The University of Alabama Jefferson County Alumni Chapter is screening the film “Red Tails” Friday at 7 p.m. at the Patton Creek Rave Theater, according to a Facebook event invite. It’s the movie Coach Nick Saban showed the Alabama football team the night before the 14th National Championship against LSU.
Watch the first public promotional trailer for the feature film above, and notice the commander says: “We need pilots who will put bombers before themselves.”
Another indication that an individual sacrificing for the team is NOT Socialism, as some Republicans and conservative news outlets would have you believe.
When I first opened my eyes and looked at the LaCross clock and temperature gauge Tuesday morning, it was 24-degrees outside in the Pinson Valley campsite. The local weather guys and gals on TeeVee say it was the coldest night of the winter so far.
Outside, the water in the bird bath is frozen, but the cardinals, finches and chickadees keep warm by flying back and forth between limbs in the dogwood tree, taking turns at the feeder.
The cold doesn’t bother me so much anymore, as long as there is a warm sleeping bag by a heater or a fire. The heat of summer is more annoying these days, perhaps because I have spent most of my life in the Sun Belt.
What annoys me more than heat or cold is ignorance.
Edward Abbey’s riotous novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is the unifying thread of this character driven feature-length documentary nearing post-production. “Wrenched” offers a penetrating look at the environmental plight of the American Southwest, with a caustic sense of humor reminiscent of Abbey himself. This film is a lyrical tour de force of environmental activists, designed to give a voice to those both young and old.
How far does one go in defense of Wilderness? The split over direct action in the environmental movement, from its beginning to the current crackdown as seen through the lens of Edward Abbey’s groundbreaking novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The story of four ordinary people who were forever transformed by the degradation of the West, crossing a legal and ethical line — and inspiring generations of activists to do the same.
Watch for news of this new film’s release from ML Lincoln Films.
Anthony Hopkins as former president John Quincy Adams delivers a most eloquent argument against slavery and for freedom based on the Declaration of Independence and international law before the United States Supreme Court of 1841. This might be a good time to revisit it, considering the immigration crisis facing the U.S. and states such as Alabama today. All people should see this movie, especially modern-day self-styled Conservative Republicans, who think they know something about American freedom. I was moved by this scene. Perhaps you would be too.
The Amistad case, also known as United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, was a U.S. Supreme Court case resulting from the rebellion of slaves on board the Spanish schooner Amistad in 1839. It was an unusual suit in a long line of cases that came to define what “freedom” meant under the law in the United States.
The rebellion broke out when the schooner, traveling along the coast of Cuba, was taken over by a group of captives who had earlier been illegally kidnapped in Africa from a British Colony where the slave trade was outlawed, modern day Sierra Leone, and sold into slavery. The Africans revolted and took over the ship, but their ship was captured near Long Island, New York, by the U.S. Revenue cutter and taken into custody. The widely publicized court cases in the United States helped the abolitionist movement in its argument against slavery, and some say it was a precursor to the Civil War, although there are historians and critics who disagree.
The final episode of this series about the natural and human history of Appalachia sparks both heartbreak and hope for the region’s ransacked mountain ecosystem is now running on public television.
Early 20th-century mineral barons ruled Appalachia with an iron fist. Company spies tracked miners’ every move. If they found a man’s union card, he would be fired, even killed.
Inspired by a brave little old lady who talked like a preacher and cursed like a sailor, mineworkers organized and demanded better treatment. The dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority drowned ancestral homesteads, but the project eliminated abject poverty for thousands.
On April 20, 2010, the BP Deep Water Horizon floating oil rig drilling on the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing eleven crewmen and injuring seventeen others.
The rig burned for three days and then sank in a mile of water fifty miles off the coast of Grand-Isle Louisiana. Over the next three months, the well gushed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into Gulf waters, spanning thousands of square miles, threatening hundreds of miles of coastal wetlands and an abundance of wildlife. It was the largest accidental marine oil spill in history.
While BP struggled to cap the spewing well, they began using unprecedented amounts of the controversial chemical dispersant Corexit, both on the surface and, for the first time, sub-sea injection at the broken well-head 5,000 feet below.
Many locals and a few officials feared BP was only using these chemicals to sink the oil, concealing the magnitude of the disaster.
The 13th annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, a celebration of new independent cinema in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, will happen this weekend, August 26-28.
Since its debut in 1999, filmmakers from across the country and around the world have come to Birmingham to screen their work at Sidewalk and have discovered “fresh, enthusiastic crowds eager to devour new independent cinema,” according to the Website for the event.
Sidewalk 2011 will take place in the Theatre District of Downtown Birmingham on August 26, 27 and 28. The Alabama Moving Image Association was created to inspire, encourage and support films and filmmaking in Alabama.
With nine venues located within Birmingham’s historic Theatre District (featuring the newly restored Alabama Theatre, a 2,200 seat movie palace built by Paramount in 1927), spontaneity rules the schedule of Sidewalk attendees. Low-priced weekend passes provide easy access to Sidewalk venues, encouraging attendees to seek out new films and sample programming they may not otherwise see.
HOT COFFEE examines the dangers of so-called “tort reform” and its threat to our civil justice system, an issue we’ve been writing about for years.
Using the now-infamous legal battle over a spilled cup of McDonald’s coffee as a springboard, the film follows four people, including McDonald’s plaintiff Stella Liebeck, whose lives have been affected by their inability to access the courts, and examines the role of corporations and a complicit media in promoting “tort reform.”
Directed by former trial lawyer and first-time filmmaker Susan Saladoff, it was selected for inclusion in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. People all over the country will be hosting House Parties during the HBO premiere on June 27.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
