theCLog

(The documentary Soul Power opens in Charlotte tomorrow. Following is Curt Holman’s review from the Atlanta Creative Loafing.)

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s concert film Soul Power can be viewed as the warm-up act to the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary When We Were Kings. In Kings, Leon Gast chronicled 1974’s famed “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire (now Congo). An African/African-American musical festival was scheduled to coincide with the heavyweight bout, but after Foreman suffered a minor injury, the show went on as planned, even though the boxing match was postponed for six weeks. (more…)

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(The drama Revanche, an Oscar nominee this year for Best Foreign Language Film, opens in Charlotte tomorrow. Following is Curt Holman’s review from the Atlanta Creative Loafing.)

Götz Spielmann’s crime drama Revanche arrives in theaters just in time to shore up Austria’s cultural reputation. While Sacha Baron Cohen puts the most frivolous face imaginable on faux-Austrian pop culture in Brüno, Revanche renews the country’s credentials for serious artistry with a sober, surprising character study initially disguised as a thriller about star-crossed lovers and organized crime. (more…)

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By Bill Maher, from The Huffington Post:

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing – in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It’s how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O’Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke’s on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia… and no I can’t show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and “listen to their constituents.” An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. (more…)

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(The foreign import O’Horten opens in Charlotte tomorrow. Following is Curt Holman’s review from the Atlanta Creative Loafing.)

Mark Twain famously remarked that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Bent Hamer’s O’Horten suggests that the saddest movie you’ll ever see could be a comedy from Norway. And it’s not exactly warm, either. (more…)

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From Brave New Films:

5 million members.

Scores of progressive legislative victories.

$88 million raised and 934,000 volunteers mobilized to put Barack Obama in the White House in 2008.

And it all started with one 15-word sentence in an online petition created by a young married couple in Berkeley, California.

Presented by Brave New Films, for the first time ever, the story of MoveOn.org is being told in a feature-length documentary film – MoveOn: The Movie.

Order your DVD copy today.

Using the Internet to inspire everyday Americans to create an unprecedented new form of citizen engagement, MoveOn.org has reinvented politics as we know it. Because of MoveOn.org, millions of progressive-minded Americans, isolated from each other in red and blue communities all over the country, have been able to find each other online, organize themselves in the real world and build a movement that has changed the country forever.

This feature-length documentary tells the story of a movement that became the voice of opposition to an out-of-control Bush Administration and the inception of a new form of democratic participation.

Share with us your favorite MoveOn.org moment today and enter for a chance to win tickets to the premiere in either New York, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles. Trip includes (2) roundtrip airplane tickets and a (2) night stay.

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From MoveOn:

Last week a special interest lobbying firm with ties to dirty energy companies was caught sending forged letters to a Democratic congressman’s office – urging him to oppose clean energy legislation.

The letters claimed to be from a Hispanic non-profit called Creciendo Juntos and the local chapter of the NAACP. The only problem? Neither group had ever seen the letters, much less sent them.

Faking letters from ethnic groups to oppose progressive legislation? It’s like Karl Rove is back running the show.

This incident could be just the tip of the iceberg – one small part of a coordinated campaign to undermine the president’s agenda. The House of Representatives has started to investigate how far this scam goes – but with allegations this serious, this is a federal criminal matter.

Can you sign our petition asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether the lobbying firm committed fraud? Clicking here will add your name:

http://pol.moveon.org/roveisback/o.pl?id=16707-3563042-VzVEbbx&t=9

The petition reads: (more…)

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From MoveOn:

The New York Times just wrote an incredibly important editorial. Did you see it?

In it, they called on the Senate to save the Clean Air Act from an underhanded attack: a loophole in the energy bill that removes President Obama’s authority to clean up existing coal plants.

“The older, dirtiest [coal] plants…simply cannot be let off the hook,” the Times wrote.¹

If we don’t do something, the coal industry is likely to win this battle.

Several key senators are already speaking out on this issue. But to get the rest to stand up to the coal industry, we need to let them know we’re paying attention and demanding action. We’re aiming to get 200,000 petition signatures in the next week and then hand-deliver them when senators are home for their August recess.

Can you click here to sign your name?

http://pol.moveon.org/cleanairact/o.pl?id=16672-3563042-y6y3O_x&t=3

The petition says: “Congress must not repeal the Clean Air Act provision that requires President Obama to crack down on dirty coal plants.”

Without this important Clean Air Act provision, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to halt recent efforts toward cracking down on the global warming pollution from dirty coal plants.

And if Congress eliminates this part of the Clean Air Act, they’ll let old, dirty coal plants off the hook for their pollution—and it could pave the way for the construction of over 100 new coal plants in communities across the country.

In short, as long as Big Coal dominates our politics and our energy grid, wind and solar power won’t be able to compete on a level playing field. That’s terrible news for the climate and the economy, because wind and solar create more than twice as many jobs as coal and oil. (more…)

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From www.democrats.org:

Special interests and opponents of health care reform in Washington have made their priority clear: Attack President Obama at any cost.

On Friday, GOP Senator Jim DeMint told a special-interest attack group that if they’re “able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” And just [yesterday] morning, Republican Chairman Michael Steele backed up DeMint’s statement 100%. At the same time, the Republican National Committee is running deceptive ads to scare Americans away from the reform we need.

Their plan is simple: Oppose health care reform as a political ploy to weaken the President and defeat his entire agenda of change. But if we follow the Republican “Party of No” and do nothing, we’ll not only ensure more of the same, but saddle our children and grandchildren with a growing burden of exploding costs and declining care that they may never overcome.

We can’t let this kind of slash and burn politics succeed. We can fight back by collecting as many signatures as possible backing the President’s principles for health care reform. A huge response will show Washington and the media that when Republicans try to “break” the President, Americans are ready to stand up for what’s right.

Sign your name in support of the President’s health care principles. Or if you’ve already signed, please forward this message to all your friends and neighbors. (more…)

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(The documentary Every Little Step opens this Friday in Charlotte. Following is Curt Holman’s review from the Atlanta Creative Loafing.)

Where filmmaker Sir Richard Attenborough failed, the new film Every Little Step succeeds in making an engrossing movie of A Chorus Line. With its 1975 premiere, A Chorus Line became one of Broadway’s biggest hits, winning a Pulitzer and multiple Tonys and running for a record-breaking 6,137 performances. It dramatized the dance auditions for a glitzy musical, put the audience inside the theatrical creative process and, consequently, seemed utterly unfilmable. Attenborough’s 1985 adaptation felt artificial rather than immediate, and seemed to confirm that A Chorus Line belonged on the stage. (more…)

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From www.politicsdaily.com:

Fox News: We’re All Democrats When Scandal Breaks

In 2006 Fox News misidentified Mark Foley as a Democrat when the GOP congressman resigned after sending sexually explicit emails to teenage males. Clearly, network producers couldn’t imagine a Republican doing anything scandalous and assumed Foley must be a Democrat. An honest mistake, right? (Hey, I’m trying not to be cynical.)

Well it’s a “mistake” Fox News has made again: Wednesday, while broadcasting the news conference of Mark Sanford admitting to cheating on his wife, Fox ran a Chyron identifying the weepy South Carolina governor as… you guessed it, a Democrat. Oops!

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