Film

...Kaler's six-year battle to secure a government investigation and obtain redress is detailed by Switzgable, but the story is more than an individual saga...

...Hits and Misses Five Days One Summer Veteran filmmaker Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, Julia) directed this tale of love and obsession based on a short story by Kay Boyle...

...Tapping into a municipal well didn't help, for it, too, was polluted...

...Fundi" is the Swahili word for a person who passes on craft skills to a community's younger generation...

...The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, Julian Bond, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Bob Moses, Stokeley Carmichael, and others share their appraisals of Baker's impact on black and white America...

...As the film points out, the liquor industry spends about $900 million a year advertising its stuff and promoting the notion that women who drink are sophisticated and sexually alluring...

...political and social history...

...The film retains the Broadway cast, featuring Sandy Dennis, Cher, and Karen Black, but it is inventive in its own cinematic way...

...Filmmaker Meg Switzgable spent years chronicling the struggle of a housepainter in South Brunswick, New Jersey, who battled government and industry to halt the contamination of his community's water supply...

...Kramer) concentrates more on paying homage to old movies—mostly Hitchcock's—than on telling a good story...

...Appreciate your coming down...

...Friends try to cover up for alcoholic women and families often refuse to face up to a condition that carries a nasty social stigma...

...She is a credible junkie— no small feat, since many a great screen actress has tried unsuccessfully to give life to the role...

...Still, this is a far cry from the fruity, carnival-esque treatments of Brazil we get from Hollywood...

...Baker seems to have considered herself a facilitator, which may be why she was able to work so effectively with such a variety of groups...

...Amor Bandito The glitter and shabbiness of Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana is the backdrop for a combination love story, murder mystery, and social study...

...Extensive location shooting by director Bruno Barreto (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) conveys the physical and moral tawdriness of the characters and their milieu...

...Members screen many works each year, but colleagues and their films are taken aboard only by consensus...

...At the end, he says: "I used to tell my kids when we went to the parades in James-burg, Take off your hat, this is your flag, your country!' Now I tell them, 'Justice— well, you can buy your share if you're rich and powerful...

...The cooperative was founded in 1972 by four feminist filmmakers whose work had been shunned by commercial distributors unwilling to deal in controversy...

...Only Judy Davis's vibrant performance as Lou gives the film life...

...There's just no erotic spark...

...Fundi reminds us that the struggle goes on and that each of us is in for a long haul—maybe longer than Baker's...

...Starstruck doesn't lack energy, but the maker of My Brilliant Career founders on the banality of the scenario...

...Joanne Grant's movie is, however, a work of much broader scope than the title suggests: Along with the life story of the influential Ella Baker, it tells much of the history of the black civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1970s...

...For a New Day catalogue or to place orders, write New Day Films, P.O...

...Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker is a film about one of the nation's pioneering civil rights activists...

...The scope of the problem, as this unflinching film explains, is immense...

...Still of the Night The coolness of Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider ends up distancing viewers from this mystery-thriller...

...The gamble paid off: New Day now boasts about twenty-eight members, including several men, and the current catalogue lists thirty-five films...

...they're conducting biological warfare experiments to fend off the Soviet menace...

...Winter of Our Dreams Another Australian product % but more cerebral...

...Intermittent flashbacks reveal the youthful dreams of the women, while the reunion rituals trigger revelations of disappointment...

...Their frank assessments are intercut with one another, and the testimony is poignant and compelling, as is the entire forty-five-minute film...

...Despite Rob's so-called open marriage, he proves to be too settled and complacent for Lou...

...Although the stringent approval process does not guarantee that every film will be top-quality, four New Day films have been nominated for Academy Awards, more than a dozen have been tabbed for broadcast on public television, and many have won honors at international film festivals...

...As one woman interviewed by the filmmaker said, "It's more socially acceptable to be crazy than to be drunk...

...In Our Water captures some rarely recorded expressions of embarrassment, if not duplicity: Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, for example, tells Kaler—as Chafee backs out of a door—"We'll have to just feel our way through this thing...

...It is still a relative neophyte among distribution giants, but New Day is growing and prospering...

...He first appears as a likable man with generally conservative attitudes, more interested in raising geese, pigs, and vegetables than in confronting corporate criminals...

...Although Sean Connery gives a credible performance as an aging lecher who angles after his young niece, the drama barely simmers when it ought to ignite...

...But the authentic feeling is undermined by an excess of coincidence and contrivance in the story of an adolescent nightclub performer and part-time prostitute and her pubescent lover...

...Like other victims of dumping, Kaler had to twist arms before government scientists confirmed that his water contained benzene, carbon tetrachloride, formaldehyde, and PCBs...

...Starstruck Australian director Gillian Armstrong introduces an appealing young star—Jo Kennedy as a throaty rock-'n'-roll singer—in this New Wave revision of the old Rooney-Garland "Let's put on a show" genre of musicals...

...Zinnemann seems to have been primarily interested in presenting mountain-climbing sequences...

...Rather than water down their movies to meet commercial standards, the four set about marketing the films themselves...

...A prostitute and junkie, Lou, reforms herself after falling for Rob, a former student activist who is comfortably married and middle-class...

...Three were recovering and one was still abusing drugs and liquor when the film was made...

...The range of topics in the cooperative's inventory has also broadened: Films address environmental, health, family, and sex-role issues, as well as U.S...

...Robert Altman's adaptation of the Ed Graczyk play—which Altman directed on Broadway—is a fine example of faithful stage-to-screen translation...

...Many of the goals of the 1960s civil rights movement have not been realized, yet some of the achievements of that decade are already beginning to erode...

...Box 315, Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417, or call (201) 891-8240...

...But the most important factors behind New Day's success seem to be its cooperative method of operation and the commitment of its members...

...Dennis, a fidgeting mass of neurotic tics and nervous mannerisms, easily steals the show...

...The New Day system ensures that filmmakers have a personal stake in the cooperative's total effort...

...Such a hefty chunk of personal and social history is handled deftly by interweaving archival footage, stills, location shots, Baker's own reminiscences, and interviews with the people who worked with her...

...We get the word out because we ourselves are involved with the issues we seek to address in our films," says one member...

...Its goals and ways are reminiscent of the leftist documentary film clubs of the 1930s, except that New Day operates under no rigid political or aesthetic doctrine...

...there are an estimated five million women alcoholics in the United States...

...John Duigan's direction is undistinguished and Bryan Brown is thoroughly unimpressive as Rob...

...Others may be put off by director Alan Rudolph's murky plot and shallow characters...

...Army— which, after all, killed 6,000 sheep in Utah and is expected to spend about $705 million this year preparing for chemical warfare— may be disappointed by this paranoid political thriller...

...Physicians, zealously courted by the pharmaceutical companies, find it easier to prescribe mood-altering drugs than to diagnose alcoholism...

...her work with the NAACP as an organizer, education director, and president of the New York branch...

...By doggedly pursuing her subject, Switzgable both uncovers the facts and reproduces Kaler's evolving responses...

...Come Back to the Five & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean In 1975, in a small Texas town, a group of women congregate in the local Woolworth's for the twentieth reunion of a long-defunct James Dean fan club...

...A younger generation of activists readily accepted Baker, showing the continuity of struggle that is the theme of this film...

...This is one of the best movies I've seen in many months...

...In 1981, the disposal site was finally closed by court order, though not before the Jones company tried to silence Kaler with a defamation suit...

...the photography is so spectacular that it induces acrophobia...

...the New Jersey dump is one of an estimated 50,000 chemical time bombs in the United States...

...Bonnie Friedman's The Last to Know airs a topic that seeps into weepy Hollywood melodramas from time to time but rarely receives forthright or perceptive treatment: women and alcoholism...

...It affords people with a shared social vision a chance to work together, and it allows popular films to subsidize those which appeal to smaller or more specialized audiences...

...Three recent releases offer a representative view of New Day's work: n Our Water marries top-notch investigative reporting to an engaging narrative drama...

...A major achievement, a decade after its inception, is that New Day avoids the kind of self-destructive ideological squabbles that plagued many of its predecessors...

...New Day stands out as a singular enterprise in the movie business—a cooperative distributor that does well by doing good...

...A sociocultural conspiracy of sorts has kept the issue under wraps...

...An aerial shot then shows the modest Kaler red-bfick home is sitting next to a hazardous dump site, the Jones Industrial Service...

...Moreover, Friedman's film asserts that approximately one-third of all women incarcerated in mental institutions are undiagnosed alcoholics...

...We plug into the activist network...

...Then the camera follows him on a series of fruitless visits to county, state, and Federal officials, and even on a journey to Washington to testify before a Senate committee...

...But the heart of The Last to Know is four interviews with startlingly candid women alcoholics...

...Each participant helps promote and distribute all films in the catalogue and shares in any costs incurred...

...New Day's survival can be attributed, in part, to the organization's selectivity and the high quality of its films...

...that's industry and they run the country.' " The film is sobering in its treatment of a national problem—the poisons, incidentally, still leak into ground wells from the Jones dump, and the company is seeking permission to reopen the site—and it is inspiring in its portrayal of a political activist in the making...

...And director Robert Benton (Kramer vs...

...But for New Day Films, social change is full-time work...

...Kaler runs up against bureaucratic pusillanimity and corporate mendacity, and he begins to formulate a rather radical outlook...

...At the beginning of the film, Frank Kaler recounts how his family became convinced in 1975 that there was something terribly wrong with their water: Unexplained holes appeared in laundry, boiled vegetables turned black, pasta disintegrated in the pot, the children developed odd rashes and lesions after showers, and all the Kalers felt lethargic...

...The portrait that emerges from Fundi is of a remarkably tough-minded, articulate, somewhat distant woman, who held a rare ability to mobilize others in pursuit of a common goal...

...Those who believe that anonymous crazies are less dangerous than the U.S...

...The film carefully incorporates inserts of drug and liquor advertisements, and viewers are reminded that pills and alcohol have a long history of "medicinal" uses for treating what ads call "feminine problems...

...The rightists aren't eating steaks, though...

...her position as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her role as a "godmother" to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee...

...Endangered Species A pack of right-wing fanatics is blamed for some 10,000 unsolved cattle mutilations reported in the United States since 1969...

...In a little more than an hour, the film traces Baker's life and pursuits, from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to a stint with the Works Projects Administration during the Depression...

...Along the way, Grant focuses on momentous events: the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, voter registration drives, and the formation and 1964 convention showdown of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...