Saturday Matinee: The Chocolate War

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“The Chocolate War” (1988) is the film version of the classic YA novel by Robert Cormier. It was the debut feature film from actor Keith Gordon (The Legend of Billie Jean) who directed as well as wrote the screenplay. The film depicts the rebellion of new student Jerry Renault (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) against his school’s official and unofficial structures of power while coming to terms with his mother’s death. The Chocolate War features solid acting from the entire cast, especially John Glover and Wallace Langham as the main antagonists and Bud Cort (Harold and Maude) in a memorable cameo appearance. The film also features a fine soundtrack of 80s artists such as Yaz, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel.

Watch the The Chocolate War here.

Saturday Matinee: In the Year of the Pig

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“In the Year of the Pig” (1968) by Emile De Antonio (Point of Order, Underground, Rush to Judgement) was one of the earliest Vietnam War documentaries and was often greeted with hostility during its run in theaters by pro-war audiences. It combines interviews with a wide range of journalists, politicians, activists and key military personnel (including Harry Ashmore, Daniel Berrigan, Philippe Devillers, David Halberstam, Roger Hilsman, Jean Lacouture, Kenneth P. Landon, Paul Mus, Charlton Osburn, Harrison Salisbury, Ilya Todd, John Toller, David K. Tuck, David Werfel and John White), international newsreels and archival footage to create a scathing portrait of America’ escalating involvement in Vietnam. Horrific images speak for themselves in the most controversial film of de Antonio’s career.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xm7wme_in-the-year-of-the-pig_shortfilms

Saturday Matinee: League of Gods

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“League of Gods” (2016) is a Hong Kong/Chinese production directed by Koan Hui (co-screenwriter of The Blade) and starring Jet Li, Tony Leung, Fan Bingbing, Louis Koo, Huang Xiaoming, Angelababy, Wen Zhang, and Jacky Heung. It’s an adaptation of Fengshen Yanyi, a 16th century novel by Xu Zhonglin widely viewed as one of the great works of Chinese literature. The story is a mythologized retelling of the fall of the Shang dynasty combining elements of history, folklore and fantasy and has previously been adapted as a manga, anime, TV series and video game.

Saturday Matinee: VR Short Double Feature

“Uncanny Valley” (2015, dir. Federico Heller) uses a documentary format and virtual reality scenarios to depict a frightening world in which damaged individuals rely on VR as a means to escape their depressing social reality while being used by the state.

“Hyper-Reality” (2016, dir. Keiichi Matsuda) depicts an average day in the life of a struggling precariat woman, that is, until she’s gang stalked by virtual and physical predators.

The real Hunger Games: the Capitalist recipe to maximise profits while ‘having fun’

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By Sky Wanderer

Source: Investment Watch

Introduce a political economy upon the arbitrary axiom that Capitalism is the one and only economic system for mankind, and introduce a narcissistic moral philosophy that you as a Capitalist represent unsurpassable objective moral virtues.

You as a Capitalist hire politicians to implement policy as per your moral and economic philosophy and redefine ‘democracy’ as the political system to sustain Capitalism. Then from such position of self-established authority, abolish unions and all labour-representation, thus force your employees into a race-to-the-bottom contest to compete for jobs by accepting lower and lower wages.

Give decent jobs and benefits to only those who belong to your noble circles. For everyone else reintroduce slavery in the form of “workfare”. The goal is that you pay the lowest wages for jobs done by the fittest slaves, who will survive the contest. If you wish, you can call the contest “real Hunger Games”.

To speed up the process, extend the race-to-the-bottom into global scope so that you will have access to the cheapest and fittest labour everywhere on the planet. Never mind that your slaves will have to live out of a suitcase and every time when you lay them off and labour demand calls them elsewhere, they will have to relocate to yet another continent.

To further accelerate the process, make good use of your 3rd-world colonies, your Mideast colonising wars and your secretly sponsored mercenaries (ISIS). Via your “leftist” assistants, organise a massive refugee crisis to import the cheapest possible workforce via your war-refugees and economic migrants. These migrants are the fittest contestants who – glad just to escape your bombs – will worship you as their saviours and will work for you for literally zero payment. The migrants will not only boost your profits to sky-high levels but will rapidly pull down the overall wages of your domestic employees.

Meanwhile keep increasing the prices so your slaves can’t pay for food, energy, heat and shelter from their next-to-zero incomes. If some of them attempt to survive by taking bank-loans to acquire shelter, education and meet other basic needs, but they can’t repay the loans from their low incomes, you can just evict them from their homes via your banks.

When you made them homeless this way, make sure their ugly presence won’t spoil the beauty of your city. Install pretty anti-homeless spikes, so when they crush onto the pavement they will die, and you can just collect their bodies. To project your capitalist moral virtues into eternity, incorporate the beauty of your anti-homeless spikes into the modern concept of art and beauty.

Introduce private banking to enable yourself to creating new money when you wish. This way you can easily indebt the entire society, soon you can even purchase the whole planet.

Meanwhile dismantle public healthcare, so those of your slaves who are still alive but get sick, will die without treatment. Eliminate (privatise) all affordable public services, destroy the public sphere, abolish all public spaces and welfare benefits. To have a dandy excuse for such policy, make sure to keep the country in ever increasing debt by taking countless £ billions of government loans, and transfer the responsibility of these odious debts onto your slaves. Refer to these debts as the reason for the crisis, then refer to the crisis as the reason for these debts, then refer to the debts and the crisis as the reason for austerity and spending cuts. Then you can increase the public debt again and continue the same loop ad infinitum.

Make sure your very own mainstream media and academia would never reveal the truth that the never-ending crisis and mass-unemployment are due to your private banking and debt- and profit-mongering dysfunctional capitalist system, and keep the real disastrous indicators of the state of economy in secret.

Instead of admitting the truth, use the divide et impera strategy to make your victims blame themselves and one another. To increase the fun, produce reality shows where the still active part of your slaves will blame the disabled and the unemployed, meanwhile make the local poor blame the immigrant poor for the overall misery that you inflicted. Then establish offices where the local poor dressed as fancy clerks will evict the immigrant poor, meanwhile watch how all of them are begging for their lives until they give up and commit suicide.

Enjoy!

Saturday Matinee: Attack the Block

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“Attack the Block” (2011) is a British  sci-fi/horror/comedy written and directed by Joe Cornish. The plot takes place in London on Guy Fawkes night following a teenage street gang who, with the help of neighbors, drug dealers, a nurse and college student, hatch a scheme to save their city from an alien invasion. The film was produced from the creators of Shaun of the Dead and features a cameo by Nick Frost as well as a stand-out lead performance (and film debut) by John Boyega who later played Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Watch the full movie here.

Saturday Matinee: Mars Attacks!

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“Mars Attacks!” (1996) is a satirical alien invasion film directed by Tim Burton and starring a surprisingly large cast of familiar actors. It’s easy to forget that Burton, now a friend of the establishment, once made films with a misanthropic subversive element. This is in full view in Mars Attacks! which (similar to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers) embraces its inherently xenophobic premise and pushes it over-the-top to skewer society’s most cherished institutions (ie. government, media, religion, and business). The movie bombed when first released but perhaps it was just a little ahead of its time?
Watch the full film here.

Saturday Matinee: Carnival of Souls

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Synopsis from Wikipedia:

Carnival of Souls is a 1962 American independent horror film starring Candace Hilligoss. The film was produced and directed by Herk Harvey for an estimated $33,000. Carnival of Souls did not gain widespread attention when originally released as a double feature with The Devil’s Messenger. Today, however, it is regarded as a cult classic. Its plot follows a young woman whose life is disturbed after a car accident, finding herself drawn to the pavilion of an abandoned carnival.

Set to an organ score by Gene Moore, Carnival of Souls relies more on atmosphere than on special effects to create a mood of unease and foreboding. The film has a large cult following and is occasionally screened at film and Halloween festivals. It has been cited as an important influence on the films of both David Lynch and George A. Romero.