Alex Reid

Last Sunday, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Toronto International Film Festival screened an incredibly controversial film that depicts the assassination of U.S President George W. Bush.

The film, Death of a President, uses real archival footage, special effects and actors to produce a fictional documentary from 2010 about a fictional assassination of the US President as he leaves a Chicago hotel in 2007, in front of an anti-war demostration.

Here’s the Toronto International Film Festival desciption:

An unknown gunman assassinates George W. Bush. A couple of years later, an investigative documentary is made. It features all the people involved that fateful day: the protestors outside a Chicago hotel; the suspects in the shooting and their families; the Secret Service men who failed to protect their charge; the press; and an array of experts, desperately seeking meaning in this horrible act of violence. We learn, agonizingly, what happened to America… after the death of a president.

This is easily the most dangerous and breathtakingly original film I have encountered this year. Director Gabriel Range’s 2003 project The Day Britain Stopped – which asked what might happen if Britain’s transportation grid was suddenly halted – was his first experiment with this style. He assembles a vast array of media, manipulating and subtly altering it to act as a continuous background illustration of falsified history – and then employs the conventional, after-the-fact style of History Television and its ilk as narration.

But it’s a long leap from Britain’s trains to a gunned-down Commander-in-Chief. Range is up to the task: collaborating with some of the finest special effects wizards in the world, he inserts his characters seamlessly into existing footage. His narrative is also airtight. Cautionary tales are too often flights of fancy; as they push the envelope of credibility, the lessons gleaned from dark speculation become somehow tarnished. Not here. Every moment is completely believable, every comment is somehow appropriate – to the point of chilling, horrifying certainty.

As one might expect, Range is ultimately interested in addressing today’s political issues through the lens of the future. Xenophobia, the hidden costs of war and the nature of civil liberties in a hyper-media age all come under the microscope. The film is never a personal attack on Bush; Range simply seeks to explore the potential consequences that might follow from the President’s policies and actions.

The director Gabriel Range has reported that he’s already received death threats for his film. The White House isn’t “digifying” the film with a comment, but the Repulican Party has asked it not be screened and expressed doubt that no American would want to watch the film. But Newmarket Films (they handled Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) is challenging that by securing the U.S. distribution rights to the movie for a reported $1 million USD.

During a question & answer period following the film’s screening, Range said this:

“I think the film makes it clear it would really be a horrific event. There have been plenty of fictional films about assassinations, so this is not the first in that sense,”

While you might think making such a movie could get you thrown into an American jail, what Range has done is merely an extension of the past movies’ depiction of an assassination, like the infamous Day of the Jackal film (1973) which details a fictional story of hired assassin’s goal to kill Charles de Gaulle. This was one of the first movies to depict a assassination of a real historical figure who was not assassinated.

Even by Hollywood standards, there’s The Sentinel which opened with footage of an attempt on former president Ronald Reagan’s life and The Assassination of Richard Nixon which was about a man’s attempt to fly a hijacked commercial plane into the White House (sound familiar?).

But of course, as computer graphics and film skill evolves, we should expect more movies like this.

I hope to see this movie, not because it depicts murder or for who it murders, but I’m intrigued that the idea of a mockumentary is being taken to the next step; fiction based in the future. The past can only be fully understood by looking back onto it, and this making of a future event gives us persceptive on the present.

SPOILER ALERT (from Wikipedia.org)

Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian, is initially suspected as the assassin. Dick Cheney, after being elevated to the position of President, uses the possible al-Qaeda connection of the suspect to push his own agenda. He calls for a Patriot Act 3, suspends most civil liberties and for military action against Syria. An already grotesque world situation keeps growing more grotesque.

Eventually, the movie revealed that the perpetrator is a black American, a father of a soldier who had died on duty in Iraq. The assassin blames Bush for the death of his son. He shoots the President, then himself. The killer’s suicide note reads: “There’s no honor in standing for an immoral country. George Bush killed our David and I can’t forgive him.” So it turns out that the assassination was entirely personal.

The 93-minute film is set to air on More4 – a digital subsidiary of Channel 4 – on October 9th, in Britain.

On Saturday, September 30th, the popular children’s channel Nickelodeon will be airing a black screen, starting at 11 am until 2 pm CST to encourage kids to play outside. In it’s third year, the Viacom-owned channel attempts to stop childhood obesity through encouraging activity.

Check out their website for more info.

A US federal ruling issued last week raises the bar for online businesses, requiring them to meet the terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) just as offline business have been required to do since the law’s passage in 1990.

It started when Bruce Sexton Jr, a blind University of California-Berkeley student sued Target last February, arguing its website (target.com) was inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violated the ADA , the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Sexton is the president of the California Association of Blind Students. His lawsuit was filed in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind and they are seeking class-action status in their lawsuit.

The crux of the issue is the use of the “alt” tags on Target’s website. Alt tags are used to provide brief text descriptions of web page elements like images or hyperlinks. And since search engines rely on this information to be related to the image or the hyperlink, often Alt tags are misused to manipulate search engines. Hover over any photos on my website and often you’ll see an Alt tag related to the photo. On Target’s website, the alt tags were sometimes misleading or missing altogether. One crucial example is Target’s “Add to Cart” graphic did not include an Alt tag.

This isn’t the first time the question of accessibility has been raised. A few years ago, the same National Federation for the Blind sued AOL, but the case never went to trial after AOL agreed to make its sites fully navigable for the visually impaired. In 2004, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer pressured Priceline.com and Ramada.com to make their websites more accessible.

This is the first case in which a judge has ruled that the ADA covers a web site in addition to a bricks-and-mortar business. And that’s the reasoning for allowing the lawsuit through. By having a physical real-world location, the website is merely an extension of the business and the law applies to the website just as much as it does to the tangible business.

The term “Web 2.0″ is bunk.

O’Reilly Media coined the term back in 2004, but I believe the term is used by suits trying to sell the Internet to dumb-ass venture capitalists as a rebirthing when it’s simply part of the evolution.

The reason for the new hard sell is because people too often confuse the Internet IPO bubble-crash of 2000 with the Internet as a whole. The whole cause of the Internet IPO “bubble-crash” wasn’t because of the “Internet”. It was because of speculation. People too often confuse the short term capitalization of “property” over long term multiple benefits of “property”.

Using the IPO bust of 2000 as evidence against the Internet is just as silly as saying cars don’t work because the car industry is in trouble.

I refuse to use the term “web 2.0″. It’s bunk.

I would say it’s the new generation of the Internet, but I will not use numbers to denote where the Internet is on a plane. Why not just jump to Web 3.0 while we’re at it? Whose children are they to jump generations. People are simply creating simple ways to “connect” with the Internet, one season at a time. This numbers of ‘where the Internet is’ only represent the marketing chapters of said concept.

Markus Angermeier came up with this brilliant mindmap to describe what this new ‘generation’ looks like:

Cyber Libel is a growing concern in both the field of law and for Internet Service Providers. But here’s some reaching cases like this one: Woman faces eviction over Internet innuendo.

In this article, it also tells of a man who worked for VIA Rail, wrote about turmoil inside the Crown Corporation under a pseudonym on the bulletin board of the Frank Magazine website over a three month period in 2004, on his own time. He then received an order to appear at the company’s administrative offices in Toronto to provide a “formal employee statement” about those comments. Even though his union wanted to fight the action, he chose to resign.

These cases raise important issues of freedom of speech, as well underline the imbalance of law where many of these plantiffs could afford large lawfirms, while a simple blogger could not and as a result, could not fairly fight the case.