Before VCR's, my father on Fridays would visit the Montgomery County Library in Dayton, Ohio, after work and come home with canvas bags of 16 mm film reels that we older kids learned how to thread into the 16 mm projector he "borrowed" from work then we'd flip the couch to face the wall with the projector behind us and watch classic oldies like this film that I grew to love the more I saw it. The other reviews here shed great historical light on this film but all I know is Tom Sawyer, Sidney and Aunt Polly as portrayed in this film were a joy to watch whenever dad brought this movie home for family movie night among many others rather than breaking the bank by taking his eight children out to the full-price movies. Years later, I read my First Edition Library replica copy of the first edition of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to revisit and add to the memories I had of watching this film as a child.
Reviews
23 Reviews
Pokémon
(1997–2023)
Something my 5-year old can watch after burned out on Paw Patrol
4 February 2021
After getting burned out on Paw Patrol, my five year-old is now into Pokemon and so he has collectible cards and I print him coloring pages etc., but he also wants to watch video content too - but after seeing some of the web junk out there on YouTube where gamers record themselves playing Pokemon games or collecting stuff and teaching my boy swear words in the process, I thought, "there's gotta be more to Pokemon than this" - then I remembered this 90's show and showed my boy an episode from season one and he loved it. For a parent, this is a nice introduction to Pokemon culture that I don't mind my boy getting in to.
As good as TV sitcoms get
24 January 2021
Warning: Spoilers
The Dr. Wiggle (Dr. Suess) dialogue and the TNG Trekkies beaming up out of the courtroom are memorable but the "C'mon Speedy!" bit was what likely put this on TV Guide's 100 Greatest TV episodes list for awhile and clearly served, at least in part, as the inspiration for the sloth at the DMV on the movie, Zootopia, decades later.
The Incredible Hulk
(1977 TV Movie)
A viscerally moving superhero flick where everything comes together beautifully
15 January 2021
Other far more eloquent voices than my own have reviewed this movie (thank you, rooprect), but to just put in my two cents' worth, I watched this again awhile ago after not seeing it since I was a kid and I could not believe how moving it was. The acting, the story, the directing - and Joe Harnell's timeless, poignant "Lonely man" piano theme song - all come together to make this an unforgettable experience. Joe Harnell's music is as inextricably linked to "The Incredible Hulk" as Max Steiner's score is to "King Kong", in my mind. Composers of this calibre are the unsung heroes (pun intended) of fare like this, and they furnish the icing on the cake after all the other elements have come together so well, as they did here. Even dazzling CGI that's so frequently on display in more contemporary superhero fair - absent great direction, writing, acting, and music like we have here - is little more than so much white noise.
Atlantis: The Lost Continent
(1961)
Not "The War of the Worlds", but...
29 October 2020
Warning: Spoilers
I was curious to watch this effort by the same man who created one of my favorite sci-fi films of any decade, the 1953 "War of the Worlds" which I've seen numerous times and prefer even over the modern Tom Cruise version. The premise that unfolds, that of an advanced civilization run amok and ready to enslave its less advanced neighbors, has been very well-explored in Star Trek with its Prime Directive and I appreciated the message well-conveyed by Edward Platt's character, the high priest Azor, that, barring a civilization imposing restraints on its own appetite for conquest, the hand of God has a way of keeping said nation in check through other means, in due course. Having said that, once I figured out twenty minutes in or so that it was about an ancient advanced civilization, that piqued my initial interest; however, it was Azor's character with the wisdom of Spock that kept me watching 'til the end; otherwise I would likely have given up trying to finish it as the Demetrius and Princess characters didn't quite do it for me, and even if it featured sadistic scientists building a death ray, turning men into beasts and a looming volcanic eruption. An interesting find but one I can't honestly say I'd ever care to revisit.
Fantastic Planet
(1973)
a 70's audiovisual psychedelic trip
28 October 2020
I first saw bits and pieces of this on USA Up All Night that aired on Friday nights on the USA cable network back in the 80's and it was such a radical departure from the Disney / Warner Bros / Hanna-Barbera / Max Fleischer animation I had grown up with, I had to know what its title was and who made it. It was weird enough that I knew it wouldn't likely be shown in an after-school cartoon lineup on any of the usual channels either. Rene Laloux's name has since been added to my animation lexicon.
Seeing it again decades later, the animation is as distinctive as ever though, as other reviewers have pointed out, the actual character development and storyline just by themselves aren't enough to carry the film.
It's all about the weird animation and - dare I say it - the soundtrack. From the music with its echoes of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to the exotic plant and animal sounds and sounds of Traag gadgetry, the psychedelic atmosphere created by these stunning aural and visual elements are what keep people coming back to this film after nearly 50 years.
Eerily prescient episode 60 years ahead of its time
25 July 2020
First off, another reviewer noted the "it's a ship" scene where Warden and the android are looking at the stars has been quietly edited out for whatever reason but at least six years ago, the scene was still in there. If you have old VHS tapes or DVD's in storage somewhere in your home, don't part with them just yet as what you get nowadays on streaming may not be as you remember it back in the day.
In the age of coronavirus where Drudge news headlines would have us believe that some people are seeking android companionship because social distancing and fear of contagion makes seeking human companionship too risky, this episode is eerily prescient. Whether alone on an asteroid or isolated on lockdown, boredom and the need for meaningful interaction causes human beings to seek out sometimes strange avenues to get those needs met and this Twilight Zone episode surely attests to that.
What really drove this point home for me was a July 24, 2020 DNYUZ news headline, "The star of this $70 Million Sci-fi film is a robot" wherein "Erica" an android actress modeled after Miss Universe finalists is described by its designer as being developed with the "goal of creating an android that people wouldn't just relate to, but also confide in and feel affection for", according to "Erica's" designer, Hiroshi Ishiguro. This episode was way ahead of its time.
Life imitates art.
Let There Be Light
(1980)
This film needs a candid modern-day follow up
26 May 2020
I learned about this film on Memorial Day 2020 and I felt compelled to share a few thoughts about the plight of some of our aging vets in our modern healthcare system. While I wouldn't go so far as the reviewer who dismissed this film out-of-hand as a "propaganda piece", I would say a follow-up on our aging vets, were it made today, should shed the rose-colored glasses and offer a candid glimpse of what they are up against. I work for a phone captioning service for the hard-of-hearing (primarily the elderly) and, although being disabled and never having served in the military myself, I have gotten quite a vicarious education captioning vets' phone calls into our Veterans Administration medical centers. For every "happy ending" like those experienced by the psych patients in this film, there are many more vets whose ailments remain under- or untreated in an increasingly complex healthcare system as many of the vets' calls I transcribe attest. One such call recently that I had a few weeks ago still haunts me in which an embittered vet who had seen dead bodies piled up on the Berlin wall after it was first built while he was stationed there, now years later had to seek out a patient's advocate (to whom this phone call was made) because he was being passed around from doctor to doctor, getting prescriptions he couldn't use or was allergic to, getting leg braces sent to him in the mail that didn't fit, and desperately needing therapies which weren't always well-administered or which he was unable to get altogether - all while meanwhile having not having any one medical professional taking ownership of his case, following up, or tracking his progress on his journey to wellness This 1946 film needs a modern counterpart that speaks the unvarnished truth and tells the stories of our forgotten war vets who nowadays find themselves navigating with trembling hands and voices a healthcare system with its often impersonal bureaucracy and bewildering array of Telehealth phone options while trying to get a hold of a live human being (e.g. "speaking into your phone or using your touchstone keypad, please enter the top number of your blood pressure reading.. bottom number.. date and time of your reading with two digits for the month.. I'm sorry I didn't get that. Let's try this another way.. etc, etc." Really?!!) If it weren't for the internet, such a candid contemporary documentary likely wouldn't see the light of day for decades either if indeed it could even be made at all.
Echoes the lore surrounding fraternal orders like Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Skull and Bones
17 April 2020
Warning: Spoilers
Echoes of John Hechinger's book, "True Gentlemen: the broken pledge of America's fraternities" resonate through this episode and secret societies like Skull and Bones which included three generations of the Bush family, Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush - a C student at Yale, and George W. Bush come to mind when it's mentioned in the episode that those "fortunate" enough to be accepted in the order's ranks can expect to enjoy a lifetime of privilege and preferential treatment over their peers throughout their careers including perks that include predation with impunity like the Argentine diplomat's son presumed to have.
Is it that much of stretch to think the those like the Argentine diplomat's son and the captain of the football team whose tattoos indicate membership in such orders after raping women to join the ranks in this episode do, in fact, in real life grow up to be those same ones who torture trafficked children in cages at secretive retreats like Bohemian Grove where torture victim and murder witness Paul Bonacci recorded in his journal that he was taken, as relayed by his lawyer John DeCamp on the Alex Jones show? (DeCamp spent his own fortune to win a $1 million settlement for Bonacci after Bonacci's ordeal at Bohemian Grove)
Plenty of ghoulish atmosphere without wanton gore and skankiness
10 January 2020
As other reviewers have noted, this one gave them nightmares as kids. After watching it curled up in a warm blanket alone at night after the kids were put to bed, I wouldn't let them watch it (not that they would sit through it anyways) but I know it would've creeped me out for awhile too had I seen it at their age.
When it comes to horror movies, I'm a fan of the ones that manage to keep the blood and guts off-camera and don't resort to dialog peppered with four letter words and maniacs interrupting teen makout sessions in parked cars - while nevertheless being evocative and atmospheric with the help of a decent score (Ravel's "La Valse" performed by Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is one of my all-time faves), some good acting, and macabre subject matter to stir the imagination, as do a lot of other folks like me out there. (Compare for example the enduring success of Hitchcock's "Psycho" whose shower scene implies explicit violence and nudity just off-camera accompanied by a great score with his all-but-forgotten 1973 film "Frenzy" where the topless strangulation scene leaves nothing to the imagination.)
Not to put this film in the same category as Psycho or its score up there with Bernard Hermann's and Maurice Ravel's masterpieces, but, for me, it does manage to do a solid job of being creepy - what with shrunken heads being sought by the living dead who themselves are enbalmed in curare - without being explicit or gross and with a decent organ score and some decent performances by veteran actors to back it up.
I was fortunate to watch this film in a crisp, digitally-restored copy that conveys much more immediacy and presence than the blurry VHS or, heaven forbid, broadcast TV incarnations, complete with fuzzy reception and Medicare Supplement plan commercials mercilessly interspersed throughout, that other reviewers have likely been subjected to watching fare like this which may have swayed me to rate this more favorably than other folks.
For fans of artfully-done evocations of the ghoulish and macabre, and not so much into wanton sex, blood, and guts - this one's a solid recommendation.
When it comes to horror movies, I'm a fan of the ones that manage to keep the blood and guts off-camera and don't resort to dialog peppered with four letter words and maniacs interrupting teen makout sessions in parked cars - while nevertheless being evocative and atmospheric with the help of a decent score (Ravel's "La Valse" performed by Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is one of my all-time faves), some good acting, and macabre subject matter to stir the imagination, as do a lot of other folks like me out there. (Compare for example the enduring success of Hitchcock's "Psycho" whose shower scene implies explicit violence and nudity just off-camera accompanied by a great score with his all-but-forgotten 1973 film "Frenzy" where the topless strangulation scene leaves nothing to the imagination.)
Not to put this film in the same category as Psycho or its score up there with Bernard Hermann's and Maurice Ravel's masterpieces, but, for me, it does manage to do a solid job of being creepy - what with shrunken heads being sought by the living dead who themselves are enbalmed in curare - without being explicit or gross and with a decent organ score and some decent performances by veteran actors to back it up.
I was fortunate to watch this film in a crisp, digitally-restored copy that conveys much more immediacy and presence than the blurry VHS or, heaven forbid, broadcast TV incarnations, complete with fuzzy reception and Medicare Supplement plan commercials mercilessly interspersed throughout, that other reviewers have likely been subjected to watching fare like this which may have swayed me to rate this more favorably than other folks.
For fans of artfully-done evocations of the ghoulish and macabre, and not so much into wanton sex, blood, and guts - this one's a solid recommendation.
Top Secret!
(1984)
Cold war comedy that shows what satire begs to be written about the New World Order
27 December 2019
This brand of comedy isn't for everybody - my wife who grew up after the Cold War and the heyday of ZAZ movies thinks it's stupid - but watching it again after 25 years, I was still laughing the whole way through.
Now imagine if that same over-the-top silliness directed then at East Germany in this film was directed today at China, the Middle East and their hard-and-fast Big Oil and Silicon Valley business partners here in the West; back then leading up to WWII, you had Thomas Watson's IBM furnishing the Fuhrer with the punch card technology used to efficiently process the prisoners through the death camps and Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors furnishing the Fuhrer with the Blitz trucks used in the Blitzkrieg, as Edwin Black has written about. Today, you have Google and other American tech giants helping China perfect its Social Credit Score and facial recognition systems to make its surveillance state all the more oppressive, while meanwhile, American retirement fund money is finding its way into investments in the same Chinese companies manufacturing the ICBM's that China is pointing at American cities. (Go read the October 2019 issue of Hillsdale College's Imprimis entitled "Why and How the U.S. Should Stop Financing China's Bad Actors".) Why not take the same kind of jabs at Silicon Valley tech giants the same way ZAZ did with Ford with the exploding Pinto gag in the film?
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, you have reports coming out about how the government misled the American public about the failed 18-year Afghanistan War campaign on the same scope and level they did with Vietnam while Big Oil grew richer and richer by the day. (Go read "The Afghanistan papers: a secret history of the war" published by the Washington Post.) that commenced, of course, after 9/11 (which 3,000 professionals over at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have staked their professional reputations on asserting that the WTC collapse was a controlled demolition using remotely-activated explosive charges planted inside the buildings) which was ostensibly masterminded in a cave in Afghanistan by fromer CIA director and president George H.W. Bush's old 1970's "Arbusto Energy" business partner, Salem bin Laden's half-brother, Osama bin Laden.... Uh-huh.
Can you imagine if Abrahams and the Zucker brothers weren't hamstrung by political correctness and the fear of offending the Chinese and the Saudis (not to mention Silicon Valley and Wall Street) and felt as free to take the same jabs at those entities as they were with the East Germans?
As author Dorothy Sayers who translated "The Inferno" has pointed out, back in his day, Dante took a lot of heat (pun intended) for populating the various levels of hell with real-life celebrity characters in Italian public life and politics whose foibles and misdeeds were well-known in his day and, in the process, created a piece of satire that has stood the test of time for 7 centuries.
The foibles and misdeeds of the 21st-century New World Order similarly beg to satirized as unforgivingly by the Zucker bros. or somebody - perhaps with the same over-the-top absurdity - in as worthy a work of satire as East Germany was in this film. If you can't change the existing order of things, at least you can take a good jab at it. Humanity needs that - as both Dante and the Zucker bros. enduring satire has proven.
Now imagine if that same over-the-top silliness directed then at East Germany in this film was directed today at China, the Middle East and their hard-and-fast Big Oil and Silicon Valley business partners here in the West; back then leading up to WWII, you had Thomas Watson's IBM furnishing the Fuhrer with the punch card technology used to efficiently process the prisoners through the death camps and Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors furnishing the Fuhrer with the Blitz trucks used in the Blitzkrieg, as Edwin Black has written about. Today, you have Google and other American tech giants helping China perfect its Social Credit Score and facial recognition systems to make its surveillance state all the more oppressive, while meanwhile, American retirement fund money is finding its way into investments in the same Chinese companies manufacturing the ICBM's that China is pointing at American cities. (Go read the October 2019 issue of Hillsdale College's Imprimis entitled "Why and How the U.S. Should Stop Financing China's Bad Actors".) Why not take the same kind of jabs at Silicon Valley tech giants the same way ZAZ did with Ford with the exploding Pinto gag in the film?
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, you have reports coming out about how the government misled the American public about the failed 18-year Afghanistan War campaign on the same scope and level they did with Vietnam while Big Oil grew richer and richer by the day. (Go read "The Afghanistan papers: a secret history of the war" published by the Washington Post.) that commenced, of course, after 9/11 (which 3,000 professionals over at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have staked their professional reputations on asserting that the WTC collapse was a controlled demolition using remotely-activated explosive charges planted inside the buildings) which was ostensibly masterminded in a cave in Afghanistan by fromer CIA director and president George H.W. Bush's old 1970's "Arbusto Energy" business partner, Salem bin Laden's half-brother, Osama bin Laden.... Uh-huh.
Can you imagine if Abrahams and the Zucker brothers weren't hamstrung by political correctness and the fear of offending the Chinese and the Saudis (not to mention Silicon Valley and Wall Street) and felt as free to take the same jabs at those entities as they were with the East Germans?
As author Dorothy Sayers who translated "The Inferno" has pointed out, back in his day, Dante took a lot of heat (pun intended) for populating the various levels of hell with real-life celebrity characters in Italian public life and politics whose foibles and misdeeds were well-known in his day and, in the process, created a piece of satire that has stood the test of time for 7 centuries.
The foibles and misdeeds of the 21st-century New World Order similarly beg to satirized as unforgivingly by the Zucker bros. or somebody - perhaps with the same over-the-top absurdity - in as worthy a work of satire as East Germany was in this film. If you can't change the existing order of things, at least you can take a good jab at it. Humanity needs that - as both Dante and the Zucker bros. enduring satire has proven.
A poignant film about hurt, forgiveness and how showing God's love can help mend broken people
30 November 2019
In an era that saw the Vietnam War's lasting effects on veteran fathers and rising divorce rates leave an indelible impression upon young children's, Mister Rogers did not shy away from talking about her things like divorce, death and war with his young audience and helping them sort through their feelings.
I am glad those who made this movie took their subject, Mr. Rogers, as seriously as he undertook his own mission to minister to young children in his own idiosyncratic way, even as Jesus, no matter what, ministered to the children, telling his impatient disciples, "suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come into me for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
My only complaint is that the magnificent musical contributions of Johnny Costa, who has been hailed as the "white Art Tatum", gets short shrift in the film. Mr. McFeely and the lady who talks to the hand puppets make their appearance in the film, but not John Costa. When I was little, I wanted to grow up to play jazz piano like I heard in the closing credits on "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" every day. To this day, I would love to see Johnny Costa's music for the show as painstakingly transcribed in note-for-note sheet music transcriptions as Art Tatum's or Jelly Roll Morton's recordings and published by the Smithsonian Press. Ah, well...
That said, as a grandchild whose grandparents' sad story is similar to that of the Esquire writer's parents', I went through several facial tissues during the course of this film which is ultimately about hurt and forgiveness and how demonstrating God's love can help mend broken people. As Rankin-Bass' beloved classic, "The Little Drummer Boy"''s immortal status has shown, this is a visceral theme children, young and old, are forever drawn to.
Derek
(2012–2014)
S02E06 is the best TV episode I've seen in years.
25 October 2019
I admit upront I am giving this rating based on only seeing one episode S02E06 so far.
My wife heard Glenn Beck on the radio this morning talking about "Derek" on Netflix, specifically S02E06. We watched it on Netflix w/ subtitiles active since I have a bit of a time understanding thick English accents in such fare, but discovered it to have some profanity; hence, my 9- rather than 10-star rating, this from a family man who grew up in the TV generation back when the Hays Code was still very much in effect.
Having said that, my wife and I are always on the lookout for good content on Netflix and Amazon Prime in the vast streaming TV wasteland that has all but replaced broadcast but, alas, all to often still stares us in the face unapologetically at the end of the day and after our usually fruitless searches through our local movie theater offerings on half-price Tuesday.
We watched the episode of "Derek" where he falls off his bike repeatedly trying to learn to ride it. This poignant episode had us in tears with its ending which I won't give away here. As mentioned elsewhere in these user reviews, the age of the sitcom marked by sight gags and shallow humor is drawing to a close and the kind of writing featured here in Derek points the way to the future for the TV sitcom, if indeed it has one.
I recognize this while at the same time I freely admit that I've endeared myself to a few of the best examples of the schlocky sitcom, such as the "Turkeys away" episode S06E22 from WKRP and the "Yet another day in the life" episode of Night Court (which features a brilliant performance by a sadly uncredited actor playing a man with the medical condition, "tortoise nervosa", who took 8 signal changes to cross the street. Go watch the "NIght Court C'mon Speedy" clip on YouTube)
Yet even the writing in a schlocky sitcom like Night Court had its tender moments that reaffirms your faith in humanity and which foreshadows the writing featured in "Derek". For example, the Night Court episode "Walk away Renee", a long-forgotten TV gem, where Bull discovers he's dating a prostitute, especially the final scene, is unforgettable and is on a par with Ricky Gervais writing in Derek. In that forgotten Night Court episode, Bull, nstead of hitting his girlfriend across the face like she tells him to after learning she's a prostitute, instead picks her up off the floor as she's sobbing cathartically, brushes her off, and affords her all the love, gentleness and respect of a lady for the first time in her life to the astonishment of everyone in the courtroom except his firends. Such TV moments stay with you long after the gags and one-liners have faded from memory and this episode of Derek is most certainly one of those.
S02E06 of Derek deserves to be appended to TV Guide's "100 greatest episodes" list like the two aforementioned WKRP and NIght Court episodes are and perhaps in a decade or so, when the list is rewritten, it will replace the more banal and dated episodes on that list.
My wife heard Glenn Beck on the radio this morning talking about "Derek" on Netflix, specifically S02E06. We watched it on Netflix w/ subtitiles active since I have a bit of a time understanding thick English accents in such fare, but discovered it to have some profanity; hence, my 9- rather than 10-star rating, this from a family man who grew up in the TV generation back when the Hays Code was still very much in effect.
Having said that, my wife and I are always on the lookout for good content on Netflix and Amazon Prime in the vast streaming TV wasteland that has all but replaced broadcast but, alas, all to often still stares us in the face unapologetically at the end of the day and after our usually fruitless searches through our local movie theater offerings on half-price Tuesday.
We watched the episode of "Derek" where he falls off his bike repeatedly trying to learn to ride it. This poignant episode had us in tears with its ending which I won't give away here. As mentioned elsewhere in these user reviews, the age of the sitcom marked by sight gags and shallow humor is drawing to a close and the kind of writing featured here in Derek points the way to the future for the TV sitcom, if indeed it has one.
I recognize this while at the same time I freely admit that I've endeared myself to a few of the best examples of the schlocky sitcom, such as the "Turkeys away" episode S06E22 from WKRP and the "Yet another day in the life" episode of Night Court (which features a brilliant performance by a sadly uncredited actor playing a man with the medical condition, "tortoise nervosa", who took 8 signal changes to cross the street. Go watch the "NIght Court C'mon Speedy" clip on YouTube)
Yet even the writing in a schlocky sitcom like Night Court had its tender moments that reaffirms your faith in humanity and which foreshadows the writing featured in "Derek". For example, the Night Court episode "Walk away Renee", a long-forgotten TV gem, where Bull discovers he's dating a prostitute, especially the final scene, is unforgettable and is on a par with Ricky Gervais writing in Derek. In that forgotten Night Court episode, Bull, nstead of hitting his girlfriend across the face like she tells him to after learning she's a prostitute, instead picks her up off the floor as she's sobbing cathartically, brushes her off, and affords her all the love, gentleness and respect of a lady for the first time in her life to the astonishment of everyone in the courtroom except his firends. Such TV moments stay with you long after the gags and one-liners have faded from memory and this episode of Derek is most certainly one of those.
S02E06 of Derek deserves to be appended to TV Guide's "100 greatest episodes" list like the two aforementioned WKRP and NIght Court episodes are and perhaps in a decade or so, when the list is rewritten, it will replace the more banal and dated episodes on that list.
They Shall Not Grow Old
(II) (2018)
Stands alongside "All Quiet" and "Lost horizon" as an antiwar masterpiece
13 September 2019
I had to read Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" in college and Peter Jackson's masterpiece here just as vividly evokes the same miserable conditions the British soldiers endured as I recall reading about of that of their German counterparts in Remarque's book. I agree with other reviewers here that schoolchildren of sufficient age everywhere should be made acquainted with the horrors of war through narratives like this as it would make the world a safer place for future generations as it would strengthen our resolve to never again suffer the warmongers among us to have their way.
What is the alternative to a world like this depicted here? The one proffered by James Hilton's "Lost horizon" and set to film by Frank Capra wherein we are promised "the meek shall inherit the earth" once those who would rule the world with terror and force have killed each other off and those who remain alive on all sides see the futility of war and the fruits of the Seven Deadly Sins and beat their swords into plowshares.
Having emblazoned on our minds ithe mages of war such as those depicted in narratives like Jackson's and Remarque's will help firm humanity's resolve to strive for the eventual "blue zone" of longevity, fertility, moderation, peace and plenty envisioned by Hilton and Capra which, as a Christian who looks forward to the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the ensuing Millennium of Peace pending the "end of the world, or destruction of the wicked", I know lies in humanity's future and well within our grasp.
What is the alternative to a world like this depicted here? The one proffered by James Hilton's "Lost horizon" and set to film by Frank Capra wherein we are promised "the meek shall inherit the earth" once those who would rule the world with terror and force have killed each other off and those who remain alive on all sides see the futility of war and the fruits of the Seven Deadly Sins and beat their swords into plowshares.
Having emblazoned on our minds ithe mages of war such as those depicted in narratives like Jackson's and Remarque's will help firm humanity's resolve to strive for the eventual "blue zone" of longevity, fertility, moderation, peace and plenty envisioned by Hilton and Capra which, as a Christian who looks forward to the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the ensuing Millennium of Peace pending the "end of the world, or destruction of the wicked", I know lies in humanity's future and well within our grasp.
Take Me Home
(2011)
For those who want a break from frenetic CGI fantasy & lefty arthouse trash
28 May 2019
I've discovered I prefer well-written stories to CGI smoke-and-mirrors - (I'm one of those who prefers Star Trek TOS and the original Star Wars trilogy with their humble '60's/'70's special effects over all their incarnations with subsequently-added CGI "enhancements" any day because the storytelling is their main attraction) - with the caveat, however, being that I don't want to be mired in icky arthouse garbage that's passed off as "drama" either in pursuit of a well-written human interest story; so I'm always happy to find a well-written apolitical movie that doesn't resort to over-the-top CGI on the one hand or garish obscenity or psychosis on the other to convey its message and be engaging.
This movie fits that bill very nicely. It's an adventurous road trip with unexpected twists and turns and, with a real-life husband-and-wife team as the main characters, it has a tinge of poignant authenticity as well. ("Lonely men have large DVD collections" - so true.) Too bad more people haven't heard of it.
To the big-name studios out there, some of us who aren't into superheroes have movie gift cards and popcorn bucket refills that go unused for weeks or months on end because we simply don't see anything on Fandago that we care to see. Try making more fare like this and you might be surprised. Just look at Lifetime and Hallmark channels - they know their audience and fill their niche very nicely by making inviting fare that appeals to a large swath of people - and they do so very profitably too, I'm sure.
This movie fits that bill very nicely. It's an adventurous road trip with unexpected twists and turns and, with a real-life husband-and-wife team as the main characters, it has a tinge of poignant authenticity as well. ("Lonely men have large DVD collections" - so true.) Too bad more people haven't heard of it.
To the big-name studios out there, some of us who aren't into superheroes have movie gift cards and popcorn bucket refills that go unused for weeks or months on end because we simply don't see anything on Fandago that we care to see. Try making more fare like this and you might be surprised. Just look at Lifetime and Hallmark channels - they know their audience and fill their niche very nicely by making inviting fare that appeals to a large swath of people - and they do so very profitably too, I'm sure.
Like Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", cringeworthy for all the right reasons
16 March 2019
Warning: Spoilers
I've seen many Christian films that are cringeworthy for the wrong reasons; poor production value, bad acting, overly preachy, corny, etc. etc. - which is not to say I don't watch them with my family anyway since they can be endearing in a cheeseball kind of way, but I would nevertheless be embarrassed to admit to liking them in mixed company.
This film suffers from none of those banalities; as other reviewers have said, it presents "just the facts" with a first-rate presentation that, without being lugubrious or preachy in the least, still tugs the heartsrings and punches the gut of the viewer every bit as effectively as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" did in its day when it laid bare the deplorable conditions of Chicago's meatpacking plants to its nauseated readers, except whereas "The Jungle"'s publication in 1904 spurred the creation of the FDA under Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 after the President read it and tossed his cookies, this movie's impact, I believe, conversely played no small part in creating the opposite effect among staunch abortion proponents who have lately responded by brazenly doubling down to protect abortion providers who offer late-term abortions or otherwise skirt regulations by passing legislation that spares them from being consigned to the same fate as Gosnell, as we've witnessed with New York States's passage of its Reproductive Health Act in 2019.
Watching the film and looking at the picture of Baby Boy A on the movie's website - the same one that Sarah Jane Morris' character showed the jury in the film - evoked the same nauseaous feeling just as effectively for me as when I first read about those men falling into the vats and being turned into slurry in "The jungle" and I'm just as content being labeled a "bitter clinger" by Obama for doing things like sharing this film's message with anyone who'll listen, just as those in Upton Sinclair's day happily wore Teddy Roosevelt's pejorative label "muckrakers" for daring to change the world for the better by propagating investigative journalism in their day.
This film will definitely be part of my children's frank, no-holds-barred "home sex ed" curriculum along with the 1982 PBS Nova episode "The Miracle of Life" long since purged from YouTube, the "jaimesbirth" unassisted homebirth video on YouTube, those undercover Planned Parenthood videos which ironically led to the 2016 indictment of the filmmakers, Mehcad Brooks' sick ad celebrating the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the book, "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health" by Robie Harris, and finally, the "I love you" segment from HBO''s Classical baby "The art show" featuring a beautiful montage of paintings of mothers gazing into the faces of their children by Mary Cassatt set to Franz Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898, the second movement, "Andante un poco mosso".
...In the Gosnell film, Gosnell is shown playing a Chopin etude in his living room while agents are making ghastly discoveries in his basement for heightened creepy effect. For me, after all is said and done, a "mother and child" montage from HBO's Classical Baby with its beuatiful vignettes is a welcome antitode to all the ghoulishness and explicitness our culture thrusts upon its youth when it comes to sex education which we as parents are compelled to relay if we want to head off the state's sex ed agenda from getting inside our children's heads.
This film suffers from none of those banalities; as other reviewers have said, it presents "just the facts" with a first-rate presentation that, without being lugubrious or preachy in the least, still tugs the heartsrings and punches the gut of the viewer every bit as effectively as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" did in its day when it laid bare the deplorable conditions of Chicago's meatpacking plants to its nauseated readers, except whereas "The Jungle"'s publication in 1904 spurred the creation of the FDA under Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 after the President read it and tossed his cookies, this movie's impact, I believe, conversely played no small part in creating the opposite effect among staunch abortion proponents who have lately responded by brazenly doubling down to protect abortion providers who offer late-term abortions or otherwise skirt regulations by passing legislation that spares them from being consigned to the same fate as Gosnell, as we've witnessed with New York States's passage of its Reproductive Health Act in 2019.
Watching the film and looking at the picture of Baby Boy A on the movie's website - the same one that Sarah Jane Morris' character showed the jury in the film - evoked the same nauseaous feeling just as effectively for me as when I first read about those men falling into the vats and being turned into slurry in "The jungle" and I'm just as content being labeled a "bitter clinger" by Obama for doing things like sharing this film's message with anyone who'll listen, just as those in Upton Sinclair's day happily wore Teddy Roosevelt's pejorative label "muckrakers" for daring to change the world for the better by propagating investigative journalism in their day.
This film will definitely be part of my children's frank, no-holds-barred "home sex ed" curriculum along with the 1982 PBS Nova episode "The Miracle of Life" long since purged from YouTube, the "jaimesbirth" unassisted homebirth video on YouTube, those undercover Planned Parenthood videos which ironically led to the 2016 indictment of the filmmakers, Mehcad Brooks' sick ad celebrating the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the book, "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health" by Robie Harris, and finally, the "I love you" segment from HBO''s Classical baby "The art show" featuring a beautiful montage of paintings of mothers gazing into the faces of their children by Mary Cassatt set to Franz Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898, the second movement, "Andante un poco mosso".
...In the Gosnell film, Gosnell is shown playing a Chopin etude in his living room while agents are making ghastly discoveries in his basement for heightened creepy effect. For me, after all is said and done, a "mother and child" montage from HBO's Classical Baby with its beuatiful vignettes is a welcome antitode to all the ghoulishness and explicitness our culture thrusts upon its youth when it comes to sex education which we as parents are compelled to relay if we want to head off the state's sex ed agenda from getting inside our children's heads.
The PJs
(1999–2001)
Humor that hits hilariously close to home! No wonder some aren't laughing
1 March 2019
This endearing cartoon series perfectly evokes the aroma of alcohol vapors wafting up from broken liquor bottles and the faint tinge of urine on damp concrete, mixed with diesel fumes and spent fast-food grease hovering in the stagnant air on a drizzly, muggy July afternoon in the inner city, that I experienced first-hand.
But one example, down the street from my south Atlanta apartment where I lived for awhile in the '90's there was a Subway sandwich shop that one day saw some hoodlums take hostages during lunch hour. (Fortunately, no one in our complex happened to be eating lunch there that day.) They had to call in a SWAT team to diffuse the situation and the incident made the evening news. So when I saw in a PJs episode a scene where a helicopter airlifted supplies for the residents onto the roof of their tenement building before quickly taking off, I just busted out laughing.
Another such bit is the sign above the housing office that reads, "keeping you in the projects since 1965".
Eddie Murphy hits the nail right on the head with many such scenes and references in this series, evoking smiles of recognition for anyone who's lived in such an environment.
But one example, down the street from my south Atlanta apartment where I lived for awhile in the '90's there was a Subway sandwich shop that one day saw some hoodlums take hostages during lunch hour. (Fortunately, no one in our complex happened to be eating lunch there that day.) They had to call in a SWAT team to diffuse the situation and the incident made the evening news. So when I saw in a PJs episode a scene where a helicopter airlifted supplies for the residents onto the roof of their tenement building before quickly taking off, I just busted out laughing.
Another such bit is the sign above the housing office that reads, "keeping you in the projects since 1965".
Eddie Murphy hits the nail right on the head with many such scenes and references in this series, evoking smiles of recognition for anyone who's lived in such an environment.
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
(2018)
Made me more deeply appreciate anew Mr. Rogers ministry - wish I could have heard more about Johnny Costa.
26 August 2018
Warning: Spoilers
I was misty-eyed most of the way through this and realized what my dad said after Rogers died that Mr. Rogers took his work very seriously from the very beginning.
I'm sad to say I've allowed Pixar, Dreamworks, and YouTube Kids to become white noise in my house as a means of pacifying rambunctious children rather than putting forth my best self in genuinely communicating with them and here is Mr. Rogers telling gently but sternly that that is not okay, especially since such programming for all of its CGI dazzle falls woefully short of Mr. Rogers' gold standard for children's programming.
As the documentary points out, Mr. Rogers kept a slow pace making the most of pauses and silence in stark contrast to the ever-accelerating pace of children's programming that treats children as future consumers rather than as a son or daughter of God who deserves to be treated with love, respect and dignity as Mr. Rogers, an ordained minister, did.
This documentary helped me appreciate anew the calm reassuring voice Fred Rogers was to millions of children who've grown up in an increasingly tumultuous world as he unflinchingly addressed such topics as "assassination" in the aftermath of RFK's assassination, "death", "divorce", etc. and helped children to come to terms with their own feelings of sadness, fear, etc. about such grownup issues that American society has grappled with - and shows us what a real "safe space" for children should look like - not a place to curl up and suck our thumbs and pretend the big, bad outside world doesn't exist but rather a place where children are gently and lovingly taught to deal with those things that world throws at them.
The segment about Francois Clemmons was especially moving; The footbath Rogers shared with Mr. Clemmons was as powerful a statement for its time about racial equality as that which Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry made by putting Michelle Nichols as Uhura on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I was especially touched when Clemmons tearfully relayed recalling the moment he realized that Mr. Rogers statement "I love you just the way you are" was directed at him, a gay man, and bespoke a love and acceptance that Clemmons never got from his father - inspiring Clemmons to view Mr. Rogers as a surrogate father the likes of which he didn't have growing up.
I was very glad to see Mr. Rogers' musical intelligence - his ability to write, sing and most importantly genuinely communicate through music - discussed in the film, and my only wish would have been to see Johnny Costa's indelible musical contribution to "Mr. Rogers' neighborhood" given fair treatment. The beloved Peanuts holiday specials would be what they are without Vince Guaraldi and "Mr. Rogers' neighborhood"'s legacy wouldn't be what it is today without Johnny Costa's brilliant jazz piano accompaniments. Such brilliance and simplicity in musical language with those well-beloved jazz chord progressions goes hand-in-hand with the Christian overtones of the messages conveyed in both Mr. Rogers' songs and "Christmas time is here" from the Peanuts Christmas special and endears the audience of children young and old all the more to such programming. Conversely, we should be warned that "the man that hath no music in himself...is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils...Let no such man be trusted" - a line from another beautiful piece of music, Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Serenade to Music" (with its text adapted from Shakespeare's "music of the spheres" portion of Act V Scene 1 from his "Merchant of Venice") Vaughan Williams' masterpeice with its message about the importance of music in the eternities moved another beloved musical giant, Sergei Rachmaninoff - who wrote his "Vespers" in two weeks despite no professed musical affiliation - to tears.
Continuing on a divine note, thanks to this documentary, I've come to appreciate the extraordinary and unique ministry of Fred Rogers that in its own way stands alongside those of C.S. Lewis, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Jeffrey R. Holland. The genuine sincerity, authority, intelligence and eloquence with which such men speak to their intended auidences transcends religious affiliation, titles, and physical trappings - wherever such ministering angels like these men go, endearing music that evokes fond memories isn't far behind.
I'm sad to say I've allowed Pixar, Dreamworks, and YouTube Kids to become white noise in my house as a means of pacifying rambunctious children rather than putting forth my best self in genuinely communicating with them and here is Mr. Rogers telling gently but sternly that that is not okay, especially since such programming for all of its CGI dazzle falls woefully short of Mr. Rogers' gold standard for children's programming.
As the documentary points out, Mr. Rogers kept a slow pace making the most of pauses and silence in stark contrast to the ever-accelerating pace of children's programming that treats children as future consumers rather than as a son or daughter of God who deserves to be treated with love, respect and dignity as Mr. Rogers, an ordained minister, did.
This documentary helped me appreciate anew the calm reassuring voice Fred Rogers was to millions of children who've grown up in an increasingly tumultuous world as he unflinchingly addressed such topics as "assassination" in the aftermath of RFK's assassination, "death", "divorce", etc. and helped children to come to terms with their own feelings of sadness, fear, etc. about such grownup issues that American society has grappled with - and shows us what a real "safe space" for children should look like - not a place to curl up and suck our thumbs and pretend the big, bad outside world doesn't exist but rather a place where children are gently and lovingly taught to deal with those things that world throws at them.
The segment about Francois Clemmons was especially moving; The footbath Rogers shared with Mr. Clemmons was as powerful a statement for its time about racial equality as that which Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry made by putting Michelle Nichols as Uhura on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I was especially touched when Clemmons tearfully relayed recalling the moment he realized that Mr. Rogers statement "I love you just the way you are" was directed at him, a gay man, and bespoke a love and acceptance that Clemmons never got from his father - inspiring Clemmons to view Mr. Rogers as a surrogate father the likes of which he didn't have growing up.
I was very glad to see Mr. Rogers' musical intelligence - his ability to write, sing and most importantly genuinely communicate through music - discussed in the film, and my only wish would have been to see Johnny Costa's indelible musical contribution to "Mr. Rogers' neighborhood" given fair treatment. The beloved Peanuts holiday specials would be what they are without Vince Guaraldi and "Mr. Rogers' neighborhood"'s legacy wouldn't be what it is today without Johnny Costa's brilliant jazz piano accompaniments. Such brilliance and simplicity in musical language with those well-beloved jazz chord progressions goes hand-in-hand with the Christian overtones of the messages conveyed in both Mr. Rogers' songs and "Christmas time is here" from the Peanuts Christmas special and endears the audience of children young and old all the more to such programming. Conversely, we should be warned that "the man that hath no music in himself...is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils...Let no such man be trusted" - a line from another beautiful piece of music, Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Serenade to Music" (with its text adapted from Shakespeare's "music of the spheres" portion of Act V Scene 1 from his "Merchant of Venice") Vaughan Williams' masterpeice with its message about the importance of music in the eternities moved another beloved musical giant, Sergei Rachmaninoff - who wrote his "Vespers" in two weeks despite no professed musical affiliation - to tears.
Continuing on a divine note, thanks to this documentary, I've come to appreciate the extraordinary and unique ministry of Fred Rogers that in its own way stands alongside those of C.S. Lewis, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Jeffrey R. Holland. The genuine sincerity, authority, intelligence and eloquence with which such men speak to their intended auidences transcends religious affiliation, titles, and physical trappings - wherever such ministering angels like these men go, endearing music that evokes fond memories isn't far behind.
Funniest King of Queens for me
14 August 2018
Warning: Spoilers
I've always been cheap (washing & re-using Ziploc bags, hoarding fast food coupons, grocery ads, etc.) so when we first saw this episode where Carrie discovers Doug used a "50% off the second eye" coupon at Vision Village for Carrie's surgery that really wasn't a bargain after all, my wife and I both had a bout of side-splitting laughter.
I Can Only Imagine
(2018)
It's great because it's real
24 June 2018
Although this movie's domestic violence is a bit over-the-top for some tastes as far as Christian movies go - as some of these reviews have mentioned - especially since it involves children, it provides a stark contrast against which to convey the Christian message of redemption as is the case in other powerful Christian stories...
One of my favorite Christmas specials of all time, Rankin & Bass's "The Little Drummer Boy", tells the story of a little boy, whose family and home are cruelly taken from him by a band of robbers, who then finally learns to let go of his hate when he plays his heart out for the Christ child in a manger and experiences the love that only God can give.
Stepping out of storyland and into the grown-up real world, "Amazing Grace", John Newton's redemption story, is set against the backdrop of the slave trade, and imbues the famouse verses he penned with that much more depth and meaning as he himself helped manage and profited from that trade...
...not to mention that most Bible stories, even when parsed down for young audiences like they are in "The Living Scriptures" series, usually allude to - even if they don't outright depict - some form of severe violence that is more often than not part of the Christian's proving ground throughout history even though, in our culture, there's a Disneyesque taboo that's somehow carried over from mainstream family entertainment into Christian media that says we shouldn't even speak of it at all.
While violence never needs to be wanton and gratuitous as much Hollywood fare portrays with the help of endless special effects, it nevertheless is part of the fallen world in which we live for now and young children are not immuned to its effects.
Overcoming it and accepting God's message of forgiveness and love, especially after having survived it as an impressionable child, is one of the biggest challenges faced by many would-be Christians in our day and age and this story does a great job of showing how to do just that.
One of my favorite Christmas specials of all time, Rankin & Bass's "The Little Drummer Boy", tells the story of a little boy, whose family and home are cruelly taken from him by a band of robbers, who then finally learns to let go of his hate when he plays his heart out for the Christ child in a manger and experiences the love that only God can give.
Stepping out of storyland and into the grown-up real world, "Amazing Grace", John Newton's redemption story, is set against the backdrop of the slave trade, and imbues the famouse verses he penned with that much more depth and meaning as he himself helped manage and profited from that trade...
...not to mention that most Bible stories, even when parsed down for young audiences like they are in "The Living Scriptures" series, usually allude to - even if they don't outright depict - some form of severe violence that is more often than not part of the Christian's proving ground throughout history even though, in our culture, there's a Disneyesque taboo that's somehow carried over from mainstream family entertainment into Christian media that says we shouldn't even speak of it at all.
While violence never needs to be wanton and gratuitous as much Hollywood fare portrays with the help of endless special effects, it nevertheless is part of the fallen world in which we live for now and young children are not immuned to its effects.
Overcoming it and accepting God's message of forgiveness and love, especially after having survived it as an impressionable child, is one of the biggest challenges faced by many would-be Christians in our day and age and this story does a great job of showing how to do just that.
One of the 9/11 documentaries I've seen so far - up there w/ 9/11 explosive evidence
16 December 2017
Warning: Spoilers
At our home, on the 9/11 anniversary, we watch 9/11 retropsectives that usually feature recollections from first responders and survivors, news clips, families discussing their loss, etc., but don't really ask any hard questions.
On the other end of the spectrum, we've seen 9/11 discussions on Infowars, from independent journalists, YouTubers and the like that are vitriolic and get caught up in wrangling over who the perpetrators were, who wasn't in NYC that day, who stood to benefit and why - questions all of which need to be answered but are ever subject to change and shift as more evidence is brought to light with the passage of time.
Both extremes for me come up short.
While singling out "The project for a new American century" and a few prominent government lackeys pushing the official narrative, this documentary for the most part avoids the endless minutiae extrapolated from poring over documents and demonizing the deaf blind men who still perpetuate the 9/11 myth (see for example Webster Tarpley's ponderous tome "9/11: synthetic terror" that gets thicker and thicker with each subsequent edition) and chooses instead to focus on cognitive dissonance and the painful process it is for the average American to wake up to our nation's precarious situation which is something that has to happen on a national scale before the perpetrators are ever finally identified, their methods definitively exposed, and all these other ancillary issues - which agencies and defense contractors, politicians, foreign agents, demolition teams are to blame, etc. - are finally brought to light and laid to rest.
There are a lot of great printed quotes from the world's great thinkers in the montages during and between segments so that while I was watching on my desktop, I found myself puasing to read them on the screen, googling book titles, bringing up articles, and visiting various 9/11 truth websites.
The high point for me was the most cogent explanation from a structural engineering perspective I've heard yet (about 50 minutes in) as to why the official explanation is not scientifically sound as furnished by architects and engineers for 9/11 truth at ae911truth.org.
Their point was well made that whether we choose to face it or not, the laws of physics tell a different story than the official narrative does and no self-respecting architect or engineer who's worth their salt (or, for that matter, a layperson who can endure a 5-minute high school physics lecture) can accept the official explanation at face value without setting aside their basic education and understanding necessary for their line of work.
Regardless of who the culprits are, coming to terms with our own cognitive dissonance about the paradigm we thought we lived in as well as acknowledging the laws of physics is something we all need to do in order to survive as a nation and that point is very well made here.
That said, the last hour or so after the physics lesson featured a lot of psychologists talking about people having to come out of their comfort zone and come to terms with their world being shattered. One therapist talked about her discussions with her brother and how she was initially revolted that he would suggest that 9/11 was a false flag but that the more she read and researched for herself, the more she realized he was right which left her feeling she'd been cast out into the wilderness.
The last half dragged a bit for me probably because I've been a 9/11 truther almost from the moment the buildings fell. I remember thinking at the time that there were "kingmen" - to use a Book of Mormon term - who were bent on destroying the laws of this nation and 9/11 would be their excuse to do it which this documentary points out with its discussion of our abandoning habeus corpus (1297-2006) as a necessary expediency for waging our endless "war on terror".
In short, if you have friends or family who aren't awake yet and you don't want to aleinate them by being that crazy uncle in the tin-foil hat sputtering nonsense in an effort to try to say everything at once (I've done that too), but you still want to at least start an intelligent dialogue (religion, politics, and 9/11 are the three taboos now as someone in one of the clips says, so you have to tread carefully), then this documentary is a good way to get the ball rolling.
On the other end of the spectrum, we've seen 9/11 discussions on Infowars, from independent journalists, YouTubers and the like that are vitriolic and get caught up in wrangling over who the perpetrators were, who wasn't in NYC that day, who stood to benefit and why - questions all of which need to be answered but are ever subject to change and shift as more evidence is brought to light with the passage of time.
Both extremes for me come up short.
While singling out "The project for a new American century" and a few prominent government lackeys pushing the official narrative, this documentary for the most part avoids the endless minutiae extrapolated from poring over documents and demonizing the deaf blind men who still perpetuate the 9/11 myth (see for example Webster Tarpley's ponderous tome "9/11: synthetic terror" that gets thicker and thicker with each subsequent edition) and chooses instead to focus on cognitive dissonance and the painful process it is for the average American to wake up to our nation's precarious situation which is something that has to happen on a national scale before the perpetrators are ever finally identified, their methods definitively exposed, and all these other ancillary issues - which agencies and defense contractors, politicians, foreign agents, demolition teams are to blame, etc. - are finally brought to light and laid to rest.
There are a lot of great printed quotes from the world's great thinkers in the montages during and between segments so that while I was watching on my desktop, I found myself puasing to read them on the screen, googling book titles, bringing up articles, and visiting various 9/11 truth websites.
The high point for me was the most cogent explanation from a structural engineering perspective I've heard yet (about 50 minutes in) as to why the official explanation is not scientifically sound as furnished by architects and engineers for 9/11 truth at ae911truth.org.
Their point was well made that whether we choose to face it or not, the laws of physics tell a different story than the official narrative does and no self-respecting architect or engineer who's worth their salt (or, for that matter, a layperson who can endure a 5-minute high school physics lecture) can accept the official explanation at face value without setting aside their basic education and understanding necessary for their line of work.
Regardless of who the culprits are, coming to terms with our own cognitive dissonance about the paradigm we thought we lived in as well as acknowledging the laws of physics is something we all need to do in order to survive as a nation and that point is very well made here.
That said, the last hour or so after the physics lesson featured a lot of psychologists talking about people having to come out of their comfort zone and come to terms with their world being shattered. One therapist talked about her discussions with her brother and how she was initially revolted that he would suggest that 9/11 was a false flag but that the more she read and researched for herself, the more she realized he was right which left her feeling she'd been cast out into the wilderness.
The last half dragged a bit for me probably because I've been a 9/11 truther almost from the moment the buildings fell. I remember thinking at the time that there were "kingmen" - to use a Book of Mormon term - who were bent on destroying the laws of this nation and 9/11 would be their excuse to do it which this documentary points out with its discussion of our abandoning habeus corpus (1297-2006) as a necessary expediency for waging our endless "war on terror".
In short, if you have friends or family who aren't awake yet and you don't want to aleinate them by being that crazy uncle in the tin-foil hat sputtering nonsense in an effort to try to say everything at once (I've done that too), but you still want to at least start an intelligent dialogue (religion, politics, and 9/11 are the three taboos now as someone in one of the clips says, so you have to tread carefully), then this documentary is a good way to get the ball rolling.
Dark Legacy
(2009)
Unvarnished at-the-scene testimony -- then lots of charts -- could've covered more than just JFK
3 September 2017
Warning: Spoilers
I've learned from watching pivotal events unfold over the years, that initial testimony from people at the scene before an official narrative can be spun and all the messy details from initial accounts can be synthesized into corroborating official details can later prove invaluable for those interested later in revisiting the events of a given day and poking holes in said narrative. For example, when reporters on the scene on the morning of 9/11 got all these eyewitness accounts describing a series of explosions right before the twin towers came down OR when BBC reporter Jane Standley talked on the air later in the afternoon about the collapse of the Salomon Brothers Building (Building 7) on BBC Worldwide a whole twenty minutes before it actually collapsed - a clip since removed on copyright grounds - such tidbits, I am sure, made people like Webster Tarpley, author of "George Bush: the unauthorized biography" and later "9/11: synthetic terror" go, "wait, WHAT?!" and delve further.
The first part of this documentary has some great clips of just this kind of unfiltered initial testimony of people doing their jobs on the scene that day in Dallas and initial tidbits not adding up that similarly make anyone paying attention question the established official JFK narrative that's been put forth for over half a century. That George Bush can be plausibly linked to the JFK cover-up is all the more interesting because he can also be plausibly linked to the planning of 9/11 (Tarpley's "9/11: synthetic terror" makes a good case for a Bush/Cheney 9/11 connection) and the planning of the assassination attempt on Reagan (see below).
Having said that, after the documentary presents people-on-the-scene testimony from the JFK era - many of which I hadn't seen before - it then goes into the chart-on-the-wall territory linking Bush Sr.'s portrait to E. Howard Hunt's portrait, etc, etc in the same way that made my eyes glaze over watching Glenn Beck on the Blaze back in the day discussing the nefarious deeds of and all the links between Bill Ayers, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Saul Alinsky, George Soros, and the rest of Obama's crowd drawn from the Chicago machine, academia, and the global establishment.
Despite that, this documentary did manage to present some interesting facts I wasn't aware of like Zapata Petroleum putting Bush Sr. right in the middle of the Caribean where he could have been involved in anti-Castro operations in the '60's like the Bay of Pigs invasion code-named - what else? - Operation Zapata or businessman George de Mohrenschildt turning up dead in '77 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound right before he was to meet with an investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassinations to discuss the JFK case. I didn't realize anyone (besides Lee Harvey Oswald of course) from the JFK era was silenced that way. This bore an interesting resemblance to Gary Webb's "suicide" by two shots in the head after going public about the CIA's alleged role in the cocaine trade during Iran-Contra era (Bush again?) and portends the "whistleblowers beware" era we're so familiar with today exemplified in the Michael Hastings case where his Mercedes C250 ran into a tree and blew up sending the engine block flying several hundred yards behind the car right before he was to go public with some dirt he had on the CIA. (Remember all those engine blocks ejected from cars crashing into walls shown in those "You could learn a lot from a dummy" TV ads in the 80's and 90's? I don't either but recreating Hastings' accident to see if an engine could be made to eject like that would've made a great Mythbusters series finale.)
What I was hoping for from this documentary but didn't get was more time devoted to discussing Bush Sr.'s pre-9/11 connections - his business ties to the bin Laden family going back to the 1970's (Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founding Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas, In 1978 acc. to the Denver Post article, "Bush ties to bin Laden haunt grim anniversary") or the Bush's pre-Reagan assassination connection with would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr.'s, family ("Bush's son was to dine tonight with suspect's brother" by Arthur Wiese and Margaret Downing, Houston Post ca. March 1981 which reads in part, "Scott Hinckley ... was to have been a dinner guest Tuesday night at the home of Neil Bush..." - is that why Nancy seemed to dislike the Bushes so much?) and other "weird Bush stuff" that could establish a pattern that if touched on here, after awhile, would make anyone stop and say, "wait, WHAT?!". It's like the whole "Clinton body count" phenomenon where suspicion unavoidably mounts with the sheer number of deaths of former Clinton associates that Snopes, Mother Jones, etc, have to explain away all the while their credibility with each new iteration of their broken-record narrative and also reducing the odds that all those freak accidents, suicides, and deadly burglaries were just random happenstances and that's what could've been shown here. I mean, if your neighbor's business name showed up in a failed government operation, you'd probably shrug your shoulders and think, "huh, that's random" but then if their son's friend's brother tried to kill a prominent public figure, you'd wrinkle your nose and think, "that's odd" and finally if your neighbor's business partner's brother blew up a building, at some point you'd probably begin to wonder about your neighbor and at least ask them about it especially if they were running for public office.
"JFK" is in this documentary's title so I shouldn't have expected this other "Weird Bush stuff" to be touched on but, still this documentary could've helped explain to the uninitiated why the Bush's family name is mud as far as those who are awake are concerned and why they likely won't be winning more races for prominent political office any time soon...
The first part of this documentary has some great clips of just this kind of unfiltered initial testimony of people doing their jobs on the scene that day in Dallas and initial tidbits not adding up that similarly make anyone paying attention question the established official JFK narrative that's been put forth for over half a century. That George Bush can be plausibly linked to the JFK cover-up is all the more interesting because he can also be plausibly linked to the planning of 9/11 (Tarpley's "9/11: synthetic terror" makes a good case for a Bush/Cheney 9/11 connection) and the planning of the assassination attempt on Reagan (see below).
Having said that, after the documentary presents people-on-the-scene testimony from the JFK era - many of which I hadn't seen before - it then goes into the chart-on-the-wall territory linking Bush Sr.'s portrait to E. Howard Hunt's portrait, etc, etc in the same way that made my eyes glaze over watching Glenn Beck on the Blaze back in the day discussing the nefarious deeds of and all the links between Bill Ayers, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Saul Alinsky, George Soros, and the rest of Obama's crowd drawn from the Chicago machine, academia, and the global establishment.
Despite that, this documentary did manage to present some interesting facts I wasn't aware of like Zapata Petroleum putting Bush Sr. right in the middle of the Caribean where he could have been involved in anti-Castro operations in the '60's like the Bay of Pigs invasion code-named - what else? - Operation Zapata or businessman George de Mohrenschildt turning up dead in '77 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound right before he was to meet with an investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassinations to discuss the JFK case. I didn't realize anyone (besides Lee Harvey Oswald of course) from the JFK era was silenced that way. This bore an interesting resemblance to Gary Webb's "suicide" by two shots in the head after going public about the CIA's alleged role in the cocaine trade during Iran-Contra era (Bush again?) and portends the "whistleblowers beware" era we're so familiar with today exemplified in the Michael Hastings case where his Mercedes C250 ran into a tree and blew up sending the engine block flying several hundred yards behind the car right before he was to go public with some dirt he had on the CIA. (Remember all those engine blocks ejected from cars crashing into walls shown in those "You could learn a lot from a dummy" TV ads in the 80's and 90's? I don't either but recreating Hastings' accident to see if an engine could be made to eject like that would've made a great Mythbusters series finale.)
What I was hoping for from this documentary but didn't get was more time devoted to discussing Bush Sr.'s pre-9/11 connections - his business ties to the bin Laden family going back to the 1970's (Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founding Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas, In 1978 acc. to the Denver Post article, "Bush ties to bin Laden haunt grim anniversary") or the Bush's pre-Reagan assassination connection with would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr.'s, family ("Bush's son was to dine tonight with suspect's brother" by Arthur Wiese and Margaret Downing, Houston Post ca. March 1981 which reads in part, "Scott Hinckley ... was to have been a dinner guest Tuesday night at the home of Neil Bush..." - is that why Nancy seemed to dislike the Bushes so much?) and other "weird Bush stuff" that could establish a pattern that if touched on here, after awhile, would make anyone stop and say, "wait, WHAT?!". It's like the whole "Clinton body count" phenomenon where suspicion unavoidably mounts with the sheer number of deaths of former Clinton associates that Snopes, Mother Jones, etc, have to explain away all the while their credibility with each new iteration of their broken-record narrative and also reducing the odds that all those freak accidents, suicides, and deadly burglaries were just random happenstances and that's what could've been shown here. I mean, if your neighbor's business name showed up in a failed government operation, you'd probably shrug your shoulders and think, "huh, that's random" but then if their son's friend's brother tried to kill a prominent public figure, you'd wrinkle your nose and think, "that's odd" and finally if your neighbor's business partner's brother blew up a building, at some point you'd probably begin to wonder about your neighbor and at least ask them about it especially if they were running for public office.
"JFK" is in this documentary's title so I shouldn't have expected this other "Weird Bush stuff" to be touched on but, still this documentary could've helped explain to the uninitiated why the Bush's family name is mud as far as those who are awake are concerned and why they likely won't be winning more races for prominent political office any time soon...
AmeriGeddon
(2016)
Low-budget depiction of the last-ditch resistance against the noose that Carroll Quigley suggests is tightening around our necks once our time is finally up
2 October 2016
Warning: Spoilers
With Chuck Norris' son at the helm, Amerigeddon offers hokey acting and low production value to be sure - you'd have to look through Christian family entertainment titles to find anything nearly as bad - but, even if it's probably under most people's radar and deservedly so, its message is timely although a film covering material like this is not going to get a big budget Hollywood treatment any time soon since entertainment professionals with such views are blacklisted in Hollywood which instead is bent on depicting preppers as inbred, polygamous religious fanatics marrying children in their compounds with their guns at the ready to shoot interloping law enforcement. (See the "Nine wives" episode from season 3 of Numb3rs for a typical example) In this current Hollywood climate, I suspect Mike Norris didn't have a whole lot of resources to draw on and this film's inferior quality consequently shines through.
Even though the film itself was awful, the issues and context it represents is something that shouldn't be ignored. I admit upfront that I'm a confessed former NPR listener / donor whose paradigm has since been changed by passing familiarity with Gary Allen's None dare call it a conspiracy, Jean Raspail's The camp of the saints, Woodrow Wilson's chief adviser Edward Mandell House's Philip Dru: administrator, Alexander Inglis' Principles of Secondary Education (for a discussion of chapter 10 of Inglis' book, see the YouTube video, "John Taylor Gatto: the purpose of schooling"), Leonard Lewin's Report from Iron Mountain, G. Edward Griffin's The creature from Jekyll Island, the works of the Fabian socialists, Margaret Sanger, Anthony Sutton, Murray Rothbard, and John Taylor Gatto, and of course Tragedy and Hope by Bill Clinton's mentor Carroll Quigley which you can find reviewed in a 1966 back issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs in the JSTOR database at your local library or see summarized in W. Cleon Skousen's The naked capitalist. The aggregate globalist message of these works - snuffing out Western middle-class prosperity, mores, values, and the surplus population itself using economic pressure, birth control, Prussian-style compulsory education, environmental regulations, a dependency-promoting welfare state, a staged clash of civilizations, and ultimately brute force to create a well-pruned, malleable, disarmed, drugged up, hyper-regulated, child-like populace governable by a modern ubiquitous administrative surveillance-state - is what the resistance fighters refuse to accept in Amerigeddon and taken together is what ultimately animates their fight.
If you follow Infowars, Breitbart, and Drudge (all of which will likely be pulled soon just as Savage Nation recently was), you'll notice that Amerigeddon is an amalgam of the ideas in the above-mentioned books which have gotten their second wind in these alternative media outlets and if you've heard of Amerigeddon at all, it probably was in one of these venues. Talk-show discussions and articles about billionaire-financed revolutions, Jade Helm, the impending federalization of police, UN takeover of the U.S. military and regulatory bodies and the Internet, gun control, big pharma, corporate migration overseas to countries where environmental regulations are not imposed, as well as topics du jour like the CDC's refusal to conduct a study comparing autism rates in MMR-vaccinated vs unvaccinated children or the German family who sought asylum to home school their kids, and relentless calls for abolishing the Federal Reserve are interspersed with ads using Mafiophobia to peddle precious metals, non-GMO herbal supplements and food storage, body armor, ammo, EMP-proof solar generators, and other prepper items which the main characters in Amerigeddon seem to have in a good supply.
The way these alternative media outlets like Savage nation usually tell it and the way Amerigeddon portrays it, the financial angel currently sponsoring much of this social unrest is the ubiquitous George Soros who uses a phalanx of tax-exempt foundations to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to finance agitator groups, riots, and mass Muslim (but not eastern Christian) migrations into the West - all with the end objective of consolidating the world's wealth and power and collapsing the remaining independent nation-states of the West into a global New World Order run by a cartel of multi-national corporations, megabanks and Roundtable groups as described by Quigley, Allen, and others. These entities, they say, are headed up by Soros and his ilk - families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds in years past - who nowadays have armed body guards, private jets, multiple mansions and super-yachts leaving huge carbon footprints that the average individual working-class citizen would be hard-pressed to match while these same elites use their ownership/control of seminal news outlets like AP and Reuters to mold public opinion in favor of population control and doing more with less to avoid impending environmental disaster.
The Soros character in Norris' film is elevated from social agitator and environmental regulator sponsor to the status of James Bond villain whose endgame involves a doomsday satellite weapon armed with an EMP that wipes out the power grid of the United States, paving the way for a Jade Helm-style invasion by Chinese troops into the American heartland accompanied by gun confiscation and martial law. The U.N. invaders set out to extinguish the last pockets of resistance with the help of traitorous American military leaders in order to usher in the New World Order which a few lone-wolf Texans desperately try to stave off.
Amerigeddon's shelf life, if it will have any, will be due to its being an interesting historical footnote and curiosity should its scenario ever go from being a Sinophobic fantasy to nightmarish reality in much the same way that the March 4, 2001, TV pilot episode of an otherwise-utterly forgettable TV series, The Lone Gunmen, is still remembered for using the plot device of airliners being crashed into the World Trade Center via remote-control in much the same way Webster Tarpley hypothesized it happened in his book, 9/11 : synthetic terror, where he asserted that the planes that actually crashed into the World Trade Center were navigated remotely using the Global Hawk guidance system.
Even though the film itself was awful, the issues and context it represents is something that shouldn't be ignored. I admit upfront that I'm a confessed former NPR listener / donor whose paradigm has since been changed by passing familiarity with Gary Allen's None dare call it a conspiracy, Jean Raspail's The camp of the saints, Woodrow Wilson's chief adviser Edward Mandell House's Philip Dru: administrator, Alexander Inglis' Principles of Secondary Education (for a discussion of chapter 10 of Inglis' book, see the YouTube video, "John Taylor Gatto: the purpose of schooling"), Leonard Lewin's Report from Iron Mountain, G. Edward Griffin's The creature from Jekyll Island, the works of the Fabian socialists, Margaret Sanger, Anthony Sutton, Murray Rothbard, and John Taylor Gatto, and of course Tragedy and Hope by Bill Clinton's mentor Carroll Quigley which you can find reviewed in a 1966 back issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs in the JSTOR database at your local library or see summarized in W. Cleon Skousen's The naked capitalist. The aggregate globalist message of these works - snuffing out Western middle-class prosperity, mores, values, and the surplus population itself using economic pressure, birth control, Prussian-style compulsory education, environmental regulations, a dependency-promoting welfare state, a staged clash of civilizations, and ultimately brute force to create a well-pruned, malleable, disarmed, drugged up, hyper-regulated, child-like populace governable by a modern ubiquitous administrative surveillance-state - is what the resistance fighters refuse to accept in Amerigeddon and taken together is what ultimately animates their fight.
If you follow Infowars, Breitbart, and Drudge (all of which will likely be pulled soon just as Savage Nation recently was), you'll notice that Amerigeddon is an amalgam of the ideas in the above-mentioned books which have gotten their second wind in these alternative media outlets and if you've heard of Amerigeddon at all, it probably was in one of these venues. Talk-show discussions and articles about billionaire-financed revolutions, Jade Helm, the impending federalization of police, UN takeover of the U.S. military and regulatory bodies and the Internet, gun control, big pharma, corporate migration overseas to countries where environmental regulations are not imposed, as well as topics du jour like the CDC's refusal to conduct a study comparing autism rates in MMR-vaccinated vs unvaccinated children or the German family who sought asylum to home school their kids, and relentless calls for abolishing the Federal Reserve are interspersed with ads using Mafiophobia to peddle precious metals, non-GMO herbal supplements and food storage, body armor, ammo, EMP-proof solar generators, and other prepper items which the main characters in Amerigeddon seem to have in a good supply.
The way these alternative media outlets like Savage nation usually tell it and the way Amerigeddon portrays it, the financial angel currently sponsoring much of this social unrest is the ubiquitous George Soros who uses a phalanx of tax-exempt foundations to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to finance agitator groups, riots, and mass Muslim (but not eastern Christian) migrations into the West - all with the end objective of consolidating the world's wealth and power and collapsing the remaining independent nation-states of the West into a global New World Order run by a cartel of multi-national corporations, megabanks and Roundtable groups as described by Quigley, Allen, and others. These entities, they say, are headed up by Soros and his ilk - families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds in years past - who nowadays have armed body guards, private jets, multiple mansions and super-yachts leaving huge carbon footprints that the average individual working-class citizen would be hard-pressed to match while these same elites use their ownership/control of seminal news outlets like AP and Reuters to mold public opinion in favor of population control and doing more with less to avoid impending environmental disaster.
The Soros character in Norris' film is elevated from social agitator and environmental regulator sponsor to the status of James Bond villain whose endgame involves a doomsday satellite weapon armed with an EMP that wipes out the power grid of the United States, paving the way for a Jade Helm-style invasion by Chinese troops into the American heartland accompanied by gun confiscation and martial law. The U.N. invaders set out to extinguish the last pockets of resistance with the help of traitorous American military leaders in order to usher in the New World Order which a few lone-wolf Texans desperately try to stave off.
Amerigeddon's shelf life, if it will have any, will be due to its being an interesting historical footnote and curiosity should its scenario ever go from being a Sinophobic fantasy to nightmarish reality in much the same way that the March 4, 2001, TV pilot episode of an otherwise-utterly forgettable TV series, The Lone Gunmen, is still remembered for using the plot device of airliners being crashed into the World Trade Center via remote-control in much the same way Webster Tarpley hypothesized it happened in his book, 9/11 : synthetic terror, where he asserted that the planes that actually crashed into the World Trade Center were navigated remotely using the Global Hawk guidance system.
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