.. and Fuck Hollywood Too!

(You Lying, Stealing, Hypocritical Pricks)

Is anyone left unsure how strongly I feel about this? I have had enough of the double-standard of remaking, sorry, stealing films from overseas and from previous filmakers, and then taking a zero-tolerance stand against so-called piracy.
The 'Are remakes destroying cinema?' argument is a smokescreen, this is a trade issue.
There is no such thing as 'free trade', it is just Nuevo Protectionism, and Hollywood is yet another example of American financial and cultural imperialism.
American cinema is attacking the film industries of the rest of the world, taking whatever they want from foreign markets, then use their distribution cartels to pump American crap back into the same markets they steal from. The result in places like Australia is the exclusion of Australian film makers to the Australian market: to cinemas, to television, to DVD, and the Australian film industry whither through lack of investment and return on investment. Since VHS squeezed Beta out of the rental market, Australian video stores have had small specialist sections for 'foriegn films' and 'Australian films', leaving 95% of the shop devoted to Hollywood as the default or generic product. Some Australian video stores just put the Australian films under the heading 'foreign and arthouse', 'arthouse' being yet another term that serves to alienate audiences. To put it simply: Australian films are often considered, in Australia, an alien and inferior product to the default or generic Hollywood film industry ...this can hardly be considered an accident.

Don't get me wrong, I watch American film and TV, but would be happier about it if they focused on quality not quantity, also, if the industry wasn't (as outlined above) designed to destroy and replace the film and TV industries of other nations - only to replace diversity with so much of this content-poor homogeneous crap, and rip-offs of the products produced by what little that survives from the markets they attack. I acknowledge that a 'do unto others...' type approach from a nation that proudly proclaims itself as 'One nation under (a Christian) God' is most unlikely. For this reason I watch as much film and TV from places other than America as I can ...as if a film or TV program has managed to get itself distributed or broadcast, despite American distribution cartels, despite the numerous (unrepentant) copies from Hollywood, it's likely to be something special.

So what prompted this rant? The 'straw that broke the camel's back' was an American film (rip-off) called 'Quarantine' (review/outrage below)

So while this blog might be called Fuck Off Krispy Kreme, today I say '...and Fuck Hollywood too!


For further reading and lists of remakes:
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/166239/55_movie_remakes_currently_in_the_works.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_TV_shows_remade_for_the_American_market
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-language_movies_based_on_foreign-language_movies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_remakes_A-M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_remakes_N-Z
http://www.listology.com/list/feature-films-based-films-foreign-language

Quarantine (Film Review/study of the Hollywood virus)

I put on a dvd called Quarantine - it's a new release horror film, I was not expecting brilliance, as I picked it at random - I've seen a lot of good films by just picking at random (and I've seen a lot of rubbish too).
The opening shot has Jennifer Carpenter (the actor who plays Dexter's sister in the TV series Dexter) standing with a microphone in hand in front of a fire station - she's a news reporter.

After the initial surprise of 'oh, it's her!', I got another surprise 'oh, I've seen this film, but not this film'. It's a new record - under 10 seconds and I know what is going to happen in a film I haven't seen, but there's a second 'new record' here, the film is a remake of a Spanish film Rec (as in 'record' - the film about a news crew reporting on a fire brigade that gets a call-out to a medical emergency and is 'quarantined' in zombie-infected building).

If you look Quarantine up on IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1082868/) you'll find that it used the working title Rec - the makers not denying the fact that it's a shot-for-shot remake, but with the original being less that a year old, the change of title isn't in good faith (I wouldn't have gotten this film if I know it was simply a desecration of Rec), and any arguments supporting the remaker's right to change the title became invalid when they decided to do an exact remake of a current film (if it's the same film it has to have the same name). To use the 'working title' of Rec, but release it as Quarantine amounts to plagiarism, to Copyright Infringement, they are not selling it as Rec, and to leave acknowledgement that it is Rec, hidden just far enough that you have to know already that you have been screwed-over by Video Pirates, isn't good enough.
Those loud FBI warnings at the start of DVD's telling you to be vigilant of copyright infringement - of inferior copies, somehow don't apply to the film they so often proceed.

As one reviewer on IMDb said of Quarantine "I expect the Mona Lisa to be repainted as a god damn cheerleader any day now... " (owen_williams - 1, from the UK)


Another example of a successful film being remade within a year was the British film The Descent [2005], with 3 rip-off's coming out soon after (using the titles: The Cave, The Cavern, and WithIN). In the case of The Descent, the original is in English, has a tigher and far better developed screenplay, and slicker production than the subsequent Hollywood copies - none of the commonly used arguments to justify copyright infringement apply. I assume the only reason that film makers and governments around the world allow this continual process of Hollywood pirating films is that they are powerless to stop it - film makers realise that Americans will not acknowledge a legal system other than their own, that means sueing Hollywood in America, under American law (a fixed contest if ever there was one), and governess of England, of Spain, and Australia etc, aren't going to take issue with the US over a film - America would never consider allowing a Hollywood film maker to be to face copyright infringement proceedings in another country (but Australia happily allowed an Australian citizen to be to be locked-up in a US federal prison for 20years, despite the person having not even been to American - how do break a US federal law if not in America?)

Hollywood are the real Pirates, the real threat to copyright and to cinema in general.

White Phosphorus: How not to fight an asymmetric conflict

Israel has been caught out using White Phosphorus on civilians in Palestine. The explanation given was that ‘Israel doesn’t use White Phosphorus on civilians, it’s used on the battlefield to provide smoke’. More interestingly, the same spokesperson said that we ‘use it in the same way western countries do’. I’m figuring that they are talking about America, since they are armed by the Americans, and the US is a strong supporter of Israel.
This battlefield referred to sounds like something not seen since the First World War, with opposing armies neatly lined-up facing each other with a clearly defined space in between, not crowded urban Palestine. White Phosphorus has been banned for use in combat since perhaps WW1.

Incidents like this use of White Phosphorus in the middle of civilian populations (one family of 5 was burnt to death when a White Phosphorus shell landed in their lounge room) points to the fact that countries like Israel and America aren’t really prepared to fight asymmetric warfare in an appropriate manner, going in and engaging an enemy on their territory, the weapons and tactics that are appropriate for such a fight place soldiers at greater risk. It is far safer to just rely on technological supremacy. Safer for the soldiers that don’t have to fight in tunnels and caves against forces that are prepared for such a battle, and safer for the government that sends the troops to fight against a force like the Viet Kong, Taliban, etc, as getting your people killed by a rag-tag force armed with sharpened sticks puts you in considerable risk in the next election.
The problem is that the ‘bomb it flat from a safe distance’ approach to fighting guerrilla forces will kill a lot more civilians than ‘combatants’. Never-the-less, this is the method employed by countries like America and Israel, simply because they can’t afford to pay the full price in dead soldiers, it is also the reason they haven’t /won’t win any of these wars. They may kill a lot of people, but the high percentage of civilian casualties just inspires more people to take-up arms against the injustice.

Israel may use the ‘but other countries do it too’ excuse, it kind of shows that they aren’t planning on winning the war, at least not in a conventional sense – about the only way to defeat a guerrilla force with such indiscriminate force is to commit genocide. The Americans are in a similar mess with Iraq and Afghanistan, although there is some hope that the new president is trying to extricate his country from the mess his predecessor got them into. It’s worth taking a moment to consider the achievement of George W. Bush, managing to get his country (and others) into two wars that they can’t win, that is an extraordinary effort – few presidents ever manage to start one unwinnable war.

As long as the US and Israel believe that their ‘terrorism problem’ should be responded to with a ‘nation versus nation’, air-strikes to remove all resistance and critical infrastructure, followed by an bloody and largely unsuccessful attempt to occupy territory, then don’t expect the ‘problem’ to be solved, and get used to White Phosphorus, Depleted Uranium, Cluster Bombs, and other outlawed practices being used on civilians. The US and Israel will say that they weren’t trying to get the civilians (or will say they were terrorists, or that the terrorists were using civilians as ‘human shields’), but nor are they interested in avoiding the civilians – it’s just not a high enough priority. It's not so much a matter of 'acceptable losses', but 'unacceptable cost' to avoid civilians.

And the White Phosphorus? Well, the practice of bombing civilians is illegal – America and Israel are war criminals – so while bombing civilians is illegal, why not use some exotic and barbaric banned weapons if you are going to do it?

Stephen Conroy – Pathological Liar and Family First Stooge

I’m watching Senator Conroy on ABC's Q&A, trying to lie his way out of being grilled for his grim determination to push through a fundamentally flawed Internet filter. Forget the so called 'moral question', that's a ruse that Senator Conroy's stunt to divert attention from the real questions ...and a cheap shot: 'don't want internet filtering? you must be a supporter of pedophiles'.

When confronted with the problem that the filter doesn’t work, that it will put an 87% performance hit on the internet (among other problems), Senator Conroy blamed the previous government, and claimed that we need a trial of the technology. "It‘s the Howard government - that’s where the famous 87% comes from”. This is absolute bullshit (sorry for the emotive language, but Senator Conroy is aware that what he has said simply isn't true - the results came from a report he commissioned).

Sorry, Senator Conroy, the famous 87% comes the closed trial initiated last year by the Labor Government. While moral concerns about censorship should be taken seriously, the question should be whether it's remotely possible before letting a 'Clayton's' moral debate act as a smoke-screen to disguise the bulldozer-like effort to get the filter in place. Folks, read the report, see how far it is from ready, and keep this in mind; when Lackey of the Christian Right and Family First, Senator Conroy, is pushing the filter unconditionally.

http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf

There's also the Blacklist leaked on Wikileaks... I've had a quick look, and a lot of this seems to be just soft core porn, and not the evil Child Pornography/Child Abuse that poses a great threat to our civil society. In many cases you can see that many of the websites have US certification that all models are over 18 years old at the bottom of the page "All graphic materials & texts used on this site are in compliance with 18 USC 2257." There was another page that I saw that had images of modestly clothed adults bound with ropes ...presumably some kind of bondage thing. I expect the classification rejection (remember, it's not just Child Pornography that is 'blacklisted', but material refused classifaction) would be for 'sexual violence'. Sexual violence is a serious matter, but the pictures that I saw contained no violence, just people restrained by ropes - they didn't appear to be in distress. While this kind of thing doesn't interest me, I'm figuring that 'whatever floats your boat' is OK, provided it's not at the expense of someone else's well-being. This reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, and the terrible fuss about the film when it was released - the violence is implied - it's that 'pure mind sees no evil' problem.
I see the Christian Right behind this, which might seem strange with a Labor government in power. The ACMA does not change with the change of government, but the Senator Conroy has shown relentless determination to please Family First's Steve Fielding, and there's the suggestion in various publications from around the world that this effort will benefit uptight moral crusaders from around the world. America treasures it supposed 'absolute freedom of speech' (the reality is that you aren't free to say various unpopular things in America), and the few attempts that have been made to impose ISP-level censorship/filtering have not been recieved well - it seems that Australia is doing the 'heavy lifting' for the benefit (or harm) of other nations.

There's a Queensland Dentist and several other law-abiding citizens whose webpages have found their way onto the 'blacklist' (a woman who runs a local school canteen, a web host/designer...). Have a look for yourself at:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Dentist%27s_website_on_leaked_blacklist

The most recent and complete copy of the 'Blacklist' can be found at:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_internet_censorship_blacklist%2C_6_Aug_2008#Aug_6_2008

CleanFeed: Rudd and Conroy afraid of Christian Right?

When I first started writing a post on this topic 5 or 6 months ago it was largely a technical detail-based doc that sought to expose the depth of absurdity that Senator Conroy and the Rudd Labor government should pursue this internet filtering policy so fervently, but three to four thousand words later I’d barely scratched the surface on why CleanFeed just won’t work, and why it is ridiculous that the government try and push it through regardless. I still think this topic needs addressing, but I’ve started afresh, and kept it brief...


In the interests of keeping this short the areas I wanted to address are: content and censorship standards, practical outcomes, and motivation.


CleanFeed is being promoted on the basis of ‘reducing child abuse’, that children need to be protected from access to images of child abuse on the internet, but the level of restriction of content is to be on-par with computer games – this is tighter regulation than film and television. This MA15+ standard is a far cry from ‘stopping child abuse’, it’s an attack on the very spirit of the internet.


The chance of present technologies delivering the intended result is next to zero. Closed trials (you know, a controlled environment free of real world variables to see the potential capabilities of the technology) revealed the 6 candidate filter products weren’t even close to being able, with problems such as: inaccuracies in filtering (filtering large number of safe sites, missing targeted sites), and massive speed reduction (upto 80% reduction in speed – not desirable in Australia’s second-rate internet). The other problems with ISP-level filtering are that it is does nothing to prevent net predators and bullies, and is no substitute for appropriate supervision of children using the internet, but by having this super-duper infrastructure-level piece of protection it gives parents a false sense of security.

Also worthy of note is that the poor results in closed trial were obtained by filtering only HTTP and HTTPS protocols, leaving the other 60% percent of the internet traffic either unfiltered or totally blocked, Senator Conroy has since announced that the final product could include filtering for bittorrent and other p2p protocols. Closed trials were a dismal failure when attempting to filter only a small portion of total traffic - why does the government think they can get it right in real world implementation? One theory is that proposed upgrade national broadband infrastructure will speed-up the internet so that an 80% performance hit will be unnoticeable, this is just all kinds of wrong...

Political censorship has been mentioned in connection with CleanFeed... we have sedition laws, is political censorship such a stretch? Iceland's internet filter features censorship of an outspoken critics, although one in particular did name his website the Icelandic word for Child Pornography, it features no images of children - only articles and links relating to censorship in Iceland. For the Federal government to impose CleanFeed on Australia they need to convince the Greens and independents in the Senate to pass legislation. Family First's Steve Fielding is the only one supporting it at the moment (is that a surprise?). Senator Xenaphon has suggested that if the government add Internet Gambling to material blocked then he would support CleanFeed, it's not radical censorship to serve the interests of powerful lobby groups says the government, but a deal with each Senator to get the legislation through is OK... I wonder what Bob Brown would sell his soul for?


CleanFeed sounds all honourable and impressive, but is just smoke and mirrors – it has no positive outcomes other than giving the impression that the government are doing something serious about questionable problem – who has ever accidentally stumbled onto a Child Pornography site? In fact, who has ever seen Child Pornography? As the government says that we have to protect children from stumbling onto depictions of child abuse. Stopping child abuse is a well worthwhile endeavour, but to use the emotive responses that the topic of child abuse produces to justify such an absurd project is not OK. If the government is determined to waste money on ridiculous bullshit, they could give the money to me – my trivial amusements don’t screw-up the internet... well not to the same extent.


So why push CleanFeed? A good question without a good answer. The Christian Right are one of the few groups pushing as hard as the government, and in the last month or so it has become apparent that similar other countries, as well as governments, are interested in the outcomes here. The one thing that is clear is the average Australians aren’t screaming out “please mess-up our internet”. So the question remains; with the federal government trying to rollout better internet infrastructure, why impose such a flawed idea on Australian internet?

Has Kevin said 'no' to reconciliation?

It’s easy to say ‘sorry’, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a sincere desire to put things right.

Kevin Rudd has named prof. Mick Dodson Australian of the Year, presumably for his work on reconciliation. John Howard failed to listen to Mick’s recommendations re: ‘sorry’ and other steps forward, that helped motivate Mick Dodson to be a most active critic of John Howard – it’s too early to tell if Kevin might have made the same mistake.
Using the opportunity afforded by being named Australian of the Year, Mick Dodson has suggested that Australian Day be moved from Invasion Day, 26th January to a date that doesn’t have such a negative association (one day in May was suggested).
Kevin Rudd has said that Australia Day will stay as 26th January – too afraid that the type of Anglo psychos that draped themselves in the Australian Flag to further the cause of racism at Cronulla a few years back will no longer vote for him.
John Howard’s bigoted resolution that he had nothing to apologise for – well, you know where you stand with that, but a (hollow?) apology, then to be fobbed-off personal recognition for an Aboriginal leader – I sincerely hope that is not all Kevin and co planned for reconciliation. The reason I’m concerned at this moment is that personal honours are normally bestowed after something is achieved; Sorry wasn’t the end of this issue, but the start of the journey.

Moving Australia Day sounds like a symbolic move, but presently that is part of what required - to remove Colonial signifiers, most public institutions frame Australia as a British colony. These public institutions make a narrative about Australia, and while one group is excluded (especially the first nations) then the narrative doesn't appropriately describe Australia.

I hope Sorry wasn’t all that Kevin planned for reconciliation.

Please aim more carefully (G.W. Bush leaves office)

I'm back after a 1 year unplanned sabbatical. I’d like to thank the parole board out at Port Phillip... no, not true. It’s been study and work commitments that have kept me from shooting off my mouth here. It’s not because I’ve been super-busy (there have been a lot of 18-hour days) that I haven’t contributed here in a year, it’s that with the work I was doing for school I didn’t feel the need; it seems that well-constructed academic essays come from the same place - use the same energy as emotive polemics (sorry, rants). I did try to keep writing, but sated, spent, energy channelled elsewhere, I couldn’t be bothered – I’ve got the start of dozens posts that I couldn’t have been bothered finishing (I might start posting those up if they interest me enough to finish them, and aren't relevant only to a moment now passed).

The thing that I regret the most in this year of silence is that I’ve missed the last year of G.W. Bush’s presidency, and the opportunity to be appropriately inappropriate about Pres Bush – the idiot and the elected leader (well, second choice).
...there are those people who say they’ll miss him. To those people I say: please aim more carefully.

John Howard wins "brown nose" medal

Former Australian PM John Howard will receive the highest civilian honour a US president can bestow during a White House ceremony this month.

George W Bush will confer the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom award on his staunch international supporters in an East Room ceremony on January 13, exactly one week before he leaves office.

Howard says he is honoured personally to receive the award but more so because of the compliment it pays to Australia.

"It's an indication of the very close relationship between our two countries and I'm very pleased that during the time as prime minister I was able to contribute too," he said.

It was also testament to the "very obvious" personal warmth between himself and President Bush.

Does this make anyone else ill?

This award has essentially been awarded to those who did not oppose the atrocities perpetrated by the US and it’s allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush has awarded 78 medals of freedom during his tenure in office, quick George, create a legacy that doesn’t involve lies and the suffering and death of the innocent.

This reminds me of Pope John Paul II canonising a record 86 saints in his senile tenure as Pope.

I think that it is worth noting that the father of the Hydrogen Bomb Edward Teller won one of these.