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“The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom”: A Day of Carnage

Nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award this year “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is also a powerful narrative as vibrant as any dramatic cinema, an extraordinary, mesmerizing tribute to the resilience of human nature.  More than an epitaph of mourning and loss, this film interviews ordinary residents whose philosophical attitudes toward the day of carnage are not easily dismissed.  Their amazing faces humanize this catastrophe of nature. The ten-minutes of home-video taken from a hill overlooking the explosive black waves surging towards the coastline of Sendai will...

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“Hit and Miss”–Or, “Boys Don’t Cry” meets “Dexter”

This new mini-series created exclusively for DirecTV’s Audience Network stars Chloë Sevigny as a transgender hired assassin living in Yorkshire, England and fated to parent four children who have just lost their mother to cancer.  One of the children, Ryan, is her son whom she fathered before pursuing her journey to becoming Mia. Now she finds herself the legal guardian to  four children.  When the children she inherits begin to affect her, she is shaken by her own amorality. In each opening scene, the camera moves over Mia’s pre-op transsexual body: nude with both breasts and a...

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Bar Pintxo: In a pinch

Recently on a trip to LA we embarked on a culinary adventure beginning with a cooking demo by Bar Pintxo Chef David Planowski   at Surfas, a gourmet kitchen supply store in Culver City.  Recently rated as one of the top 10 bars/tapas restaurants by Los Angeles Magazine, we wanted to check it out for ourselves by sampling at the demo.  Surfas had about fifty participants with several audience volunteers helping Chef David with an unforgettable gazpacho, including his secrets: squeezing the tomatoes and cucumbers to get maximum juice and the variability of  his standard vinaigrette (has to do...

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“Between the Folds”–Origami as Scientific Art

Vanessa Gold, producer of the film, “Between the Folds”  (winner of the 2010 Peabody award), chronicles origami, literally, “folding paper”.  Many American children have attempted this Japanese craft in elementary school, making an origami crane or simple fish.  However, origami is much, much more and has become something of a manic hobby among a number of Silicon Valley engineers.  And, this film explains why–through filming the stories of ten origami artists/scientists, who have developed origami “technology”, in engineering, industrial design, and...

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“The Stoning of Soraya M”–Let He Who Is Without Sin….

“The Stoning of Soraya M. (2009) cuts into the soul with its fierce, unflinching narrative of Soraya Manutchehri, a 35-year-old woman stoned to death in a small Iranian village in 1986 after being convicted of adultery. Her death was the subject of Freidoune Sahebjam’s 2009 novel, La Femme Lapidée, a book banned in Iran. This award-winning indie film lovingly caresses the beautiful, wounded face of Aunt Zahra (breathtakingly played by the luminous Shohreh Aghdashloo) who is devastated by the stoning of her niece Soraya (perfectly portrayed by Mozhan Marno).  Zahra pleads with a...

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“Scottsboro”–The Inexcusable

“Scottsboro: An American Tragedy”  is a 2001 PBS documentary in the American Experience series about the notorious trials of  nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. The landmark trial magnified rampant racism, denial of a fair trial, and the continued North-South animosity that existed almost 70 years after the Civil War had ended.  The miscarriage of justice on the part of several judges, jurors, and witnesses belies the assumption that justice will prevail in the face of truth and obviously false testimony, including the recanting by one of the...

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