Monthly Archives: October 2007
Snatch (2000)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: Several interlocking plots revolve around a scramble for a stolen 86-karat diamond, an attempt to fix a boxing match and … pigs. Director Guy Ritchie returns to London’s mean streets, rife again with characters such as Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) and Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro). Brad Pitt is a standout as a bare-knuckles fighter who speaks a gypsy dialect nobody understands.
REVIEW: Not as flawless as my personal Ritchie pinnacle, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but a fun ride nevertheless with lots to recommend it. Here we’ve got two bookies working for a mean louse of a guy who stages fights and, well, feeds those who get in his way to the pigs. Then we’ve got the three mind-on-a-mission novice thieves (and the dog one of them adopts from the gypsies, aka “pikeys”) with a goal that intersects those of the bookies. Eventually, all the characters plots intersect in a tidy plot with an ending that brings you back to square one.
In look and feel, Snatch is a lot like Lock, Stock: That cool British vibe with expletives in every sentence, freeze frames, split frames, fast frames, and great music. The scene with one of the thugs rocking out to Madonna in his car is pretty funny, and Brad Pitt’s performance is damn good.
Rating: 3.5 stars.
Audrey
Terrorstorm: A History of Government-Sponsored Terrorism (2006)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: Documentary filmmaker Alex Jones dissects the concept of false-flag terrorism, a state-sponsored terrorist act carried out on home soil and meant to strike fear in the population — and to create a “public enemy.” Attempting to show the public they’ve been duped, Jones offers several examples and argues that the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, the London bombings on July 7, 2005, and other terrorist incidents were self-inflicted.
REVIEW: Wow. This film has been sitting at home for a month or so, so I’d forgotten what the premise of it was. I was also nervous that the both of us would fall asleep watching it because: (a) the only time we could see it was late, late at night; (b) the envelope says it has a running time of 3 hours and (c) it’s a documentary (picture the soothing omniscient voiceovers of Richard Attenborough, Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones). Nothing could be further from our actual experience – it is electrifying.
I’d never heard of Alex Jones, but imagine Michael Moore on speed. This guy is one hopped-up ball of informed, impassioned, kinetic energy, just waiting to let loose on the uninformed, the think-they’re-informed, and all those in between, a telling of the history of government-sponsored terrorism and, wait for it, his absolute conviction that the United States government had something to do with 9/11.
Now when he says that at the beginning of the doc, I was thinking, uh-oh, please don’t go there, Mr. Conspiracy Theorist; but by the end, I was wondering whether I was one of the masses in Orwell’s 1984, even though I consider myself well-informed and am always trying to be more well-informed. Terrorstorm, essentially part history lesson, part crime procedural, is Alex Jones’ well-researched, well-supported, well-executed, riveting and mindblowing discourse on a subject that doesn’t get much light of day: that governments (not just ours, though ours was obviously the most relevant to me) have not only sponsored, but been actively involved in, terrorist acts – not just against other nations’ citizens, but their own citizens as well, primarily to give the government an excuse, a rationale, to be able to carry out some objective that might otherwise be objectionable to its citizenry. Make the citizens fear for their lives and they won’t protest, trading their “liberty” for security, in effect.
From the very beginning, the documentary grabs you by the hair, shakes you up and doesn’t let go ’til the end. If you’ve never heard of “false flag terrorism” (i.e., a government committing a terrorist act under another nation’s flag – in essence, pointing to a scapegoat or patsy as responsible for the act), then this may not be news to you, but it was absolutely mindblowing for me. At the beginning of the doc, Alex Jones lays out various undisputed incidents of such “false flag terrorism” from the early 1920s through WWII through the Vietnam War, including those perpetrated by our own U.S.government…against its own citizens. These he classifies as the ones that are inarguable, that have been confessed to by the governments involved. One such incident was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that provided the justification for the U.S. government to escalate our involvement in the war. The one that was absolutely horrifying to me was the attack on the USS Liberty and the knowing massacre of our U.S. shipmen on board. “In the interests of time,” per the documentary, it can’t go into all of the historical “false flag” incidents that are “incontrovertible,” so presumably there are many other incidents of false flag terrorism not mentioned in the doc.
Of course, the documentary clarifies, these “false flag” terrorist acts are highly classified and it’s not the case that everyone in the government knows about it. In fact, in many cases only a very select few know about it, because if a plot were uncovered, it’s best that more people not know about it since you can’t confess to what you don’t know. I believe the term the documentary uses is “black cloud.”
If this weren’t troubling enough, the documentary moves to very recent incidents of terrorism, the Madrid Bombings, the 7/7 London bombings, and of course, 9/11. Needless to say, by this point the documentary has already laid the groundwork, through narrative, through interviews with ex-MI-6 (the British CIA) and CIA agents who were involved in the execution of these plots, through high-level government officials, through interviews with regular citizens who were at the scenes of the various bombings, so I went in with an open mind. The evidence he lays out isn’t incontrovertible obviously, but it is very thought-provoking. At the same time, after I watched the documentary, I am definitely wondering whether the various governments, if not actively involved, knew of the bombings and that they were going to happen. What absolutely stunned me were polls taken of Londoners after the bombings and Americans years after 9/11 that reflected an overwhelming majority believing that their government had some hand in it.
I began thinking back to all those newsclips I’d seen – of Bush’s tanking approval ratings at the time of 9/11, why he continued reading to those children after he was informed by the Secret Service that the towers had collapsed, why Building 7 seemed to implode on itself demolition-style, and WHAT, to this day still unsolved, was that mysterious airplane flying over the White House (restricted air space) at or about the time of the Pentagon strike? How is it that 3-4 commercial airliners were able to hit their targets at all, much less without NORAD intervention, itself inconceivable? How is it that one of those planes hit the Pentagon, supposedly one of the most secured locations on Earth? The memos before 9/11 about invading Iraq or Dick Cheney’s “Defense of America” paper saying that America would need to be attacked, on the scale of “Pearl Harbor,” as a catalyzing event before the U.S. would be able to invade Iraq could all just be an unhappy coincidence, but what of all the physicists, high-level government officials, ex-intelligence officers that are on the record saying the same or have left their positions because they could no longer continue, morally, acting in those capacities with respect to other allegedly false flag terrorist acts? Now I can’t say for sure whether it’s such a conspiracy theory after all and, to that extent, the documentary succeeded. (My fiance, after seeing this with me, reiterated that he always thought the U.S. government had some involvement with the 9/11 attacks. That if the government didn’t execute or mastermind the attacks, it knew the attacks were going to happen and intentionally didn’t do anything to prevent them.)
Without knowing of any prior U.S. false flag terrorist history, I would have seen Jones’ argument as provocative and eye-opening, but arguable and perhaps a bit far-fetched. With our country’s and other countries’ histories of false flag terrorist acts, however, the context has changed. This documentary convinced me that the paradigm has indeed shifted and that, if we don’t keep an eye on our government, we have indeed become the pacified drones in Orwell’s 1984.
Rating: 5 stars.
Audrey
The Dresden Files – Season 1 (2007)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: Do you have a mystery to solve? If you can afford $500 a day and you won’t ask any questions, then Harry Dresden (Paul Blackthorne) can take your case. The sardonic Chicago P.I. is secretly a wizard who uses the dark arts to solve crimes, with the help of his ghostly pal Bob (Terrence Mann). Based on the novels of Jim Butcher, this detective series also stars Valerie Cruz as Lt. Connie Murphy and Conrad Coates as suspicious wizard Morgan.
REVIEW: What a great show! I cannot believe this comes from the same network that insists on casting Stephen Baldwin in all those hokey made-for-TV movies they continually force on us poor unsuspecting viewers!
This is a great series, I love mysteries and this is a terrific detective/paranormal series. The entire cast is wonderful and they have the best ghost sidekick since the Topper movie series.
The storylines are great, there’s not an overload of special effects that some shows with a paranormal twist suffer from, and this series has a film noir feel to it.
I highly recommend this series, it is especially appropriate to view during the spooky month of October.
5 stars
Big A
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