Category: Arts and Entertainment

Jenna Ortega: Antisemite or useful idiot?

On Instagram alone, Gen Z superstar Jenna Ortega has more than 40 million followers, roughly three times as many people as there are Jews in the world. Consequently, what she says about us matters. And what she’s been saying has been bad.

Very bad.

I wrote in these pages last year that Ortega seemed to be an intelligent person who had, in her naivete, made an innocent mistake in posting propaganda from a website that justifies violence and seeks Israel’s destruction. I also argued that she probably isn’t an antisemite.

I retract at least one of these judgments.

She’s either a smart antisemite or a decent person who happens to be, to put it plainly, stupid. As I demonstrated in previous posts, the website she linked to had deeply antisemitic content. It was created by people who champion terrorists who killed civilians and who think that a “free Palestine” would mean most Jews leaving Israel and the remainder being “re-educated.” After the article and ensuing blowback, the actress quietly removed the pinned post from her Twitter (now X) feed.

Everyone makes mistakes, but a smart person in her position would be extremely careful in what content she posts moving forward, at least if she cares an ounce about the Jewish people. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been.

On October 18, yesterday, Ortega used her platform to broadcast to the world a message calling to “stop the genocide against Palestinians.” The idea that the planet’s only Jewish state, uniquely evil, is somehow hellbent on killing innocent Palestinians harkens back to the Middle Ages. Then, Jews were routinely accused of plotting to kill children or other crimes. It was common to accuse us even of trying to wipe out much of Europe by poisoning drinking water. The only difference is that before Jews were thought to be working out of their shtetls; now we are assumed to be using the miraculous state we established to kill for fun. 

The notion that Israel is consciously trying to kill off the Palestinians is not just insane – it is, as President Herzog himself said in reference to the various conspiracy theories being pedaled, a modern form of blood libel.

And now Ortega’s broadcast it to 40 million people, most of them young and impressionable kids who listen more to celebrities than thought leaders.

It should come as no surprise to any thinking person that these kinds of accusations fuel hatred against Jews and can end up getting people hurt – or worse. In recent years, but especially since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s response, Jews around the world have been fearful of going to synagogues, wearing their Magen Davids in public, sending their kids to Jewish schools, and a host of other things that non-Jews do without a care in the world.

They’re not fearful for no reason: the FBI and police departments across the country and world have been forced to step up security around Jewish institutions. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S., which had already been on the rise, rose by a whopping 300 percent, dramatically increasing after the Israel-Hamas war began. A teacher was stabbed in France. A synagogue was firebombed in Germany. The list goes on. Even as I write this, the news is reporting that a New York woman was just punched in the face by an assailant who yelled, “You are Jewish.”

And Ortega decided to fan the flames to her 40 million followers around the world.

Here’s the tricky part, the part that makes it unclear whether Ortega was motivated by a belief that Jews are generally bad and wanted to hide that unfortunate believe or if she is just really, really gullible.

The post Ortega shared was from a group called “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

Perhaps Ortega thought that JVP must not be a problem, given the term Jewish in their moniker. But a person of goodwill who had already been condemned for posting a call to destroy a nation, if they were smart, would have done at least a little bit of research into the organization whose voice they’re amplifying to millions, especially when it’s making accusations of genocide.

If Ortega merely spent a moment on Google, she would have found that JVP, far from being a nice and fluffy peace group full of Jews, is actually a shadowy organization flagged by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The ADL’s report is literally the second thing that comes up in a Google search for “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

The ADL states the problem with JVP very clearly: “JVP does not represent the mainstream Jewish community, which it views as bigoted for its association with Israel.” Further, “The spread of JVP’s most inflammatory ideas can help give rise to antisemitism.” The idea that the Jewish state is engaged in genocide is certainly one of its most extreme ideas.

Click here to read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel.

Jenna Ortega vs. Kanye: Who’s more dangerous on antisemitism?

Who’s more dangerous to the safety of Jewish people, Kanye West or Jenna Ortega?

Easy, right? Kanye is an open Jew hater. He creates tweets that are both incomprehensible and threateningly anti-Semitic, spews Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam propaganda, and declares his love for Hitler and the Nazis. He even appeared to cause discomfort for even Alex Jones, the guy who attacked the survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting. Ortega, who plays Wednesday Addams in the current Netflix series, is, according to those who work with her, genuinely nice. While West uses his social media for self-aggrandizement, unhinged rants, declarations that he is a god, and, most troublingly, Jew hatred, Ortega uses hers to promote her work and humanitarian causes. She seems to genuinely want to help others.

And therein lies the problem.

The anti-Semitism of the well-intentioned but uninformed

West understands antisemitism perfectly well. He hates Jews. Whatever else is going on in his addled mind, that much is clear. Jenna Ortega presumably sincerely believes that antisemitism is evil, no less so than sexism, homophobia, hatred of Muslims, or other forms of racism and xenophobia. The idea that she promotes anti-Jewish causes would likely make her shudder. The problem is that, like millions of other well meaning Americans, she has no real understanding of antisemitism, and therefore is unlikely to recognize it in at least some of its forms. And, also like millions of other Americans, she likely doesn’t do much investigation into a cause before she posts it to social media. (The number of celebrities who at least in part handle their own social media is astounding.)

Earlier this year, someone forwarded a link to a group chat, horrified that “the girl from Scream” (the Netflix series hadn’t yet been released) would post something like it. (My friend, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew, used far more vividly descriptive and colorful language which I avoid repeating here.) The link was to a Jenna Ortega Tweet that read simply “Decolonize Palestine,” with an embedded link to a website bearing the same moniker.

Decolonize? Was this a clumsy attempt at supporting a two-state solution? I clicked the link.

And I was horrified.

Check out the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Netlfix’s Farha: irredeemable anti-Semitic propaganda

If you make it through the entirety of Farha, the controversial Jordanian film about a young Palestinian girl during the conflict of 1948, and then watch the credits, you’ll find something curious. The extras are listed as residents of the “Gaza Refugee Camp” in Jerash, Jordan. This movie, supposedly in solidarity with the plight of Palestinian Arabs, was made in and financed by a country that keeps hundreds of thousands of them locked in refugee camps. The filmmakers, along with the Jordanian and other governments, care less about Palestinians than about using them as a tool to demonize Israel and Jews.

Farha is nothing more than propaganda, and boring propaganda at that. The film is grotesquely one-sided, even slanderous, in its depiction of the military units that later became the Israel Defense Force. While the situation around the creation of the State of Israel and the conditions that led to the hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs displaced from their homes are varied and complex, Farha paints a Manichean picture, in which benevolent Arab villagers are mercilessly slaughtered by carnage-loving Jews.

The plot, centering on the eponymous teen girl, is simple. Farha wants to leave her village in Mandatory Palestine to go study in the unnamed “city,” presumably Jerusalem. Alas, it’s 1948, and the devious Jews attack her town. Though her father tries to send her away with her uncle and his family, she flees the escape car to stay with him. To keep her from danger, he locks her in a food storage cellar, promising to return. The rest of the movie tediously chronicles Farha’s days in the cellar. For most of the movie, the viewer desperately waits for anything to happen while watching a girl mill about in a basement. Farha cries, goes to sleep, wakes up, her lamp runs out of oil, she runs out of water, she collects rainwater, and on and on…and on.

While supposedly based on true events, there is very little actual historical detail presented. Early on, Farha and her cousin see a convoy of British soldiers as they are leaving the country, prompting her and other village kids to mock the soldiers and cheer their withdrawal. The average American, unfamiliar with the conflict, must surely wonder: why are these British soldiers there? Why are they leaving? Those who know a bit more might suspect that the villagers were cheering some kind of Arab victory in pushing the British out. That seems to be the notion the filmmakers want to present, but it’s a false one. Few Arabs actually sided with the British – indeed, Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was an open supporter of Hitler and recruited Arabs to fight in the Third Reich’s army – but the Jewish military organizations the film slanders were the ones who actually expelled the British, as documented in Menachem Begin’s The Revolt.

The film’s fudging of the historical record is the least of its flaws, however. Much more important is the blood libel. In the film’s central scene, Farha, watching through an opening in the cellar door, sees Jewish soldiers capture an Arab couple from the village. The Jews – the filmmakers, who aim for historical accuracy nowhere else, do not neglect to ensure that the proto-IDF are speaking Hebrew – laugh and taunt the woman. Believing her to be pregnant, the fighters place a bet as to whether the baby is a boy or a girl, deciding to gut her to find out. However, a baby cries out from above; they realize the woman has actually just given birth and hidden the baby. The Jews then find the newborn and their two other children. After more taunting, the soldiers line everyone but the baby against the wall and shoot them.

As they prepare to depart, the commander tells his subordinate to kill the baby, but not “to waste a bullet.” The soldier places the baby on the ground, throws a towel over it, and leaves. Later, when Farha breaks out of the cellar, she finds the baby dead, covered in flies.

Farha is one-sided and engages in blatant antisemitism: but is its core story true? Probably not. According to the film’s opening, it was “inspired by true events.” But “inspired” is a weasel word; which part was true, and which was simply inspired? And of the events that the filmmaker actually believed to be true, was it really? Perhaps there was a girl who hid in a food cellar. There is no documentation of anything that happened, and new scholarship tells us that many well-known “truths” of Israeli brutality were nothing more substantial than rumors that swirled during wartime, later amplified by various interests. 

What’s more, filmmaker Darin Sallam said that there were “parallels” between her film’s story and the life of Anne Frank. This analogy is by definition antisemitic, as the logical conclusion is that, if this girl is Anne Frank, the Israelis are to be taken as the Nazis. According to the definition of antisemitism agreed upon by the United States and dozens of other countries, comparisons between Israelis and the State of Israel to Nazis is antisemitism.

Liberal democracies tend to produce better movies than authoritarian regimes. Compare, for example, this misfortune of a film with the Israeli series Fauda. The latter, about the current stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is layered and rich, and every character on any side is a multi-faceted human being with complex motivations. Fauda is not without bias; it is as pro-Israel as Farha is pro-PLO. The difference is that in the world of Fauda, the Israelis are on the right side of the conflict, but they are imperfect, and the Palestinians are real human beings caught between sides in a situation they wouldn’t choose for themselves. In Farha, the Arabs are good and the Jews are monsters who like to kill.

Given that Farda’s “true” story is highly unlikely to be so, the closest we come to a crime against humanity is the producers and Netflix causing anyone to endure this film. Stripped of its anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment, the film is just a bore, its brief 92-minute runtime seeming to stretch to hours.

The libel against Jews and Israel is clearly the only reason anyone has taken notice of this film. Admittedly, lead actress Karam Taher turns in an excellent performance, but even that cannot rescue what is ultimately a wretched propaganda film with no redeeming values.

“No Good Nick” – Darkness and Redemption

I would never have watched the new Neflix sitcom No Good Nick, but I’m a straight guy who went to high school in the 1990s. Of course, I had a crush on Melissa Joan Hart, first Clarissa, who explained it all, and then the original Sabrina, who was casting spells just as The Craft made it cool to do so. And I was a child in the 1980s, so I watched The Goonies enough that Mikey – uh, Sean Astin – became indelibly etched into my childhood memories, long before the same happened for millennials after watching the tedious Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Given my background, I thought the new sitcom (still a viable form of entertainment in the 1990s) No Good Nick, which stars Hart and Astin as an upper-middle-class mother and father in Portland, would be decent fare to watch after a long day, when I was too tired to read or to watch something more intelligent. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. All in the Family) four-camera situation comedies have always been cheap, lowest-common-denominator entertainment for the masses, no thought required. What I found, however, was a darkly intelligent show that asked challenging questions under the veneer of saccharine family comedy.

Expecting bland escapist entertainment with blast-from-the-past actors, I was drawn in and binge watched both seasons (released, strangely, within a few months of each other by Netflix). The story, which sounds gimmicky, becomes incredibly dark incredibly quickly, though it is presented in the sunny, smiley colors that one might find more reminiscent of Alf or Family Ties than anything with the themes Nick handles. The titular character (played by the wildly talented new actress Siena Agudong) is a 14-or-so-year-old girl who shows up at the Hart-Astin (sorry, “Thompson”) house, announcing that they are her distant relatives, and that she has been sent to stay with them by the foster agency after her parents died in a car accident.

Unlike the Thompsons, who take Nick in and set her up with a bed in their daughter Molly’s (Lauren Lindsey Donzis) room, we learn that Nick is actually a con artist, and that the woman acting as her social worker is actually her foster mother. Both her foster parents are bumbling criminals who use Nick and their other foster kids to run crime-rings. Also: Nick’s father is actually alive, but in jail. Unbeknownst to the foster parents, he is running Nick behind their backs, using her as his girl on the outside to criminally raise money to pay for his, as we’re told early on, legal fees. The Harbaugh’s, Nick’s foster parents, are masters of navigating America’s corrupt foster care systems, deftly placing people on “the inside.”

The first season of No Good Nick, which debuted on Netflix in April, kept itself firmly within the format of a TV sitcom. It was episodic for the most part, had the typical four-camera setup, and even had a live studio audience. But watching it, one can’t help but ask: who is the intended audience? Men exactly my age with a fondness for Melissa Joan Hart? But surely “people who bought the October 1999 edition of Maxim” isn’t a large enough demographic to sustain a whole show . No Good Nick isn’t really for kids, either, and it’s far darker than the average sitcom viewer is likely to enjoy. It is hard to imagine someone who looks forward to piffle like the dreadful Fuller House, also on Netflix, enjoying Nick. This is a production in which the protagonist is a 14-year-old girl who’s being used for criminal purposes by evil foster parents, her jailed father, and other characters, like the mobster she routinely meets up with in a seedy bar. While it is amusing to watch Nick come up with plots to raise money – she steals expensive wine from the restaurant owned by Hart’s character, Liz Thompson, and replaces it with cheap swill labeled as expensive wine, for example – the real strength of the first season is in watching a girl trying to navigate between ripping off the Thompsons and falling in love with them as a family, all the while trying to handle myriad layers of guilt: guilt at stealing from the people who took her in, as well as guilt towards her father, both for sometimes failing him in raising money and, especially, for beginning to see the Thompson’s as family.

But if the bleak comedy masked as slapstick keeps the viewer perplexed but entertained in the first season, the second season, released Aug. 5, goes much further. I would be creating spoilers if I were to say too much, but starting about midway through the second season, we learn Nick’s real backstory, and the Thompsons are part of it. Their clan, which until that episode, entitled “The Italian Job”, had seemed like the typical perfect sitcom family, are, while operating within the confines of the law, themselves far from perfect and, in being so, are in large part responsible for the destruction of Nick’s life with her father, a fact of which they remain blissfully unaware until the end of season two.

Especially starting here, at “The Italian Job”, the series remains both true to sitcom form – and blows it up at the same time. Astin’s perfect suburban father, always spouting platitudes about the importance of family and sticking together, also embodies the dark side of those beliefs: must love of family come at others’ expense? Is life a zero-sum game?

The series raises further unexpected questions: are we always ultimately responsible for our actions? What is our responsibility to each other beyond those within our immediate circles? Going even further: what is the nature of people? Is humanity irredeemably flawed? Are even seemingly selfless acts somehow motivated by greed? (Molly, who becomes Nick’s best friend, sort of, runs their school’s “Volunteer Club,” an obvious lampoon of middle-class philanthropy and social media influencers.) Or, perhaps, people are inherently good, pushed to evil deeds by their surrounding influences, and everyone is trapped by the bad choices of everyone else.

In one poignant scene, Nick, talking with her father, discusses the revenge she’s just exacted, and how she actually began to enjoy it. “It was hard at first,” she says. “But then it got easier and easier, and I didn’t even have to think about it…and for a minute, I enjoyed it. What does that say about me? I’m a bad person.” But we, the audience, know she’s not: she’s the character with the strongest moral compass, the only character who seems to grapple with the ethics and morality of each decision she makes that doesn’t involve a quick con.

Does our world determine us? Or do we determine our world? Maybe the answer is neither, but maybe our choices define who we are. As Nick notes in an emotional conversation with someone who truly has been wronged and who has just as truly wronged her, “All of those were your choices, and [no one] made you do any of them.”

Nick does something most sitcoms do not do: underneath one-liners and perfectly set-up jokes, it deals with the world as it is, with all of its flaws and all of its potential for redemption; with its greed and abuse, and with the loving kindness somewhere in each person; with its zero-sum competition and the innate human desire for love and cooperation. Though much of the show’s humor is rooted in darkness and the notion of “homo homini lupus”, it turns out to be, more than anything else, a show about redemption, even if not everyone is redeemed and not every redemption is full.

Perhaps even sitcoms can be redeemed.

Television Review
No Good Nick
Starring Sienna Agudong, Melissa Joan Hart, Sean Astin, Lauren Lindsey Donzis, Kalama Epstein
Now streaming on Netflix

“Camaraderie to make the city better”: Worcester World Cup teams ready to play

WORCESTER, Mass. – Captains of teams participating in the 12th annual Worcester World Cup (WWC) games met Aug. 3 at the Pleasant Street Neighborhood Network Center to discuss game rules and to determine matchups.

The soccer tournament, scheduled this year for Aug. 11 through 13 at Foley Stadium’s Commerce Field, is a series of matches between teams representing Worcester’s diverse immigrant community. The event, which is organized by about a dozen volunteers, engages Worcester-based soccer (or football, as the sport is called in most other countries) players and fans from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S.A. This year, there are 19 teams, 16 male and 13 female.

Even though not affiliated with any official soccer leagues in the U.S., the games and players seem to draw a wide respect from professionals. George Cortes, of the United States Soccer Federation said that the referees would actually be assigned by USSF.

“It usually isn’t allowed,” Cortes, himself a professional referee, said, referring to USSF-assigned referees calling games of unaffiliated leagues like the WWC, but the organization made an exception in this case.

“Worcester is becoming known to people from other cities” for the games, Mushtaq Alzahiri, who was born in Iraq and now lives in Worcester, said. His team won the championship a year ago, and he is eager to defend it. Soccer, he said, “is my passion.”

Of course, soccer is a sport, and there are rivalries.

“We’re coming back to take what is ours,” Charles Allison, president of the Liberia Association of Worcester County and a partisan of the Liberia team, said, smiling. He noted that, of the previous 11 tournaments, “we are the six-time champions.”

But the tournament aims to help unite Worcester’s diverse immigrant communities as well. “This is important because it shows immigrants coming together and uniting themselves,” Allison said. “This is about immigrants, and this is about camaraderie to make the city better.”

While the captains met, organizers went over the rules, all typical to soccer: the clock would not stop for anything, yellow cards and red cards, and so on.

The rules are designed to encourage sportsmanship, said Laura, one of the organizers. “We’re celebrating in a fun, safe space,” she said.

WWC is a project of and fundraiser for Cultural Exchange Through Soccer, a city organization that serves as “a vehicle to develop young leaders,” Laura explained.

Albert, another volunteer organizer, said that the organization has a youth group, which “is to bring kids from different backgrounds – I’m from the Congo – together, let them play, tour colleges” and develop leadership in other ways.

The team captains drew papers randomly, each of which had a letter written on it, representing a time slot. As the time slots were filled in by Tereza Ngendahoruri, a volunteer, on the board, it became apparent who would be playing whom. The schedule is:

Worcester World Cup – Men’s Bracket

Friday, Aug. 11:

 

5.30: Brazil v. Ghana

6.45: U.S.A v. Nigeria

8.00: Guatemala v. Honduras

 

Saturday, Aug. 12:

 

9.30: Kenya v. Somalia

10.45: Togo v. Myanmar

1.15: Albania v. El Salvador

2.30: Jamaica v. Iraq

3.45: Ecuador v. Liberia

 

Worcester World Cup – Women’s Bracket

Sunday, Aug. 13

10:15 AM Game 1: USA vs Ecuador

12:30 PM Game 2: USA vs Italy

02:45 PM Game 3: Ecuador vs Italy

Tickets are six dollars and allow admission to all games.

Promises to the Disappeared: Art in the Wake of Chile’s 9-11

This past month the United States solemnly commemorated the eighth anniversary of 9/11/01. While life in the U.S. has largely returned to normal in the interceding years (though, life is gone for the nearly 3,000 who perished, and will never again be truly “normal” for their families), the horror and legacy of 9/11 has lingered and festered deep in the collective memory.

Much of the way any nation deals with tragedy is through its culture: music, literature, film, and other forms of art. But it has only been eight years since 9/11/01, a relatively short time; artists in the U.S. have really only just started dealing with this national catastrophe.

Perhaps the body of work from artists in another country in the Americas, Chile, can offer further perspective on how traumatic and pivotal events are approached by those who have been directly affected by them. On another September 11, that of 1973, Chile’s Popular Unity (UP, for its Spanish initials) coalition government was overthrown by a military coup d’état resulting in the death of President Salvador Allende and the beginning of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

To read further, click here: http://worldup.org/blog/?p=1000

Harry Potter and the tide of history

The final installment of the Harry Potter  movie series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, has been accompanied by chatter about what it all means.

Some Christians have complained that the books on which the films are based, with all their magic and wizards, were causing children to accept demonic ideas (though the Catholic Church seems to have given up that fight with the good review it gave to the first Deathly Hallows film). Some atheists jumped into the discussion, arguing that the adventures were actually no good because they were very Christian.

While this debate drew some attention, it’s irrelevant and boring. Perhaps demons and sorcery in a novel might have been taboo in Oliver Cromwell’s England, but not for modern audiences. Overly defensive atheists should lighten up; the western world was dominated by Christian ideas for centuries, and that cultural background that can’t help but make its way into fiction.

Far more interesting is the series’ relevance to the previous century and our modern world. It’s a thinly veiled allegory for humanity’s heights and pitfalls over the past 100 years or so. In that sense, both installments ofHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows work together as a fitting epilogue to the film series, telling a longer story in sequential order but also expressing the fear and hope many feel when dealing with the 21st century world.

Those who love the series often note, despite the magical plot elements, how realistic it is as a coming-of-age story. Unlike most other young adult fiction, Potter doesn’t candy coat anything. The earlier books, about a younger Potter, are indeed cheerful, but as the characters grow older the books – and the films – grow darker. Growing up often includes casting off the happy naiveté of childhood and learning that there are actually bad people – even if they aren’t magic – in the world. We also learn that nothing is black and white, including goodness itself: Even the heroes battle their inner demons, and sometimes they turn against everything they stood for.

But viewing the story only as a well-written parable of becoming an adult misses a lot. Humanity itself came of age in the 20th century, in which more blood was spilled in war and violence than any other combined, andPotter alludes to that.

Despite previous wars, humanity was optimistic as the 1900s dawned. A faith in the future and invention prevailed. At that time there was no such thing as a world war, and no term had yet been invented for what would become known as genocide, the extermination of an entire race.

As the century bore on, the worst-ever war broke out, only to be outdone by an even worse conflict. Fascism and the total state made their debuts, and just before the century’s mid-point came its “midnight.” As Hitler rose and launched that second war, Stalin signed a pact and the western powers appeased. Hitler was toppled, but at great cost – 60 million dead – and a dark new word, genocide, was added to the vocabulary. Add the Cold War, international terrorism, and global climate change into the mix, and humanity reached adulthood, naiveté no longer intact.

How the century’s midnight must have felt is well summed up in The Deathly Hallows Part I. The liberating Ministry of Magic had become a dictatorship in its fight against Voldemort’s minions, and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), along with Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), fled underground.

But while that movie ended with the death of Dobby, the liberated house elf, and a victory on the part of Voldemort, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II,  stunningly directed by David Yates, is much more hopeful.

As it opens, magical fascism is in full swing: The Ministry has fallen to racial-purity-obsessed Voldemort supporters and civil society seems dead. But shortly after the movie opens, we are, for the first time in years, back at Hogwarts, and insurrection is brewing. It seems that the magical community, no matter how repressed it is, and despite Ministry propaganda, is at all times only a step away from insurrection. Shortly thereafter, a full-scale revolution is in swing (along with the necessary cruelty: Professor McGonagall orders all members of the Slytherin house held in the dungeon, just in case).

In a sense, the two final films of the series work together to present different visions of humanity’s future. The first film is dark and pessimistic, its soul the same as a world destroyed by climate change and extreme right-wing terror. Part II is a film of insurrection and revolution, democracy and humanity.

Which path will humanity ultimately choose? That is yet to be determined. But it is fitting that the film came out shortly after the Arab world began throwing off its own Voldemorts.

Movie Review
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
Directed by David Yates
Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint
2010, 130 mins., PG-13

Trapped in history: “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”

In December 1994, explorers walking through southern France’s rocky environment found a slight disturbance in the air, coming from the rocks. They began to dig at the rocks, and uncovered what came to be known as the Chauvet Cave, a cavern sealed off by a rockslide some 20,000 years earlier.

What the explorers found was a treasure trove of cave paintings and skeletal remains of extinct animals. The art is twice as old as anything else found to date, the earliest example of culture produced by modern humans. Consequently, the French government sensibly sealed the Chauvet Cave. A door to the cave was constructed, making it impossible for anyone to enter without permission. Access is restricted only to scientists studying the discoveries.

But besides enriching our knowledge anthropologically, such a find cannot help but produce feelings beyond the simple excitement of a new discovery: awe, mystery – even a sense of sorrow.

Enter Werner Herzog. He is the only filmmaker ever granted access by the French to the cave, and judging by his documentary of it, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the Ministry of Culture made the right choice. Any film crew working for National Geographic could have gone in and simply shown people what had been found and explained the scientific significance of it. But Herzog does this as deftly as anyone else could, while adding something deeper.

Herzog is known for both wildly eccentric dramas like Even Dwarfs Started Small and for highly stylized documentaries. He is also an eccentric personality. In a possibly apocryphal story, after one of the dwarf actors in Even Dwarfs complained about dangerous working conditions, Herzog made a promise to the actor, on which he made good: if the actor survived the making of the film, Herzog would throw himself into a cactus.

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog adds a sometimes absurd, but always human, touch.

In an interview with The A.V. Club, Herzog said, “It’s not so much facts that interest me, but a deeper truth in them – an ecstasy of truth, an ecstatic truth that illuminates us. That’s what I’ve been after. … The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.”

Indeed, Herzog revisits the theme of the phone book in Cave, telling a scientist he interviews that many of the facts he presents are like the Manhattan directory, with its list of “4 million names.” These people are just a list, according to Herzog, about which the phone book says nothing. “What are their hopes, their dreams?” he asks.

Herzog has largely been successful in bringing out these deeper, more human truths in earlier documentaries. In his Encounters at the End of the World, he studies Antarctica. But instead of a simple catalogue of animals and glaciers, he presents a desolate world inhabited by animals and people, all of whom, perhaps a product of their world’s desolation, seem a bit insane. (Is there a definition of insanity among penguins? he asks a scientist. “…I don’t mean that a penguin might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go crazy, because they’ve had enough of their colony?”)

And while Herzog is seemingly omnipresent in his documentaries, he also knows when to keep quiet. In his 1992 documentary Lessons of Darkness, he allows the cruel character of Saddamist Iraq to show itself, most poignantly in drawn out scenes of Kuwaiti oil wells burning with an evil beauty. In How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, a short film on the bizarre language of cattle auctioneers, he allows the subjects to speak in their auctioneering voice at great length.

The same style holds sway in Cave, producing both an awe at the simple fact that our ancestors were there creating art – and here we are, 30,000 years later, looking at it – as well as a sense of sorrow. We will never know these people, the vast majority of people who ever existed. “We are stuck in history,” Herzog says. “But they were not.”

How stuck are we? In one scene, the audience is shown the fossilized tracks of a child and a wolf, next to each other. Herzog ponders: Did they walk together as friends or did the child run from the wolf? Or were the tracks made 5,000 years apart?

And who were these people? The point of the Manhattan phone book analogy: we’ll never know; we can’t. There is a section in the cave in which red handprints decorate a wall, somewhat like an abstract painting. The painter has a curved pinky; this is the closest we’ll ever come to understanding his individuality. To Herzog’s delight, though, it is possible to see, based on the knowledge of his curved finger, that the same painter did drawings throughout the cave. It is, remarks Herzog, like we’re following him as he works.

Herzog doesn’t skimp on the historical details. The viewer emerges from the theater with a much wider knowledge of this cave, the science used to study the age of the artifacts and so on. But, in the hands of someone else, there would be no emotional connection.

And check out the albino alligators in the tropical landscape produced by France’s nuclear reactors, in the film’s postscript.

Movie Review
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Directed by Werner Herzog
2010, 90 mins., Rated G

Nelson Mandela’s conversations – a review

Mandela book cover
Hardcover artwork for Conversations with Myself.

Watching Invictus, the 2009 movie based on Nelson Mandela’s attempts to unify South Africa through rugby, then considered an Afrikaner sport, the viewer can’t help but question whether the film does a disservice by glorifying Mandela into a saint-like figure. While no one can deny that Mandela is one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, the film seems to portray a Mandela too perfect. The character played by Morgan Freeman simply didn’t seem like a person who could exist.

Given Mandela’s stature, the question of whether the film went overboard is far too impolite to actually ask. Lucky, then, was the release of Conversations with Myself, a compilation of Mandela’s writings and written materials, which definitively answers in the affirmative: Mandela is as heroic as can be imagined.

Madiba, as he is often called, is primarily known for his work in leading (or, as he would emphasize, helping to lead) the struggle against South Africa’s notorious apartheid system. There were many liberation fighters in the past 100 years, from Africa alone, and few if any can be remembered in the same light as Mandela. While your reviewer is not inclined to hero worship or the “great man” theory of history, it is obvious that Mandela’s personal traits influenced the course of South African history and, perhaps, helped to keep that nation’s transition from going awry.

The volume is ostensibly “by” Nelson Mandela, but, as the editors admit, it was pieced together by committee. It is a collection of his writings and conversations, of diaries he kept and even notes he jotted down on a calendar. While this makes for choppy and sometimes frustrating reading, it provides the clearest glimpse yet into the mind of a man who is by nature private and reserved.

Mandela, known for his peaceful nature, is no pacifist. A number of conversation transcripts deal with his arguing against non-violence as a principle. To Mandela, this is a tactic that must be used when conditions allow – and abandoned when the time to do so comes. It was he who argued for, and then led the creation of, the MK, or Umkhonto we Sizwe – the Spear of the Nation. This group, formed in alliance with the South African Communist Party, became the military wing of the African National Congress.

The MK was a military organization, and it fought, engaged in violence and acts of terror (never aimed at civilians). But Mandela argued its necessity on two fronts: first, it was morally necessary to fight physically for a democratic society, as violence from the MK was nothing compared to violence from the apartheid state, and the MK’s goal, a free society, would end all forms of terror.

Secondly, relations between the black majority and the white minority government had become so bad that violence was bound to break out. Without the formation of the MK, which would organize violence, Mandela argued, acts of terror that could push the country to the brink of chaos would erupt.

The seeming contradiction between Mandela’s love for peace and his willingness to fight is no contradiction at all: Mandela simply did what was necessary for justice. And he, even in the face of criticism from his comrades, refused to give up on the notion that all people share a common humanity, that all people can be good.

Perhaps the most shocking sections of the book are the passages in which Mandela considers his white oppressors. While sitting in a prison, in the midst of brutality, even after white officials refused his pleas to attend the funeral of his mother and of his son, the future leader wrote about the need to show “respect” to the guards. Of course, he wasn’t writing out of deference to white authority: he simply saw even his warders as human beings working positions into which they were born.

In a particular diary entry, Mandela reflects upon his treatment of a young Afrikaner guard who was rude to Mandela. Madiba insulted the guard in front of the other prisoners, and was, apparently, punished. But instead of writing with bitterness, the liberation leader considers that the guard was rude because he was young, new and looking for respect from his peers. Mandela went to apologize: no revolutionary phrase mongering, nothing overtly moralistic – just simple human compassion.

Of course, it was always the position of the ANC that a nonracial society was for the best, and that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of their skin color. Still, seeing an example of that position so sharply personified is jarring.

When apartheid was overthrown, and the black majority finally won the right to vote, electing the ANC to lead the country, the transition was overwhelmingly peaceful. Despite provocations from the police, and despite years of suffering at the hands of a cruel white ruling caste, retribution never came to the white minority. How any people were able to act with such class and dignity after all that happened was always beyond this reviewer, but as his personal notes make clear, President Mandela played a major hand in that, and in influencing South Africa to become a nonracial nation.

As choppy as the book had to be, the insights derived from it lend a great historical worth. Be warned, though: a portion of the book, several dozen pages, is tedium encapsulated. Page after page of entries Mandela made on his calendar are reproduced, though, for the sake of brevity, much was left out. Reading through these pages becomes something of a chore, and the urge to skip forward is hard to resist. Whether or not the editors intended this, a point has been made: the reader can’t help but think to himself how wretchedly awful life must have been inside prison for Mandela to have meticulously recorded even how many ounces of Vaseline hair oil he was given.

Towards the end of the book, Mandela argues that he’s no saint, not even by the definition of someone who “sins, but keeps on trying.” Your reviewer finally found something in Mandela’s writings with which he could disagree.

Book Review
Conversations with Myself
By Nelson Mandela, Foreword by Barack Obama
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pp, 2010

Originally published here in the People’s World.

Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, darkest and best of series yet

The 20th century wasn’t a particularly good one in historical terms: more people were killed in war than in previous centuries combined; we saw fascist states for the first time; and the century ended with multiple wars raging around a world cowed by the threat of terrorism.

Still, it was that same century that, among other historical breakthroughs, brought us Nelson Mandela and the overthrow of apartheid, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.S. Civil Rights Revolution, women began to assert their rights and the United Nations was established.

Clichés are only clichés in that they are truths repeated too many times, and it therefore would not be a total loss to use one here: it was an age of extremes.

The preceding 100 years or so brought the world great evils never before imagined – who could have conceived of the awesome terror of the nuclear bomb? – but those same evils produced an opposite, if not yet equal, reaction. Humanity began to assert and reassert its generally cooperative nature, though how things will turn out in the long run is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps we’ll move on to better society; perhaps we’ll wipe ourselves away in a cloud of greenhouse gases.

Given that background, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, most especially in its original written form but also in its film version, provides a literary finale to the century. Begun in 1998, these works can be interpreted as something of a summing-up.

Children’s tales have always dealt with good vs. evil, but Rowling’s work, while acknowledging a timeless feature of all that which is bad, gave evil a modern feeling: the villains were totalitarians and fascists, racists and bigots, dictators and environmental destroyers – all in magical form.

Another question is brought to the fore as well: what is the nature of good and evil? Where do they overlap? Can the “good guys” have evil tendencies?

The series, of course, chronicles the story of Harry Potter and his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger (in the film version, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson respectively) growing up under the threat of Voldemort, an evil wizard bent on world control, and his Nazi/KKK-like minions.

Their journey from innocent wonder at a magical world to scared fighters under siege parallels humanity’s loss of innocence.

The most recent film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One,” is the darkest of the series. While the series had been growing increasingly serious, Deathly Hallows represents a qualitative change. At the movie’s opening, Hedwig, Harry’s owl and long-time companion, is struck dead by evil wizards, as is another member of the Order of the Phoenix, a sort of magical guerilla army working to defeat Voldemort. Hermione, in order to protect her family, casts an “obliviate” spell, wiping her parents’ memories away – including any thought of her.

The wizard world’s government, the Ministry of Magic, falls near the beginning of the movie, only to be replaced by a puppet regime. The new government, under control of Voldemort, is essentially an enchanted Third Reich, bent on enslaving or exterminating “inferiors” – non “pure blood” wizards.

Harry Potter and his friends don’t return to Hogwarts this time; instead they spend their time “underground” attempting to plan their strategy.

The acting is superb. The adult character, since the series began, have been played by British A-list actors, including Alan Rickman. But Radcliffe, Grint and Watson were sorely lacking in credibility during the early films. Now, however, they have seemingly magically transformed into actors. Aside from one particularly unfortunate scene in which Ron sees a truly silly vision of Harry and Hermione scorning him, the trio are able to pull off a high degree of emotional intensity.

This intensity is surprising for a series that started out as a children’s story. Previous films shyly explored the characters’ budding sexuality, but in the current installment, that sexuality is in bloom – and, like in the real world, is preyed upon by enemy armies. At several points in the film, one gets the impression that Hermione is about to be raped. Of course, this is a PG-13 film, and such things are implied only, but the shock felt by the audience is no lesser.

The action sequences are also top-notch. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is the way the characters deal with their quandary. On previous outings, they had been full of hope and a syrupy-sweet you-can-do-anything-with-your-friends attitude, but in Deathly Hallows, each of them vacillates between hope, despair and cynicism. Is it better, Hermione asks while she and Harry are in the woods alone, to continue the fight, or to just give up, “to stay here and grow old?” The future of their world is very much up in the air.

The film, being the first of a two-part finale, doesn’t offer any resolve to this question. In that sense, it mirrors a humanity embarking on the 21st century. For me and perhaps the non-magical world, Voldemort is environmental destruction, war and terrorism, the tea party, increased poverty and wealth gaps. And, for the first time in history, people question the viability of humanity going forward.

Deathly Hallows Part 1 mirrors us; hopefully Part 2 will inspire us.

Movie review
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1
Directed by Robert Yates
2010, 146 min., PG-13