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This is my proposed list (in no particular order) of 70s masterpieces for Cinema Nana-Roku, our Sunday night feature film club (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=105601096152914)

I'm offering to show a film once in a while, depending on enthusiasm. Seriously, if you haven't seen these films, you really should!

The Conformist (1970) - Bertolucci's achingly beautiful tale of how emotional damage leads to fascism.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) - Olmi's profoundly poetic vision of brutal feudalism in the Italian countryside.

Padre Padrone (1977) - continuing the theme of rural dystopia(!), the Taviani brothers' powerful film about a young man who succeeds in escaping the control of his tyrannical father in Sardinia.

Mean Streets (1973) - seminal film for the American New Wave, introducing such actors as DeNiro and Harvey Keitel and precursor to Taxi Driver (1975), which should be watched by all film makers often, just to study how Scorsese does it.

Dersu Uzala the hunter (1975) - the great Akira Kurosawa's extraordinary portrat of humans and nature, and the "civilized" and the indigenous. And a breath-taking scene where the two men realize they will die of exposure if they don't build a shelter before before sunset.....

The Conversation (1974) - Coppola's zeitgeist thriller about surveillance.

Solaris (1972) - not the American re-make, but Tarkovksy's original - science fiction as you have never seen it.

Arabian Nights (1974) - the climax of Pasolini's trilogy, which according to wikipedia contains "abundant sex, nudity and slapstick", but also has amazing photography by Tonino delli Colli and spectacular locations in San'aa, Yemen.

Coffy (1973) - my favourite of the so-called blaxploitation pictures which cashed in on the civil rights movement - one of the most politically astute in its critique of the new black bourgeoisie, and one of the most fun, with outrageous clothes. The iconic Pam Grier plays a nurse avenging her drug-addict sister.....

Don't Look Now (1973) - the dizzying technique and symbolic imagery of director Nic Roeg elevate this psychological thriller into high art. And it's really scary.

Cries and Whispers (1972) - Bergman's masterpiece is a sometimes shocking tale of 3 unhappy sisters, with great performances, cinematography and sound mix.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) - arguably the best of the Python movies, they take their undergraduate English literature studies on a truly surreal and hilarious quest.

(That's enough for now....)

“This one goes to 11” (Nigel – This Is Spinal Tap)

1. A project of shared communities, all maximally linked to each other.
2. A platform which is owned by NOBODY – producing neutral unbranded databases and widgets which can be individually branded.
3. At the core of the project is an rss aggregator of both video and text news and a tag displayer.
4. Both a machine network and a human network.

The machine network enables different sites to query each other and link to each other via tags, 2-way real-time rss feeds, and updating video embeds.

The human network hooks into this in a multiplicity of ways, which we don’t choose for the users, but they choose for themselves.

5. A project of appropriate technology, not the “most perfect” technology.
6. A training project for citizen reporters to make watchable, fast-turnaround news for a wide viewership, making the content relevant, not random.
7. A source of in-depth and verifiable news, via fact-checking links to reliable sources.
8. Not saying to anybody “you need to do this, and this, and this” and repeating it louder and louder in the hope that people listen, which is a road to failure.
9. For the user, it’s not actually about the amazing functionality of a content-rich site (though this is important), it’s about desire – visionOntv needs to be desirable, the place to be involved in.
10. When building the project, the tools come first, the ideas for the structure of the project come second. “These are the tools. What can we make from them?” rather than “Here’s what we want to make - let’s fashion the tools for it.”
11. For film distribution, it is about building the lasting and automatically-updating in a thousand places around the web, not the “here today, and gone tomorrow”.

Last night I wrote to the 12 MPs who signed John McDonnell's Early Day Motion demanding an inquiry into the circumstances of the Yarl's Wood hunger strike:

We are sending this letter to all MPs who signed John McDonnell's Early Day Motion of 23rd February on the fate of the hunger strikers at Yarl's Wood.

Reporters from visionOn.tv asked women currently on hunger strike in Yarl's Wood to respond to Meg Hillier's letter of 25th February from the Home Office to all MPs.

The women's testimony is here: http://visionon.tv/nooneisillegal

They adamantly deny the Home Office's allegation that they have been eating from vending machines or the detention centre shop, pointing out that cameras would easily observe them doing so, and all purchases at the shop are recorded to their personal account. In addition, the allegation that visitors have been bringing them food is false, as visitors to Yarl's Wood are not allowed to bring either food or drink for detainees. They also refute the Home Office's claim that women are not falling sick.

In our earlier report, which immediately follows the video in the link, women describe the prolonged "kettling" of the hunger strikers in a corridor on 8th February, and the violence from guards which ensued.

Feel free to ask us for any further details etc

The Vancouver Olympics Committee has withdrawn its own promotional video for the torch relay, after complaints about the use of images from the Berlin "Nazi" Games of 1936. Here is an alternative version they could have used..... http://visionon.tv http://no2010.com

James Cameron's Avatar is a stunningly beautiful, hugely enjoyable and extremely simplistic film. The last is perhaps its greatest virtue. So much imperialism throughout history is really as morally straightforward as that, brutal in all its effects, but with a hand-wringing missionary class attached (the scientists in the case of Avatar). And, interestingly, the film does not sugar the pill for an American audience, despite the fact that large numbers of them erroneously think US armed power is a force for good in the world. Most telling is an exchange between two marines, the battle-hardened genocidal Colonel Quaritch and the hero of the film Corporal Jake Sully, for whom the term "going native" is hardly sufficient. Quaritch praises Sully's previous military record, in Venezuela ("some mean bush") and three times in Nigeria. These oil-producing nations, the film proposes, will be the sites of America's future invasions in a desperate imperial resources-grab by military force. They will, in other words, be the new Iraqs. Particularly striking is the reference to Venezuela as a tough place to fight, where the US would in reality be taking on a people devoted to a new system (the famous "21st century socialism"), already armed and passionate in its defence.

And you thought Avatar was just some blue cats in 3D?

For English subtitles, click cc in the player window.

An eye witness account from The Gaza Strip. December 27th, 2008, Operation Cast Lead. 21 days shooting elephants. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images from the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians. Film by Alberto Arce and Mohammed Rujallah. http://toshootanelephant.com http;//visionon.tv

For the latest films on Gaza, go to visionOntv's Gaza channel.