MY FATHER MY LORD;

My Father My Lord
David Volach

Plot: This film tells the story of an Orthodox Jewish family, with detailed depiction of the interrelationship amongst the Rabbi (Assi Dayan) his wife (Sharon Hacohen Bar) their only child Menachem(Elan Griff) and God.

It isn't often movie goers get a look into the fine details of a religious education.  But with My Father My Lord a code of silent secrecy appears to have been broken and viewers are dealt an emotional blow as they watch the unfolding of this tragic hell, the Ultra Orthodox Judaic teachings.

Any religion that is extreme is, in a broad sense of the word, a cult, with rules and ideas far different from main stream community life.  This film, My Father My Lord shows how the religious dictates triumph over the ordinary needs for the expression and nurturing of the young whom they cherish as the source of their immediate enjoyment of life and of their future, the continuance of their extreme understanding of God, of the Torah, of a way of life alien to rest of human kind.


The suffering of the Women in this religious sect, the way they are not allowed to have free access to their children, their secondary role in the Temple and in the intellectual rearing of their children is just a hint of what women in many cultures, and for thousands of years had have to endure.

The detail, the gentle yet persistent depiction of this way of life, where God triumphs over the human needs of the young and men rule is so compelling that this film My Father My God will stay with you long after you see it.

It is an experience well worth the price of the admission.


Linda Zises

The Mother of Tears: Dario Argento

Plot: An Urn uncovered after centuries of being buried, contains the tunic and artifacts of three figures (in reference to the Trinity) that set the chase between the adolescent acting daughter of the "Good White Witch", Sarah (Asia Argebnto) and the beautiful mature, enticing and evil Mother Of Tears (Moran Atias).

If you like thrillers, if you like blood and horror, if you like reality interspersed with fantasy, if you enjoy the subtlety of the Trinity transposed into three witches and chase scenes, a screaming woman running endlessly away from the very horror of which she is an unknowing participant/creator.

If you enjoy seeing skin peeled off the human body, our organs gushing forth in vivid depiction accompanied by powerful, creative musical scores that are meant to augment but become center stage.

If you enjoy seeing eyes repeatedly pierced and an up front detailed view of what an eye looks like, as an isolated entity enlarged like the face of an actor filling an over large screen, If you like to see animals become aggressive evil doers and need to applaud at the sight of a squirrel violently murdered.

If you like to see good mother and bad mother portrayed and women treated not with dignity but with the raw ingredients that make for our machismo society, then this film The Mother of Tears is for you.

In Rome this is a sought after experience, with the impact of centuries of religion and civilizations under the very ground upon which the City is built giving extra everyday experiential meaning to the script. But in America I think the significance of this reality is not even a subliminal connection.


If you are brave and a little desperate, see the film and laugh or be "grossed out" by this creative, comedic triller/horror film.



Linda Z
WBAI women’s Collective

The Mother of Tears

The Mother of Tears
Dario Argento

Plot: An Urn uncovered after centuries of being buried, contains the tunic and artifacts of three figures (in reference to the Trinity) that set the chase between the adolescent acting daughter of the "Good White Witch", Sarah (Asia Argebnto) and the beautiful mature, enticing and evil Mother Of Tears (Moran Atias).

If you like thrillers, if you like blood and horror, if you like reality interspersed with fantasy, if you enjoy the subtlety of the Trinity transposed into three witches and chase scenes, a screaming woman running endlessly away from the very horror of which she is an unknowing participant/creator.

If you enjoy seeing skin peeled off the human body, our organs gushing forth in vivid depiction accompanied by powerful, creative musical scores that are meant to augment but become center stage.

If you enjoy seeing eyes repeatedly pierced and an up front detailed view of what an eye looks like, as an isolated entity enlarged like the face of an actor filling an over large screen, If you like to see animals become aggressive evil doers and need to applaud at the sight of a squirrel violently murdered.

If you like to see good mother and bad mother portrayed and women treated not with dignity but with the raw ingredients that make for our machismo society, then this film The Mother of Tears is for you.

In Rome this is a sought after experience, with the impact of centuries of religion and civilizations under the very ground upon which the City is built giving extra everyday experiential meaning to the script. But in America I think the significance of this reality is not even a subliminal connection.


If you are brave and a little desperate, see the film and laugh or be "grossed out" by this creative, comedic triller/horror film.



Linda Z
WBAI women’s Collective

Beauty In Trouble

BEAUTY IN TROUBLE
2006
English subtitles

Jan Hrebejk_

PLOT:
“A smart situation comedy that contrasts old and new Czecho-no-Slovakias... The title comes from a Robert Graves poem and the soundtrack from Once’s busker-songwriter Glen Hansard.”_— Harlan Jacobson. The story line is a woman marcela *anna geislerova)who is –forced to chose between two men, one whom she loves with her intellect, the other , her husband–who dominates and fulfils her sexual strivings.


Czech Republic | 2006_110 minutes_
English subtitles
Director: Jan Hrebejk_
Producer: Ondrej Trojan_is
Screenplay: Petr Jarchovsky_
Photography: Jan Malír

Cast:
Anna Geislerová
Marcela

Roman Luknár
Jarda (Marcela's Husband)

Jana Brejchová
Marcela's Mother

Jirí Schmitzer
Uncle Richie


Josef Abrhám
Evzen Benes (knight in shining armor)

Beauty in Trouble is such a delightful film with characters vividly drawn who come from a world very similar in class as the people found in a Coen brother films. ie. (Fargo 1996)

The characters who represent the old republic speak crudely but honestly and their love is often expressed in terms with little endearment.

But they are funny, pathetic, and yet…. .this film is about character, ethics, the true and honest way people can and should act towards one another. What is paramount is not sex, as stated in the promotional material. It is love and the conflict between the passion that the body craves and the love that is not passionate but full, rich and nurturing for the mind and soul. It is the conflict delineated in William Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage, where for those who read the book or saw the movie, Mildred, the waitress with whom the intellectual author is obsessed, is the essence of love and hate while intellectual women are simply there for stimulation of the mind. Nothing passionate about that!

Beautyin Trouble has clear readable subtitles with only one blatant error “there “ was put on the screen when it should have read “they’re”.
But I could read it all, plenty of time afforded the slow reader and the film’s shots were effected without undo prolongation of a facial image.. I never got tired of looking at one actor or another and there were bodies to be seen, all the way from head to foot, not truncated at the shoulders or waist.


It was great dialogue and enjoyable images of an old lady and a sleazy older man and even the “knight in shinning armor “ who comes to save the day, is over drawn to the point of almost ridiculous but stops right at the moment when he is believable and enviable for his solid integrity, a quality so rarely put on the screen for us to imitate and absorb as a goal of our own.
The music is all the rave. If you see the vilm for nothing more than the music, you will not be disappointed.


Do see, women in trouble. Not for the sex particularly but for the plot, the resolution of conflicts we have all experienced in one form or another.


Linda Zises

Beauty in Trouble: a second assessment

Films are immediate emotional experiences and often, only in hindsight, does the plot slowly deteriorate into something other than the fulfilling experience of the moment.

That is what happened with this 2006 film. Beauty in Trouble. While I watched the fairy tale of the poor financially devastated mother of two prepubescent children struggle when the flood forced her to return to her maternal home where her mother and step father lived in a somewhat less than tranquil abode, I was emotionally drawn into the seemingly fairy tale plot of a wealthy man who entered the sceen, superfluity of money in hand and a determination to help remedy the wrongs she has to endure.

But all is not right in this story line.

Does this wealthy much older man "buy" the woman and her children?

There is reference to an abortion but who was the father of the almost terminated birth is not explicitly stated.

There is reference to sexual assault by the step father that seems to slide into and out of the film without any real emotional impact: a shower scene with the naked step father and the young girl trapped in the room where he lets go of his protective towel.

What is paramount (emotionally accented) is the garbage that the step father throws onto the bed while the children sleep or the cookies the children ate that he claimed were for him only. But cookies and garbage do not hold the intellectual place in our lives that the sexual molestation of children rightly earns.

I still hold the opinion that the Beauty in Trouble is worth viewing, if only to see how emotions of the moment can triumph over intellegent understanding.


Linda Zises

brooklyn museum: ticketed exhibition?

The Brooklyn museum is not what it used to be.

Beautiful, new façade with an awe inspiriting fountain are welcomed additions but insufficient to off set the over 50 corporate sponsorship (not including KeySpan that hosts a concession type eatery on the main floor) All employees who work for these companies are admitted free of charge.

I would not highlight this largesse if it were not for my experience today of going to the museum and finding the most colorful, child-like art (Murakami) from which I am excluded until I pay an additional $10 admission fee.

What is this all about? A tease, a sample of the appealing art is prominent in the museum lobby It stimulates a desire to see more until I am stopped in my happy sojourn into the Museum’s fifth floor by the query, where is your ticket?


The last ticketed exhibit was approximately five years ago when Star Wars entered the museum. Is there something about art that entices the child, the teenager that encourages the museum to charge for their product?

I hope the administrator of this new policy of :ticketed’ exhibits rethinks this fee in light of the museum’s mission to bring appreciation of art into the lives of ordinary citizens and community denizens.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LADY?

The lady is no longer the person
who sat next to the Gentleman and listened
while a man on high said with full dignity of tone

"Ladies and Gentlemen".

She is lost to the world of half clad females
women who model their bodies
as if they were mannequins
designed for the naked eye
of greedy, needy strivings
Not unkind

Just mindless

Linda Zises

The Moon and the Womb:

Sleep
Is a cycle of rest
Of darkness
Fish
Who don't close their eyes
Seek areas of total darkness
Underwater

Sleep
Is the moon in the sky
The cool reflection of the brilliant sun

Sleep
Keeps us connected to the earth,
To life and Evolution

The Blue moon reminds us
Of a women's menstrual cycle,

Slightly less than once a month
The full moon appears

It starts as a slither
And matures into a ripened,
Fecund
Womb


Linda Zises

Why do We Sleep?

To Dream

Last night I went to Denny's
A local bar where I go almost every Friday night

Last week I met a man

He is an artist with a large nose
It looked like an abstract sculpture

I stared at his nose
He smiled at me,
unperturbed

Last night my eyes focused on the Bar door
He didn't appear

Until
Later
When I went home and slept

All night he was there in the doorway
He left
And returned over and over again

Linda Zises