** "Some people hate me after watching this, some people really feel for me after watching it, some people don't want to go on the journey. But it is a journey - and into some dark ideas about America..."
Predators: A Conversation with David Osit. The investigative filmmaker is our guest on the program, to talk about his latest film probing To Catch A Predator, the notorious reality TV show airing four years, and now perpetually online - including the dubious predator vigilante podcast offshoots. And with the online youth predators lured into host Chris Hanson's fabricated home setting studio, their victims portrayed by police decoys, and then their broadcast arrests on camera.
Osit, on the crew of 'No Man's Land' as well, infiltrating a right wing Oregon survivalist rebellion, addresses questions arising from his stunning documentary, including as a predator child victim himself, of media, audience and cop complicity - along with the disturbing thinning line between law enforcement, the media and entertainment, most recently in the video broadcast cheerleading US execution of Carribean boat people currently in progress. And interrogating as well his own complicity as a filmmaker, in perpetuating the issues he condemns.
** "The United States is everywhere - trying to run the world, to blow things up, to take people's stuff..."
Pacifica Host Garland Nixon in the latest art of figuring out the world episode. With connections to 900 US bases, homeless school children, bad roads, Ukraine, Venezuela, WMDs, the Afghan Papers - and a brainwashed America...
Plus...Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe in a continuing cross-continental Arts Express intimate conversation. As the culture and media critic as well as novelist dissects socio-politically the way things are. Stay tuned and all will be revealed...
BREAKDOWN: 1975 REVIEW: HISTORY BOXED IN
Pursuing the premise that history, political and cultural in this case, can be shoved into predetermined packaging, director Morgan Neville does just that with his self-conscious, artificially categorized historical film documentary Breakdown: 1975. And proposing that movies took a sharp ideological turn from rebellion to reaction during that year, despite the reality that films take years to conceptualize into completion. As does in this case in particular as well, the course of human history.
Condensing what has been designated as the Hollywood Renaissance of the 70's into that single year 1975 proclaiming a sequential twelve month artistic celebratory uprising into socio-politically driven collapse, Neville as a traditonally recognized music documentarian, ventures into artificially encapsulating that creative breakout in Hollywood, vividly referencing Taxi Driver, Network, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and other period rebel classics. But in his attempt to pinpoint where it all fell apart as it segued into an oppositional celebration of conservative values tied to the ensuing 1976 200th anniversary US Bicentennial, his out of context cinema critique falls flat.
For starters, the mandatory military draft of young men sent off to die in Vietnam, and the mass protests fueling some of these films, ended in 1973, while these movies in question were in the process of production. And the subsequent overhaul of the US military into a virtual voluntary mercenary force instead, more than what Neville professes ,led to the decade's cultural demise.
Add to that a switch from the studio system open to taking chances on unconventional ideas motivated by innovative sources of profit, to Hollywood subsequently dominated not by the audience as the primary driving force which this documentary theorizes - but the rather hostile takeover financially by Wall Street profiteering, and politically by Pentagon propaganda infiltration of movies.
Prairie Miller
We Shall Not Be Moved - Out Of Context Cinema At The Oscars
Don't expect the usual demeaning caricatures sidelining female elders in this deplorable Mexican international Oscar entry this year, when not monsters on the menu of horror fare. In fact far worse, at least when it comes to that other usual 'out of context cinema' bypassing history in progress all around it.
For starters, the misleading title, whether intentional or not - an insult to the historic US Civil Rights Movement anthem. In other words, in a case of detrimental double meaning, dismissing both popular struggle and the honoring of those who sacrificed enabling those causes as a kind of psychological impairment - embracing collective sedentary amnesia as the path forward instead.
Symbolizing and central to this drama's cynical historical hypothesis, is Socorro (Luisa Huertas), a seemingly senile alcoholic, chain smoking Mexican lawyer. The bitter, bedraggled Socorro is portrayed as psychotically obsessed with finding and murdering the unindicted officer who tortured to death her brother nearly six decades ago during the 1968 student uprising culminating in the Tlatelolco Massacre. And though her family is dismissive of what is portrayed as a toxic mix of geriatric fantasy and dementia, Socorro proceeds on her determined mission. This while soliciting the assistance of local hitmen, when not staging a homicidal dress rehearsal murdering a neighbor's cat. And the rest is history - or rather, not.
Much more a reflection of perhaps pessimistic and derisive younger generations today, the film sets itself squarely, when it comes to the real world all around them, as a flinching Mexico bowing beneath the bullying, increasingly imposing threats of the US that began with renaming the Gulf Of Mexico. And which has progressed to internal signaling of that potential invasion of the country, under the pretext of wiping out their neighbor's domestic criminal activity - along with the simultaneous encroaching US occupation of the entire Caribbean with their massive military fleet, and engaged in assassinating alleged fishing boat suspects in the surrounding waters.
Thus signaling a not unrelated allegory of a film promoting historical passivity and amnesia as the cure, culminating in a cynically rehabilitated Socorro ultimately breaking with the past in creating a funeral pyre out of a symbolic photo of both criminal perpetrators and victims. And likely palatable simultaneously to US movie audiences - that is, the Oscars...
Prairie Miller