Film
After the polling irregularities in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, which saw George W. Bush come to office, David Earnhart did nothing. But when it was repeated in 2004, he could not let it pass again.
“A lot of people were angry in 2004,” Mr. Earnhart said this week from his office in Nashville. “But where most everybody else moved on, I didn’t.”
A movie featuring the Coastal Picket Patrol and its generally unknown yet strategic role in protecting the U.S. Coast during World War II will be shown on Wednesday, March 19, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.
During the initial involvement of the United States in World War II, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard Reserve were short-staffed and short on vessels to protect the shipping channels along the Eastern seaboard. German U-boats and submarines were threatening American Merchant Marine vessels in the Atlantic Ocean just off U.S. soil.
In the disturbing yet vital film Taxi to the Dark Side, Army Specialist Damien Corsetti, one of six interrogators who confessed to torturing and killing an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in 2002, stoically peers into the camera and tries to justify his actions.
“When you look at people as less than human, you find yourself doing unthinkable things,” Mr. Corsetti says of his role in the death of Dilawar, the young Afghani wrongly accused of being the trigger man in a rocket attack.
Annual membership is strongly encouraged: For $40 a year you get half-price admission into any of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival screenings — winter or summer (every Wednesday night).
Individual tickets are available at the door, $5 for members or $10 for nonmembers.
Weekend passes are available at Island Entertainment: $50 for members, $100 for nonmembers.
You will not experience a more independent film at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival than Surfwise, a 93-minute recounting of the Paskowitz famil
Edward (Big Ed) Johnson is not physically large. In fact Mr. Johnson, who is serving a life sentence for gang-related homicide, looks wispy standing next to some of his fellow inmates. The origin of his nickname is likely wrapped up in the fact, as a convict at Donaldson Correctional Facility, Alabama’s highest security prison, he was a gang-leader in a prison populated by violent criminals.
That is, until taking part in the Vipassana Buddhist meditation program that forms the centerpiece of the documentary The Dhamma Brothers.