November 15, 2019 by WCCB Rising
Dreama Denver, wife of late TV-icon Bob Denver, is in Charlotte for the Southern Christmas Show. She is launching her new children’s book “Four Bears in a Box.”
WAMU |
A D.C. florist is sending encouragement in the form of fresh flowers to the four U.S. Congresswomen targeted in President Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets this week.
Alisa Rabinovich, who owns and operates Nosegay Flowers in D.C. and Galleria Florist in Falls Church, Virginia, said she designed custom flower arrangements to send to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) to show the women support.
“It’s really not about politics for me,” Alisa Rabinovich said in a statement sent to WAMU. “I’m not a terribly political person. It’s about these women being bullied by the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, and standing up for themselves.”
She delivered the flowers on Thursday with a note thanking the Congresswomen.
The notes read: “Thanks for being a role model for women everywhere. You are the best part of America!”
Trump told the representatives to “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came” in a racist tweet.
The president’s intentions behind making the comments urging the women to go back to their countries of origin have been widely disputed by lawmakers and pundits throughout the week, some denying the hurtful usage of Trump’s “go back” comment and the context in which the statement has historically been used toward people of color.
Omar, a Somali refugee, is the only representative of the four women born outside of the U.S. She became a naturalized citizen as a teen.
Rabinovich immigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child from Russia. She said she identified with the four Congresswomen who received Trump’s taunts.
“I love America, and one of the things I love most about my home is that people here have been able to have civil disagreements, and also look for ways to come together for the common good,” she said. “That seems to be lost on the President sometimes.”
By Chris Lawrence in | April 12, 2019 at 12:02PM
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Audiences at theaters across West Virginia and throughout the Appalachian coalfields will be the first to see the new movie Mine 9. Inspired by true events, the movie is about a crew of nine men working in an underground mine in Appalachia when things go wrong.
“It’s not based on any one event, but based on several that have happened over time,” said Kevin Sizemore, a Princeton, West Virginia native who stars in the movie. “Our director and writer Eddie Mensore put the script together and took it from different elements over the course of his life and friends of his have told stories.”
Mensore is a native of New Martinsville, West Virginia. The plot line contains familiar elements from the three most recent high profile mine disasters in West Virginia; Upper Big Branch, Aracoma, and Sago.
The trailer reflected the men in the movie wind up trapped with only one hour of oxygen and faulty self contained self rescuers. The unreliable oxygen units were a notable discovery from the Sago mine disaster in Upshur County. The plot also reflects a culture of production over safety and employees afraid to blow the whistle on an unsafe workplace for fear of losing their jobs.
“It’s about nine different miners, just like every day they work hard to put food on the table for their family,” Sizemore said. “It’s just another day at work and they get two miles deep, something bad happens and suddenly they have about an hour of oxygen left and they’re hoping somebody will help save them.”
It’s a familiar story in the coalfields, one that will likely hit very close to home for some. Sizemore is one of them.
“Some of my family and some of my best friends families worked in the mines,” he said on the West Virginia Morning News Friday. “I’m very familiar.”
The movie is expected to be released nationwide in the weeks ahead, but according to Sizmore , Mensore was adamant about showing in the Appalachian region of the country first.
“He wanted to get it into coal country first.,” Sizemore said. “He wanted to bring it home to the grass roots, so the people who really know this work could see it before we take it to other markets.”
By GUY LODGE
A modestly budgeted, cannily made survival drama centered on a fictional coal mine explosion in Appalachia, “Mine 9” plays a little like a humble blueprint for a more extravagant Hollywood exercise in high-octane heroism: Squint a little, and you can see how Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg, say, would muscle out the solemn, simple narrative devised here by writer-director-producer Eddie Mensore. That’s not a criticism of “Mine 9,” which is most interesting for the ways it avoids the standard gung-ho dramatics of a disaster movie, treating its male ensemble as heroes and victims in equal measure.
Neither is it a stringent exercise in docu-realism, however, as a streak of heartland sentimentality runs through its gritty tragedy. Dedicated to the hard-up coal-mining community in the closing credits, Mensore’s film aims chiefly to highlight the typical plight of an American underclass that rarely gets big-screen attention. That it does with honesty and conviction, if not a great deal of inspiration. “Mine 9” will surely resonate with audiences in the U.S. coal belt, where its limited theatrical release is being concentrated; elsewhere, it’s a niche, streaming-bound item.
Though it hasn’t been drawn from specific real-life events, Mensore’s script keeps characterization and dramatic complication to a bare minimum, as if to stress how easily what transpires on screen could be true. Every man here is an everyman, and the harrowing ordeal they endure across a very lean 83-minute runtime — including a full ten minutes of credits — is portrayed in such blunt, straightforward terms as to suggest this is hardly a remarkable incident in a troubled, dangerous industry. It’s effective enough in that regard, but still, “Mine 9” could stand more human nuance and environmental detail: Its evocation of the real lives and families imperiled by irresponsible authorities is cursory at best.
Mensore sets the claustrophobic mood immediately with a tense false alarm, as hazardously high methane levels in one mine cause a nerve-jangling flare-up. The grimy darkness and tight framing of Matthew Boyd’s cinematography play up the panic and confusion felt by the miners affected, in a space hardly conducive to clarity and communication in the face of danger. Afterwards, the men debate how to follow up on this near-catastrophe: Team leader Zeke (Terry Serpico) wants to report the incident to safety monitors, but his colleagues would rather take the risk and let it slide, fearful that an investigation could shut down the mine and cost them their livelihood. Slightly declarative, on-the-nose dialogue maps out the men’s differing positions in a cruel working-class bind: One even points out that, from an economic perspective, they’re more use to their families dead than unemployed.
No prizes for guessing that this gamble backfires sooner rather than later — on the very day that Zeke’s teenage nephew Ryan (Drew Starkey) reluctantly joins the crew for his first day down the shaft. Mensore sketches in the dire socioeconomic circumstances that have narrowed Ryan’s life choices down to following in the soot-trailing footsteps of his uncle, as well as his callous father Kenny (Mark Ashworth), though the scant above-ground action in “Mine 9” would benefit from a little more observation and texture: There’s little sense of who these men really are, beyond their arduous labor.
Soon enough, at least, we get to see their most visceral individual instincts, when a full-on methane explosion occurs — collapsing the mine and killing several men instantly. The survivors, meanwhile, have less than an hour’s worth of air left while they figure out their escape, making some grisly life-or-death decisions along the way. Playing out nearly in real time, it’s a tension exercise rightly shorn of any sense of macho exhilaration, anxiously realized with limited means. Production designer Tim Barrett and visual effects coordinator Anaitte Vaccaro (both of whom also take executive producer credits) work around evident budget constraints to convey a vivid sense of murky, crumbling space, as escape routes are shed and sealed off by the minute.
The actors do what’s required of them with appropriately clenched jaws, though Mensore’s script isn’t designed to let any of them especially shine. Rather like the crisis depicted on screen, this is an all-for-one-and-one-for-all affair, inviting viewers not to identify with particular characters as such, but to place themselves in the men’s heavy steel-toed boots, sweating it out with them to the bitter, throat-closing end.
The film, from Eddie Mensore, is about desperation and survival. On one level, the survival of miners trapped by a cave-in; on an allegorical level, the survival of a gasping coal industry and a dying Appalachian way of life.
Mine 9 features a close-knit group of veteran undergrounders – some related to each other – braving methane gas and coffin-like confines to provide for their families. Modest of budget, the film is not stocked with soot-faced Kurt Russells or Sam Elliotts. But if this isn’t a Deepwater Horizon blockbuster, the premise – workers jeopardized by exploitative, willfully unsafe conditions – is the same.
There’s also a horror-film aesthetic at work, amplified by the realness of the situation. Claustrophobic audience members will grip their arm rests tighter than most. One character questions the worth of wearing a crucifix pendant. As one would, working in what looks to be a hell on earth.
Eddie Mensore has not made a masterpiece of the genre, but there’s a poignancy to his gritty calamity tale that makes Mine 9 worth watching.
