RIFLE RANGE BOY

American Fiction (2023) Screenplay & Direction: Cord Jefferson It seems that we have not changed much since our days as cavemen. Imagine living exposed in a world so hostile we would have tried to understand the unusual things around us. We continued compartmentalising the living and non-living things amongst us even when we became hunter-gatherers, farmers or city dwellers. By compartmentalising everyone in boxes, we thought we had our defences up to remind us which one of them was friends and which were potentially harmful. Gone are club-carrying or sabre-rattling days, but these classifications helped somewhat. The Chinese viewed anyone non-Huns as barbaric. So did the Greeks, Persians and Arabs. During the mercantile era, the dark-skinned were labelled as God-sanctioned slaves.  In the USA, post-Civil War America assumed that the emancipated slaves were ill-prepared to fit into modern society. They expected them to remain the subservient ones. They were prevented from getti...

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) Director: Martin Scorsese Based on David Grann's book (2017) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI The narration is always the same. Again and again, history has repeatedly shown the same narration. The local population would live in harmony, in sync with their environment. The rambunctious mavericks from outside, with both eyes fixed on the wealth, would trickle in, peddle their snake oil elixirs and promise the moons and the stars. They would bulldoze their thinking into the local populace. The host would be cordial enough to accommodate the newcomers' wisdom, too. Once the shields are lowered, when the host treats the visitors as equals and gives them due recognition, they would zap.  The bottom line is all about wealth, money and control.  The Native Indians were nicely tugged into the New World, as 'discovered' by Europeans. The areas around Missouri and Kansas were occupied by a group that later be...