"I waited until after 5PM on the day Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour was going to air - so Mattel couldn't get an injunction against me."

*Filmmaker Susan Stern Talks Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. And...before Judy Dolls there was...Barbie Doll! Or rather, a post-WW II German sex doll Lilli, cut from the same cloth so to speak. The director presents assorted under the radar revelations, and shares a look back at her screen memoir 'Bad Attitude' of her late legendary underground cartoonist spouse, Spain Rodriguez.

*Wickermania - In Search Of 'The Wicker Man.' On the 50th anniversary of the enduring cult classic recently reimagined in the film Midsommar, Brett Gregory at our UK Desk in a conversation.

*Plus...Arts Express Comic Relief...

El Conde Review: Equal Parts Pinochet And Peter Pan Noir...

A presumed biopic not exactly Pinochet nor Peter Pan noir for that matter but perhaps more so, Chilean director Pablo Larrain's El Conde, 'The Count' in English, is much more than simply lost in translation and in time as well - as the horrific history of the general turned murderous dictator gets a pass as his cinematic vampire eludes this 50 year anniversary of that 'other' 9/11 fateful Chilean coup.

Repackaged flippantly here as not exactly dislikable let alone detested buffoon, the hopelessly eating disorder afflicted 250 year old shape shifter (Jaime Vadell) sighted climbing atop the guillotine visited during the French Revolution by the just swiftly departed Marie Antoinette to lick her blood off the blade - Pinochet soon turns up for the duration at a bleak remote Chilean estate, addicted to human heart slushies fresh from the blender, that never quite satisfy. All the while surrounded by his attentive butler apparently arrived as a former cossack presumably fleeing the Russian Revolution, along with his incestuous combo mother and wife, who may or may not be a recurrent Margaret Thatcher, don't ask.

And in the midst of boredom with eternity while pondering a career change somewhere in the human afterlife instead, Pinochet is visited by a mysterious young undercover duplicitous nun (Paula Luchsinger) investigating his family's ill gotten finances, or alternately mulling the octogenarian's exorcism. While in no way Wendy to his smitten Pan, thrilled when bitten by the urge literally to take vampiric flight into the stratosphere herself, in this eat your heart out entertainment fluff.

With each successive heinous historical reincarnation of the protagonist past and present, and presumably in the here and now as this country provides billions to arm a reignited similar Ukrainian Azov fascism in bloody battle, we get it. But why sugar coat depraved horror in the real world repeatedly as entertainment intent as distraction rather than revelation. And this while a collective Chile still grieves on this 50th 9/11 anniversary of the Pinochet presidential assassination of Allende, and mass torture, murder, genocidal glee and disappeared tens of thousands of progressives and their kidnapped children - as personifying no less in El Conde than persecution porn. 

Prairie Miller, Rotten Tomatoes Review