Bloggasm

The King of Kong is a new documentary about two grown men who fight it out for the world record for the arcade version of Donkey Kong. Yes, this sounds awesome. A youtube trailer for the movie can be found below:

via pajiba

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Related posts:
1. Awesome statue
2. Supersize Me filmmaker makes fun of retarded people
3. Interview with PSP Hacks

Google to HMOs: pay us and we’ll defuse “Sicko”

Google’s “Health Advertising Team” is trying to sell the health industry on buying ads to be shown opposite searches for “Sicko.” The idea is to counter Michael Moore’s amazing, enraging, must-see indictment of the health industry’s grip on American society by running ads over search results for Sicko.

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Related posts: The hardships of starting and owning a brothel, Our Cultural Learnings from Borat, Interview with Nehring the Edge, Google’s employees transported to work in their own buses, How to make $50 million in online advertising revenue

Brian Flemming is a film director, a playwright, and an outspoken atheist. In 2005, he released the controversial documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There, a film not just arguing that Jesus wasn’t God, but that Jesus the man never existed at all. He’s also the creator of the faux documentary, Nothing So Strange,and the musical, Bat Boy.

Last year, Flemming developed the Blasphemy Challenge, which called on atheists to upload videos to YouTube where they commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Flemming has a blog where he talks about atheism, film, and politics and a variety of other things as well.

Simon Owens: In the past year, we’ve seen a huge surge of atheists in the media. We have everything from The God Delusion to Letter to a Christian Nation to your documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There. Does this mean that atheists are finally banding together as activists, or that the public is becoming more open to hearing the atheist point of view? Or both?

Brian Flemming: The number of atheists is growing, we’re getting more vocal, and as evidence rises that religion is doing harm to our culture, people are more receptive to a godless point of view. In fact, many people who don’t identify as atheists actually are atheists, in that they live their lives as if there is no supreme being. They may obey the rule that says it is rude to publicly reveal one’s atheism (as it implicitly criticizes theists), but they’re essentially atheists.

The visibility of atheists isn’t much of a surprise to me. I think we’ll see the United States head down the same road as the countries of Europe — which over the past several decades have become not only strongly secular but also specifically atheistic. When religion is openly discussed on a fair playing field, it never wins. It simply can’t be defended on rational grounds. Barring a development such as a great disaster, which could be exploited to empower totalitarian ideologies like Christianity, we’re headed for atheism as a default point of view.

This development is, of course, a very good thing for the United States. There is a correlation between standard of living and atheism — the more atheistic a country is, the healthier it is, in terms of overall lifespan, overall wealth, access to health care, stillbirth rate, children living with two parents and many other measures. Even within the United States, the people doing the worst by these measures are in the Bible Belt. The most religious communities in the U.S., for example, have the highest divorce rate.

As atheism increases, we’ll see others benefit as well. In terms of giving to the less fortunate, the highest rate of giving to other countries occurs in the most atheistic countries.

As facts like these make it into the mainstream conversation, I think we’ll hear a lot more positive things about atheism — and a lot more wonder at how so many of us once believed that Jesus would soon come down from the sky and save us.

Simon Owens: In our last interview in early 2006, you indicated that Bush’s greatest talent was “manipulating the American people with fear.” Do you think that talent has subsided at all?

Brian Flemming: Yes. He really only had that one trick, and its effectiveness is reaching its expiration date. As the man said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Simon Owens: More importantly, will that talent strengthen again if there were another terrorist attack on American soil, or will Americans be more wary next time?

Brian Flemming: I really don’t know. It is very hard to predict reactions like that. I would expect that the Bush Administration would certainly try to exploit any new attack to further increase Bush’s dictatorship powers, but people are certainly a lot more aware of Bush’s basic character now, and they don’t like it.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed a growing trend in documentaries where the documentarian becomes a narrator in the story, while old-school film-makers like Errol Morris hardly speak at all in their documenaries. Do you think today’s documentarians are becoming too intrusive on their work? Which style is more unbiased?

Brian Flemming: I think we’re seeing the language of the documentary expand, and that’s a good thing. But the old guard will always gripe and complain. Errol Morris himself was undeservedly rebuked by the establishment for using re-creations in “The Thin Blue Line,” which is the best documentary ever made.

As it becomes easier and easier to make a documentary (and that possibility now extends as far as the lower-middle class) we’re going to hear a lot more voices that are unhampered by establishment rules — one of which is that a documentary should be “unbiased.” There’s a place for the kind of documentary that imitates newsmagazine segments, but there are also many other ways to make a documentary.

I personally don’t mind if a documentarian “intrudes” on the movie — so long as that documentarian has a strong point of view that is worth my attention or has some essential role in the action of the film. I’ve never heard anyone complain about nonfiction writers of books or magazine articles who use the word “I” — if that first- person point of view is justified by the material. Text nonfiction runs the gamut from sterile schoolbook prose to intimate personal essay. There’s no reason that video nonfiction can’t do the same thing.

Simon Owens: Do you think the “blasphemy project” is an effective way for atheists to come out of the closet?

Brian Flemming: The Blasphemy Challenge has certainly encouraged quite a few godless folks to unequivocally state that they aren’t afraid of Satan. I think it’s hilarious that this is actually a controversial statement to make — as if Satan were not a purely mythological character. The Blasphemy Challenge is radical compared to how we normally talk about superstitions such as Christianity, but it shouldn’t be. It should always be acceptable to declare one’s independence from Bronze Age myths. In fact, it shouldn’t really be news at all.

Simon Owens: Does the internet provide an outlet that atheists wouldn’t normally have?

Brian Flemming: Yes. It is hard to imagine a project like the Blasphemy Challenge without a site like YouTube to organize it. It’s amazing how easy it is for the participants in the challenge to communicate their views using video. Not too long ago, this ability was tightly held by corporations who controlled access to the extremely expensive equipment needed for TV broadcast. Now, a webcam is as cheap as $20.

Given that religion in the United States is a strongly intimidating force on media outlets, the internet is the perfect medium to express an atheistic message. Religion has created a rule in our culture that says religious beliefs are the sole beliefs that cannot be critically examined — one is allowed to state the most outlandish conclusions under the banner of religion, and it is considered rude to question those conclusions in the way one would question any others. Mainstream media outlets largely follow this rule. They praise the emperor’s new clothes.

Since atheists are essentially pointing out a naked emperor, it’s great that we have the internet to get around the special exemption that religion has declared for itself.

Simon Owens: As an atheist, do you view all religion with equal disdain? Are there any religions you dislike more than others?

Brian Flemming: I don’t see much difference between the beliefs of, say, Scientologists, and those of Christians. The space-alien theology of L. Ron Hubbard is no more or less ridiculous than the flying-dead-man theology of the Holy Bible.

Simon Owens: What is the future of atheist activism? What specific issues should atheists focus on first?

Brian Flemming: I think we’ll see many different atheists concentrate on many different messages. Declared atheists tend to be independent-minded folk with strong points of view, so we’re never going to gather under a single banner. Which makes sense — we don’t see organizations of “a-Clausians” (people who don’t believe in Santa Claus), as that group is filled with far too many sub-groups. Since atheism is merely a rational default position with regard to a certain brand of mythology, we shouldn’t expect a great deal of ideological unity within this group.

Via maddox (wow, not only did maddox actually update his site for the first time in forever, he actually linked to an outside source AND his posts was something better than “My balls are huge”), Here are two comprehensive sites that debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories. I haven’t gotten a chance to read through everything yet.

9/11: Debunking the Myths:

FROM THE MOMENT the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen?

Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase “World Trade Center conspiracy” and you’ll get links to an estimated 628,000 Web sites. More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into U.S. landmarks.

9-11 Loose Change Second Edition Viewer Guide:

This guide is meant to be a companion to, not a substitute for, the video itself. For one thing, I had to greatly reduce the resolution of the video screenshots in this document in order to keep the file size manageable. The video looks a lot better. “Loose Change Second Edition” is available as a free bittorrent download, as a Google Video stream, and for purchase from the Loose Change website. The creators of Loose Change also have an internet forum where you can discuss the video and 9/11 conspiracy-related issues. I encourage you to sign up there and let them know how you feel about their efforts.

Fittingly, this is the second edition of this critique. The first was done in six long nights, because I wanted to hand copies of it to the creators of “Loose Change” when they were in New York to protest the premiere of the movie “United 93″ on April 25, 2006. Because that version was written in the heat of the moment, it contained more obvious anger and sarcasm directed towards the creators of Loose Change. That anger hasn’t abated, but cooler heads than mine have convinced me that cutting down on the “cutting” remarks should help me get my points across more effectively.

These debunkings are mainly responding to this video.

Related posts: Copyright hurdles for documentarians

This is nothing I really stopped to consider before. I knew that film-makers who make fictional films have to run the copyright loops from a variety of venues, considering that they’re dealing with things like ad-placement, movie-albums, etc…, but never did I realize that documentarians have to go through these same hurdles. There’s something about this that just makes you want to scream; the fact that those who have enlisted themselves to record history for us in visual form aren’t completely protected by fair-use laws. There’s a Wired article that interviews law professors who wrote a comic book about this subject: Battling the Copyright Monster.

At one point, it begins talking about how copyright has changed over the last 80 years, and how it has actually become an us-versus-them mentality for film-makers:

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There’s a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art. We actually view ourselves as copyright defenders, showing how copyright is supposed to work. We’re saying this imbalance could cause us to lose the next generation of artists, if they think of copyright as worthless.

But perhaps the most shocking paragraph in the whole interview was this one:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They’re visual histories, and they’re increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it’s supposed to.

A massive amount of money for a Rocky ringtone that went off somewhere in the background? For a documentary? Something that usually isn’t expected to make much money anyway?

via IFC

Related posts: Netflix is getting distribution rights to indie movies, Supersize Me filmmaker makes fun of retarded people,

As someone who pretends to be a movie buff, I think it’s awesome that Netflix is buying up the distributor rights to a bunch of small indie movies: Netflix widens niche by broadening tastes:

So it’s no surprise that Netflix is moving into distributing more indie titles. On a mission to bring viewers movies they might never come across, Sarandos has acquired various rights to 175 titles, including the Hal Hartley art flick “The Girl From Monday” and several documentaries from distributor DocuRama, the Sundance Channel and PBS’ “POV” indie film showcase.

via cinematech

As someone who loves documentaries, I really didn’t like the self-indulgent crap-fest known as Supersize Me. That’s why I found this article interesting: “Super Size Me” filmmaker angers some with speech at high school:

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gave a profanity-laced, politically incorrect speech to several hundred high school students, and not everyone was lovin’ it.

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In his hourlong presentation before 700 students, Spurlock joked about the intelligence of McDonald’s employees, using an Indian accent as he imitated a cashier trying to figure out how to ring up a Quarter Pounder. He also joked about “retarded kids in the back wearing helmets” and teachers smoking pot in the balcony.

Ok. Are you ready to laugh out loud?

There actually were special education students in the back row. Teachers led them out during the hourlong presentation.

via Sister Toldjah