First Impressions
“Through dreaming you have the opportunity to tolerate some of the unchangeable hardships of life.” Abbas Kiarostami
Judging by what we are shown
Politicians and news reporting agencies are just another bunch of storytellers. Cinema makes us a better deal. It provides us the most factual history. Because it doesn’t rely on actual names or accounts to sharpen our sense of what is false and what is real.
Lesson in Leadership
What is the value of community? How is it won? Who benefits most? This film is a primer in grassroots activism. If we focus on the film like a blueprint for organization, it could be used to help talented but underprivileged folk transcend their circumstances everywhere.
Working Class Hero
The opening sequence in “Iron Island” takes place in the dark. A pair of hands lights a match and attempts to light a lamp. But it’s not so easy. The hands are obliged to light a candle first, then find a lamp with some fuel in it. We are watching the passing of flame from one source to another, each one more technical and sophisticated than the previous. It suggests that there are degrees of industrialization that correspond with stages of enlightenment. Multiple levels of evolutionary processes are on parade in this allegory.
Compassion cracks the shell of hand-me-down prejudice
If martyrs are moths, we watch this film to learn what burns one in the flame and the other one not. But this story doesn’t seem to be about some valuable result gained at great cost. It’s more about who gets left behind and what gets lost.
Big Wheels Keep on Turning
Pressure will build, exposing weakness until it reaches critical mass and crashes, causing corrections across the map. No thing is spared accept by luck, chance or happenstance. It is faced with just such a roll of the dice that Said seeks his one-way ticket to paradise.
Seventh Richest Realm Blues
It’s capital, Caracas, as it is exposed in Sequestro Express,” will give many a viewer the impression of a modern gold rush town. Sequestro, better known in the United States as kidnapping, is a common crime in this region. Sequestro Express is kidnapping “light,” you might say. We’re given the impression from watching the movie, this month, that it could happen to almost anyone at any time.
On Keeping Friends Close and Enemies Closer
I was not up to date on which countries in this world my country’s most pissed at, so I scooped up a few low hanging statistics. There are other ways to distinguish a snake from a hiss, but “enemies of America” is something anyone could search the Internet for a list and that’s what I did.
“we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.” Jorge Luis Borges
While we watch this excellent, cutting edge work of cinematic fine art, let’s be open to how Iñarratu’s achievement lets us appreciate the entire collective soul and history of Latin America as part of what we call home.
“The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” What more apt headline for our times?
Fame was something Riggin Thomson leveraged his pop notoriety into an illustrious career in the American theater. Ironically, it turns out, the same trick gets entertainers into to politics.