There is a film that pre­miered at Cannes this year called Short­bus. I don’t expect you to have heard about it or John Cameron Mitchell, the direc­tor of the film, but I read about this stuff, hence my knowl­edge of its exis­tence. The film is pretty much polit­i­cal porn, at least that’s what Mitchell says it is.

“It’s a lit­tle bit of a cri de coeur to us, a lit­tle bit of a call to arms” against the pre­vail­ing con­ser­vatism, he told a media con­fer­ence, adding that his coun­try was liv­ing in “the era of Bush, which is about clamp­ing down, being scared.” The 43-year-old, whose pre­vi­ous work was Hed­wig and the Angry Inch, about a trans­sex­ual rock singer, said the film was his own small act of defi­ance against Bush. “If you can’t do elec­tions you might as well do erec­tions,” he said.

More…

One scene likely to cre­ate con­tro­versy in the United States and some other coun­tries shows a gay three­some in which one par­tic­i­pant joy­fully bel­lows “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” The actor with the singing voice, PJ Deboy, said he did the scene to show that he was as Amer­i­can as any­one, despite resis­tance to gays in parts of the coun­try, includ­ing Washington.

“I thought to myself: “Can I do it…?’ And I decided I could, because it is a patri­otic act.… There’s noth­ing un-American about gay sex and there’s noth­ing unpa­tri­otic about it,” he said.

Tim Rob­bins, an actor I’ve liked for a long time, is cur­rently star­ring in a stage pro­duc­tion of George Orwell’s “1984?. His thoughts on the play -

“We have right now a media that is will­fully ignor­ing the high crimes and mis­de­meanors of the pres­i­dent of the United States…””(Bush) got us into (the Iraq) war based on lies that he knew were lies. … His war has recruited more al-Qaeda mem­bers than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamed for … yet no one in the media is call­ing for impeach­ment,” he said.

“Unfor­tu­nately, the book and the play is more rel­e­vant now than it ever has been,” he said. “(It) talks about con­tin­u­ous war­fare as a means to con­trol the West­ern econ­omy, and as a way to con­trol rebel ele­ments within soci­ety through the use of fear, con­stant fear.”

“In my coun­try we seem to be sanc­tion­ing ren­di­tion­ing of inno­cent peo­ple with­out trial… put them in jail with­out telling any­one… and tor­ture them out of sus­pi­cion of what we think they might do,” Rob­bins said.

“This is exactly what Orwell was talk­ing about when he spoke of thought crimes,” he added.

You may not know this, but as soon as the 3 peo­ple above said what they said, they were whisked away to a secret CIA prison camp where they were tor­tured and humil­i­ated for say­ing and doing what they did.

Yeah, right.

Why do film mak­ers feel that they’re under con­stant per­se­cu­tion, when they live in the freest coun­try in the world? Many places, they wouldn’t be able to even make these films or say what they are say­ing. It’s just foolish.