Colors Glorious Film - World Sales

Sicilia Film Commission

MIR Cinematografica - Operà Films 2016.

www.mircinema.com

"Dark Night" at Venice Film Festival

Tim Sutton’s Dark Night

by Moira Jean Sullivan, accredited film critic at Venice Film Festival
Reprinted from Movie Magazine International, San Francisco

Dark Night was featured as a special screening at the Venice Film Festival in September, a film that debuted at Sundance this year. It is part Frederick Wiseman and part Gus Van Sant, his later years, two filmmakers whose style has been a problem for some spectators and who are praised by others. Both filmmakers have crews which set up shots perfectly and both have acquired funding for professionally made films. The content is revealed often in long takes with little dialogue, snapshot edited scenes (editor Jean Applegate) and redundant imagery. Introspection with lingering momentum is their watchdog. Their films are part reality TV, part commercial with voyeurism with a male gaze. Their focus in is primarily on male characters and when, for example, it is on female characters such as Wiseman’s long surveillance of battered women and children in Domestic Violence,  he did not seem to know much about women. (Interview with Wiseman for Filmfestivals.com at Venice 2001), so much that he went on to make Domestic Violence 2 the following year, where a woman is arrested for attacking her husband.

In Dark Night written and directed by Sutton, the surveillance cameras are pointed at young people in a middle income area where mall shopping and painting fingernails help pass the time. (Six youth are chronicled played by Anna Rose Hopkins, Robert Jumper, Karina Macias, Conor A. Murphy, Aaron Purvis and Rosie Rodriguez). The young people skateboard, swim, go to the movies, dye their hair orange, use Google maps (as does cinematographer Hélène Louvart, The Wonders, 2014), Skype, ride around in cars, and fill their universe with “nothing”. To make this film, Sutton uses guns, darts, butt shots and masks. Male characters (and one woman) express heir deep seated rage and women shop, pose for selfies in their underwear or lie in bed listening to their boyfriend.

Two women play the guitar and sing “You are my sunshine…But if you leave me and love another, you'll regret it all some day” with a gun pointed at their heads unbeknownst to them. That this triste existence is pervasive is evidenced by repetitive aerial shots of the neighborhoods where restless youth live. They don’t read books, converse with one another in meaningful dialogue, attend school or change the world in any way. Conversation between counselors, young men and women and support groups are on the fringe of the empty pictures that pose as landscape, but not in any artistic Antonioni sense. These are the real discussions beneath the constant numbing of youth, the realities they don’t want to know about, to hear about or understand.

Freeways, tract homes, parking lots, green grass, and recurrent mall lights resurface as the momentum builds for a brutal gun attack. We know that it is coming like the slithering slide of a snake as it approaches its prey and is ready to pounce. The vacant dead eyes of the perpetrator should give pause to the victims or anyone who sees him. But they walk innocently in scenes that put the spectator in a voyeuristic trance, for we are the voyeurs, waiting for the pounce and the carnage. Listening to a young man claim that humans are not real unlike animals, and for his mother to claim he is smarter than his peers is one of the many internal contradictions in the film, as if brutal acts are committed by geniuses. We know that he is going to kill his turtle when he holds it up on a few occasions. In this regard, he demonstrates that animals aren’t real either.

We know that the sunshine singers are going to be blown away and all the scantily clad young women who check their phones and take selfies. Video games don’t lead to violence, says the young man who later takes a hammer to the turtle. Humanity raised on artificial tech culture, without support, in middle income neighborhoods and nuclear families, confined to gender roles, produce numb brains without connection to people. The contorted faces of men and women who scream reveal the angst that so many keep inside. In that respect the scenes that build up to these contortions, express the real violence.

Dark Night's carnage, is a real life occurrence at a movie theater, that claimed the lives of young people, many with bottled up rage, just like their shooter. “You make me happy… the skies are grey… please don’t take my sunshine away" are the slow languid lyrics (arrangement by Maica Armata) heard before the shooter enters a cineplex by a back door designed for mall security. We don’t see turtles killed or humans. We are suspended as victims while the snake slithers.

The year is 2012, Aurora Colorado.

Frameline 40 Film Fest nears festival and Pride month end

Frameline 40 Film Fest nears festival and Pride month end

The Ovarian Psyco Brigade

The Frameline Film Festival is in full swing through the end of Gay Pride month that culminates in the Pride Parade on June 26 in San Francisco. The LGBT event features narratives, shorts and documentaries from around the world, and prides itself on taking the best films out there from this world. It is an eclectic pageant with films about gay men, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals.

There are 55 about lesbians this year, which mostly share a low budget profile, but for lesbians at the Frameline Audience, it doesn’t matter since the authentic voices of the community are more important than artistic content or cinematic innovation. What matters most is authentic representation and the films for this weekend have that stamp of quality.

The Bay area premiere of AWOL directed by Deb Shoval is based on an award winning short story- a film set in rural America about a chance meeting which goes beyond being a summer fling. An incongruent couple fill the narrative arc in a relationship between high school graduate Joey and Daisy Dukes, a woman with kids and a truck driver husband. The film screens June 25 at Landmark Theatres in Piedmont.

Also on June 25 at the Castro Theatre is a screening of four shorts concerning lesbian friendship, dating, and cross cultural meetings - Sticky Fingers - One Last Night Raniya, Arrivederci Rosa, and Sticky Fingers. The films are invigorated by excellent sound tracks. At the screening director Sidsel Møller Johnsen and producer Niels Wee of "Rainya" will be in attendance.

At the Roxie is a cinematic extravaganza "Ovarian Psycos" on June 25 and directors Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle will be in attendance. The film is a documentary about twenty plus young women of color who bike through the streets of East LA with black bandanas emblazoned with white Fallopian tubes over their faces - "The Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade". Their mission is to protest violence against women. The bikers echo the "Women's Army" in Lizzie Borden's cult classic "Born in Flames "(1983)shown at a previous Frameline Festival (2007). In a cameo role as a feminist newspaper editor is future Oscar winning filmmaker Kathyrn Bigelow. "The Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade" was founded by poet M.C. and activist Xela de la X and is composed of cisgender and transgender women who protest misogyny and racism and honor the legacy of the Chicanx civil rights movement.

On Saturday is the annual "Fun in Girls Shorts" and "Fun in Boys Shorts" Pride Parade on June 26, an uplifting event showing some of the latest work by emerging directors with issues that concern the young LGBT community.

The festival closes with Andrew Haigh "Looking" at the Castro at 7pm on June 26 -the last Pride event of this month. The series is set in San Francisco and featured for two seasons on HBO. As proof of its enduring popularity advance tickets are sold out but "Rush" tickets are available at the box office.

Andrea Arnold's youth road movie 'American Honey' wins Cannes 'Jury Prize

Andrea Arnold's youth road movie 'American Honey' wins Cannes 'Jury Prize'

 

Andrea Arnold's 'American Honey' wins jury prize at Cannes  Courtesy of Festival de Cannes, used with permission

American Honey 

by Moira Jean Sullivan, accredited film critic at Festival de Cannes

Andrea Arnold won the "jury prize "for “American Honey (UK)” on May 22 at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a strong contender for the Palme d’Or and the third best favorite of the jury. The prolific and talented Arnold has received the second most jury prize awards for "Red Road", "Fish Tank" and "American Honey" after the record set by Ken Loach (UK), this year's Palme d'Or winner. This year, the Palme d'Or was never closer to her grasp and many critics praised the film as the best. "American Honey", more than other films in the official selection, was the most cinematic with highly handcrafted visual architecture and superb mobile camera work and framing. The continuity editing is brilliant and the film serves not only as a road journey for the characters but for the spectator. A youth caravan travels across middle America selling phony magazine subscriptions stewarded by an “Oliver Twist”-like ”Fagin” called Jake (Shia La Beouf) and his boss Krystal (Riley Keough). Her practice is to belittle the crew and recruit a lover from among their ranks; Jake is the current paramour. These young people become a family and occasionally recruit new sellers such as Star (Sasha Lane), an 18 year old young woman from Texas. She claims her name was given to her in homage to the “Death Star” of Star Wars mythology. Elsewhere in the film, references are made to Darth Vadar. Jake also keeps a gun that he threatens to use on a few occasions. But the film never turns completely dark and is reverently respectful of this motley crew of young people. Star is a case in point who comes from a broken home where her father molests her and her mother has abandoned her family preferring to spend her time at a bar doing line dancing. There are two younger children that live with Star and her father and when we first meet her she is hitchhiking with them to get back home.The caravan is thrown into the wilderness of small town USA and the crew is even compared to wild animals. Moreover, there are numerous animals in the film such as a caped Superman dog, a turtle, horses, a variety of insects and a brown bear. The animals never pose a danger but the young people are prey for middle aged men who try to take advantage of the young women, in particular Star.

In the evenings, the crew lives in cramped rooms at cheap motels. Group activities include beating up the seller who did the worst job of the day, though this is done in an a spirit of playfulness The camaraderie the young people show each other is what makes their job so captivating since most come from broken homes. They engage in a lot of singing and dancing so it is a joyful saga as well as a chronicle of despair for the economic conditions of working class USA. Krystal targets the very wealthy or the very poor for the magazine sales and it is fairly clear that none of these people will ever receive their subscriptions. Besides, today there are not many eager customers for magazines with free reading material readily available on the Internet.

Three films in this year's Cannes official competition have tackled important social and political issues of today: “I, Daniel Blake” (Palme d’Or reviewed here), “American Honey” and “Aquarius” directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho starring Sônia Braga. Braga plays a 65-year-old woman who refuses to sell her rental unit to a housing company. This situation is common for many global cities today such as San Francisco. Not far from the Cannes festival is the sovereign state of Monaco. ("Principauté de Monaco"). Below the Royal Palace is a huge banner strung across the streets of old rental units advertising "Commercial Space Available for Condominium Sales”, for this is a state where the wealthy have succeeded in owning virtually everything.

These excellent films reflect the effects of globalization, increasing economic disparity and the commodification of the housing market by corporate greed. The characters of these films represent “Ulysses in a Strange Land”, trying to make sense of why the road map no longer points the way back home but how close to the edge an increasing amount of the working class has become, in particular the young.