Screening Room: ‘Whose Streets?’

On August 10, 2017August 10, 2017 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

The modern-day civil rights documentary Whose Streets? opens this week—three years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson—in limited release.

My review is at The Playlist:

“St. Louis, I don’t know what year it is, but it’s not 2014,” a voice intones at the start of Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’ activist documentary “Whose Streets?.” That weariness comes back later in this documentary about the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the waves of protest that followed, but it’s not the movie’s overriding emotion. Each of the film’s five sections is buttressed with beaten-but-not-down quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frantz Fanon. This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform…

Here’s the trailer:

Weekend Reading: August 5, 2016

On August 5, 2016August 4, 2016 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

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“Chicken soup for the anti-racist soul.“
National Review: “Here’s a handy rule of life — always honor Gold Star families.“
Max Boot: “It is genuinely terrifying that [Trump] could win the nomination of a party once led by Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote more books than Mr. Trump has probably read.“
Barry finally says it: The guy is unfit to be president.
Harlequin goes “literary”? Why not?
Now on Netflix: All the Norwegian knitting you can stand to watch.
DC comics fans lobby (who, exactly?) to shut down Rotten Tomatoes, forgetting perhaps that those critics would still be able to say mean things about Suicide Squad.
Language takes yet another dive.
An inventive solution to the public defender crisis in Missouri: Hire the governor!
Print and read: How Ferguson, fear, and law and order are burning in the Missouri (and Missour-ah) gubernatorial election.
Bonus print and read: On the current infatuation with isolationism and Christian nativism, “In the 1930s, authoritarianism arrived hand-in-hand, as it often does, with demagoguery.”

Screening Room: ‘Do Not Resist’

On June 13, 2016June 11, 2016 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Following the Ferguson riots of 2014, there was a brief moment where the county noticed that all of a sudden, its police departments—stuffed with billions of dollars worth of military surplus and bristling with body armor, assault rifles, and make-my-day attitude—were looking more like a domestic military.

Craig Atkinson’s sober, occasionally terrifying Do Not Resist keeps the spotlight on the militarization of American police forces. It’s screening tomorrow night at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and should be showing up around the country in more festival dates.

My review is at Eyes Wide Open:

The film starts in the tear gas-fogged streets of Ferguson, Missouri during the riots of August 2014 that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white police officer. As the St. Louis County police department tries to clear the streets of protestors, their body armor and gas masks, plus their hulking dark-green armored transports, turn the scene into something out of a war zone, not a Midwestern suburb…

Weekend Reading: March 18, 2016

On March 18, 2016March 17, 2016 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

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How would you break up the banks, anyway?
Men quit books faster than women, and other surprising finds from literary moneyball.
Next up at Universal Studios: the Walking Dead…something.
When robots can tell a joke, then come talk to us about artificial intelligence.
So that’s why Lorne Michaels banned the Replacements from Saturday Night Live.
The “Ferguson Effect” as the Keyser Söze of criminology.
Of Trump, tomatoes, Wendy’s, and slave labor.
Why a punk anniversary is ridiculous; burn it all.
How do you legalize discrimination? Like this.
Print and read: Maybe it’s not so crazy to say that you can derive real meaning from your work.

Weekend Reading: March 4, 2016

On March 4, 2016March 3, 2016 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

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Michael Cunningham: War and Peace needs to be as long as it is; not so much many other books.
Scalia, not so much a man of the people.
It was bound to happen: artisanal gasoline.
Surrealism and this year’s Oscars.
The guy best described as America’s back mole.
Too white to win?
Maybe your time as governor is over, sir.
Home flipping rates in some cities now higher than before the crash.
How to become an American dictator.
Print and read: When blacks had to leave Ferguson before sundown, how Olivette strung up barbed wire to keep blacks out, and other incidents from St. Louis’s sordid history of housing discrimination.

Weekend Reading: September 18, 2015

On September 18, 2015September 17, 2015 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Here’s what to do about St. Louis; the full report.
The billionaires who wanna be president.
When trying to make yourself a martyr ends up hurting your cause.
The surprising millennial fastidiousness when it comes to grammar and spelling.
Which candidate thinks African Americans are not actually (legally speaking) citizens?
The glorious weirdness of Soviet bus stops.
“Complaining about book prices: $20.00” and other great bookstore signage.
Print and read: When Ted Bundy’s mother talked to the mother of one of his victims.

Weekend Reading: May 22, 2015

On May 22, 2015May 20, 2015 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Most cars might be driverless as early as 2025, which could destroy tens of thousands of jobs.
What if you built a utopian commune and nobody came?
“Wear good shoes in a thumbtack factory” and other advice from Bill Nye.
Ramadi’s fall as the canary in the Iraqi coal mine.
Ethan Coen: “I haven’t watched a television show in decades.“
Baltimore and Ferguson are one thing, but Waco apparently deserves a different standard.
Print and read: Regime-friendly journalists, 9/11 truther conspiracies, and other revelations from the Assad regime email hack.

Weekend Reading: May 1, 2015

On May 1, 2015April 30, 2015 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Bill Gates on the first steps toward saving millions from treatable diseases.
It’s not that some conservatives think there’s going to be a disaster, it’s that they want a disaster.
Baltimore defeats the great libertarian hopeful.
No Kiss camera, no fans; the creepy silence at Camden.
Reasons not to put an NHL team (or any other team, really) in Las Vegas.
The Society for Creative Anachronism close up.
Here’s what the Wall Street Journal Interactive online edition looked like in 1996.
Print and read: If there’s a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Ferguson, why was the city using fines from (mostly) black citizens to pay its bills?

Department of Weekend Reading: March 13, 2015

On March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

George R. R. Martin knows who should win the Hugo Award.
From Oklahoma, a different song about lynching.
There was once a leper colony on an island just a stone’s throw from the Bronx; here’s what it looks like now.
The sinkable Chris Christie?
Questlove on Kim Gordon: “She stays cool because she is cool, even in those rare moments when she’s not.”
I sincerely hope that I did not break the law.
A history of drinking in America.
Next big threat: Rooftop solar panels.
The Ferguson police department as organized criminal gang.
Print and read: Ferguson, it officially time to change everything you do.

Department of Weekend Reading: December 12, 2014

On December 12, 2014December 10, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Five-year veteran of the St. Louis PD: “I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.“
Here’s one way to hold the last administration and the CIA accountable for torture: Pardon them.
Not only did these guys get paid $80 million to train the CIA how to torture people, they weren’t even good at it.
So who do millionaires want to see as president?
GOP 2016: There can be only one.
How do Republicans keep outperforming Democrats despite, well, reality? Ideological homogeneity and unapologetically being themselves.
Burritos for justice.
Time bomb: Mexico’s southern region is filling up with tens of thousands of refugees who can’t get into America and can’t go home.
Print and read: The true history of Reagan’s fabled Chicago welfare queen was more violent and bizarre than previously known.

Department of Weekend Reading: December 5, 2014

On December 5, 2014December 5, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

“Oath Keepers” on the roofs in Ferguson.
It is nearly impossible to know how many people the police actually kill every year.
Centuries ago in Poland, people were sometimes buried with sickles across their necks—just in case they might have been vampires.
France gets into the ISIS fight.
Patrolling the north with Canada’s Rangers, their Native American reserve defense force.
Once upon a time, General Motors was Google, and before them…
No more Social Security checks for you Nazis.
At this office, no ugly water bottles (or anything else, really) allowed.
Print and read: The 2010 Mother Jones investigation of the Oath Keepers quasi-insurrectionist movement that recruits cops and veterans.

Department of Weekend Reading: October 31, 2014

On October 31, 2014October 30, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Silent Missouri State protesters told to “go back to Ferguson.”
Sullivan: Did a Times columnist actually “throw a hissy fit” about Francis’s reforms and suggest that there should be a schism in the Church?
What happens when straight white boys text.
Everybody needs to calm down about Ebola yesterday.
In 1923, Virginia Woolf was asked by her two nephews to contribute to a family newspaper they were putting together; she went all in.
The Israel-U.S. alliance isn’t quite irreversibly damaged yet, but it’s getting there.
The dismal science and zombies: Economics and the dead.
Who’s fighting ISIS on the ground while the West bombs from the air? Iran and Syria.
Psst: Wanna buy an attorney general?
Print and read: A shattered community regroups at the Ferguson Burger Bar & More.