Mambety's final film would be great for high-school or college classes

The Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's last work, the brief (42 minutes!) feature The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun (yes, the upper-case The is intentional - as what she's selling are copies of the daily newspaper The Sun) - is a close look at the street people of Dakar, their difficult lives, their painful rivalries, and their occasional instances of solidarity and affection. The eponymous young girl - perhaps about 10 years old - starts off begging for money to support her and her blind grandmother. While doing so - unsuccessfully - she observes a group of teenage boys selling copies of the newspaper on the street. The next day she sets off - with great difficulty, as she uses crutches because of what she calls a "bad knee" and gets copies of the paper on credit from a sympathetic distributor. Amazingly, a wealthy guy - he looks like a film star or athlete - buys the whole packet from her and gives her an enormous tip. As she sets about using this money for benevolent deeds in the community, the other vendors, jealous, set out to get her and to drive away he competition; one benevolent soul, a somewhat older and much more agile and fit young man, protects her. That's pretty much it. The characters are not fully developed and plot line is thin and we have to wonder - as DDM made this film as he was near a young death (lung cancer) if he hadn't planned something more grand and complex, like his two great (and only feature-length) films, Touki Bouki and Hyenas; nevertheless, what we have is a really good film that apparently used for the entire cast real street people from Dakar, so the movie has almost a documentary quality. I streamed this film from the excellent service, Kanopy, which is a service provided by a national consortium of libraries - and this film is appropriate for that site as it would be a great film for viewing and class discussion about a range of issues - poverty, colonialism, social relations - in many high schools or colleges.

A powerful documentary far more dramatic and sigmicant than its understated title: American Factory

The 2019 Netflix documentary American Factory (Julia Richert and Steven Bognar) is a fantastic look at a clash of cultures and how that affects the American workplace in the post-industrial era. The film is much better and more powerful than its understated title would suggest; it's full of drama, conflict, ideas, and just plain weirdness. In brief, the film depicts - with unusual full access (the factory owners obviously had no idea of the effect of this film on an American audience - the fate of a former GM assembly plant that closed about a decade ago in Dayton, Ohio. After years of stagnation and the kind of economic hardship in the community affected by the loss of thousands of unionized blue-collar jobs, a Chinese billionaire factory owner took over the abandoned plant and under the umbrella name Fuyao began hiring thousands of workers for an auto-glass manufacturing facility. What ensures is a tremendous cultural clash, as the Chinese ownership (and hundreds of Chinese workers consigned to this new factory) have completely different management styles and expectations. The pay is terrible, the workplace unsafe, the push to meet quotas unrealistic and even dangerous - and the Chinese can never comprehend why the American workers refuse to work OT and weekends. Things come to a boiling point when the American workers try to unionize, and the Chinese spend about a $1 million to block the effort. We see close up the near-enslavement of workers - particularly the Chinese workers sent to the U.S. and separated from their families, living her in incredibly Spartan poverty. The best part of the movie by far is the account of a visit to the HQ in China by a team of American workers, who are amazed and befuddled by everything they see in the Chinese workplace: the militaristic approach to forming workplace "teams," the paternalism, the bizarre (to us) worship of the founder/CEO and of the company itself, the lavish but strange entertainment at a New Year's celebration - all leaving us (as well as some, though not all, of the visiting workers) fully aware that this partnership is bound to fail. Near the end of the documentary, there's quite a kicker, which I won't divulge. This film should be required viewing in any program that looks at labor-management relations or at U.S.-China business partnerships - though you don't have to be a specialist to be caught up in the drama and pathos of this powerful film.

A high-school drama that touches on many important themes - all from the students' point of view

The second season (2019) of the Netflix series Elite (created by Carlos Montero and Darío Madrona) picks up where Season 1 ended as a fine teen drama with many plot strands and many important elements: class conflict, murder and a coverup, corruption at the highest level of Spanish government and business, teenage romance, homosexual love, cross-cultural conflict, and I could go on. In essence, the plot concerns an "elite" private high school in Madrid that accepts several scholarship students, with inevitable fights and romances and other entanglements between the rich students and their new, street-savvy classmates. In the 2nd season we follow the investigation of the killing of a popular female student - particularly interesting in that we know who killed her and we watch that character simmer with guilt and remorse. There are many plot twists and subplots - one of the better being the attempts of a scholarship student to hide her background (her mother is a janitor in the school) and try to pass herself off as wealthy. There are so many plot elements - much like a telenova series - that it can be hard to keep everything straight as you watch, which also keeps you paying close attention to everything that happens (no doubt it will be easier to follow if you're fluent in Spanish). Most of all, what's impressive and unusual about this series, is that it's almost entirely from the POV of the students; there are a few parents with supporting roles - notably the devout Muslim storekeeper whose loyal and studious daughter is drawn into the party life -but the adults are always at the periphery and could almost be written off, or out, with impunity. Apparently, a Season 3 is on the way - good, though I thought the loose plot strands left danging at the end of Season 2 were thin at best.

Where did Tony Soprano go to high school?

Where did Tony Soprano go to high school? There are a # of references to his high-school days throughout the span of The Sopranos, but David Chase et al. are surprisingly silent on the precise name/locale of the school. (There are some ambiguous and conflicting hints about the location of his mother's house - Nutley? Verona? - but it's not even clear that she owned the house when Tony was a teenager.) One visual clue, however, gives us the definitive answer: When Tony is at his mother's house going through a box of old possessions, he comes across his varsity letter and it's unmistakable: the maroon and white superimposed W - O of West Orange High School. (Season 3, episode 2, 32 minutes 19 seconds into the show)

Some incredible scenes in the Keaton silen film Our Hospitality

The Buster Keaton silent from 1923, Our Hospitality, recently restored and with a newly composed/recorded sound track, shows its age, of course - it's so quaint to see these broadly drawn characters bob and smirk and leap their way through a silent comedy, but it's still worth watching as a historic relic in film history and as a pretty amazing work of film production. The story, sketchy as it is, is based on the Hatfield-McCoy rivalry, with in this case Keaton as the youngest offspring of the McCay family marked for murder - we never know why nor does it matter - by the brothers of the Canfield family. This leads to some really funny scenes in which Keaton, unaware that he's a target, escapes from a few jams and culminates in an incredible chase sequence, involving an antique (movie set in 1810) train - how did they build that thing and get it to work? - and some special effects way ahead of their time as Keaton climbs a precipice and ends up in a rushing river; I really have no idea how they could have filmed some of this sequence w/out putting the actors at great risk. Keaton is not as well appreciated today as is his contemporary, Chaplin, but he deserves props in his own right: in a way, he's more athletic and more expressive than CC, although his character doesn't seem as sweet and vulnerable. One quibble w/ the movie: a little stray dog plays a big role, up to a point, but he's completely forgotten in the chase scene and the romantic conclusion. What happened to the pup?

A classic Western from Ford that should have been 30 minutes shorter

All things considered, I prefer to song. There's a lot to like, though, in John Ford's 1962 Western drama, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (based on a short story by a woman author I'd never heard of - who knew?), most notably the strong lead performance by 3 megastars: James Stewart as the principled lawyer who comes to town and refuses (at first) to resort to violence to settle disputes; John Wayne as the strongest guy in town, who has a grudging respect for the lawyer though their rivals in love; and Lee Marvin as the eponymous Liberty and the essence of an incorrigible bad dude outlaw. Any time that the drama centers on these 3 men and their rivalries and their ethos the movie is good, even great: some classic confrontations, shootouts, bar-room (or dining room) brawls, and a huge climactic night-time encounter in the town crossroads. But there are far too many long, languorous passages that attempt provide almost a comic background for the action - the goofy and feckless town marshal (Andy Devine), the goings-on in the kitchen of the town eatery, stuttering and alcoholic characters - and an ending that drags on for a good, or bad actually, 30 minutes after the big showdown wrapping up some loose plot points (the long section on the fight between farmers an cattlemen over statehood just weighs down the drama). As always with Ford, the exterior shots are beautiful - especially in this throwback b/w production - though the many scenes shot on sets today look stagey. And what about the famous song? It's not even the closing-credits theme song; must have been released after or independent of the movie, especially in that its narrative of events doesn't quite match that of the film.

Second season of Mindhunter may be even better than the first - a rarity!

Season 2 of the Netflix series Mindhunter is that rarity, as good as or even better than the intriguing Season 1. The first season, which aired a few years back, stayed I imagine pretty close to the nonfiction book on which it was based: We watch as a team of agents (Ford and Tench) introduce to the reluctant FBI the concept of building psychological profiles of particular kinds of criminals (in this case, serial killers) to help identify suspects; the agents are in the process of developing methods for predicting the type of person who might be behind a series of crimes - using interviews w/ convicted killers to get insight into the mind of likely suspects. This methodology represented a severe shift in criminology, which till then had been based only on physical evidence and witness accounts. IN the second season we move beyond the establishment of profiling (fewer interviews w/ convicted killers) and we see the application of the principle in relation to a major killing spree, the Atlanta child abductions in the 1980s. The FBI agents, Ford in particular, insist that their data reveals a certain profile of the killer; the forces on the ground will have none of this and seek only physical evidence. The profiling is particularly troublesome to Atlantans because Agent Ford is sure that the perpetrator must be a young black man - which on the surface looks and sounds like racism. Aside from the political battles and the complex, unfolding search for the likely killer, there's a good back story developing, as Agent Tench's young, troubled son is involved in a brutal killing of a child - a plot line that strains credibility a little but leads to some powerful scenes and really builds our sympathies for the ramrod-straight agent Tench. Another secondary plot line involving the love life of Wendy, the academic expert who's an outside consultant to the team, feels peripheral and forced, but that's a minor matter. Overall, the 9-part series will hold interest and attention throughout and promises more developments if there ever is to be a Season 3.

The surprisingly hilarious Romanian film 12:08 East of Bucharest

The Romanian film 12:08 East of Bucharest (2016, Cormeliu Porumboiu [had to look that one up]) is a dark and unexpectedly hilarious comedy about a single call-in talk show broadcast in a small city in Romania. The host of the show has selected for his topic an examination of the day that the totalitarian Communist government/police state was overthrown and the question - apparently quite controversial, at least in this film and this city - as to whether local activists held a demonstration before the overthrow or merely poured into the streets to join the throng after the overthrow. The show itself, though apparently on local TV, seems much more like the old days of public-access TV in the U.S., with extremely poor production and virtually no audience. The host, after much struggle in the first half of the movie to get assurances that his guests will show at the studio!, gets for his panel 2 guys: One is the supposed leader of the pre-overthrow demonstrations, a sad sack of a guy w/ major drinking and debt problems. As the show rolls along, various callers denounce the guy as an imposter and insist that the city square was empty the whole morning (in fact until after 12:08, the time of the capitulation); the guy keeps insisting that he led a dangerous demonstration, but hes pretty much crushed by the end of the broadcast. The other guest is an old curmudgeon who actually says very little but pretty much steals the show with his glowering and fidgeting (throughout the broadcast he seems to be folding notepaper into paper boats). At the end, nobody's any the wiser, and the film ends with a look at some of the pathetic  public housing in this city in the midst of a slushy winter storm.The message beneath the subtle comedy (and commentary) seems to be: Is life any better in a "free" country? Does it really matter who was the first to demonstrate for freedom? We get a sense that there are many old wounds and resentments, and this weird talk-show is something like a public airing of long-stranding grievances and jealousies - but to what end? Isn't it better to move on and look to the future?