FLAMING STAR is a Don Siegel western about a mixed-race family – a white man, his white son, his Native American wife, and their son together, Pacer. They all get it from both sides but especially Pacer, who has one foot in each world. The whites won’t even speak to him after a Kiowa massacre of a white family, and at the same time he’s being pressured by the new chief to turn his back on the white man and become a Kiowa warrior. Not like the chief gives two shits about him, he just wants him for the propaganda value, to be able to show somebody who turned their back on the white man. But Pacer doesn’t want to do it and thinks they’ll kill him when he says no.
He and his mother go into the Kiowa village to try to talk their way out of it. Pacer is convinced he’ll be forced to say no in front of everybody, but in fact the chief respects his bravery and allows him to leave peacefully to consider it more. They shouldn’t have been so distrustful. Ironically it’s a white man, an old friend, who ambushes them when they’re leaving.
Oh, and by the way Pacer is played by Elvis Presley. You know, the singer. I should’ve mentioned that probly. That might be relevant to how you’ll react to this one. (read the rest of this shit…)
The outlawvern.com technical squad (Chris – not pictured) has determined that moving to a new server will help us in our goal of bringing unparalleled filmatistic analysis to the ladies and gentlemen of the internet. The switch is planned for 11:30 pm eastern time Friday night, so there will be some downtime then while it takes place.
CITY OF GOD, CITY OF MEN and NEWS FROM A PERSONAL WAR got me interested in what’s going on in Brazil. For further research I decided to check out this video I’d always meant to see, an enlightening travel documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger visiting Rio De Janeiro during Carnaval.
Somehow I made it to the futuristic year of 2010 without ever seeing CITY OF GOD. I don’t know, just one of those things I never got around to, like skydiving or owning a house. But hey, the rest of the world: you were right! This is a good one.
I think the end of the Bush era killed most of the demand for left wing documentaries. I think I heard Robert Greenwald is managing a food co-op or something.
It is a time of economic turmoil. The gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps getting wider and wider, like a hippopotamus’s mouth when he yawns. Hard-working people hit some bad luck and they lose their homes, property and life savings to the banks. Anger rises, and in the face of cruel systems too complex for guys like me to understand, it’s easy to fall into simplistic stick-it-to-the-man sentiment. These faceless institutions seem to be crushing people under their boots, and we want revenge. If a company can have the rights of a human being, it ought to feel the pain of a human being. We want it to suffer.
As a Chris Tucker fan in a white-people-heavy part of the country I too often find myself defending the kind-of-funniness of RUSH HOUR. I don’t love the movie or anything (MONEY TALKS is the real classic) but I have to admit that every time I come across it on TV I find myself laughing at the shit Chris Tucker says and saying, “I forgot how funny this was.”
