Zero Patience (1993)

The surreal and the supernatural join forces in this extremely unusual "AIDS musical." The story features the ghost of the French-Canadian airline steward (played by Normand Fauteux) who, according to And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts' book about the AIDS epidemic, was the origin of one of the largest outbreaks of HIV. Known as "Patient Zero" by the Centers for Disease Control, the handsome and promiscuous steward was basically the "Typhoid Mary" of the AIDS phenomenon. In the story, Patient Zero comes back from limbo as a ghost to see his friends suffering from the syndrome: some dying, the rest protesting at ACT-UP rallies. He realizes that his memory has been vilified as the extremely promiscuous source of all this suffering. However, it is only when he becomes aware of an exhibit being prepared at the Toronto Natural History Museum, one which singles him out yet again as the villain, that he becomes aware that the exhibit's curator is an unusual being in his own right. In fact, the show is being put together the famous nineteenth-century explorer of the upper Nile, Sir Richard Burton (John Robinson), inexplicably still living, working at the museum, and filled with misguided homophobia. Though no one else can see Zero, Burton can, and eventually the two become lovers and the ancient explorer comes to view "Patient Zero" as "the heroic slut who inspired safe sex." Musical numbers include a high-camp underwater ballet production of Tell Me The Story of My Life. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 100 mins
Zero Patience (1993)

Quite the hilarious campy movie for adults only. The general dialogue should make this an R at least especially the two anuses singing. The musical numbers is what made this film enjoyable for myself even if the filming was very amateurish and not fluid especially with the Act-Up meeting.

Homoeroticism to the extreme!

The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

One of Luis Buñuel's most episodic films, The Phantom of Liberty focuses on no one particular narrative. In the beginning, a man sells postcards of French tourist attractions, calling them "pornographic." A sniper in Montparnasse is hailed as a hero for killing passersby. A "missing" child helps the police fill out the report on her. A group of monks play poker, using religious medallions as chips, and in the most infamous sequence, a formally dressed social group gathers at toilets around a table, occasionally excusing themselves to go into little stalls in a private room to eat. ~ John Voorhees, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 104 mins
The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Technically it seems it should be episodic or not and thus "most" is inappropriate as a adjective in this case. I missed the parts on the "pornographic" postcards, but at one time the small girl gets some pictures of buildings and the parents go through them tearing up the ones they consider in bad taste, i.e. pornographic. Dirty minds find dirty things.

I also missed the monks poker chips, but it was already obvious that the director was having fun with their immodest behavior. As they already were drinking and smoking like chimneys while gambling. But the funny aspect was that they suddenly were offended when one couple in the bed and breakfast got out a whip and the male was being whipped on the bare butt. They both went into the restroom to change-private bath where others shared a common one.

So in one way it was funny that defecating in public was acceptable but eating required a separate room that could be locked. But this was a far cry from the jacket cover as to how funny this film could have been. Some of the "jokes" could have been told in a lot less time. Like the child that was missing in school but then on roll call she says here and then they still proceed to do an investigation for like 18 months.

Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Bunuel's surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of non sequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Bunuel throughout his career-from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.

Not really demolished and not really bourgeois as do any culture consider excrement as a form of social interaction and eating as something to shun in public?

In hind sight maybe many of the social arrangements are indeed arbitrary but then the analysis would be apolitical and ahistorical. Basically the film had some funny moments including the very perverse nephew that wants to see his aunt naked and at one time tells someone else she is his mother. After much coaxing we get to see the aunt and that was funny enough to see the movie. But overall I could not rate it more than a 2.

When I think back today, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty, which were three original screenplays, seem to form a kind of trilogy, or rather a triptych, as in the Middle Ages. All three have the same themes, sometimes even the same lines; all evoke the search for truth, and the need to flee that truth once we think we’ve found it, and the implacable nature of social rituals. And all deal with the indispensable quest for chance, personal ethics, and the sense of mystery which must be respected.

That was from the introduction to the interview entitled: BUÑUEL ON “THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY”. The library version had a pamphlet which included the interview and also a longer review of the film at The Phantom of Liberty: The Serpentine Movements of Chance By Gary Indiana. Still keeping my rating low for this film but with the variety of information about the ideas behind the film, I will schedule to watch the other two. The purpose more of a thought experiment and research.

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)

It is refreshing to watch a film that just explains the situation instead of paranoid logic being used. It also appears to be honest by mentioning that yes Sulfur Dioxide (Nitrogen Oxides) would increase under EV (Electric Vehicle) cars. Although one of the deleted scenes was an excerpt of the tearing out of electric streetcars by GM.

One of the deleted scenes was a delightful interview with two African American women {Colette and J. Karen}. They describe how the younger one volunteered to be arrested in trying to block the transport vehicles taking away the EVs. If I was as desperate as they were, I think I would have refused to bring it back, just claim it was stolen and hide it out somewhere. She also gives a funny anecdote of how people now plug in their phones before taking them around with them each day. And yes that is a flimsy excuse for not buying an EV to be bothered with plugging it in. Alhtough working at Radio Shack, I have seen enough times that batteries do not last as long as they are suppose or give a short use time.

Filmmaker Chris Payne explores the many factors that played into the ultimate failure of the electric car to catch on with consumers, even as gas prices began to skyrocket, in a thoughtful meditation on the increasingly important role that renewable energy plays in modern society. Introduced as a means of providing an alternative to increasing oil consumption and reducing pollution in 1996, the electric car was all but a forgotten memory only a decade later -- but why? Though interviews with consumer advocacy experts, automotive industry experts, and oil industry heavyweights, Payne paints a though-provoking picture of a culture whose aversion to change and reliance on dwindling resources may be rooted in the financial concerns of a wealthy few, and may also be leading consumers down a troubling path. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide


Theatrical Feature Running Time: 93 mins
Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)

Special Features:
Deleted scenes as some are mentioned above.
Jump starting the future, which gives a positive message about the future and that steps are being made even if not the grand schemes as before {i.e. hybrids}.
Meeky Rosie video with some scene shots from the movie.
And a quite a few previews of other movies.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.
...
War, the breeder of hate.
That's for sure. Just think in a few years after this movie was made, WWI ended and the hating began. I thought it was interesting that Lincoln actually comes off as sort of benevolent toward the South (after the war) as depicted until his untimely death that they reenact with historical precision as the inter-titles tell us. John Wilkes Booth shouts out: "Sic semper tyrannis!"Sic semper tyrannis

The most successful and artistically advanced film of its time, The Birth of a Nation has also sparked protests, riots, and divisiveness since its first release. The film tells the story of the Civil War and its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of two families. The Stonemans hail from the North, the Camerons from the South. When war breaks out, the Stonemans cast their lot with the Union, while the Camerons are loyal to Dixie. After the war, Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), distressed that his beloved south is now under the rule of blacks and carpetbaggers, organizes several like-minded Southerners into a secret vigilante group called the Ku Klux Klan. When Cameron's beloved younger sister Flora (Mae Marsh) leaps to her death rather than surrender to the lustful advances of renegade slave Gus (Walter Long), the Klan wages war on the new Northern-inspired government and ultimately restores "order" to the South. In the original prints, Griffith suggested that the black population be shipped to Liberia, citing Abraham Lincoln as the inspiration for this ethnic cleansing. Showings of Birth of a Nation were picketed and boycotted from the start, and as recently as 1995, Turner Classic Movies cancelled a showing of a restored print in the wake of the racial tensions around the O.J. Simpson trial verdict. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 187 mins
The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Woodrow Wilson's/"History of the American People":
"...Adventures swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of the one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes...In the villages the Negores were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences."
"...The policy of the congressional leaders wrought...a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South...in their determination to 'put the white South under the heel of the black South'"
...
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation...until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."

For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor we should not grieve that shy found sweeter the opal gates of death.

The only special feature is a documentary commentary by David Shepard entitled "The Making of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1993 by Film Preservation Associates.

In 1915 the Supreme Court gave States and local municipalities the right to enact "prior restraint" and censorship of motion pictures, when it wrote that,

"The exhibition of motion pictures is a business pure and simple, not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion, they are mere representations of events of ideas and sentiments published and known, vivid, useful and entertaining no doubt. But as we have said, capable of evil having power for the greater because of the attractiveness and manner of exhibition."

Obviously a racist piece of propaganda as a portrayal of Negroes, but shows a period of deep racial divide that even 50 years after the Civil War still felt a lot of animosity in the country.

Judge Tourgee fo the carpet-baggers.

One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern (2005)

"Access of Evil"
-Amy Goodman
Oh boy, I have to say that a film that has special features like an interview with Amy Goodman has to be in my all time favorite category...NOT!
My word, she can not see anything beyond hating the USA. When you have to emphasize the thousands that died under Pinochet, you really have no idea of what real genocide/democide is, just watch S21 to get an idea. That one location had 17,000, which is more than the 10,000 for all of the 17 years of Pinochet.

So she wants to have a trial for all USA leaders, but strangely does not want to mention Clinton (air war) or Carter. And she so magnanimously said OBL should be tried also. Which allows her to equate and equalize leaders that have been elected with jihadists that want to cut off people's heads.

Brave people only vote in Haiti and East Timor, but please do not mention Iraq or Afghanistan or the former Yugoslavia...

"The old guard needs to be thrown out." Well strange if they got elected then what can Amy complain about. I am positive that she considers democracy as only things that support her points of view. This seems evident when she says we have only a right wing and a far right wing party. She has no idea how many consider Bush not even that conservative...

In the spring and summer of 1972, George McGovern, a Democratic senator from South Dakota, achieved the seemingly impossible. Backed by a motley collection of Prairie populists, old-school liberals, and young people disenchanted with the war in Vietnam, McGovern overwhelmed longtime party favorites such as Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. However, McGovern's triumph proved to be short-lived; after his initial running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was revealed to have a history of mental illness, the McGovern campaign went into a tailspin from which it would never recover, with the incumbent Richard Nixon winning the 1972 election by a landslide. However, McGovern's campaign is still remembered by many as one of the last examples of a candidate truly triumphing through the will of the people rather than working the party political machine, and given the scandalous downfall of Nixon following his re-election, many have wondered what America would be like today if McGovern, once described by Robert F. Kennedy as "the most decent man in the Senate," had won. One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern is a documentary which looks back at the McGovern campaign and explores what went right, what went wrong, and what was McGovern's true legacy. The film includes interviews with Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Gary Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Warren Beatty, Gore Vidal, Ron Kovic, and McGovern himself. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Good morning Vietnam!
I have not watched it all yet, but if I go mad over the next two hours of hearing Amy Goodman dialog this film, I will know why. It seems to be nothing more than one long winded diatribe of USA hatred.

Can you imagine if McGovern had become President? Can you imagine a world without Watergate, without yellow ribbons, without Madison Avenue induced Patriotism,? Can you imagine that wasn't hungry?

LOL, funny. So yes no Watergate, so what? Life went on. Yellow ribbons, the war was still going on and thus to assume that is foolish. Maybe fewer ribbons but probably more boat people and Pol Pot had more time in the killing fields. Madison only feeds on people buying stuff, so not likely anyone could control that. And a world without hunger, is he serious? Unless McGovern was godlike that is an impossibility.

Ohhhh those Democrats, they saw themselves as the real people, dressed for work. The Republicans ,of course, saw them as a rabble dressed for trouble.
The Republicans didn't spend their time milling around in hotel lobbies arguing about women's rights and having black caucuses. I'll tell you that. Many of them spent their afternoons on Yachts.

How many are many? Boy I love that colorful piece of propaganda.

Don't change Dicks
In the Middle of a Screw
Vote for Nixon in '72

The Southern Strategy

General elections generally go to the man who can portray his hatred of black people in the most tactful way so he can't be caught. And they (Republicans) were masters.

...

Nixon's interpretation of the souther strategy was blatantly racist.

Boy what a dastardly thing for Nixon to end an unpopular war to win the elections. Instead of glorifying the win over the Hawks it is better to curse the sky.

List of accomplices:
Warren Beatty
Gloria Steinem
Gore Vidal
Howard Zinn
Gary Hart