Lakota Nation vs. United States
The difference between indigeneity and settler colonialism grows from a relationship with the land. The colonialist sees themselves as its manager, pledged to “improving” and extracting as many resources as possible from their private property to further their capital. As Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli poignantly articulate in their new documentary, Indigenous North Americans are of, from, and with the land. They are its caretakers and beneficiaries. Lakota Nation vs. The United States makes a passionate case that the US Government should return the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Lakota and their future generations. Continue Reading →
Reality Winner
From depictions of Black beauty to the ethics of whistleblowing, two female-focused docs out of SXSW struggle to hammer home a central message.
(This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.)
Subjects of Desire, from director Jennifer Holmes, looks at the way Black beauty has changed over the last century. Holmes examines the boxes that Black women have been forced into through the lens of the Miss Black America beauty pageant. Interviewing a range of contestants, coupled with small group sessions of Black women of varying ages, Holmes’ film forces you to reckon with the sexualization of this unrespected and often disregarded group of people. Continue Reading →
Try Harder!
Debbie Lum’s engrossing documentary about scary-smart teens and the arduous college application process will make you both nostalgic for and glad to be done with high school.
Back when I was in high school, during the Pleistocene Era, applying for college meant filling out a piece of paper, meeting once or twice with your indifferent guidance counselor, and then waiting for an envelope to come in the mail. It was a solitary experience, where often you didn’t know what schools your classmates wanted to get into until they got into them (or didn’t). Now, however, it’s a far more elaborate process, sometimes starting as early as junior year, and involving essays, interviews, and hours and hours of preparation, at the service of a gradually decreasing acceptance rate. Debbie Lum’s documentary Try Harder! focuses on a year in one high school, as its students muddle through an exhausting, often dispiriting college application experience. It’s surprisingly fascinating, and endlessly charming.
San Francisco’s Lowell High School is one of the most highly ranked public high schools in the country, with a student body made up entirely of the future in science and technology. These kids are way smarter than me, and probably you, and probably most adults, with enviable confidence to go with it. They have the poise of people who have spent much of their lives always knowing the answer to the next problem, and never questioning that they have bright and successful futures in front of them. That confidence and poise wavers a bit once they discover just how competitive and disappointing applying for college can be. With college acceptance rates dropping by 50% over the past 15 years, the numbers seem to be stacked against them from the beginning, and that’s even with astonishing SAT scores and endless extracurricular activities on their resumes. Continue Reading →
Feels Good Man
In detailing Pepe the Frog's journey from meme to monster, Feels Good Man charts the corrosive nature of creative ownership.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
For San Francisco-based artist Matt Furie, it was always just a frog. But for legions of people on the Internet, Pepe the Frog means so much more: a source of joy, a catalyst for hate, and a million things in between. Pepe's been around almost as long as the modern Internet; he caught on in 2005 when Furie uploaded his first digital comic about Pepe (part of the gang in his irreverent slice-of-life comic Boys' Life) to MySpace. It wasn't long before he took off, the frog's carefree, half-lidded expression becoming an avatar for a generation of disaffected, directionless youth finding refuge on social media -- and later, finding himself on the Anti-Defamation League's list of hate symbols.
Arthur Jones, an illustrator and animator in his own right, wanted to chart the meme's descent from innocent mascot to icon of the alt-right, and Furie's Sisyphean attempts to reclaim his creation. In Feels Good Man, he manages to accomplish quite a bit more than that: Furie and Pepe become the poster children for the consumptive, corrosive nature of the Internet, and the complications that come from the democratization of art. Continue Reading →