Writer/Directors of films, over the last fifty years, have championed and promoted the phrase “personal vision” and/or “auteur”.  Other creative art forms like painting, music, and writing usually are create alone.  Film, however, is a collaborative art form.  Instead of paint, clay, or musical notes, movies are the stuff of dreams accompanied by a story. And, stories have words and images about people or things that move.

Henry Jaglom is an American actor, and a writer/director of sometime quirky and idiosyncratic films that often deal with women’s issues, or subject matter that main- stream writer/directors often eschew.  Jaglom relishes the filmic road less traveled.

He epitomizes the self indulgent “indie filmmaker”, and often uses his family and friends as actors in his films, occasionally joining the cast himself in order to tell his stories of ordinary people, with not so ordinary problems.  His films are character driven, and entertaining, if one can get on his wavelength.  If not, then a Jaglom film may leave you scratching your head and asking yourself what was it that I just sat through?

“ Just 45 Minutes From Broadway”, now booking into art houses across the country, is a typical Jaglom movie. For starters, Jaglom introduces us to the dysfunctional Isaacs family of unconventional actors.  A family gathering is the rationale to introduce a new, staid, fiancé (Judd Nelson) of Betsy (Julie Davis) the acting family’s traditionally-minded “non pro” older sister, to her show biz family and relatives.  They all gather, over a weekend, at her parents George and Vivien Isaacs’ (Jack Heller and Diane Louise Salinger) crumbling and aging-without-grace, home in a sylvan woodland setting outside New York City.

George is a Chekovian devotee who views and lives his life through the literary lens of Anton Chekov.  Vivien is a larger than life red headed actor/drama queen who is more Auntie Mame-like than a traditional home-bound mother.   In the Isaacs’ world the theatre comes first.

Crashing this “announcement party” comes Pandora Isaacs (Tanna Frederick), the young sister who is just getting over a recent breakup, and is now seeking solace and attention.  The sisters have been distant toward one another for some time.  “Pandy”, as the family calls her, is also an actor along the lines of her expansive and over-the-top mother.  Betsy views her family as people who can’t get in touch with reality.

The weekend provides lots of time for talk, and lots of opportunities to drink lots of wine. Various family members and relatives, chime in from time to time, occasionally roiling the waters.  Subtly is not always a strong suit in Jaglom films, so one awaits the obligatory scenes of new fiancé James coming under the spell of Pandy.  Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy weekend once Betsy catches wind of the shenanigans.

Jaglom claims writer credit on the comedy and rightly so, but he also allows his actors, from time to time, to indulge in improv dialogue.  The actors love it.  The audience sometimes finds itself wondering if they missed something along the way.

For all its ennui (very Chekovian, by the way), “Just 45 Seconds From Broadway” has vividly lush photography and richly textured sets and lighting, thanks to cinematographer Hanania Baer who eases the pain of some of that ennui, but not enough, I’m sorry to say.

It’s Time to “Fall” Back!

It is Daylight Savings Time this weekend and the Desert Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce is recommending people change the batteries in their smoke detectors when they set their clocks back. This is a great safety practice to ensure your smoke detectors are in proper working order.

Most of the country will turn back the clocks this weekend for the annual shift back to standard time.

The change becomes official at 2am on Sunday November 4th.

So…enjoy the “extra” hour!

By Adrian Salbuchi /(Op-Ed)

Millions of voting Americans have been misled – even coaxed – into believing that either incumbent Barack Obama or challenger Mitt Romney must become the next president of the US. A bad choice? Sure, but… “No buts!”

Look again, however, because Americans do have a choice. For instance, consider what presidential candidates Gary Johnson (former Governor of New Mexico) of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein of the Green Party have to say.

Watch Monday evening’s second and final Third Party Presidential Debate from Washington DC, hosted by RT, where both these candidates will offer American voters real options; or at least different options from what political look-alikes Mitt and Barack are offering; “Oromney” and “Rombama” as some have dubbed them.

Two sides of same coin

Many American voters were particularly taken aback by the latest major prime-time candidate “debate” focusing on foreign policy, in which Obama and Romney seemed to agree on all those key issues that have got – and continue to get – America and the world into so much trouble.

Both expressed unflinching support for Israel, even though it’s the sole saber-rattling nuclear power in the Middle East; both continue to threaten Iran with unilateral military attack, demonizing that country as a “threat to the international community,” even though Iran hasn’t attacked any neighbor in over a century (actually, Iran was repeatedly attacked directly by the Western powers or through proxies like Saddam Hussein); both pledged continued support for terrorist “freedom fighters” in Syria’s civil war triggered by the US and allies, just as they did in Iraq and Libya; and both will continue hi-tech drone attacks over Pakistan and Afghanistan, which seem particularly fond of local wedding parties.

But are there no foreign policy options? How about pulling out of the Middle East and stop triggering generalized civil war in the region – aka, “Arab Spring”? Why not curb America’s pro-Israel foreign policy lobbies and put the US national interest back in center stage instead of Israel’s national interest as happens today?

On the global financial scene, why not stop bailing out the irresponsible and criminal Bankster claque to the tune of trillions upon trillions of dollars – with the Fed’s recently-announced QEIII acting as yet another open-ended Bankster Charity Fund – and start bailing out American workers for a change?  Here Republicans and Democrats are in full pro-bankster sync.

US voters have other coins in their pockets

It doesn’t always have to be this way. Although it doesn’t hit mainstream media headlines, American Voters do have other choices.

A week ago, the Free & Equal Elections Foundation sponsored a Third Party Candidates Debate that included Gary Jackson and Jill Stein, together with Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party. It was aired nationwide and worldwide by RT, moderated by Larry King, and boycotted by the mainstream media.

Obama and Romney also boycotted this debate by declining invitations to attend, a clear snub at the American voter.

Reflecting the public’s favorites from that first debate, tomorrow Johnson and Stein will meet once again to speak to America on key issues.

Gary Johnson, a former Republican, says lots of things millions of Americans want to hear: cut military spending by 43 per cent; stop meddling in Syria and Libya; stop threatening Iran with military attack; refuse to support Israel if it decides to go against Iran on its own; stop fueling America’s imperial overdrive and over-reach.

Johnson also supports Ron Paul’s crusade to audit the Federal Reserve Bank and even to close it down altogether, recognizing that the Fed is the culprit for the ongoing financial crisis, having allowed the Bankster takeover of the US and global financial systems.

Jill Stein of the Green Party, in turn, also says things millions are eager to hear. When announcing her presidential candidacy a year ago in her native Massachusetts, the Boston Globe quotes her as saying, “We are all realizing that we, the people, have to take charge because the political parties that are serving the top 1 per cent are not going to solve the problems that the rest of us face. We need people in Washington who will refuse to be bought by lobbyists and for whom change is not just a slogan.”

A courageous and powerful statement from a female candidate who personally took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement and was arrested several times for peacefully and democratically daring to express her ideas in a country that is fast becoming a police state under Gestapo-like FEMA/FBI/CIA/NSA/local police thugs.

No more fizzy drinks

A key factor to the Global Power Elite’s stranglehold on We the People is what America and its favorite allies call the “two-party system”, glorifying it as the “backbone of democracy”.

If we take a closer look, however, we find that “two-party-system-democracy” – whether of Democrats and Republicans as in America, Labour and Conservatives in the UK, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in Germany, and similar variants in most other countries – hides a neat and simplistic mechanism of coaxing people into the lowest infantile common denominators for “solutions to our nation’s problems”.

What the two-party-system basically does is impose one sole mainstream ideological road that’s been previously surveyed and approved as “politically correct” for Global Power Master interests and objectives.

Then, they put a face to each party: your Obamas, Romneys, Bushes, McCains, Clintons… Then, they let voters play around making believe they have an absolutely free and democratic choice to decide whether they will drive on the left side or right side of that one sole road.

But don’t they dare look around for other, more direct highways or “kinder, gentler” side-roads that might carry them and their nation towards a very different, far more beneficial destination!

No, no. In America, voters must choose between Bush and Gore, or Bush and Kerry, or Obama and McCain, or Obama and Romney.

It must boil down to the “have-a-pepsi-or-coke…” option: you might think you’ve been given a choice, but more and more people are realizing that both are basically the same brown, sugary, bubbly slushy soda drink.

So, if you insist on drinking something different, that’s when the Powers That Be will brand independent thinkers as trouble-maker anarchists, communists,  fascists, or “downright stupid for throwing your vote away on a third  party candidate.”

It doesn’t always have to be that way.

Why should the world care?

In an incredible twist of history, US “democracy” has sunk to such loathsome depths that in order for American voters to even learn about electoral options for their country, they must now tune-in to RT of the Russian Federation.

How times have changed from when the Global Power Masters played with our fears about the “red menace”, “mutually assured destruction” and “better dead than red”!

But why should people outside the US really care whether Americans will pay more or less in taxes, have better or worse healthcare, or whether unemployment, inflation and poverty will rise or fall?

Here’s why: in today’s highly complex global power structure, where an unelected but extremely powerful private Global Power Elite have become embedded into the US and its key allies, whatever happens there will affect all of us.

If, for example, Argentineans vote for the wrong leaders (and believe me, we do!), or the Colombians, or the Greeks, or Malaysians, the consequences of such mistaken choices are basically suffered only by those peoples. The world can just sit back and look at us, for example, and mutter, “Those Argentineans…always making mistakes; serves them right!!”

But when US voters put the wrong guy in the White House, that means untold millions of dead, injured, maimed and wrecked lives in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Latin America, Africa, Asia and other places in this dark, troubled world.

So, yes, it is our business to make sure slumbering American Voters wake up. Not just for their sakes, but for the rest of the world’s sake.

Precedent begs perspective

A new generation of war-mongers is right now preparing to double their bets on the geopolitical arena. They have no qualms in risking outright military confrontation, not just with Iran, but even with Russia and China.

Maybe that reflects their mad geopolitical ambitions; maybe it’s about their less mad realization that they have so completely destroyed the global financial system that their only way out is to “flee forwards” to an overwhelming world war, the likes of which mankind can hardly fathom.

The Global Power Masters already pulled something like that back in 1914 and especially in 1939; why shouldn’t they be tempted to so again?

So, “friends, Americans, countrymen” tomorrow evening please watch the Jackson-Stein Debate.  “Lend them your ears!!”

Not that they’re a panacea for America. Not that American voters should childishly “fall in love and rave” about them.

Actually, it’s not so much that Jackson or Stein are better, but rather that Obama and Romney are so much worse!

A final irony: in a world where politicians and media moguls speak and drool over “democracy”, on November 6 around 60, maybe 70, million US voters will decide the destiny over the next four years for 7 billion people. That’s 1 per cent deciding for the remaining 99 per cent.

Democracy should be made of sterner stuff!

Let’s hope US voters realize the huge global responsibility they carry upon their shoulders. In the end, the world will hold them accountable.

Adrian Salbuchi for RT

Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina. www.asalbuchi.com.ar