I saw a tweet about this and checked it out. Joel Gilbert’s film Dreams from My Real Father is available on Netflix for streaming.
As Loren Collins demonstrated, if the nude model in the film is really Stanley Ann Dunham as the film claims, then she would have been 15 at the time those photos were taken, making the film child pornography. I’m not an expert here, but I understand that even picturing an adult model in a salacious context represented as a minor is illegal. See Wikipedia on simulated child pornography.
I have expressed my displeasure to Netflix, and am considering whether to cancel my subscription. What were they thinking?
What were they thinking? It’s a corp, and corps ain’t people my friend. Corrected: was it thinking? Recalling the Qwikster initiative, I must ask: has it ever thought?
No.
They acquire content and make it available. They may not provide domestic pornography, as it is not seen as mainstream here. They do carry tons of foreign content, from mainstream sources, numerous examples of which would be deemed pornographic here.
No credence should be given to the proven nonsense that the pictures are Stanley Anne Dunham. I think any communications with Netflix should be in the way of demands that the filmmaker admit the falsehood.
I have no problem with them carrying pornography.
Pedophilia is another matter altogether.
Agreed. And it should be prominently displayed at the beginning of the ‘film’ and as a banner during the segment that is attempting to make the claim.
I think at the next debate Obama should demand that Romney either stand by or repudiate the sleazy, despicable “movie.” It is easily the vilest thing ever done in any election I have lived to see.
We who follow birtherism are somewhat inured to this, having daily witnessed the lunacy the Loopy Right is capable of. But a political machine that would call the President’s mother a slut, claim she slept with Davis, a man more than three times her age, AND that she made pornography while still a child… and that would pay for millions of copies to be distributed to voters… that’s utterly sick, and Romney should have it hung around his neck like an albatross.
I doubt that will happen, there are just too many uncontrollable political risks involved.
But I do expect some law suits when Obama leaves office in 2016.
In which case Romney would repudiate it and call it a filthy bit of propaganda. It’s not like that’s a tough question. You’re not asking Romney to repudiate D’Souza’s film; you’re asking him to reject a patently dishonest direct-to-DVD conspiracy narrative.
There’s a good chance that such a question could backfire on Obama. For all its distribution the film is still pretty obscure, and Obama would be giving it a much higher profile. By asking Romney about some independent nonsense, Obama would look like he’s trying to connect Romney to it. And by saying the obvious in reply, Romney would come off looking reasonable.
This idea reminds me of a Birther’s suggestion that Romney should ask Obama about his ring during a debate. Which would similarly backfire. Obama would simply show it, and Romney would look like an absolute fool.
When I logged into my Netflix account to watch movies the other night, Netflix had chosen this title for me and indicated that I would give it 4 stars. Rather than watch it, i left a review that it was garbage and I was going to cancel my subscription which I did.
Yesterday, I signed up for Amazon’s streaming movies. It is less expensive and they have more movies that I like including new releases that usually take Netflix a couple of years to add.
Practically every review left on that movie was asking Netflix to withdraw it. Since it is still there, it leads me to believe that someone in Netflix’s management is a birther or wants to try to smear the president before the election – especially since it seems that movie is coming up in the suggested movies for every member. I hope a lot of people cancel their subscriptions and move elsewhere.
doc: What were they thinking?
who makes tons of money from porn?
General Motors at one time owned the national satellite distribution service DirecTV, which channels pornography into millions of American homes for a nice profit. But General Motors sold its stake in DirecTV to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation which continues to offer pornography channels.
The big companies, making big money, that are featured in FRONTLINE’s “American Porn” report, first broadcast in February 2002.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/business/mainstream.html
and who subscribes to the most porn?
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”
Not sure how one would determine the politics of individual subscribers to specific channels on satellite or cable but that’s not the real point.
What people (of all political stripes) are paying for on their cable and satellite subscriptions is legal adult fare.
What may be in this lurid little movie could involve a child and that’s illegal.
The producer needs to be held accountable and for him it’s a no win deal: If it is of a child he’s in trouble. If the pictures are of an adult he’s just a gullible idiot.
I don’t believe anyone has actually contacted the FBI with this accusation, have they?
Not to my knowledge. I’m not sure that the FBI would do anything if they were contacted about it.
Just another note. Amazon also carries this title in their selection of streaming movies. I don’t care if people watch it. It won’t influence anyone that is undecided to vote for Mitt because the claims are just so preposterous. My complaint with Netflix is that it was set up as the very first item I saw when I logged in and it was recommended to me by them for my viewing. Out of curiousity, I contacted a family member that also uses Netflix to see if it had also been put into their recommended list and it was. Perhaps I could get a larger sampling but it sure seems like Netflix is promoting the video. Usually, you have to do a lot of hunting through their titles to find any movie you may want to watch.
The assertion is that it is a crime. If people are witnessing a crime and not reporting it, that makes them accessories in my book.
Since I do not do streaming movies, I am not sure how it works but if you access Netflix through a web browser, you may find deleting history and tracking cookies causes the title not to show up first. I know some advertisers use tracking cookies to focus advertisements to something you might purchase. Netflix may do the same. If you browser (and your family member) have been visiting Obama conspiracy sites (including this one), Netflix may be picking up on that. Political sites may also trigger the movie to go higher.
The problem is that no one knows if it is a crime because we really don’t know who the person is or how old she was when the pictures were taken.
Absent a referral from the Justice Department the FBI won’t be doing anything with it.
Netflix uses a rating system where the user rates movies they’ve already seen. When you first sign up, they build a profile on you based on the types of movies you like to watch ie Dramas, Thrillers, Comedies, Documentaries, etc. Then they give you a list of movies and ask if you’ve seen them and if you have you can rate them from one through five stars.
Since I answered that I rarely watch documentaries it shouldn’t have been a recommendation. I use a Vizio Blu Ray player to watch movies on Netflix and Vudu. It was when I connected to Netflix through that player where the movie came up in the recommendations.
As far as my sister, it was recommended to her as well and she uses an Xbox 360 to watch Netflix.
Now, there are times that I would watch a movie on my Mac, PC or one of my iPads. But I don’t allow cookies to be stored and I have settings in IE to clear my browsing history everytime I quit. On my Mac, I use Safari and reset it everyday. On my iPads, I used the Netflix app to watch movies and I don’t ever browse the internet on either and if I do, i always clear the browsing history and cookies after each session.
Regardless, I was offended that Netflix would put it in my recommendations and indicate that I would give it 4 stars. I can’t count the number of times I have wanted to watch a movie on Netflix and found them difficult to find if I didn’t know their exact name. Some of the newer releases I found that I would have been interested in watching never made their way into my recommendations. It was always the same old crap that I was never interested in and indicated by clicking on the “not interested” button. In the end, I had been thinking of canceling my subscription because they never seemed to get new stuff in their selections and if they did, it was buried so deep that it was difficult to find. Having this documentary added into the recommendation list just helped me make up my mind to cancel.
I don’t know if it is a crime or not. If Gilbert is convinced that this is Ann Dunham, then he should know he’s distributing pictures of an underage model. If he knows it isn’t Ann Dunham and he’s distributing pictures of a model claiming it is Ann Dunham who was underage at that time, then it sure seems to fall under the laws of simulated child pornography.
As to if anyone has reported it, I haven’t so I guess I am possibly guilty of a crime. I won’t be expecting the FBI to come knocking at my door because of it. The information is out there and people are talking about it. If it is a crime, then the FBI should be aware of it and charge Gibert with the crime.
What is unfortunate about it is that people are talking about it. The more people talk about it the more people are curious enough to watch the stupid film.
No one viewing the film or talking about it is in any danger.
The real problem, as you note, is stupidity. Stupidity on the part of the producer and the people who believe the nonsense. Fortunately for them being stupid in public isn’t a crime.
The images I have seen will never rise to the level of “pornography”, let alone “kiddie porn.”
Also, it’s only a matter of time before vintage pin-up enthusiasts identify the woman.
Hey, they found the Spiderpool. I’ll wager that this model turns out to be easily identified.
CarlOrcas: Not sure how one would determine the politics of individual subscribers to specific channels on satellite or cable ……
oh they used a variety of data to determine that right down to zip codes, answers to poll questions (which i cited), porn subscribers, credit-card receipt, etc
Sorry but I can’t imagine being able to cross tabulate that information. Exactly how would they get their hands on some of it….like the names and locations of subscribers and credit card receipts?
I see it this simple: if Gilbert is himself claiming to be distributing pornographic pictures of an underage girl, he should be taken on his word.
CarlOrcas:
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
If you have the photo in question, you can always try Tineye’s reverse image search engine.
http://www.tineye.com/
The reason he’s not at liberty to identify them is because what they did is a violation of their merchant agreements with Visa, MasterCard, etc.
It strikes me as highly doubtful that a big company would do that sort of thing but, for the the sake of discussion, let’s say they did. Now just how did he manage to draw any conclusions about a person’s politics with only one relevant data point….a Zip Code? There are too many other variables to simply extrapolate from something like voter registration numbers in the Zip Code.
Can you point me to this research? This making less and less sense. I’d really like to see how he managed to draw that sort of conclusion with such insignificant numbers. Hell a power outage could account for a one tenth of one percent drop in visits to internet websites.
They gave it a 1.5 star estimate for me, somewhere between Didn’t like and Hated it.
Dr. Conspiracy, I think you are off-base with your criticism of Netflix. Not Gilbert or his film, just Netflix. I don’t see their job as being one of censorship. Even if the film is full of lies (and I have no doubt that it is), as long as it doesn’t contain child pornography, it should be shown.
Why is Netflix responsible for this, but not other documentaries which lie, stretch the truth and manipulate time-lines?
Michael Moore, a popular documentary maker has been roundly criticized for leaving things out, sometimes materially important things, for the sake of the story.
For example, in Roger & Me, a film about trying to meet Roger Smith, the (then) chairman of GM to discuss plant closings and lay-offs, Moore never mentions that he had actually met Smith previously. The man Moore spent the entire movie chasing wasn’t new to him.
The film also isn’t shown in the order it was filmed in. Some parts of the time-line were compressed tremendously. The plants closed were in four states and took twelve years to close, not a few months or years, and not only in the Flint area.
From the New York Times:
“The criticisms of Mr. Moore, which were first outlined by Mr. Jacobson and then were picked up by Ms. Kael in a sharply critical review, are based on several points. First, as Mr. Jacobson wrote, the film compressed events that actually took place over a long period of time and altered the sequence of some of them. The 11 plant closings affected 4 states, not just Flint. The 30,000 jobs lost in Flint were lost over 12 years, not the far shorter span suggested – though never explicitly stated – by Mr. Moore in ”Roger and Me.””
Those are significant departures from reality.
from the same:
“Pressed in his interview with Mr. Jacobson about his presentation of events, Mr. Moore said: ”All art -listen, every piece of journalism -manipulates sequence and things.””
Dreams from My Real Father sounds like it is much more egregious than anything Michael Moore has ever attempted. No one is saying that Moore made up anything out of whole cloth.
But if we’re going to allow good documentary makers like Michael Moore to manipulate facts and time-lines for affect, why isn’t it okay for bad documentary makers like Gilbert?
‘Roger and Me’: Documentary? Satire? Or Both? at the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/01/movies/roger-and-me-documentary-satire-or-both.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Wikipedia article about Roger & Me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_%26_Me#Criticism
It got to the point that Roger Ebert penned a piece supporting Moore’s “truthiness”. From the above Wikipedia article:
“Critic Roger Ebert wrote an article entitled, “Attacks on ‘Roger & Me’ completely miss point of film” that defends Moore’s manipulation of his film’s timeline as an artistic and stylistic choice that has less to do with his credibility as a filmmaker and more to do with the flexibility of film as a medium to express a viewpoint using the same methods that satirists have used.Ebert argues that the point of the film is not to present a completely cut and dried presentation of facts, but instead to create a jumping point for interest and dialogue through use of humor and irony”
Bowling for Columbine had many problems as well: From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine#Criticisms
Why start with this film? “Dreams of My Real Father” doesn’t show child pornography, because the young lady is pretty clearly not Ms. Dunham. It’s a steaming pile of rancid garbage, but a lot of the documentaries out there are (alien abductions documentaries, for example), and Netflix has tons of those. Why should we carve out a specific exception to our general acceptance of manipulation in documentaries?
The young woman is not Ann Dunham. No children were harmed. It’s a nasty, viscous lie meant to draw in idiot birthers, but how is it worse than other bald-faced lies (alien abduction documentaries), or deliberate manipulation of the time-line or events (Moore’s work)?
The film “Ken Park” was banned (in Australia at least) because it depicted underage sex – the actors were of age, but the characters they were portraying were not.
To follow up on Zixi’s comment, my initial reaction was to think “Would Netflix stream similar conspiracist trash like the 9/11 film Loose Change?”
And as it turned out…they DO stream Loose Change. Leaving me hard-pressed to think of a reason why I was OK with Netflix streaming a Truther conspiracy film that’s full of lies, but ought to be outraged at them streaming a Birther conspiracy film that’s full of lies.
Now that’s not to say that we shouldn’t complain. Netflix doesn’t make ALL films available for streaming; it has limited resources itself. I’m sure Netflix makes judgment calls as to what it will and will not stream. They don’t stream porn, for instance. They probably won’t stream racist propaganda films. Netflix could certainly be convinced that Gilbert’s ‘Dreams’ is so fundamentally dishonest that they ought to pull it, and perhaps they might do so. I just wouldn’t read too much into their decision to keep it if that’s what happened instead.
I don’t know about Doc but my problem is that Netflix seemed to be promoting this documentary prior to the election. Netflix has a section “Recommended for {your name}” that you see when you first log in to Netflix. The documentary was the very first item in my recommendations.
As I wrote earlier, I really don’t have a problem with them having this documentary in their selections. Amazon has it in their streaming videos as well. But to put it in MY recommendations when I don’t watch documentaries based on my taste profile sure seems like they’re trying to push this documentary on people that may not wise enough not to watch it.
My decision to cancel my account became much easier. I wrote above that it has always been difficult to find movies that I like on Netflix. Even new releases are often buried to where I stumble up them by going through hordes of titles when they should be easy to find. And the only reason I would browse movies was to find one when a cursory look through their “New Release” or “Recently Added” titles contained the same selections that have had for the last 3 or 4 months.
From what I have seen, the movie sparked a lot of outrage on Netflix in their comments on it. Reviews giving it one star and saying they were going to cancel their accounts greatly outnumbed those that gave it a good review. It was obvious from the good reviews that the person was a birther.
In the end, I would prefer they pull the selection. The fact that Gilbert portrays Ann Dunham as a slut is wrong and goes beyond what is acceptable in attacking a candidate. If she were still alive today, he wouldn’t have made the documentary and if he had he would have been sued for libel.
I don’t think you understand my point. The film contains salacious images of someone who the film says is barely 18, but if it is who it says it is, is really 15.
I don’t think the young woman is Stanley Ann Dunham myself nor that the model is underage, but the film says that it is. I think that when someone lies, and Gilbert does, there should be consequences.
The argument I’m making is not against Netflix, but rather against the film and I’m using Netflix as a lever. If I have a problem with Netflix it is their promoting feature-length attack ad right before the election.
You mentioned the film Roger and Me. This film along with Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 are available on Netflix but not for streaming.
Let me add that the film received an average of 2.8 stars among 6,705 ratings on Netflix.
I also notice that the number of member reviews of this film are shrinking. There were 4 pages last night, but only 3 today. My review, with its allegations of child pornography, was never approved.
so many lies … (i.e. advertisements) you can’t stop them all
I just checked and now most of the negative one star reviews have been removed. My review still shows up when I go into my account and click on “My Reviews” but the review isn’t listed with the other reviews.
Oh well. Netflix apparently doesn’t care much about their customers and wants to spread unacceptable crap about Obama’s mother to link Obama with Frank Marshal Davis. Not my loss. Amazon is also carrying the title but not promoting like Netflix was. The Amazon streaming service is less expensive since you pay for the entire year up front and they have a better selection of titles than Netflix. I’ll stick with Amazon since my premier membership will also allow me to read books available on Kindle.
Making that accusation requires making connections that smear artists aren’t interested in. They don’t care about correlating the date of the photos with the birthdate of Obama’s mom. They don’t care about the age of the photos at all, only about saying ‘Obama’s mom is a ho.’ I haven’t seen any of these nutters doing the math and claiming this is Obama’s mom at 15. They seem to all be operating on the assumption that these are of Obama’s mom after he was born, and revel in all that it implies … a young, single mom engaging in deviant behavior while her toddler is in the care of others.
It is a ridiculous, despicable story no matter the variation, but it takes a literal reading, and an assertion of an interest in truth on the part of those engaged in obvious lying (people willing to smear multiple deceased persons!), to arrive at a pedo charge.
I presume all the nude photos of Lenore LeFount been scrubbed from the internet.
I have the same experience with my review. Despite the overall Netflix viewer rating of the film being 2.7 stars, most of the reviews are either 3 or 5 stars (liked or loved). This doesn’t seem right.