It’s one thing to question authority and official explanations of highly public events; it’s something else entirely to portray them in a wholly falsified light, especially when done so in a ridiculing manner that causes tremendous personal pain. Such is what happened when conspiracy theorist broadcaster Alex Jones fanatically contended that the December 2012 mass shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School was a staged false flag event.
Finding meaning and purpose in life can be a long and solitary journey, especially if one doesn’t know how or where to look. So it is for a single, lonely thirtysomething seeker (Le Phong Vu) living in Saigon after moving there from his rural mountain village after most of his family emigrates to America. He feels empty and lost as he looks for a suitable path to follow, but nothing turns up, leaving him increasingly adrift and unfulfilled.
Providing care, comfort and compassion to the world’s downtrodden is undoubtedly a noble, if exhausting and often-frustrating, cause, especially when pleas for help go ignored or fall on deaf ears. Yet, every so often, someone comes along who tirelessly keeps on fighting for those less fortunate, as was the case with Italian immigrant Mother Francesca Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna).
For some of us, there’s no stopping when it comes to seeing through on a mission of vital importance. So it was in 1938, when a dedicated English stockbroker selflessly enabled the successful escape of 669 children (mostly Jewish) from Prague not long after the Third Reich “annexed” Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region, the first step toward Germany’s invasion of the country and the eventual onset of World War II.
How far are you willing to go in realizing your ambitions? Would you be willing to make big sacrifices? Associate with shady beings? Sell your soul? Those are among the possibilities raised in the latest hair-raising smart horror/comedy from the writing-directing duo of Cameron and Colin Cairnes.
According to official estimates, a woman in India is raped every 20 minutes, and roughly 90% of those incidents go unreported, despite strengthened legal protections that have been put into place. Police investigations seldom achieve much, either, especially since residents in many communities (particularly in rural areas) prefer to handle such episodes among themselves without outside official intervention, a means to avoid bringing undue attention to such troubling circumstances and the attendant shame that accompanies them. However, in 2017 in eastern India, a courageous father whose 13-year-old daughter was brutally assaulted and subsequently beaten by three men chose to pursue the matter legally in court.
Films that feel like they’re “reaching” in their attempts to make a statement can result in a frustrating watch, as is very much the case with the latest from acclaimed writer-director Wim Wenders. This character study about the life of a middle-aged public toilet cleaner in Tokyo (Koji Yakusho) follows him through his virtually unchanging daily routine of working, reading and taking nearly identical photos of trees. Even though there are minor differences in the events of his day-to-day life, much of his schedule is relentlessly the same, a comfortable yet mundane pattern that’s cinematically repeated endlessly (and one can imagine what that does for holding viewer interest).
Those who believe that institutionalized systemic racism is fundamentally an American problem should probably give a serious look to this latest offering from writer-director Ava DuVernay, best known for the superb historical drama, “Selma” (2014). Based on the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson, the film examines how organic prejudices are actually a worldwide phenomenon.
Given the blatantly self-serving attempts at spin, unrepentant obfuscation and outright lying that we see so much of these days coming from officialdom, big business and the media, it’s no wonder that so many of us have become fed up with such brazenly untruthful tactics. And that’s not just activists and advocates saying this – it’s a growing sentiment from everyday citizens who’ve tired of the practice of unbridled deliberate deception.
Isn’t it amazing how failures can often lead to unexpected successes? Those missteps frequently have a way of opening meaningful doors, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the time they occur. But how readily are we aware that such developments can occur?
