"Caged": in a European high school, a straight immigrant athlete learns to stand up for his gay friends

“Caged”, directed by Dylan and Lazlo Tonk, presents a group of high school students on athletic fields at a Netherlands school.  One of the men (immigrant, Poc) has to get used to the idea that at least two of his best friends are gay, despite dating girls. He has to learn to defend them.

The sports are track and soccer, and the title of the film refers to a wire structure where athletes practice soccer kicking skills.  The campus is a huge complex of modern low-rise buildings.

  

Wikipedia attribution link for Rotterdam picture, CCSA 3.0.

"No Country for Old Men", a very layered modern western from the Coen Brothers

Screenprism analyses (12 min) the Coen Brother’s film “No Country for Old Men” (2007, best picture, Miramax and Paramount Vantage), especially the abstract and ambiguous ending.

The sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is somewhat the alien spectator, as he relates what he sees to his wife (Tess Harper), the battle between the villain Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an ambiguous non-allegro hero.

The film suggests an internal time travel, where Bell changes places with his father, who idealized a simpler world.

The film was somewhat a modern western, set in the early 80s, just before modern tech.

  

The film is said to be faithful to the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

"The Color Purple": Spielberg

“The Color Purple”, directed by Steven Spielberg (1985) was an unusual film for this director. It told a personal story of a black girl growing up in the South in the early 1900s after abuse by her father (who made her pregnant).  It is based on a novel by Alice Walker with a screenplay by Menno Meyjas.

I can recall seeing it at Northpark in Dallas.  As I’ve gotten older, I seem to welcome this level of intimacy even more.

It would make actress Whoopi Goldberg a regular, as on the View.

  

This is a followup to the physics of the color purple.

"Cultural Marxism Explained" in filmstrip style

“Cultural Marxism Explained”, by Dr. Jordan Cooper, from July 2018. .

The video is in the style of a grade school filmstrip.

Cooper explains the history of Marxism, and then the development of the Frankfort School and Critical Theory.

He sees cultural Marxism as the attempt to redistribute wealth or opportunity strictly along to the idea of belonging to an oppressed group.  Christianity does reinforce helping the oppressed, but on a case-by-case basis. Until Christianity, he says, here was no coherent moral theory that it was important to help the poor or oppressed.

  

You can pay attention to opportunities for oppression on a much more individualized level (“pay your dues”).  You could, for example, restrict the use of inherited wealth much more than we do now. “Class” and “oppressed group” are not always the same.  I faced this kind of a problem as an individual after a career-ending layoff at the end of 2001 taking my turn with more regimented, menial jobs.  That is cultural Marxism at an individual level. 

"Brain Divided": an animated story about a split personality, with a real twist

“Brain Divided”, a CGI animated short (5 minutes) by Josiah Haworth, Joon Shik and Joon Soo, and the Ringling College of Art and Design, has an odd concept, about a split personality.

An alien with a split brain codes a program to make two abducted humans go on a "test" date inside their space colony – it’s heterosexual and has plenty of male chivalry. But the split personality within the alien mind (split between red and blue moral values) causes the same among the male human character.

  

An odd sci-fi concept indeed.  Remember “Donovan’s Brian” controlling the stock market (Lew Ayres) back in the early 1950s?

"Hunter Avallon Fails to Use Facts and Logic":

Suris has short films similar to yesterday’s, where he offers commentary on another (conservative’s) presentation.

  

This time is “Hunter Avallon Fails to Use Facts and Logic”.  There is an alternate title that is not too complementary. See the embed (well, "Who Knew?") 

Avallon attracted attention when he his channel was banned for part of the day April 8, one day before important House hearings on Internet content moderation. This 20-minute video was made April 9.

Most of this particular video deals with a lot of the canards (choice or lifestyle, etc).  Ar 4.16 Suris does respond to the apparent argument that people have a moral obligation to have children.

Suris does a nice job of destroying the usual stereotypes of LGBT persons (although they were already going away with Stonewall).

Here is a rationalWiki biography of Hunter.

"Why You Shouldn't Debate Leftists": an annotated response

“Why You Shouldn’t Debate Leftists: A Response to Prager U” from Vaush. This indeed a good meta-interview.

Interesting meta-video, responding to Owen Benjamin of Prager, who divides the world into “liberals and conservatives V THE LEFT.   Owen claims that the far Left has different aims, and wants to destroy current society with expropriation to invent their own egalitarian utopia. The Far Left wants America to be ashamed of its exploitations of PoC.

  

The response mentions that in the first half of the 19^th Century, all children were referred to as girls until about age 5, when boys began to behave like boys. I had never heard that.

The format of this film reminds me of the book "The Life of a Fact".