To paraphrase Pilger's last sentence, "Wow, what a ...... (word that rhymes with banker)."

OK ... Graham Young will probably hate me for the above comment but sheesh it's about time that someone wrote an article titled "Why John Pilger is a con". I'm sure that it could be easily researched. As for this article, it's nothing more than sanctimonious twaddle.

Poor Mr Pilger,

The guy is even pissed off watching a great film like The Deer Hunter.

I wonder what he does to wind down if going to the movies is also so traumatic for him.

I was in the US army during WW2. I remain proud of it.

It looks like I'm in the minority, but I think the article is an excellent commentary on the American action film genre. Go John!

He resembles one of those saints who like to flagellate themselves and everybody else all the time for all the sins of the world, whilst venting his wrath about all that is bad and simultaneously spitting streams of bile from the corners of his grimacing mouth.

Maybe when he dies he will be able to cure our cancers if we behave as he has advised, and he will become Australia's next saint after MacKillop.

Come to think of it, we could ask Pell to organise for him to become Pope as soon as Benny drops off the papal perch, then Johnny P could get a fair swathe of the world's population behaving properly right here and now by simply announcing infallible dogmas from the Vatican pulpit.

I remember John Pilger writing for the London Daily Mirror Newspaperin the 1960's. The usual bile and grief against "Western" democracy. Never said a word about the 100 million killed by communism of course. Only turned against the Kmer Rouge when his North Viet mates attacked them.
I can understand how awful he must feel seeing all his writings comming to nothing lol.
Yes the US has a terrible record but it is a democracy and it is running in the the right direction unlike Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

JBowyer fails to acknowlege that Vietnam was a lie just like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most of you miss the point of Pilger.We are the Hollywood whorshippers of image without substance.It is the image,that for most, now creates the reality.The ultimate objective now for many, is to live the image and not create their own reality.Hence we have a population who live in perpetual insecurity trying to attain an illusion of self,which is ulimately self destructive.

"We are the hollywood men,head piece filled with straw"

Yes it is a bit like the old cowboy and indian movies. Cowboys good, Indians bad. It wasn't until some of the later movies that Indians were portrayed in a less definitve way, highlighting issues such as prejudice and dispossession of land.

Many years ago Casey Kasem (then a well known American media identity) with Lebanese heritage, criticised Hollywood movies for always portraying Middle Easterners as either evil villians or likeable buffoons (not his words exactly) - the perfect foil for the dashing (Anglo Saxon) hero.

Fact is there are always the goodies and the baddies and most nations will portray their 'side' as the heroes. Hollywood is about making money and cashes in on nationalist sentiment. Avatar was sympathetic to the underdog which is a positive, even if the hero had to come from the exploiter camp. Fact is in real life, you have to get some of the 'exploiters' on side if you are going to influence a change in mindsets. eg. anti-Vietnam marches.

On a positive note, things have improved over the years and many good movies are made that reflect more realistically the ambiguity in global relationships, even if the facts are sometimes distorted for the sake of a good storyline.

I think that John Pilger is a very perceptive and honest human being.He is not up there with the likes of TS Elliot in literary prowess,but he makes our current media prostitutes look very ordinary.

Power,guns,gonads and stolen capital does not make a civilisation.The West is now very corrupted and most of us don't or won't realise it.

I don't understand the point of this article.

John Pilger seems to wind people up, but then fails to offer practical suggestions of how to fight against the injustices against which he rails. In my experience, this is a common characteristic of his articles.

I thought Avatar was very good, BTW.

John Pilger's complaint strikes me as nitpicking (although the budget for that movie was frightening and it seems implausible that Rupert Murdoch of all people would have funded it).

A favourable review can be found at http://candobetter.org/node/1762

I grant that most hollywood movies are propaganda for the US corporate elite, but a good many also tell a lot of the truth.

I thought it was fantastic how, in "Good Morning Vietnam" a Vietnamese fried of Adrian Cronauer, when he revealed that he was a member of the NLF, which was fighting against the US, was allowed to eloquently articulate why.

The best movie that I can think of at this moment (perhaps apart from Avatar) is Oliver Stone's JFK of 1991 which shows how President Kennedy was killed because he was a threat to the same US military industrial complex that JFK's immediate predecessor President Eisenhower warned against in his last days as President.