New media potpourri
BECOMING ABIE is a six-episode Netflix dramedy featuring a Nigerian millennial, female, articulate and brainy, feisty, articulate and gorgeous, in her first job as a new hire in a topnotch Lagos advertising firm where she must learn the ropes of…
QUEEN OF THE DESERT is Director Mary Ann Rotondi’s creative endeavor to make a movie commentary about what she believed are the dynamic social and political forces menacing this country, writes the WORD’s Luis De Leon. Rotondi, who won Best Woman Directed Short at the 2022 Poppy Jasper International Film Festival, uses two characters of different gender, ethnicity, personal values as well as social and political mores to express her point of view that the power of people’s shared humanity can ameliorate the centrifugal forces she believes are tearing away at America.
In other words, people living in the United States of America need to empathize more with people who don’t appear to be like them.
Article content has been removed because the writer refused to follow the guidelines and rules for corroborating and verifying the content. Wednesday, August 3.
Says Photo Journalist Brent Jones who shot innumerable headline news making pictures of Chicago’s First Black Hizzoner: “I was covering Harold Washington from just before he made his run and until his passing. I covered his funeral. There were many people who thought that I was actually on his staff because I was around him so much. I was privy to his daily schedule and came up with ways to be where he would be.” Jones was the first Black photographer to have a picture on the front page of Newsweek.
Washington’s campaign was a centrifugal force for news attention, Jones says. It created serendipitous opportunities for people of all stripes as well as diverse areas of Chicago that had rarely attracted much notice from the mainstream news media. He was literally and figuratively putting people and places on the map unlike ever before.
PUNCH 9 FOR HAROLD WASHINGTON is an enthralling cinematic tour de force about Chicago’s first African American Hizzoner, who was a riveting political tour de force. By Gregg W. Morris
It was five-minutes, 38-seconds into this marvel of a film – melancholic yet tempered with cosmic bliss – when I experienced the first swell of an unexpected rapture, brought on by scenes of the spoken-word-like-rapping of Zowie pitching to publishers of adult books about a children’s book she wants published. Her main character may be the only character, and she is a girl whose superpowers are diminishing, and who frequently falls on the floor or to the ground like a klutz at certain moments in the time-space continuum. Audiences need to be ready to deal with otherworldly themes in this film. – By Gregg W. Morris
After screening a record 75 films over 16 days in person and virtually, the 20th Edition closed out an epic run Sunday, August 22, with back-to-back screenings of three thrilling titles: Evan Jackson Leong’s Chinatown-set crime thriller Snakehead; Yoon Jae-Keun’s head-spinning Spiritwalker, winner of the NYAFF 2021 Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema; and the NYAFF Closing Film, Kim Ji-hoon’s blockbuster disaster comedy Sinkhole. – By Gregg W. Morris
Has a satisfying finish like a fine wine, it’s aftertaste will be inspiring audiences to revisit it on their home screens and other streaming devices again and again and again.
By Gregg W. Morris