In honor of what would’ve been his 50th birthday, a handful of theaters around the world—including the fine folks over at the Alamo Drafthouse (all weekend!)—are screening this movie.
ERROL MORRIS: Do you think a woman can rape a man?
JOYCE McKINNEY: No. I think that’s like puttin’ a marshmallow in a parking meter.
We saw Tabloid last night and it has to be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year. The less you know about it going in, the more you’ll enjoy it (although I’m not so sure that my better half would second that opinion).
As Ebert began his review by noting:
If “Tabloid” is a love story, it is one only Errol Morris could film. He says its subject, Joyce McKinney, is his favorite protagonist, which means she places ahead of Robert McNamara, Stephen Hawking and the expert on naked mole rats. Certainly she is the most enigmatic.
Rad poster for Errol Morris’s Tabloid
Watch the *excellent* trailer →
Excited to see this and read Morris’s forthcoming book, Believing Is Seeing.
Talk about a well-timed release …
RED ALERT NETFLIX USERS: WATCH INSTANTLY WAVING HANDS FURIOUSLY
This reminded me that I owe some thanks to l3fan-o-rama for originally informing me a while back that Hicks was on Netflix and (of course) billhicks for mentioning when the instant play became available. It made Sunday a day off very well-spent.
What stood out a little more for me after seeing the film would have to be the portion touching on Hicks’ thoughts regarding the 1993 conflict in Waco, Texas.
That topic made me want to revisit this film, which is not currently available for instant play on Netflix—but is available here and here for free instead.
Breaking The Taboo 2011 | Official Trailer (English Version) (by quebrandootabu)
End The #WarOnDrugs
I’m assuming I’ll have to wait until this is available on DVD, but that full H.W. speech containing the snippet which opens this trailer was really something:
Now, I can imagine a few whispers out there: Maybe you think we’ll never get drugs under control, that it’s too easy for the dealers to get back on the street. Well, those days are over, too. The revolving door just jammed. Some think there won’t be room for them in jail. We’ll make room. We’re almost doubling prison space. Some think there aren’t enough prosecutors. We’ll hire them, with the largest increase in Federal prosecutors in history. The day of the dealer is drawing to a close.
“Gene Siskel, who was a wise man, gave me the best investment advice I’ve ever received. ‘You can never outsmart the market, if that’s what you’re trying to do,’ he said. ‘Find something you love, for reasons you understand, that not everyone agrees with you about, and put your money in it.’ The stocks I thought of were Apple, Google and Steak ‘n Shake. I bought some shares. That was a long time ago. Reader, if I had invested every penny I had on Gene’s advice, today I would be a Master of the Universe.”
I finally got to see “The Tillman Story” yesterday, and it was every bit as heartbreaking/infuriating as I expected it to be.
It also made me recall this strip Ted Rall that received criticism for (among the others), and while I didn’t necessarily laugh at it, I wasn’t offended either. Like Rall, I too was being turned off by the “cartoon image” that was being propagandized at that time. The movie about Tillman forcefully dispels that myth (Tillman’s own words: “This war is so fucking illegal”) and Rall apologized five years ago.
While Pat Tillman’s celebrity status as a football player in the military makes his story fascinating, I still recall and share the opinion offered in the tremendously ballsy column penned by then-Sun-Times scribe Greg Couch—entitled “Tillman’s death tragic — and so are all the others”—when everybody was “taking Tillman’s death and wrapping it up neatly into a box that fits our usual thinking”:
What bothers me is the talk about how much Tillman gave up. He was offered $3.6 million to play football for three years and chose to fight for his country instead. He joined the elite Army Rangers, commandos who strike behind enemy lines. It was a grand act of patriotism, yes.
But the $3.6 million had nothing to do with that. Tillman is dead now, and so are lots of others. He didn’t give up any more than they did. He gave up his life. They gave up their lives. The ultimate sacrifice cannot be improved upon.
I still consider Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight” to be the definitive film about the war in Iraq, but “The Tillman Story” is every bit as riveting.
OK, I finally found the movie this summer I have to see as soon as it’s released.
Arab-Americans are not one monolithic group, but rather a diverse and complex array of many voices and cultures. By making a coherent and entertaining documentary on the Arab-American life and experience, we hope to educate as well as inform audiences on this contemporary American story.
1998 biopic Kurt and Courtney is now on Hulu in its entirety.
Also on Hulu in full:
—The Secret of NIMH
—What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
—Slacker
—Cry Baby
—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
—The Last Days of Disco
—Dirty Work
HOLY FUCK!
“The 14th Amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War to give equal rights to black people, and therefore it said no state can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law and that was intended to prevent the states from taking life, liberty or property away from black people, as they had done for so much of our history. What happened was corporations would come into court, and corporation lawyers are very clever and would say you cannot deprive a person of life, liberty, or property, we are a person, a corporation is a person. The Supreme Court goes along with that. What is particularly grotesque about this was the 14th Amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves. Between 1890 and 1910 there were 307 cases brought before the court under the 14th Amendment, 288 of these brought by corporations, 19 by African Americans. 600,000 were killed to get rights for people and then with strokes of the pen over the next 30 years, judges applied those rights to capital and property, while stripping them from people.”
— Richard Grossman
Today’s Supreme Court ruling reminded me of this quote from the documentary “The Corportation” where companies were given the same rights as people.
You can watch “The Corportation” in it’s entirety here.
(via soupsoup)
I honestly thought about the exact same clip when I first read the news today.
Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (Paul Jay, 1998, 93:36)
Sis was asking if I still had those wicked-awesome sunglasses Bret Hart used to wear, because I guess now he’s come back and buried the hatchet? I had just been mentioning this documentary, and always thought critic Scott Renshaw best put the fact that the film happens to be about a pro wrestler among the universal praise it received with his “shame on you if that’s enough to keep you from watching”:
Viewers expecting Hitman Hart to be a behind-the-scenes exposéé of the “phony” wrestling world will find that, but only to a certain extent. They’ll also find a man named Bret Hart who made the tragic mistake of attaching his identity to a fictional construct in a multi-million dollar business. As clearly as Vince McMahon is the villain of this piece, he also makes one extremely insightful comment about Bret Hart: “He forgot that this is sports entertainment.” Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows is a tale of capitalism and personal integrity, and the extent to which one has anything to do with the other. It’s a human drama, a social satire and a thrilling adventure. And it is not, repeat, not “just about wrestling.”
Why We Fight (full film)
“Why We Fight describes the rise and maintenance of the United States military-industrial complex and its fifty-year involvement with the wars led by the United States to date, especially its 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The documentary asserts that in every decade since World War II, the American public was told a lie, so that the Government (incumbent Administration) could take them to war and fuel the military-industrial economy maintaining American political dominance in the world. Interviewed about this matter, are politician John McCain, political scientist and former-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, politician Richard Perle, reporter William Kristol, writer Gore Vidal, and public policy expert Joseph Cirincione.
Why We Fight documents the consequences of said foreign policy with the stories of a Vietnam War veteran whose son was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and who then asked the military to write the name of his dead son on any bomb to be dropped in Iraq; and that of a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker who enlists in the United States Army because he is poor and in debt, his decision impelled by his mother’s death; and a military explosives scientist who arrived to the U.S. as a refugee girl from Vietnam in 1975.”
As Owen Gleiberman put it:
Why We Fight asks us to revel in the irony that President Eisenhower now sounds like the sort of guy who would get tarred as a leader of the ”Hate America” crowd.
Walter Cronkite & America’s Disastrous Drug War - Part 1 of 6 (via DrugPolicyAlliance)
Maybe people will listen now that the man is dead.
