Listen Here @ 1:09:56

I’m a Texan. I drive a pick-up truck. I drink beer. I hunt. I’m a liberal. So What?

Let’s have fun, do good, raise some hell! Dance with them what brung you! That’s what Molly Ivins demanded.

Directed by Janice Engle, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, documents the life of the late outspoken journalist, activist, and columnist, and author of her New York Times best selling collection of essays Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?; and, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America; and, You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, another collection of essays.

There is no narrator to guide our thoughts in Raise Hell. We feast on her interviews and speeches and the voices of her friends, family, and colleagues. She is a fellow southerner with a booming southern accent; a maverick and outsider as she describes herself. Engles makes known that this 6 foot Texan carried the heart and soul of journalism into political moments what with her witty and raucous insights, especially on the former President George W. Bush whom she affectionately named Shrub.

I accidentally became an authority on George W. Bush. Like the guy who climbed Everest, it was there.

Over the course of her career Molly Ivins, navigated the waters of journalism during the time when men dominated the papers. A fast paced documentary, Engles backs up and allows Ivins to delve onto the landscape of Texas Politics

Texas has always been the national laboratory for bad government.

and, later, into the terrain of national politics

We keep pretending that the political spectrum runs from right to left; it doesn’t. It runs from top to bottom. It’s not those people in Washington; It’s not those people in your state capital. This country is run by us.

Political digs and insults aside, Raise Hell showcases a woman—a privileged southern white woman–born into a staunch Republican family. Her political views tantalized her father, General Jim Ivins the authoritative gas and oil executive because, as one friend revealed, General Jim could control his family and those who worked for him but he could not control his liberal-minded daughter. To add such insult to his psyche, Molly dared to bring an African American man to the Ivins home and, get this, General Jim arrived to find him swimming in the pool! – this in the heat of America’s civil unrest. Oh yes she did, too. Even The New York Times could not control her.

They wanted Molly for the unique voice, for the iconoclast, but they wanted her to fit into the times, but as we say in Texas, that dog don’t bark.

~ Linda Jann Lewis, Oral Historian

Through an objective lens, Engles brings to us a journalist who found her calling, and as did the late Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Ivins realized words have power, and Ivins squeezed from them the juices of their influence.

Her friends boasted that she could drink any man under the table; and drinking with the good ol’ boys gave her power and access into circles closed off to women. But that power and access had a price, and Ivins paid dearly for it with bouts of alcoholism. Later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. But she kept on living. She kept on talking until the last edition of her spark and wit. In 2007, Mary Tyler “Molly Ivins” passed away of breast cancer at the age of 62 in her beloved Austin, Texas.

Listen Here @ 28:52

Jimmie Fails

Danny Glover’s narration sets the tone for The Last Black Man Standing. Directed by Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man Standing is a haunting story about holding on to the past and stories one has been told about the past to manage day-to-day living especially in the wake of loss. Jimmie Fails stars as himself, a young black man who has come of age in the city of San Francisco. His family has lost a magnificent Victorian home in the Fillmore district, and this loss, or shall I write, death, has affected Jimmie to such an extent that he returns from time-to-time to give it a facelift much to the consternation of its newest inhabitants. His only consolation is an anecdote handed down to him by his father, James Sr. Jimmie’s grandfather built the house with his bare hands in the 1940s, and it is this history that endears him to the house. When the new inhabitants vacate, Jimmie considers reclaiming the house.

But his father, James Sr., lacerates his ideas with a disturbing reality check.  In spite of his father’s warning, Jimmie and his best friend, Montgomery, takeover the house. The interior is fabulous. Adam Newport-Berry, cinematographer, ensures a full sweep of its grandeur accentuated by high ceilings and wood floors, a sauna, staircase, and a hidden room. Once moved in, Jimmie and Montgomery just … Be …

On the whole, The Last Man in San Francisco is a heartwarming film about a Black man’s love for his city and how an iconic architectural structure shaped and molded him. Talbot deftly enfolds within the film issues of housing, gentrification, and displacement in San Francisco that challenge Jimmie’s every emotion. Questions of the African American energies that went into the building of the city, and it is the history of their blood, sweat, and toil that makes it difficult for Jimmie to wrestle his heart away from San Francisco.

With every stage in life, we must move on or else remain stagnant as has Montgomery, who lives and takes care of his grandfather in a house overlooking a contaminated bay. Ironically, it is Montgomery who challenges his friend to explore the horizon waiting for him after he learns the truth about why Jimmie and his family lost their home.

What Montgomery does with the information sets Jimmie on an entirely different course.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays through August 8 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Also playing through August 8 is Wild Rose, a film by Tom Harper about a rebellious country singer in Glasgow who dreams of stardom in Nashville, Tennessee.

Listen to the Review @29:01

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Pauline Burley as Violette and Alban Lenoir as Jean

How do women cope in the time of war? In our own history, we know women went to work and managed households until war’s end. In her film The Sower, filmmaker Marine Fransoun marks out the day-to-day activities of women who have to fend for themselves in a remote mountain farming village. The time is 1851. The place, France. A brutal coup d’etat occurs and, on orders by President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, all men either are arrested and/or or killed. The women and children assume the responsibility of managing life as a result of this violent state of affairs.

The Sower is Marie Fransoun’s directorial debut she has based on the novel by Violette Ailhoud, written in 1919 at 84 years of age. Rather than using the original title L’homme Semence translated as The Man Semen, Fransoun entitles the film from the same name of the painting by Jean Francois Millet. She deftly handles every scene; Alain Duplantier’s extreme long shots of the landscape invoke visions of The Gleaners in the art of Jean Millet or The Sweatgrass Carriers in the art of South Carolina artist, Jonathan Green.

Jean and the women

Bereft and traumatized, the women band together to farm, harvest crops, and tend to the children. Some women are mothers; some have experienced intimacy. Others find themselves with no prospects for either venture. So, they make a vow: If a man comes to the village, each of them will share him as their lover. There’s just one thing, though. No one asks the question, what shall we do if I fall in love with him and he with me? Jean, the man, (played with delicate sensuality by Alban Lenoir) arrives in the village, and he is fine-looking and he is mysterious and he is young. The women remark, “If he was the only one left, you wouldn’t make a fuss” and “You’d be happy to wrap your legs around him” or “I think he fancies you; he’s so handsome.”

There is an interesting twist to the story. Pauline Burley plays Violette, the young woman who spies Jean ambling along on the hilltop, and their interaction threatens to upend the overall peace in the village. Each actress communicates character reaction to Jean’s arrival with exceptional range. Feelings are revealed via side glances as she harvests. Their hearts beat intense desire wrapped in anxiety and sexual frustration.

One of the women reminds Juliette of the bargain

Alain Duplantier’s cinematography interposes scenic space between dialogue and action to prevent emotions running high throughout the village from overwhelming the narrative; Fransoun’s direction allows the story to breathe in and to breathe out but keeping in focus the simmering conflicts. Alban Lenoir interprets Jean well as a stranger among women caught up in their sexual politics. “You’re all mad—stark mad” he retorts. Remarkable to the story, Fransoun agrees with Jean, and relieves the character of his anxiety in a very practical way.

The Sower plays through April 4 at the Ross Media Arts Center. English Subtitles.

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In the meantime,

Catch a film! Share the Popcorn! Feed Your Soul!