Have you been out to see the greatest movie ever made?
“Oh, Avatar! It’s the best movie I’ve EVER SEEN! It’s about US! We, the oppressed people!!! US!!! US!! MEEE!!!! MEEE!!!!”
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Yes, this is it – the moment all the world has been held in hushed silence for! The streets of Iraq will burst into safety and joy, Afghanistan will bloom green and poppy-free, and Detroit will burst into 4 part harmony on every street corner!
Yes! It’s HERE! it’s James Cameron’s approximately 450 million dollar (300 for the movie, 150 for the marketing) anti-war, pro-war, anti-imperialist, pro-imperialist, anti-capitalist, pro-money-money-money interstellar nativist pro-tribal land-rights demanding hot interspecies sex-travaganza.
House of Numbers, a 2009 Documentary by Brent Leung (IMDB) takes on the most controversial human rights and human health issue of the last fifty years. Asking the un-askable, questioning the un-questionable, Mr. Leung uncovers the mass of information about HIV testing and the AIDS diagnosis that is daily suppressed by government and media, and hidden from public view. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a maze of a story, a comic-book-cum-novel about some troubled-to-psychopathic people who like to dress in Halloween drag (the story’s superheroes), and fight… well, whatever.
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Divine Intervention
Directed by Elia Suleiman; Featuring Manal Khader, Elia Suleiman
Boston’s Weekly Dig June 2003
No one’s ever cared much about Palestinians, so it’s not surprising that Elia Suleiman’s artful Palestinian film Divine Intervention was refused acceptance into this year’s Academy Awards.
But don’t blame the Oscar committee. From Colonial Britain to Imperial America, Palestinians have always been regarded as a nuisance and a bother.
In 1917 Britain’s Lord Balfour decreed that Palestine be re-designated as the Zionist homeland, “be it right or wrong, good or bad,” and regardless of the “desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs” who were already living there.
In 1937 Winston Churchill put it more plainly. After British soldiers crushed the first Palestinian uprising against Jewish settlers, Churchill [who fought so nobly for Britain in WW2] said of the Palestinians:
“I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
In 1947 the UN gave 55 percent of Palestine to the Zionists to form the new Israeli state. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the UN’s mandate, and the UN has refused to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state ever since. Read the rest of this entry »
– The woman in question
“The older I get, the greater a burden I feel that I worked for this man and actually liked him…he was criminal and I just didn’t recognize it,” confesses Traudl Junge in “Blind Spot – Hitler‘s Secretary.”
Junge met Adolph Hitler when she was a fatherless, impressionable teenager. By 22 she was one of his private secretaries. She worked under him from 1942 to 1945, recording his last will and testament hours before his suicide.
We learn that Hitler was kind to her, loved his dog Blondie and had chronic stomach problems. He liked to arrange marriages, but didn’t like to be touched, and he never spoke of death camps or Jews.
“He didn’t think in human dimensions,” she tells us, “only of ideals and the Nation…Personal happiness never meant a thing to him.”
Junge’s recollection is stunning; when she speaks, her eyes fix on a point in space, and she‘s back in the bunker, watching Hitler and Eva Braun talk about how to commit suicide. “I‘ll take poison,” said Braun, “I want a beautiful corpse.”
Junge isn’t just remembering, she’s reliving, and her words flow with such force and clarity that we’re taken with her to the morbid, bloody heart of delusion.
Traudl Junge died the day of the film’s premiere, but her story lives on in all the loyal boys and girls (from Baghdad to Pennsylvania Avenue) politely taking notes and carrying out orders. “We thought we were at the source of information,” she warns, “but we were the blind spot.”
