AIFF 2010: Opening Gala - Some Photos

Bear Tooth Audience Early On

This is where the blogger considers walking out into the snow and just abandoning everything.  Going home at 1am, my work begins.  And the Bear Tooth auditorium is dark, I won't use the flash, and so I have to pretend my pictures are arty. So here are some photos and I'll try to get some film maker videos up before the sun rises.

The orange cones will be easily recognizable to Bear Tooth regulars.  For others, this is how the wait staff know which order to bring you during the movie. 

Tony Shepherd and Rand Thornsley - the the man who makes it happen and the man who makes it work - opening the festival.  There was even a birthday cake and a singer from the Anchorage Opera led in singing Happy Birthday.

Jon Voight and some of the crew from "Everybody Loves Whales" were there and spoke about being in Anchorage.

After The Wild Hunt showed - I'll try to get into that in another post - there was a break to go into the lobby and eat and mingle.  I got a chance to talk to several of the film makers and will try to get some of that up soon. 

Back in the auditorium, there was a band and also some trailers and film makers in the audience were introduced.  Here's Erik Knudsen, recently arrived from UK and who did Silent Accomplice.

Andy Thomas encouraged folks to check out his film The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi.

And Taavi Eelmaa, from Estonia, talked a little bit about the film in which he plays the title role, The Temptation of St. Tony.  This is a film I'm particularly looking forward to.  It sounds like a perfect festival type movie - honoring classic film makers and telling a dark tale in non-Hollywood fashion. 



More coming.  There are some neat folks in town for the festival and I'm hoping to share some with you here.

Fixing Mom's Keyboard - Intergenerational, Cross Continental Tech Fix

I was on the phone with my mom in LA. She'd taken my son (her grandson) to the airport to fly back to DC. But he'd left an ergonomic keyboard for her to use. And while she liked the keyboard, she wasn't getting the letters she wanted when she typed. My son uses a Dvorak keyboard, but that wasn't the issue.

She types the alphabet and tells me what she's getting. A, ok. B. ok. C ok. D ok. E ok. Trouble starts with J, then K then L. She's getting numbers.

Is there a numlock key? She can't find one.

What kind of keyboard is it?

Kinesis.

I look online. It does look strange. But nothing detailed enough.

An 800 number. Mom's on one phone. Call Kinesis on the other phone. I explain to Rick - my mon's in LA, I'm in Anchorage, my son's on a plane, and she's getting numbers instead of letters.


Rick: I think I can help. Find the Key(something key, I can't remember) in the upper right. Push it.

I repeat this to my mom.

She does it. She types. It works.

It's nice to be able to solve a little, but vexing problem for my mom, so easily. But this is a truly strange world.


Meanwhile, I've added a "Today's Tips" in the "Anchorage International Film Festival" tab above. Let's see if I can keep up enough to even have daily tips. Shannyn Moore has asked me to call into her radio show on KUDO every weekday after the 1pm news to say what's happening at the festival. So putting up daily tips should help get me ready.

AIFF 2010: Fanny, Annie, and Danny - and their creator Chris Brown

Danny's interrupted by the phone while playing computer games in his fancy apartment, which leads to a confrontation that shows us a darker edge to Danny's life.

Fanny is practicing a Christmas song on her recorder. It's pretty bad. Then someone knocks on her door.

Lady: Fanny, you can't practice your flute . . .
Fanny: It's not a flute, it's a recorder.
Lady: You can't do this at 6 am, other people are sleeping.

Fanny acts like a 5 year old, but she's clearly adult, living in a type of independent living/group house. We then follow her to work where she sorts chocolates on a conveyor belt in a near empty factory.

We meet Annie in the dentist office where her boss is telling her, over an open mouthed patient, that he's thinking of adding another 'girl'.
Annie: But I don't need any help.
Dentist: Business is expanding.
Annie: I can handle it.
Dentist: I've already placed an ad, people are coming this afternoon.
Annie:  I have an appointment, but I can cancel it.
Dentist: I can handle this, go to your appointment.

As I write this, I'm seeing foreshadowing of things to come that I didn't see when I first saw this on DVD the other night. I can also see how vividly the whole movie impressed itself in my brain. I think I could reconstruct almost every scene.

I'm not a fan of dysfunctional family movies in general, and my initial reaction was that no one could be so relentlessly nasty to her kids (even these adult kids) as the mom, and if someone were, that those who could - like the husband and Annie - would just leave. For example, Fanny, who comes by bus, gets to the house early. Mom says, "It's not 2 o'clock yet. Wait outside."  Mom has not one atom in her body that is sympathetic to Fanny.

But for the last couple of days, these characters have inhabited my head. They were so real. I can't imagine the actors not really being the characters. And I learned so much about them in 82 minutes. Though I'm still perplexed by the mom - though I'm sure there are people like her. If she hates her kids (except for Danny) so much, why do they get together for Christmas?  But a good film should leave you still chewing when it's over.  And my jaw is sore.

Fanny is a wonderful, wonderful character. A good person struggling to make her way in a world too complex for her brain. Chris did miracles to show her humanity on the screen so well
. And Annie's boyfriend, Todd, though he has problems of his own, is also thoroughly decent and talks to Franny adult to adult. And Dad is in second place only to Job.

This is a powerful movie. It's not a light parody of dysfunctional people, but more a like a serious documentary that follows them as they move toward a disastrous Christmas dinner (well Mom likes to celebrate the week before Christmas, something about less pressure). 

Anyone nervous about going home for Christmas because of family dynamics might want to check out Fanny, Annie, and Danny. I promise you, unless one of your family members gets cut up and put in the freezer, this family will make you feel good about your own. (I say this half seriously, but I want to emphasize, this is a movie that drew me right in with its absolutely real characters.  Even if I don't understand this mother (I'd like to think she's a little over the top, but maybe there are people out there like her) watching each sibling individually in their own lives and then watching them come together was riveting. 

And Thursday night I got to meet the film maker - Chris Brown - and to ask a bit about the dark characters in his film.





This film won Best US/International Narrative at the Kansas City FilmFest and Best Performance at the San Antonio Film Festival. It says a lot for the quality of the films at our festival that this one didn't make it into the films in competition. Or it might say something about the selection committee's tastes. (Don't know cause I haven't seen the films in Features in Competition.)

AIFF 2010: Andrew Thomas on The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi

One of the perks of blogging the festival is getting to see some of the films on DVD before the festival. One I saw this week is Andrew Thomas' The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi. Guaraldi was a jazz musician whose name sounded familiar, but I couldn't have told you why. Until the notes of Cast Your Fate to the Wind began.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the film. Once you get settled into the music, the film goes off in a different direction - we have civil rights (Dave Brubeck talks about coming back from WW II and how the black soldiers weren't allowed to eat in the restaurant with the white soldiers in their first stop back in the US). We have the hungry i and Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory. We go to the opening of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. And we also see Charlie Brown and Lucy. And by the end, we've heard a dozen or more versions of Cast Your Fate to the Wind.

J and I both really liked this movie. So when I said hello to the man in the hat Thursday night at the reception after NightJohn and he said he was Andy and that his film was about Vince Guaraldi, I had lots of questions. After a bit I remembered I had my video camera. So here's Andy Thomas talking about the movie. He does it much better than I and I'm sorry I didn't keep the camera going longer.   He's so completely into the film and how he did it and the interruptions - to do a film about manufacturing nail polish and a German film about spelunking in Italy to pay the bills.




But you'll be able to hear him and ask your own question after  
The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi shows  
Saturday at 5pm at the 
Bear Tooth.  Unfortunately, that's it, the only time it shows. 

AIFF 2010: Charles Burnett and NightJohn

Film maker Charles Burnett after NightJohn Showing

Although the Festival doesn't officially begin until Friday night, there was a pre-festival showing at the Anchorage Museum of Charles Burnett's NightJohn Thursday night.  I heard someone describe Burnett as the best American film maker that no one knows.  But the other film makers there all talked about being in the same room with a legend.






Here, for example, is Fanny, Annie, and Danny film maker Chris Brown talking about Charles Burnett.  (This is a very short video.)






This is a 1996 film about a slave who'd escaped to freedom in the North on his third try and then came back to the South so he could teach other slaves to read.  This was a Disney film, but with a black director and tells the story from the slaves' point of view.  Powerful stuff. 

But I don't have time to do too much except put up some pictures.  I'm not putting up any pictures from the after film talk because even I have some standards about photo quality and the ones I took, well the documentation of the event doesn't erase the low quality of the pictures.  But here are a couple of the reception afterward.

Anyone complaining about the expense of $8 festival tickets should have been at the museum tonight.  Not only was this 1996 film free, but so was the spread afterward.

I've pretty much given up eating cheese for health reasons, but I'd talked to Fromagio owner Helen Howarth last summer before the store was open and when I saw all the exquisite cheeses there, I was pretty sure I knew where it came from.  And I tasted some.  I completely understand anyone's addiction.  This is not your typical packaged American cheese.












Here's Burnett with a film festival volunteer.





And here he was good enough to pose with film maker Chris Brown, whose Fanny, Annie, and Danny plays Saturday at 5:30pm at the Bear Tooth.  I got to see it on dvd this week and the characters were so real and compelling that they seem like people I actually spent a couple of hours with. 

And the third person is Dawnell Smith, the Festival general manager.

AIFF 2010: Free Pre-Festival Movie Tonight

The Festival starts officially tomorrow night but you can get a head start with a free film at the Anchorage Museum tonight at 7pm.  There are still tickets left.  You can order online now.

Click here to reserve Nightjohn tickets

Here's what the Museum says Nightjohn by Charles Burnett, who will be there:

The film, about a slave who risks his life to teach other slaves to read, was called the "best American movie of 1996" by the New Yorker.

The New York Times wrote:

Lest we forget, knowledge is power, and for slaves in the antebellum South, learning to read was forbidden. Some slaves who dared to become literate were punished by having a finger chopped off in front of the whole slave community. Or worse. . .


Although narrated in the simple, straightforward style of a typical family movie and filmed with a picture-book prettiness, ''Nightjohn'' is no cop-out when it comes to confronting the day-to-day horrors of slavery. Its representative slave owner, Clel Waller (Beau Bridges), is a conscienceless brute who terrorizes his field workers with beatings and humiliations and bullies his squeamish young son, Jeffrey (Joel Thomas Traywick), into following his example.  .   .

Burnett has a second free movie showing Thursday night.  You can reserve your ticket at the same link. 

And tomorrow night the Wild Hunt opens the Festival at 7pm at the Bear Tooth.  It's $30 for the event. (It says on page 8 of the printed program.) You can also see the movie for $8 on Tuesday at 7:45pm at the Bear Tooth. 

Trying to Watch "Fair Game" with an Open Mind

[This is a long post.  Most of you won't read it all.  It's long though, because it shows step-by-step how a rightwing website neutralizes truth, in this case how they make bogus claims against the movie Fair Game - the name is so apt - to neutralize some of the most shocking known behavior of the Bush Administration.  This is probably longer than it need be, but finding the truth, despite what people say, doesn't come in bumper-sticker brevity.]


We saw the movie Fair Game last week. It tells a story* about the active undercover CIA Agent Valerie Plame who was outed by the White House in July 2003.  Her husband, former US Ambassador Joe Wilson, had been hired to determine if Niger had really supplied yellow-cake uranium to the Iraqi government to be delivered in those now infamous aluminum tubes.  (*I think we have to stop using "the" story for anything, because even without the ideological split in the US, it is ever clearer that different people relate different stories about the same events)

Contributing to my state of mind, was the fact I had just heard an NPR story called the The Great Textbook Wars that afternoon.  From NPR:

In 1974, Kanawha County, West Virginia was the first battleground in the American culture wars. Controversy erupted over newly-adopted school textbooks. School buildings were hit by dynamite and Molotov cocktails, buses were riddled with... [The full article is at WNYC]

This piece had interviews with the people who began the boycott against the new textbooks which included a more modern and diverse group of authors and ideas than the previous texts had.  A couple of people cited their 1974 protest as the beginning of the Tea Party movement.  From the piece I gathered that the protesters were generally not well educated, their world view was dominated by religion, and they were not happy about the changes in their lives being brought about by integration - which was reflected in the textbook changes.  We also heard from teachers who said they needed a curriculum which better reflected their students, that discussed more than just dead white males in literature and history and science.  BUT, it was also clear that the catalyst for the protesters was a feeling of being disrespected.  They felt these changes were being forced on them without any input from them and they weren't going to take it any more.  Perhaps they couldn't stop the national civil rights legislation of the 60s, but they could stop their local schools from imposing new texts which raised questions they didn't want their kids exposed to.

Yikes, I'm trying to explain the link between textbook wars and Fair Game without making this too lengthy.  Much of this has been sitting for a week as I let the ideas naturally rise.  I don't think I used enough yeast.  But I need to get this done.  Let's just say the textbook wars reminded me once again that people do things for reasons and when people get pushed too far, emotion blocks out any chance for reason to triumph.

Even without the textbook story in my head, my tendency is to play the devil's advocate and think about other interpretations of the story.  I can't watch anything - even something I agree with - without thinking about how someone with a different perspective would react.  

As I watched Fair Game, with the radio show fresh in my mind, I could hear the Tea Party supporters of Joe Miller shouting out "Lies, Lies!" throughout the movie.  I did wonder what they would have said about a Joe Wilson talk to college students where he warned about government becoming a tyranny and how it would get worse if they didn't pay attention and stand up and protest.

We're in a period of American history - one that is not unique in this respect - where 'truth' is limited to facts that don't challenge 'my' world view.  This affects those on all points of the political spectrum, though some are more prone to be ruled by raw emotion rather than hard facts and logic.  The key is to find a path which blends both the passion that stirs us to do things with the rationality that gets us to do them effectively.  We can't let emotion blind us to the 'truth.'

In Fair Game's portrayal of the Valerie Plame case, even recognizing that Hollywood leaves out much of the story and enhances it for dramatic effect (so do politicians and all of us, of course), a few facts can't be disputed.

1. President George W Bush used evidence - the aluminum tubes and the non-existent yellow-cake uranium - to justify going to war with Iraq, even though the CIA was telling them couldn't be true.  In one scene Scooter Libby badgers a CIA analyst - Are you 100% sure?  99% sure?  96% sure?  If you aren't 95% sure, are you willing to risk our security?  
   
   Even if we accept the notion that the White House was convinced this was true - and not simply a plausible ploy for getting the American public to go along - it turns out later that they were, in fact, wrong.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  .
   
   
2. The White House exposed the identity of an active undercover CIA agent with open projects - and informants in different parts of the world whose lives were jeopardized and possibly lost because of the outing.  Besides being a federal crime, this also forced the resignation of an experienced agent with active, needed knowledge, and endangered CIA contacts around the world.  While the White House ran a misinformation campaign that suggested Plame was a third rate agent who didn't do anything, they do the same sort of campaign with anyone who is in their way - ie the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry.
    
3. Scooter Libby was tried and convicted.  And his sentence was commuted by the White House
   

These 'truths' are all on the record.  You can quibble about different details of the movie - it had 90 minutes or so to present its narrative - these three things are indisputable..


Or so I thought.  While prepping this, I ran across the blog Newsbusters - a right wing blog set up to debunk liberal lies - which reviewed the movie Fair Game


Here's what Newsbusters tells us about NewsBusters.org

Welcome to NewsBusters, a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.
In August of 2005, with the assistance of Matthew Sheffield of Dialog New Media, the MRC launched the NewsBusters blog to provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting. [emphasis added.]

You can read the Wikipedia post on NewsBusters which emphasizes the ideological stance (and was itself attacked by Newsbusters.)   Even if you read NewsBusters itself, it is clear  that this is a site set up to promote conservative Republican causes first, and not to expose the truth.

The trend I see is this:

1. Attack the opponent - lying is totally within the rules
2. If your opponent fights back you have a couple of choices
1.  Attack again
2.  Change the subject
3.  Say that nobody can be trusted - raise questions about the honest folks so the dishonest folks look equal.  This is what they mean by 'neutralizing'.

The point is to totally sully the water so that any sort of authentic discussion is impossible.  Then the loudest and most persistent wins.

This works to the advantage of the conservatives because their reserve of funding is deeper.  Sure, liberals can raise a lot of money too, but in part that's because the money people want everyone - people who agree with them and those who don't - to be indebted to them.  They bet on all the horses - the only sure way to win no matter who's in office.  The Republicans have also just done a much better job of spreading their message.

I go through all this because I'm pretty sure that Fair Game is reasonably accurate on the basics if not every cinematic detail.  Newsbusters attacks Fair Game's validity by making bogus claims on minor issues and distracting the reader from the really serious issues the movie raised.  Neutralizing them as Newsbusters says its goal is.   Few people will check their out-of-context quotes..  This stirs up their partisans and sows seeds of doubt among those who don't know the background and who assume that no one could lie so shamelessly.  In the end, the casual reader goes away thinking, "another biased movie.  You can't believe anyone these days." Neutralization accomplished.  But what if they are telling the truth?  Then the truth has been neutralized and lies are equal to truth.

Look at  Newsbusters' damning conclusions about Fair Game:

1. Liman [the movie's director] is being dishonest in order to push a left-wing agenda.
2. Liman is being dishonest because the factual story is far less interesting than the fictional account released Friday.
3. Liman is completely ignorant of the facts, and too lazy to do even a little research.

The message is:  it's all lies, there's nothing there, they're stupid and lazy.

How did they reach these conclusions?  They made them up.  They took several ideas from the movie and declared them to be false with the help of out-of-context quotes from the Robb-Silbermann Report on WMD's. 

The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein did the legwork in demonstrating just how far from the truth some of the film's central claims are. Chief among them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and other White House officials exerted political pressure on intelligence officials to cherrypick intelligence favorable to claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, not only did Libby do no such thing, but according to the Robb-Silbermann Commission, which investigated the intelligence behind the Iraq war, "The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

What??!!  First, there is no contradiction.  The Robb-Silbermann Report quote does NOT say there was no pressure exerted.  It clearly says that the intelligence officials didn't "skew or alter any of their analytical judgments" because of political pressure that did exist.  

They damn Liman because he didn't read the report:

Weinstein asked "Fair Game" director Doug Liman if he had read the Robb-Silbermann report. He had not.

Liman was the director.  It was his job to take the script (not write the script) and make a movie from it.  The report is 601 pages.  Why should Liman read it?  But I'm sure the author of the book  the movie was based on read the report.  Why do am I sure?  Because the book was written by Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson assisted her.  They had a huge stake in knowing every detail of this report and Wilson testified before the commission and is cited in the report. And probably the script-writer read a lot more of it than did anyone associated directly with the Newsbusters article.


Then Newsbusters proceeds with more obfuscation.

But other blatant falsehoods pervade the film that could be disproven with a simple Google search. For instance, it is near-common knowledge by now - except among politically interested Bush-bashers - that neither Libby nor then-White House advisor Karl Rove leaked Wilson's wife's name to the press. In fact, State Department official Richard Armitage dropped the name to the late columnist Robert Novak, setting off a political firestorm.
But according to Weinstein,

You wouldn’t know this by watching Liman’s “Fair Game,” since Armitage is nowhere to be found — except in script at the very end. The narrative that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby were nefarious behind-the-scenes players intent on destroying innocent reputations while pushing the nation into war on false pretenses fits too nicely into Liman and Hollywood’s leftwing vision. You can’t, after all, let facts spoil a cinematic anti-Bush diatribe.

OK,  neither Rove nor Libby contacted the media and directly told them. And the movie doesn't say they did. But it is also 'near-common knowledge' that Armitage worked closely with them both and would never have leaked the information exposing the identity of an active undercover CIA agent on his own, without their assent.   Newsbusters conveniently fails to mention that Libby was convicted and President Bush commuted his sentence because of his actions portrayed in this movie.  Here's what Fox News wrote (yes, that Fox News) about the conviction:

I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby Guilty on Four of Five Counts in CIA Leak Trial

Libby was accused of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned about Valerie Plame's identity and whom he told. Plame is the CIA employee whose husband. Amb. Joe Wilson, was sent to Niger by the agency to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium.

The Newsbusters article continues with more twisted truth:

According to Weinstein, the fictional Wilson "suggests his report to the CIA definitively debunked the Iraq-Niger claim." In fact, Bush's statement was accurate: British intelligence had discovered just that. A bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2004 that Wilson's report "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium” and "did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal."

Wait, wait, wait.  The movie didn't dispute that the British reported this.  But the movie said that the British report was wrong.  Which it was. 

Here's the paragraph from the  Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq the first quote is lifted from:

When the former ambassador [Joe Wilson] spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respects. First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and, specifically, as refuting both the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report described how the structure of Niger's uranium mines would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Niger to sell uranium to rouge [sic] nations, and noted that Nigerien officials denied knowledge of any deals to sell uranium to any rogue states, but did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium. 

The movie didn't deny the possibility that Iraq might have approached Niger for uranium, only that if they did, Niger never sold or gave them any.  And even if this allegation about the movie were true, it's a relatively minor point compared to the ones I listed above. It's like disputing that the man had dirty fingernails and skipping the fact that he murdered someone. 

The second quote is also shown to NOT support Newsbusters contention:

(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             
(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             
(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             

(U) Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

The three paragraphs before this conclusion are deleted, so we have to go from the little that is there.  But it is clear if you read this, that analysts' assessments weren't changed because they already believed there was no uranium deal between Niger and Iraq.  His report "lent more credibility to the original" CIA reports.  The only way that could be true is if those reports said the deal didn't take place.  And the quote clearly says the INR didn't think Niger would sell the uranium to Iraq.

So everything in these two quotes is consistent with what was in the movie.  But not too many Newsbusters readers are likely to go to the original source to check on a narrative they already want to believe.

This attack on the Fair Game, in my mind, is the same as claiming Obama is a Kenyan citizen and a Muslim.  The point is to raise questions about clear, factual events that you don't want people to believe.  To destroy the good name and character of people who oppose you.  To raise questions about their message.  What don't the Newsbusters folks want people to believe?

1.  People close to Karl Rove and VP Cheney, people who would not have acted without Rove's and probably VP Cheney's approval (of course it would be given with plausible deniability) exposed an active CIA agent, a serious violation of the law and breach of US Security.  An action that the conservatives would have lynched a Democratic White House had it done the same thing. 

2.  That there was clear evidence that there was no uranium deal between Niger and Iraq and the aluminum tubes were not for rockets to launch nuclear weapons, yet President GW Bush used this as a key justification for going to war against Iraq.  In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell knew it was false and did not mention the Niger uranium in his speech to the United Nations. (See the Robb-Silbermann report, footnote 210 on page 213 - and no, I didn't read the whole report either, I just know how to use 'search.')

3.  The attack on Valerie Plame clearly came from the White House, most probably Rove and Cheney were involved, and was in retaliation for Plame's husband publicly refuting the lies the White House was using to justify going to war against Iraq.

4.  Scooter Libby was convicted - presumably as the fall guy to protect Rove and probably Cheney - and then his sentence was commuted by President Bush.

The point of this post is NOT to have a pissing match over facts with people who don't care about seeking out truth.  You can't win a game like that against people who have unlimited resources and no shame.  The point is to illustrate where we are in the US today - nearing a dark age when truth is suppressed ruthlessly and the common good is trashed for private gain. Over and over again.  In every sector from religion to oil to banking, and yes, even in academia. 

The attack on the movie attempts to make readers think the movie is total fiction, but it doesn't acknowledge or refute these facts I've outlined that the movie clearly presents. Facts that should raise a hue and cry from anyone who believes our leaders should obey the law, be fiscally responsible, and that human life is sacred and should not be sacrificed needlessly. (The war in Iraq has killed about 100,000 Iraqi civilians.)

But we shouldn't  be surprised they would attack the movie.  If  Rove and Cheney's people were willing to expose an active undercover CIA agent in retaliation for her husband telling the truth, there's probably little they wouldn't do to defeat their perceived enemies.  Newsbusters behavior here isn't that different from what the movie is about - attack the messenger to suppress the truth. 

Their tactics to replace 'truth' with their own version of reality is working.  People who oppose them are attacked and have to 'prove' their innocence (a traditional American value, right?) and so much mud is thrown that most people throw up their hands and say, "They're all corrupt."  And that's a victory for the corrupt.  Because their corruption isn't as problematic if the voters think that the honest folks are corrupt too.

And lots of writers think twice before posting on something like this out of fear they will be attacked.  This blog is off-the-radar enough I don't think I have to worry.   I'm not pointing out the inconsistencies because I think anyone will change their mind.  I'm doing it to illustrate how public discourse has been horribly polluted so that truth becomes totally indistinguishable - for many - from fiction. 

Yes, Valerie Plame was declared by Karl Rove to be "Fair Game" for this sort of nasty, democracy destroying attack.  But Plame, thanks to her husband, didn't fold.  She did what President Obama needs to do.  They fought back.  So, put Fair Game on your movie list.

Blog Adjustments During Film Festival

You have to keep moving or you die, right?  So, I've adjusted the orange header box on top, to reflect that I'm focusing on the Anchorage International Film Festival for the next two weeks.  (I bet you didn't notice until you read it here.)  I'm also experimenting with a new feature on blogger (ok, fairly new) that allows me to make 'pages' that are not posts.  More like pages on a website.  You get to them from a tab on top!  (Actually I could have  used a box on the side as well, but that's already cluttered up.)

If you look below the orange header you can see two tabs - Home and Anchorage International Film Festival 2010.

Home gets you to the blog.
Anchorage International Film Festival 2010 gets you to a 'page' where I'm keeping a linked index to festival posts so it's easier to find specific films, film makers, tips, etc.

For you other blogspot-bloggers, you can have up to ten pages.  So, you could actually make a website using blogger.  Ah... the more things change the more they stay the same.  

This should be a useful addition from blogger.  Now, I'd like them to give us sub-labels.  I could put sub-labels for Eagle and Swan under the label for Birds. Then I could do more labels, but have just the major labels listed in that messy right hand column.  (Blogger calls them labels; others call them tags.)

If you haven't done so already, go try the tab.

AIFF 2010: UFAQs - Unasked Frequently Asked Questions about the Festival

I'm not sure its cricket to have FAQs if no one has asked any questions so these are UFAQs - Unasked Frequently Asked Questions. This is information people might be or should be asking for. Below are links to posts with general information about the Anchorage International Film Festival.

Where's the official AIFF site?

Who won in each category?
2011  Winners -  My 2011 winners (none) - Official AIFF 2011 Winners Page
2010 Winners -  My 2010 winners post -  Official AIFF 2010 Winners Page
2009 Winners -  My 2009 winners post -  Official AIFF 2009 Winners Page
2008 Winners - My 2008 winners post  -  Official AIFF 2008 Winners Page
[Note:  'My winners' tend to be films I picked.  Sometimes I've only discussed one category, sometimes more than one.  Sometimes my comments are buried in posts even I can't find.]


What do all the categories mean? ("official selection;" "films in competition," etc. ) This is a post from 2008, but still gets the basic information across.  It also covers the process for how films get selected for the Festival and how the winners get chosen. 


What  films are the best films this year (2010)?
Films in Competition are the ones chosen  to compete for the Golden Oosiker awards.  Here are guides to each category - something about each film and when and where they will play.  [For the film categories I have up for 2012, you can find the films in competition posts listed at the AIFF2012 page.  They are marked with a check on the Official AIFF website.]

Films in Competition  - Features 2010
Films in Competition -  Documentaries [2009 at link, until I get the 2010 done] 
Films in Competition -  Shorts  [2009 at link, until I get the 2010 done]
Films in Competition -  Animation [2009 at link, until I get the 2010 done]
Films in Competition -  Short Documentaries [Coming Soon maybe- never got this one last year]

Short films are grouped together into 'programs.'  How do I find which short films are playing together and the same of program?
Easiest place is the printed program. It's much easier to get in this year online than last.
Animation Programs  [The link takes you to the Animation Program in Festival Genius.  Once there also look for short and super short animation programs.]
Snowdance Programs (films made in Alaska or by Alaskans)
Short Films
Super Shorts
(The links only go to week one.  You can change it to week two.  See the red rectangle in the screen shot below.)

I'm not interested in the festival, but if there are any films on my favorite place, food, sport, etc.,  I'd go.  Are there any?

The new website software for 2010 allows you to look at a list of countries and then see what films are being shown from that country.  Click on the blue (where the red arrow points below) and it will open a list of countries.  Then pick a country, and wait until it loads the films from that country.

Also note the red box in the lower left.  The film festival spans three calendar weeks and so you have to check for each week.  Just click on the week and it changes.  I got to the page above from the link below:

 http://anchorage.bside.com/2010/schedule/week/type/film

To find out about films of special topics, you need to look through the films themselves.  The Anchorage Daily News did a post on films about the Alaska Outdoors.  I'll try to add some information as I become aware of it. 


How do I find your blog posts on specific films or film makers?  I'll put links for specific films here as I post them  (check the video posts below too) 

Nov 23 -  Feature Films in Competition
Nov 24 - The Wild Hunt
Nov 27 - The Temptation of St. Tony
Nov 30 - Son Istasyon (Last Station)

 [A lot of these posts went to the videos - see that list below.]

Do you have videos of the Festival? - I'll add the video posts as they happen.



Where will the films be shown?
Locations:   Bear Tooth, is the main venue.  

1230 West 27th Avenue (West of Spenard Road) - 907.276.4200

Out North is the second venue.  
3800 DeBarr Road, (two blocks SW of Debarr and Bragraw)  907.279.8099


Marston Theater (Loussac Library) will have the Family Programming on Saturday Dec.

There are special events at other venues.  You can check all the venues next to window where you check the countries (see screenshot above). 

What workshops are there?
There are six workshops with film makers.

What are your criteria for a good movie? When I made my picks for the 2008 best films, at the end of the post I outlined my criteria. The link takes you to that post, scroll down to second part.


Should I buy a pass or just buy tickets as I go?  

Tickets are $8 per film. All films passes are $90. So, if you go to eleven films, the pass is cheaper. But there are other benefits to the pass. You do have to get a ticket (free) for each film and only a certain number of seats are held for passholders, but you do get priority seating with your pass.
And if you have a pass, you'll go see more films because you'll think "I've paid for them. I should go and get my money's worth."
All Films and Events passes are $115. This gets you into Workshops, a few extra events, like the opening night film (which is actually $30 a ticket) and the awards. These extra events also have food.

[Update:  another option is to volunteer and get a pass to a movie.]

You can buy tickets at the venues.  You can also get advanced tickets at the venues.
You can buy tickets for Out North online.  The option is next to the films. 


What about family films? 
Saturday, December 11 at Loussac Library - in the Marston Auditorium.
Here are the AIFF links for family events.



Who Are You Anyways? - who's paying you to do this? does your brother have a film in competition? What is your connection to the festival? From an earlier post here's my  
Disclosure:

Well I blogged the  2007 festival  and the AIFF people liked what I did and asked if I would be the official blogger in 2008. They promised me I could say what I wanted, but I decided it was better to blog on my own and then if I write something that upsets one of the film makers, the Festival isn't responsible.  They had a link to the blog last year.  They also threw in a free pass for me in 2008, 2009, and this year.

I probably won't say anything terrible about a film, but I did rant about one film two years that I thought was exploiting its subject as well as boorishly demeaning a whole country. I mentioned in an earlier post that if I sound a little promotional at times, it's only because I like films and I like the kinds of quirky films that show up at festivals, so I want as many people to know about the festival as possible so the festival will continue. Will I fudge on what I write to get people out? No way. There are plenty of people in Anchorage who like films. They're my main target - to get them out of the house in the dark December chill when inertia tugs heavily if they even think about leaving the house. But if others who normally don't go out to films hear about a movie on a topic they're into, that's good too.

I did a post this year for Film Festival Skeptics who might be sitting on the fence and need to be given reasons to go and strategies to make it work.  

How do I Keep Track of What's Happening at the Festival?
  I'll be blogging the film festival every day.  The link below will be my festival posts only, starting with the most recent.

Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF 2010)


Are there other Alaskan Film Festivals? 
There are some events called 'festival' that I know of in Anchorage, but they aren't major film events like this one.  There is another organization,  that puts Alaska in it's name and rents a postal box in Alaska, but has no other connection that we can find to Alaska.  You can read about that at  Comparing the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA International Film Festivals - Real Festival? Scam?

Anyone who knows of other legitimate film festivals in Alaska, let me know.  I've heard stuff about Sitka in 2008.  And there's also an Indigenous Film Festival Feb. 2011.

Salute to People Who Do Their Jobs Well - Lynda, My Travel Agent

Someone gave me Lynda's phone number back in late 1991 or early 1992 when I was planning a class on Chinese Civil Service Reform and wanted to take the students to Hong Kong and Beijing as part of the class.  Even then, air fare and ten days of hotels plus a day tour in both cities for about $800 was a bargain.  I'd really expected to work out local housing with people I knew, but when she came back with those prices I surrendered.

She's been my travel agent ever since, and I've posted about her before - Why Travel Agents are Worth the Fee and  The Academy Award for Best Travel Agent Goes To.

She's great because:

1.  She tells me things like, "Steve, just do it online yourself, you don't want to pay my fee."
2.  She's always ready and willing to check things out even if she knows she's probably  not make any money off it.
3.  She's made my life much easier when flights got canceled or changed for a variety of reasons.
4.  She's funny.  And she laughs, and it sounds genuine, at my bad jokes.
5.  She's smart and knows how to make things work.
6.  I know she'll do whatever it takes to make sure my trip goes well.

She also knows that sometimes I'll find a fare I like and then send it to her to make the reservation.  I'm willing to pay the fee knowing if anything, and I mean anything, goes wrong, she'll be working hard to help straighten it out.  I'm more likely to do that on more complicated trips.  She's called an airline for me and made a huge fuss which led to someone in the airline president's office calling me to offer apologies and reparations. He also said, you've got helluva travel agent working for you. 

We did business together for years by phone and email and she'd send tickets by courier.  One day I was someplace, I can't remember where, and I heard this woman talk.  I looked at her and said, "Lynda?"  and she looked at me and said, "Steve?"   Her voice is pretty distinctive, I didn't realize mine was too.   

In this day and age of online reservations, who needs a travel agent?  Sometimes you just get exhausted.  Sometimes the options you want aren't available online.  Sometimes you need someone who knows people at an airline, in a system, in a part of the world.  And if things go wrong, it's nice to have a travel agent call for you.  They have direct phone numbers that reach real people.  (Except the Prinz Hotel.)

We had lunch today with Lynda and she let me take the picture above to post here.  The company she first worked for when we met got bought out half a dozen times since then (picture a big fish swallowing the next fish swallowing the next fish and on and on) and I can't ever remember the latest name.  She used to specialize in business travelers and still has old customers who feel the same way I do about her.  She does a lot of cruises these days and some package tours, but says Alaskans tend to be more independent travelers.    She does a lot of vacation travel - putting a whole package together.  She's good at Mexico, Caribbean, Italy, Asia (she loves Bali), and Hawaii. 

So, if you need someone who's been a gem for me, you can call her at

One, eight hundred, Three Three Three 6 Three 8 Three.

Or email her at lmcmahon AT cwtvacations.com

And remember, be as nice to her as you want her to be to you.

And remember all the professionals in your life who are good at what they do, totally trustworthy, and believe in giving their clients the best possible service.  Let them know how you feel.

[Regular readers know I don't take money or other favors to say good things about businesses or products, and that I've posted about companies that solicit bloggers to push businesses.  Know your blogger before you take their recommendations.]