** "My family is mixed, and I think when your family looks like the world, you see the world in a different perspective - I made this western gumbo with lots of love and jalapeno!..."

Mario Van Peebles Talks 'Outlaw Posse.' The actor and director shakes up the conventional western with that buried post-Civil War history of race and class in this country...and about how and why.

And those black 'outlaws' invisible in westerns historically on screen, but who actually were one out of every three cowboys, in this daring flip of the script - robbing not for greed but rather slave reparations. Van Peebles also revisits his portrayal of Malcolm X in the film 'Ali' - and turning up as Stokely Camichael in 'Panther.'

** "The disruption of mankind is defined as both good and evil. But in American mythology that doesn't exist, you have heroes and villains. And that transfers over into law enforcement - police don't come into our society, they come out of it..."

Good Cop, Bad Cop: detoxifying the police. Pacifica host Garland Nixon on messing with the minds of the masses, and challenging that conversation. With connections from Garland's vault of wisdom to Abu Ghraib, bad apples, wolves - and janitors and corporations.

** "In King Lear as now, tragedy turns into horror..."

Arts Express Playhouse: Don't Touch That Dial! Apocalypse Now: Shakspeare Without Tears. An ongoing Arts Express episodic adventure - drama for the ears solo performance and investigation.

** "It's not simply memory that the series is concerned with, it's representation. That is, social memory refracted - through in this case a hostile media which often exists to correct the sins and failures of bloody imperial overreach..."

Bro On The Global Television Beat: The Sympathizer - Not Sympathetic Enough...Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe critiques the Vietnam spy thriller. Referencing Rambo, Apocalypse Now, scene chewing, the spy genre and the belly of the beast... 

'Picture if you will...' Lazereth As Pied Piper Allegory For Our Time

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the final Twilight Zone episode, back in 1964. But that iconic, enduring sci-fi classic series continues to challenge perceptions, as its presence in the combo mass consciousness and objective reality, is warts and all apparently here to stay. And as acutely discernible as ever in what may be termed the doomsday genre in its latest evocative incarnation, Lazareth.

And while Rod Serling invited the masses to step inside the dubious yet visionary fifth dimension of The Twilight Zone, one might infer from what appears to be emerging as a millennial cinema - a movement in the opposite direction in the present time. That is, young writer/director Alec Tibaldi crafting a Pied Piper allegory in reverse in our present time.

With an astute combination of a growing millennial generation visionary sense in movies and Australian filmmaker Tibaldi's increasingly cultural outsider looking in perspective, Lazareth as metaphorical storytelling creates a hermetic wilderness world of a traumatized family clan - Ashley Judd as stern caretaker of her two teen orphan nieces (Katie Douglas and Sarah Pidgeon), the girls since childhood retreated with their aunt away from the outside world during the covid epidemic. And years later, rebellious youthful suspicion arising against their possibly deceptive aunt, that a far different real world out there may actually exist beyond their physical and mental rural fortress.

So what may all of this have to do with audience existence beyond the big screen - itself ironically a seeming psychological fortress. Namely, the easily traumatized and manipulated younger generations today, that have only known endless war all their lives from birth. And with no accessible alternative political reality. 

And in that sense, easier to manipulate their perceptions of the world around them - bombarding everyone with an endless succession of war, dread of the outsider, and apocalyptic fare to collectively terrify, subdue and control the population. And by endlessly creating and imposing these imaginary threats on the minds of the masses,  masterminded by the psychology of capitalism and imperialism - the better to promote the profits of consumerism and the military industrial complex, perpetually engaged in concocted world conflict. 

Or as so succinctly expressed in Lazareth as Judd presumably points to her soul within: 'Freedom is in here, freedom is an idea...' And not any clear sense of a troubled world, that with a clear eye one might face in political struggle rather than imaginary retreat.

Prairie Miller
Rotten Tomatoes Review HERE