Just ask Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben

It looks like something you’d see on
PBS, with self-important talking heads, dramatic voiceovers, and vintage photos
lovingly caressed by the camera, but writer-director Kevin Willmott’sCSA: The Confederate States of America is an audacious mockumentary that induces both laughs
and squirms as it explores the last 150 years in a country where the South
emerged victorious from the Civil War.

Disguised as a banned documentary of
British origin — “not suitable for children or servants” — CSA uses both real and ingeniously faked
footage to illustrate the direction this country could have taken. Lincoln
flees (in blackface, naturally) with the help of war criminal Harriet Tubman, while the abolitionist and suffragist movements
take root in Canada
behind the Cotton Curtain. Native American children are snatched from their
families and sent to boarding school, and, after much debate, the Jews are
allowed to stay in a reservation on Long Island. Not
surprisingly, the CSA enjoys good relations with Hitler, though our
administration couldn’t get behind the notion of exterminating a perfectly good
source of slave labor.

Willmott
re-imagines nearly every aspect of American life (the CSA has very little
success at the Olympics) with ironic tongue firmly in cheek, approximating a
’50s horror film in which a wife learns that her husband has been reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well
as a Cops-type TV show called Runaways, with the original’sreggae-tinged theme song giving way to
banjo and jaw harp. But Willmott makes some very
sobering points about the current state of racial
inequality and US
imperialism in the guise of defense, pointing out “What is terrorism to one is
patriotism to another.” And vice versa.

CSA is sprinkled throughout with ads for accoutrements attendant to living in a
slave-based economy, such as a Ronco-type contraption
called The Shackle, as well as products that only seem outlandish, like Darkie
toothpaste and Niggerhair cigarettes. CSA opens with a title card bearing an
admonition from George Bernard Shaw: “If you’re going to tell the truth, you
better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.” Willmott
saves himself from an untimely death by doing both, positing an alternate
reality that isn’t as far from actuality as one would hope.

About town

National Guard Sergeant Jeremy Lewis
served in Iraq
for a year as part of the military police, and he will lead a discussion at the
Little Theatre following the 7:05 p.m.
screening on March 17 of Eugene Jarecki’s
award-winning documentary Why We Fight, which shines a light
on the big business of war. A member of the nonpartisan organization Iraq
and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Sergeant Lewis has spoken to various
groups around the country about the unique issues facing veterans of the
current conflict as well as the war’s larger implications on the state of our
union. Go to the Little’s website,
www.little-theatre.com, for more information.

Like a Roman emperor, he decides
fates with an outstretched thumb and a twist of the wrist. He’s arguably the
most famous film — hell, art critic
in the world, and Roger Ebert visits
Rochester this weekend as the
latest George Eastman Honorary Scholar. Besides attending a reception
and a private screening, Ebert will also present two of his selections from the
ongoing Dryden series Ebert’s Great
Movies. On Friday, March 17, Ebert introduces Vittorio
De Sica’s neorealist classic Umberto D, and on Saturday, March 18, the Pulitzer Prize winner
presents Robert Altman’s 3 Women,
answering questions following the screening and perhaps explaining the
distinction between an ordinary vixen and an ultra-vixen. For further details
visit www.eastmanhouse.org.

You probably won’t see its entire
title splashed across the marquee of the host googolplex, but at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 23, the Beastie Boys
documentary Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!enjoys a one-night digital stand at selected theaters in
advance of its March 31 release date. Awesome was filmed by 50 camera-wielding fans in October 2004 at a sold-out Beasties
show in Madison Square Garden, giving the clichéd concert film an unusually
enthusiastic perspective, though hopefully the amateur shooters were neither
too short nor too wrecked. The special screening of Awesome will be preceded by a 30-minute short called A Day in the Life of Nathaniel Hornblower, starring David Cross (not Adam Yauch) as the reclusive director. Advance tickets are
available online at www.bigscreenconcerts.com and at the individual theater box
offices. Participating venues at press time include the Regal
outposts at Eastview and in Henrietta, so click on
www.awesomeishotthat.com/march23 to verify. Rock stars are notoriously
unreliable.