Saturday, August 2, 2014

CLASSIC CONSPIRACY CINEMA: "I COMME ICARE" (1973)


What if a powerful head of state was murdered by a shadowy faction within his own government? And his assassination was blamed on a lone nut assassin? What if this patsy was to die in prison before coming to trial? And what if a white-wash commission was set up to investigate the whole sorry mess? And what if that commission was mostly made up of former opponents of the murdered head of state? And what if there was one exception to this, and what if this one honest man refused to sign on, choosing instead to conduct a potentially deadly dangerous investigation of his own?

This wonderful, little known (outside of the English speaking world) gem of paranoid 70's conspiracy cinema is very much worth watching, even if you don't understand French (the language in which it was filmed) or Spanish (the subtitles). For one thing, Stanley Kubrick's visual stamp isn't all over it... and y'all know how much I love me some Kubrick! I especially love the loosely fictionalized vision of the United States created for this film... it's vision of a totally compromised, unanswerable, purely symbolic, figurehead type of government order is so close to the way things have turned out, it's actually kind of scary. 

Friday, August 1, 2014

JESSE VENTURA VINDICATED IN COURT

I wouldn't be telling the truth if I claimed to be untroubled by the way former Navy SEAL and Minnesota state governor Jesse Ventura has sought to monetize, popularize and (some would argue) vulgarize the already troubled arena of parapolitics and conspiracy scholarship over the years, but I've always felt that the man was, at the very least, sincere, honest, and well intentioned. That's why I was definitely on his side when celebrity mass-murderer Chris Kyle - who was recently killed under strange circumstances - went on FOX News and started going off about how he'd knocked Ventura out with a single punch after hearing the governor say soldiers killed in Iraq deserved what they got. And today, that's why I'm glad that Jesse Ventura was able to fully clear his name in a court of law. You can listen to what Ventura had to say about this debacle, here. Or watch it below. S'up to you.