wklessens-47621 Reviews

Michael Moore in TrumpLand (2016)

No spoilers, just a cautionary article about the Donald Trump campaign

[8/10 · 23 October 2016]

In 2016 American voters have been witness not only to the ugly presentations and personal invective from the absolute worst presidential candidate in modern US history. We have also seen the spectacle of the Republican Party, one of our two major political bastions for the past 2+ centuries, overtaken and dominated by a fringe element that has been percolating for the past two decades right in front of us. And in GOP presidential nominee and entitled bullyboy Donald Trump, we have amazingly seen the personification of everything the present-day conservative movement in our nation has actually stood for over the past 20 years, only writ very, very large.The national Republican Party has had the "Trump Look" for years. He has simply magnified it past all recognition and sanity.

Nobody in their right mind on either side of the aisle could have envisioned the turmoil, white-hot (pun intended) anger, as well as sheer lunacy that Donald Trump has foisted on us over the past year. America's voters could have ideological differences and disagreements with recent/past Oval Office candidates ranging from Mitt Romney, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Bush (obviously) on any number of issues, without having their basic "Americanness" being in question. There was always a level of decorum, intelligence quotient and competence present…we could all disagree with each other without calling into question our own decency, current-events' acumen, and even rationality.

Donald Trump is the enemy of all our daughters, wives and girlfriends, and undoubtedly has nothing but contempt for even the American women who are still going to vote for him, except for the ones he deems "hot" enough to interest him. His degrading comments and unwanted physical actions with various females and their angry response has been recorded in full, but a point that seems to have been missed is that his foolish excuse of it being "locker room talk" and that these trash conversations are routine with men is an insult to every decent male in America. No Donald, we DON'T spend our time talking about all the sex we're having with our wives and girlfriends. Nor do we dwell lasciviously on descriptions of our daughters' bodies. Not just because you do.

Trump is the scourge of every single minority demographic in America, African-American, Hispanic and Muslim, home-borne or not, save for the gay population. He leveled some of his most acerbic and notorious kiddie-insults and nicknames against Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and his other Republican primary competitors as his adoring fans guffawed along with him, dividing his own political party in the process. And Trump is the last president that our allies have ANY desire to have to deal with in either friendly or contentious issues, a schoolyard bully/loose cannon who has no business discussing issues of import, domestic or external, with any of the world's real leaders.

Donald Trump is an exaggeration, not an aberration. So don't be fooled by all the phony hand wringing being done currently by all those caught-in-the-spotlight "disaffected" Republicans. Many of them from Paul Ryan to Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell to Marco Rubio have already announced that they will support Trump on Election Day despite their absolute knowledge of what a destructive candidate he is. Most of the rest will without question be swinging back to his side over the next week and will pull the lever for him, forgetting all the insults to both themselves and their other conservative partners, along with the rampant ignorance and ever-present hate displayed every time he opens his mouth, no matter the topic. Viewers finally lost count of all the times he called the Obama administration "stupid" during the (thankfully) final debate. And this proves unquestionably what most of us have known for years that the national GOP cares not a whit for America's well-being as long as "their boy" gets in, no matter the dire consequences that will explode across the United States and the world if he does.

There are certainly one or two legitimate attacks against Hillary Clinton one can cull from her near-40 years in the national spotlight, but none of them rises even close to the level of incompetence and evil that Trump represents, and certainly don't equal the rape culture and xenophobia for every demographic except for the angry white male that he espouses. And his latest rabble-rousing canard is his lying claim that the upcoming election is somehow "rigged" in Clinton's favor, while offering exactly zero proof for his whining allegation. Leaving Trump sycophants Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich out of the equation, even the most conservative Republicans in government are refuting this one.

Perhaps Trump's simply setting himself up for a bunch of lawsuits against the federal government if he loses. But judging from both his thinly-veiled comments urging his masses to appoint themselves enforcement officials and congregate at voting places, monitoring closely for any "clandestine activities", as well as the many recent violence-promising quotes from his white male fans across America, it looks more and more like there'll be plenty of potentially-tragic displays we can all look forward to on November 8th. He's obviously using this tactic to target and frighten away minority voters as they attempt to practice their Constitution-given right. So there'll probably be lots of available overtime pay for all the extra police security that will be necessary due to his latest incendiary posturing, this being maybe the only real example of job creation that Trump has been able to come up with in his specifics-starved campaign.

This is the awful imitation of America that the Trump supporters want. It's up to the rest of us to stop him. He will take America on a straight trajectory to hell if he's elected, a hell that would make the eight disastrous Bush/Cheney years last decade seem like a smooth cakewalk by comparison.

Revolution (II) (2012)

REVOLUTION - An Education About Climate Change

[8/10 · 10 August 2015]

An educational and sometimes eye-opening movie event was enjoyed by around 100 attendees last Wednesday at Salem's Southern New Hampshire University. NextGen Climate – NH and Regional Field Director McKenzie St. Germain hosted a full evening that included refreshments, a showing of the independent movie REVOLUTION, an entertaining, interactive talk by New England Aquarium Education Director John Anderson, followed by informal discussions by the audience. The evening's topic centered on the worsening problem of climate change/global warming, and steps we all can take to become more aware of what we, our families and friends can do to mitigate it.

The ridiculing and goofy bumper sticker days are over, as anyone who has the slightest inkling of what is happening right in front of us already knows. This fact was pointed out in both visually beautiful as well as unnerving ways by REVOLUTION,the 85-minute documentary directed by Rob Stewart that opened the evening. Stewart also directed an earlier doc, SHARKWATER, and it was while he was filming that movie that he received one of those epiphanies that we all get sometimes that there was an even bigger situation occurring than what he was then concentrating on.

One of the problems with climate change is the fact that until the last couple decades its deleterious effects weren't obvious to most people in their day-to-day lives. Those of us who peruse cutting-edge books, online informational studies, etc. were onto the problem long before warming became routinely accepted. But there are still many people whose only knowledge of this universal concern is the well-known plight of the polar bears up in the Arctic, mainly because this piece of information went viral years ago in TV and print.

REVOLUTION's excellence rests on the incredible job that Stewart and his team did in shooting hours and hours of the underbelly of the ongoing predicament, including close-up shots of the world's rapidly dying coral reefs, various fish/crustacean species in their natural habitat (many on the endangered list), amusing and poignant views of monkey-like lemurs living, loving and playing together, the director and team swimming underwater intermingling with schools of sharks….all fascinating.

Stewart's narration complements the visuals perfectly, as instead of the typical professional and analytical tone taken by most scientists in nature documentaries we get to listen to a younger voice (32 years old at time of filming) whose awe and fear of what he was discovering as the cinematic process commenced comes through loud and clear. His friendly and personal style seems to be saying that he's "one of us" despite his superior knowledge about his subject, and we get more of a kinship with what he is imparting than we would from someone dryly talking over our heads.

Stewart cites a wealth of statistics: the Great Barrier Reef's 38% reduction of coral over the past 25 years; 44% of America's electricity still coming from coal despite all the knowledge we've gleaned over the past half-century about the unquestionable warming effects of CO2 emissions; ocean acidification that is happening faster and faster, destroying our seas' ecosystem; Canada, China and many other nations being willful partners with the United States in mostly ignoring the ongoing threat, and man's continuing deforestation around the world (his sidebar animal species/forest scenes filmed in Madagascar are simultaneously comical and tragic).

Much of this data is already available and has been for some time to the interested. What Stewart's movie is attempting to do is to make this knowledge more mainstream to the thankfully slowly-dwindling number of people and governments around the world still denying the obvious. The director attended a number of world conferences on the subject, and in REVOLUTION he shares some of the speeches by leaders, politicians and scientists at these affairs, as well as encouraging shots of young activists before and after the events, all of them galvanized about making other nations aware of our responsibility to lower our burning of fossil fuels and lessen our reliance on automobiles.

What we all have to realize is that only 10% of the ongoing warming the earth is experiencing is happening in our air – 90% is occurring in our oceans. Our upper atmosphere has become a heat-trapping blanket over the near-two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, a simple fact that anyone with an aquarium and a little fuel and tinder can experimentally recreate at home. And despite being cyclical, the (literally) countless tons of pollutants and hot emissions that have been spewed into our air over those years have made warming increase exponentially, with thousands of instances including the 4-year drought in California, many Arctic ice caps becoming mostly lakes, numerous animal species dying off : all making the necessity of human intervention crystal-clear.

Please GOOGLE NextGen Climate for more information on what you can do to both learn more about something we ALL should be aware of, and to hopefully start changing the mindsets of our acquaintances who may still be stuck in the past. We're all in this together, and for anyone who cares about the world we're going to leave to our children's children's children, as well as the health and continuance of our animal species, forests and natural wonders, this is all necessary knowledge.