The Killing of Gaza ... the movie

Description at video: In their new film "Killing Gaza," journalists Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal capture the harrowing stories of Palestinians who survived the 2014 Israeli assault, and their struggles to recover and persist under a crippling blockade

Description at video: Max Blumenthal, director and writer of ‘Killing Gaza,’ and Dan Cohen, the documentary’s editor and cinematographer, discuss their new production, which details Israeli war crimes committed against the people of Gaza.

Truth-telling Documentaries suppressed and unappreciated ....

because the sheeple would rather be comforted by lies than have to tackle with stark reality of the dying Empire's umpteen sins.
The documentary Pilger mentions in his article is posted at the very bottom.
 

John Pilger at ConsortiumNews
Silencing of Courageous Documentaries

I first understood the power of the documentary during the editing of my first film, The Quiet Mutiny. In the commentary, I make reference to a chicken, which my crew and I encountered while on patrol with American soldiers in Vietnam.
“It must be a Vietcong chicken – a communist chicken,” said the sergeant. He wrote in his report: “enemy sighted.” The chicken moment seemed to underline the farce of the war – so I included it in the film. That may have been unwise.

The regulator of commercial television in Britain – then the Independent Television Authority or ITA – had demanded to see my script. What was my source for the political affiliation of the chicken? I was asked. Was it really a communist chicken, or could it have been a pro-American chicken?

Of course, this nonsense had a serious purpose; when The Quiet Mutiny was broadcast by ITV in 1970, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, a personal friend of President Richard Nixon, complained to the ITA. He complained not about the chicken but about the whole film. “I intend to inform the White House,” the ambassador wrote. Gosh.

The Quiet Mutiny had revealed that the U.S. Army in Vietnam was tearing itself apart. There was open rebellion: drafted men were refusing orders and shooting their officers in the back or “fragging” them with grenades as they slept. None of this had been news. What it meant was that the war was lost; and the messenger was not appreciated.

The Director-General of the ITA was Sir Robert Fraser. He summoned Denis Foreman, then Director of Programmes at Granada TV, and went into a state of apoplexy. Spraying expletives, Sir Robert described me as a “dangerous subversive.”

What concerned the regulator and the ambassador was the power of a single documentary film: the power of its facts and witnesses: especially young soldiers speaking the truth and treated sympathetically by the film-maker.

I was a newspaper journalist. I had never made a film before and I was indebted to Charles Denton, a renegade producer from the BBC, who taught me that facts and evidence told straight to the camera and to the audience could indeed be subversive.

This subversion of official lies is the power of documentary. I have now made 60 films and I ......
 

How the rich in Hollywood wield their power over dreamers who want to make it big in movies

If you read Ronan Farrow's (Mia Farrow's jounalist son) two articles below, you will be able to gauge how much power and privilege the rich and powerful have over the small fry around them who are like fish caught in a net and scaled alive for the rich folks' supers.



Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies

The film executive hired private investigators, including ex-Mossad agents, to track actresses and journalists.
In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that
Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.

In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case..........

Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
Annabella Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, and other women explain their struggles with going public.
In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.

“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your ...

On the psychopaths and dirty laundry hiders of Hollywood

While reading up on the airing of this dirty laundry, this dirtiest of linen that has been piling up since the last 3 decades but kept hidden by the collective community of tens of hundreds of  people in Babylon who are now pretending not to have known what was happening, I feel confident that the 9/11 insider job, the whodunit, will be revealed to us one day. There are Rose McGowans in the 9/11 Truth Movement too, their voices might be suppressed for now just like how Rose McGowan's voice fell on deaf ears for many years, but  never fear the day will come when many will pay the price for the atrocity of 9/11.


Ronan Farrow  at the NewYorker
From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault:
Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories
Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.
In the course of a ten-month investigation, thirteen women interviewed said that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them.
Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.

For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.”

Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company.

The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims...


Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at NYTimes
Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein...........

Mothers don't let your children grow up to be killers which they ultimately become in Uncle Sam's War Factory.

"Twilight's Last Gleaming"  a  Burt Lancaster movie.

Dr Ron Paul talks to Oliver Stone

On the Star Wars latest film

Thought provoking article. If you haven't seen the film, there might be a spoiler within the article below. You have been warned!

Christopher S Morrissey writing at TheCatholicWorldReport
...If every generation has to contend with an adjacent-generation family member going over to the Dark Side, and if every generation has to defeat an existential threat of Death Star-sized proportions, then either nothing is new under the sun (on Jakku or Tatooine), or else the Force is somehow perpetually able to awaken that which is new and beautiful and good. ........

....The idea that the Force maintains the balance between good and evil is more fully explained here. If this balance were simply the affirmation of a cyclical dualism of good and evil in which, at least from the standpoint of the endless cycle of history, the two sides were morally equivalent, then the Force would be an almost nonsensical idea. Why fight for the good, if the Dark Side is nothing but the other side of the same cosmic coin? ....

Documentary on the American Civil War

Let's take a look at a small part of that civil war as the next one is looming over that war-loving nation. 

On the Side of the Road

Lia Tarachansky, an Israeli, was partly educated in Canada and is the director of "On the Side of the Road" a documentary film that won't go well with the delusional apologists for Israel's many misdeeds under Netanyahu.  Below is part 1 of 3 of her very compelling interview at the The Real News network.



To view other segments of the interview go to Reality Asserts Itself of the The Real News network. 

North Korea wants joint probe with US into the Sony hack issue

When I first saw the story of the USA blaming  North Korea for hacking into Sony because of the movie "The Interview" which is supposedly a fictional story about the  assassination of the present head of that nation, I thought that supporters and sympathizers of Kim Jong-un were behind the hack and that is exactly what the North Korean govt. claims has probably happened. 

BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the investors in the movie are the culprits themselves.  
Just look at the publicity the issue has garnered now which it would NEVER have had if not for the hacking story. When we see "Sony release" of a movie, we tend to think it's all fully corporate money ... but it's seldom that way. When the movie is released.... and I am sure it will be, after we the sheeple are given some more story-telling.... chances are Sony will make a bundle which means those who were part of that  venture will make money or at least not suffer a loss as we are made to believe at this moment in time. Moreover, don't forget that movie productions are all covered by insurance. 

Jak Kim and Steve Holland writing at Reuters:
North Korea said U.S. accusations that it was involved in a cyberattack on Sony Pictures were "groundless slander" and that it was wanted a joint investigation into the incident with the United States.

An unnamed spokesman of the North's foreign ministry said there would be "grave consequences" if Washington refused to agree to the joint probe and continued to accuse Pyongyang, the official KCNA news agency reported on Saturday.

On Friday, President Barack Obama blamed North Korea for the devastating cyberattack, which led to the Hollywood studio cancelling "The Interview", a comedy on the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
In its first substantive response to the accusation, the isolated North Korea said it could prove it had nothing to do with the massive hacking attack.
"We propose to conduct a joint investigation with the U.S. in response to groundless slander being perpetrated by the U.S. by mobilizing public opinion," the North Korean spokesman said.
"If the U.S. refuses to accept our proposal for a joint investigation and continues to talk about some kind of response by dragging us into the case, it must remember there will be grave consequences," the spokesman said.......

Martin Fackler writing at NYTimes:
North Korea Warns U.S.    Not to Take Sony Action
Warning of “serious consequences” if the United States retaliates against it over the damaging cyberattack on Sony Pictures, North Korea on Saturday insisted that it was not behind it, and it offered to prove its innocence by taking part in a joint investigation with Washington to identify the hackers......

........The cyberattack and emailed threats of attacks against movie theaters prompted Sony to cancel the Christmas release of “The Interview,” a comedy about a plan to assassinate the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. North Korea has previously denied responsibility for the hacking, though it called the attacks a “righteous deed” by its “supporters and sympathizers.”.....

3000 Miles to Graceland

Please click over to YouTube to watch the movie, unless you want the original posters to scream at me for stealing their effort.

"Human beings want to live by each other's happiness not by each other's misery"

Found the vid below at  the anti-war website. It's set to Charlie Chaplin's final speech in the movie "The Great Dictator." 

Action movie: Red-2

Mindless action.  Even having Bruce Willis and several other well-known names in the movie, it  failed to keep my attention.  

Jeremy Scahill writer and producer of "Dirty Wars" gives an in-depth interview

The second vid is the full documentary.  



Description by the poster at YouTube says:
Watch an in-depth conversation between Uprising host Sonali Kolhatkar and award winning investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill. 

Jeremy Scahill is the national security correspondent for the Nation Magazine and a Fellow at the Nation Institute. He's the author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won the George Polk Book Award. He is producer and writer of the film Dirty Wars and author of the book Dirty Wars. He is also a Senior Editor with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras of a new media venture called The Intercept, a Project of First Look Media. 
Please help us bring this and other interviews we've done to television by supporting our indiegogo campaign to televise Uprising. With your contribution we can purchase the equipment we need to bring our show to Free Speech TV where we can have potentially millions of viewers. Go to www.indiegogo.com/projects/uprisingtv and see our amazing perks!

William Wallace .... Braveheart

First vid is a small slice from the movie "Braveheart" starring Mel Gibson as William Wallace. Second vid is a  documentary on the Scotsman.

Movie: They Only Kill Their Masters

A James Garner, Katherine Ross movie of the 70s.  I haven't watched it yet so don't know what it's about .... but I like the title.

Movie: Dead Man's Folly

Another classic from the Queen of Mystery writers. Very enjoyable.
Remember YouTube is sadistic and removes good movies in the shortest possible time.  Watch it sooner than later.

Five Broken Cameras

Documentary: Breaking the Silence

The First World War

Episode One:  To Arms