Ak-47 Documentary

[Ogier Dudley]

Asa photojournalist, the Israeli-born New Yorker had covered conflicts and disasters around the world for National Geographic, Newsweek and other publications. For his first film, he and his sound engineer traveled to Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

"People hear the sirens and see us as angels of death," the soft-spoken Soto says as he drives through the streets of his hometown. He wears a mask over his face to conceal his identity from dealers and their informants and hit men. The film shows him tagging bodies in the morgue, collecting bullets and classifying evidence that simply gets warehoused. Filmmaker Schwarz says the work of the CSI never ends.

Onstage, the boisterous members of the group Los Bukanas de Culiacan wear bandoliers of bullets and brandish a prop bazooka. The group's enthusiastic lead singer and songwriter, Edgar Quintero, is the film's other protagonist, a young Mexican-American born in L.A. One minute, he's at home with his wife and babies. The next, he's sitting in a van, taking a wad of $100 bills from a shady character who wants a narcocorrido written about him.

A few weeks ago, I met up with the singer in his Los Angeles recording studio as he was working on his latest song about the founder of the Guadalajara cartel. Quintero likens what he does to gangster rap.

"A lot of people say, 'How can you sit there and glorify these people?' And I'm telling them, 'You can't hang the messenger.' You know, I'm not the one that caused this," Quintero says. "All we do is give people what they want, which is hardcore Spanish rap songs. That's what they want. They want the truth, so my songs are the truth. You're either gonna love it or gonna hate it. One or the other."

Narcocorridos are popular on both sides of the border, with popular music videos, sold-out concerts and CDs sold at Wal-Mart. The documentary shows teens in school uniforms saying that being a narco's girlfriend would be cool. And the filmmakers interviewed people like Oscar Lopez, who produces action films about drug traffickers.

"I hated them at the beginning," Schwarz says of the musicians and partygoers. "As time went along, I was just less mad about them, and I really thought they're a product of the bigger picture, they're a product of the policy, they're a product of what we're ignoring."

For his documentary, Schwarz filmed countless dead bodies. He interviewed a tattooed prisoner describing a hit he did for a cartel. And he included scenes of a woman whose son was found chopped into 16 pieces.

"As I was watching that, I did put myself in that situation for a second, and it did give me a little knot in my throat. It did get to me," Quintero says from his studio in L.A. "That just goes to show how in the United States, we're just so blinded. Kids from here, they're just in these nightclubs; they don't even know what's going on out there. And I guess that's gonna be the good thing of this movie. It's gonna open a bunch of eyes."

Since Narco Cultura was filmed from 2008 to 2010, the cartels have shifted their violence beyond Juarez and into other parts of Mexico. Narcocorridos are now banned from the airwaves in Mexico. And Quintero says the lyrics are not quite as graphic, though the narcocorrido scene is still going strong.

In a viral ad campaign, producers of the upcoming film "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" have released a series of videos showing weapon-wielding apes. Stylized to look like documentary footage out of Africa, one video features a chimp shooting an AK-47 at a group of off-duty soldiers who had been taunting it. Another clip shows a chimp hacking a carcass to bits with a machete.

The shocking footage is most likely intended to make the premise of the new film (intelligence-enhanced apes rising up and taking control of Earth, enslaving humans in the process) frighteningly plausible. But can chimps really wield weapons? [Watch Video of Chimp with AK-47]

Likewise, Steve Ross, a chimpanzee primatologist at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, agreed that chimps are cognitively and physically capable of operating weapons, and said they even use them in the wild. "Chimpanzees have been seen to use rudimentary weapons (such as projectiles, clubs and spears), so they have the capability of understanding that a tool can be used to cause harm or do damage," Ross told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Whether or not they would understand a gun is more difficult to say."

Any chimp gunplay would most likely be restricted to mimicry. Mitani believes actor chimps would likely learn to operate machine guns to please their trainers and receive rewards, but he doesn't think the apes are capable of using them to purposely do harm. "When shooting the gun, I'd be hard-pressed to think that the chimp can really understand [the consequences of] what he's doing."

Mitani echoed that concern. "Well before humans showed up on Earth, the planet was literally filled with apes. Itwas the planet of the apes, 20 [million] to 50 million years ago before humans came on the scene," he said. "Since then, that ape diversity has been lost to the point that we only have five different kinds." [Read: What If Neanderthals Had Not Gone Extinct?]

"There's a story going on here, but it's one in which humans have taken over the planet and have driven apes nearly to the point of extinction," Mitani continued. "That's the story that needs to be told, rather than this fictitious one about how they're taking over the planet."

Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark\/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics. "}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Natalie WolchoverSocial Links NavigationNatalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.

The filmmaker of a new documentary about a Vietnam War reenactment said he was shocked to learn that one of his actors was Eric Frein, the subject of a massive Pennsylvania manhunt, and said he had sensed that some reenactors were on the \"edge of violence.\"

The dragnet for Frein, wanted for allegedly shooting two state troopers at the Blooming Grove barracks on Sept. 12, has plagued eastern Pennsylvania for the past 12 days. Schools in the Pocono Mountain School District reopened today, but students were kept indoors and some bus routes were canceled. Frein is believed to be hiding out in the woods near his home in Canadensis, Pa.

\"I think we always had a fear that one of the people we were following -- because they had so much weaponry -- could do something very dangerous,\" filmmaker Patrick Bresnan of Austin, Texas, told ABC News today.

Bresnan, 38, said he and his wife, also a filmmaker, have been busy all summer getting their documentary \"Vietnam Appreciation Day\" ready for film festival submissions. The documentary follows a group of war reenactors in rural Pennsylvania, including Frein, preparing for a public show.

\"A lot of these guys try to act in History Channel episodes as extras, and they get paid $150 so they justify hoarding and collecting weaponry through their reenacting. That's like the crown jewel for a lot of these guys -- getting to portray a Nazi or a soldier on the History Channel.\"

Frein is accused of killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and critically wounding another trooper when police say he opened fire at the barracks, and then fled into the woods. He's a survivalist with experience living off the land and a skilled shooter, police said.

His father, a retired Army major, said two weapons were missing from his home, a .308 with a scope and an AK-47 assault rifle. Police scouring the woods have found an AK-47 and ammuniction that they believe Frein either abandoned or had stashed.

The bylaw has been in effect for more than 30 years. But the PBA still receives calls today from angry citizens demanding to please be taken off their call list. And the file includes many emails from citizens asking if the calls they received could be a scam.

And there are some like the July 29, 2010, email passed along from former Monmouth Beach Local 332 State Delegate Tom Walsh, who reported that a resident had received a call from a telemarketer and made a donation. According to the email, the telemarketing company said that somebody would come by right away to pick up the cash. The resident thought something was fishy, reported it to the police department who sent officers out to the house. They wound up running the person who came to pick up the cash and found he was a parolee/registered sex offender.

3a8082e126