Category: Weighty Matters

Movie Watch: ‘Paradise Lost 3 – Purgatory’

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley  & Damien Echols at the time of their arrest in 1994. Image via webpronews.

Having watched the other two documentaries in the ‘West Memphis 3 – Paradise Lost’ trilogy, I was fairly sure there weren’t going to be too many surprises in store when I sat down to watch the third.

I was already aware of the inconsistencies in evidence gathering, the frequently bizarre interpretations of information collected and witch hunt-like tone to an investigation that had resulted in eighteen-year -old heavy metal fan Damien Echols being sentenced to death for the murder of three eight-year-old Arkansas boys, while his friends, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr (sixteen and seventeen respectively) received life for their involvement.

If that wasn’t enough, my interest in the case after watching the Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky directed films ‘Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills’ & ‘Paradise Lost 2: Revelations’, was such that I learned through their support network that the men had been freed as part of a plea bargain in August 2011.

I was confident that my shock and awe muscle would remain relatively unmolested throughout the viewing.

Wrongly.

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Diane Abbott: A ‘Penny’ For My Thoughts

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Image via dailymail.co.uk.

Although I love the 24- hour immersive information culture we now live in, it does have it’s down sides. Just because everybody has the ability to express their feelings in a public forum, whether on a blog, a social networking site or a newspaper, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should. The proliferation of subjective, ill-informed interpretations of news events hasn’t increased the quality of opinion in a capitalist, cream-rises-to-the-top kind of way.

It has merely made it even harder to locate informed, educative information on a subject.

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Movie Watch: I Want To Be A Soldier

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Image via imdb

Crime specialists maintain that their job is made appreciably harder by the number of police procedurals on TV that are essentially ‘how-to’ guides for budding villains. Despite this, plus an advertising industry with a global spend of approximately $503 billion per year, a persistent school of thought still insists that violent & sexualised games, films, TV and adverts do not cause psychological problems.

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Implausible Deniability: Oh, Lighten Up, Love. It’s Just A Joke.

Posted on by Kelly Welles

A selection of ‘lads mags’. Very empowering, apparently. 

I may be a totally unreliable servant to the feminist ideal, rarely available for campaigning purposes or placard waving due to prior drinking commitments, but I’ve always maintained a belief that equality can and should be achieved without emasculating men. Indeed, the two should be wholly separate, which is why I have no time for ‘girl power’, ‘ladette-ism‘ and women who insist their boob jobs are ‘for them’ and then pop them out all the time for pecuniary gain. All these things create images of women that a majority of men feel comfortable with, which kind of misses the point for me.

However, over the last week I have been forced to reconsider the viability of my views. Maybe empowerment cannot exist without emasculation?

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Christopher Hitchens: A (Literary) God Is Dead

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Controversial author and journalist Christopher Hitchens died yesterday after a long battle with esophageal cancer. During his career, he managed to piss off pretty much everyone with his refusal to allow a commitment to one political ideology to prevent him from speaking out against it, plus, of course, his vehement opposition to organised religion in any form.

In 2008, in preparation for an article in Vanity Fair, Hitchens allowed himself to be subjected to waterboarding.  He sought to learn whether the technique, which was used and defended as a tool of  interrogation by the US government in the War On Terror, could indeed be described as torture. After wards, he said:

…if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

He will be missed.

The Deaf Penalty: ‘Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead’

Posted on by Kelly Welles

‘Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead’ is a 2008 documentary about two men. One is the Robert Blecker of the title, a law professor from South Manhattan, who campaigns for the death penalty. The other is Daryl Holton, a former Gulf War veteran and (current) death row inmate who murdered his four children and is waiting for his sentence to be carried out.

Through his work, Blecker ends up visiting Holton in prison, and is surprised by how emotionally engaged he is with the man. The film is the story of their cautiously developing friendship and it’s context within their apparently diametrically opposed worlds.

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Supporting Documentation For Emigration Request, Pts 1&2

Posted on by Kelly Welles

I haven’t been around much lately, but with good reason. I have been completing my application for permission to leave this pleasant land* for greener pastures and surprisingly, considering that the government is supposedly desperate to bring down the net migration figure, it’s ridiculously complicated.

Surely a  multiple choice form with pictures of the ‘Desperate Scousewives’ cast in the margins might be more appealing to a demographic we can probably do without?

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Poppy Wars: This Isn’t Just A Game, Y’Know

Posted on by Kelly Welles

If you want to wear a poppy to show your respect for the war dead, wear one. If you don’t, don’t.

Either way, it wouldn’t hurt the majority of people blathering on about how it’s disrespectful to wander around without a cardboard and plastic flower in one’s lapel spent their time more productively. Like perhaps making sure everyone (especially the next generation) know that wars actually occur, and aren’t merely a figment of some random software developer’s fevered imagination.

Image: REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol.

‘Top Boy’ – Food For Thought

Posted on by Kelly Welles

I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to watching Channel 4’s four part drama ‘Top Boy’ this week for the insight it was likely to give me into South London drug culture. I was rather more intrigued by how the white, middle class TV reviewers for broadsheet British newspapers might handle the show. Would they really have anything useful and/or constructive to offer on a subject matter so far removed from their own comfy cubby holes on Buckingham Palace Road?

I, on the other hand, once stood near someone as they carried out a transaction for a small amount of cannabis in Mitcham, so am far more qualified to comment.

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