Global

Writer/director Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire epitomizes the type of specialty cinema that makes a cineaste’s heart go pitter patter when it plays at a favorite art house. On the other hand, popcorn munchers at the local multiplex used to superheroes, explosions and car chases would likely find this 2-hour foreign film subtitled in English to be excruciatingly slow - only “redeemed” by its hot lesbian sex scenes.

This French feminist film - which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay and Queer Palme awards, and was nominated for Cannes’ grand prize, the Palme d’Or - is set in Brittany in 1760. Portrait ponders: How enlightened was the Enlightenment when it came to women and their rights? In particular, how reasonable was the Age of Reason when it came to the love that dared not speak its name - especially when it involved the female of the species.

On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post sent out a news alert headlined "John Kerry Endorses Biden in 2020 Race, Saying He Has the Character and Experience to Beat Trump, Confront the Nation's Challenges." Meanwhile, in Iowa, Joe Biden was also touting his experience. "Look," Biden said as he angrily lectured an 83-year-old farmer at a campaign stop, "the reason I'm running is because I've been around a long time and I know more than most people know, and I can get things done."

But Kerry and Biden don't want to acknowledge a historic tie that binds them: Both men were important supporters of the Iraq war, voting for the invasion on the Senate floor and continuing to back the war after it began. Over the years, political winds have shifted—and Biden, like Kerry, has methodically lied about his support for that horrendous war.

Let’s bomb Iowa! Or maybe Texas or Michigan or Nebraska . . .

Oh wait, I got confused for a second. Those places are part of America and we love them. We would never bomb them. These are places we would bomb: Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, etc.

Thanksgiving is gone and no thanks were given for the House Democrats’ unfolding plan for a quick, tidy, Christmas-wrapped impeachment package. Why are they doing it like this? What are they thinking? Why not take the fight to the president on all the available grounds? What is the rationale for a rushed process based on a fraction of presidential infractions? Why deliberately give up control of the narrative when you have mountains of evidence on your side?

That’s where the Democrats appear to be taking us. At this point, no one knows how it will turn out, and I long to be wrong in my apprehensions. But there’s not much to work with here. Democratic leaders don’t even explain their thinking publicly. The state of play as this is written seems unchanged from what CNN reported November 21:

It is not often that one hears anything like the truth in today’s Washington, a city where the art of dissimulation has reached new heights among both Democrats and Republicans. Everyone who has not been asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the past twenty years knows that the most powerful foreign lobby operating in the United States is that of the state of Israel. Indeed, by some measures it just might be the most powerful lobby period, given the fact that it has now succeeded in extending its tentacles into state and local levels with its largely successful campaigns to punish criticism or boycotting of Israel while also infiltrating boards of education to require Holocaust education and textbooks that reflect favorably on the Jewish state.

Occasionally, however, the light does shine in darkness. The efforts by Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to challenge the power of the Israel Lobby are commendable and it is worth noting that the two women are being subjected to harassment by their own Democratic Party in an effort to make them be silent.

[NOTE: This review may contain some plot spoilers.]

Anastasiya Miroshnichenko’s well-made, touching documentary Debut provides viewers with a rare glimpse behind the “Iron Curtain.” By this I’m not merely referring to the fact that this 80-minute film was shot in Belarus, which was formerly known as Byelorussia or Belorussia and, like Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. Rather, more to the point, Debut was largely filmed behind bars and barbed wire, inside the sprawling complex of “Women’s Prison #4 of Gomel City” in the southeastern part of Belarus.

The weaknesses of Ukrainegate are on display in a new book by Neal Katyal (“with Sam Koppelman”) making the case for Ukrainegate, but titled “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”

The death penalty’s slow death is accelerating. At least 140 nations no longer use it. No nation in Europe uses the death penalty. No nation in the Western Hemisphere uses it, except the United States.

Twenty-nine U.S. states have banned capital punishment or imposed a moratorium, and most of the rest have effectively stopped using it.

Virginia, the northernmost east-coast state with the death penalty, has not sentenced anyone to death in over 8 years. Virginia’s death row holds only three men, all of whose sentences are facing challenges in court, meaning that the death row could soon be emptied out without anyone being killed.

The last time Virginia executed a man was in 2017. Now that man’s victim’s daughter is speaking out for abolition of the death penalty.