Not just a horror movie: Guy Pearce, starring as The Preacher in the subversive western Brimstone, in a conversation about mythologized fabrications in movies - along with frontier women rendered literally voiceless, and the roots of religious fundamentalism in this country manifested today as warped messianic impulses fueling US exceptionalism, and the brutal urge to subjugate and dominate the world.

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** "Will there ever be a time...when men like me don't have to hide their poems from the boss...But would rather look for the beauty in a line of words, with machine grease on their fingers."

Poetry Corner: Movement worker poet and machinist Fred Voss reads from his work. Referencing Whitman, jazz, the Beats, Shakespeare, Bukowski, Louis Armstrong's trumpet, time clocks, 'this era of the busted union and the beaten down worker,' and 'a brotherhood of the wrench and hammer and soul - and learning what honesty, nobility and poetry can be found in a machine shop.' Poet Julia Stein reports.

** "The Paris Commune proved that in a modern industrialized society, people in the right time and place with the right ideas, can take control of their own lives and communities. But those in control at the moment, those with power, wish to write moments like the Paris Commune out of history."

Tribute to the March 18th anniversary of the Paris Commune: UK commentator Paul Case, from The Rebel Chronicles. A Captain Of The Rant excerpted episode investigating 'the histories created by ordinary people, challenging the status quo.'

** "There are people who you know, have never seen a Paul Newman film. Paul Newman is now past tense, except in the grocery store." 

Behind Enemy Lines? Veteran Hollywood publicist Dick Guttman phones in from LA to discuss his book, Starflacker: Inside The Golden Age Of Hollywood. And Arts Express interrogates the author as to, among other topics, the very few films that dubiously always win all the awards. 

Brimstone Review

Millenial cinema would seem at times to be reinventing conventional genres to delve into pressing issues and dilemma pertaining to their particular historical moment. And lending insight and clarity to the confusion of a world in perpetual chaos.

Such is the case with the hybrid horror western Brimstone, directed by young Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhoven with a determined outsider looking in perspective. And shedding raw light on all sorts of dark and buried historical roots of this nation.

That is, the religious fundamentalism that has ideologically anchored this country from its inception. And through the diabolically driven western frontier character of The Preacher played by Guy Pearce - pathological patriarch presiding over his victimized wife (Clarice von Houten) and daughter (Dakota Fanning) - finds allegorical terror in the brutality and fanatical religious obsession with warped self-righteousness that is ultimately at the heart of US exceptionalism. And the messianic impulse to subjugate and dominate the rest of the world today.

Not just a horror movie, Brimstone anchors through its dramatic flourishes however excessive, real horrors within US history, where atrocities have been concealed with fabricated mythologies. And a disturbing landscape littered in particular back then with sex trafficking saloons and women as male property, rendered voiceless literally and figuratively.