If there is a film genre that has been the source of more fiction and mythology than the western, that category would have to be the American Civil War. The difference seems to be that while some of the most persistent myths about the frontier West like the quick draw shoot-out are Hollywood fabrications that keep getting put into new movies, many of the contemporary beliefs about the Civil War are perpetuated because contrary facts get omitted from scripts. So whereas the reputation of Tombstone’s Johnny Ringo as a gunfighter is maintained on the screen even though he was never in a gunfight (nor was he killed by Doc Holliday as the movies have it) according to those who knew him like my grandfather and great uncle, a US Deputy Marshal and business partner of Wyatt Earp’s, we never see that Union general Ulysses S. Grant, the man supposedly fighting a war to end slavery, used his wife’s slave during that entire war or that Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the man supposedly fighting to protect slavery, considered it an evil and didn’t own any slaves. That’s just one of the numerous contradictions of this conflict that we have not seen on the screen that have created so many false perceptions of it.

We never see that many blacks in the South were free men, that the Confederate government was not ant-Semitic (its Attorney General and acting Secretary of War was Jewish and many Jews fought for the South), that 3,000 blacks owned 20,000 slaves according to the 1860 census, that northerners (some abolitionists excepted) did not go to war to end slavery, that armed pro Union resistance to the Confederate government by southern whites was rampant in portions of the South, and we certainly never see Union General William Sherman emphatically state that “Slavery is not the Cause but the pretext” for the  war before listing what he believed was in his letters.  How do we reconcile that with all the southern state secession declarations that name the retention of slavery as their reason for leaving the United States?  Beats me. But if anyone at that time understood southern motivations, it was Sherman.

For years Sherman was superintendent of the school that became Louisiana State University and he understood the South and its people in a way virtually nobody in the the North did.  Grant did say slavery was the cause of the war, but that was after years of Union floundering around for a cause to rally around. Before the war, Grant said “If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side.” That quote is disputed, but having seen it in several books over the years, I believe it’s accurate and suspect it has been attacked because it does not fit the the currently favored political narrative.

The net result of those and many other omissions like the extreme importance of the Irish immigrant soldiers to both sides is that most Americans are largely ignorant of the complexities and contradictions and outright hypocrisies that school boys of my background generally knew about their ancestors, their war and its issues that still underlie much of our contemporary political contention. The reason we knew was that we got to talk to people who were raised by those who actually fought in the Civil War or lived through it. That was the case in my family.

My father’s parents were on opposite sides of the Civil War and they would re-fight it over dinner every day. My grandfather had several brothers who fought for the North, one of whom was a telegrapher in Sherman’s army and was privy to many candid staff conversations he passed along that have not made it into any history book I’ve seen. Grandad was a strong Union Republican and to him, secession was treason. That was Sherman’s view and motivation for his vicious campaign against the Confederacy and its people as well.  My grandmother didn’t agree. Her father, older brothers and cousins had fought with Texas and North Carolina cavalry units. What I learned from them and others was that slavery was basically a non issue for most people then and that the likes of Sherman, Grant and even Abraham Lincoln felt that way too no matter what they said late in the war or after it that contradicted their earlier or privately expressed opinions. That “nuance” never makes it onto the screen just as other relevant facts have not in the most recent Civil War films.

The Conspirator shows the tooth and nail legal defense by Union Army hero Frederick Aiken of accused Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt before a US Army kangaroo court. So we have the drama of Surratt, a backer of the Confederacy, being defended by a former Yankee soldier of principle who’s upset that Surratt’s constitutional rights are being violated. What’s missing? Setting Surratt’s obvious guilt aside, the fact that Lincoln had rescinded the very constitutional rights Aiken complains are being trashed by the military court, for one, and the fact that before joining the Union army, Aiken had written to Confederate president Jefferson Davis offering to serve with the South, for another.

Glory shows us the first all black regiment formed by the Union — the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — and seems to imply that only the North was evolved enough to allow blacks into its army. In reality, they were cannon fodder for suicidal attacks like the 54th’s on Confederate Fort Wagner ,  key parts of which the film got wrong.

But have you ever seen a film portraying this eyewitness account of the Confederate army as it marched through Frederick, Maryland  (the town where 96 year old  Barbara Fritchie taunted the southerners with her American flag)  on its way to Gettysburg? “Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in the number … They had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and they were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy army.” CBS 60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney fumed that textbooks saying blacks fought for the South were a spreading a lie during a recent rant. Sorry Andy. Era newspapers contain accounts of captured fully armed black soldiers, black snipers and a History Channel piece correctly recounts how soldiers at Camp Douglas, the Union’s hellish POW prison near Chicago  — immediately killed black confederate soldiers.

Cold Mountain shows us a sadistic western North Carolina Confederate home guard that murders a harmless retarded boy and a musician in addition to terrorizing the civilians it’s supposed to be protecting. This story I know well. I heard it along with most everyone else while a child living in the mountains and have been to the grave that holds both victims several times. The film has the reason for the killings wrong (the two were Union sympathizers not Confederate army deserters), but maybe that’s because Cold Mountain is really an anti-war, women’s empowerment film. Far as it went,  the film still does not show what a bunch of murdering bastards this home guard actually was in addition to the other murdering bastard raider gangs that robbed, raped and pillaged area towns in North Carolina’s “valley of  humility between two mountains of conceit.”  Those mountains were the plantation aristocrats of Virginia and South Carolina, a class the average man tended to dislike for its arrogance. That’s why the Appalachians on through northern South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia were part of that other South that was ambivalent or outright hostile to the Confederacy and the war years there were not unlike the Missouri border war Bushwaker –  Jayhawker bloodlettings shown in The Outlaw Jose Wales and Ride with the Devil.

Gods and Generals presents another issue of authenticity that I have not seen on the screen. Take a look at this movie scene photo of actors portraying Confederate soldiers and compare it with the eye witness description of southern troops below it.

“I have never seen a mass of such filthy strong-smelling men. Three in a room would make it unbearable, and when marching in column along the street the smell from them was most offensive… The filth that pervades them is most remarkable… They have no uniforms, but are all well armed and equipped … They are the roughest looking set of creatures I ever saw.” Another observer described the Confederates as “a lean and hungry set of wolves.”

Do you see “lean and hungry wolves” in that scene? Neither do I.  But maybe I expect too much.

The Civil War or any other historical period can be interpreted any way a director wants, but that interpretation tends to reflect current sensibilities. Past interpretations like those in Gone With The Wind presented a ridiculous southern fiction of chivalry,  whimsical lost cause  and the off-putting sight of “darkies” singin’ ‘n dancin’ in da cotton fields.  We’re now at the opposite end of that spectrum within a framework of what Indiana University history professor David Thelen defined as a “story of bitter irreconcilable conflict between two societies and between two sets of values” — some of which we are still arguing about with no resolution in sight.

Rockwell’s Conviction performance  is enhanced by double Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Oscar-nominee Minnie Driver.  Together, they perform like a well-matched troika, the Russian three horse team that pulls sleighs, where the middle horse provides steadiness and stability while the two outer ones gallop with abandon. Driver provides that centeredness with a humorous, smoldering femininity,  allowing Rockwell’s  and Swank’s characters to respectively express the gut wrenching emotion of a man unjustly convicted and the journey of a sister trying to free him against all odds.

It’s a predicament that many have shared and still do. Evidence fakery and coerced lying under oath by law enforcement officers happens way more often in America’s justice system than most know or would ever believe because too many people think stories like Waters’ are aberrations or exaggerations. In fact, that’s what Hilary Swank thought at first. “There’s a part of you that has to be like,  This could never happen.  And then you realise that it is happening.”

The particulars of the Conviction story has all of the above abominations and more. It is the stuff of classic fighting-the-system outrage that only gets most people’s blood boiling and talking for a couple of hours after leaving the theater because they don’t think what happened to Rockwell’s character could possibly ever happen to them.

Kenneth Waters was a small town, former juvenile delinquent hell raiser convicted of brutally murdering an Ayer neighbor woman, Katharina Brow,  in 1983 because a police officer intimidated people into falsely testifying against him. Waters, who was certainly capable of killing (a bar fight scene where he threatens a man’s life with a broken bottle makes that all too clear),  spent 18 years in prison while his sister, Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), had to earn a high school GED before she could get into college and earn a law degree in order to represent and free her brother.

She finally did so by locating murder weapon blood evidence thought to have been destroyed and then taking it to attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) and his Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing. Those DNA tests did not exist at the time of the murder and showed the blood was not Kenneth Waters’.

The reel Waters

So he was exonerated and released forthwith, right? Not according to the film, and this is one place where the film story strays from its marquee billing as “The incredible true story of  Betty Anne Waters.”  That divergence is for the sake of dramatic license says the former district attorney involved: “this is Hollywood. The public should be aware that 20 years of history was collapsed to fit into two hours. This is not a documentary.”

In the script,  Margaret Coakley, drags her heels and files unconscionable new CYA charges against Waters which are classics of prosecutorial corruption. “That sequence of time is simply inaccurate and wrong,” says the real Coakley. “Kenny Waters did not sit in jail for months after (the defense team’s) DNA results cleared him. Fact is, he was released from jail in less than two weeks.” Coakley is now the Massachusetts Attorney General. She’s also the  Democrat who lost her bid for Teddy Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown because she was too arrogant to campaign for it,  according to the Massachusetts media.

Lest I forget,  publicity seeking attorney Gloria Allred had a problem with the script as well:  “No proper respect or compassion has been shown by Ms. Swank [the executive producer] for the murder victim and her family.” Allred vented at a recent news conference together with Melrose Brow, the daughter of the woman Waters was accused of murdering, who spoke for her siblings:  “We are not Hollywood people like you are. We are just children of a murder victim. Nevertheless, we believe that victims matter. My mother was not just a name, and was not and is not a person who should be used as a line in a script or just a way to make a profit for the entertainment industry.”

In response, Conviction’s three producers offered a private family screening:  “We have the deepest compassion and sympathy for the family of Katharina Brow.  (The screening) will no doubt answer many of their questions surrounding the unthinkable and horrific tragedy that befell their mother.” Opinions about what, if any, obligation the makers of Conviction had to the murdered Brow’s family continue to be expressed.  Perhaps the most realistic comes from producer Nathan Folks:

“It is obviously a very sensitive, very painful issue when you’re dealing with such a tragic story,  but ‘Conviction’ is about the Waters family, not the Brow family and the filmmakers obviously met with the people they felt necessary for the film. They were not under any legal or moral responsibility to take things further than that.”

Please post your thoughts.

Once free, Waters found that the police officer who had caused his misery could not be criminally prosecuted because the Massachusetts statute of limitations had expired. Kenneth and Betty Anne Waters then spent the next 26 years suing the town of Ayer and its police department for coercing false testimony to convict Kenneth and withholding evidence that could have cleared him. The town and its liability insurer finally agreed to pay 3.4 million dollars last year, but it was too late for Kenneth.

He had been killed in an accident eight years before.

The real Waters

Kenneth Waters’ story is the visible part of a much larger criminal injustice iceberg few dare acknowledge and most news media have no cojones to expose.  Rarely do honest law enforcement officials either for reasons ranging from job protection, to pension protection to political and peer pressures to maintain the blue wall of silence.  The fact that politicians keep passing increasing numbers of new laws doesn’t help matters.  Their sheer accumulation over the years means that I may be unwittingly breaking some law by writing this review and you may be in violation of some statute by reading it.

So as you watch Conviction, please keep in mind that what is happening to the late Kenneth Waters on the screen could happen to any of us,  even you.

That’s the Winter’s Bone world of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a 17 year old Ozark girl who cares for her two siblings and catatonic mother. She chops wood, shoots and skins squirrels, and she keeps her mouth shut about her crank cookin’ father, Jessup. It’s a world where family trees can resemble telephone poles and family feuds get deadly. No 9-1-1 callers here. The code of honor says when trouble brews, ya’ grab a weapon and take care of things yer own damn self — like the time when Jessup got crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and got shot in the chest. According to Daniel Woodrell’s novel on which the film is based: Jessup “was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor, he drove 30 miles to … the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling.”

Rhee lives strictly by the don’t ask, don’t tell, clan code until she learns she and her family will be homeless in a week because daddy Jessup posted the family home and property for his bail and then didn’t show up for trial.

Bail bondsman Satterfield (Tate Taylor) thinks Ree knows where Jessup is. So does Sheriff Baskin (Garret Dillahunt), who tells Ree that her father wouldn’t have gotten himself arrested if he’d stuck to growing marijuana. Well, Ree doesn’t know where daddy is, but she’s got to find him fast, and that means getting up the nerve to do something that just isn’t done in those parts. She must trudge from house to cabin through the woods to ask some mighty scary meth cookin’ members of her own family if they know where her father can be found  — and they might kill her just for asking.

One after another won’t tell her anything even though it’s plain they know something. “Aren’t we all supposed to be kin?” she asks many times. “Conversations just make witnesses” one says. Jessup’s brother, uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), grabs Rhee by the throat to emphasize the gravity of her questions. “Are you going to kill me?” Ree asks after a group of women led by the wife of the clan patriarch beat the holy Jesus out of Ree and tossed her in a barn. “That idea was talked about,” is the blunt reply.

If that all seems a bit “over the top” as one might say in  metrosexual society, please understand that violence and defiance of overreaching authority are integral parts of the Scots-Irish DNA that settled the Appalachians and Ozarks. They are the descendants of King William III’s “Billy Boys” (the arguable origin of the term hillbilly) and the Scottish Covenanters. The former warred against the Catholic supporters of James II for the English, Irish and Scottish crowns. The latter were Presbyterians who signed covenants of war in their own blood against bishop rule and unlimited royal power in the bloody Bishop’s Wars which preceded the English Civil War. Because the Covenanters wore red scarves around their necks, the English ruling class called them rednecks and the name stuck. No wonder the British Crown shipped my ancestors to the colonies. They spread the libertarian virus of individuality and self sufficiency that undermines authoritarian rule and collectivist schemes here to this day. It is the culture the political left understands it must compromise in order to conquer the American soul.

Back in the woods, Ree’s search for her father has upset her own plans to join the U.S. Army and bank the signing bonus for her family’s benefit. Military service is considered honorable among the poor southern whites who have traditionally composed its backbone (especially in the elite combat units), but she’s not old enough to enlist without her parents signature, and that’s tough to get when daddy is missing and mommy is out of it.

To Ree’s surprise, the same Uncle Teardrop that grabbed her throat comes around to help her search for his brother. He even makes Sheriff Baskin back down in a terrific scene.

“Is this gonna be our time?” Teardrop asks, Ruger rifle at the ready, as he watches Baskin in his side view mirror.  The sheriff has pulled his gun and ordered Teardrop out of his truck for no apparent legitimate reason. The subtext implies Baskin knows something about Jessup’s whereabouts and wants to stop Teardrop and Ree from looking..

Ree eventually does find Jessup with the help of some women aged by meth far beyond their years, and that made me rethink my fond memories of Sadie Hawkins Day. That’s the day cartoonist Al Capp invented in his Li’l Abner comic strip when mountain women get to chase down the man they want to marry and he has to comply.  It was a fine fantasy when many backwoods women I saw as a kid looked like young Dolly Partons or Capp’s Stupefyin’ Jones. But crank has got to be the closest thing to an ugly pill yet invented, and the sight of those worn women’s  faces so wonderfully cast by director Debra Granik really made me think how my old world has changed.

Thanks to Granik’s attention to authentic detail, Winter’s Bone never offers up silly Dukes of Hazard stereotypes, and that makes it work for me to the point of causing a bit of nostalgia for those woods even if I don’t miss eatin’ possum, raccoon and chitlins.

But while their mind game is going on between characters in front of the camera, there’s another one playing the audience from behind the lens. For the words the actors are saying and the situations they are in have been intentionally scripted by director John Curran and writer Angus MacLachlan to sell their own apparent nihilism, according to Norton at a Q&A I attended.

“John told me we have to do this film now while things are bad,” Norton said. “We have to show that traditional establishments like religion and marriage that people have relied on for truth have failed them.” Curran does that by showing those institutions as hypocrisies that are the refuge of hypocrites like Maybrey, a deeply flawed, nasty man who, in his heart, may be little better than the convicts he judges for early release.

A flashback prologue shows young Maybrey sitting in a Lazy Boy and sipping whiskey while watching golf on TV. When his wife says she’s leaving because “you imprison my soul” amid the buzz of a metaphorical angry bee swarm, Maybrey threatens to kill their baby daughter unless she promises to stay. She does. Thirty years later, Maybrey is still sipping whiskey in the same Lazy Boy and watching golf on the same TV — at least when he and his wife (Frances Conroy) aren’t attending Episcopalian church services and reading Bible verses to each other. In his car, in one of the believability disconnects that betray the Curran/MacLachlan agenda, Maybrey augments those passages by listening to the kind of  “Brother Al’s Hellfire and Brimstone Belchin’ Beat the Hades Outa Beelzebub’s Sneaky Serpent Send Me Yo Money Church of the Almighty Me” radio that no High Whiskeypalian (whenever four are gathered in His name, there is a fifth) that I ever encountered during my years in that church would sit through.

At his office in the same Michigan prison where The Jaundiced Eye, a documentary I produced back in 1999, was filmed when it was an active hoosegow, Maybrey deals with Stone, his last case before retirement. During their banter, the repressed frustration of Maybrey’s passionless marriage is detected by Stone and he starts a trash talk narrative about the sexual acts his wife (Milla Jovovich) performs for him.

Stone picks up on the tells that he’s right, sics his screw-anyone spouse on Maybrey, and before long he’s in bed with her and open to blackmail if he does not recommend release of Stone, a man he now realizes is a whacko and clear danger to society. But it’s too late. The judgee has brought the judge down to street level. “My wife told me you fucked her,” as if that’s not what he planned. “See you on the bricks, Jack,” Stone tells the former “Mr. Maybrey” as he leaves prison.

That close call with public ruin at least motivates Maybrey to ask a question that many in the audience would probably like to pose: “Do you actually believe any of this stuff?” Maybrey asks his wife during one of their Bible readings. Conroy’s face says it all: “I’m tired. I’m tired of this charade, and I’m tired of this crutch and I want out.”

Viewers expecting some sort of positive epiphany at that point will do better waiting for Godot.

Stone wanders off into some sort of new age (at least that’s all I can figure it to be) alternate reality he’s concocted in his mind from a book he read in the pen while Maybrey is left to ponder what a profane, SOB he’s been all his life while holding a gun in his hand.

Does he end it all?

No ending-giver here, but as Mabrey’s grown daughter tells her mother at the close: “I can’t believe you took it for so long.”

—–

On the western Hitler side, his national socialists mass murdered Poland’s civil leaders and its Jews at a variety of well-known death camps like Auschwitz, or worked them to death in Nazi factories.  On the eastern Stalin side, his international socialists mass murdered Poland’s military officers and intelligentsia — much of which was Jewish — and either deported those other Jews deemed threats to Russian rule to the Nazis to be slaughtered or to Soviet labor camps to be worked to death. So Eastside, Westside, all around Poland, both the Jewish religion and its unique culture were crushed by two Marxist based political systems concocted by demented intellectuals in which a malevolent dictator’s state is god.

That left many, like Krakow Jewish Festival founder Janusz Makuch, whose ancestors were Jewish, feeling lost: “I tried to find the answer on a basic question: What is my cultural identity? I’m not Jewish. However, I was born in Poland. Poland, where Jewish culture and polish culture intertwined through the centuries.”  According to Cantor Nathan Lam, the film’s executive producer and a man I have met several times at a neighbor’s home, 90% of American Jews can trace their ancestry to Poland before the mass murdering began.

It is against that bloody background that filmmakers Danny Gold and Matthew Asner followed a group of American cantors and well known song writer Charles Fox (“Killing Me Softly,” “I Got a Name” and “Ready to Take a Chance Again.”) on a journey to Poland last year. Their aim was to document the rediscovery of Poland’s lost pre WWII  Jewish art form that has so heavily influenced American theater, comedy and classic song scribes like George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen.  Their fathers were cantors.

“As a first-generation American whose father was born in Lublin, Poland, this film was as close as possible to being there for me,” said Cantor Paul Silbersher. “My father recalled childhood memories of Chazzan Rovitz, who was so famous even among non-Jews that there was a section in the synagogue reserved for Polish Army officers. They didn’t come to pray as Jews would, but as human beings seeking God through chazzanut (the art of singing the liturgy). Perhaps each culture has its own chazzanut, which reveals its own struggle and story. The movie reinforces my belief that this culture will not die, but be renewed.”

“I think one of the most powerful messages of this film is the importance of knowing and reclaiming one’s personal and national history,” said Cantor Sharon Kohn. “This lesson can resonate for anyone. You don’t have to be Jewish, Polish or a music lover to appreciate this documentary. When I am on the pulpit in front of the congregation, I try to emulate the authenticity of the passion for the sacred texts and authentic enthusiasm for Jewish culture that is depicted vocally by the esteemed cantors spotlighted in the movie.”

“Let’s face it, you know, the way cantorial music was here will never come back,” says Cantor Alberto Mizrahi. “There’s no audience for it, they were killed by the Nazis. I heard somebody say, whoa, we won, they lost. No, no, no:  We lost. We lost. We didn’t lose just a generation of Jews, we lost an entire way of life.  It’s gone.”

“100 Voices: A Journey Home” is a reflective movie,” Danny Gold told me. “We followed the cantors on the certain aspects of what they did to tie that into certain historical aspects of what went on with the Jewish culture in Poland.”

Among other things, those cantors and Charles Fox sang in Europe’s largest concert hall, Warsaw’s National Opera House, joined a Jewish festival in Krakow and prayed at Auschwitz with a Torah that was smuggled out of the extermination camp under the Nazi’s noses.

“It was the first time in the history of Auschwitz that anything like that had happened” says Cantor Lam. “There are souls that hover there. There are millions of jewish souls that are at that place.”

Poland is, in fact, awash in bloodied souls.

At the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival, the hourly bugle warning call of the hejnal from atop St. Mary’s Basilica is a reminder that the original horn blower had his signal cut short during the 13th century by a Mongol arrow through his neck.

Below, in a nearby town, the search for a connection with grandparents and fathers moved on: “I feel like I’m walking in the footsteps of my father,” says Charles Fox. “I can picture him running through the streets there. There’s basically nothing indicating that a Jew had lived in this town. In fact, there were 8,000 Jews that lived there and the town was only 10,000. So it was 80% Jewish. They were all sent to Treblinka.”

“People need to know the past and how glorious it was in order to go forward, observes Cantor Joel Lichterman. “This trip made them begin to see themselves in a different light of what they could be, and that’s what we wanted,” says Nathan Lam. “We wanted them to see that we could be a positive force in the world.

Lam believes 100 Voices will allow those who see it to better understand the revival of Jewish culture in Poland and the progress of Polish-Jewish reconciliation.

“It’s about making connections between people, Lam says.  “Only relationships are important.”

Well, I must respectfully disagree, Cantor Lam, with this coda: If the phrase “never again” is to have gravitas, an accurate historical record is singularly important.

Toward that end, 100 Voices adds one more bit of verification to the record General Dwight Eisenhower is popularly said to have ordered be established after allied soldiers liberated Dachau, the infamous Nazi death camp in Germany:  “Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Are you listening, Ahmadinejad?

How hostile is Hollywood for fundamental Christians that they would be ramping up productions in places like rural Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and especially central Florida? Mel Damski, director of several David E. Kelly hits, told me Kelly hates all religion but especially despises Christians, and that he misses no opportunity to “put them in the pit” of one of his dramas. The mini drama between David Duchovny and Victoria Jackson is another example.

I had a small X Files part on an episode that guest starred Jackson. She is a well known conservative Christian who left the Saturday Night Live cast after six seasons of being ridiculed for her religion, she said. Having worked as an SNL extra during the early 90s, I can personally attest to the derision of her by many on the show. But back to X Files.

Between takes, atheist star Duchovny, a very smart guy in terms of an SAT test with degrees from both Princeton and Yale, made fun of Jackson by baiting her with cleverly worded, condescending questions about God, Christianity, sex and politics. To her credit, she did not respond in kind. But no matter what she said, Duchovny was right back on her with another sly sarcastic put down. Every so often, the torment would cause  Jackson to exclaim “I’m a Christian woman!” That just whetted  Duchovny’s appetite for more, of course, and he’d then begin needling her anew.

Now, the only difference between what Duchovny was doing and what goes on almost every day in Hollywood is that he was expressing his disdain openly. The stuff I and maybe you hear weekly at some conservative Christian’s expense is done passive-aggressively behind their backs — and yes, such sentiments do translate into cancelled projects  and lost work opportunities even for the likes of billionaire Christian conservative  Philip Anschutz. 

Disney pulled out of its deal with Anschutz’ Walden Media to film C.S. Lewis‘ complete three book Christian message Narnia series. Disney had profitably financed The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian but gave no reason for dumping the third book.  Could jokes made by some at Disney about Jesus being a lion and less flattering comments have had something to do with the decision? Others, like my director friend Charlie Carner, do manage to have a career, but I have no doubt he’d be getting more greenlights if he were not an openly conservative Catholic who stands up for both his religion and American exeptionalism. “You got a problem with that?” I watched him growl at a liberal heckler during a Directors Guild presentation Carner was giving. Others just prefer “to get the ‘L’ out of Hollywood,” as Florida filmmaker De Miller puts it. “We’d like Central Florida to be ‘Holywood,‘” he adds.

Should Hollywood be worried? Could a Holywood turn out to be a Roger Corman type filmmaking factory that spawns faith-oriented equivalents of  Corman protégés Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich and James Cameron who may not only prefer to film in non union Florida, but who also want to put stories on the screen that skew popular culture away from the edge of what fundamental Christians see as a Tinselltown enabled moral precipice?

That’s unknowable at the moment, of course, and there’s no savvy, Christian version of Corman that I’m aware of. But every reduction of Hollywood’s constantly shrinking audience share has to be a concern to all but the most fiscally foolish who avoid reading the proverbial writing on the wall. Sure the faith-based films are made on micro budgets, often with with donated labor, locations and gear.  Sure they almost never feature name actors and maybe the writing and camera work are the stuff of Hollywood sneers. But they are in a learning curve and the available evidence indicates conservative Christians are a growing segment of America whose entertainment dollars are profiting their own.

“Fireproof,” a Christian film made by the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia made 40 million dollars and cost waaaay less than 1 million to make. The filmmakers themselves, the Kendrick brothers, are both Baptist ministers. Great as their number are, I suspect a pitch by those guys to Harvey Weinstein would not be well received and they know it. So they and others are looking to make the Orlando area their own filmmaking capital for some very sound reasons.

The weather is good all year and “there’s all this acting talent, thanks to the theme parks,” says David Nixon, co-director of “Letters to God.”  That local talent includes some retired and snowbird name actors. Gary Burghoff of TV’s “M*A*S*H” winters on Florida and has worked on a couple of projects. “We have A-list crews who don’t get the chance to showcase their work very often,” adds “The Whisper Home” director Jaime Velez-Soto. “They want the chance to make movies here, and not in L.A. or wherever, so they help you out.”

Then there are the churches.

Central Florida, like the South in general, is chock full of conservative Christian churches who want to evangelize on a broader scale. “We’ve always wanted to minister outside the four walls of the church, to the whole world,” said Pastor Matthew J. Shaw of the Faith and Power Worship Center in Apopka. It’s the church behind Faith and Power Pictures. “Movies seem like a better way of spreading our message.” That point is not lost on many other churches who are starting their own production companies in hopes their films may eventually reach theaters.

That may seem like a big stretch, but do remember that the Hebrews trained in the wilderness for a long time before emerging as a force to be reckoned with in Canaan.

You’ll recall that Cameron hectored to the world, “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” and then just last week through a proxy, invited Breitbart & Co. to battle him before an audience of committed global warming believers in Aspen.

I have just learned that an earlier challenge to Humphries made by this same proxy, environmental activist Richard Greene, followed the same nonsensical pattern that involves Cameron inviting you, encouraging you to incur costs, and then finding an absurd reason to cancel at the last minute. Humphries tells his story:

“What they wanted me to do was pay to fly across the country, pay for a hotel, pay my own way to the event, and then, after an opening showing of the Avatar DVD, I would get the privilege of debating James Cameron on climate change in front of 5,000 of his rabid fans. Oh, by the way, I was also asked: ‘can you bring along Glenn Beck (whom Cameron calls a “fucking asshole”) and Sean Hannity?’ I don’t know them and could’t get them, but I was going to do it because, eh, what the hell, I’ll get to meet James Cameron. But just before the event, I was told the thing was off because there was a bio or eco emergency or something like that in Brazil.”

Once in the Amazon, Cameron painted his face and tried to figure how to work Nanny McPhee’s magic walking stick to solve the crisis.

“I’m less interested in making money for the movie and more interested in saving the world,” King of the Jungle says.

But was a sudden trip to a far away place the real reason Cameron’s contrived political theater event was canceled? Absolutely not. What we have here is a wanker joke twice pulled-off  by one of the wealthiest directors of all time for the benefit his own cowardly ego.  I’ll save the discussion about whether debates prove anything beyond who is the better debater for another time, but if there is any evidence that Cameron would actually engage a knowledgeable opponent in verbal combat on level ground before an impartial audience where he is at risk of losing face or repelling people with his profane arrogance, I’ve yet to see it.

On the other hand, his chicken tracks are plain:

• Cameron invites prominent conservatives to a high-profile debate on a very important issue.
• They agree to pay their own way for the opportunity of being on stage with him.
• Then he starts demanding ridiculous changes to prior agreements.
• He then either uses the exotic coolness schtik of being too needed in other parts of the globe to cancel the debate or….
• Tells those he’s invited to debate with him that they’re suddenly not good enough to share the stage with, and…
• Sticks would-be participants with any expenses they’ve incurred for stupidly assuming he was negotiating in good faith. I know for a fact McElhinney ate more than $1,000 in camera crew expenditures.

Cameron clearly sees no need to honor his commitment with those he regards as lesser mortals. Get the joke?

“Morano is not at Cameron’s level to debate, and that’s why it didn’t happen,” sneered Cameron’s proxy procurer Greene. “Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society.” Hmmm, then maybe Greene credibly can explain why he was even allowed to negotiate with Morano for more than a week.

Greene’s calls to God have gone unanswered.

I warned you it was unconventional — but fitting.

Argenti resides in that portion of Dante’s perdition reserved for pimps, seducers and hypocrites. The available evidence indicates that all three terms apply to Cameron in this matter.

He is pimping as fact the notion that human beings cause global warming despite contrary scientific opinion and revelations that researchers may have concocted that view for political and funding reasons. Cameron’s opinion of those who disagree with him: “I think they’re swine.”

He is seducing others to believe in human caused global warming by the sheer intimidating force of his prominence, power and wealth:  “Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their a–,  I’m not sure they could hear me.”

He hypocritically encourages the destruction of other people’s luxury property by environmental terrorists but not his own huge home. “I Believe In Eco-Terrorism,” he smugly says.

Any normal egotist would consider that to be quite enough expressed arrogance, but  like Argenti,  Cameron pushed his pimpery, seduction and hypocrisy to the point where he exposed himself for the bullying coward he is. “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he puffed.

One of the deniers Cameron had in mind was documentarian Ann McElhinney, director of the film “Not Evil, Just Wrong.” Her film sets out the non-politically correct evidence that humans may not be the cause of whatever global warming there is. But notice the difference in tone.  Cameron affords no such deference. To him, those who so much as question his contention are evil in addition to being wrong.

McElhinney recounted events in this open letter. Here are the highlights:

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.

The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.

Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.

His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur. …

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.

But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a round-table”.  We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,”  decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/round-table would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet.  No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was canceled.

So why did Cameron back out?  See if you can determine the reason in this note I received from environmental activist Richard Greene, the man who negotiated the terms of the debate for Cameron:

Dear Dan,

Here are the relevant parts of the email sent to Andrew and the others on Saturday advising of the change in plans.   This is my position.   I’m sorry that Andrew did not join Marc Morano in the 2 hour session with the environmental community here in Aspen.  Thanks.  Richard

—–

Dear Andrew, Larry, Marc and Anne,

Here is the final decision in what has been, without a doubt, a very challenging road.

I take full responsibility for all of these challenges.

There will be no debate as originally envisioned and discussed . . . for now.   Instead, AREDAY and I offer the three of you (or two or even just one) the FULL platform – 5:30 – 7:00 pm Paepke Auditorium on The Aspen Institute campus . . .with FULL video and audio rights – to share “the other side” of the climate change and energy debate with the assembled notable in the environmental community.  Same time, same place, same goal . . . to forward a meaningful dialogue and, hopefully, better understand your points of view and the many significant issues facing our country and the planet.

You will have quite the audience to play with.  I just spoke with Professor George Lakoff and he is very much looking forward to attending.  Daryl Hannah and other notables in the movement are also in town.

James Cameron will not participate.  Again, this is my fault and my responsibility.  Way back in April James authorized me to set up a debate with either Glenn Beck or Senator Inhofe.  As Matt Dempsey will tell you, we tried very hard to get something done for Earth Day and then continued to talk.

I communicated that the “denier” team was representing and indirectly chosen by Sen. Inhofe’s office (as Matt had 100% endorsed Marc for that role) but it somehow, given James’ travel, literally to Siberia, was not clear that Sen. Inhofe or someone of his public stature would not be involved.  As a result, despite James’ total willingness to engage, he has been universally advised to wait for the time that Senator Inhofe or Governor Palin or Glenn Beck are willing and able to engage in this important debate.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Best,
Richard Greene

Green’s respectful tone in this note sharply differs from his description in The Aspen Times of human caused global warming critics as “Effing demigods.“  But maybe that’s an indication that the planned debate would not have accomplished anything useful.

Cameron’s reported stock response to fans wanting an autograph is the sort of comment that landed Argenti in the lowest ring of Dante’s Inferno: “I don’t owe you a f*cking signature.  Just get out of my f*cking personal space.”

Would such arrogance allow Cameron to have anything more helpful to say in a debate?

—–

That double murder was a real event known as The Walsh Street Police Shootings and it was done by the Petingill family, a vicious gang of armed bank robbers run by a woman named Kath Pettingill, in reprisal for the killing of one of their own by police. The men charged were acquitted in court, but after one of them was gunned down by rival criminals, his widow later told Melbourne reporters her late husband and the others charged did do the crime they escaped conviction for.

In his film treatment of this real story, writer – director David Michôd shows us this sordid crime family as one of brothers overseen by a sociopathic matriarch, Janine “Smurf” Cody (Jacki Weaver), America’s Ma Barker and her depression era bank robbing, murderous sons would have loved.

Like Ma, Smurf loves her sons.  In fact she loves them so much that the scent of incest wafts through the theater as she kisses each full on the mouth.

Eldest son and armed robber Andrew “Pope” Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) is hiding from a bunch of killer cops and not taking the pills that temper his considerable temper. Middle brother Craig (Sullivan Stapelton) has an unstable personality from taking the street drugs he sells. Youngest brother Darren (Luke Ford) is ambivalent but goes along with whatever his older brothers do.

Michôd reveals the pathology of these pathetic Melbourne animals in their blue collar kingdom through the eyes of their emotionally numbed 17 year old nephew, Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville). He’s living with his uncles and grandmother because his mother, who kept him shielded from her criminal brothers and mother, has overdosed on heroin and he has no place else to go. Soon after arriving, his uncle Craig welcomes him into the family way of doing things by having him point a gun at two street hoodlums.

That inclusiveness reverses shortly after a family friend and fellow crime partner is murdered by the same killer cops gunning for Pope. The Cody boys retaliate by killing two policemen. At that point,  detective Leckie (Guy Pearce) does what all good police investigators do, he goes predator and isolates the weakest member from his criminal herd.  That’s “J” in this case, and Leckie starts applying the pressure for him to testify against his own blood.  Smurf being the cunning animal she is knows “J” knows too much, so she conspires with the corrupt cops hunting her sons to murder her own grandson.

All of this is pulled off by Michôd in a way that reflects reality,  and I believe that’s a good thing considering the crime, violence and resolution fantasies movies so often depict. The real criminal world is populated by malevolent, banal scum, not principled Godfather glorification princes in some alternate but equivalent moral realm.  Real violence is quick, nasty and often unexpected. Having been shot at several times and stabbed once myself, I can assure all reading this that real violence is nothing like the extended choreographed fight scenes of  a   James Bond,  Jason Bourne or Evelyn Salt.  Most of all, justice and goodness do not necessarily prevail in the real world and Animal Kingdom constantly smacks us in the face with that fact without anyone’s acting technique getting in the way.  Our mates down under seem to have a talent for that.

The only downside about Animal Kingdom for me is the Aussie accent. It’s allegedly English, but I find myself not immediately catching onto the slang, the pronunciation and the quick turn of indigenous phrase so that I’m often a few beats  behind what’s being said. In sum, I rather feel like the grievously wounded American GI in a WWII joke who was brought to an Australian hospital.

“Did they bring me here to die?”, the GI asks.

The Aussie nurses replies: “Wie now suh, thie brot ya ear yustuhdie.”

That aside, I highly recommend Animal Kingdom.

—–

No, that was  Z, the film by Costa-Gavras, about the revolutionary romance and righteousness of communists fighting the Greek Junta that was suppressing the human rights of communist radicals who wanted to turn Greece into a Marxist dictatorship so they could suppress the human rights of all Greeks. Different movie, but as I think of worshipping this stunning view with some Retsina, that’s where this film’s cliched, anti-capitalist story line begins, according to the Tzimas description which I have slightly enhanced for effect.

The drive for success transforms Alexis (James D’Arcy, “Master and Commander,” “Nicholas Nickleby”) from a young, Greek Bolshevik idealist into the capitalist pig embodiment of everything he hates. But when his company causes a Biblical scale (that’s how the film describes it)  ecological tragedy, he is shaken to his senses. To reclaim his lost soul in this gazillionth riff on  Goethe’s Faust (which is essentially an assortment of Greek mythology themes about the mortal road to the Hellenistic hell of Tarturus), Alexis must expose the Mephistophelian beast he serves. Bemoans Alexis about the bill he’s run-up with Beelzebub: “I ended up serving the system I fought so hard to change. Yes, it gave me riches, but the price was my soul.”

—–

Arrrrrrrrrghhhhhhh!!!!! – the angst of Faust is thrust upon us by D’Arcy as a Medea mimic — it is a Greek film, ya know!

Unlike the play,  however, he gets no winged dragon drawn chariot to lift him away to Heliopolis before the audience can retaliate for his excessive melodrama. Then again, maybe the flying swan scenes which are the source of the movie’s title are really dragon metaphors. Whatever they were, I couldn’t figure them out and Tzimas’ answers to my questions were all Greek to me.

—–

But no wonder Alexis is pained, his hippy-dippy 60s sensibilities wife, Maria (Alicia Witt, “Mr. Holland’s Opus” “88 Minutes”), thinks they can have the money that pays for their expensive home with that great view of the anchored cruise ship without paying the price in stress and time away from family that practically everybody else finds necessary to earn that kind of money: “I’m sleeping with a fucking robot. You’ve lost yourself at that stupid firm. Where’s the tender poet I fell in love with?”

Wellll, Maria, ya think that tender poet realized nobody pays for prose and started working his butt off to afford your Mercedes, designer clothes and all the other expensive stuff you obviously can’t live without? And does it occur to you or Tzimas that if all Greeks worked as hard as the Alexis character, the Germans wouldn’t have to tell his countrymen they could fix a lot of their own financial woes by getting up earlier and napping less?

Not a chance.

Tzimas’ intent is to cast corporations, especially American ones,  in the worst possible light as wanton destroyers of the environment and worse. Speaking as one who used to expose corporate crime (check my bio), that’s a ridiculously broad brush smear of an institution that has provided the highest standard of living the human race has ever known, but it is the operative leftist stereotype being sold here in order to make a case for replacing it with authoritarian government power. So to that end, Tzimas portrays Alexis’ company as one that routinely lies, cheats, steals and hires murderers to kill anyone who gets in the way of an obscene profit. “Ethics are really no concern of ours. The rules of the game are set by the system,” the company chairman explains to Alexis.

And who did Tzimas cast to play that amoral corporate master philosopher of crime in the suites? Why none other than Larry Hagman in a repetition of his ethically challenged J.R. Ewing role.

—–

That should be enough for any ordinary director to pound home this anti-capitalist message. But just in case somebody missed the Dallas association, Tzimas also cast Linda Gray, J.R. Ewing’s long suffering wife Sue Ellen, as Alexis’ mother.

Speaking of Alexis, the last time I saw  James D’Arcy in a movie he was a suicidal midshipman holding a cannonball while  jumping into Davey Jones’ locker. That may not be a bad place for this film, because I cannot imagine any amount of re-editing that will make The Flight of the Swan worth paying money to see.  On the other hand, letting people into the theater free and then charging them to get out would be worth the exit price.