Tag: film

No Other Land Won an Oscar. Miami Beach’s Mayor Is Trying To Evict a Movie Theater for Screening It

The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is trying to terminate the lease of a movie theater for screening No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Miami Herald reported that Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner introduced a resolution to terminate the lease of O Cinema, an independent film theater that rents space from the city, and discontinue more than $60,000 in promised grant funding. The legislation comes after Meiner tried to pressure the theater to cancel the screening.

Florida civil rights groups and First Amendment experts say such government retaliation against the theater for the content of the films it chooses to screen would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow the government to discriminate based on viewpoint or to retaliate against anyone for their speech,” says Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. “Pulling funding from an independent, community-based cinema under these circumstances is patently unconstitutional. The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them.”

The Miami Beach mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

However, in a newsletter to Miami Beach residents earlier this week, Meiner wrote: “I am a staunch believer in free speech. But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach, after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”

On March 5, Meiner sent O Cinema a letter on official city letterhead expressing outrage at the cinema’s decision to screen the film, which documents the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.

“Here in Miami Beach, our City has adopted a strong policy of support for the State of Israel in its struggle to defend itself and its residents against attacks by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah,” the letter read. “Airing performances of the one-sided, inaccurate film ‘No Other Land’ at a movie theater facility owned by the City and operated by O Cinema is disappointing.”

This is flagrant government jawboning—an attempt to use the mayor’s bully pulpit and the implicit threat of government action to cow the theater into self-censorship.

O Cinema initially complied.

“Due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric, we have decided to withdraw the film from our programming,” Vivian Marthell, CEO of O Cinema, wrote to Meiner the following day. “This film has exposed a rift which makes us unable to do the thing we’ve always sought out to do which is to foster thoughtful conversations about cinematic works.”

However, the theater then reversed course and told the Miami Herald it would continue the screenings after all.

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A Bizarre Kind of Executive Action: The Suppression of Epochal Documentaries

“The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”)
– Wilfred Owen

Yes, it seems fitting that I am writing these words on November 11, Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, a day that began as Armistice Day to celebrate the ending of World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

That phrase has become a sardonic joke in the century that has followed as wars have piled up upon wars to create a permanent condition, and the censorship and propaganda that became acute with WW I have been exacerbated a hundredfold today. The number of dead soldiers and civilians in the century since numbs a mind intent on counting numbers, as courage, love, and innocence wails from skeletons sleeping deep in dirt everywhere. The minds of the living are ravished at the thought of so much death.

Almost a year ago I reviewed a film – Four Died Trying – about four American men who were assassinated by the U.S. government because they opposed the wars upon which their country had come to rely: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote of this documentary film, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, that it was powerful, riveting, and masterful, the opening 58 minute prologue to a film series meant to be released at intervals over a few years. This prologue was released at the end of 2023 to great applause.
I wrote of it:

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series of films, beginning with its first installment, will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, colonialism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Then in March of this year I wrote about the second film in the series, The World As It Was, that explores the very disturbing history of the 1950s in the U.S.A., a decade that lay the foundation of fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and from which we now are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

But I was hopeful that if enough people got see to see these illuminating and brilliantly done films, built on more than one hundred and twenty interviews over six years with key historical figures, including many family members of the four men, change was possible because more people would demand accountability. That the movies were also entertaining, despite their profoundly serious content, boded well for their reaching a wide audience.

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The True Story Behind The Conjuring: Where Is the Perron Family Now?

The Conjuring has spooked audiences for over a decade since its release, but the premise of the movie isn’t as fictitious as people may think.

The horror movie premiered in theaters in 2013 and quickly became a smash hit, grossing over $320 million at the global box office. The movie starred Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston as Roger and Carolyn Perron, two parents who try to protect their children from malicious spirits in their new home.

Desperate for help, the parents call in paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), who reveal that the spirit of an alleged witch named Bathsheba Sherman is the one harming the family.

The Conjuring transformed the Warrens into folk heroes and turned the Rhode Island farmhouse where the events supposedly took place into a tourist hotspot. In 2022, the home was sold for a whopping $1.5 million, thanks to the film’s fame.

However, while the movie is based on the Perrons’ true experiences, the majority of the film is fictionalized.

“Even though The Conjuring is an excellent film for what it is, it’s about 95 percent fiction and about five percent hard truth,” the Perrons’ daughter, Andrea Perron, told Canada’s Global News in 2021.

But what’s the true story behind the notorious haunting, and where is the real Perron family now? Here’s everything to know about the tale that inspired The Conjuring.

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New Film Commemorates Legacy Of Lawyer Who Exposed Conspiracy To Murder MLK

 Conventional wisdom holds that James Earl Ray was a deranged white supremacist who killed Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968.

Research carried out by King family attorney William F. Pepper determined, however, that King was really killed in a conspiracy coordinated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Pepper died in April. He is the focus of a new film by John Barbour, with Len Osanic, A Tribute to William Pepper, that was screened on July 30 at American University at the 12th Annual Whistleblower Summit in Washington, D.C.

Barbour is a Canadian-born comedian, actor and TV host who directed two documentary films on Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who uncovered a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy that involved elements of the CIA.

In introducing his film, Barbour said that Pepper and Garrison should be regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln, as among the greatest lawyers in U.S. history.

A Tribute to William Pepper begins by detailing the friendship that developed between Pepper and King after Pepper wrote an article in the countercultural magazine Ramparts in 1967 about the use of napalm in Vietnam called “The Children of Vietnam.”

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Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer

Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945.   In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”  As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts,  and in three books, since 1984:  Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End.   Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked – or mourned today.

Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly.  It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff (though not Oppie himself) proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”

Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff – who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan – placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.

Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.

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AMC Slaps Trigger Warning On Goodfellas For Lack Of ‘Inclusion And Tolerance’

AMC has angered audiences by placing a trigger warning on the classic mobster movie Goodfellas, noting that it lacks “inclusion and tolerance.”

The New York Post notes that “AMC Networks added a trigger warning to the classic mob movie Goodfellas — rankling those who were in the film and wiseguys alike.”

The warning noted that “This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers.”

It’s a film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci. It isn’t supposed to be inclusive.

It is also based on a true story about Henry Hill, the infamous mobster who was associated with the Lucchese crime family of New York City from 1955 until 1980.

Pretty sure that he wasn’t tolerant or inclusive.

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The 2024 Santa Monica Film Festival was chock full of red-pilled conspiracy content

The 18th annual Santa Monica Film Festival, which held in-person screenings on Saturday, February 3 and which is running online screenings through February 28, chose to feature and then give awards to some dangerous right-wing conspiracy theories masquerading as “documentary” films.

The festival awarded “Best Documentary Feature” to The Great Awakening, the third film in anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Mikki Willis’ Plandemic series. The Santa Monica Film Festival website describes the film:

The Great Awakening is the third installment of the ‘Plandemic’ series. This documentary experience assembles forbidden puzzle pieces to reveal the big picture of what’s really happening in America and beyond. The Great Awakening is intended to be a lighthouse to guide us out of the storm and into a brighter future.

 The Plandemic website also provides a description of the film:

Witness the culmination of truth-seeking as PLANDEMIC 3: The Great Awakening unravels the layers of corruption and unveils a path towards a brighter future. Prepare to be inspired, awakened, and empowered to take a stand for liberty.

After the screening, the audience was treated to a Q&A with Rizza Islam, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and member of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s disinformation dozen.

The first installment of Plandemic was released May 4, 2000, and was largely responsible for the viral spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation. The New York Times explained in 2020 that nothing in the pandemic had gone as viral as the 26-minute short film, “a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.”

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Did a dose of LSD spawn some of cinema’s greatest films?

Federico Fellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, attributes much of his success to a single dose of LSD he took in the summer of 1964 ​“during a time of creative crisis”. According to a recent study looking into how this experience influenced his work, the dose was administered by Dr Emilio Servadio, one of the most prominent Italian psychoanalysts of the time. It induced a trip so intense that the filmmaker later needed sedative medication to put it to an end.

Fellini took part in the psychotherapy session directly after he had finished working on his masterpiece 8 ½, and before he started writing his next film Giulietta degli Spiriti. The talking therapy that occurred after the LSD dose was recorded with a magnetophone. The tapes have never been found by researchers, but in an interview with the BBC a year later, Fellini explained how the experience stimulated his creativity by altering his perception of colour and allowing him to perceive colours in an entirely different light.

“The doctor gave me an explanation and I agree with him,” he told a reporter in 1965. ​“He said that an artist lives always in the imagination so the barrier between sensorial reality and his imagination is very vague… I saw colours not like they normally are – we see colours in the objects, you know; we see objects that are coloured. I saw colours detached from the objects. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of the colours in a detached way.” Fellini’s work after the acid trip was later praised for having ​“supernaturally brilliant colours”.

Fellini’s perception of time was also altered during his trip, which was was reflected in his work post-LSD trip – the authors of the study said his films started to incorporate plots involving ​“puzzling and disorienting flashbacks”. The filmmaker was also said to have had epiphanies during the trip involving space and perception of self, both of which were apparent in his subsequent work. ​“The world depicted in his post-LSD movies includes major changes in the perception of space, time and others,” the study concluded.

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Bloomberg ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Hit Piece Written By Pro-Pedo Contributor

Following the release of the “Sound of Freedom,” Jim Caviezel’s anti-child-trafficking film, a chorus of mainstream hit-pieces came out denouncing it as a “QAnon” conspiracy flick.

But one author of a recent SoF hit-piece in Bloomberg isn’t just against the movie, he’s a pedo-defending freelancer who used to work for an organization working to normalize pedophilia.

Meet Noah Berlatsky: he’s just your average liberal mainstream media news contributor. Ironically, Berlatsky’s latest criticism of the drama focusing on the grave yet glossed over issue of child trafficking lambasted the movie with vitriolic scorn for perpetuating dangerous tropes, whilst he himself turned to the truly tired trope of accusing the movie of packaging together various QAnon conspiracy theories and being a movie made for alt-right boomers. There’s just one problem…Berlatsky has a sordid history of advocating for the normalization of pedophilia.

In 2021, Berlatsky was named the communications director at Prostasia, a non-profit organization which has dedicates itself to a self-avowed mission of protecting children from sexual abuse. While that on its face sounds antithetical to advocating for the normalization of pedophilia, a deeper look into Prostasia’s published content shows it merely masquerades under the guise of acting in the interest of protecting children from sexual abuse in order to promote a much more perverse ulterior motive.

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40 Years Ago, Monty Python Predicted (and Mocked) Wokeness

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the most prescient movie ever made, predicting exactly in 1979 the cultural madness you see around you today.

Despite that, the flick was wrongly derided four decades ago by the very people who might find it gob-smackingly funny today.

Life of Brian was vigorously protested during its U.S. release by various groups who believed — apparently without having seen the movie — that it was anti-Christian.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are only two appearances by Jesus in the movie, one of which is off-screen. The first is the night of Jesus’ birth (Brian’s, too) and what little we see is true to the Bible.

Well, except for the part where the Three Wise Men first tried to deliver their gifts to baby Brian in the manger next door.

In the other scene, years later, we briefly see Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount. No mockery is made of Jesus or His message.

Of all the jokes, gags, and barbs thrown in every direction, Jesus is the only figure shown respect. Monty Python trouper Eric Idle later said of Jesus, “What he’s saying isn’t mockable, it’s very decent stuff.”

For a non-believing, take-no-prisoners comedian like Idle, that’s practically a whole-hearted endorsement.

Instead, the film — Python’s only real film, the others were basically collections of sketches, even Holy Grail — is anti-authoritarian, anti-fanaticism, anti-nihilism, and anti-humorless prigs.

Life of Brian is, however, very pro-funny.

The Pythons even saved their sharpest barbs for political extremists and self-deluded lefties.

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