The Maryland Minority Film Festival, which is scheduled to take place Aug. 19th at the Creative Alliance in Highland- town, will feature “Implied Warranty,” a 30-minute futuris- tic film-short produced by Quiet Mountain Films and direct- ed by local filmmaker Robert G. Christie. It stars an ensem- ble Baltimore cast, including 2 Hotmedia Film Fest winners.

CREATIVE ALLIANCE VENUE ON EASTERN AVENUE
IN HIGHLANDTOWN IS SITE FOR ANNUAL EVENT
BILLED AS ‘MINORITY FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE’

The medium of the moment for everyone
 
By Jill Yesko
 
These days it seems that everybody with an iPhone is making a movie.

Which makes Sharin Nelson, founder and director of Reel Independent Women, an organization devoted to showcasing films by women and minority filmmakers, a very happy person.

“For the longest time, making movies was something people could only dream of,” says the Owings Mills resident.

“Today technology has evolved so that you don’t need thousands of dollars or sophisticated equipment to make interesting, quality movies.”

Nelson should know. She has her own IMDb (Internet Movie Database) page and numerous film credits both as a producer and actor.

Nelson has worked with local area filmmakers such as Dundalk’s Jimmy Traynor and Baltimore’s Marlene Zechman of Zany Zone Productions.

But she isn’t satisfied with just making movies: “I want to give back to the community of local filmmakers,” she says.

To that end, Nelson is the driving force behind the Second Annual Maryland Minority Film Festival, which will take place at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore on Wednesday, August 19th at 7 p.m.

The event, which was well received in its first year, includes an expanded genre of films, from anime to horror and documentary.

Among this year’s highlighted filmmakers are:  Phoenix Tremayne, a former Baltimore City fire fighter turned writer, producer, and photographer; feature film producer Ashleigh Coffelt, founder of Miss Ash Productions; Jasmine Jones, director of Living Natural, a documentary about Jenise Wamble’s natural hair story and her role as president of Towson University’s natural hair club, the Naturalistas; and James Bowman’s short animated movie “Kassi.”

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Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s brashness & bluster might be just what the world of television commercials ordered, facts and truth be damned.

ADVERTISING INNOVATORS MAY LEARN
FROM PARTISAN POLITICAL COMMERCIALS
BY CANDIDATES LIKE DONALD TRUMP

BRASHNESS AND BLUSTER;
CRITICIZING, NAME-CALLING
 
By David Maril
 
You have to figure advertising executives who produce television commercials are always hard at work, re- thinking their approaches to peddling their products and influencing the public.

Many advertising producers are no doubt impressed each political season at the effort that goes into trying to win elections with the use of television, radio and Internet commercials.

In most cases, the political commercial is little more than shameless propaganda, turning the candidate into a flawless hero and demonizing the opposition.

Only time will tell what Donald Trump’s impact will be on advertising and self-promotion. If he manages to stay near the top of the polls in the Republican presidential chase, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture him pitching himself in front of a camera the way a salesman tries to unload cars and trucks.

“Look, you know me. I get things done,” you can just see him saying on a commercial.

“I will not be undersold, lowering taxes and putting money back in your pocket. If one of these losers running against me says your taxes will be cut five percent, I’ll make it six.”

Sometimes it makes you wonder if the politicians can get away with criticizing the competition and without having to document their own strong-points; so why not extend the whole concept into the world of general advertising?

Would it be very surprising to soon see any of the following television commercials?

A Ford commercial shows a Chevrolet, broken down on the side of the highway with its hood up. While hundreds of Fords zoom by, a voice snarls, “You can call Chevy and tell them to stop making cars that break down.”

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Gregory Peck, shown here in a screen shot with Mary Bad- ham, won a Best Actor Oscar as Atticus Finch, the great liber- al hero of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. But as it turns out, fiction’s most celebrated opponent of racial prejudice in the Depression-era Deep South was actually a fiction himself, a hero and role model only in his 6-year-old daughter’s eyes and mind: In reality he was a closet bigot and unapologetic racist. Finch’s true colors come out in Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee’s “sequel” that takes place 20 years fol- lowing the events depicted in Mockingbird as his now-grown- up daughter “Scout” is devastated to learn her father is not — and likely never was — the shining example of forward-thinking liberalism she mistakenly believed him to be when she was growing up, not unlike the author’s experience with her own father, upon whom the character Atticus is based.

EXCITEMENT, INTRIGUE, FEAR & CONTROVERSY
OVER HARPER LEE’S “NEW” NOVEL’S RELEASE
PROVES PRINTED BOOKS ARE FAR FROM DEAD

As Enoch Pratt gets long-awaited refurbishing,
what can we expect from libraries of the future?

ARE PUBLIC LIBRARIES JUDGING BOOKS
BASED ON POPULARITY, RATHER THAN
ON QUALITY, IMPORT & SIGNIFICANCE?

Entertainment centers? …or guardians of history?
 
By David Maril
 
While many soulless marketing trendsetters who want to use technology to drive our communica- tion skills back into the Stone Age consider printed books obsolete, hardcover publications have lately been in the news.

The excitement, controversy and fear over the publication of Harper Lee’s supposedly lost novel Go Set A Watchman has been interesting to follow.

Even though the book’s setting is years after the much-beloved To Kill A Mockingbird, it was actually written earlier.

While Harper Lee, the reclusive author, will never explain, the popular theory is that this newly published novel was the original draft of Mockingbird before her publisher demanded a series of rewrites, ultimately focusing on the rape trial of a falsely accused black man.

Atticus Finch, the driving moral force for justice and racial equality in Mockingbird, reveals, as a much older man, racist attitudes in the new book. This is quite unsettling to a generation of readers who considered him a hero.

Mockingbird was published in 1960; the film came out in 1962.

Some might argue the new book should be called “To Kill An Atticus.”

However, why not simply consider Watchman a separate entity from Mockingbird and critique it on its own? It’s fascinating to theorize why we are seeing a different Atticus.

The book’s focus differs from Mockingbird, concentrating on an older “Scout,” his daughter, returning to her small-town Southern home after having moved to New York.

Has Atticus changed or has Scout’s perception and understanding of her father and hometown changed?

Conversely, Mockingbird’s standing as a modern book classic should remain unchanged. The two books have threads of connection but do not deserve to be treated as if they are a two-part edition.

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A Voice of Baltimore Commentary

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“The Donald” (Trump, that is) represents one of the worst examples of American presidential candidates to seek the country’s highest office.

‘OLE STROM,’ GEORGE WALLACE, ‘THE DONALD’
AND THE RACIST DOOFUS FROM ’SEINFELD’
ENLIVEN PRESIDENTIAL SWEEPSTAKES

Could American politics sink any lower?
 
By Jay Liner
 
If you’ve been genuflecting lately over Donald Trump’s ugly display of affection for the Mexican murderers and rapists that have illegally entered our country, don’t get your bowels in too much of an uproar. Although he’s the center of attention and the pick hit to click at the moment, history will give us some perspective.

Trump is going to flame out, and be relegated to a short list of haters that have attempted this maneuver.

The glowing examples I’m referring to from past history were Southern white males, who had garnered an inordinate amount of national attention during their ascendancy. Their careers in public service took some very strange twists and turns later on.

In 1948 Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina bolted the Democratic Party and ran for the Oval Office on a states’ rights/segregationist platform.

Against incumbent President Harry S. Truman and Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey, he carried four states: Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

One of Ole Strom’s finest hours of Southern charm occurred more than four decades later during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings when, as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thurmond railroaded the confirmation through, while being seen and heard asking “if the machine was on,” in reference to the recording devices in use while the hearing was being broadcast.

Poor old Anita Hill (the about-to-be Justice Thomas’s accuser of sexual misconduct) got trashed, and it was ugly.

The then-Republican Senator Thurmond — he abandoned the Democrats and switched parties in 1964 — wound up endorsing a black man for the Supreme Court in a very contentious hearing involving allegations of sexual harassment.

The icing on the cake, however, was when it was revealed near the end of his tenure as a U.S. Senator, that Thurmond had fathered a black child. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

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Charm City’s next mayor?  Will disgraced former Mayor Sheila Dixon become the “Marion Barry of Baltimore”? or will her gift-card thievery conviction do her in?

LIKE MARION BARRY,
MAYOR-FOR-LIFE
DESPITE FLAWS

Rawlings-Blake fails to convey
vision for the future, or to build
confidence she is in control

ORIOLES’ FEAST-OR-FAMINE
HOME RUN & STRIKEOUT
OFFENSE DOOMS HOPE
OF 2015 CHAMPIONSHIP
 
By David Maril
 
While wondering, after an announcement of the arrival in November of her fourth book, if Sarah Palin is the only person who has written more books than she has read, it’s interesting to note the following:

 Don’t count disgraced Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon out from reclaiming her place in City Hall after the next election.

The late Marion Barry, former Mayor of Washington D.C., showed there is always a second, and in some cases, third chance to resurrect a political career after scandal.

Baltimore has a serious leadership vacuum and Dixon offers the passion, vision and confidence many voters feel has been missing.

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, with her uninspiring, methodical and out-of-touch style, is dropping in popularity and will have a hard time getting reelected as mayor.

In a different era, she would be OK. But with all the turmoil of the past six months, plus an alarming increase in shootings and homicides, the city needs a bold leader who appears to be more in control, offering a vision of optimism.

Unfortunately, the Mayor gives the impression of waiting too long to be decisive. Instead of being out in front of problems and difficult situations, she is too often in a defensive mode, trying to minimize damage instead of preventing it.

 Many critics feel Rawlings-Blake should share the blame for police department dysfunction equally with fired Commissioner Anthony Batts.

One certainty, all of these issues with training, protocol and procedure go much deeper into the administrative level than just Batts and the Mayor.

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