black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             
'Bully': Behind Every Harassed Child? A Whole Lot of Clueless Adults

“Bully,” Lee Hirsch’s moving and troubling documentary about the misery some children inflict upon others, arrives at a moment when bullying, long tolerated as a fact of life, is being redefined as a social problem. “Just kids being kids” can no longer be an acceptable response to the kind of sustained physical and emotional abuse that damages the lives of young people whose only sin is appearing weak or weird to their peers.

And while the film focuses on the specific struggles of five families in four states, it is also about — and part of — the emergence of a movement. It documents a shift in consciousness of the kind that occurs when isolated, oppressed individuals discover that they are not alone and begin the difficult work of altering intolerable conditions widely regarded as normal.

The feeling of aloneness is one of the most painful consequences of bullying. It is also, in some ways, a cause of it, since it is almost always socially isolated children (the new kid, the fat kid, the gay kid, the strange kid) who are singled out for mistreatment. For some reason — for any number of reasons that hover unspoken around the edges of Mr. Hirsch’s inquiry — adults often fail to protect their vulnerable charges. […]

But while we are on the subject of adult failures, it should be noted that the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board, by insisting on an R rating for “Bully,” has made it harder for young audiences to see. The Weinstein Company, which is distributing the film, has released it without a rating after the association denied its appeal and after a widely publicized petition drive was unable to change the board’s mind.

There is a little swearing in the movie, and a lot of upsetting stuff, but while some of it may shock parents, very little of it is likely to surprise their school-age children. Whose sensitivity does the association suppose it is protecting? The answer is nobody’s: That organization, like the panicked educators in the film itself, holds fast to its rigid, myopic policies to preserve its own authority. The members of the ratings board perform a useful function, but this is not the first time they’ve politicianed us.

thedailywhat:

Another Follow Up of the Day: The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) has sided with the MPAA in its decision to reject The Weinstein Company’s request to lower the rating of the film studio’s bullying documentary from an R to a PG-13 so it could be used as an educational aid.

Bully received an R rating from the MPAA for “some language.”

If The Weinstein Company makes good on its threat to set aside the rating system, NATO’s President and CEO John Fithian said in a statement, “I will have no choice but to encourage my theater owner members to treat unrated movies from The Weinstein Company in the same manner as they treat unrated movies from anyone else.”

The would mean branding Bully an NC-17 movie, prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from viewing it.

Responding with its own statement, The Weinstein Company called the treatment of Bully as an NC-17 film “unconscionable, not to mention unreasonable.”

The statement continued: “In light of the tragedy that occurred yesterday in Ohio, we feel now is the time for the bullying epidemic to take center stage, we need to demand our community takes action.”

A petition posted to Change.org by a teenage victim of bullying calling for the MPAA to reverse its decision has racked up over 100,000 signatures since it was launched a three days ago.

[deadline.]

Get involved. 

onearth: Congratulations to Marshall Curry and the team behind “If a Tree Halls for the Oscar nomination. Here is our blog editor Ben Jervey’s review of the film, which he calls “evenhanded” and “conflicting” from back in August. Even during these politically-charged times, when Tea Party activists stomp on the heads of opponents and conservative media moguls take pies to the face, the radical and destructive actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) still seem pretty extreme. Don’t remember the ELF (by name anyway)? You’ll probably remember them as the “eco-terrorists” that torched a whole bunch of buildings in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s. They were radical environmental extremists who made the nightly news by setting ablaze a Forest Service ranger station, a slaughterhouse, a timber company office, an SUV dealership, a $12 million resort in Vail, and on and on and on. It’s a short, volatile period in the history of the environmental movement that most mainstream environmentalists would probably prefer to remain forever swept under the rug. (And, it should be noted, most environmental activist groups and organizations, including NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, immediately and vehemently renounced these actions at the time.) Indeed, many mainstream environmentalists probably aren’t thrilled that there’s a new documentary out about the explosive rise and sudden fall of the ELF. And that’s a shame. Because If A Tree Falls is a powerful and fascinating film, and one that could and should be instructive for participants in any social movement. Read more. Queue it up.

onearth:

Congratulations to Marshall Curry and the team behind “If a Tree Halls for the Oscar nomination. Here is our blog editor Ben Jervey’s review of the film, which he calls “evenhanded” and “conflicting” from back in August.

Even during these politically-charged times, when Tea Party activists stomp on the heads of opponents and conservative media moguls take pies to the face, the radical and destructive actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) still seem pretty extreme.

Don’t remember the ELF (by name anyway)? You’ll probably remember them as the “eco-terrorists” that torched a whole bunch of buildings in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s. They were radical environmental extremists who made the nightly news by setting ablaze a Forest Service ranger station, a slaughterhouse, a timber company office, an SUV dealership, a $12 million resort in Vail, and on and on and on.

It’s a short, volatile period in the history of the environmental movement that most mainstream environmentalists would probably prefer to remain forever swept under the rug. (And, it should be noted, most environmental activist groups and organizations, including NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, immediately and vehemently renounced these actions at the time.) Indeed, many mainstream environmentalists probably aren’t thrilled that there’s a new documentary out about the explosive rise and sudden fall of the ELF.

And that’s a shame. Because If A Tree Falls is a powerful and fascinating film, and one that could and should be instructive for participants in any social movement.

Read more.

Queue it up.

Farmageddon, a documentary by Kristin Canty, “tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.”

A Vermont family has its entire herd of imported sheep destroyed, thanks to a completely imaginary outbreak of mad-cow disease (which is not known to occur in sheep in the first place, and definitely didn’t occur in theirs). Armed agents invade an upstate New York farm to seize a cooler full of raspberry yogurt. An undercover unit breaks up an interstate trafficking ring — one devoted to bringing USDA-certified raw milk from South Carolina across the line into Georgia. 

You don’t have to believe that raw milk is good for you (which is a contentious issue I can’t tackle here) to think that the hodgepodge of state and federal regulations covering it — and numerous other “natural” animal and vegetable products — is ludicrous. As someone in “Farmageddon” observes, the fast food and processed food that renders so many Americans morbidly obese and hastens the deaths of millions is legally available everywhere, but in many states people can’t make their own decisions about whether to consume raw dairy products. (E.g., in California you can buy raw milk at the grocery store; in New York or Pennsylvania you have to buy it from a farmer; in Maryland you can’t legally buy it at all.) 

— Andrew O’Hehir
©2011 Kateoplis