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Free Online at HULU (temporarily)
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.
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DVD: The End of America: Director’s Cut
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.
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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.
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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.
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Free Online
This is another Robert Greenwald/Brave New Films project.
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.
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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.
DVD: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Blu-ray: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (Director’s Cut)
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.”
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DVD: The International
Blu-ray: The International
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.”
Will Sicko spark a movement?
July 6, 2007
ALAN MAASS reports on the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s Sicko–and the potential of a movement to win fundamental change.
Article originally appeared at socialistworker.org.
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.
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DVD: There Will Be Blood
Blu-ray: There Will Be Blood
Oil, blood and greed
Alan Maass compares the movie There Will Be Blood with the book that inspired it.
Article originally appeared at socialistworker.org.
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.
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