This article was first published in The eXile on January 22, 2003

Dima’s eyes lit up when he first saw the Solnyshko orphanage’s toy collection two months ago. He had never seen anything like it. It took me a few moments of staring at the same collection last week for it to register that the pile of ratty animals with ears worn from having been sucked on by untold numbers of orphans could cause such joy.

But then, I’m not a three-year-old who used to survive by rooting around trash heaps looking for something to eat. Dima is. (more…)

This article first appeared in The eXile on November 11, 2003

TBILISI, GEORGIA – If you want to understand what’s really going on beneath the current election crisis in the former Soviet republic of Georgia — a struggle that threatens to push the country back into the kind of civil war which killed tens of thousands from 1989 through 1993 – then you need to pull the camera back. Way back, to the global level.

That’s because Georgia is a battleground not just between local political factions vying for power, but also between the geostrategic interests of America and Russia, between competing Big Oil interests, and between the forces of globalization and the forces which defy globalization (chaos, tradition, isolation). (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on September 18, 2003

On September 11, Great Britain have accorded political asylum to the most notorious refugee from Russia: to Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. I never met him personally. Once, in 1990s, we, members of National-Bolsheviks Party have staged a mass anti-Berezovsky demonstration in front of building of “LogoVaz” — his former headquarters.

In spite of that demonstration, he helped me little bit with money when I was imprisoned by Putin. Then it was a bottle of cognac.

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Click the cover, buy the book!

Eileen Jones’ new screed on America’s cinematic flameout, Filmsuck, USA, is currently available on Amazon for the absurdly low price of $1.99.  Buy it today!

Here’s an excerpt from the intro:

That loud sucking noise you hear is American cinema going down the drain. We’ve been listening to that slow slurping gurgle for a long time now, and are used to it. Still, sometimes you might wonder how American cinema, which was once the best in the world, wound up circling the drain with a mournful glugging sound for years and years and years. And you might also wonder how much longer it can go on like this, before the Final Suck occurs and we’re looking at nothing but empty drainpipe.

It’ll never happen, you might say. That’d be like saying America’s going to shut down its space program, and let other people take over, like the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians and any random jerk-off billionaire looking for an expensive hobby. Oh, wait…yeah. That already happened, didn’t it?

Anyway, I have a few ideas about how it all went to hell. They’re presented here in two forms: the longer, concentrated rant of this introduction, plus the short ranting bursts erupting out of a number of reviews of specific films from the years 2008 – 2012. The reviews are there to help you chart the American cinematic decline as it actually occurred, from the point of view of a reporter in the field, somebody risking her life by standing right next to the drain during The Big Suck of the 21st century.

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A New Leaf, a 1971 screwball comedy written and directed by Elaine May, is a great genre film made by a women. You know how many great genre films were ever made by women? Well, lessee, there was…oh, how about…no, that one was a genre film made by a woman, but it was rotten…hmmm…

Given enough time you’ll come up with something (Ida Lupino, The Hitch-Hiker), but it isn’t really worth the effort. Too depressing.

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