Avengers: Infinity War Official Trailer

"There was an idea…" Avengers: Infinity War. In theaters May 4th.

Wonder Woman Comic Con Trailer

From Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Entertainment comes the epic action adventure starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright. In theaters June 2017.

How To Watch 'The Big Short,' 'Making A Murderer' And 'Concussion' Without Losing Your Mind

By Lauren Duca

 

Tales of real-life corruption and evil bureaucracy are hot entertainment — and infuriating to watch.

 

Pop culture is drenched in bureaucratic corruption right now. Between “Making a Murderer,” “Concussion” and “The Big Short,” we have three portraits of flawed institutions, seemingly lacking in a clear villain. None point to a single figure responsible for the unethical nonsense on display.

Instead, in each distinct yet eerily similar story, it’s clear that unquestioning cooperation is required for corruption to prosper. It takes a village to induce depravity.

First off, we have “Making a Murderer,” which presents a police force so irrationally hellbent on putting a man away for a crime, they practically brainwash themselves into believing their suspect is guilty. It’s worth noting that there’s certainly an alternative way of presenting the content of Stephen Avery’s trial. Like most documentaries, “Making a Murderer” has a clear opinion that it doesn’t work to obscure. Still, in the effort of proving Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were framed for the murder of Teresa Halbach, the potential for unethical behavior quickly spans the Manitowac County hierarchy. From Lt. James Lenk to prosecutor and “Fraggle Rock” monster Ken Kratz or Dassey’s own lawyer Len Kachinsky, few hands are left clean. In order to simplify things for the jury, the defense would like to argue that one or two people could have planted the pieces necessary to convict Avery. Perhaps they’re right. But, as the case unfolds, we see a system built on unethical practices like coercing testimony and concealing evidence. It’s little wrongdoings from a laundry list of people that add up to a sentencing that will more than likely rob a man of his life.

In “Concussion,” a similar phenomenon is at play. In light of Dr. Bennet Omalu’s discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the National Football League convinces itself that its precious hobby is not dangerous to its players (or, depending on your level of cynicism, deliberately covers up the fact that it is). Since “Concussion” is a dramatization of real-life events unlike “Making a Murderer,” there was certainly more of an opportunity to send up a clear antagonist. Yet, while NFL chairman Roger Goodell leads the public charge against Omalu’s condemning findings, it is clear that the effort to conceal the possible side effects of the sport straddles the business of football in its entirety. Press reps, suits and the doctors they hire are all partially responsible for allowing the condition to remain hidden. This is not Goodell huddling up employees and telling them to keep quiet about evidence of CTE; it’s a system of people each doing their small part to prevent Omalu from disrupting the status quo, if only by staying quiet.

Structural corruption is at its most brazen in “The Big Short.” The film reveals crookedness so far-reaching it extends through entire companies, ultimately poisoning the whole of the American banking system. It’s tough to explain the way the housing market falls apart (and Adam McKay goes out of his way to simplify things, recruiting Anthony Bourdain and Margot Robbie in a bathtub to break it all down). Put most simply, by the end of the film it’s clear the banks likely knew mortgages would fail and didn’t bother to fix things, assuming the taxpayers would bail them out. As Steve Carell’s character puts it, creasing his brow into the depths of his dramatic role, “They knew, they just didn’t care.” The “they” in that simple statement hits on how entrenched and far-reaching the issues lie. Again, it’s not some awful, mustachioed CEO directing his company to destroy the lives of millions of Americans, because “Muahaha, profit anyway.” It’s an industry holistically complicit in accepting crookedness as the way business that is done.

Finishing “Making a Murderer” or leaving the theater after “Concussion” or “The Big Short,” the questions of “who’s responsible?” and “how could they let this happen?” linger. The knee-jerk reaction looks to the dark psychology of authority, the banality of cogs in the machine following orders, but there’s no Hitler stand-in in any of the three stories. Rather, we see a structural lack of ethics built on the sum total of individual ethical infractions. Each scenario seems like an implausibly malicious case, leading to false imprisonment, fatal injuries or our country’s near-financial ruin, but lining them up reveals more mundane forces fueling the devastation. And so, the question turns to our own culpability. In order to watch each film without descending into despair, we have to look at how the portraits of corruption they reveal reflect back on ourselves. We are all susceptible to the phenomenon we see on-screen. These are often perfectly “normal,” often boring people, going about their day without asking questions. The takeaway should be that there is not always going to be a horned creature demanding you “do your job.” We all play a role in the systems that allow for these horrors, sometimes just by letting things be. In Manitowoc County, the NFL, Wall Street and far outside the boundaries of each, evil can be as simple as going with the flow.

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Scientology Cultists Will Hate This Movie, So Be Sure To Watch It

By Karoli



Mark your calendars for March 16th and tune into HBO. You don't have to have a cable subscription to watch, now that HBO offers subscriptions delivered to your tablet or phone. And you will want to tune in, to see Alex Gibney's new film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
Huffington Post:

Even if you've read Lawrence Wright's book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief on which the film is based, Gibney's adaptation is an eye-opening and transformative experience. The difference between reading about Scientology's bizarre principles and seeing them up on-screen, spelled out in an easily digestible and visually exciting way is profound. The film is eerily entertaining and even funny at times, that is, until you catch yourself and remember how many lives have been ruined in the name of these far-fetched science fiction concepts.

As you might imagine, the Elron devotees are lining up a veritable parade of PR attacks on Gibney and his film:

The Church of Scientology took out advertisements in The New York Times on Jan. 16 comparing the documentary to Rolling Stone’s discredited story about campus rape—and now the Church is expanding its efforts online. A special report has been published on the Church’s Freedom website, and a new Twitter account, Freedom Media Ethics, is “taking a resolute stand against the broadcasting and publishing of false information.”
The Church claims Gibney only spoke to disgruntled former members—who they attempt to discredit one by one on the new site—and failed to allow itself to respond to the allegations in the film.

I'll bet those guys are the same ones who handle Republicans' public relations issues, too. I recognize that whole "attack the messenger" trope they're so famous for.

Personally, I cannot wait to see this. Alex Gibney is a stellar filmmaker, and it's about time this cult was shown for what it is -- a malevolent money machine.

"I don't give a fuck it's your house" - American Sniper's Failure

Posted By Rude One

The Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who  chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the innate good of the American soldier.

And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a documentary.

So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:

American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.

After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking order of the universe. This hypermasculine bullshit plays out, as it does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after 9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife, rinse, repeat for four tours.

Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in order to convey its simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up.

So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents. They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a fuck it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher." (Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear to Christ, "Biggles," like a fuckin' cat.) That family, the only "good" Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less, take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of course, he ends up dead.

Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.

It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.

And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.

American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone who would point it out. Shit, once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because Iraqis are trying to kill us, fuck if we care whose house it is.

At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and American flags.  No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us.  We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.

If You Think Selma’s Snubbing Is a Fluke, Think Again. The Oscars Have Stiffed Lots of Black Films

Movies like The Help, with white protagonists, get lots of recognition, while cinematic classics like Do the Right Thing and Lumumba don’t get their due.

By Peniel E. Joseph

David Oyelowo as Selma’s Martin Luther King Jr. talks to director Ava DuVernay. Courtesy of Paramout Pictures

Social media is abuzz with news that Ava DuVernay’s towering film Selma received only two Academy Award nominations, for best picture and best song. The best film ever made about the civil rights movement, Selma was shut out of nominations for best director and actor that seemed inevitable just weeks ago. And the popular Twitter hashtag #OscarSoWhite, which is trending now, tells us only part of the story.

This is not the first time the Oscars have snubbed a black filmmaker whose artistic achievements seem to be overwhelmed by a storm of political controversy.

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is rightly regarded as the director’s masterpiece, a scintillating meditation on American race relations that turned the summer of 1989 into a national conversation about racial conflicts simmering across the nation. Many in Hollywood, including actress Kim Basinger, who said as much during the 1990 Academy Award show, felt that Lee should have received a best director nomination, and the film nominated for best picture. Instead Lee was nominated, but did not win, for best original screenplay.

Three years later, Lee’s searing three-hour biopic, Malcolm X, was again shut out from the best picture and best director categories, although Denzel Washington did receive (but did not win) a best actor nomination.

A less-recognized and more recent slighting of a seminal black film is Raoul Peck’s woefully unrecognized Lumumba, which tells the story of Congolese prime minister and Pan-African icon Patrice Émery Lumumba, whose fight against colonialism influenced African-American leaders from Malcolm X to Amiri Baraka. Independently produced and helmed by a Haitian director, Lumumba features an electrifying performance by actor Eriq Ebouaney.

Selma is simply the latest black-directed masterpiece whose artistic integrity confronted the unapologetic racism of a film industry more comfortable with white fantasies of black life than the genuine article.

We live in a world where the 2012 film The Help, a fictionalized account of the civil rights era featuring actress Emma Stone as the Jackson, Miss., black community’s white savior, not only was nominated for four Oscars but also became a box office sensation, grossing $216 million worldwide.

Unfortunately for the brilliant and bold Ava DuVernay, many academy voters didn’t get the message that The Help was a work of fiction. Instead, as they watched Selma’s provocative and inspired blend of history and artistic integrity unfold, they waited. And waited. And waited. For the kind of white protagonist (read: hero) that enables white voters to identify with films presenting black subject matter. Even 12 Years a Slave provided white characters that allowed contemporary mainstream audiences to relate, even if simply through an act of personal revulsion that allowed 21st-century liberals a measure of moral superiority.

Selma offers no such embellishments.

Just the humbling experience of witnessing a period in American history when black folks stood at the cutting edge of a movement that was both morally specific and expansively universal. DuVernay’s camera does not avert its gaze from white violence or black resistance. Most important, she embraces, even takes as a given, the transcendent glory of African-American intelligence and self-determination. Black women and men, young and old, are portrayed as leaders, not victims; as strategists and tacticians, and not simply obedient followers of Martin Luther King Jr.

Selma’s purposely unglamorous depiction of a warts-and-all King offered a heartbreaking entree into the story of an icon and his wife whose images have become calcified to the point of being disfigured in our own time.

But it’s arguably the depiction of President Lyndon B. Johnson that sealed Selma’s Oscar fate.

DuVernay’s LBJ is presented as a wary ally of the movement; a man pulled by competing political interests who only grudgingly supported the voting-rights movement. This contrasts with the historical Johnson’s more robust support for civil rights, but did little to diminish the film’s artistic power and achievement. Yet the controversy over historical accuracy—one that largely escaped other prestige pictures, like American Sniper, Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, all also based on historical events, and that have been accused of taking literary license with history—focused squarely on Selma, the awards season’s lone film directed by a black woman.

If there’s a silver lining to all this talk of Oscar snubs, disrespect, sexism and racism, it’s that it will both inspire more people to see the film and inspire more black women and men to—following in DuVernay’s footsteps—dare to make films of such power and grace that they defy conventional standards of artistic and commercial success, even as they take black culture to new cinematic heights.

Peniel E. Joseph, a contributing editor at The Root, is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and a professor of history at Tufts University. He is the author of Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama and Stokely: A Life. Follow him on Twitter.

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