Since my scathing two-part Big Hollywood editorial on imprisoned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi nearly three weeks ago, I have found myself drawn neck-deep into the campaign to push for his freedom. In that cause I have email-blitzed the media, the Academy, all the major US film festivals and as many contacts in Hollywood as I know and could find. I sent out deep background on his case, petitions for his release, and heartfelt pleas for Hollywood voices to speak up on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, along with not-so-veiled threats of PR Armageddon should the deafening silence continue.

I also informed all parties involved that I would do the same for any of them under similar brutal and inhuman circumstances. Whatever it took, be it sweetheart pleas or promises of a nuclear PR war. I have since dropped the latter approach, as I have been informed by Iranians also campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s release that it was not helpful to his cause. So on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, I have traded in my sword for a plowshare for the duration. Not a problem. I’m not a total ideologue. Just mostly.

This past three weeks have also brought many valuable learning experiences as well. I have since found that Facebook, which I have avoided like the Plague because I have enough on my geek plate already, is an incredibly valuable social networking tool that reaches even into the heart of Iran itself. I have made many new friends behind the Islamist Curtain, among them a Panahi family member, by posting any good news I could find on the Jafar Panahi and Free Jafar Panahi Facebook pages. (more…)

Director Ang Lee’s films tackle a wide variety of ostensible subjects and genres, but they’re consistent in conveying antinomian-individualist platitudes.

After his big international success with the superb martial arts saga “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Chinese-born film director Ang Lee continued in the eclectic manner indicated by his earlier films, jumping from genre to genre and style to style. Over the years he has directed the genial “Sense and Sensibility,” the thoughtful historical film “Ride with the Devil,” the gloomy family drama “The Ice Storm,” the homosexual love story “Brokeback Mountain,” and the inept superhero action film Hulk, among others.

This eclecticism and the tendency toward a rather downbeat style have kept Lee from developing a large following among U.S. moviegoers, as has the fact that he tends not to work with the top stars or in popular genres. Thus it was perhaps to be expected that his latest, the historical comedy “Taking Woodstock,” didn’t do much business at U.S. movie theaters in its opening weekend, taking in only $3.7 million and finishing ninth in the box office standings. (more…)

In the late 1960s there were young people in college and starting families, young people far from home fighting and dying for the sovereignty of our allies in Vietnam, young people just starting to see results from their brave and noble fight for Civil Rights, and then there were the dirty, filthy hippies – the most spoiled, narcissistic, ungrateful species in the history of mankind – whose legacy of drug addiction, STDs, the misery of single motherhood and 2 million left dead on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, still reverberates forty years on.

Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock,” a halfway competent but ultimately erratic, unfocused story of how “three days of peace and music” came to the small town of White Lake, New York and changed for the better the lives of those who embraced “the spirit,” not only celebrates the drug abuse and loveless sex that defined the “Woodstock Generation,” but goes beyond caricatures and into outright anti-Semitism to condemn those who didn’t.

Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a young Jewish man in his early twenties, once again abandons his work as a struggling Greenwich Village artist to help his elderly parents (two Jewish stereotypes played by Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) through another summer season in the Catskills. Their “resort,” a filthy, dilapidated motel, is about to be foreclosed on and probably should be, but Elliott convinces an exasperated banker to give him one more season. But foreclosure is inevitable and Elliot knows it, and while his friends go to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, his dreams take a back seat to this annual guilt trip sponsored by his overbearing mother. (more…)