The Doctor Is In...LA cardiologist Rico Simonini just happens to be the screenwriter of 'Frank And Ava,' in his stormy relationship with Ava Gardner - and plays Sinatra in the film as well, in the last movie of Harry Dean Stanton. And at a time when McCarthyism, the music business and Hollywood conspired to destroy Sinatra.

                (Gravitas Ventures)

Dr. Simonini also reports on what's going down with the coronavirus pandemic in LA, how he's been personally involved as a physician in California - and crisis advice for listeners.

And, as a doctor to the stars, how does he feel his Hollywood patients are different from others. The doctor also explains his own unusual parallel careers as physician, filmmaker and actor, as something to do with the late Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, himself likewise a doctor who once proclaimed that - medicine is my wife, and theater my mistress.

** "Hunters is a flashy, highly stylized hyperactive comic book version of the Holocaust."

Bro On The Global Television Beat: Hunters And The Commodity Of Evil. Arts Express Paris correspondent Professor Dennis Broe takes a look at several current mini-series, including Hunters and the Irish economic crime thriller, Taken Down.

And what Hunters, starring Al Pacino, may have to do with Batman, Israeli settlers and the Palestinians, and Operation Paper Clip - where the US secretly brought Nazi scientists into the country to work on the space race and the hydrogen bomb.

** "In 1948, the Nobel Prize for medicine was given for the lobotomy. How much have we progressed since then? The movement to de-institutionalize from state hospitals to jails, prisons and homelessness, is probably the saddest part of 20th and 21st century psychiatry."

Bedlam: Jack Shalom in a continuing conversation with filmmaker and psychiatrist Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, about his documentary delving into the current state of mental health - or lack of it.

And this week, a look at the politics of mental health, and Dr. Rosenberg's own very personal connection to the subject. Referencing prevention, poverty, racism, addiction, universal health care, twins, treatment with kindness, yoga and meditation.

Sorry We Miss You Movie Review

...Sorry, we missed the point. Or in other words, a director of Ken Loach's esteemed stature has been in need of a new screenwriter for some time.

'Sorry We Missed You' as title and reference in this film to the notice left by delivery contractors in the UK, likewise unfortunately can be said of this workingclass drama missing the point - which it may or may not have set out to make. In other words, ironically, an esteemed director of Ken Loach's stature may be clinging to his flawed screenwriter Paul Laverty for far too long now.

In other words, where politically passionate and righteous rebellion should be front and center, what transpires with 'Sorry We Missed You' in dramatically denouncing the misleading elements of the new so-called gig employment, deceptively lures proletarians into a kind of pseudo-bourgeois independence. But which effectively shackles them to a new brutal, exploitative debt servitude.

The relentlessly hopeless melodrama unravels within the Turner family, as primary breadwinner Ricky (Kris Hitchen) opts for the new gig economy  as an independent contractor delivery driver. While misled by the prospect of becoming an independent businessman that instead drives him metaphorically as a class unconscious laborer, back decades to say the least. 

While when in reality, it's these companies that are the real winners, charging the ultimately deluded debt-ridden workers who sign on, for every item necessary to perform their duties - along with infraction penalty payments as well. And bypassing all previously existing union and labor rights fought for and achieved over centuries. While this downwardly spiraling turn of events ends in destroying everyone in this family as well.

And where in the past Loach would have ignited the screen with a righteous worker fury both mobilized and verbalized in inspired contentious conversations against the way things are under capitalism, the film somehow ironically again, exploits its characters. That is with dramatically lethal doses of sudsy miserabilism, contrived plot twists, fanatically unawakened class consciousness all around - and unfortunately not unrelated coincidental insight into a country that demonized Jeremy Corbyn and got anti-workingclass Boris instead.

And with the end result getting back to Sorry We Missed You, that resignation about the way things are. triumphs - rather than the way forward in this drastically troublesome times.

Prairie Miller