** "That's the dynamic they set up - a dynamic where the American people box each others' ears..."

Bayonets have two sides - with the working class at each end...Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on what he uncovered at his time as an on-air punching bag at Fox News...

** "Because I had been acting my whole life, I reached a point that I had become immune to the qualities that excited me about acting. And working with Ben, he had so much passion and so much energy - and it reignited my own..."

Nora: A Conversation With Lesley Ann Warren. Exploring her latest film, and the struggles of women to reinvent themselves in movies as actresses through the decades; Ben Kingsley as her male muse - and the impact and legacy of her blossoming during the subversive Hollywood Renaissance of the 70s 'that I do believe will never go away, but it's harder due to the corporate takeover...'

** "Usually on the show we try to crack open the paint chipped doors of the British cultural underbelly. But tonight we're diving somewhere darker, deeper - the monsters we live with, the ones we elect, the ones we internalize..."

UK Desk. John Greenaway Talks 'Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism And The Dark Side Of The Radical Imagination' - "a descent into horror with teeth..."

** "Watching Jeff Bezos fiddle, while Europe burns..."

Bro On The Global Television Beat: Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe plummets the depths of Series Mania 2025 - The largest TV festival in the world. Deciphering unstoppable AI, and Trump's European onslaught....

Plus...Paris Blues, Paul Newman, jazz and racial justice... 

Self Driver Review: Taxi Driver 21st Century Digital Descent Into A Differently Depraved Reality

Economic crisis cinema crashes even deeper into the low wage surveillance state, and its division on screens between escapism and real time erosion of ethical principles in the necessary face of survival. Compound those two human essentials at work in the current, increasingly debilitating belly of the US capitalist beast - and writer/director Michael Pierro's low budget, high voltage thriller,  'Self Driver' takes off literally and figuratively down that metaphorical highway few among the corporate compliant filmmakers dare to tread.

Moving on from the disoriented rage propelling 20th century's Taxi' Driver Travis Bickle, down on his luck young father 'D' (Nathanael Chadwick) in Self Driver resorts to turning his car into a cab, reinventing himself as a gig worker for a digital outfit in order to feed his family. When a mysterious, suspiciously cheerful passenger offers him a better financial deal as a driver, the economically desperate 'D' agrees.

But as the night ensues, the dangerous passengers along with the demanding and increasingly dreaded robot on his cell phone direct him around town - choreographing a descent into an endless nightmare of anarchy and violence. As 'D' along with his riders, are engulfed into an increasingly terrifying abyss of urban dread and decay..

And no consumer entertainment stress relieving monster or superhero staple on this ride, the subversive scenario's intensity  intimates something more raw and real on its mind. Namely, the masses in a downwardly spiraling economic existence, faced with a choice of survival as necessary complicity with a morally depraved politically and ideologically encircled workplace, or not economically surviving essentially at all.

And while in a greater sense, the US masses in this ironically titled 'Self Driver' - are driven or lured into making their peace as accomplices, passive or not, with a nation constantly engaging in off screen terror, horror and war around the world.

Prairie Miller