"Bent": 1997 concentration camp film focuses on Nazi treatment of gay men, based on Martin Sherman's play

I saw the 1997 film “Bent” (Film Movement and Samuel Goldwyn), directed by Sean Mathias, based on the 1979 play by Martin Sherman, in Minneapolis shortly after I had moved there.  I may have seen it in the Bell Auditorium at the University of Minnesota.

On the late 1930s in Germany, Max (Clive Owen), takes home a Nazi stormtrooper posing as a gay trick, to the chagrin of his boyfriend.

He is taken to Dachau, does the work details and befriends another prisoner but “chooses” to wear the yellow star for Jews rather than a pink triangle.

The initial processing scene is quite striking.  Not only is Max’s head shaved (no surprise) but his wad of chest hair is loped off in camera like it as an afterthought.

The playwright wrote the script, and the film often looks like a filmed stage play.

P.D. wikipedia credit for Dachau image. 

"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". 

"There's No Purple Light" (not a feature classic film)

“There’s No Purple Light”  This should not be confused with Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” from 1985 with Whoopi Goldberg, which we can come back to another time. There is a certain correspondence.  

This little short explains the color wheel, and why there is no purple light, even though we can see a color purple as next to red on color wheel.

It has to do with combined signals of rods and cones.

It also has to do with primary colors for paint, compared to mixing light.

"NYC, 1981: A Most Violent Year", as Reaganism started

“New York City, 1981: A Most Violent Year”, from A24 films (6 minute short).

In 1980, John Lennon had been killed near the Dakota.

In 1981, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to be noticed.

A black man describes witnessing a kidnapping and then being kidnapped himself in the same convenience store one week later.  He resisted. The bullet is still at the base of his spine.

"The Capitalist Agenda" (and rejecting it for "fun and profit", maybe)

For the sake of journalism, I’ll present American Johnson’s “The Capitalist Agenda” (or “Here’s Wht Capitalism S___ and Why It Needs to End”, as an animated short (in a series).

It’s on his “NonCompete” channel.

He explains how capitalism replaced feudalism and how that did give the underclasses a new chance.

But only a few people get a chance to make it if they’re not already rich.

He also tries to debunk meritocracy.

You have to watch further videos to find out how to replace it.

Umair Haque seems to want to go back to a system of guilds.  So much for self-publishing.

No matter how good you are at your own goals, if you are seen as an enemy merely because of capitalism, you can be destroyed, he seems to be warning.  I’ve seen this threatening posture by the far Left before.  Except that this channel wants to “reject capitalism for fun and profit”.  That sounds like an oxymoron. 

Try this article from John Nichols in The Nation, when socialism "worked', if you like. 

"Just Role With It": When is an actor in a gay scene transformed by the experience?

“Just Role With It” is an R-rated gay short film (so I won’t embed it) where an actor is practicing his lines for a play where he loses his girl friend.  Here’s the link (Helix Studios, and the video resolution quality is finally better than for some of their earlier videos).

  

His best male friend comes over, and suddenly really “becomes” that other character.

 Some people have really been transformed by the characters they acted, as this documentary short shows.  (No, really, please don't model your behavior after cigarette smoking in older films; O want your body to stay biologically young forever.) 

Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell did a video where he tries drag at a dance party in West Hollywood (see the LGBT blog March 31), where the challenge is not to be changed by the “acting” experience.  (Was it at The Abbey?  That's the bar I remember well.) 

      

What if a virus could transmit your identity and consciousness temporarily to somebody else?  The picture above poses the question (UFO's). 

"10 Types of Physics Majors" on April Fools Day

Here’s an April Fools short, “10 Types of Physics Majors”. The film calls itself a “Joke”.

The same stereotypically manly handsome actor plays both professor and student. He looks familiar.

I like the way they throw around the idea if string theory as an answer to everything.

  

This video reminds me of asking a professor about the idea of pursuing a PhD in computer science and not knowing what an index register is (back in the 1960s).