The Wikileaks film

[sammynb 3640]

And someone doesn't like Django Unchained.

 

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Assange savages film about WikiLeaks

Published: January 24, 2013 - 1:56PM

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• "]First look at WikiLeaks film
  

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says a film about his whistle-blowing website is propaganda designed to fan the flames of a war against Iran.

The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is due to be released in November.

Assange on Wednesday night said WikiLeaks had managed to get hold of a copy of the script of the DreamWorks movie.

And he doesn't like what he's read.

"It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks the organisation," the 41-year-old Australian told students in Oxford via a video-link from the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

"But it is not just an attack against us – it is an attack against Iran.

"It fans the flames to start a war with Iran."

Assange said the opening scene was set in a military complex in Tehran and showed Iran was working on an atomic weapon.

"How does this have anything to do with us?" he said.

A subsequent scene in Cairo showed an Iranian nuclear scientist talking with a United States CIA agent. The scientist says Iran is testing the explosive in the next six months.

But Assange said that in fact, the US's own intelligence agencies had confirmed Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program.

"It's a lie upon a lie – a great big-budget thing that's going to be pushed out in November."

The WikiLeaks founder said "corrupt media and corrupt culture" were engaged in a war alongside intelligence agencies.

He said the institutions that formed the "big media machine" were too close to the table of power they were meant to be reporting on.

"Everything we see, read and hear is produced for a purpose."

Assange said the film slandered an entire nation and "beat the drums of war".

Assange was addressing the Oxford Union's annual Sam Adams Awards, which recognises courageous whistleblowers. He's a previous winner.

The first pictures of Cumberbatch, from TV's Sherlock, playing Assange on-set were released by DreamWorks Studios this week.

The Fifth Estate also stars Daniel Bruhl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an early WikiLeaks associate who eventually fell out with Assange.

Early filming has been taking place in Iceland. A photo released on Wednesday by producers shows Cumberbatch and Bruhl on location in Reykjavik.

Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie and Dan Stevens also star in the film.

Director Bill Condon, who directed The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, said the movie would not offer "any final judgment" on WikiLeaks, which is both praised and reviled for publishing classified government material.

He said it would "explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age".

AAP

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/assange-savages-film-about-wikileaks-20130124-2d8sh.html

 

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Tarantino's lost the plot and needs a good editor

Keith Austin

Published: January 24, 2013 - 4:10PM

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OK, let's get this over and done with. I'm going to talk about Django Unchained, the new Quentin Tarantino movie out in cinemas on Thursday and I'm going to use the 'N' word. Oh yes I am, and you can't stop me. Nonsensical.

There, I've said it. Read it and weep, fan-boys; this is a film with more holes in it than a crocheted bikini. Does Tarantino not have anyone around him who can say, without fear or favour: ''I'm sorry Quent, but that's a load of rubbish?''

Perhaps the absence of Tarantino at this week's red carpet premiere in Sydney was a blessing in disguise. Because someone, surely, would have had to have asked him, in the post-show Q&A, ''when was the last time you heard the word 'no'?''

Overlong, overcooked and underdone (not an easy thing to do), this is not up there with Tarantino's best. That it's being considered for a best film Oscar beggars belief. Even Jackie Brown made more sense than this unoriginal mishmash of cliches and non-sequiturs.

It's probably too late. Someone should have stepped in on the set of Inglourious Basterds and told him that the ridiculous denouement in the theatre belonged to another, not very good, film.

But perhaps there comes a point in every auteur's success story when those voices are either silenced, or silence themselves. It's why rock bands can get away with demanding only green Smarties in their dressing rooms.

As any journalist/writer worth their salt knows, everyone benefits from a good editor. But try telling that to Neil Gaiman, whose wonderfully inventive 2001 book American Gods was re-issued as a 10th anniversary special with 12,000 extra words. The original paperback came in at a massive 501 large format pages.

The 12,000 extra words are called ''the author's preferred text'', also known as all the stuff the editors wouldn't let the author put in the first time around.

Stephen King, too, has gone down the reissue road with his book The Stand. His ''director's cut'' turned an 800-pager into 1100 pages. Again, to no great advantage.

Of course, King's publishers could print the man's shopping list and it would sell its socks off so why even bother editing anything he does?

Well, perhaps to prevent the debacles of his last two books, Under The Dome and 11/22/63, his J.F.K. assassination time travel romp. In both of them, King gradually paints himself into a plot-line corner and has to resort to utterly unlikely and unsatisfactory endings.

These otherwise excellent books could have done with a brave, experienced editor writing ''B -, could do better'' in the margin.

That same editor could have been redeployed to work on A Dance With Dragons, the latest 1000-page instalment in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones franchise. A great, sprawling breezeblock of a thing that would choke a sperm whale, it cried out for a firm hand from someone who could perhaps have said: ''George, seeing as it's called A Dance With Dragons - maybe fewer feasts and a tad more dragon?''

As it is, even rusted-on Game of Thrones readers have come away disappointed. As one online review site, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, put it: ''For a thousand or so pages almost nothing happens and then we get a bunch of cliffhangers. The End.''

Are these hugely successful creative writers victims of their own success? Can they just disregard editors, or have editors become mere pipelines to the public? As the League of Ordinary Gentleman site added: ''I just can't imagine reading a manuscript of this book and thinking 'This is good. This is ready for publication.'''

Tarantino is reported to have said he would like to release a director's cut of his spaghetti western that is five hours long. Good, then we might find out some more about Django's wife Broomhilda, who seems to have been dropped into the plot from a circling spaceship (maybe King helped out there); and maybe it will solve the mystery of Zoe Bell and her bizarre eyeballs-only appearance. It certainly had better explain the stupid dancing horse, that's for sure.

All of which should have been picked up and corrected before we crammed into the State Theatre to watch Tarantino strained through Tarantino.

*This story has been brought to you by me, followed by my partner, the opinion page editor, a subeditor and, with any luck, a final proofread. And it's all the better for it; the first draft read like a Tarantino movie.

Keith Austin is a freelance writer.

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This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/tarantinos-lost-the-plot-and-needs-a-good-editor-20130123-2d78t.html

[Happy Face 29]

Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world. They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard the limits of informed public debate.

 

These public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was given the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam war.

 

Like Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film director Ken Loach and others lost bail money in standing up for Assange. “The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets,” Loach wrote to me. “Extradition via Sweden is more than likely . . . is it difficult to choose whom to support?”

 

No, it is not difficult.

 

In the NS last week, Jemima Khan ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on Wiki­Leaks’s founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Loaches and Knightleys, and the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We are all “blinkered”. We are all mindlessly “devoted”. We are all “cultists”. In the final words of her j’accuse, she describes Assange as “an Australian L Ron Hubbard”. She must have known this would make a gratuitous headline, as indeed it did across the press in Australia.

 

I respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as the Palestinians. She supports the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am a judge, and my own film-making. But her attack on Assange is specious and plays to a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone.

 

Khan complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she “executive produced”. Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor “fair” and “represent the truth”, as Khan wrote, and that its very title, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America’s hellholes. Having interviewed axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the “paranoid” Assange. Oscars all round.

 

The sum of Khan’s and Gibney’s attacks is that Ecuador granted him asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been declared an official “enemy” of a torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in official files, obtained under Freedom of Information, that betray Washington’s “unprecedented” pursuit of him, together with the Australian government’s abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.

 

Khan refers to a “long list” of Assange’s “alienated and disaffected allies”. Almost none was ever an ally. What is striking about most of these “allies” and Assange’s haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they attribute to a man whose resilience and good humour under extreme pressure are evident to those he trusts.

 

Another on the “long list” is the lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill was paid from an advance on a book whose unauthorised manuscript was published by another “ally” without Assange’s knowledge or permission. When Assange moved his legal defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain’s leading human rights lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to the Australian government, warning how the US deliberately “synchronised” its extradition demands with pending cases and that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and personal danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London in person that she had known few cases as shocking as this.

 

It is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest danger of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be despatched under a secret arrangement with Washington; and it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America, not the courts, that will make this decision.

 

Khan is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.

 

As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian in August 2012, “. . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .

 

“The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/02/wikileaks-rare-truth-teller-smearing-julian-assange-shameful