‘Pro-Palestinian’ George Advises Obama
August 12, 2008
Don’t write off Hollywood just yet. ‘How Clooney offers good friend Obama advice on issues from body language to Iraq,’ report Caroline Graham and Sharon Churcher.
George Clooney once famously declared he could never run for public office because he’d ‘slept with too many women, done too many drugs and been to too many parties’.
But now the Hollywood heart-throb has entered the political arena at
the highest level – by becoming an unofficial adviser to US Presidential front-runner Barack Obama.Oscar-winner Clooney, 47, is said to be helping the Democratic candidate to polish his image at home and abroad.
But he is also sharing with Obama his strong opinions on Iraq and the Middle East.
Dubya is…The Dark Knight!
July 30, 2008
![[What Bush and Batman Have in Common]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BX473_oj_kla_20080724191516.jpg)
So I am not the only one drawing this analogy. It appears the Murdoch press has also seen the parallels. Andrew Klavan tells readers of the Wall Street Journal ‘What Bush and Batman Have in Common‘. (via TruthDig)
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
Holy Man
March 24, 2008
‘What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?‘ Pankaj Mishra pores through a book on the holy man an answer.
Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.
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The Pentagon Goes Hollywood
March 21, 2008
From the excellent TomDispatch website: Nick Turse on the Military-Entertainment Complex introduced by Tom Engelhardt.
Recently, photographic portraits of nine World War I vets (all 105 or older when taken) were unveiled at a Pentagon ceremony. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates then noted that, when it comes to their war, “There is no big memorial on the National Mall. Hollywood has not turned its gaze in this direction for decades.”
If true, that is little short of a miracle — as Nick Turse indicates below. Hollywood hasn’t been able to keep its gaze off either war or the Pentagon since “the war to end all wars” began in 1914 (and the favor has long been returned). In fact, Hollywood and the Pentagon have been in an intricate dance of support and cross-promotion for almost a century, from a time when the Department of Defense was still quaintly — if more accurately — known as the War Department. Today, however, without leaving Hollywood behind, the Pentagon has branched out into the larger universe of entertainment. Video games, TV, NASCAR racing, social networking, professional bull riding, toys, professional wrestling, you name it and the military-entertainment complex has a hand in it — and don’t forget about the Pentagon’s links to Starbucks, Apple Computer, Oakley sunglasses, and well, gosh… in one way or another, directly or indirectly, just about everything that looks civilian in (or out of) your house.
In fact, there’s a remarkable new book that looks into all of this, while doing the best job around of updating the old military-industrial complex, a term whose hard-edged simplicity an ever-expanding Pentagon long ago left in the dust. Whatever you do, don’t miss Nick Turse’s The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. It’s an eye-opener on the degree to which we are, without realizing it, a militarized society; it is, as well, the latest spin-off book from Tomdispatch.com, where some of its parts were initially tested out. But let me just quote Chalmers Johnson on The Complex: “Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. The gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and enlist gullible 18 to 24 year olds make signing up anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon’s pervasive influence in our lives.”
The Ghost of Rambo
January 29, 2008
Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America’s movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone’s bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you’re rolling your eyes, you’re not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film’s reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as “torture porn,” “jingoistic imperialism,” and “the Schindler’s List of B-list butchery.”
For the most part I’ll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can’t dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.
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Saudi Arabia for Dummies (Really)
December 19, 2007
First class graphics, third rate history. (thanks Dave)
Strike Until You Drop
November 30, 2007
An excellent glimpse into the insulated, conformist world of US TV and Film writers from the Real News Network. Had some of them not been asked these questions by the RNN anchor, it is unlikely that they would have ever looked at these issues beyond immediate self-interest. After all, how much empathy or nuance can you expect from people who write garbage like 24?
Fore this reason and more, Christopher Ketchum sees no reason why the strike should have anyone’s support.His Memo to Striking Entertainment Writers reads: ‘Strike until you drop‘.
Dear Entertainment Writers on Strike: Recently returned to so-called civilization from the canyons of Utah, I had the opportunity, after long hiatus, to enjoy the product of some of your writing as it gets shoveled into the American maw via television (no TV in my house–shoot ‘em if they get close to the porch). What a feat, this writing. It evidenced so much that was stale, false, crass, violent, foolish, salacious, gimmicky, irrelevant, sycophantic, complacent, compliant –it was, in short, the perfect distraction in a dying republic fast on its way to tyranny, the gift that keeps on giving to a government that would hope to turn the screw on free-thinking citizens. In other words, writers–you keep on striking! Behold: The entertainment will grow cold and grey as the corpse that it already is, with no new cadavers to puppeteer for the newness of each season, where nothing is as new as the recycled dead from the last season. Like Plato’s chained slaves in the cave of shadows, let the viewers wake up, walk into the light, starved for reality–oh writers, let no new entertainments issue from your minds! You may just save the Republic.
