David Lynch is for most people, including critics, unclassifiable. A director who follows his own visions (which most auteurs do, anyhow) in this 1977 surrealist horror film Lynch (who also gave us Mulholland Drive and The Lost Highway) breaks most “sacred” rules to build an utterly strange dreamlike world mixing imagery redolent of steampunk and nightmarish biology, all along apparently drawing inspiration from the likes of Kafka and Dali. In sum, weird.
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DAVID WALSH—As we noted in our original review, South Korea is one of the most socially unequal societies on the planet. Bong’s film spells out, in a thoughtful and logical manner, the inevitable results of such a division: the impoverished will do almost anything to emerge from their nightmarish conditions, subsisting literally in the underworld. The pampered rich, living in a cocoon, are utterly unprepared for the envy, anger and violence their dominance and arrogance provokes.
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Narrative Managers Claim White Helmets Founder Was Driven To Suicide By Syria Skeptics
21 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—On Christmas Eve PBS aired a bizarre segment on the death of James Le Mesurier, the former military intelligence officer who founded the extremely shady propaganda construct known as the White Helmets. The segment makes relentless, ham-fisted appeals to emotion, even attempting to associate the White Helmets with Armistice Day using wistful camera pans over poppy flowers and misty war memorial art exhibits…
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25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia
48 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled “25 times Trump was soft on Russia“, in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case that the US president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.
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BILL VAN AUKEN—”Bergoglio (the new Pope Francis) was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power…”