Gloomy Retrospective

©  1989 Bernadette Associates International  & Special People Productions Activists are not terrorists. This should be an obvious thing, but government administrations and officials have, for probably the entirety of modern history, labelled them as such because governments and their military forces do not like to be held accountable for their actions. Most recently, we can see examples of this in the Duterte administration's Anti-Terror Act that seeks to broaden the definition of who terrorists are (and to reduce the inherent rights that every human being has in the process), in the United States of America where protesters of police brutality has been abused and arrested by the law enforcement officers who are sworn to protect them, and in Hong Kong where the population there is fighting against a general takeover by Mainland China. Governments do not like to be questioned, especially by the people they are ruling over. In the post-People Power environment, a lot...

Copyright © 1989 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks.  [SPOILERS AHEAD]  The point about Do The Right Thing  isn't that Mookie (played by Spike Lee) did or did not do the right thing. The point is that we, as a society, are more willing to create a moment of angry response against social ills rather than participating in a social movement to change the systems and keep something like Radio Raheem's (played by Bill Nunn) death from happening often. I found myself going back to this film after an entire week of my Twitter and Facebook and every social media being filled with pictures of rallies and dumb tweets from both sides and general police brutality as a whole. But mostly it was because of that one video, the one that started everything, of George Floyd begging for air while police officer and certified piece-of-shit Derek Chauvin choked him with his knee--and how it reminded me of the climax of this film. Radio Raheem shows off his philosophy...

Copyright © 2020 Netflix US, LLC. Égalité: Pride Month 2020  is our series commemorating or criticizing pop culture that relates directly to the LGBTQIA+ movement. Done in a non-chronological order, it will span films, music, and even historical events to show a concrete picture of the evolution of the movement from Stonewall onward. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To start off the week, we're commemorating the more recent attempts to pin down the emotional turmoil a child in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum would have.  The Half of It  is a 2020 LGBT romance film written and directed by Alice Wu--her second feature film. Previously, she had made waves with her 2004 film Saving Face , an exploration of the realities of being lesbian and Asian-American that tackles it with the qualities of a great romantic comedy: smart enough to ground the characters' problems and take it seriously, but light enough tonally to be easily rewatc...