Shoot On Sight - Menezes feature film being supressed

[Disco_Destroyer]

Hollywood's New Censors

By John Pilger

February 17, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" --- When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favourable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, “politics”, included comments such as: “This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.”

By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, “articulates the new patriotism”. The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (“liberal by instinct”) and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or “gooks”. The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. “I have this insane feeling that I was there,” he said. “Somehow … the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.”

The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. “The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” said the Daily Mail. President Jimmy Carter was reportedly moved by its “genuine American message”. Catharsis was at hand. The Vietnam movies became a revisionist popular history of the great crime in Indo-China. That more than four million people had died terribly and unnecessarily and their homeland poisoned to a wasteland was not the concern of these films. Rather, Vietnam was an “American tragedy”, in which the invader was to be pitied in a blend of false bravado-and-angst: sometimes crude (the Rambo films) and sometimes subtle (Oliver Stone’s Platoon). What mattered was the strength of the purgative.

None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native-American; and how the Second World War has been relentlessly glorified, which may be harmless enough unless you happen to be one of countless innocent human beings, from Serbia to Iraq, whose deaths or dispossession are justified by moralising references to 1939-45. Hollywood’s gooks, its Untermenschen, are essential to this crusade -- the dispatched Somalis in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the sinister Arabs in movies like Rendition, in which the torturing CIA is absolved by Jake Gyllenhal’s good egg. As Robbie Graham and Mark Alford pointed out in their New Statesman enquiry into corporate control of the cinema (2 February), in 167 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the Palestinian cause is restricted to just two and a half minutes. “Far from being an ‘even-handed cry for peace’, as one critic claimed,” they wrote, “Munich is more easily interpreted as a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy.”

With honourable exceptions, film critics rarely question this and identify the true power behind the screen. Obsessed with celebrity actors and vacuous narratives, they are the cinema’s lobby correspondents, its dutiful press corps. Emitting safe snipes and sneers, they promote a deeply political system that dominates most of what we pay to see, knowing not what we are denied. Brian de Palma’s 2007 film Redacted shows an Iraq the media does not report. He depicts the homicides and gang-rapes that are never prosecuted and are the essence of any colonial conquest. In the New York Village Voice, the critic Anthony Kaufman, in abusing the “divisive” De Palma for his “perverse tales of voyeurism and violence”, did his best to taint the film as a kind of heresy and to bury it.

In this way, the “war on terror” – the conquest and subversion of resource rich regions of the world, whose ramifications and oppressions touch all our lives – is almost excluded from the popular cinema. Michael Moore’s outstanding Fahrenheit 911 was a freak; the notoriety of its distribution ban by the Walt Disney Company helped to force its way into cinemas. My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the “war on terror” in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. “You will need to make structural and political changes,” said a major New York distributor. “Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it – he likes liberal causes -- and tame those anti-Bush sequences.”

During the cold war, Hollywood’s state propaganda was unabashed. The classic 1957 dance movie, Silk Stockings, was an anti-Soviet diatribe interrupted by the fabulous footwork of Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. These days, there are two types of censorship. The first is censorship by introspective dross. Betraying its long tradition of producing gems, escapist Hollywood is consumed by the corporate formula: just make ‘em long and asinine and hope the hype will pay off. Ricky Gervais is his clever comic self in Ghost Town, while around him stale, formulaic characters sentimentalise the humour to death.

These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically.. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium.

www.johnpilger.com

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22024.htm

[Eckyboy]

"We must trust the intelligence that comes our way today"

This was one of the first lines of dialogue in the itv program and it is so nonsensical I thought it came from a poorly translated japanese role playing game.

What always disgusted me about the whole tragic shooting is that the police maintained throughout the investigation and subsequent enquiry that Mr Jean Charles de Menezes was acting suspicious. The CCTV footage and actual eye witness testimony from people inside the carriage he was killed in prove this is a total lie. Indeed one eye witness stated that the only person she found to be acting suspicious was the undercover officer who appeared agitated and nervous.

It was mentioned that the armed police had no idea who the undercover officer was or what he looked like. Which begs the question how did they know not to shoot him as he was acting suspicious? How did they identify him?

Also why was Mr Jean Charles de Menezes allowed to board buses before getting to the underground station. If he was a genuine suspect then surely he had to be intercepted before getting on any public transport. The whole thing stinks. The police themselves cannot even get their stories straight. Some claim they shouted out a warning while others testified that they never heard any such warning. A sure sign that there is some serious lying going on. The officers involved and the people in charge that day should be facing criminal charges for not only killing an innocent man but for then attempting to smear and slander him afterwards as having acted suspicious when the individual was clearly doing nothing out of the ordinary. His family deserve better.

[TonyGosling]

you can now watch all this on You Tube starting here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX0hJp0NOkI


Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03sGqMLkaSQ

The audience reaction to the film Shoot On Sight after its first showing at the Dubai Film Festival. Shoot On Sight is a upcoming Political thriller film "Shoot On Sight", inspired by July 7, 2005, events of London Underground Bombings, directed by Jag Mundhra and produced by Aron Govil of Cine Boutique Entertainment.
Shoot On Sight is a fictional story based on London Police order of "shoot on sight" after the July 7th 2005 London bombings, that resulted in racial profiling. The Film unfolds the turmoil in the life of Tariq Ali, a Muslim police officer at Scotland Yard. Commander Ali, born in Lahore and married to an English woman, is tasked to investigate the police shooting of a suspected Muslim terrorist in the London Underground. Distrusted by both his superiors, and his fellow Muslims, he finds his inquiry hampered from all sides. When evidence surfaces pointing to the slain man's innocence, as well as the existence of a terrorist cell operating in his own backyard, Tariq must face the realization that sometimes, the right decision is the hardest one to make. Film starcast includes Naseeruddin Shah,Brian Cox, Greta Scacchi, Om Puri, Stephen Greif, Ralph Ineson, Gulshan Grover, Laila Rouass, Mikaal Zulfiqar, Sadie Frost, and India Wadsworth. Shoot On Sight is expected to release world-wide in July 2008.