Too bad he bought and shelved Cosmic Banditos

but at least J.C. has shown over the years that he has a conscience unlike 99% of holywood

but, he plays both sides, which may be effective, or may be death by fabians

i just do not know

but i will watch the movies, and i look forward to seeing ‘Grace is Gone’ which I never, ever heard of.

I can’t believe you, Mr Scahill, who so effectively researched and wrote about Blacwater would so slavishly salivate over a hollywood reactionary or is the appropriate oxymorn, re visionist. If you want some analysis, try Gillo Pontecorvo
Centripetal

Other grammar issues aside… do you know what the word oxymoron actually means? Just curious.

See also interview in Alternet

John Cusack says, Outsourced Warfare Represents a ‘Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology’

Maybe he’s not a word guy, maybe he’s just good at reaching people who aren’t word people.

OPEN QUOTE

Joshua Holland: Tell me a little bit about your new project.

John Cusack: Well, we thought of it as an incendiary political cartoon that would hopefully put America’s current imperial adventures in Iraq into a kind of a larger context. And maybe put a different lens on what privatization means; what this plan has been and what it’s been like when people try to privatize the very core things it means to be a state. And what it means to spread an ideology like that across the globe.

There are 180,000 contractors in Iraq and about 160,000 troops, right? And if one just takes that trend to its logical conclusion, well that’s where “War, Inc.” is set. It takes place at a time in the near future when warfare us an entirely corporate affair.

Holland: As a political nerd, it struck me as a highly referential film. I felt like your character, to some extent, was loosely patterned maybe on John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Cusack: You know, that book came out when we were already making the film, I believe. And I know we were writing it when Naomi Klein’s groundbreaking piece called “Baghdad Year Zero” came out in Harper’s. She’s a journalist I’ve always greatly admired and respected. And then as we were making the movie, she was writing the Shock Doctrine. I remember being aware of it while we were writing it. And I remember talking about it. But you know, this character was also based on [former U.S. Envoy to Iraq] Paul Bremer flying in while Baghdad was still burning and literally ruling by Fiat. Sitting down in Saddam’s old palace and banging out 50 or 60 new laws that would allow 100 percent foreign ownership of previously state-owned industry by these outside corporations. And he was running around in those Brooks Brothers suits and the military boots when he did it.

END OF QUOTE

I wasn’t even going to think about it until Jeremy opened his peeper and now I can’t wait to see it.

OK. So. But. Having said that, I do quite simply love the last paragraph. Sorry John. It’s too funny.

OPEN QUOTE

You know, maybe the only thing I would ask, or rather what I would say is America has been an empire. And America has done a bunch of horrible things to build that empire. A lot. But there’s also so many great things about America and there’s so many great things that America has done … you know, like the GI Bill and the rise of the middle class or the Marshall Plan after World War Two.

END OF QUOTE

Although, it’s true, I’m probably one of the few people on this planet that thinks that US-centric corporatism engineered world war two in the first place.

This is interesting too :

“. . . the studios all took a pass, but we found a small studio that does a lot of foreign sales, and

“they gave us about *a third of the budget we had for “Grosse Pointe Blank” — ten years ago.

“And we went to Bulgaria to shoot.”

END OF QUOTE

Did ya’lls see The Contract

Oops. Forgot the question mark. Sorry.

?

Just in case I haven’t already talked you into reading the Alternet interview, let alone forking out the bucks to see War, Inc while it’s still in the theaters

OPEN QUOTE some more

even last year when we were just beginning to screen it, the reaction was a lot different than it is now. Today, everybody seems to want to have … maybe not as in depth a discussion as the one I’m having with you, but everybody wants to talk about these ideas and use the film as a springboard to talk about what’s going on. And that’s very different than even six months ago.

END OF QUOTE

That’s some serious Holy Cow. John’s got a fair chunk of mainstream Corporate Mass Media Zombie pulse between his thumb and fore-finger.

So maybe we WILL have our first Black President.

. . .

I’m still voting for Cynthia.

Tamerlane, War, Inc.‘s Halliburton, from das wikie — for those of us who, like moi, are essentially clueless :

Timur, also written Emir Timur or Amir Temur (1336 – 19 February 1405), among his other names, commonly called Tamerlane or Timur the Lame, was a 14th century Turco-Mongol conqueror of much of western and Central Asia, and founder of the Timurid Empire and Timurid dynasty (1370–1405) in Central Asia, which survived until 1857 as the Mughal dynasty of India.

He ruled over an empire that, in modern times, extends from southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, through Central Asia encompassing part of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, North-Western India, and even approaching Kashgar in China.

Timur’s military talents were unique. He is known to have employed what is known nowadays as information warfare. Timur’s campaigns were preceded by spies whose task included collection of information and spreading of horrifying reports about cruelty, size and might of his armies – eventually weakening the morale of population and setting panic among the enemy forces.

Sources claim that when Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan, he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded, and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside of Aleppo. Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame, and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad. As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests

I wonder if the Gnome De Cliff came from John’s Bulgarian sponsors.

‘course Cusak has always been a big Chomsky promoter so maybe they are all gatekeepers of allowable dissidence? doubt it but…

i saw JC on Bill Maher’s show a while back talking about this movie, and i was pretty unimpressed at the time…seemed a bit too ham-fisted to be really effective.

this article, on the other hand, has me interested again.

i look forward to seeing ‘Grace is Gone’ which I never, ever heard of.

same

md- i am certain ww2 was totally fabricated too
as Satre called it, ‘the phony war’

That Cusack plays a hitman again and Dan Aykroyd is in it has me sold…

Fight the backlash

mcmistress your cuioxyty has left you correcting grammar butt
do you know who pontecorvo is?
centripetal

If you’re going to spend money on a movie about the “war” in Iraq, go see Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure

shhhh, war inc

The film critics I’ve read don’t seem to have liked it. Rotten Tomatoes’s consensus was “War, Inc. attempts to satirize the military industrial complex, but more often than not it misses its target.” Reading individual reviews, it looks like the movie was more crap than effective. Then again, what do film critics know about the military-industrial complex?

I’ve seen it, you all should too.

this movie is absolute crap

more crap than 2 girls 1 cup?

I prefer movies where the brave white cowboys massacre the noble savages sisyphus, how bout you?

how ‘bout them apples?