[2620] in peace2
Short Notice Film Series: Mon & Wed at 10pm, 9-554
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jdu@MIT.EDU)
Sun Jul 13 13:35:03 2003
From: jdu@MIT.EDU
Message-ID: <1058117619.3f1197f358445@webmail.mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 13:33:39 -0400
To: peace-announce@mit.edu
Cc: greens-announce@mit.edu, nowar-announce@mit.edu, labor@mit.edu,
duspsummer@mit.edu, tad@media.mit.edu
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ F A C T I V I S T F I L M O G R A P H Y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Proudly Presents
^^^ T W O S L I N G S H O T C I N E M A S P E C I A L S C R E E N I N G S ^^^
Monday: Steal This Movie!
Wednesday: Tell The Truth and Run
Admission cost is 25 cents; no pennies please. Film descriptions below.
(Note: To cut down on email congestion both films were included in one
announcement and an atypical amount of advance notice was unavoidable. Every
effort will be made to maintain short notice in the future.)
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Steal This Movie! (USA, 2000)
107 mins.
Steal This Movie! tells the story of the famous Chicago 7 radical, Abbie
Hoffman. The unabashedly one-sided movie by director Robert Greenwald, a friend
of Abbie and Anita Hoffman, is a lucid and intriguing tale of perhaps the most
famous of the Vietnam War protestors.
As the movie starts in 1977, a highly paranoid Abbie has been hiding underground
for 5 years. "5 years, 17 cities, 10 jobs," is how Abbie describes it to David
Glenn (Alan Van Sprang), a reporter who promises to tell his story without
revealing his whereabouts. Bruce Graham's bright script, based on books by
Abbie and Anita Hoffman and by Marty Jezer, is funny and insightful.
Ever the philosopher, Abbie's mouth is a shotgun of ideas. "The problem with
liberals is that they see all sides to every argument, which leads to
paralysis," he claims. "You aren't fighting the [Vietnam] war to save
democracy," he says. "You're fighting this war to save Wall Street."
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Tell The Truth and Run (USA, 1996)
111 mins.
This award-winning examination of censorship and suppression in the America
press profiles pioneering press critic George Seldes. Seldes was a noted foreign
correspondent in World War I and in the 1920s in Europe. Fiercely independent,
he was threatened with a court-martial by General Pershing, censored by the
Bolsheviks and expelled by the Italian Fascists in 1925, barely escaping with
his life. Seldes became a press critic in the 1930s. His books criticized the
"Lords of the Press" and the big money that distorted and colored the news. In
1940, he started his own investigative weekly, In Fact: An Antidote for
Falsehoods in the Daily Press, which pioneered modern American press criticism.
Seldes became a pariah in his own profession, ostracized and marginalized by the
mainstream press. But he profoundly influenced three generations of journalists
and activists, including I.F. Stone, editor of The Nation Victor Navasky, and
Ralph Nader. At age 98, Seldes is the centerpiece of the film. He is joined by
Ben Bagdikian, columnist Nat Hentoff, Jeff Cohen of the media-watchdog group
"Fair," Marian Seldes and several others.
