Jesse Ventura phones in to Arts Express to discuss his latest contentious projects butting heads with the political and economic establishment and the big bought corporate media. Man of many hats Ventura - including former Independent governor and a mayor in Minnesota, author, actor, political commentator, talk show host, pro-marijuana movement advocate, WWE Hall Of Fame wrestler, and former Rolling Stones bodyguard - delves into his latest book, Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto; his current tour with the World Cannabis Congress; The World According To Jesse - his new RT talk show in its debut this month; and what's up with all the US attacks on RT - what's behind it, and why.
And what all of this may have to do with PBS Television; the CIA and Fidel; Tommy Chong; the tomato garden planted by Ventura's mother every summer when he was growing up; and Ventura pretty much blackballed out of the corporate media because 'I ask questions they don't want asked.'
** "There is in the belly of this cinema a more socially conscious movement, which knows that in a society with high unemployment and increasing social tensions, crime as John Huston proclaimed, 'is just a left handed form of human endeavor.'
Bro On The World Film Beat: Arts Express Paris correspondent Professor Dennis Broe with the Best Of The Rest on location from Cannes - and among them films opening here this summer.
Including a Wyoming First Nation Reservation thriller as the occasion for a socially relevant indictment of contemporary outside forces which perpetuate that historical misery - apropos Pine Ridge and an energy company whose shadowy army of mercenaries impose themselves; a Jersey musical and the place of music in sustaining working class culture - with the morass of the chemical plants that have all but left them for dead; and a supposedly red state/blue state fable about attacks on Bushwick, Brooklyn by extreme Republican outside forces - against the artist class of colonialist gentrification shock troops there.
** "Are we really talking about a world where the main task is, how do we both clean up the aftermath of capitalism's destruction of the environment, and also come up with some way of allocating who gets what are fundamentally scarce resources."
Ideology And Culture Corner: Jack Shalom steps into the future with guest theoretician Peter Frase, author of Four Futures: Visions Of The World After Capitalism. Contemplating together options for the planet and its people following end stage capitalism, and what is to be done - with the advent especially of a potential Star Trek World.
** "How many times we had to raise these safety issues, and now these slumlords grabbing tissues; There's murder in the hi rise this wasn't just a fire, this was the work of the system's many liar, liars; The Tory executioners we got to lay the blame, 'cause they treat the lives of poor people like a game.'
Arts Express Crime Scenes Edition: Rapper and aspiring revolutionary Marcel Cartier's Mass Murder. A musical tribute for the crime against the working class victims of London's gangster landlordism Grenfell Tower inferno. Our Arts Express Best Of The Net Hotspot for this week.
Beauty Mark Movie Review
"I gotta survive first before I can call myself a survivor."
A harrowing and disturbing dramatic feature about much more than dealing with the scars of child sexual abuse in adulthood, Beauty Mark sets its terrifying trajectory of personal trauma within a spectrum defining much of millennial troubled existence today. In other words, had the star at the turbulent center of this narrative, Auden Thornton as Angie, not been a child sexual abuse survivor, there would still be massive issues at stake which the younger generation during these economic hard times, is subjected to today.
A socio-economic victim as well of inadequate minimum wage subsistence while raising an interracial child out of wedlock which has led to scorn and ostracism from the surrounding racist rural Kentucky community, Angie and her alcoholic mother are about to be evicted from their condemned home due to mold contamination. And with no financial prospects at hand as a lawyer informs her that the statute of limitations to mount a sexual abuse lawsuit has expired, the distraught young single mother suppresses her revulsion towards the financially well off abuser who still lives in the town, to request rent money from him for a new home - and implicitly compensation for the harm that had been inflicted on her as well.
Thornton's extraordinary performance conjures such powerful emotional horror and desperation, that audiences have little choice but to be carried along with her into the dramatic vortex of her unrelenting plight. Though certain plot points within the story raise thorny questions, such as her dysfunctional mother who is revelaed to have been even more abused as a child, yet the filmmaker seems content to simply demonize her as a maternal caricature from hell, rather than exploring anything beyond stereotypical about her. Questionable as well is a conclusion that finds the protagonist psychologically and financially prevailing over her miserable state by re-experiencing what brought her to that horrific personal reality in the first place.
But what is refreshing and uplifting about Beauty Mark, is a separate concluding narrative strand as well. In which Angie triumphs in an inspiring way, by utilizing the trauma and pain of her past to save another.
Prairie Miller