“I can’t even get the photographs out there, that was all surprising to me,” he said. “What is going on here? These are war photographs. … You see these and you go ‘oh boy, this shouldn’t be happening.'”
Month: October 2007
Complicit Culture
Please, no serious Iraq war fiction for us, we might be a bit discomfitted:
“…when people come out of a movie that is serious, provocative and disturbing, it’s hard for them to recommend that other people see it.”
On seeing and not seeing Rendition and other Iraq war or related films: “Marketing a War Film..”
Colbert and Dimslow – President and Vice President?
Dimslow in ’08 never had a chance. As this CNN article makes clear, he can’t even afford to get on the ballot.
So, he throws his support to Colbert, and hopes for the Vice Presidential nod.
Why They’re Afraid Of Michael Moore – by John Pilger
Moore’s “threat” is his unerring view from the ground. He abrogates the contempt in which elite America and the media hold ordinary people. This is a taboo subject among many journalists, especially those claiming to have risen to the nirvana of “impartiality” and others who profess to teach journalism. Continue reading Why They’re Afraid Of Michael Moore – by John Pilger
Guantanamo lawyer says film Rendition “surprisingly courageous for Hollywood”
Reuters
Hollywood‘s latest take on kidnapping and torture in the war on terror is surprisingly bold and realistic but won’t change people’s views overnight, a prominent lawyer for Guantanamo Bay prisoners says.
Continue reading Guantanamo lawyer says film Rendition “surprisingly courageous for Hollywood”
Doris Lessing – Nobel Prize
Freedom Writ Large – English PEN – Burma
From English PEN:
Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has spent most of the last eighteen years under house arrest in Burma. Her example continues to inspire other Burmese writers, whose names are rarely celebrated. John Pilger will be joined by other Aung San Suu Kyi supporters including Maureen Lipman and Rhys Ifans to pay tribute to all those writers of conscience in Burma whose voices have been silenced. New footage of interviews with Burmese writers living on the Thai border will also be shown. All proceeds will go to the Writers in Prison programme.
Iraq War Novels and Plays
Iraq War Films, Movies, Video
Incomplete lists:
Iraq War Fiction Films, Movies, Video
Lions for Lambs
Over There
Valley of the Wolves Iraq
The Tiger and the Snow
Stop-Loss
The Situation
G.I. Jesus
Continue reading Iraq War Films, Movies, Video
Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis
I took Martin Amis to task for advocating the hounding of Muslims, but this has been reduced to an academic spat.
In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published in September 2006, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain.
American Fiction – Kwajalein Missile Range, Captain Yossarian And Robert Jordan
by Andre Vltchek
All of you probably read Catch 22, one of the greatest antiwar novels of all time. And perhaps you remember Captain Yossarian’s friend Nino, an insane bloke, who in a moment of thorough insanity, in order to sell to Germans his planeload of rotten eggs, agreed to bomb his own airport during WWII. I read Heller’s masterpiece when I was a kid, about fifteen years old, growing up in occupied Czechoslovakia.
Continue reading American Fiction – Kwajalein Missile Range, Captain Yossarian And Robert Jordan
New Stories at Liberation Lit
Narrative situations on the ground: stories of injustice spanning North and South America, Asia and Africa.
Brian De Palma’s Iraq war film Redacted has been Redacted by its financiers
Laurie Heifetz:
A seething feud between Brian De Palma, director of the fictional Iraq war documentary Redacted, and the film’s financiers, billionaire Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, erupted at a New York Film Festival press event Monday.
Animal’s People – by Indra Sinha, novel of Bhopal
from “Eyes Wide Open”
by Vaiju Naravane
Continue reading Animal’s People – by Indra Sinha, novel of Bhopal
New at Liberation Lit
Blood-strewn quarters of the Police State and the struggle against it.
Partisan fiction stories by Abiola and Emersberger
Recent stories at Liberation Lit journal:
The Publisher – by Joe Emersberger
A Canadian newspaper publisher confronts his complicity in the Canadian, US and corporate backed coup and mass murder in Haiti.
Tim Robbins and Terry Eagleton
Bhopal – Indra Sinha – Animal’s People – Polemic Novel and Change
Guardian review:
Indra Sinha has been shortlisted for his second novel, Animal’s People, a powerful fictionalisation of the Bhopal disaster of 1984 in which a gas escape from a US-owned chemical factory killed thousands in the central Indian city.
There Will Be Blood – Oil! – Upton Sinclair
Review by Scott Weinberg of film There Will Be Blood based in part on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!
Also: more recent, in “This Land of Hope,” a detailed overview of Upton Sinclair and his novel Oil! in relation to the recent film There Will Be Blood:
In its obsession with the road and the roadside poster, Sinclair’s novel overlaps with other key American novels of the pre-second world war period. Another portrait of an American money-maker who has accumulated his fortune dangerously, The Great Gatsby, which just beat Oil! to the bookshops, crucially involves a motor accident and is visually dominated by a huckstering hoarding for an occulist.
And Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, which charts the introduction of marketing tactics and financial corruption to American politics, begins with a description of a new freeway across a state which is so similar to the prologue of Oil! that it must be presumed a deliberate tribute. In any case, in all of these novels, the car is the star, although it is already also cast as a possible villain, at least in its potential for ruining tycoons.
What notoriously disappears from even the best cinematic adaptations of novels is the writer’s style, and the biggest surprise of my rereading was the grandeur of Sinclair’s narrative voice. In common with other popular American novelists of his generation – such as Penn Warren and Thornton Wilder – Sinclair was greatly impressed by the Greek and Latin classics, and seems to have been attempting some kind of coalition between ancient poetics and modern subject matter, a project encouraged by America’s self-conscious ambition to become a great republic.
Civil Acts
Cut to downtown small town Little League baseball field. Carolyn Thompson, mother of Aaron Thompson, sits on wooden bleachers badly painted. She stares out over an empty field. She looks like Cindy Sheehan. A US mom. Continue reading Civil Acts
A Practical Policy 