The Mumpsimus

BPM: Beats Per Minute (120 battements par minute)  tells the story of AIDS activists with ACT UP Paris in the 1990s, and its scenes of ACT UP meetings are among the most compelling representations of everyday political planning and argument I know of other than the extraordinary land reform debate scene in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom .  (There's also a powerful debate scene in Loach's later  The Wind that Shakes the Barley ,  but Land and Freedom  is even more remarkable in my eyes because it so patiently dramatizes a kind of conversation rarely even imagined by most of its likely viewers. Almost any other director would pare such scenes down to soundbites, but Campillo lets us watch discussions play out and doesn't simplify the arguments into pro/con battles. We see the characters react, think, respond. Even in a movie like Land and Freedom , the narrative starts with a focal character and brings us into the story via that focal character. One of the m...

This review originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Z Magazine . I'd forgotten about it until somebody today mentioned that it's the anniversary of most of the striking workers' demands being met (12 March 1912), and so today seemed like a good one to post this: Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream   by Bruce Watson New York, Viking, 2005, 337 pp. Lawrence, Massachusetts was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, what might be called one of the greatest mill towns in the United States, but "greatest" is a difficult term, and underneath it hide all the conditions that erupted during the frigid winter of 1912 into a strike that affected both the labor movement and the textile industry for decades afterward.             Bruce Watson's compelling and deeply researched chronicle of the strike takes its name from a poem and song that have come to be associ...