Movie Review: Love Actually (2003)

Ultimate post-911 feel-good holiday movie (9/10)

All you need is love. — The Beatles

You look at the IMDb entry for Love Actually and you think they must have spent a year assembling so large a cast of quite competent working actors from stage and screen—I swear there are 100+ names on the list—not to mention acquiring the services of all the stars.  Anyway, regardless of how one feels about the acting profession, one has to hand it to all the beautiful people in this film for doing a first rate job in conveying a dozen separate love stories… not to mention kudos to the director for weaving them together so seamlessly.

Thus credit goes primarily to the director/writer, Richard Curtis, who has written such fine English fare as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.  On this occasion he also directs, and from the DVD extras we learn he was highly motivated to counter the negative energy from the 911 attacks —negative whether one believes the official conspiracy theory of 911 or the evidential alternative conspiracy theory(s) of 911.  And Curtis sought to do so explicitly through the healing energies of love and music in the lives of real people.  The soundtrack itself brings your spirit to a special place.

The movie begins with actual video footage taken at the Heathrow Airport arrival gates of people of all shapes, colors, and sizes embracing one another.  The caring yet confident voice of Hugh Grant, playing the newly elected prime minister of England, fades in with words that prove to be the movie’s overarching theme: Continue reading

Movie Review: A Christmas Story (1983)

“You’ll shoot your eye out.” (10/10)

christmas_storyA Christmas Story is becoming the It’s a Wonderful Life of the Baby Boomer generation… maybe more so for the Tweener Generation—a designation I just made up for folks born between, say, 1930 and 1946.  The movie is especially meaningful for those who were boys in the context of a loving family where Pop worked, Mom kept house (and kept you out of trouble), and the Popsicle Index [1] was nearly 100%.

The year is somewhere around 1940—some reviews claim it’s the depression era, one says it’s 1940, some say it’s the 1940s in general, and it always looked to me something like 1949—in Hohman, Indiana, a mythical northern industrial city approximating Gary, Indiana.  The movie is based on several narratives from Jean Shepherd’s book of reminiscences, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Mr. Shepherd narrates the movie, which was filmed in the early 1980s in Toronto, with some downtown shots set in Cleveland. He’s Ralph Parker, a New York writer thinking back to the days when he was Ralphie, a nine-year-old everyboy growing up there in middle-class Indiana off the smokestack-laden southern shores of Lake Michigan with Mom (Melinda Dillon) and the Old Man (Darren McGavin) and his exasperatingly, though often funny, infantile five-year-old brother. Continue reading

Movie Review: Who Killed the Electric Car? (2005)

Documentary written and directed by Chris Paine

BW’s Note: The following review is not intended to vouch for all the claims made in this documentary movie, though I do find many of  the arguments and statements of fact compelling or at least reasonable.

electric_carWho Killed the Electric Car? is a clever, heart-wrenching post-mortem of the GM electric car by first-time director Chris Paine.  The film, made for a budget of one million dollars, premiered in January 2006 at the Sundance Film Festival and has been gathering viewer-advocates ever since.

In the 1990s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) imposed a requirement that auto manufacturers include a small percentage of “zero emission” vehicles to sell cars there.

In response, General Motors built the EV1.  The initial release in 1997 had a range of 55-75 miles.  The second generation of EV1s released in the 2000 model year were equipped with advanced batteries for a range of 75-150 miles.

The air-conditioned EV1s had equal or better acceleration and cruising speeds than their internal-combustion-engine counterparts. The list of EV1 advanced features reads like a Green auto-enthusiast’s wet dream: including regenerative braking, traction control, and an air drag coefficient of 0.19. Continue reading

Movie Review: America: From Freedom to Fascism (2006)

Passionate call to action from leading-edge libertarian director Aaron Russo
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

freedom_to_fascismReview originally posted, April 2007. — bw

Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws. —  Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

The Constitution is just a goddam piece of paper.
— George Bush II

Today I come down to earth with commentary on Aaron Russo’s important documentary for resolving two peculiarly American precipitants of tyranny: the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act. Both of these confiscation-and-control mechanisms were set in place in the ominous year of 1913.

Note: This review was written originally in spring of 2007. Since 2003, with the publication of Peter Hendrickson’s Cracking the Code: The fascinating truth about taxation in America, steadily increasing numbers of people have come to understand that the federal income tax is NOT unconstitutional—namely, because income is very specifically defined in the statutes and code as an excise due to exercise of a federal privilege.

When I first wrote this review, neither the producer of the film nor I were aware of the ‘Hendrickson Discovery.’ Thus several of Russo’s observations about the tax while correct in spirit (if one uses the incorrect yet commonplace definition of income) are not correct in fact. Still, I have retained the wording from the original review.

[The fact is that a goodly part of the intent of those behind the 16th Amendment was to obfuscate the reality of the income tax as solely applying to payments or property rendered to an individual from the federal government. IOW, these tax advocates did want—via subterfuge and deception—the people to come to believe that their non-federal direct earnings were subject to the tax.] Continue reading

Movie Review: Wag the Dog (1997)

Wag the Dog ____ 8/10
Only the role of the CIA rings doubtful

wag_the_dogBy that I mean, in real life, were the president to try to spin favorable poll numbers by creating a phony war in the media, the CIA would be in the loop.  Indeed, the CIA would be the loop.

[Note: this is a timely reposting of my review from August 2007. Nearly 10 years have passed since the original review and nearly 20 years since the movie’s premier. For anyone who doubts that the media today conveys a manufactured reality 24/7/365, please watch this film… and be prepared to cringe in reluctant acknowledgment.]

That’s the fascinating premise of this decade-old, Clinton-era satire of what the rich and powerful friends of the president can do these days if the president gets in trouble.  In the movie the Clinton-like POTUS (President of the United States) is accused of enticing an underage “Firefly Girl” (a Girl Scout analog) into a room in the White House and taking unspecified liberties there.

The president is up for reelection within two weeks and the media is already beginning to home in on the indiscretion.  His opponent has ads playing Maurice Chevalier’s “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”  His handlers know he’s in deep trouble and they need to generate a smokescreen to deflect all the attention from the voters.

Presidential aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) locates seasoned political spin-doctor Conrad Brean, who accompanies her to a White House basement skunk works and begins to work out a plan:  Let the President stay in China for a few more days, have the White House press spokesman start denying the existence of a bomber which does not exist, then create a threat from a small country no one knows much about: Albania. Continue reading

Movie Review: VAXXED (2016)

From coverup to catastrophe, the film they don’t want you to see
Produced by Del Bigtree, Polly Tommey, and directed by Dr. Andrew Wakefield

vaxxedWhat hits me just past the credits of this marvelous film is how on earth these hundreds of thousands of clinical cases of autism stemming directly from the administering of vaccines—particularly the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) trifecta from Merck—is somehow NOT a scientific fact. IOW, when one is passing judgment on the value of a medical treatment, why doesn’t one consider its substantial effects on real people as SCIENTIFICALLY RELEVANT?! Real science aims to gibe with the facts of reality, not sweep them under the rug.

VAXXED is a heartbreaking film.[1] The most hardened, unquestioning vaccine enthusiast—not to mention the most passionate advocate of vaccine truth, science, and freedom—will find it difficult not to succumb to tears watching the havoc these substances have wreaked on children and families around the world.

Which is the main focus of the film, it makes two related points: Continue reading

Movie Review: Follow the Fleet (1936)

Classic with a monster Fred and Ginger song-and-dance hit at the end (8/10)

follow_the_fleetReaders of my movie reviews realize occasionally I like to dig back into the vault of golden memories, even before I was born, to check out the classics.  Follow the Fleet is one such classic that you may have a hard time finding at your local video store, but NetFlix carries the DVD complete with some fascinating special features.

Fleet was released in 1936 during the middle of the depression when people were having a tough time worldwide finding jobs or even finding food to put on the table.  In Europe Hitler was on the rise, along with other nationalist/socialist whackjobs.  In the United States seeds of the Cartel sown with the Federal Reserve Act and subterfuges surrounding the income tax amendment (16) were beginning to bear fruit for connected finance capitalists and their dominating secret societies.

For the average guy and girl, times were tough.  Enter Hollywood with at least some hopeful images—I don’t think we can properly call them propaganda at this point, even though this particular movie revolves around war-preparatory naval exercises.  The real issue for boys and girls then, as now, was how to hook up with the right one, lead a decent life, have wonderful children, with a modicum of grace and elegance.

The odds were long. Continue reading