“In this first of its kind dramatic-documentary-musical,” essayist Lewis Lapham and an all-star cast (including Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Altman, James Baker and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.) take two young Ivy-League graduates on a tour of the corridors of power. This “astonishing”, “coruscating” satire poses the question: Is it better to rule the world, or to save it?”
I like this film for its boldness, tackling one of the most ignored open secrets in America. There are numerous cameos from people across the spectrum: Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut and Pete Seeger to some of the darker Lords of the Sith. Each thinker is given screen time to get in his/her own take on America’s ruling class, what it means to them, and to weigh in on the moral implications. Continue
While taboo topics like underage female sexuality and racism in America will inspire controversy on their own, combining them as the main focus of a feature film guarantees discomfort from all fronts. In fact, the unease viewers experience while watching Alan Ball’s “Towelhead” is constant throughout, beginning with the opening scene which narrows in on an older stay-at-home boyfriend shaving the bikini line of his girlfriend’s 13 year old daughter Jasira, played by 18 year old Summer Bishil. Continue
“We’ll have to work … the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows … A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion … it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives.”
These were the words of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, during a Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert five days after the September 11 attacks of 2001.
Acknowledging Cheney’s words as a telling precursor to America’s self-serving and calamitous ‘War on Terror,’ Alex Gibney’s 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side provides viewers with a glimpse of what the ‘dark side’ of the Bush administration’s tactics and policies entailed for detainees who had been apprehended by U.S. military forces. Continue
Watching “The Hurt Locker” Hurts
by Jasmin Ramsey, P U L S E
“The Hurt Locker” was a Box Office favorite and may become an Academy Award contender.
…That a film that does not include a single Iraqi perspective is being hailed as an accurate portrayal of the situation in Iraq is either indicative of the blatant bias and possibly hidden intentions of the film’s creators and reviewers, or representative of the flawed view that continues to resonate within people’s minds about the war in Iraq.
As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is “The Hurt Locker,” the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.
Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it. Continue
Are “CyberBraceros” the future? Or are they another really good metaphor for globalization?
Sleep Dealer came into existence as a result of a huge effort by its writer/director Alex Rivera, who also workshopped it at the Sundance Institute.
Sleep Dealer attacks current issues with future scenarios. Privatized water supplies, forced migration to the cities, working in dangerous conditions and at pittance wages, all the themes are current and relevant to the lives of billions.
Shown from the perspective of the global south, the drone warfare, corporatized control of natural resources and dehumanizing sweatshops resonate loud and clear. Definitely check out Sleep Dealer.
Over the past ten years, the Yes Men have emerged as an infamously daring and creative duo of anti-corporate pranksters. In their new movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (known in their non-activist lives as Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) explain their methodology: “What we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like,” they say. “We make fake websites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences.” Continue
Apparently, the Obama administration has made a deal with all the major TV networks to push “service” conceptually onto Americans.
“Campaign Elements
- Unprecedented week long of television programming on all four leading broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and all affiliated broadcast and cable properties as well – and other networks, beginning October 19,
- To “organically” create and produce as many stories as possible about service and volunteerism and connect them in the plots of network dramas, comedies and reality shows”
Let’s be clear, there is an agenda at work here. Obama has come out in favor of what he calls “service” in the form of military service and other non-military federal programs (AmeriCorp) as a mandatory requirement for American children to graduate from high school.
Such “service,” the military variety in particular is very much on the minds of Washington war planners as they struggle to find more available troops for their never ending quagmire in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
Obama prefers the soft-sell. That is to use lofty, roundabout rhetoric and innocuous seeming propaganda (like sitcoms) to get ideas out there that the US government wants you to go to Asia and kill.
Obama’s strategy has always included increasing the bloated military, and his latest military budget is the largest in history, outspending the rest of the entire world combined on miltiary (which they call “defense,” but that is quite false when the funds go to “offense.”)
Let’s return to this “volunteerism” agenda in the midst of an economic meltdown, the likes we haven’t seen since the 1930s.
While the government and its fatcat base of donor/bribers continues to plunder the treasury to the tune of $13 Trillion plus, and yes, as Obama himself continues to cash his paycheck for his own personal government “service,” our nation is collapsing.
I suppose it takes a special kind of sucker to be distracted by the president’s call to go volunteer when you can’t find a paying job to feed your kids, keep your house, or afford medical treatment.
A lot of the motivation behind propaganda is distraction. They get you talking about the wrong issues, the wrong problems, the wrong solutions. The right issues, the right problems, and the right solutions are squeezed out of the discussion. That is the nature of the modern propaganda state. Remember eternal vigilance. Don’t be punked.
Andrew and Leslie Cockburn have produced an investigation into the housing / financial crisis, and in particular the mortgage company “product” called “subprime mortgages.”
“We meet the players. A banker explains that the complex securities he designed were “fourth dimensional” and sold to “idiots.” A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes being ordered to “guess” the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman explains how borrowers’ incomes were inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far.”
That seems to be the question that most of the talking heads seek to answer in this PBS Frontline film.
Several of the speakers allude to pulling out and letting the Afghans fix their own country, but that idea is not seriously considered, not without a massive NATO/American domination campaign first. Continue
The Alliance For Justice has produced this call for accountability.
Full Petition Text:
Dear Attorney General Holder:
For more than five years, we have known that senior lawyers in the Bush Administration wrote the infamous “torture memos” to provide legal cover for human rights abuses taking place. Since 2004, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has been investigating the authors of the “torture memos”–Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Yoo.
In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in June, you said that this five-year investigation was close to an end and that OPR’s report would be ready in a “matter of weeks.” However, when you ordered a preliminary review into the interrogation of certain detainees in late August, you indicated that the OPR report would not be released imminently. And while you expanded Special Prosecutor John Durham?s mandate to investigate those interrogators who went outside the legal guidance provided by the Office Legal Counsel, you have failed to affirm that the investigation will follow the facts where the evidence leads, even if up the chain of command.
I urge you to authorize a full-scale investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture. You can begin this public accountability process by immediately releasing the OPR report. Only by knowing all of the facts can our nation move forward and take the necessary actions to uphold the Constitution and the law.
Signed by:
[Your name]
[Your address]
RIP! is an important film. Technically, it’s an illegal film without copyright permissions for numerous song samples and video clips which would push the budget into the tens of millions of dollars if the publishing corporations had their ways (and they often do get their way). That is the point filmmaker Brett Gaylor makes with this investigation of copyright in the modern age of Interweb Tubes and sprawling corporatocracies.
Jack Herer is a driven man, driven by a vision to save the world in the following way.
Use a naturally growing substance to–
– manufacture paper from, instead of cutting down forests full of trees, and
– use the oil from the seeds for lubrication instead of petroleum with its high levels of pollution, and
– use the fibers for rope, cloth, canvas, clothing, and
– use the medicinal powers of the plant to alleviate suffering, and
– reduce the prison population and associated astronomical costs of incarceration and interdiction and
– roll back the police state measures of the “drug war” restoring civil liberties to the people of America…
WMD is a frustrating film, not a little bit because of its subject matter. This is the story of some big lies which transcend borders, the globalisation of big lying. This is about forged uranium documents, fake intelligence sources and knowing war crimes as the U.S, Britain and others sent their armies to “disarm” a country they knew wasn’t “armed” with WMDs in the first place. Continue
I stumbled on this free online film, not knowing what it was. I’m glad I did. Naomi Wolf has made a film to accompany her book of the same name, which is essentially an indictment of the Nazi-type policies inflicted on America since 9/11, primarily by the Bush regime, but also approved by many Democrats.
Comparisons to Hitler’s strategic plan to overthrow democracy in Germany are relevant and real. There is no excuse for ignorance in this information age . Wrapping one’s self in the flag and in mindless flag waving is no substitute for the “eternal vigilance” required of a free people. Continue
Move Over Congress, Here Comes Achbar, Moore and the Yes Men
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists
By Pam Martens
Article originally published at CounterPunch.org.
Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?
— Edward, First Baron Thurlow
We’re about to find out if the filmmakers can succeed where Congressional hearings and mainstream media have failed. Will the film documentaries examining insatiable corporate greed and Wall Street malfeasance provide the American people with the necessary foundation of understanding and activist tools to seriously tackle the problem head on?
The embryo of a breakthrough idea is emerging amidst the smell of popcorn and Raisinets in theatres around the globe: the mega corporate structure is no longer facilitating product innovation as much as it is spawning audacious crime innovation. So big and bulky it can’t get out of its own way, let alone innovate, the bloated behemoth resorts to crime for profits. Unless we think there is a future for our nation in patenting, securitizing and exporting felonious acts, we need to change course and fast.
Three films are standouts as a combined curriculum for leading Americans out of the darkness. Together, they provide a compelling argument that the seeds of today’s financial calamity were planted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1886 to effectively grant corporations the same protections as humans. Continue
Beginning of the End for the Corporate Press?
Killing the Messenger
By Anthony DiMaggio
The Pew Center for public opinion research has released its September study of public trust in media, and the picture isn’t very pretty. Americans are pessimistic when it comes to the quality of reporting in the corporate press. This should hardly be a surprise considering the extent to which reporting on Iraq and Iran in recent years propagandistically and falsely reported both countries as pursuing and perhaps even possessing nuclear weapons, and the way that reporters muddy the waters of rational debate on important domestic issues such as health care, the economy, the 2008 election, and so on. Most Americans are also weary of the titillating mass media coverage of celebrity gossip, finding these stories to be a diversion from more relevant political issues. Continue
U.S. media is effectively controlled, and that includes this free online film. The range of debate is limited, restricted. Hard hitting and longstanding critics of US imperialism do not appear. This is unsurprising, and yet it does bias the film in several important ways.
The phrase “US imperialism” does not appear. It is the elephant in the room, the unspoken motive for the crime, yet it isn’t named. There is a long and repetitive history of US aggressions against weaker states, but this crucial history is ignored by Greenwald.
Even the role of the US government in the Soviet/Afgan war from 1979 to 1989 (misstated in the film as 1980-89) is not mentioned. Therefore much is not mentioned. Continue
Lucile Chaufour’s “Violent Days”
Working-Class Culture, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Social Crisis
By LARRY PORTIS
Are you waiting for the Revolution? Well the time is right, because the long-awaited financial collapse has already happened. All we have to do now is wait for the social and political consequences.
Just kidding; we know it’s more complicated. After all, the working class has to be politically conscious, and that means being aware of its historical role as the bearer of revolutionary change in the form of a new mode of production and social relations that preclude domination and exploitation. Yet, wherever you go, the workers—the proletariat if you will—seem to be far from realizing this destiny. In fact, they could be further from it than almost any other group.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 drug frenzied diary is brought to the screen care of Terry Gilliam, with Johnny Depp in the role of Thompson.
Thompson’s twisted prose and Depp’s narration are what make this descent into madness so completely hilarious. Thompson was a force of nature, his own rogue state provoking and challenging everyone everywhere he went. In the words of Tom Wolfe, each encounter with Thompson was “an event.” Continue
This film is a fictionalized suspense thriller based upon a criminal international bank. This story, as revealed by the writer in the DVD extras, is based upon BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which was one of the largest criminal conspiracies ever to exist.
The International is a well thought out suspense plot where a lone Interpol investigator (Clive Owen) goes up against an insurmountably huge and well-connected adversary, the “International Bank of Business and Credit.”
MICHAEL MOORE’S film Sicko has become a lightning rod for all the anger with the U.S. health care system–and activists who support radical health care reform were on hand to show tens of thousands of people who saw the film what they can do about it.
At sneak previews across the country last month (2007), the red carpet outside the theater wasn’t for preening and paparazzi, but picket lines. Continue
WHEN I heard about it–one of today’s best filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson, making a movie from a novel by socialist writer Upton Sinclair–I moved quick, and asked to do the SW review.
There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on a novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano. Continue
District 9 is an Ugly Marvel
Science Fiction of the Now
By KIM NICOLINI
District 9 is not a pretty movie. It doesn’t look pretty. Its message isn’t pretty. It hurts the eyes to watch. In fact, District 9 is an outright ugly movie, but it is an ugly that is perfectly crafted and takes ugly to the heights of a new aesthetic. The screen is full of unflinchingly realistic ugly slums, banal ugly interiors of institutionalized spaces, and ugly people whose entire lives and bodies have been corrupted by the ugly greedy powers that dominate everything in the landscape.
Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, the movie centers on a camp of stranded space aliens who have been contained within a hideous filthy militarized slum and are in the process of being relocated to a concentration camp in the desert. Through its narrative, District 9 overtly exposes South Africa’s egregious practice of apartheid, a system of segregation that was the government-sanctioned practice of legal racism. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out this connection and to understand the film in relation to its historic and geographic specificity. Certainly, apartheid and all systems of racism need to be addressed. But what makes this movie most interesting is how it uses the real life practice of apartheid as a jumping point to expose a whole global system of exploitation, discrimination, and economic cannibalism. District 9 doesn’t take on these big issues with bombastic Hollywood gloss and spectacle, but rather through a beautifully ugly hybrid of film genres – sci-fi, body horror, toxic accident, war and action films – to show how in a world where the toxins of global capital are so fluid, everything is corrupt, nothing is in its natural state, and toxic hybrids have become the new norm. Continue
So, here we are at the end of summer… and not a great summer. Though there have been some gems like HURT LOCKER and HANGOVER, most of the films have been big really stupid popcorn flicks. Last summer we have IRON MAN and DARK KNIGHT, two films that worked as popcorn *and* were good films that actually explored characters and issues. Movies that were both kinds of good. This year it seems like no one was trying to make movies that were “popcorn plus”, instead we’ve had good popcorn like STAR TREK and bad popcorn like… well, too many to name them all. What happened? Has the slump in DVD sales made the studios stop thinking about tomorrow? And aftermarkets? Hey, no one’s buying DVDs anyway, so why make a film that is good enough that people will want to own it and see it again and again? Let’s just make completely disposable summer popcorn flicks that people forget as soon as they’ve seen them? (Hmm, maybe that’s the marketing plan – if the film is really forgettable consumers will have to see the film again on DVD?) The problem with making completely disposable summer films is that they cost so damned much. There was a time when a movie could live just on cinema box office receipts, but with summer popcorn films costing as much as $250 million, many of these films *need* the DVD money to make a profit for the studio. The thing I do not understand – it costs the same to make a big popcorn movie with a brain as it does to make a big stupid popcorn movie – so why not make the version that I want to buy on DVD and see again, rather than the version that makes me want to go home right after the movie and pop in IRON MAN or BATMAN BEGINS into the DVD player to wash away any memory of that crappy film I just paid $11.50 to see?
So, here comes this $30 million sci-fi film from South Africa with no one in it you’ve ever heard of (Shia LaBouf isn’t in a single frame of this film, thankfully) and it opens at #1 in the USA on opening weekend and ends up #2 in its second weekend… and I suspect this will be one of those word-of-mouth films that hang around for a while. Oh, and I already want to buy the DVD because I not only want to see the behind the scenes making of stuff, I want to see the movie again. Continued
‘CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY’ – In Theaters October 2nd
“It’s a crime story. But it’s also a war story about class warfare. And a vampire movie, with the upper 1 percent feeding off the rest of us. And, of course, it’s also a love story. Only it’s about an abusive relationship. Continue
HEART OF THE FACTORY
a film by Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito
“The film looks at the life of a group of workers, men and women,
inhabitants of the Argentinean Patagonia. These workers start a fight to stop the deaths and accidents that happen in the factory where they work. They live complex and dangerous conflicts and they are taking more and more commitment, something many of them had never imagined could happen. These strong episodes are affecting their perception of the reality, of the world. No one now can see himself or herself like the human he or she used to be. Something broke, something has changed and can not return to the original place. In a poor country looted by its own governments and businessmen, the workers of Zanon Ceramic take the factory in their own hands when the owner closes it. They start to produce ceramics again, but without bosses. Continue
Outstanding sci-fi film, go see it (in theaters now).
The best sci-fi has something to say and uses elaborate worlds to say it. District 9 excels because it has something to say, and the story is solid. Continue
This short film features Oliver Stone and other celebrities weighing in on the Bush administration’s “torture memos.” This is an action alert of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a web page makes sending a message to Attorney General Eric Holder easy and convenient.
These memos were written by Bush white house lawyers, particularly John Yoo and David Addngton. They display a clear intent to break the law and an insane attempt to redefine torture as non-torture. These are grave crimes and must be addressed by the current president and his Attorney General, or else the rule of law can simply not continue.
People who are tortured will give “testimony” to anything their torturers demand of them. This is incompatible with a free and democratic society, and is expressly forbidden right in the US Constitution (“cruel and unusual punishment”).
Believe it or not, I have seen Brüno twice at the movie theater since it opened two weeks ago. I went the first time not really knowing what to expect because I had never seen a Sacha Baron Cohen movie before. I knew it would be funny. I knew it would be outrageous. I knew it would push buttons. I was pretty sure I would get some good laughs out of it (even if they were politically incorrect laughs), but I really wanted to see it because I wanted to see what all the controversy was about. I’ll be honest with you. I laughed my ass off both times I saw the movie, but I also will concede that my laughter was not without a minor dose of guilt lurking over my shoulder from all those people who see Brüno as cinematic gay bashing. Every time I laughed at, say, Brüno getting his anus bleached or swapping his iPod for a black baby, I had to ask myself, “Am I wrong for finding this funny?” In fact, that needling voice of controversy even led me to believe that I wasn’t enjoying the movie as much as I was. By the end of the movie, I had proclaimed that there were even too many ass jokes for me in the movie (and that’s saying something because I love a good ass joke.) By the time I finished watching 81 minutes of Sacha Baron Cohen bending over or baring his butt thong or squirting a fire extinguisher up his pygmy flight attendant boyfriend’s arse, I thought that even I had my fill of butt jokes. When the movie closed with its uplifting celebratory gay-positive song performed by the likes of Snoop Dog, Sting, Bono, Elton John and Brüno, I was reluctant to embrace Brüno, and my response to the movie remained tepid. I wasn’t sure what my stand on it was. Did I like it? Did I not like it? Continue
The Hurt Locker, the widely praised movie about American soldiers on a bomb squad in Iraq, has arrived in theaters with enough rave reviews to fill two dozen quote ads. While the film is excellent in some respects, its politics are worrisome – not because they’re wrong, but because there are no politics in a film about the most politically fraught conflict in recent memory. And the eagerness of critics to overlook or excuse this bothers me just as much.
