...I was waiting for the Statue of Liberty head to come crashing down near them

I think alot of Americans misunderstand the roots of the criticism.

I am not American, but I believe in the idea and ideals that lie behind America as a nation expressed through the Bill of rights, the Constitution and in the countless writings of the founding fathers who have tried to address almost every possible problem that might befall the nation, if only all their words were taught more thoroughly in schools rather in universities.

It's the fusion of many ideas of liberty and democracy, starting with perhaps with Rome, the Magna Carta in Britain right up to the French revolution and so on.

I criticize the US not from a blind hatred towards its foreign policy or corporate hegemony but because it is perhaps the strongest beacon of individualism and democracy that remains in our world, almost every nation regardless of its personal views strives to achieve what America allows for it's people, the idea that any man or woman can achieve progress through hard work, that they can influence the course of government, that they essentially have a voice. A fundamental idea that still has to take stronger roots elsewhere in the world, especially now with a rise of a new neo-despotic capitalism taking place in Russia and China.

This is not to say that America has perfected the idea or it's execution, no not at all but is has come close, but it has hit obstacles, corporate control has replaced population control and the vote of the people only because the people have slowly forgotten their civil liberties over the liberties of the dollar and the corporate sector.

In this way America sets the standard for the rest of the world, this is why seeing the War on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan was so heart breaking because the thinking goes if America can do it... so can any one else, the moral high ground of being against torture has been lost. That's why the criticism is so harsh, the world wants America to be better, in fact it wants it to be the best. I think its like that perhaps to the wide spread of it's culture, the fact that its in reality the representation of many populations of the world coming together.

This is my personal belief. I think developed from reading these words for the first time when I was younger.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, 1883

"The New Colossus" is a sonnet by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), written in 1883 and, in 1903, engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the Statue of Liberty.

These words, that essential idea is something all Americans need to remember. There is such richness of ideas in American political and constitutional history with regards to liberity, that really makes me happy inside. Like reading about liberty for someone who has known only the shackles of jail all their life.

More very scary pictures at the game URL: http://www.codemasters.com/turningpoint/

I found the picture of the statue of liberty brandishing a swastika pretty poignant.

oh, i'm afraid it's worse than that, ladies and gentlemen.

if you look closely, comparing frames 417 and 418, you can clearly make out the head of the statue of liberty, being snapped back, and to the left.

back, and to the left...

Do you really think that marshmallow is strong enough to send the head of the Statue of Liberty flying through Manhattan? A whale flipper is filled with bones.

Why I am arguing about this anyway?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

From Wikipedia:

The decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty was inspired by the poster of the 1981 film Escape from New York, which had shown the head lying in the streets in New York despite not appearing in the film itself. According to Reeves, "It's an incredibly provocative image. And that was the source that inspired [producer] J.J. [Abrams] to say, 'Now this would be an interesting idea for a movie.'

So obviously, the monster is a mutated giant Snake Plissken. Anyone who has been following VideoSift mythology knows that Snake Plissken features prominently.

The gig is up. VideoSift has been a 2 year-long marketing campaign for this film.

What do I need to prove... I mean it fits right in to the Ghostbusters plot line. Stay Puft attacks New York, knocks off statue of liberty's head...Duh. It is freaking obvious.

needs a purpose for promote? other videosift shirts around the world? in front of the statue of liberty, wrapped around some mobsters being buried in concrete, etc.

And with a snap of his fingers, they turned the lights off! Lo and behold a dark tower against a dark sky! POOF!

I actually thought they had just erected a black sheet behind the silver one. That wouldn't even require turning the lights off. A dark sheet against a dark sky. Again, a trick that couldn't be performed during the day, and one that wouldn't get past YouTube outside of Lithuania.

Or maybe that's how Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear.

I heard every time this kind of thing happens, the statue of liberty cries

the statue of liberty has been closed since sep II , what could make a better statement than that , easy to not see these as bad steps , you defend the steps and those that made them .
Why is our government no longer transparent ? and how can that be good?

They were interesting shows. I’m not a big fan of these shows that make a derisive comment on the people they are interviewing and I think Louis Theroux (and Nick Broomfield in film) were the first sign of the nightmarish reality shows that were to come. However, compared to the sneering tone taken to contestants on The Apprentice, Survivor or Big Brother (whether they deserve to be sneered at for agreeing to go on such a show in the first place apart!), it is strange to be able to look back on Louis Theroux’s shows nostalgically – at least he was interviewing people the public were interested in knowing more about in the case of these When Louis Met… docs, or of cults, crazies and strange sub-cultures in his Weird Weekends programmes. I was interested by the way I was never sure whether I found Louis endearing in his curiosity or whether his naivete was an act, and I think his subjects felt the same way. I think a more important thing is to think that Louis gave his subjects ample rope with which to hang themselves!

He is a particularly good comparison to Nick Broomfield in the sense that their films are much more about their reaction to the people and places they visit than they are about the actual things they are supposedly documenting – not that their subjects are not important, but the presence of Theroux or Broomfield and their reactions are really the primary focus and makes them in a way an audience surrogate where we are exploring the situation with them (and in a more difficult way we are also being given clues of what reaction is expected of us as viewers by the way we see Broomfield and Theroux reacting). This is perhaps best shown in the Theroux documentary which follows him trying to get an interview with Michael Jackson, which he eventually doesn’t get – that infamously went to Martin Bashir – though Louis does get an outside view of the baby dangling incident.

The When Louis Met… programmes were full of pathos (the same pathos Ricky Gervais was tapping into when he had Les Dennis as a guest star in the first series of Extras), since most of the subjects were entertainers from a past television generation: the magician Paul Daniels and his assistant (and wife) Debbie McGee who had a high profile magic show in the 80s on the BBC which I remember watching. They were kind of shown up when David Copperfield became huge in America – somehow seeing the (relatively) ugly Daniels performing middling magic tricks seemed very old fashioned after seeing Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China or making the Statue of Liberty disappear etc, and I think the BBC felt that too since they dropped the show soon afterwards despite his show still getting good ratings (and ratings the BBC would kill for today – in the tens of millions). Then the vogue for debunking magic tricks occurred which destroyed his act anyway.

I remember seeing Jimmy Savilles ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ show in the mid-80s, where kids would write with requests such as wanting to ride a monster truck or meet a celebrity etc which Jim then ‘fixed’. It is just difficult to watch the programme now in these more cynical times without a feeling of watching a dirty old man with an unhealthy interest in children which is probably why the show stopped. Not that Saville ever expressed any such interest, it is just the society has sadly become more distrustful of men and children, and there isn't the possibility of such a programme being shown now without those kind of thoughts popping into the audiences heads!

Chris Eubank, while ostensibly famous as a boxer, was only ever familiar to me from his comical television appearances, which had grown fewer over the years before this Louis documentary was made – probably as he realised that the audiences were laughing at him and his affectations rather than with him.

And I actually saw Keith Harris and Orville the Duck perform on stage in the late 80s – they were very well loved at the time, but again it was perhaps a more innocent gentle humour that didn’t really work as the world changed.

Neil and Christine Hamilton are the odd ones out from the group as they only became famous because of Neil’s accepting cash payments for asking question in Parliament in the early 90s and then being spectacularly defeated in 1997 when New Labour came to power. They were basically just opportunists hungry for publicity compared to the other participants who weren’t adverse to getting back in the limelight but had their limits. They were also minor figures by the early 2000s as well – it is just that they had much briefer fame and hadn’t done anything to be particularly proud of or to be fondly remembered for anyway! (Perhaps making them the earliest examples of people ‘famous for being famous’, ready to do anything to keep their profile in the media up)

The Statue of Liberty, a beacon to the downtrodden, the huddled masses, the people who jump fences and drive drunk in our country when they're not supposed to be here. Marvelous.

Statue of Liberty.

'nuff said.

it pisses me off when guys like Gonzalez don't give a crap about the individual rights and freedoms that are SUPPOSED to be guaranteed by the Constitution. it's good to see at least someone cares.

"Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Ben Franklin said that in 1759, and it's inscribed in the Statue of Liberty. i don't think Bush or Gonzalez has ever heard it.