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“Logorama is a work of art and a parody.
Best regards,”
-Elsa Chevallier
Exclusive:
The legal questions behind an Oscar winning Short
LOGORAMA
This brilliant look at the world from an “over-marketed” perspective just won the Academy Award for animated short, 2009. In Logorama, nearly everything is constructed from corporate brand images, much as the real world is steadily evolving toward.
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“You’re either an activist or an in-activist.”
This documentary is receiving Oscar buzz, and it is a must-see. The Cove is an activist film, made by activists for the purpose of inspiring change.
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From:
John Scagliotti, member of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association’s documentary caucus and programmer of Kopkind’s CineSlam, Vermont’s LGBT Fest of Shorts.
AP headline: “Economy grows in 3Q, signals end of recession”
We are helping do our part by announcing a $250 reduction for Pride of the Ocean’s first historic LGBT Film Cruise (benefit for Kopkind’s CineSlam, VT’s LGBT shorts festival) for registering before Dec 20th for the May 30th 2010 embarkation from New York City (where we will be commemorating the first pride event 40 years ago: The Christopher Street Liberation March (June 1970) . Don’t forget to invite some NY State Senators to join you .) www.prideoftheocean.com
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DVD: The American Ruling Class
This film describes itself as follows:
“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.
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Normal is hard to watch in “Towelhead”
Review by Jasmin Ramsey, P U L S E
“Towelhead” is based on a novel by Alicia Erian and directed by “American Beauty” writer Alan Ball
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.
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DVD: Sleep Dealer
Blu-ray: Sleep Dealer
Independent Sci-Fi is where it’s at.
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.
Coming Soon!
An Interview with Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men
Pranksters Fixing the World
By MARK ENGLER
Foreign Policy in Focus
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.”
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On DVD: Rip! A Remix Manifesto
“My point is copyright is out of control. It’s been manipulated for profit at everyone’s expense.”
-Brett GaylorFree Online at Hulu (Temporarily)
Also here.
See: Open Source Cinema
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.
Could this film be erased from history?
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From the film’s Press Release:
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.
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This is truly independent filmmaking. No budgets, no scripts, just a road trip across America in the modern age version of a “hippie bus.” The Los Angeles Filmmaker’s Cooperative (LAFCO) takes a stab at trying to find the real America, with numerous interviews, numerous bands and numerous locations and situations.
Racism is an ugly subject, and always controversial. This controversy is magnified a thousand fold when talking about the most powerful media corporations on the planet with powers above and beyond citizens or citizens’ groups (and even beyond a number of nation-states). It is important to discuss and to expose racism wherever we find it, as it is the sea in which warmongers swim.
DVD: Incident at Oglala – The Leonard Peltier Story
Incident at Oglala is one of the most powerful documentaries I’ve ever seen. I was completely unaware of the American Indian Movement before I stumbled upon this film at a video store back in the 1990s. This film was produced and narrated by Robert Redford.
