The New York Times published an article with its list of the best films on Amazon Prime.
Scrolling through the mostly anodyne selections the blogger search ground to a halt. On the list is the highly regarded “Riotsville USA”. A documentary about what can be categorized as the origins of the modern Police State America. On a Sunday afternoon I watched this riveting, educational and disturbing piece of documentary film making.
When I see the ongoing militarization of American law enforcement I will never again wonder about the origins of the American police state after watching this film.
The following review claims the Riotsville USA story is “in some sense, laughable”. It is not in the least funny.
The mid-1960s saw a conspicuous rise in civil unrest in the United States. The war in Vietnam, substandard living conditions for people of color, and a larger shift in consciousness all contributed to people wielding violence as a tool of protest. The new documentary “Riotsville, USA.,” shows the federal government’s response to this tactic as both sinister and, in some sense, laughable.
The Riotsville of the title is the name of a fake town built as a training ground for law enforcement, in which riot story lines were enacted by soldiers. More than one of these towns were built by the U.S. government, with the events filmed for official review. The documentary’s director, Sierra Pettengill, uses a variety of archival footage here. There are government films of Riotsville exercises, clips from talk shows, and a mini-narrative of a public television station whose progressive politics led to its defunding by the Ford Foundation. And searing footage from riots near the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami, which received scant media coverage at the time.
A staged demonstration in Riotsville USA
A blog for Riotsville USA needs some musical accompaniment. This piece, a cover of the Led Zeppelin “Immigrant Song” done by Karen O, Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch fits the bill. It was in the trailer for the American film version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’
SAN FRANCISCO – BALBOA THEATER – OUTER RICHMOND DISTRICT
Music from the Ex Machina soundtrack. As eerie as the movie itself. Great listening
Bloggers Liz and Lee attended a recent screening of the 2014 sci-fi classic ‘Ex Machina’ at our neighborhood theater. Following is a review.
Marquee for “Ex Machina” Balboa Theater special showing
Liz Heidhues 6.10.2025
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” the talented, young coder Caleb at Bluebook, a huge search engine company, says to Nathan, the company’s CEO, as the two sit together in a surreal forest discussing the humanoid robot Ava which Nathan had brought into being.
“There you go again, Mr. quotable,” quips Nathan, the anti-Hero of the film “Ex Machina”, to Caleb, whom he lured to his isolated mountain-top home to test if Ava could successfully pass a test of human capabilities – truly thinking and feeling for herself, exhibiting genuine human consciousness.
“It is not my quote,” counters Caleb. “It is what Oppenheimer said after making the atomic bomb.”
There is a lot to unpack in “Ex Machina”.
Alex Garland, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Garland the writer and director of the sci-fi thriller, has always been ahead of the game when it comes to making movies. He put Oppenheimer’s famous citation of the Hindu Gita in his 2014 film ten years before it appeared in the Oppenheimer movie.
There is nothing more human than the will to survive. Would you resort to violence as a mechanism to escape erasure?
Are we playing god seeking more and more power over the inert world which spirals largely out of human control no matter how we tweak its secrets to gain mastery over it?
Do we have license to create artificial intelligence which we can then manipulate to seduce unsuspecting victims?
“Ex Machina” is not a cut-and-dried piece about crossing the line between man and machine. It strays into the dark worlds of the abuse of power and its consequences, the ambivalence of twisted morality and its conflicts, the controversy over sexual attraction as a part of programming from birth (nature) or as a result of our exposure to diverse cultures which influence our sexual identities (nurture).
There are some notable scenes in “Ex Machina”.
Ava and Caleb get acquainted
One is a sexually titillating dance scene with a humanoid Nathan has created. Nathan, who drinks profusely to lower his inhibitions, drunkenly gyrates to the beat of “Get Down Saturday Night” with a seductive Japanese cyborg named Kyoko to demonstrate to a skeptical Caleb that the human experience of dancing can be enjoyed with even an automated partner. It is at this point that Caleb begins to suspect the all-powerful CEO might be more dangerous than he first thought.
Another is of Caleb fretting over being forced to sign Nathan’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in order to participate in Nathan’s cyborg experiment. If Caleb doesn’t sign the NDA, he must return to being a cog in the company Nathan has gotten rich from. If he signs it, his freedom to talk about what he is going to see and do will be forever restricted and he will need to relinquish sole access to his own electronic devices over to Nathan, giving Nathan access too.
Nathan: “Man, but what a thing we’ve shared, huh? Something to tell our grandchildren, right?”
Caleb: “After they’ve signed their NDAs.”
Nathan (laughs): “Yeah, their NDAS. Dude, you crack me up, man.”
This scene resonated with me due to a similar situation I went through in which signing an NDA would have meant giving up my right to bring impermissible conduct to light. I wouldn’t do it.
Nathan created Kyoko solely for his own sexual exploitation. Kyoko is a mute android who cannot speak. Kyoko is a symbol of the oppression of women, an android shackled by Nathan to bring coffee to Caleb and perform as Nathan programmed her to perform. She tears open a piece of her skin to reveal to Caleb her robotic structure underneath. She is a cyborg too. Caleb becomes so paranoid over the fantasy of the deranged AI inventor playing with fire, he then slashes open his own arm with a razor to make sure he’s still human.
Ava in cyborg repose
In the end, Kyoko turns on her creator and helps the cyborg Ava escape Nathan’s house and into the human world. Caleb had trusted Ava and dreamt they would have sex together.
Caleb: “Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a grey box.”
Nathan: “Actually I don’t think that’s true. Can you give me an example of consciousness at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension? What imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you’re gonna exist, why not enjoy it? You want to remove the chance of Ava falling in love and fucking?”
Kyoko and Ava
But Ava did not fall in love with Caleb nor did she want to be with him. She is manipulative and tricks Caleb. After dressing like a woman, she leaves for the real world Caleb had seductively described to her. She leaves Caleb to die of starvation locked in Nathan’s mountain-top fortress with no way out.
The scenes take place in a twilight world near a real and majestic waterfall called Gronfossen in Grondalen, Norway.
Did Nathan actually program Ava to develop and coordinate a plan to escape?
“One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Atlanta. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction,” Nathan admonishes Caleb.
SAN FRANCISCO – OUTER RICHMOND DISTRICT – BALBOA THEATER
Liz and Lee Heidhues 5.25.2025
Movies are forever. When I was 12 years old my parents took me to see “North by Northwest.” It was quite racy fare for a pre-teen and remains one of my favorite films of all time.
As part of a Memorial Day weekend special the soon to be 100 year old Balboa Theater is holding an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective.Last night Liz and I went to this neighborhood theater in our corner of San Francisco where we have lived nearly 50 years.
We walked into a packed theater which included people of all ages and found comfortable seats in the next to the last row. It had been mysteriously roped off and was waiting for us. It goes to show that good movies are timeless.
The ‘A-List’ cast including Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Leo J. Carroll is stellar. I was duly impressed when I look up Eva Marie Saint and learned she will be 101 years old on the Fourth of July. One of the most entertaining performers in the film is Jessie Royce Landis who gives a bravura portrayal playing Cary Grant’s mother. It’s classic stuff.
Jessie Royce Landis in the brown overcoat gives a bravura portrayal playing Cary Grant’s “mother.” It’s classic stuff.
Liz’ review says it all
No trip to the movie house is complete without popcorn. Kitchen master Liz dug out our 40 year old West Bend popcorn maker. Found a recipe for caramel corn and went to work. Producing a tasty treat which Liz dumped into a double paper sack and munched away as she sat transfixed during “North by Northwest.“
Blogger Lee beams as he admires the caramel popcorn. photo-Liz Heidhues
The iconic crop duster scene. It’s worth watching all nine minutes.
Even David Lynch couldn’t fathom and did not want to witness this fascist bully’s return to power.
While I only saw a couple of his films, ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ one song from ‘Lost Highway’ best encapsulates Lynch is wild, crazy, mind bending style.
‘You are the Perfect Drug’ written and performed by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails specifically for ‘Lost Highway’.
Lost Highway is a 1997 surrealistneo-noirfilm directed by David Lynch, and co-written by Lynch and Barry Gifford. It stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, and Robert Blake in his final film role. The film follows a musician (Pullman) who begins receiving mysterious VHS tapes of him and his wife (Arquette) in their home. He is suddenly convicted of murder, after which he inexplicably disappears and is replaced by a young mechanic (Getty) leading a different life.
