Propaganda Minister wanted

 

You know what I think?  I think Trump just likes signing documents at the Resolute desk and holding them up for the camera.  He thrives on putting his name on things.

Whaaaaat?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08/03/2023:

Don't know much about the Oscars

I usually check in after the Oscars to see who won.  Usually I don't know most of the actors because I don't watch many current movies (and by current, I mean anything that hasn't made it to free streaming).  The only movies nominated this year that I saw were Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once.  I liked them both.  Only Banshees is one I'll watch more than once.

Since I haven't seen most of them, I can't compare actors' performances, but I will say it's hard to imagine anyone giving a better performance than Brendan Gleeson in Banshees.  But, without a doubt, if anybody should get an award for best dressed actor, it should be him.  That jacket is classy and snazzy at the same time.  Good on ya, Brendan.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The whole world is watching

Outdated models of masculinity?

“As Hollywood begins to navigate the #MeToo landscape,” Tatiana Siegel reported, “one of the first casualties appears to be big-screen erotica. [...] Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in the Washington Post, hopes that Hollywood’s embarrassed executives are navigating “the end of a very narrow way of thinking about what’s alluring.”

[...]

This reckoning is long overdue. And it can be extended to another genre that has distorted how men behave: war movies. [...] Some of the biggest war movies of the post-9/11 era don’t just show violence in ways that are often gratuitous and occasionally racist. They model a cliched form of masculinity that veers from simplistic to monstrous."

[...]

Whenever I write about the real-world impact of war movies – and I’ve gone to bat against “American Sniper,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “13 Hours” — I always get responses along the lines of “Relax, these are just movies. Don’t take them so seriously. They’re harmless.” That’s when it becomes necessary to say that movies can create or reinforce narratives of history and gender that influence what people think and what they do. Boys and men develop their notions of masculinity from a variety of sources that include the films they watch (the extent to which this is true is, of course, open to debate).

[...]

What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.

  Intercept

I couldn't agree more with that last sentence.  This is a good article.  I say that without having seen the movie it's reviewing: "12 Strong".  And I won't be seeing it, based on the review and the screenshot, and the fact that I've never been a fan of war movies.

But, this is one of the things I appreciated about 'Dunkirk', a war movie that I did go see - it wasn't war porn. It was an intelligent and beautifully shot movie.  I'm not so sure, though, as the headline of the above Intercept article reads, that these models of masculinity are outdated. They're sad, but they seem pretty strong to me. Maybe that's due in part to the movies. But those movies wouldn't make so much money if they had no appeal because they were outdated.

And, speaking of the screenshot, you know of course that's an American movie piece of propaganda where it's the Americans who are always leading the heroic charges in brown people's wars.  The brown people are always the extras.  According to the review, this is a movie about actual events, but this event didn't happen.  Surprise.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Columbia, Missouri, Makes It to al Jazeera

So there.

The True/False Film Fest, a documentary-focused program that started this year’s run on Thursday, has become one of the most respected film festivals in the country, if not internationally. Yet most people outside the film community and Columbia, Mo., where the festival takes place, have never heard of it.

When it started 11 years ago, the festival sold about 4,000 tickets. This year, T/F nearly sold out of its 50,000 tickets more than two weeks before it opened.

[...]

Robert Greene, premiering his new film “Actress” at this year’s True/False, called the event a “perfect storm.” The timing is good because it’s held after Sundance and before South by Southwest. The selection includes smaller, quirky movies as well as known names. And it’s held in an affordable, charming college town with a nationally known journalism school.

“All the directors go there, big films, small films, the ones who just won Sundance,” said Greene, who is premiering a film here for the third time.

  Aljazeera

Nooooooooooooooooo!

Latino News columnist Umberto “El Mayimbe” Gonzalez told interview[er] Victor Garcia: “Harrison Ford will reprise his role as Han Solo in the upcoming Star Wars movies. The deal is done. It’s huge.”

[...]

Another insider-scoop blogger, Roger Friedman of showbiz411.com, agreed with Gonzalez, asserting that he was “told some time ago that Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill would be reprising their roles” in Episode VII. He also claimed to have some plot details: “It’s some time in the future. Han, Princess Leia (presumably with a better hairstyle) and Luke Skywalker will be a lot older. Their children will be the new main characters. R2D2 and C-3PO will be unchanged.”

  Raw Story

Well, it can't be worse than that second round of Star Wars movies. Or can it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.