Pophistory: music, movies, history, and life.
Hot Coffee is a new HBO documentary about how corporations used a famous legal case to push for limits on their liability under the guise of “tort reform.” Although you think you know about the McDonald’s hot-coffee-spill case, you know less about what happened than you think. In 1992, the 79-year-old Stella Liebeck went to … Continue reading “Hot Coffee (Mad Movies)”
{Note: On February 21, 2011, Chimesfreedom posted the following discussion of the documentary Gasland, but for some reason the blog post disappeared in early July 2011. The web hosting company does not know what happened, so we are re-posting the review, which is still relevant in light of recent debates in states like New York … Continue reading “An Industry Attempts to Prevent Gasland from Winning an Oscar (Mad Movies)”
The Tillman Story (2010) is one of those movies that reveals information about a story you thought you already knew. As you probably recall from extensive media coverage, Pat Tillman was an Arizona Cardinal football player who enlisted in the U.S. Army after the 9/11 events in June 2002. Director Amir Bar-Levi’s movie delves into … Continue reading “The Tillman Story (Mad Movies)”
One of the recent movies that has made me angrier than I have been in a long time is Merchants of Doubt, a 2014 documentary directed by Robert Kenner. The film delves into how for decades people have been peddling doubt to citizens to protect corporate interests on topics ranging from tobacco to climate change. … Continue reading “Movies That Make Us Mad: “Merchants of Doubt””
When Mel Gibson announced he was going to follow up his hit The Passion of the Christ (2004) with unknown actors in a film set in the Mayan kingdom in the early 1500s using the Yucatec Maya language with subtitles, many thought he was crazy (besides other reasons that people think he is crazy). But … Continue reading “Apocalypto: Mad Max Meets Rambo (Missed Movies)”