This might be playing near where you live. If you’re a fan of Cassavetes, you’ll love the way Burnett presents the characters and story in his 1977 masterpiece, Killer of Sheep. Read more about Charles Burnett here.
Author: J T. Ramsay
There are helicopters, napalm and children.
28 Weeks Later, the heroless sequel to Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Days Later, does for zombie movies what Children of Men did for dystopian thrillers. Director Juan Fresnadillo uses familiar scenes from Iraq and Katrina to criticize U.S. military involvement and the value the government places on civilians, somehow managing to never get bogged down by Message. This will undoubtedly end up being the most underappreciated movie of the summer, lost among the blockbusters.
A rare circumstance where television might really help you.
I voted for Michael Nutter today. A few weeks ago this seemed like a protest vote — the kind favored generally by the well-educated Age of Reform Part One types who typically also believe that pluralism works, a thousand flowers bloom, etc.
I went into the voting booth today believing that America’s mayoralties might be better left to antiquity and left feeling the same way. Mayors and city councils have become so quaint in recent years, unable to muster the support they need to provide for the cities they ostensibly govern and unwilling to meaningfully contest the big picture problems their constituents demand they address. Whether it’s in battles with the federal government, as in the case with New Orleans, or battles with the state, as is our plight as Philadelphians, mayors and city councils wield less power than ever in an increasingly suburbanized nation.
What we’re left with are either/or propositions that mayors can’t handle either; while Ed Rendell forces the casinos down our throats, the mayor will be left with a law and order problem that he doesn’t know how to fix and the casinos question will fade from view. Moreover, if you watched so much as two episodes of The Wire last season, it’s pretty clear that quality-of-life policing puts everyone at risk, civilians and police alike, broken windows thesis be damned. Stop and frisk policing may pad overtime and create the illusion that something’s being done, but it militarizes communities by treating everyone as a suspect. It’s a civil rights and a civil liberties issue.
[Don’t say people in these communities are asking for more police. Of course they are. They ask for police because it seems like it’s the easiest solution. But it’s the type of policing they get that counts. Put in a different context, stop and frisk is like calling for a troop surge. This is the sort of hamfisted approach Frank Rizzo took that Rudy Giuliani later Disneyfied. We need to do much better than this. We need to be smarter than this. We can do much better than this.]
In the future even books will have video trailers.
It’s like the office, but instead of Tim and Dawn [or whatever the American counterparts are named] it’s a romance between an unnamed narrator and the office itself. And all it’s inhabitants, sort of. One of those two entities [the office or the unnamed narrator] has a MySpace. And an amazingly produced website. Check them out, like you might do with library books, etc. etc.
And you thought it was just zombie masters and crooked cops.
PTW’s got a pretty nice Baltimore scene mixtape at the ready. Looks pretty cool but keep an eye out for Chris, Snoop and Omar anyway.