“Stud Life” was one of three opening films (May 3 at Cambridge’s Brattle Theater) for the 2013 Boston LGBT Film Festival.

In one of her podcasts, the handsome butch JJ places two dildos in front of the camera. One is playfully multi-colored, nearly disguising the fact that it is an artificial cock, and the other is black with an angry red head and strong veins on the shaft. While JJ can’t get her head around the one with a spectrum of crayon colors, she also cannot understand why black dildos seem to only come in size gigantic. “Short and wide” would work better.

A dreamer (Leos Carax) wakes up and walks over to the wall. His prosthetic finger is a metal key that unlocks a wall covering. He enters the balcony of a movie theater. Below him in the orchestra an audience of unmoving spectres are watching a film. It’s a scene reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, which also begins with a machine (the movie camera on a tripod) and a view of the audience—but here the machine is the filmmaker’s metallic finger; the apparatus of cinema is invisible.

To paraphrase a popular commercial for Chevrolet cars: The new Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum isn’t your father’s museum. With the recently opened Renzo Piano wing, the Gardner is a new Boston destination.

And, emphasizing its new identity, this summer the museum is featuring “Magic Moments: The Screen and The Eye,” nine unique films by nine experimental artists who over the years have been in the museum’s artist-in-residence program. The films explore complex themes, including historical, political, social, and conceptual subjects. The artists’ visions, documentary and artistic, reflect a thoughtful consideration of technique and challenging topics. A different projection is featured every week. Tickets for the films include museum admission.

I know that Miss Representation is an important film and I feel bad that I didn’t love it more.  Its mission is to explore “how the media’s misrepresentations of women contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence.” And it makes a strong case. Miss Representation is getting a lot of play at a lot of film festivals as well as through the educational campaign built around it. I just question how crucial the dream of “power and influence” is to most women today.

It is an excellent would-be-mainstream vehicle, what with its high profile talking heads, top production values, and some gut-wrenching statistics: “[T]he United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.” The stats on violence and abuse are, as always, a never-ending nightmare since we first exposed them in the late 60s. I’m very glad there’s a piece of celluloid trying to get all these points across. But today most women are struggling hard just to secure the basics: the glass ceiling is visible to only a very few at the top.

“The Guard” (shouldn’t that be, The Garda?) is a terrific Irish film that showcases Brendan Gleeson, a wry and splendid actor who plays a small time village cop, Sergeant Gerry Boyle. (The film was a critical and popular hit in Ireland.) When three drug traffickers make their way to his area, he suddenly has to deal with the rather up-tight FBI agent Wendell Everett played with fitting cultural confusion by Don Cheadle.

Adam Curtis’ new documentary, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, gives hope that at least some of the world is waking up from the mass hallucination of disembodied information. The documentary, which is subtitled, “The Rise of the Machines,” explores how in the later part of the 20th Century, and the first decade of the 21st, much of the world became organized around the old gnostic fantasy that information or souls can be separated from the constraints of the material world, becoming free to circulate through time and space. This way of seeing the world has always unleashed powerful fantasies of power among the powerful. And it has recently led some to the ludicrous conclusion that, “information wants to be free,” or that human beings are merely meat vehicles for the transport of genetic information through time.

So what’s funny about being in my 60s? It’s funny to be at an age where historical documentaries are being made about political actions I was involved in. Am I history?

Recently, on the exact fortieth anniversary of our takeover of a Harvard building, the final cut of “Left on Pearl” was shown to a sold-out crowd at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a documentary about the 1971 feminist takeover of a Harvard University building – one of very few such incidents ever – leading to 10 days of occupation, political agitation, individual transformation and media hysteria. We activists were told to scurry back to our husbands’ kitchens. The press could not get enough of us, or rather of bashing us.

American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Wars make poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

More than sixty years after the war that cemented Israel’s statehood, known both as the War of Independence and The Catastrophe, Jews and Palestinians alike can affirm the truth in King’s declaration. In the film, Little Town of Bethlehem, coming out this October, three men from either side of the concrete wall that now separates Israel and Palestine, talk about growing up under the cloud of this long conflict and how it has shaped each of their lives.

The “Art of the Steal,” which just opened at the Kendall Square Theatre, Cambridge, documents a true Horatio Alger story and how it went awry.



A boy grows up in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood, attends public schools, and, after earning an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, studies chemistry and pharmacology in Berlin. He meets a German scientist. Together they develop a new antiseptic silver compound. The American returns to the United States and partners with the German in a firm to manufacture and market their invention. Their product is phenomenally successful. When the American buys out his partner five years later, it provides him with vast financial resources.

Michael Moore has wrestled with Congress, insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, General Motors, and various players in the “military-industrial complex."

But Goliath has never been this big…

In his new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” which opened nationwide on Friday, Michael Moore (playing David) “volunteers” to save his tribe by taking on the behemoths that sit atop our economic system; i.e. the banks and mega-financial services corporations – companies such as AIG, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs – who many believe are responsible for the global economic disaster that erupted into public view 18 months ago.