RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Staircase (Documentary, 13 episodes; 2018) Netflix No, the truth does not somehow mysteriously appears out of thin air and settles the score. Often, the perpetrator goes scot-free. It is not unusual for fall guys to carry the burden. Innocent bystanders who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes get suckered in. Tonnes of news of the incarcerated getting reprieve with newer modern scientific revelations, e.g. when DNA evidence comes to fore, is evidence of this. Truth does not manifest on its own. We have to make it appear. At the end of the day, the determinant is money. With ever-increasing legal fees and protracted trials that last forever, proving innocence is the domain of the well-heeled. The impoverished are just left to the spiralling uncertainty of time and divine intervention.  It is a game of poker. It is a question of how long can one hold his card. Court cases can run till the money runs out or the accused is out of breath, metaphorically and...

Dear White People (2014) Living in the post-modern world has proven to be quite challenging. If keeping up with fleeting of information and the changing of fashions is hard enough, try being politically correct. It would drain out the last ounce of strength in you. It seems that people these days are all so fragile and can easily cringe like mimosa pudica  the moment we hear something remotely unsavoury.  If you use a word that feels benign enough not to offend anyone, the same people would turn around and tell you that by skirting around the issue, you are actually promoting discrimination. For example by using a sex-neutral pronoun, one may allege that we are accentuating the divide! This film is a satire on the above subject. It is a bold attempt to put in the open, the dilemmas that the Ameican blacks that go through in their day to day interactions with the other. It portrays identity issues surrounding black students amongst themselves, with white students...