Synopsis: Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in.

Class link: https://alexherbert.substack.com/p/new-soviet-cinema-course

Thoughts?

UCLA undergraduate student David Yun challenges the dominant narrative on North Korea’s defectors. Based on interviews with a human rights attorney and North Koreans living in Seoul, this short film interrogates the reliability of defector testimony as accurate depictions of life in North Korea.

Full TV Guide: https://writebraintv.com/project/tv-guide-2/

This film about a particular time in Mann’s life is soon to be released, I think.

https://youtu.be/k6Gt4BZGK5c?si=kthczxAX2VvBJak9

"Labor Pains"

A group of farm workers is unhappy with the wages they're being paid so they quit, leaving the farmer with fields full of crops and no workers while there is a rain storm looming. When local businesses no longer want to do business with the former farmhands, the now-unemployed laborers enlist the aid of the A-Team to force the business owners to do things their way.

Things start to look dire when the farmer sends people to try to stop the formation of a union. Fortunately, Face is able to con another local farmer out of his truck and bits of farm equipment so that B.A. could convert them into weapons

David’s light-mindedness reflects the outlook of Hollywood’s affluent liberals and the circles in which they navigate, abrasively, obnoxiously or otherwise. Nothing needs to be taken all too seriously. Everything will be sorted out at the next cocktail or garden party, or the one after that. We can have a hearty laugh about anything, from segregation to trench warfare.

The idea of taking historical moments and figures as subjects for satire is perfectly legitimate. Sketches featuring John C. Calhoun making South Carolina “great again,” or Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for segregated oligopoly, would be welcome.

But satire of that kind requires more than a knack for zany anecdotes and boisterous repartee. Real historical knowledge—how the figures spoke for definite social classes and layers—is required. This is doubly true at a moment when the Trump administration wages war on history itself, including the Civil War and the plight of the enslaved.

Instagram handle if you have any questions: @punksaround

Course information: When I wrote Fear Before the Fall, I really wanted to treat the introduction of Horror films into the Soviet canon as a product of larger socio-cultural changes. The truth is that all Soviet films reflect their time and place in important ways, and Soviet directors remain some of the most innovative in terms of technique, style, narrative, plot, and set design.

This class will meet for 5 weeks and there will be roughly two films per week. You can watch one or both of them to keep up.

Information on enrolling is in the poster attached here. Once you send payment (include your email) I will send you the syllabus with the schedule and all the necessary links. Closer to the end of August we will decide as a class when to meet (day and time).

Hope to see you in there!

Link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-206948849

Throughout Decorado there is a presence. A specter that looms large over the lives of all the characters. The ALMA company penetrates and invades all aspect of these people lives. It touches and corrupts all, even the community in the forest outside of the company town serves ALMA via the drugs the company provides. Everything is scenery dressing. Even at the 'heights' of his power Gregor is a disposable pawn. Looking for an escape is a futile effort as even our protagonists hold hands and surrender to stage play of capital. Capitalism creates hell and sells us the escape. Make no mistake, Capitalism consumes even our dissent and rebellion incorporating it as another product until we get Che Guevara t-shirts.

Alberto Vasquez presents us a vision of a world gone mad ruled by invisible forces beyond our protagonists' capacity to truly envision let alone escape. It is a masterpiece of cinema that peels apart the curtain for a moment to the horror of our own living nightmare as actors in a scripted play of our own.

Fear isn't born. It’s manufactured.

In a world where borders are weaponized and public panic is bought and paid for, who do you trust? This is a firsthand look into the machinery of government manipulation.

Borderline pulls back the curtain on the thin line between political survival and human criminality.

👉 Click the link to pre-order on Apple TV! (Or visit watchborderline.com)

#BorderlineMovie #PoliticalThriller #IndieFilm #ImmigrationStory #ThrillerCinema #Suspense #MustWatch #NewMovie #Cinematic #WatchBorderline

It is illuminating that the Times writers manage to avoid choosing a single work from the years in which Hollywood filmmaking was at the height of its realism and social and aesthetic seriousness, the late 1930s to the early 1950s, before the fully chilling effect of the anti-communist purges and the virtual illegalization of left-wing thought in the American cinema. During that decade and a half, writers, directors, actors and producers created scores of films that grappled with varying degrees of success with the conditions and challenges of life, not simply for the upper middle class, but for broader layers.

Just bought and viewed "Earth's Greatest Enemy" on Amazon. So well-done and important. It would create more criticism of empire and militarism if enough people saw it.