P. GREANVILLE—The latest iteration of the saga of the cape crusader, an improbable, immature billionaire bent on vigilantism, is 100% typical of this crushingly tedious genre’s DNA: exploitative (but elaborately produced) action films based on comic strips once designed to entertain subteens but now widely marketed to much broader audiences. The latter sorry fact is itself proof of the deliberate infantilisation and depoliticization of the masses, which have become stupid enough to thirst for this kind of decadent and vacuous entertainment.
ARTS & FILM
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Museums: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
5 minutes readJohn Oliver discusses some of the world’s most prestigious museums, why they contain so many stolen goods, the market that continues to illegally trade antiquities, and a pretty solid blueprint for revenge.
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The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory.
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JAMILA WIGNOT—The accounts and photos, along with comments by contemporary historians, also help bring out the inhuman working conditions that led to the fire. The women worked 14-hour shifts on the 8th and 9th stories of a building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan (while the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Russian-born Jewish immigrants themselves, sat above them on the 10th floor) for $2 a day. Because it was a shirtwaist (women’s blouse) factory, rags and other highly flammable material littered the floor.
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Italian neorealism, conceived in Italy during the 1940s and concretised in the immediate postwar, when the nation was still in ruins, by three unique artists, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, is a cinema that holds an implacable but poetic mirror to the human condition under the most extreme circumstances. Working with ludicrous budgets by Hollywood standards, often employing non-professional actors, these men let their subjects do the talking and the effect was powerful and memorable. The canvas included all the curses that humanity has harvested from its fall into class-divided society: slavery, feudalism, and now capitalism, the latter ensuring war, pervasive unemployment, poverty, and untold misery for millions. But the neorealist movement also gave us visions of faith and love, and the need for moral political action, and therefore hope in a future that seems to be increasingly in doubt by the younger generation.