Monthly Archives: June 2020

The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in August 1968 as demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were churning across the United States. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy earlier that year added to the pall of anger and uncertainty across the country.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had decided not to run for re-election in the face of intensifying protests opposing the war. The Democratic nominee would be his vice-president, Hubert H. Humphrey Jr.

Outside the convention hall, violent attacks were committed by the Chicago police against demonstrators. These assaults were shown live on American television.

Chicagos legendary combative mayor, Richard J. Daley, as fierce a smoke-filled backroom wheeler-dealer as any character created by a novelist, was determined that his beloved Chicago not be shamed by protests and that the convention would proceed smoothly. He ordered the police to crush the demonstrators who had gathered in his city.

Its this backdrop that provides the core of one of the most important movies about the counterculture and the right to peaceably assemble ever produced by a major motion picture studio. Medium Cool, released in 1969, is as essential as a film can be.

In Chicago in 1968, celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler was directing a narrative feature for Paramount Pictures he had written (and would photograph). The result is a superb mix of fiction and fact thats not only the chronicle of a workingman who gets fired from his job because he takes a bold stand against his bosses, but its also a believable story of romantic affection.

Robert Forster plays John Cassellis, a Chicago television news cameraman, who discovers that his station is turning over footage of anti-war protestors to the FBI. His intense anger about this results in his dismissal. His love life has taken a positive turn because hes developed a relationship with single-mom Eileen (Verna Bloom). Her young son Harold runs away from home.

John is doing free-lance work at the Democratic National Convention. Eileen goes to the convention area to seek help from John to find her son and becomes caught up in the chaos. The films closing half-hour must never be revealed to those who havent seen it.

Through it all, Wexler expertly combines fictional footage with actual footage of the battle for Chicagos streets. His cinematographers eye is brilliant and his sense of how to tell a powerful story is equal to any of the great directors who came of age during this period of important American cinema.

In 2003, Medium Cool was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library Of Congress for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

The movie, suitable for adults and teenagers, is available on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Meanwhile, the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had decided to make his American filmmaking debut in Los Angeles with a drama called Zabriskie Point. This was after the international success of the sensational London-set Blow-Up, from 1966, his first English-Language work, and one of my favorite movies.

Antonioni, who was the master of capturing ennui among the middle-class in his native Italy, wanted to now capture the revolutionary fervor in 1968 of Americas youth. Drawing from the true story of a young man who stole a small prop plane from a local airfield, Antonioni wrangled four other screenwriters, including American playwright Sam Shepard, and created Zabriskie Point, which was released in 1970 by the legendary MGM studio. Its executives were apoplectic at the sex and nihilism Antonioni delivered.

Gorgeously photographed by Carlo Di Palma, the drama has two centerpieces, an orgy in Californias Mojave Desert and the blowing up of a house that went on for many minutes in slow-motion and actually set the standard for slow-motion Hollywood explosions.

Using mostly amateur performers, Antonionis tale follows Mark (played by occasional American model Mark Frechette), who walks out of an ineffective university protest meeting that is accomplishing nothing. Hes willing to die, but not of boredom for the cause.

Kathleen Cleaver, the real-life wife of Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, is in the scene. One thing we learn is that women are still expected to make coffee.

During protests on campus, a police officer is shot perhaps by Mark, but probably not. Mark steals an airplane and eventually flies it over a car in the desert being driven by Daria, a footloose beauty played by dancer Daria Halprin, but no ones idea of a talented actress. He lands. They meet.

A professional actor, Rod Taylor, is a real estate developer, and the story zooms forward with Mark planning to return the plane and Daria left in tears. Theyve bonded in the desert.

The weak acting hampers, but doesnt derail, what is a ultimately a fragmented study of illusion, reality, and the joy and beauty of youth hampered by capitalist rules and the need to work for a living.

Zabriskie Point is not a failed movie by any stretch of the imagination; however, it feels made by a committee, and never truly soars like Marks revolutionary spirit and airplane. The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd provide music. The visuals win the day.

The film, suitable for adults and mature teens, is available on DVD.

Michael Calleri reviews films for the Niagara Gazette and the CNHI news network. Contact him at moviecolumn@gmail.com.

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CALLERI: The right to protest is at the center of two movies about the counterculture - Niagara Gazette

Alarmingly, the landscape of Britain, especially its capital, has assumed an aspect of alien, dystopian desolation. Its origin was three months of pandemic lockdown; the more recent cause is the paralysis of government, national and local, in the face of intimidation by the violent and wholly unrepresentative elements of a mob that is successfully dictating its agenda to the elected authorities. This weekend, London is disfigured by sinister-looking wooden rectangles enclosing the statues of our monarchs, statesmen and national heroes. They have become monuments to the eclipse of civilisation.

Those statues, confined in cubes like nuclear waste, include three of our kings and Sir Winston Churchill the man who did more than any other individual in 20th century history to defeat rampant racism of a viciousness and scale unimaginable to modern woke demonstrators. They have compiled a hit list of 78 memorials they insist must be removed, across 39 towns and cities, 12 of them in London. They include monarchs, prime ministers, a holder of the Victoria Cross and national hero Nelson on his famous column, the global epitome of London. It is a project to erase large parts of Britains history, to create a tabula rasain iconography, a revolutionary Year Zero.

The pretext for visually deleting our heritage is to protect monuments from rioters. That limp excuse predicates the inevitability of riots and the impossibility of containing them. The message it sends to the perpetrators of violent disorder is: you have won. These clashes on Whitehall would have been illegal at any time, but they take on an extra dimension of nihilism in the light of the fact that Britain is still on lockdown against a deadly pandemic. Demonstrators should have been dispersed at the first signs of their congregating.

Police were not backward in harassing lonely sunbathers during lockdown, so why permit thousands to assemble cheek-by-jowl? They appear to have been crippled by deference to the demands of the more extreme protestors.

It is fashionable to claim we have an obligation to reappraise our society and its alleged faults. True, we do need to revisit many of our assumptions, including an objective investigation of the scale and incidence of racism, but it should not come at the price of abandoning all historical nuance and rationaldebate.

The unjustified slur that Britain is aninherently racist nation today must also be repudiated. This country has, successfully, opened its doors to millions of immigrants, but further integration is made more difficult by the most militant campaigners, often extravagant white liberals, relentlessly engendering a culture of grievance and victimhood that seeks to divide.

Unfortunately, the real agenda of some of these activists, as we have seen on our streets and in their social media proclamations, is to overthrow the political order of representative parliamentary democracy and to destroy capitalism,or the market system.

Many of the supporters of the organisation Black Lives Matter want peaceful change. BLM started in the US with a sensible outlook and noble goals rooted in tackling serious social problems. It has since been hijacked by the far-left. Anyone who doubts that should look at the British website UKBLM raising large sums of money for the campaign and advocating (on the read more section) the dismantling of capitalism and the abolition of the police.

In this way, just as, historically, many scoundrels wrapped themselves in the Union flag, today the catch-all mantra of anti-racism and anti-fascism is being deployed to mask a totalitarian agenda.

Troublingly, most mainstream politicians with very few exceptions appear too terrified to point any of this out. The Prime Minister had a modest go at speaking out on Friday, on Twitter. But he and his colleagues will have to go much, much further. They must make the case clearly in defence of the rule of law, democracy and civic order.

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Black Lives Matter campaign has been hijacked by extremists - Reaction

The one night of glory model has a really strong tradition in stories about teenagers. I thought about movies like Dazed and Confused and Cant Hardly Wait and Detroit Rock City, where the narrowed scope of the narrative reflects the compressed horizon and pressurized emotion of the characters. As a 15-year-oldand, okay, as a 20-something, and beyondI often couldnt see past my immediate circumstances, and the structure of the story reflects that blinkered outlook. Theres an urgency when youre a teenager, experiencing things for the first time, that you cant really get back, and I wanted to capture that.

Gebremedhin: Right, this is a coming-of-age story. Paul, the narrator, describes his efforts to have the best night of my life, to do whatever thing would change me forever. He understands that he is standing at the brink of some great shift, from which there will be no return. How does punk music inform this theme?

Martin: Punk can be about a lot of things, and the bands in the storyranging in approach from Clash-inspired political agitprop to the romantic angst of emo to the nihilism of New York hardcorereflect a small segment of what the music can represent. But they all share a common goal of catharsis, of moving the listener to transcend his or her malaise, anger, whatever through movement and action. Like most teenagers, Paul doesnt really know what he wants to change into; he just knows that he wants to change. Punk provides a kind of perfect buffet of opportunities to imagine yourself different than you really aremore engaged, more angry, more heartbroken. And it also gives you this sort of vision of utopia, where violence can be channeled into community in this unexpected way.

Gebremedhin: Are there any inherent challenges when writing about music? For instance, whats it like to try to describe a song? Who are the great practitioners of fiction when it comes to music writing?

Martin: I do think its hard to convey what a songor a painting, or a filmis like without having any direct experience of it. But I think what fiction or criticism can do is create an alternative version of the thing being described, one that is filtered through the sensibility of the writer to become something else. The story name-checks the critic Greil Marcus, whose books introduced me to a lot of the music I loved in high school. (I realize this makes me sound like Im 100 years old, or from another planet, but its true!) Theres an incredible description Marcus wrote of Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart, that made me a huge Stewart fan (I mean, of his stuff up until, like, 1973). I think if you can make a punk-obsessed teen in 2001 love Rod Stewart, youre doing something pretty impressive.

As far as fiction writers go, Proust is probably the world champion in describing musical performances (and paintings, and sexual jealousy, and ). David Gates is no slouch, either. You havent really heard Straight Outta Compton until youve heard it through the ears of his character Willis in Preston Falls, blazing down the road in his truck toward another terrible decision.

Original post:

Andrew Martin on the Coming-of-Age Story - The Atlantic

Philip K. Howard, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET June 8, 2020 | Updated 11:09 a.m. ET June 11, 2020

The doctrine of qualified immunity has been used to protect police from civil lawsuits and trials. Here's why it was put in place. USA TODAY

The tendency is to view accountability as a matter of fairness to the particular person,butwhats at stake is the health ofour publicculture.

Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin,arrestedlast week forthe death ofGeorge Floyd,should have been removed long ago from policing duties. Hehad18 complaints over his19-year tenure. Onlytwo resulted in discipline, but the union rules protecting police make it almost impossible to hold officers accountableevenfor extrememisconduct.

Chauvinhas nowbeen indicted for murder, buthis apparent killing of George Floyd is seen bymanynot as an isolated crime but asevidence of systematic police abuse. Minneapolis, like most cities, hasa poor record of holding police accountable. Out of 2,600 complaints since 2012,only 12 resulted in an officer being disciplined. The most severe penalty was a suspension for 40 hours.

The fact that three of Chauvins colleagues, themselves now indicted,watched as Floyd choked to deathis alsoan indictment of police culture.

In a show of peace and solidarity, law enforcement officials with riot shields take a knee in front of protesters on June 1, 2020, in Atlanta, during a fourth day of protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (Photo: Curtis Compton, Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Theprotests andriots show what happens when large segments of the populationbelieve the deck is stacked against them.Distrust of government leads to corrosion of civil society.The opportunistic looting across the country isindefensible, but itsrationalizedby the logic of nihilism: If police wont follow norms of civilized behavior, then neitherwillwe.

Civil rights leaders have called foranational reckoning to end racism in America. But theunaccountability of bad cops is caused by a factorlargelyunrelated to racism.

The lack of accountability, according toa Reuters report in 2017, islargelydictated by police union contracts. The standard for discipline isbasicallyharder than for a criminal conviction.

Anofficer in Columbus Ohio was accused of brutally beatinga black college student who was sitting on a bench with friends, for the alleged crime of drinking a beer in public. That officer had been the subject of 40complaints for misconduct, but Reuters found that, like most bad officers, he could not be dismissed. Why? Union contracts require that prior complaints be expunged from the record, in some jurisdictions after a few months, so it is practically impossible to terminate repeat offenders.

Union leaders argue that the rulessimplymake sure that due process is given to the officers. Something is obviously wrong with this reasoning:Police officers invoke their rights to get away with violating the rights of citizens. Due process ismeantto protect against abuses of state power by police and other state agents not to protect police when they abuse their power.

Theclash of rights meansthataccountability is basically nonexistent.This is not just a problem with police, but throughout government. A 2016 Government Accountability Officereport found that more than99% of federal employeesreceived a fully successful rating.

Democracy issupposed to be amechanism for public accountability, butdemocracycantfunction if the links in the chain are broken. We elect governors and mayors, but they have no effective control over police, schools or other public institutions.

The organizational flaw hereboils down to confusion betweenlibertyand responsibility. Police and other public employees have an affirmative responsibility to serve the public effectively. They must beaccountable not by the standards of a criminal trial, but for meeting a much higher standard of public stewardship. It is the job of supervisors to make these judgments.

Theconfusion wassownby the Supreme Courtinthe heyday of Vietnam protests, when the court held that public jobs were akin to a property rightand could not be removed without due process. Although the court went out of its way to say that the process could be minimal, due process is a slippery slope.

Due processputstheburdenof proofon the supervisor. Fellow workers describe Chauvin as tightly wound, which is not a good character trait for a cop with a loaded gun. But how does his supervisor prove in a legal hearing that he shouldnt be a cop?

The tendency is to view accountability as a matter of fairness to the particular person,butwhats at stake is the health ofour publicculture. The harmof no accountabilityis far greater than a few bad apples.

Here are a few of thedestructiveeffects:

Loss of public trust, as seen in the last week, can lead to a breakdown of civil order.

No accountability is likeMiracle-Grofor bureaucracy. When people cant be accountable, they find soon themselves wallowing in red tape dictating exactly how to do things. Rules replace norms. Compliance replaces accomplishment.

Publicservice, and especially police work, shouldbe a source ofpride and honor,but the absence ofaccountabilityleads instead tocynicism and disrespect. AVolcker Commission report on federal civil servicein 2003 founddeep resentmentat the protections provided to those poor performers among them who impede their own work and drag down the reputation of all government workers.

Safeguards against unfairaccountability can readily be provided for example, by giving veto power to apeercommittee. But supervisors cannot be put to the proof in a legal proceeding. How do you prove who doesnt try hard, or lacks good judgment or is too tightly wound?

Accountability is not the only change needed to revive trust inAmerican government. Leaders too must be trustworthy. The institutions they lead must display fidelity to accepted norms not only avoiding abuses of authority, butgenerally striving to be fair, truthful and committed to the common good.

Whats needed isa new social contract with public employees. Instead of abulletproofsinecure, the coreorganizingprinciplemustbeaccountabilityfor the public good.

We will not have public trust without it.

Philip K. Howard is founder ofCommon Good. His latest book is"Try Common Sense."Follow him on Twitter: @PhilipKHoward

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Public trust in police is fractured. Here's how to fix it. - USA TODAY

Ending Explainedis a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old.

How do you like your action? Peppered with chipper, cheeky one-liners or caked in hot piss, mud, and blood? If youre looking to let off some steam with a bit of nonsensical but cheery Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi silliness, its best to rent The Running Man. If you want to stew in filth and let your anger percolate as Edgar Ramrez brutalizes and gets brutalized, go ahead and press play on Netflixs The Last Days of American Crime.

Based on the graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini, the film is directed by Olivier Megaton, who made his bones breaking Liam Neesons with the Taken sequels, and its a grim saga of a near-future on the verge of an apocalypse a.k.a. a world just a few steps ahead of the one we currently occupy. As the government prepares to launch the American Peace Initiative (API), which is a mysterious signal capable of suppressing all criminal thought, the citizens take to the streets for one last purge of death and destruction.

The final week of debauchery mostly amounts to various acts of looting and bare-breasted cartop dancing, but for Ramrezs Graham Bricke, its an opportunity to pull off one last score. What should be a simple excuse for criminal-on-criminal ultraviolence is instead muddied by the APIs presence. Where there is a mind-altering radio wave, there will also be plenty of bait and switch and confusion.

Brickehas lost the thrill of the hunt. His brother Rory (Daniel Fox) killed himself in prison, and the loss transformed Brickeinto a lumbering morose sack of frowns. Hes reenergized after he hooks up with Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster) in the bathroom of a hellish dive bar. Brickes enthusiasm strengthens even further once Duprees scuzzball psycho lover Kevin Cash(Michael Pitt) reveals that Rory was beaten to death by prison guards while he watched. If Brickewants revenge on the system, he should join Cash in knocking over the governments money factory where bills are made and destroyed.

All is well and good until Cash turns his shotgun on Brickeand blasts a hole in his belly. Why? Rory did not kill himself, and he was not beaten bloody by prison guards. Instead, Cash tells Bricke that it was he who ended his little brothers life. In the process of ceasing Rorys motor functions, Cash discovered nihilism: the sweet bliss of nothing meaning anything.

The philosophy is Cashs golden rule, and it allows him to bypass the API. His concrete unbelief makes him invincible to the governments mind games. However, it does not make his skin impenetrable to bullets. Cash is wiped from the board by a barrage of FBI sniper fire, leaving Bricketo fend for himself under the spell of the API.

Ah, but the thug has one last trick up his sleeve. Earlier in the film, Bricke bought an extremely intense, nondescript drug from some punk at the same bar he scored with Dupree. Remembering the warnings of his dealer, Brickeconsumes the whole dose, which fries his brain and allows him to operate free of the API, and he slaughters the FBI agents while theyre gloating their victory.

So, Cash defeated the API via nihilism. Bricke bypassed it through narcotics. How does Dupree release herself? She doesnt. Shes merely lucky.

While Cash, Bricke, and the FBI come to Jesus, Dupree is battling the grabby hands of Officer Sawyer (Sharlto Copley), who can commit all the heinous acts he wants thanks to an inhibitor chip implanted in his brain. In a film already bursting with Deus Ex Machinas, Dupree is rescued when the two wrestle off a table, and Sawyers neck falls upon a metal shard.

Dupree explodes the API building, meets up with a gutshot, drugged-out Bricke, and the two flee to Canada. The land of hockey, maple syrup, and free healthcare offers sanctuary, but Bricke wont live to see it. He expires in Duprees truck shortly after crossing the border. She could do nothing for him, but the least she can do is spread Rorys ashes in an unpolluted lake.

For a film centered on a technological transmission worthy of George Orwells ire, The Last Days of American Crime cares very little about its sci-fi trappings. The hows and whys dont matter. Cashs philosophical workaround is given a ten-minute showcase to explain how he beat the beam, but without the aid of the rewind button, its easy to miss Brickes brain damage bypass. Drugs arent all that bad, kids.

With a two and a half hour runtime, Olivier Megaton has plenty of space to delve into the science fiction, but he would rather wallow in car chases tangential to the narrative and family squabbles with hints of incest. The Last Days of American Crime is a miserable foray into banality. The flick is convoluted and seemingly infinite in length.

Remove the API from the plot, and not much would differ. In fact, its absence would free the script of its puzzlement. If all you wanted to deliver was Edgar Ramrez chopping his way through chumps just a little more deplorable than he is, then why even dabble in the extraordinary?

The API is a distraction. While its easily the most interesting aspect of the film, the script just barely bothers to acknowledge its mechanics. Megaton wants his Children of Men, but in posturing significance, he cant even deliver his take on The Running Man. The Last Days of American Crime ultimately amounts to nothing more than the latest Netflix dump.

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The Ending of The Last Days of American Crime Explained - Film School Rejects