The Organizer (1964)

Poor Italian village is mostly employed by the local factory with workers pulling 14-hour shifts (6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.) with just 30 minutes for lunch. Finally fed up, they decide to unionize with the help of a professional organizer with good ideas but little to lose (from the locals’ perspective).

It’s just a flat out great movie. There are real consequences to their actions, a huge cast that we somehow learn to tell apart despite speaking a different language, and decent doses of humor throughout.

A-

Gloria (1980)

Mob accountant turns snitch and gets his family whacked, but not before they shoo their young son off with a neighbor. The neighbor is pretty mobbed up herself, but grudgingly starts to feel responsible for and affectionate toward the kid. The kid takes a little while longer to warm up, but when he does it borders on inappropriate (at one point, I’m pretty sure he was propositioning the 40ish Gloria in a flophouse bed).

Just an OK movie that could’ve been pretty good if anyone other than Rowlands as Gloria could act in the thing.

C+

Snow on Tha Bluff (2012)

A sorta, I think, documentary slice-of-life in the hood.  Or it could be complete fiction, I don't really know.

We follow Curtis Snow, who makes his living by robbing both teens rolling in to buy drugs and dealer stash houses. The repeating patterns of these wasted lives is overpowering, as is the squalor they create for themselves without seeming to realize how easy it would be to change their circumstance (or at least take a broom to it). The slang/lazy verbalizations were so garbled it may has well have been a foreign language film.

I’ve never felt whiter than I did after watching this.

C-

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Bright & shiny & predictable.

C+

The Love Parade (1930)

An attaché to Paris is returned to his home country in disgrace for screwing everything in sight. The unmarried queen, who’s supposed to punish him, instead marries him. But she’s the queen with a country to run and he’s a nobody with no duties...and that’s just not right! He’s a MAN, dammit!

I guess we’re supposed to think it’s cute that he humiliates her and she abases herself to keep him beside her -- even going so far as to give him control of the country and their marriage. So, he’s king and she’s a nobody with no duties, but it’s fair now because chauvinism. Yay!

D+