The Progress Report.

No End in Sight: Free online

I'm just reposting this from the GreenCine Daily:

Charles Ferguson's Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, winner of the Documentary Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007, "is being made available free to the public to reveal the facts about the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq to voters concerned with the issues of national security and the adverse economic impact of the war when making decisions in this crucial election."

The doc's got its own YouTube channel where, again, it'll be viewable for free from Monday through November 5. Ray Pride's posted the full press release at Movie City Indie.

Dos Americas: The Reconstruction of New Orleans (film screening)

 (Passing this along. If you're in SF, check out the screening; if you're not, keep your eyes out for this one.)

La Raza Centro Legal and Upheaval Productions present...

Dos Americas: The Reconstruction of New Orleans
A new documentary by Upheaval Productions

Post-Katrina reconstruction is still in progress throughout the Gulf
Coast, with much of the City of New Orleans still in ruins. This
documentary focuses on those rebuilding this city through interviews with
some of the estimated 100,000 Latino migrant laborers who have converged
in this area over the past two and a half years. Despite terrible working
conditions, massive fraud, a housing crisis, severe harassment by law
enforcement, and very limited resources, New Orleans’ Latino community has
mushroomed since the storm and is establishing an infrastructure
proportional to its size.

Take a look at how this community is organizing to defend itself against
numerous injustices and the attempts to bridge the gap between themselves
as new residents and the pre-Katrina population, all within the extremely
unique and tragic context of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion with local immigrant
justice organizers and one of the filmmakers!

***¡Presentado en inglés y español!***

WEDNESDAY, JULY 30TH at 7:30PM
at the WOMEN'S BUILDING
3543 18th St. btw. Valencia and Guerrero
San Francisco, CA 94110

***THIS EVENT IS FREE***
(donations will gladly be accepted)

For more information and to see a trailer please visit:

http://www.upheavalproductions.com

PRESENTED WITH HELP FROM THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS:
La Raza Centro Legal
Upheaval Productions
San Francisco Day Labor Program
Katrina Solidarity Network
The Friendly Fire Collective
...and more to come

Meeting Resistance documentary on DVD

Out tomorrow (May 20) on DVD: Meeting Resistance, Molly Bingham and Steve Connors' documentary attempts to show the "other side" (not that there's just two sides), showing the Iraqi insurgency "by meeting face to face with individuals who are passionately engaged in the struggle, and documenting for the very first time, the sentiments experienced and actions taken by a nation's citizens when their homeland is occupied."

It's a mixed bag of a documentary, frankly, but well worth seeing anyway for giving us yet one more dimension of the war in Iraq.

"It provides a more detailed and perhaps more reliable picture of the early movement's motives and practices than anything I've seen in the mainstream media," wrote JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.  It's also, as another reviewer pointed out, both enlightening and frustrating.

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

From the LA Times' Mark Olson:

Someday, perhaps, it will be possible to look back on "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" as a relic and reminder of the rhetorical logic employed during the era of George W. Bush. Until then, it should be seen simply as a tiresome ideological bludgeon, an attempt to deceive audiences into believing it is one thing when it is, in fact, quite another.

Entertainer, pitchman and political commentator Ben Stein begins the film by intoning that there is a growing conspiracy within the academic and scientific communities blocking out proponents of "intelligent design" as a means to explain the origins of life and human development in favor of lock step enforcement of Darwinist theories of evolution.

By setting the argument up in this way, one which is never fully pursued or proven, Stein has, of course, attempted to utilize a textbook Karl Rove-ian tactic to "reframe" the discussion, putting it in terms by which his side seems the valiant underdog, suppressed and belittled by its opponent, while turning notions of right and wrong, freedom of speech and even the meaning of science upside down.

More, much more from Scientific American, who, not surprisingly, were not amused by the film. But this is one of the more intelligent collections of responses you'll find.

John Rennie:

In the new science-bashing movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein and the rest of the filmmakers sincerely and seriously argue that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution paved the way for the Holocaust. By "seriously," I mean that Ben Stein acts grief-stricken and the director juxtaposes quotes from evolutionary biologists with archival newsreel clips from Hitler's Reich. Prepare for an intellectual night at the cinema.