Robert Reich

You remember when on that elementary school playground or in that high school hallway someone picked on you just because you were breathing! You longed for that bodyguard who would take up for you when that bully came around the corner for its next punch or mean word. Who knew that we, as consumers, would need someone to protect us from inequality economics? Who would have thought?

Independent director Jacob Kornbluth did think it. His documentary Inequality for All is a heartfelt and very insightful commentary on the economic inequalities experienced by the majority of Americans. Kornbluth places at its core a concern for the American people; specifically, the film focuses on the widening gap between the rich and the poor and exposes extreme income inequality that eventually will marginalize the middle class.

Income Inequality Graph

The film’s anchor is Robert Reich, political economist who served as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and is now the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His Wealth and Poverty class facilitates Reich’s concise but thorough lessons in economic theory. Reich is an effective, engaging, and passionate instructor, and you will enjoy each power point presentation as well as his detailed graphs. These classroom props certainly keep the attention of his students and the audience, and his approaches to teaching are accessible to any person coming to understand income inequality for the first time. These aspects are the film’s appeal. Reich’s bottom line is simple: a healthy middle class makes for a healthy economy. After all, the U.S. is a consumer-based economy. When the middle class has disposable income, Reich points out that the economy flourishes, jobs are created, homeowners increase as well as other growth incentives. He then supports this economic principle with a timeline to demonstrate when the U.S. economy was vigorous, and what historical events compromised the nation’s health.

Based on Reich’s book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, Kornbluth utilizes all of Reich’s expertise and charisma. The UC Berkeley instructor does not disappoint, as he mixes comedy, autobiography, history, politics, and some drama to highly the dire consequences of inequality for all.

Inequality for All plays through January 30 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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Allan Ginsburg (Daniel Radcliffe)

I am not going to talk about how an ivy league education is wasted on a bunch of privileged boys who are so bored out of their minds that their only recourse is tearing up a library of classics. Nor am I going to salivate over this group who is considered to have ushered in a most celebrated time in literary history: The Beat Poets. In John Krokidas’s film Kill Your Darlings, they are not literary rebels; rather, they are reckless, if not, wayward hollow wannabees who are angst ridden over their sexuality, momma and poppa, and their wealth. They’re just … there.

I will ask a question, however: Just where is the beat in Kill Your Darlings?

Set in 1944 and moving between Paterson, New Jersey, Harlem, and Manhattan, Krokidas closes in on the early life of men who defined the Beat generation: Lucien Carr (played by Dane DeHaan), Allan Ginsberg (played by Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston). They are not very interesting young men, and you wonder how they could carry on a conversation; rather, Krokidas dramatizes them as students in search of some kind of purpose while others are fighting for equality in America and are across the pond fighting for democracy.

Ginsberg and Kerouac (Jack Huston) in New York

Ginsberg lives in Paterson, New Jersey with his mentally unstable mother and his father Louis Ginsberg, a published poet. He leaves for Columbia University, and there, he meets Carr, Burroughs, Kerouac, and more exposure to anti-semitism. Radcliffe carries well the existential load in this movie, and his Ginsberg is bookish and awkward but a young man who burrows his way through this bohemian world filled with drugs, sex, liquor, and, of course, school suspensions.

Let me answer my own question, Where’s the Beat? The Beat is in the murder of David Kammerer, Lucien Carr’s longtime lover. Michael C. Hall—you remember him from HBO’s Six Feet Under)– wonderfully fleshes out Kammerer, the jilted lover whose desperation for the young Carr leads to a fatal struggle between the two. The Kammerer-Carr affair, murder, and trial are the pulses of film and complement its title: Kammerer indeed is the darling that is killed.

Oh, by the way, Kill the Darlings, a command for writers to do away with ‘extraneous ornament’, is largely attributed to the novelist William Faulkner; but research reveals the command belongs to British Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, who, in his 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style,” said, ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings!’

Listen to the review @ 11:39
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The Look of Freedom
Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler), Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Margaret (Quvanzhané Wallis), and Anne (Kelsey Scott) Northup in New York

Freedom. It never is given without a fight. Even if you were born as a free person of color moving and having your being in the United States of America, that birthright could be ripped from you at a moment’s notice, and from thenceforth, you had to work to take it back. 12 Years A Slave delves into this very real fact of life during antebellum slavery. Directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave is a poignant quest. The film is based on the slave narrative of the same name written by Solomon Northup in 1853.

Bondage

Needless to say, the story is brutal as it courses through the vein of the innocuous plantation regime. The film exposes the time wherein people salivated over the ownership of African flesh not only for labor and economic gain; also, McQueen draws out the psychological and emotional pleasure plantation owners enjoyed in having full possession of and the rights and title to the African body. Some easily judge this as insanity; but I strongly maintain that this practice is a part of sanity no human being should ever want to touch […] again.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars, and his portrayal of Northup marks clearly his burden of representation. Yes, Northup is front-and-center but it is quite obvious in Ejiofor’s furrowed brow that he is telling the story of thousands who labored within that plantation system—some for life.

Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) pleads with Northup to end her life.

All of the usual suspects are dramatized to the fullest extent: capture and kidnap; rape of slave women; slave chains; the slave ship; the auction block; the separation of families; the ubiquitous crack of the overseer’s whip, and death. In each instance, McQueen dares us to look away.

12 Years a Slave plays through November 28 at the Ross in Lincoln.

Listen to review of 12 Years a Slave on NET’s Friday Live! @ 45:56

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K2, The Summit

K2. The Summit. We all know of the majesty of Mount Everest. It is the highest mountain on earth. K2, its sibling is the second highest mountain on earth. It is located in the Baltistan region of Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan and the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang, China. It is a jagged, steep slope with a wall of ice called a serac, that would make you beg for its mercy as you climb. Yes, K2 demands respect, even reverence, but this mountain claims one in four mountain climbers who attempt to scale its walls. On August 1, 2008, K2 claimed the lives of eleven ambitious and experienced mountain climbers when an avalanche up rooted the fixed ropes installed to lead climbers as they descended the summit. Documentary filmmaker Nick Ryan explores the cause of these deaths in The Summit, his documentary about what is called the “deadliest day on the world’s most dangerous mountain.” The Summit is a terrifying reenactment of this expedition.

Gerard McDonnell, one of the casualties of The Summit

Ryan evokes a harrowing vulnerability within a frigid universe that is out there in the white of snow that hugs tightly to black mountains. Mountaineers whose bodies are packed into down parkas and other gear sleep—sleep?–in tents as a snow storm rages against the mountain; and it is night. Someone’s tent and all of his gear have been swept down the slope. He is open to the elements. Who will take him in? The rule is to “walk on by” climbers who are injured or on the brink of death. To help means not only a missed opportunity to reach the summit or the next camp base in time; to reach out and touch anybody on the trek could mean your own death.

The Summit is an excellent re-telling of events, and it is heartbreaking as each bio-sketch unfolds about the 11 courageous men who did not make it.

The Summit plays through November 7 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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