New Releases…
” “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” was made on a shoestring budget of $1.8 million and will be released in about two dozen theaters. But its director, Robert Greenwald, hopes to show the movie in thousands of homes and churches in the next month. The possibility that it might become a cult hit like Michael Moore’s 1989 unsympathetic portrait of General Motors, “Roger & Me,” has Wal-
Mart worried.
So, Wal-Mart has embarked on a counteroffensive that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Relying on a preview posted online, Wal-Mart investigated the events described in the film and produced a short video contending the film has factual errors. (Mr. Greenwald denies there are errors and says that Wal-Mart has not seen the final cut.)
Wal-Mart has also begun to promote a second film, “Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” which casts the company in a rosier light. Wal-Mart declined to make its executives available for the Greenwald film, but it participated with the second film’s director, Ron Galloway. The war room team helped distribute a letter, written by Mr. Galloway, that challenges Mr. Greenwald to show the two movies side-by-side.”
I’ll be looking out for the DVD – I wonder if it’ll be cheaper at Asda?
The Guardian reviews a TV mini-series I’d loge to see, though it’s only avaailable on Arab tv:
“This season there is a new rebel, a show called al-Hour al-Eyn, The Beautiful Maidens, which got past the censors and has run for an hour every night during Ramadan, to culminate in a final episode tomorrow night. The acting is good and the directing sophisticated, but the series stands out because it offers a rare, nuanced criticism of militant extremism that is neither patronising nor imposed from the west. It is one of the few times that Arabs have seen the debates they have in private echoed in popular entertainment.
The Middle East Broadcasting Company, which airs the series, is one of the main satellite channels in the Middle East, with a potential audience of many millions across the Arab world. “I want the whole of society to see it. The young to the old, ordinary people, everybody,” the Syrian director of the series, Najdat Ismail Anzour, told the Guardian.
The story tells of a group of families from across the Arab world who live together in a compound in Saudi Arabia. Each family has their own problems and aspirations. All hoped that moving to Saudi Arabia would provide both financial and religious fulfilment. In reality it has done little to resolve their personal troubles.
At the same time a group of Saudi militants preaches, talks and trains in the mosque and desert, enticed by the calling of their hardline cleric. “Jihad needs courageous knights,” one tells another as they prepare to fight.
Before long the militants attack the compound. Several civilians from among the different Arab families are either killed or injured, including children. Real news footage is woven in from the many actual attacks on Saudi compounds in recent years. “The world is horrifying now,” says one of the injured as he looks over the wreckage of their homes. “Inside ourselves we are dangerous and horrifying and we should start to change.” Only in the final episodes do the militants begin to question their actions.”
