film review

The subject of Craig Rosebraugh’s new documentary Greedy Lying Bastards is the billion dollar climate denial industry, which he blames for the failure of the global community to agree a new international climate treaty.

Okay, Okay, the Oscars and the gowns and the capped teeth and the funny fellows with squeaky voices and armchair critics, sure, in the scheme of things (look over DV for proof), is a drop in the proverbial well . . .  or proverbial outhouse.

The Square, a documentary about Egypt’s January 2011 uprising, provides glimpses of most of the players but gives short shrift to the Muslim Brotherhood, the main player that was then targeted by the deep state headed by the military.

[W]ith the weight of Magna Carta, the [British Film Institute] proclaimed Hitchcock’s 46th feature the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane’s 50-year reign at the top.
– The Guardian, August 2012

In the mid-20th century, writers and filmmakers who had experienced the Depression first-hand were keenly sensitive to the individual’s paramount concern for independence and dignity. In 1942, inspired by the New Deal speeches of then progressive-populist Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, composer Aaron Copland wrote his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man”—a musical piece entirely reflective of the renewed populism of the time.

Blustery Mood Piece by Dylan for Chrysler, Sell Out of Our Times!
You bettcha, “[We] Ain’t in it for my [Our] Health.” It’s the Levon Helm story, told by Jacob Hatley. You gotta see it. The ultimate road master, Helm was a founding member of that group, The Band, which ended up in Woodstock. That Woodstock. The ’69. That one.

“I’m telling you, this place is the most racist place I’ve ever been to. September 10, it was Latinos and Blacks. And then September 11 came, and it’s Muslims. It’s a list. I top the list.” That’s Vera, student in the USA, in the film, If These Halls Could Talk.

It’s been a bit of a gap week or two, since pining in with this sort of catharsis,  but some of us schmucks have to make some really lousy money and attend to some really rotten job hunting in a time of pure delusion, all the while that white noise buzzing, the white static noise of the mush of NPR and mainstream mindlessness and the BS of labor stats and economists who deserve what the SEALs and Obama said what happened to Osama (right, US punk prez, directs US amped-up murder incorporated to shoot to kill, ask no questions later, I don’t need no stinking badge, and then burial at sea, hea

The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.
– Vice Admiral William P. Blandy, Bikini bomb test commander, July 25, 1946

First settled by Europeans in 1640, Marcus Hook was once called Chammassungh, Finland then Marrites Hoeck, from which the present name derives. The Hook, however, does serendipitously evoke its pirate past, when Blackbeard plied the Delaware, and one of his mistresses, Margaret, lived here, in a plank house still preserved.