We mentioned a few weeks ago that we had big news afoot. Well, here it is. Clamor has recently joined forces with the Brooklyn-based (nationally distributed) progressive feminist magazine Altar (http://www.altarmagazine.com). We brought Altar’s publisher (Mandy Van Deven) on as our Associate Publisher earlier this year. She has since decided to call it a day with Altar and bring everyone on over to the Good Ship Clamor. It’s really exciting news, and we’re anxious to unfold all the amazing projects this collaboration will yield.

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Clamor film-reviewer extraordinaire spent time at the Seattle International Film Festival last month, where she saw this and two films examining Guantanamo Bay detention.

Who Killed the Electric Car?
Chris Paine, Director

With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, Sony Picture Classics is betting that summer moviegoers will want to hear about how General Motors developed a fast, stylish electric car, then scuttled every engineering advantage they had gained over their foreign competitors to embrace a gas-guzzling throwback like the Hummer.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, which opened June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, is more than just director Chris Paine’s passionate eulogy for a car he drove and loved. It’s a detailed indictment of how short-sighted management, greed, and ignorance killed automotive innovation.

Faced with an air pollution crisis in 1990, California regulators passed the Zero Emissions Mandate, requiring that 2 percent of the state’s cars be emission-free by 1998 — 10 percent by 2003. It was the most radical smog-fighting mandate since the catalytic converter.

In 1997, GM’s EV1 started appearing on California roads. Paine calls it the perfect car for the modern age. It required no gas, no oil, no mufflers, and no brake changes (a billion dollar industry unto itself). They could hit 60 mph in under 9 seconds. Ford, Honda and Toyota quickly followed suit. Yet six years later, the cars were gone.

Smart and fast-paced, Paine’s documentary builds a case against oil companies, carmakers, and state and federal government with the same methodical care that was used to create his dream car. Nor do car buyers walk away completely blameless. Swayed by questionable advertising, weaker first-generation batteries and limited availability (the EV1 could only be leased not purchased and had a lengthy waiting list for delivery), they failed to embrace the cars as a practical alternative, even though government statistics showed Americans drive an average of only 29 miles a day.

The film touches only lightly on arguments that electric vehicles don’t reduce greenhouse gases because they simply shift the pollution impacts onto power plants.

Despite the EV1’s fate, Paine and his stars are optimistic that the electric car will be back in some form, but the return wave may not be produced here. At the Seattle International Film Festival this month, Wally Rippel — principal power electronics engineer for AeroVironment, a subcontractor on the EV1 project — noted that both China and India are eagerly pursuing research into mass production of electric vehicles.
-Irene Svete

In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert challenged himself to a debate about the legality, morality, and constitutionality of detaining prisoners in Guantanamo. This debate, I might add, is hot on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling that Bush’s military tribunals of Gitmo detainees violates U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. It’s also one of the most lucid (and humorous) explanations of how far up its own ass this current administration is. Take a couple minutes and watch the clip here.

Due to popular demand, we started posting all the reviews from the print magazine online this summer. Cool, yes? But wait! We took it one step further and we decided to post an additional 13k words of web-only exclusive reviews mixed in with the others. All for you! We aim to please. Anxious to read about the latest releases? We’ve got three flavors from which to choose: print, audio, and video. Enjoy!

Road to Guantanamo
Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, directors
Roadside Attractions, 2006

Gitmo: The New Rules of War
Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh, directors
Atmo, 2005

This summer, two chilling accounts of life inside the American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay are putting faces on the human rights violations alleged by Amnesty International and others.

The docudrama “Road to Guantanamo” recounts the ordeal of four young British Muslims who travel to Pakistan for a wedding in September 2001. An ill-advised side trip to Afghanistan to see events for themselves leaves the bridegroom and his friends trapped in the country when the U.S. bombing begins and the Taliban falls. One man disappears in the chaos and is never heard from again. The others are rounded up by the Northern Alliance, which hands them over to the U.S. military — a step one of them says he thought would be their salvation.

Instead, they are shipped to Guantanamo Bay where they were held without charges for more than two years. Confined to 6’x6’ open-air cages, isolated, sleep-deprived and beaten, the men were repeatedly interrogated about membership in radical groups. American authorities claimed they appeared in a video from an Osama Bin Laden rally. The men denied the allegation, saying they were at home in Tipton — MI5 later proved that one was at work, the others on probation and unable to leave.

Two of the men, who came to be known as the “Tipton Three,” were plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that ruled detainees are entitled to access to U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The three were finally released in 2004 with no apology.
Directors Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom (“24 Hour Party People” and “Tristram Shanty: A Cock And Bull Story”) tell the men’s story through archival news footage, dramatic recreations and interviews with Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.

“Road to Guantanamo” aired last spring on British television. Since then, the controversial story has continued to grow. Two of the actors and two of the ex-detainees were temporarily held and interrogated at the airport by the British police when they returned home from being honored at a Berlin film festival. In May, the Motion Pictures Association of America rejected the film’s advertising poster depicting a hooded and blindfolded man hanging by his shackled wrists. The poster now shows only the man’s arms and wrists.

That same month, the men won the right to file a $10 million lawsuit against U.S. officials, claiming their treatment at Guantanamo directly violated their right to practice their religious faith.

In “Gitmo: The New Rules of War,” Swedish filmmakers Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh use the plight of fellow countryman Mehdi Ghezali as a springboard to explore whether the detainees’ treatment at Guantanamo provided a template for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

The U.S. military welcomes journalists’ requests to visit Guantanamo, or “Gitmo,” as the soldiers call it. Free flights from Miami, cheap hotel rooms and guided tours—all are part of a government-sponsored travel package. Just don’t expect to see any prisoners. The only hint of their presence among the clips of soldiers shopping, swimming and golfing is the eerie sound of their raised voices in the night. When the filmmakers ask what they are saying, they are told the men are praying.

Despite the limitations on them, Gandini and Saleh straightforward questions coupled with government records yield some surprising answers, and the documentary builds revelation upon revelation as they hopscotch from place to place delving into the growing number of mercenaries (euphemistically called contractors) employed in the war on terror, their role in interrogations and the question of whether Guantanamo’s former commander was replace for being “too nice,”

Using interviews with Janet Karpinski, the former commander blamed in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and others, Gandini and Salaeh lay out a strong case that people very high up in the U.S. government sanctioned the torture captured in the Abu Ghraib
photos. The result of their legwork is a searing piece of film and a disturbing portrait of U.S. policy.
review by Irene Svete

Yep, I was just interviewed by Midwestern Goodness, check it out!

Here’s what’ they are all about (from their site): MidwesternGoodness is based upon the principle of “reppin where you’re from.” For far too long, the midwest has grown and cultivated talented people and groups from St.Louis to Cleveland, but then passed those individuals on to other regions. This site is about having pride in where we come from and developing our culture whether its the cornfields or the city. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter where we come from in the midwest, it’s all goodness. This site was started back in October 2005 and was received with open arms from kids and companies both in and outside of the Midwest. With your support, we hope to be a support system for us all so stay tuned and tell the world. The Midwest Is Now!

- Jen