USA

International Philosophers’ Project 1971

Interviewer: Fons Elders

Aired on Dutch television, hence the additional subs. Debate took place in the US according to this.

Quote:
In 1971, American linguist/social activist Noam Chomsky squared off against French philosopher Michel Foucault on Dutch television … the program was entitled ‘Human Nature: Justice Vs. Power’ and offered sharp contrasts between the more traditional view of ‘human nature’ and what would become a postmodernist perspective … Chomsky, following a rationalist lineage going back to at least Plato, believes that there is a foundational ‘nature’ and that its positive aspects (love, creativity, recognizing and embracing justice) must be realized, while Foucault remains skeptical of any such notion… for him, the issue is not so much whether ‘justice’ or ‘human nature’ ‘exists,’ but how they have historically (and currently) function in society … in regard to justice, he says (this is not included in the clips): “… the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power…” The point of any political struggle, for Foucault, is to alter the ‘power relations’ in which we all find ourselves (youtube user hiperf289)Read More »

In Ropin’ Fool (1922) Rogers plays Ropes Reilly, a cowboy who ropes anything that moves until a lynch mob decides to use Reilly’s rope for a hanging party, with Reilly as the guest of honor. Motion Picture World wrote: “Plentiful use of slow motion photography shows how it is done and dispels any possible belief that the stunts are faked. No audience can help but marvel as Rogers throws a figure eight around a galloping horse, or lassoes a rat with a piece of string, or brings to term a cat melodiously inclined.” Later Rogers would wryly claim fame as America’s “Poet Lariat.”
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Plot:

Michael Gordon never intended to be a boxer. But after he decks a burly brawler at a nightclub, a ring promoter encourages him to give the fight game a shot. Gordon, whose career as an artist is going nowhere, agrees. Besides, it will bring him closer to the woman who has KO’d his heart – the promoter’s wife. The corrupt world of boxing was a staple of postwar Hollywood in well-known works like Body and Soul, The Set-Up and Champion and in lesser yet admirable works like Whiplash. Romantic melodrama and noirish atmospherics combine in this tale starring Dane Clark, Alexis Smith, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden and other reliables. Future The Mickey Mouse Club host Jimmie Dodd has an uncredited role as a piano man. From Warner Brothers!
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A children’s art project done at the Norton, Ohio Elementary Schools in 1962. Using scrap wood the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders plan and make wooden sculptures that have a primitive totem-like quality. Professors James M. Someroski, and Marlene Mancini Frost of Kent State University assisted in the making of the film. Professor Fred Coulter composed and played the music.Read More »

A lonely security guard can’t even get a decent blind date, so he begins peeping at women through their bedroom windows. Before long he’s paying call girls to come over and secretly videotaping every session.
Within two weeks he’s blown his life savings and been subjected to a lot of verbal and physical abuse. This bizarre black comedy is loaded with naked women!

Starring Andren Scott – with Monica McFarland, Karen Pombo, Becky Van Lewen and Sheila Traister. Directed by Ronnie Cramer, music by Alarming Trends.

“The Best Drive-in Movie of 1992…” Joe Bob BriggsRead More »

Quote:
Taking a breather from the Paris, Texas shooting, Wim Wenders hopped a plane, camera in hand, to look for the Tokyo enshrined by the late Yasujiro Ozu (whose work Wenders dubs “the sacred treasure of the cinema”). What he found instead, documented in this filmic journal, was an urbanized dislocation not far from the forlorn emptiness he coached out of German and American vistas. Whether abstracting businessmen teeing off atop skyscrapers or the rigorous, artisanal craft of building a wax sandwich display, Wenders scrambles for humanity seeping through neon and steel — a humanity linked, inevitably, to the old Japan of Ozu’s films (rebellious tykes, cherry blossoms, tranquil countrysides).Read More »

IMDB:
part of a modern art classic
9/10
Author: Chris_Docker from United Kingdom
20 March 2004

The Cremaster Cycle 9/10 The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films shot over eight years. Although they can be seen individually, the best experience is seeing them all together (like Wagner’s Ring Cycle) – and also researching as much as you can beforehand. To give you an idea of the magnitude, it has been suggested that their fulfilment confirms creator Matthew Barney as the most important American artist of his generation (New York Times Magazine).

The Cremaster films are works of art in the sense that the critical faculties you use whilst watching them are ones you might more normally use in, say, the Tate Modern, than in an art house cinema. They are entirely made up of symbols, have only the slimmest of linear plots, and experiencing them leaves you with a sense of awe, of more questions and inspirations than closed-book answers. The imagery is at once grotesque, beautiful, challenging, puzzling and stupendous. Any review can only hope to touch on the significance of such an event, but a few clues might be of interest, so for what it’s worth …
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Quote:
One of the most critically-acclaimed documentaries in recent years, Leviathan is a groundbreaking, immersive portrait of the contemporary commercial fishing industry. Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts – at one time the whaling capital of the world as well as Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick; it is today the country’s largest fishing port with over 500 ships sailing from its harbor every month.

Leviathan follows one such vessel, a hulking groundfish trawler, into the surrounding murky black waters on a weeks-long fishing expedition. But instead of romanticizing the labor or partaking in the longstanding tradition of turning fisherfolk into images, filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Verena Paravel (Foreign Parts) present a vivid, almost-kaleidoscopic representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine.Read More »

Quote:
Brit, Candy, Cotty, and Faith have been best friends since grade school. They live together in a boring college dorm and are hungry for adventure. All they have to do is save enough money for spring break to get their shot at having some real fun. A serendipitous encounter with rapper “Alien” promises to provide the girls with all the thrill and excitement they could hope for. With the encouragement of their new friend, it soon becomes unclear how far the girls are willing to go to experience a spring break they will never forget.
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