So it is with great excitement that I present to you a bold new project of mine—one that I think will inspire and challenge you as much as you’ve inspired and challenged me over the years.  

Naturally, I am looking forward to the scrutiny and feedback that this teaser trailer and the premise of the film will induce, and I hope that you will be moved to support and make this film possible. 

Heal America is a feature film documentary following the legendary homeless activist Ted Hayes on his journey to heal racial and generational wounds in our society. Many know Ted from his work with the homeless on skid row in Downtown L.A. 

After living with the homeless for eight years, in 1993 Ted Hayes founded The Dome Village, a groundbreaking homeless shelter that addressed the problem of homelessness in an original politically incorrect way – by nurturing the spirit of responsibility and self-reliance. A true inspiration for several generations of the downtrodden, Ted is living proof of how one man can positively transform his desperate surroundings. 

I met Ted Hayes years ago while making The Wounded Warrior (www.thewoundedwarrior.com), a documentary about the far reaching consequences of the Civil War. We talked a lot about how most of the racial and social issues today are a result of wounds inherited from our troubled past and how much of it can be healed by simply acknowledging where and how and why the wound was inflicted. 

Wherever true healing was needed—for the wounds of slavery and segregation, the conflicts between natives and settlers, or many subtle cultural clashes besides—there was an exploitation of pain in order to serve a specific political purpose and establish a fraudulent voting pattern. An entire industry of race hustlers, “social justice” witch doctors, professional class warfare agitators and ambulance chasers flourished from festering wounds whose causes had never been addressed with honesty.

In this distorted reality, good people are still being labeled racist while real racists prosper from the confusion and fuel it. Any attempt to address issues of social, racial, or cultural division with the objective of bringing us together as one people is met with hostility and finger-pointing from one side and denial from the other. Honest dialogue quickly degenerates into a blame game and a guilt trip.

Heal America shows what can happen by cutting through the veneer of political correctness and confessing one’s shortcomings without fear or self-pity. It is more than a documentary. It is a journey and a movement — one that ultimately begins with you…

The devotion of our small crew to this project has enabled us to film it on bare bones budget. The best way to fund this project, we’ve concluded, is by directly involving the very community we hope to reach with the film. A brilliant new website—kickstarter.com–makes this involvement easy and exciting, and we’ve launched a funding campaign on the site through which you can contribute to Heal America in a matter of seconds. 

Here’s how it works. On our Kickstarter page, you can pledge a donation of any size, for rewards ranging from DVDs to posters to private meetings with Ted Hayes and invitations to the premier. Your donation is only charged if we reach our fundraising goal in the allotted time (38 more days). By becoming a “backer” you not only help us continue filming but also showcase your support in a very important way for the promotion of the film and its message. 

Every little bit counts. This is new media at its best, relying on strength in numbers to circumvent the usual elite channels for the sake of a heterodox and genuinely edgy work. 

I hope you’ll check out the site, tell all your friends, and follow the project through updates I’ll be posting here.

There are different ways to write and make movies. Very few are made from the heart; many more are formula based. There are movies inspired by dishwasher manuals and a great number derived from Marxist textbooks. And there is a special category of movies: those written and made by self-righteous hypocrites.

—–

“The Whistleblower” is a drama based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac (played by Rachel Weisz), a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposed the U.N. for covering up a sex scandal involving peacekeepers and an international ring of sex traffickers. The cast also includes Monica Belluci, Vanessa ‘best friend of Israel after Obama’ Redgrave and David Strathairn among others.

As Kathryn investigates the exploitation of young and underage girls, she discovers that “sex lords” are bribing the UN officials to run the illegal prostitution clubs that spring up like mushrooms across the war-ridden and apocalyptic Balkan terrain. Moreover, not only are the UN officials are being bribed to close their eyes on sex slavery but, in fact, the clubs are really operating to serve the UN peacekeeping force. The story also flashes back to how an underage Ukrainian girl is tricked into sex slavery by her own relatives.

After nominally showing other UN peacekeepers abusing underage slave girls, the story turns into a full-fledged attack on a military contractor’s (“Dyncorp”) cover up of its employees whom Kathryn Bolkovac threatens to expose. So Dyncorp becomes the main villain, and it is mentioned in the same breath as “Halliburton.” That magic word that is honey to a leftist’s ear. Mentioning Halliburton in the popular culture is like having a plague sign nailed to a medieval city wall. Whatever comes into contact with it is automatically doomed as rotten. I mean, you can discredit the Dalai Lama by attaching him to Halliburton. You can even discredit Deepak Chopra by attaching him to Halliburton . . . though you can also do that just by reading his books.

So, the real culprit of the story is Dyncorp, who covers up its employees’ abuse and, of course, and you knew, this was coming . . . the State Department that covers up for Dyncorp. The plotline gets rapidly obsessed with the military contractors and the State Department as if they are the ones who invented sex slavery and prostitution.

And, of course, the State Department and Dyncorp are now hell-bent on killing Kathy, just like they were hell-bent on killing Valerie Plame, right?

The assassination plot device is precious . . . and as substantiated as Mayor Bloomberg fearing that Time Square car may have been rigged to blow by an American disenchanted by a health care bill. Again, not to defend Dyncorp’s alleged attempt to get rid of a whistleblower by firing her, but there is a fine line between firing someone and firing a bullet into someone’s head.

With all their sophistication and monitoring every move of their own operative, the Dyncorp/State Department assassination plot, of course, fails.

Every time I see a noble human rights warrior targeted for assassination by an evil American State Department or corporation, I am staggered by the inefficacy of the latter in dispatching their intended target. I mean, how hard could it really be? And yet, the State Department (or whoever) never ever succeeds and the heroes end up freely exposing whatever they are determined to expose.

What makes me personally disappointed in movies like The Whistleblower is the wasted potential and its outright hypocrisy. Although it is fair to criticize, and especially to fight, those who went to protect and ended up having sex with under age girls, the screenplay of The Whistleblower fails to explore the tragedy as a result of fraudulent human nature and the overall UN corruption, but rather as a self-serving singling-out of the military contractors…the American military contractors.

If it chose, on the other hand, to document the story of abuse particular to post-war Bosnia, then it is blatantly one-sided because the peacekeepers, especially the American ones, are depicted as sex maniacs whose sole purpose is to have sex in Bosnia.  Forget about putting their ass in the middle of two fratricidal maniacs and trying to calm down a millennium-long-brewed genetic animosity, the peacekeepers are here solely to abuse the young girls whom they came to protect. That’s the impression one gets from the script, and the impression is usually the result of intention.

And by shifting the focus of the movie to “America is the worst and the American military in all its forms is the darkest force since Darth Vader,” the plot of The Whistleblower loses its importance and passion because of the failure to address the cause of sex slavery and its real culprits and turns into a comic feminist rendition of Matt Damon’s wet dream fantasy Bourne movies.

In the attempt to quench a leftist thirst for putting down the military, The Whistleblower like its ilk of naïve but dangerous political movies, sacrifices the real issue of sex trafficking like a virgin to a persistent dragon of propaganda.

On a more tragic note, the creators of The Whistleblower indirectly (or, perhaps, directly) abuse children by using them for their political purposes. Letting the real culprits off the hook and chasing the American military contractors instead, proves that the creators are not really concerned about sex slavery as much as they think they are but simply use the rape of children as a platform to denigrate American military. Otherwise they would deal with real statistics that shows the American peacekeeping force as the least involved in the debauchery and abuse of all the UN peacekeeping nations worldwide.

A simple research such as the one contacted by William Norman Grigg in his article “Beasts in Blue Berets’ (published in The New American with some references to similar expositions in the Village Voice) will reveal shocking abuses, for example, of Belgian UN peacekeepers in Somalia who fried a young boy for stealing food and a Belgian Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper rewarded with a bomb threat (in Belgium) for breaking the undesired news.

The research will also reveal disturbing accounts of Italian troops torturing and abusing Somalis and a 46-page report documenting that “the criminal events were not just the result of ‘rotten apples’ that you may find in any structure, but were rather the consequence of a stretched line of command and amused compliance toward such high jinks by some junior officers.”

Then, there are 47 Canadian UN troops who served in Bosnia, yes in Bosnia, and were accused of “drunkenness, sex, black marketeering and patient abuse at a mental hospital they were guarding.”  The Whistleblower is a German-Canadian co-production so where is the Canadian self criticism of this outrageous case? All you get about other UN troop abuses in the screenplay of The Whistleblower is a throwaway line that ends with the protatgonist telling the audience Americans aren’t legally accounable for anything they do.

No, Kathy, they are accountable and interestingly they proportionally commit less abuse than any other participant country as evidence after evidence will show if you only bother looking at it, instead of listening to your boyfriend!

Many international humanitarian observers and Pentagon officials note that such problems (prostitution, sex trafficking, narco-business) are predictable, given that “the international police task force [in Bosnia] is a compendium of people from diverse countries with different degrees of professionalism and training and different backgrounds in operations and ethics”.  This sounds like the real problem, doesn’t it?

Now, why the creators of The Whistleblower chose to go after the least guilty and by doing so let the real culprit slip away? Isn’t this against any investigative logic? Isn’t this truly despicable, that in an attempt to score cheap political points, which is the only real reason this movie is being made in the first place, they would go as low as to use sex slavery of underage girls? How different they are from physical abusers or those who sell these girls into slavery?

The only noble soldier with real lines is Kathy’s boyfriend, the aforementioned Dutch peacekeeper Jan, who hates the concept of his friends raping girls, but occasionally gives them a ride from the sex club when they are pissed drunk. Again, it is a matter of choice and probably based on a true boyfriend . . . but why Dutch? Were there no good American peacekeepers to fall in love with? Or may it be that real Kathy (or at least the way she is portrayed in the script) had some issues of her own, because as much as she tries to save girls from drunk peacekeepers, she just cannot stop spewing talking points on how what is considered brave for a man in America is considered bad for a woman.  This is so old and so Berkeley that no serious American man can take it anymore, which explains the Dutch boyfriend.

Remember, Amsterdam is liberals’ El Dorado. Every disenchanted liberal threatens to leave oppressive America for Amsterdam the city where you can smoke pot, have abortions, enjoy tulips, neo-Calvinism, and euthanasia. Not to mention your pick of prostitutes, sitting on display in windows, many of them sex slaves themselves.

So when Kathy fears for her life, threatened by Dyncorp and the State Department, the Dutch boyfriend calls her and says, “It’s time to come home.”

Yes, Kathy welcome to Amsterdam, the safest city in the world! Make sure you visit those colorful tulip fields, the Van Gogh’s museum and, of course, Linnaeusstraat street where in the early morning of November 2, 2004, an Islamist thug barbarically murdered, by shooting, stabbing and attempting to decapitate, Van Gogh’s grandson, Theo—a real whistleblower who made a movie about women’s abuse by real villains who really kill, even in such places as Amsterdam.

Hopefully, to refute doubting loudmouths like me, the creators of The Whistleblower will make a movie one day that exposes sex trafficking and child abuse that is happening in their immediate neighborhood- the hills of Los Angeles. Thus, finally, making the point that it is not just girls from impoverished countries who are victims of sex abuse and it is not just military men who abuse them, but also young, underage or ‘barely legal’ actresses and models who are raped and abused by pacifist directors and producers right here in Hollywood.

I know that bringing up Polanski on a conservative-leaning blog is like exposing Nosferatu to the light, and being one of the most famous cases, Polanski’s sin, compared to what is really going in this town, can be considered mild. Yet, it is this connection to Polanski, as well,  that moves The Whistleblower from the category of  “evil Halliburton movies” to the category of “movies made by self righteous hypocrites,” like Monica Belluci, whose name you will see in the main credits of the movie as well as under the “Release child-rapist Roman Polanski” petition.

With all your love and respect for the military, not unlike Belluci’s love and respect for Polanski, I don’t think, liberal or conservative, you should be going out of your way to justify child abuse because of the peacekeepers’ combat fatigue or tough terrain filled with mines, and that’s exactly what you should expect from the people who make movies as well. When it comes to the gut-wrenching issue of using a child as a sex toy, we really should level the damn field.

“The Whistleblow” hits theatres August 5th.

Robert Mapplethorpe was not the first and certainly will not be the last child who managed to outrage the father.  Criticism of religious and social order is not really a modern phenomenon and, however tempting, cannot be attributed to deconstructive neo-Marxists tendencies in American art. 

Child’s perpetual desire to dethrone father is usually matched by father’s not so subtle urge to devour his offspring. Some fathers need to be enraged, rebelled against, and dethroned. One could only wish that Saddam Hussein’s sons would’ve inspired a national rebellion against their father’s authority instead of becoming his instruments of torture and pillage. 

Director Ingmar Bergman, on the other hand, rebelled against the patriarchal religious order of rigid Scandinavian Protestantism. He upset many fathers, including his own pastor dad who did not approve of his son’s obsession with theater and the lantern’s ability to project images on a wall. 

But the efficacy of Bergman’s rebellion was in his ability to outrage the father, not as a juvenile, but as a child coming into his own. His rebellion was sincere, his criticism of authority genuine and threatening. 

It was also self-aware. As a true thinker and artist who could travel in time, Bergman knew that every child is just an intercourse away from becoming a father. Not surprisingly, one can find more religious insight and earnest attempt to understand the mystery of God in Bergman than in many of the more pious currents of his time.

Luis Buñuel’s “Viridiana” was described by L’Osservator Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, as “blasphemous.” Buñuel later said, “I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am.”

“Viridiana,” however challenging, was not deliberately offensive, because Buñuel the child was criticizing the father as an adult: with argument, by pointing out inconsistencies, by acknowledging his own inability to understand the mystery of the father and by examining his own fear of becoming a father one day himself.

This is why no serious religious thinker or person of faith is, or should be, offended by artists’ sincere critique of religion or patriarchal institutions. Such critique is part of a dramatic conversation between generations—a renewing debate where sons transform into fathers and fathers ally with their sons’ children against their own children.

Bunuel’s first film “An Andalusian Dog,” a collaboration with Salvador Dali, was a criticism of everything including surrealism.  “An Andalusian Dog” abounds with disturbing images—most memorably, eyes being sliced with a razor and hands crawling with ants. 

Ants, of course, have quite a history of disturbance. The ants crawling on the Crucifix in the four-minute video clip “A Fire in My Belly” by late artist David Wojnarowicz – recently upset a whole bunch of fathers. One of them, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, called Wojnarowicz’s video “hate speech” meant to denigrate Christianity. His anger was automatic, but the real anger should’ve come from the child. The video did not denigrate Christianity. It denigrated surrealism. 

Ants on the Crucifix offends not because it mocks a religious symbol but because it is a second-rate art, a trite plagiarism, a primitivism. It imitates an avant-garde now on the rear end of 80 years. Sadly, this is the case with most postmodernism: whether it is a Crucifix in a jar urine or Mother Mary covered in elephant dung or, by an extension of the same logic, Michael Moore mocking corporations while getting his paycheck from one. 

These novice tricks substitute real criticism and rebellion against fathers for a juvenile contrarianism—the spoiled brat’s desire to offend a parent, just for the sake of self-assertion through offending. The father’s furious reaction owes not to challenge or scrutiny but merely to his child’s monumental inability to mature. 

Do these show-offs really think that dipping a Crucifix in urine exposes real shortcomings in the established religious order? Does the Supersize Me guy really think that people will stop eating fast food if they see his marketing campaign masquerading as a documentary film?  

All this only turns more people to the father, sometimes even an evil one who deserves to be dethroned. People sympathize with the father for having such an imbecile of a child, a brat who kicks and screams in public but cannot survive a day without a parent’s support and care. 

So, as someone who still finds himself in the children’s camp, I urge my fellow artists not to make it so easy for fathers to dismiss us. Let’s stick it to “the man,” but with respect, so the rebellion can gain support and not devolve into a dog and pony show for vegetarians only. I understand that Karl Marx urged many artists to use art as a weapon, but I’m sure even that wooly bastard did not believe it should be aimed at one’s own foot.

Had Voltaire been alive today, who knows, he might have had a show on Comedy Central between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert spots. Not to equate the hit and run style of Jonnie and Stevie’s social ridicule to the genuine wit and devastating satire of Voltaire but the early Enlightenment secularists and their late night TV comedian descendants are the representatives of the same school of social criticism through ridicule. 

—— 

The analogy between bucolic Rousseau and another nocturnal creature Bill Maher falls within the same line- both men embarked on a journey to expose the emptiness of the religious beliefs of their time.   

Mockery and ridicule are the most used and powerful tools in the armory of secular liberalism. Once I ran into Woody Allen in New York.  Since I lived on the Upper East Side, a block away from his office, I knew that one day I would run into one of my favorite directors. 

I saw his “Annie Hall” more than I saw my father when growing up, so Woody was, however strange this may sound, my childhood hero. 

I was ready for the encounter; to tell him how much I loved his movies. 

Then it happened. I was dumping garbage into one of those New York metal bins reminiscent of  Hitler’s bunker when I saw my hero rapidly approaching me along with his wife.  To my astonishment my only thought was, “If not for his movies and humor, this guy could not get laid in a whorehouse.” 

I couldn’t take him seriously; years of him making fun of others had a perverse effect on me when I saw him.  He seemed ridiculous – a distorted, jittery guy with his young weirdo wife.  Here was a master but I couldn’t bring myself to appreciate the moment I had been waiting for.  I just wanted to make fun of him… 

Yes, I know it is really easy for a civilian like me to ridicule an aging Woody Allen. Yet, it is much easier for the movie star to ridicule a patriot waving a flag at a Tea Party. Just the idea of grown men and women waving a piece of fabric while proclaiming their allegiance to a two thousand year old teaching of a carpenter can provide enough default comedic material to turn Barney Frank into a chick magnet at a DC fundraiser.  

Social satire and ridicule of rotten institutions is a very important antidote to humorless fanaticism of social experimentation (although, some of the funniest lines came from the most dead serious dictatorships, like the Soviet propaganda bragging that there was no sex in the Soviet Union and Iran’s Ahmadenijad announcing at the Columbia University that there were no gays in Iran). 

Ridicule and mockery may organically develop into an art form of political satire; so can seriousness and love for one’s country and its foundation develop into an art form of true patriotism. Just as satire should not be impeded by dogmatic humorlessness, so true patriotism should not be mocked by silliness. 

Voltaire laughed when he was supposed to learn but he truly laughed at the authority. His disdain was for a corrupt alliance of church and state.  Not a great fan of mass movements, he was, nevertheless, a true inspiration to the Tea Party of the day- the French Revolution. 

On the contrary, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert organizing a rally to mock the Tea Party Movement is not a wit fest aimed at exposing corruption of social institutions or of a corrupt mindset. They are simply making fun of people with whom they disagree in order to protect an ideology currently in power. It is a serious propaganda stunt masquerading as a ‘Jon and Steve’ travelling freak show.   

Stephen Colbert’s recent mock testimony at the Congress could’ve passed as a challenge to power had he not been invited to testify by the ruling Democrats to further their cause through ‘comic’ relief.  It may have been funny for the highly intoxicated but, in reality,

it was nothing more than a pathetic and disrespectful attempt of a house lackey  to deter the public’s attention, as John Nolte observed,  from the hearing of the Black Panthers’ voter intimidation case that was happening at the same time. 

During the decline of mid-level kingdoms, when the court intrigue and bureaucracy became unbearably serious for free-spirited court jesters, the latter went freelance by becoming clowns and speaking the truth to the power from the streets. Modern clowns like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their ilk are the sad end of the movement that laughed when it was supposed to learn. They are the clowns who left the street for the ‘bright lights,’ giving up the street in order to get back to the more elite and stable position of a court jester. And now that the jesters are also eligible for the universal health care benefits, who can blame them?

—– 

In 2006, The Washington Time reported:

“Valley of the Wolves” is not the work of independents or amateurs. With a budget of $10 million, it’s the biggest-spending Turkish film in history. The international cast includes Hollywood actor Billy Zane of “Titanic.” Within three days of its release, the movie had been seen by 1.2 million people, a 40 percent increase on the previous viewing record. At a gala performance, the actors rubbed shoulders with Turkey’s elite.

“I feel so proud of them all,” said Emine Erdogan, wife of the prime minister, comfortably ensconced in a seat next to the actor playing Alemdar.

The movie opens with a real-life incident: the arrest in July 2003 of Turkish special forces in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. The soldiers were led out of their headquarters at gunpoint, with hoods over their heads. America later apologized, but it appears the offense ran deep. At the time Turkey took the incident as national humiliation. In this film the fictional hero sets out for revenge.

The film depicts Americans as bloodthirsty villains who massacre civilians at the wedding, kill innocent Iraqis for the sport of it and occasionally blow up a friendly neighborhood mosque during an evening prayer. There are multiple random executions. And for the first time, the real-life abuses by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison are played out on the big screen.

Then there is naturally a Jewish doctor (you knew that was coming) who sells organs of killed Iraqis to clients in New York, Tel-Aviv and London (the Western axis of evil).

At the end of the movie an outraged, self-righteous Turkish hero thrusts a dagger into a heart of an American GI. As rightly calculated, in Berlin, this scene resonated with disenfranchised Turkish-immigrant audience, which at that moment cheerfully exploded in applauds while shouting, “Allah is great!”

However appalled by the blatantly anti-American message, in the spirit of good old new age guilt trip balderdash, we should, nevertheless, remember that it was our brave and outspoken American political filmmakers who inspired Turkish filmmakers to challenge authority. The Turks simply followed. They are challenging authority…the American authority (not their own, of course.)

Even in its agony, leftist Hollywood continues to inspire half intellectual filmmakers all over the world. It sets the tone. It is the endless domestic America-bashing and vilification that is responsible for creating these ugly film entities in other parts of the world. These weapons, which are used against us, are manufactured in the labs of Hollywood. The Turkish franchise is simply a secure investment in the devaluating market of confusing images.

After a screening of the movie in Germany, an inspired 18-year-old Turk told a reporter that:

“America is evil. Look what they did to Native Americans and people in Vietnam, and now in Iraq.”

One could only hope that one day this inspired Turkish boy will grow up to become a filmmaker and make a movie that criticizes his own government, which still denies the Armenian Genocide and dumps millions of dollars and enormous political pressure on the US Congress not to accept the first Genocide of the 20th century.

One could hope, that the 18-year-old Turkish boy who so sincerely cares about the extinction of the Hopi Indians in the US, will care about his history as well and make a movie about the Genocides of many Balkan Christian nations, Greeks and Kurds by not so distant Ottoman Turkish Empire.

One could only hope. Yet, I am afraid that by the time the boy enters his prime and chooses a subject for his first movie, there will be a whole herd of US film school graduates creating enough generic Marxist garbage to clog the poor young Turks pipe to the truth of his own history.

The Pig and Whistle is an old Hollywood joint right next to one of the oldest American theatres, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the home of the American Cinematique.  As Hollywood Blvd. has become safer and relatively less bizarre over the past several years, the Egyptian has become a more frequent host of various film events.                                                                

That day, it was hosting a Q&A with directors of foreign films nominated for Golden Globes. By the kitchen exit of the Pig and Whistle, Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore was giving an interview just a few steps away from Austrian director Michael Haneke, who was talking to enthusiastic film buffs (and was generally ignored by the Cardinals’ fans).  Among the directors were also the young Chilean director of “The Maid,” Sebastian Silva, and a French director of a prison saga “The Prophet,” Jacques Audiard.

During the Q&A inside the theatre, the most notable moment was a little back and forth between the Italian Tornatore and the French Audiard, who expressed his disappointment for the decline of the great Italian cinema. That really struck a wrong cord with Tornatore, who claimed that Italians are really great in exporting the notion that Italian cinema is in decline, when it is simply an extension of the world cinema in decline. Then he went into a full-fledged attack by stating that there are not many particularly great French movies either.  And there it went again, that never ending European family feud . . . then people wonder how Europe got itself into the same war twice within the same century.

Austrian director Haneke was sitting in between them. He was composed and relaxed. His movie, The White Ribbon (the eventual winner of the Globe award), explored the origins of fascism and war, a mini version of which was happening on his right and left sides.  I saw The White Ribbon some weeks later. When I was driving to the only theatre that was playing it on the opposite side of the town, I pondered about what marketing hook could be used to attract American audiences unfamiliar with Haneke’s work to go and see a black and white movie in German by a director that looks like a monk who has taken an oath of silence.  When I came out of the movie, the answer was clear. The only reason one should see The White Ribbon is because it is a masterpiece. That’s all.

It was refreshing to see how in exploring the complex dynamic between rigid Protestant religious morality and an almost feudal society, Haneke never fell into the temptation to politicize the issue and blame religion for all the ills of man. It is this wisdom and mastery that is lacking from the current American foolish and childish critic of religion in the movies and general culture.

Haneke’s criticism is wise and deep. He is concerned with finding the truth through exposition rather than through forcing his opinion on the viewer. It is not the trend but the thought that moves him and his kind of filmmaking. Haneke is one of the rare filmmakers who knows how to talk about society without being a socialist. His view of society and politics is apolitical, not in the sense that he does not care about politics, but in the sense that he goes beyond political and societal structure for the explanation of the former.

This is where lies the essential difference between a socially concerned artist and a socialist propagandist who uses art to promote political beliefs.

When the event was over, I ran into Ryan, who was mad that I left him and even madder because the Cardinals were blown out of the water by the Saints. “Where the hell did you disappear to?” he yelled.  I explained, to which he responded, “Screw your European directors, the Cardinals are over!”

Up until recently, that had been my sentiment as well. I grew up watching the films of great European directors. At some point, I got weary of their long “message” movies. Today, I have to admit, though, that proportionally more European A-list filmmakers still have that ease of expression that we, the freest people in the world, have lost due to the leftist hold on and politicization of art. I think Europeans—although, as of now, more politically socialist than we—are mostly over their experimentation with art’s Marxist use as an instrument of revolution. Regretfully, we in America are not.

By another strange coincidence, I visited the Egyptian Theatre next day. They had a showcase of short films by the students of the New York Film Academy, which is a very expensive course of learning film in a very intensive way.  So one would expect some minimal production value and thought quality from the graduate work of these directors. In fact, their work was not just bad—it was an insult to the concept of the moving picture. The films were almost exclusively about health care and none of the ten films, NONE had used a tripod. Shaky, sloppy moves about a shaky and sloppy proposal.

I asked the instructor whether the students were given an assignment to make political movies without tripods.  “No,” he smiled, “it’s synchronicity.”

That’s the freedom of thought and expression I’m talking about!

“Synchronicity” is one of those dubiously trendy concepts that everyone uses but no one really understands.  Probably, it is the same “synchronicity” of lacking a tripod, or a solid grounding, that makes Obama bend in front of foreign kings and tyrants.  This is the classic case where filmmakers deserve their leaders.

Or probably ”synchronicity” implies the narrow mindedness of socialistic experimentation with culture that results in ten students promoting the same exact point in the same exact way independently of each other. By synchronicity, one may also imply a dictatorship of ideology that results in shock when a leftist can’t come to grips with the fact that David Lynch was a Reagan supporter. How could that happen, how could he think differently from “us”?

Another example of synchronicity is LA Weekly’s article about the death of great French director Eric Rohmer and the article’s author’s bewilderment that such a talented man was fascinated “with bizarre right wing politics” (or as non-synchronistic people call it: being conservative).  Not like those well-balanced American directors like Oliver Stone who is just liberal, right? Not a wacko who is fascinated by banana republic dictators, regularly drives his car into trees on Sunset Blvd., and tries to justify Stalin?

Rohmer actually symbolizes everything that the average American movie-lover hates about European and especially French movies. Rohmer’s movies are long, actionless, and overwhelmed with words. In fact, his movies are about words. But if one cuts through the prejudice developed by years of the manipulative flow of images and fast-paced fake editing, one discovers that Rohmer is closer to real freedom than most of our contemporary American independent and studio directors. Could that be because of Rohmer’s “bizarre fascination with right wing politics,” or is it because of his lack of fascination with paranoid megalomaniacs like Chavez and Castro? Or could it be that just being born in a free country and ripping its benefits does not automatically bestow one with a free spirit?

Speaking of free spirits—as my synchronistic venture into European cinema continued, I had the privilege to conduct a phone interview with great Italian screenwriter Tonnino Guerra for Armenian TV in Los Angeles. For a screenwriter of my caliber to talk to Tonnino Guerra is like a 99-seat-theatre playwright talking with William Shakespeare. So I was naturally intimidated, plus I had to talk to a certified master wordsmith of modern Italian language in my far-from-perfect Italian. After a minute of conversation, though, he made me feel at such ease and freedom that I was emboldened to disagree and challenge him. Only after I hung up the phone, it occurred to me, a stupid youth, that I was arguing with the modern Petrarch. You see, Mr. Guerra, before getting into writing with Fellini and Antonioni and DeSica, spent some time in concentration camps, where he learnt the real value of freedom. Real freedom is not communicated through megaphones and teleprompters, but through things simple like a phone interview for a local ethnic station in LA.

Real freedom is also not in criticizing big corporations , like George Clooney does, but allowing an unknown filmmaker 60 years younger than you to challenge you when you are an internationally acknowledged luminary like Tonnino Guerra.  Now, can I freely oppose Sean Penn without being dismissed by him as a nobody? Forget about challenging Sean Penn, I can’t even get to Sean Penn. I can’t even get to Sean Penn’s dog’s walker without the right agent.

During the aforementioned Q&A at the Egyptian, Haneke claimed that real cinema cannot be national, that in spite of being grounded in specific cultures, it is essentially universal. Who could disagree with that?  There are great artists and free spirits that live all over the globe and there are mediocre souls that merely swing with the pendulum, which is currently to the left. Whether free souls walk on the Champs D’Elysees or Sunset Blvd will influence their art but will not affect their freedom.  Anyway, everything is so interchangeable.  Wasn’t the revolutionary French Wave influenced in part by the works of super-conservative American directors like John Ford? Or wasn’t it another Austrian director that gave us the American classic Sunset Blvd.?

Speaking of  actual Sunset Blvd., it’s been congested for three months now due to this endless construction. Being one of the main arteries of LA, any prolonged construction results in epic jams throughout the city, so, as a rule, constructions on Sunset Blvd. take only a day or two and mostly are done at night.

So the length and inefficiency of this construction (which is still going on, by the way) had been really puzzling for me until I saw the sign: “Putting America to Work, Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” Yep, that’s the stimulus package and, bingo, it is a government-funded construction.

So here is a great subject for a documentary for our freedom-loving anti-establishment young directors at the NY Film Academy. Move off healthcare films (they are so March 2010, anyway) and make a movie about how government-funded construction has been screwing up the traffic on Sunset Blvd. for whole three months with no end on the horizon. And just like I don’t need a thousand-page health care bill to understand that even the people who wrote it don’t get it, I don’t need to see ten films in a row to get the point; one film will do. I am really looking forward to it! Let’s stick it to the man, whatever that’s supposed to mean these days . . . otherwise, there are always those Tea Parties that can be synchronistically mocked!

Along his lonely way, Eli stumbles into a town resembling those of the Old West. The leader of the town is a self-appointed, ruthless leader named Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman who is simultaneously a cross between Mickey Rourke from 9 ½ Weeks and Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler, as well as the whole process of evolution between the former and the latter. Carnegie is an evil megalomaniac who sends his lowlife savages in search of the Book, convinced that possession of a copy of the now-extinct Bible can help him spread his rule and establish control over degraded humanity.

In case abusing his concubine, killing some people, and treating the rest like dirt was not enough to convey that Carnegie is a bad guy, we are shown that his favorite read is Mussolini’s biography. Yet, with all the weight of culture going against him, Carnegie is the only person who had managed to forge some semblance of a settlement with brewing elements of potential civilization.   His wild town—reminiscent of an Old West settlement but surrounded with cannibals instead of Indians—is the only semi-safe and positive place in an otherwise out-of-control and collapsed world. He is assembling a hierarchical society and he needs the Book to bring, as he thinks, “all the weak and wounded” under his dominion. His intentions are sinister and self-serving, but he seems to be the only person who understands the real power of the Book and its ability to transform and civilize the brutally egotistical and animal nature of disintegrated humanity . . . while at the same time correctly assessing any man’s, including his own, inability to re-create functioning societal interactions without a binding belief system.

Eli, on the other hand, is hell-bent on delivering the Book all the way west, as if Carnegie town, the etalon of the west, isn’t west enough. Eli is unwilling to bestow the power of the Book to the maniacal ambitions of Carnegie who, nevertheless, manages to usurp the Book by exchanging it for a hostage, Eli’s model-looking girl companion (the precise type of a woman you must leave home when you are going on a mission for God, which to his defense Eli attempts to do but finds himself powerless against the Biblical urge of Hollywood producers to stick an out-of-context young pretty face in everything they do). 

When the salivating Carnegie breaks open the thoroughly locked Bible, he tragically realizes that it is written in Braille and there is no one left who can read it since there is no one left who can really read anything anyway.

At the end of the movie, to our—and even to Ray Bradbury’s—surprise that Michael Moore is not the only person he should be mad at for stealing his ideas and book titles, we find out that Eli, in fact, memorized the entire Book. He IS the book and he finally gets himself to the place where the book was needed, where God, as Eli claimed, wanted him to deliver the Book…and that place is…—and this is where I wanted to deliver my popcorn, in partially digested form, to the row in front of me—that place is San Francisco.

Alcatraz prison has been turned into a citadel of cultural values and is protected by a hi-tech armed force, making it into a cross between Berkley and Guantanamo Bay. It is here that some surviving intellectuals—including a cross between Howard Zinn and the wacky Christopher Lloyd character from the Back to the Future franchise—collect surviving cultural values, print them, and distribute them to survivors, cannibals and murderers . . . who, when they are not busy eating and killing each other for old radio parts, are of course going to read Yeats and Keats.

As the head intellectual leads Eli through the sterile archives of stored masterpieces, he points out the fact that they had recovered some pieces of Mozart and Shakespeare but hadn’t had gotten any copies of the Bible yet, and now, well, they have gotten that too … delightful, isn’t it?  Wait now. This guy Eli carried this book (or himself) through dirt and blood, killed and mutilated people who endangered his mission, was chased by cannibals and maniacs . . . and after all this, the intellectual goes …”oh, perfect we got ourselves yet another bestseller.”  That’s all?  You’re kidding me, right?

This comfortably secular and politically correct ending is sad not because it is formulaically stupid but because it robs the movie of the great potential of actually being a movie about spirit as opposed to a movie about a religious book that it lamely is.  As with most current American artistic expression, The Book of Eli blindly follows the established academic elites’ anachronistic view of a cultural value as something belonging to a museum, library, archive, university and solely validated by peer views, professional commentators, Al Gore, and accepted intellectuals—basically, anyone but the people by whom and for whom those values are created.

Ironically and particularly with the Bible, it was a different story.  The Word of God was delivered directly to the people who needed it, who in their despair and ignorance depended on it not as a cultural value but as a living breath of divinity upon which depended their very existence.  It was given to the likes of people who inhabit Carnegie’s wild settlement and it was given to people like Carnegie, willful and often times evil kings, who nevertheless had the ability to deliver the Word to the people who needed it, because the Word had the power to cut directly to the people, bypassing those who tried to use It for their selfish purposes.  It was given to ruthless emperors like Constantine and mass executioners like Paul and it transformed them.

The Word of God was given to lowlifes and prostitutes, to criminals and sinners, to murderers and tyrants. In short, the Book was given to everyone but the scribes and Pharisees, the self-appointed custodians of agreed values, the professors and intellectuals. If anything, the Word was the simple liberating truth of passion that defeated the established complex dictatorship of the mind.

And this is the real story of the Great Book of Eli instead of the religious bestseller carried by a guy named Eli who, even in a post apocalyptic wasteland, feels the urge to conform to elite snobbery which, for what we know, might have been responsible for the apocalypse in the first place.

Albert was the last casualty of 9/11 that I know of. Although, I am sure there are more people who were indirectly impacted by the attack to some serious and even fatal degree. 

Albert was also famous for his devastating sense of humor, so when I read about the highly heralded eco-melodramatic documentary “No Impact Man,” I vividly imagined Albert ripping this self-righteous excretion of bored urban utopians a new one.

Here’s the premise from the “No Impact Man” film website:

Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year. It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, buses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage. No problem – at least for Colin – but he and his family live in Manhattan. So when his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No Impact Project has an unforeseen impact of its own.

This is so cute; I am going to melt now. This kind of eco-experimentation is cute when it is acted out in Manhattan of 2009 and it is tragic when it is experienced in Armenia of 1992 where Albert lived in the center of the capital, Yerevan, in a neo-classically influenced apartment building with massive wooden doors.

Those doors ignited my imagination; as a kid, I even wrote a poem in which I visualized the doors as a portal to a different dimension. Years later, in the cover of a pitch-black winter night of 1992, my friends and I dismantled and stole those century-old doors, chopped them into many pieces and shared them among ourselves for wood to heat our homes. We had to because we had no electricity and it was incredibly cold.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia found itself engaged in full-scale war with Azerbaijan.  As a consequence of the deliberately interdependent Soviet infrastructure, Armenian’s economic and energy routes lay through Azerbaijani territory. The Azerbaijani blockade that followed (and is still in place) cast the unprepared and newly formed Republic of Armenia into a horrible economic and energy crisis. 

Not only there was a scarcity of supplies in every arena, but there was virtually no gas or electricity to heat our homes. For two years, we would have electricity for a total of two hours a day. 

Those winters—which, of course, happened to be some of the coldest in the modern history of Armenia—caused many deaths of unprepared people in their own homes.

The daily two hours of electricity were anticipated with the devotional reverence of a desert tribe welcoming rain. People would try to squeeze in anything from laundry to cooking, watching TV to just enjoying the magic of the electric bulb. 

When the hours of electricity expired, like cavemen we would gather around the fireplace, quiet and collectively depressed, with no impact on the world or even on our immediate surroundings. Only in times like that is one capable of understanding the true magic and liberating power that technology gives to man. The ability to be free and proud, strong and happy, are based not on our merging with nature but on our ability to master nature, to control and oppose its powers, to use our reason and skill to elevate ourselves from the dark and wild realm of frightened beasts struggling merely to survive under the whim of capricious surrounding. 

Two hours of electricity during the cold winter was not enough to heat our homes and city apartments, so people started chopping trees on the streets and parks for firewood.

Old beautiful trees were rapidly disappearing from city streets, turning the famously green Yerevan into a bare skeleton of itself. People needed heat to survive—between preserving trees and watching babies freeze to death; there was not much of a choice. 

The demand for firewood was huge, though, and people became protective of their territories. Tree chopping gangs, armed with axes and machetes, formed to protect their neighborhood trees and distribute the wood among them. 

In savagery and ragged outlook, these gangs were not much different from prehistoric territorial tribes. Police would not dare to confront them, especially when their own reservoir of gas was almost non-existent and they could not even promptly respond to many serious emergencies.

Fierce fights would ensue if someone tried to cut a tree in someone else’s yard or park.  My friends and I, soft and spoiled city slackers, were now thrown into this anarchic struggle for life, spending hours in bread lines and chopping wood, dismantling wooden doors and benches in the parks to which we used to be taken by our parents in our not-so-distant childhood. 

It was through chopping wood that I came to identify with Abraham Lincoln in such a way that years later I would make a very personal film about his legacy.

There was something comforting in knowing that the President of that faraway country that my friends and I idealized so much would also chop wood and go through harsh times before he was able to make an impact… and boy, we wanted to make an impact! 

From our shared experience of the ‘dark age’ we carried out a zealous urge to make an impact, to claim our existence in the family of nations, to tell everyone that we are alive, that we are human, that we matter, that we want to achieve something, and that we don’t want to perish in this damn darkness of animal fear. 

And then there is, of course, Albert, who was fatally impacted by the acts of 19 evil men whom he’d never met or heard of. Sorry for the doors, my friend. I’ll plant a tree in your memory in this faraway land that you and your sister loved. I’ll plant it for all the trees that I had to cut back home. Those beautiful trees that helped us survive through the nightmares of those ‘unimpactful’ winters of ‘92 through ‘94.

After all, why wouldn’t any man (straight or gay) imitate Cary Grant’s walk up the stairs to save Ingrid Bergman at the end of Hitchcock’s “Notorious?”

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And why wouldn’t any honest woman try to talk and look like Barbara Stanwyck? 

I was at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills once where agressive supermodels were trying to seduce fake producers. That entire pack of semi-nude nymphs had less seductive power than the play of the anklet on Barbara Stanwyck left leg in Wilders’ “Double Indemnity.” 

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Watching these 40s movies has made me realize the real power of movie stars and their supercharged sexual energy. Those men and women really capitalized on consenting sadomasochistic aspect of the artist-audience relationship. And they did it without being perverse or even showing sex at all, but instead with class, elegance, and silence. 

The stars of the 40s seduce you, and you like it, because they make you feel comfortable. You believe they know what they are doing. 

Does this mean they were better lovers in real life?  Was, for instance, Clark Gable a better lover than Matt Damon? Was Barbara Stanwyck better in bed than, let’s say, Jessica Alba?

Absolutely.

(Unless, of course, Jessica Alba wants to prove me wrong.)

I know it is far-fetched and improvable, but I am convinced that they were better lovers than most of the celebrities today. 

The 40’s stars knew how to make love. They also knew how to fight, and this I can prove. 

Watch Laurence Olivier as King Henry V, calling his men to arms. Forget his forceful posture and piercing look; just close your eyes and listen to his voice. He sounds like thousands of exuberant angelic trumpets unleashing their powerful sound from the heights of heaven onto the depths of hell. His voice moves you from within; it makes you want to join the war. It makes you believe that one man can rally multitudes to their death just by intensity of character expressed through vibration of voice. Is it not mere acting, even great acting. There is something frighteningly real in Olivier’s voice. 

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Now, could Laurence Olivier rally troops in real life? Could he rally troops better than, let’s say, Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell? Yes, he could. He actually did. 

After William Wyler turned down directing “Henry V,” Laurence Olivier, who was serving in the Fleet Air Army, was released to star in and direct this war propaganda movie. Olivier was actually fighting in the real war as he was portraying a warrior in the movie. His force was real. This is why his call to arms was not merely good acting. It was a real call to arms, and it seriously moved me before I even knew about Olivier’s real-life service. 

The excuse that the introduction of color stripped movie stars of their charisma is also irrelevant in this case. “Henry V” is a color movie. In fact, it is made in the exquisite colors of medieval miniature paintings. It borrows colors and naïve perspectives from the medieval “Book of Seasons.” (A similar rendition of period paintings onto screen was later used by Stanley Kubrick in “Barry Lyndon.”) 

Color also did not diminish Nikolai Cherkasov’s intensity as Ivan the Terrible in Eisenstein’s two-part masterpiece. Black and white through most of the film, Eisenstein suddenly inserts a colored scene, which demonstrates the ferocity of the ruthless Russian Czar with more oomph and in a more “colorful” way. On the contrary, George Clooney is as believable in the overly crisp black and white “Good German” as Obama’s dethroned “green czar” Van Jones was in denying that he’s a 9/11 truther. 

Misuse of colors can wreck any movie, but it cannot take away what is truly there or add something that is not. What makes Olivier’s Henry V believable is the same dynamic that makes Jimmy Stewart’s moral courage so believable in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Jimmy Stewart was a distinguished war hero serving as a bomber pilot in WWII. 

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 It is the same connection to reality that makes one believe that Clark Gable could carry Scarlet O’Hara through the fire of Atlanta (filmed in Technicolor) because when his real wife Carol Lombard died in a plane crash on a USO tour, a devastated Clark Gable took up arms and joined the war in Europe. 

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Brad Pitt may kill many Nazis in Tarantino’s movie and its inevitable sequels and prequels. He can conquer Troy on a tax-friendly location in Romania or some other, currently, more capitalistically inclined state than that of California. But he could never convince me as a warrior. It is not even because he is not courageous by nature. I don’t know. He may be. But he was never tested in such ways and that shows on screen. 

Can he still play a convincing warrior without fighting in any real war? Maybe. 

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Will he be able to move us like Laurence Olivier? No way.

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Needless to say, acting is a craft and great actors can embody qualities without having the real-life experiences of what is being portrayed. Otherwise, how is one going to play an alien (unless, of course, one is Tom Cruise)? 

Good actors can play real-life characters more expressively than the characters depicted are in real life. And yet, there are certain qualities that one cannot embody unless one possesses them off-screen. These are qualities that can be imitated only poorly unless experienced fully. 

Those qualities are real courage, real intelligence, and the greatest of all, love (or its secular equivalent, sexiness). These are qualities that most of our stars lack today and the great actors of the 40s had in abundance.

I started thinking about how much I’ve been hearing the word “universal” lately.

“Universal” is the “it” word, as in universal health care or “The Universe will guide me,” or “Leave it to the Universe.” 

There was a different word for it back in the day, more imposing but less confusing: God. But God is not a trendy word anymore. God is not popular, just like the Republicans. You are guilty by association with both. Even C.G. Jung was annoyed by it (the not calling God a ‘God’ part, not the Republicans). 

There was also that video tribute by Ken Burns to Ted Kennedy’s legacy. 

Ken Burns, surely, is a gifted storyteller in love with Americana. I have heard him speak many times, and Ken Burns is no Michael Moore. Michael Moore is an indoctrinated “half intellectual” (as Jean- Luc Goddard called him once) who follows Karl Marx verbatim. On the contrary, Ken Burns is a voluntary propagandist who, just like most of America’s talented artists, made an inevitably subconscious left turn in order to succeed in a better-marketed liberal Democratic cultural establishment. Burns does try to maintain his independent artistic spirit somewhat, at least to the degree allowed by PBS. 

In short, Ken Burns is PBS’s Sergei Eisenstein. 

So, it was even more disappointing to see how lame of a video tribute it was. All I learned was that Ted Kennedy loved water and universal health care, and that the people whom he helped loved him. The video’s real purpose, though, was an apparent attempt to make Obama look like an heir to Kennedy’s long desired health care reform. 

As everything in the age of Obama, the video turned out to be about Obama.

Sadly, Obama is gradually becoming the zero of any socio-political equation-any number multiplied or divided by him becomes a zero. Or, rather like a zero on a roulette table, once the ball stops on him, all the money goes to the bank (a government owned one, of course). It is a uniquely universal quality.

The Kennedys were instrumental in Obama’s ascension to power. In fact, Ted Kennedy, as his friends were emotionally emphasizing during the tribute, helped a lot of people…except for one whom he left dying in the water that he loved so much, for which he was never held accountable because of the universal love for the Kennedys. Except for people who do not drink and drive, no one is exempt from drunk-driving accidents, and the shock that follows could impede anyone’s swift judgment. 

Ted Kennedy, as many mentioned, also sincerely cared for “simple folks.” 

Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns

Yet, what would have been enough to sink any other good man’s public career was forgiven to Ted Kennedy-a testimony to the major dysfunction of our consumer-driven democracy that is still unable to break the chains of seduction to its universally hailed icons and idols. 

So, there is, after all, a difference between the concepts of “Universal” and God. God brings justice; the Universe forgives. God is personal; the Universe is not. You can’t even curse the Universe. Who would be offended by cursing the Rings of Saturn, anyway? 

A half-junkie acquaintance of mine in Hollywood was telling me that she applied for many jobs and by doing so made a statement to the Universe that she needed a job. Now, the Universe must help her… 

Do you see the pattern here? The Universe is entitled to help. The Universe is the substitute for the judgmental and (rapidly disappearing) God. God and his Republican guards leave people alone and uninsured, but the Universe helps them. And Unions help them too. And the Soviet Union helped people too, after it got rid of the people who did not ‘care’ about other people. The Universal end justifies individual means, even if by the “means” one implies vilifying half of the population who do not agree with the Universal Agent of Change.

Once in thousand years, the Universe sends savior figures that materialize people’s desires and protect them against social injustice. Sometimes, however, these agents of change commit locally individual acts of injustice; yet, ultimately, they bring on the kind of “universal social justice” so eloquently championed by Ted Kennedy throughout his distinguished career.