MOD

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) recently published its annual report, which details complaints against various movies including Spectre, Kingsman and Minions. As is so often the case, sex and violence were the focus of the complaints, leading the BBFC to explain why they had allowed these scenes into films aimed at young people.

The Foreigner stars Jackie Chan and former James Bond Pierce Brosnan, and is directed by two-time Bond director Martin Campbell. In February the film-makers blew up a bus in central London in a sequence that was spookily reminiscent of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. To see if this similarity was a concern for the government agencies who approved and assisted The Foreigner filming in London, I filed a series of FOIA requests.

Have you ever wondered about the relationship between UFOs or aliens in movies and the real-life experiences of people who report contact or abduction or witnessing these things? Have you ever wondered whether the government is using UFO movies to influence people's perceptions of these fringe but popular and captivating phenomena?

As many of you will remember, in early February a Hollywood film crew blew up a bus in central London. Because the bus explosion was so eerily reminiscent of the 7/7 London bombings and because I read about the Ministry of Defence, MI5 and MI6 being warned about the explosion ahead of time, I decided to file some Freedom of Information requests. When the Met Police rejected my request about this film - titled The Foreigner - they simply copy-pasted their rejection about Kingsman.

The X-Files took a hard right turn this week with a proper scare-you-witless episode. In sharp contrast to the comedy of the last instalment, Home Again is another monster of the week but this time with the emphasis on Monster.

This short episode is an update on my recent Freedom of Information fun. I talk about my successful and not so successful requests to the Pentagon and my ongoing struggle with the Foreign Office to reveal further details of their involvement in the entertainment industry.

Kingsman is perhaps the most intriguing film of the year - on the face of it a cartoonish action comedy set in the world of gentlemen spies, but underneath it is an ultra-violent, racist, eugenicist film of dubious sexual virtue. No government agencies were listed in the credits for the film but at least two were involved in the movie.

The world's biggest films now regularly take over a billion dollars in revenue, and the world's biggest film franchises are multi-billion dollar businesses. What has never been reported before is that 6 of the top 10 (and 14 of the top 25) highest-grossing film franchises have been supported by government agencies, particularly the Department of Defense's Entertainment Liaison Offices.(Read more...)