This rant comes as a response to President Bush’s speech at 12pm EST on July 24th, 2007. I’m cliff-noting what he said since I don’t remember word-for-word.
In his speech, our president said, “There are those that note that al Qaeda wasn’t present in Iraq prior to our invasion of that land”, following with “We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they attacked our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.”, etc… You’re right about those few points., George, but you’ve completely missed your OWN POINT by diverting that way. al Qaeda was NOT in Iraq prior to our invasion, but they’re there now as a direct result of our invasion and subsequent power-vacuum created by it. Address that, George. Don’t try to make the American people think that Iraq is all sunshine and rainbows. WE caused a HUGE problem for the Iraqi people and we need to explore ALL non-violent means of cleaning it up.
George Bush also stated that “Some people imply that terrorism has been spawned from OUR actions”. Well, George, it’s true. Pick up a fuckin history book and take a look at what we’ve done to the Middle East from the 40s on. In World War 2, our national sense of antisemitism made us (and Britain) ship most of the Jews fleeing from Germany over to a little country called Palestine. We removed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Muslims from their holy land and basically said, “Hey! You fuckers settle down. These guys live here now.” And thus, Israel was born. We’ve overthrown a government in Iran in the 50s and installed a leader we thought would be more sympathetic to US-biased economic trade with the U.S. We helped Saddam Hussein gain power in Iraq in the late 70s and we even backed Iraq in their war against Iran in the 80s, simply because Iran was backed by the Soviet Union. Hell, we even supplied Saddam’s regime with the INFRASTRUCTURE to make chemical and biological weapons to use in that conflict, not knowing he would use the weapons made from that equipment on the Kurds. Mind you, this whole time we’ve been blindly loyal to Israel who has been one of the biggest violators of human rights in their struggle to ward off the terrorists created by Israel’s creation. We said that the Palestinians should hold open, free elections. Well, they did. They elected a Hamas majority. But Hamas is labeled a “terrorist organization” (and they are/were, but they also put a serious halt to their sinister deeds when they saw they had a chance to make political gains… But they DID refuse to recognize Israel as a state) so we didn’t give them a chance to try the ballots-not-bullets routine. We de-funded them and refused to recognize their authority. So, they went back to violence and took over Gaza last month. Let’s REALLY think about how our own actions affect others before we issue a blanket denial of any wrong-doing. Think about how ANY of these examples would emotionally affect the people who live in those regions. Just THINK about that.
So to say that we’re completely blameless and haven’t done anything to upset the Muslim world is a bit ignorant. Don’t get me wrong. I’m NOT saying that terrorists are somehow “right” or “just” in their actions, because they’re simply NOT. Terrorists are responsible for their own actions, and their misguided sense or “justice” defies logic in a civilized mind. I think anybody who finds violence the only way to get their message heard, is a horrible and evil fuckin person. That being said, however, knowing the history of our meddling in the Middle East, I can certainly see how an anger would fester. So next time you hear our fearless, and sometimes factless, president tout our total innocence and try to play al Qaeda’s involvement in Iraq off as something that would’ve happened anyway (or something along those lines). Anytime you see him downplay how our invasion of Iraq and meddling in the Middle East as a whole, while demonizing people who would do us harm, just remember there’s a LOT more to the story than you’re being told.
I’m TOTALLY against this war in Iraq, and I always have been. But I’m not one of those people who thinks we need to just get the fuck outta there and abandon the Iraqi people after completely fucking their country in unconceivable ways. We NEED to fix the problem we caused, but we also need to start opening some dialogs with Iraq’s neighbors and the Middle East as a whole. Iraq can’t be fixed militarily, the last head of Cent Com for Iraq said as much. It’s going to require a LOT of diplomacy, financial and economic dealings. We, as Americans, need to admit something to ourselves. THE WAR IS OVER. OUR TROOPS DID THEIR JOB BEAUTIFULLY. It’s the POST-WAR that’s fucking us. We lost the post-war, NOT THE WAR. Our troops have done a beautiful job in doing their jobs in Iraq. Let’s give them a rest and get on the road to bringing calm to Iraq and the Middle East how we should’ve done it to begin with.
Let’s give our troops a pat on the back for a job well done and let’s get the fuckin diplomats in that region to calm that bee’s nest.
other have been retained, exemplified by this year's special program
showcasing so-offensive-it's-funny antics of Herman Yau's Hong Kong opuses
(Ebola Syndrome, Gong Tau and, of course, The Untold Story)
and the Richard Fleischer retrospective starring the square-jawed (could any
living human being be possibly more square-jawed than a young Kirk Douglas?)
Kirk Douglas (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Vikings: what,
no Conan the Destroyer?). Ah, of course, there is the PiFan regular Dario
Argento, (Phantom of the Opera? Oh dear) but other favorites Miike
Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi are MIA this year. Perhaps for the Korean
cinephiles the most surprising and highly-anticipated retrospective might be the
hybrid genre films of Monte Hellman: Cockfighter, Two Lane
Backdrop, Back Door to Hell, Ride in the Whirlwind, and The
Shooting (pictured), one of those mysterious and unnerving Westerns, like
Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, pregnant with hints of the
supernatural. 
film, but please, let you be the person to discover that.
Thank God the great Nagai Go is around to introduce Cutie Honey, sadly
one of very few truly successful non-anime films adapted from Japan's classic
comics. Chotto-sa, nantoka naranai?
observation, enthusiastically blurting out "Wow, wow" at
anything that strikes his fancy. Doyle himself is such a charming subject, the
seemingly focus-less format of the docu works pretty well. Disappointingly, Wong
Kar-wai, Fruit Chan, Peter Ho-san Chan and other Hong Kong filmmakers don't give
us a whole lot of insight about what they get out of their collaborations with
the cinematographer, although the docu accurately captures the absolutely
cramped, claustrophobic environment these filmmakers work in (sort of going
against the obvious intention behind the docu's official supporters to portray
the city as enchanting). We also see Doyle in the set of M. Night Shyamalan's
Lady in the Water, glaringly ill-fitted, with the tightly coiled director
and his crew patiently tolerating his "eccentricities" and "loose" working
style. Doyle, on his part, offers an interesting observation, "In Hollywood,
it's 'Give me what I want or I will sue the f*ck out of you." 
The follow-up discussion began with Kim reminding the audience that
the situation has changed, mostly for the worse, for Korean cinema since the
docu was filmed. The Korean directors generally concurred. Kim Jee-woon's
comparison of his cohorts with the creative force behind the American New Cinema
was also a source of debate. (By this comparison director Kim probably did not
mean to point to Arthur Penn or Don Siegel) The single most important insight
one could learn from the discussion was, despite their cinephilic sensibilities
and common love of genre cinema, just how different these directors were from
one another. This was made even more evident when a young audience member asked
the panel whether any of them would be interested in making a film like
Transformers. Ryu Seung-wan flatly stated that he likes neither wu
xia novels nor video games and has become even more partial toward the old
movies as he gets older. Min Gyu-dong, in an exceedingly gentle and thoughtful
manner typical of him, nonetheless clearly indicated that he was bored out of
his skull by Transformers. Park Chan-wook claimed that he would rather
design something like Metallic Gear Solid 4 than doing a "cutting-edge
work" within the confines of a narrative film like Transformers. 
Best of Puchon: 13 (Thailand) by Chookiet
Sakveerakul.
In
this animated sci-fi world, shit is the premiere energy resource and the
government seeks to control the bowel movements of the populace. (And the media
is awash with constipation cures.) In order to keep track of who's shitting for
big brother, every newborn has an ID ring shoved up his or her anus before
release from hospital. An infrastructure of outhouses enables the government to
capture everyone's bowel movements. Their ID rings confirm each bowel movement,
and after pulling on the flush cord of the outhouse, the citizen crapper is
allotted one juicybar for their contribution. 
Let me get this out of the way first: as an adaptation of Kishi Yusuke, whom I
am a big fan of, the Korean version Black House leaves much to be
desired. Especially in its first half, the movie tastes too much like processed
cheese: indeed, in some aspects it has the outlook of a Hollywood remake of an
Asian genre film, with the level of gore and violence cranked up but much of the
appeal of the original's characters and twisted narrative turns compromised. Lee
Jong-young's screenplay invents a rather hackneyed childhood trauma for the
protagonist Jun-o (which predictably gets resolved in a cliffhanger finale),
while reducing one of the novel's most fascinating and complex characters, the
company "enforcer" Miyoshi, into a crude thug with fondness for dental floss.
Director Shin Terra, previously responsible for the ultra-low-budget
sci-fi Brainwave (2006), is clearly an inventive filmmaker but has some
way to go before mastering storytelling skills. Those who have not read the
novel might be befuddled by sequences that are in turn confusingly presented,
inadequately explained, or simply illogical (Why does the dead boy's father bite
his thumb off in one scene but is shown to have chopped it off in another?).
Others, such as a major scene where the protagonist discovers the hanged body of
a young boy, lack both the shock value as well as the kind of phlegmatic,
deliberately paced terror that we see in high-end Japanese genre literature or
film.