Media Things: Doco

The World According to Bush

2005-02-11T06:56:41-08:00

I missed this one when it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year. I'm looking forward to catching the DVD. The World According to Bush covers much of the territory of Fahrenheit 9/11, but is a more sober, conventionally made look at the first 1000 days of George Bush's presidency. It was originally scheduled to screen at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but when Michael Moore finished his film at the last minute, Karel's film was pulled because festival artistic director Thierry FrÃ©maux didn't want Cannes to appear too anti-American. The documentary has earned praise from a number of quarters for offering the most coherent exposition of the slide into war through high calibre interviews with the likes of author Norman Mailer, weapons inspector Hans Blix, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle. However, there has been little U.S. media interest. "Either they don't know or they don't care," said Karel, speaking through a interpreter. Karel said that Michael Moore had omitted some important parts in George Bush's story. "There is hardly anything about the religious right and its relationship with the Bush family and also the dangerous liaisons between Israel and the Bush family." Both films reveal the unholy relationship between Bush and bin Laden clans, but The World According to Bush goes further back in history to the days when Prescott Bush, W's grandfather, was banker to Hitler's Third Reich. -- Rebort (IOFilm Review]

Unprecedented - The 2000 Presidential Election - 2004 Campaign Edition (2002)

2005-02-06T08:25:27-08:00

This is part I in producer Robert Greenwald's Un- Trilogy which also includes Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War and Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties (2004). In the course of 47 provocative minutes, Unprecedented leaves little doubt that the 2000 presidential election was a mockery of justice. Focusing on rampant, court-sanctioned abuses of the democratic process in Florida, directors Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler present a thorough reexamination of the circumstances that allowed the election of George W. Bush, including the Gore campaign's fatal failure to request the state-wide recount to which the Democratic party was legally entitled. In particular, the political ambitions of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris are exposed with devastating, irrefutable evidence of cronyism, including the Bush administration's post-election appointment of the son of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose support of Florida's haphazard election results was arguably a violation of his oath. Through it all, Florida's African American voters and discounted "felons" are victimized by a bureaucratic nightmare of exclusion, and uncounted votes remained officially in limbo. The film's liberal bias is obvious (it was executive produced by Robert Greenwald, the director of Outfoxed), but Unprecedented is ultimately an impassioned plea to Americans of every political affiliation: If you don't vote, you will further weaken the democratic principles that were so fatefully violated in Florida. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties

2005-02-06T08:21:16-08:00

Part III in Producer Robert Greenwald's Un-Trilogy. Part I is Unprecedented - The 2000 Presidential Election - 2004 Campaign Edition (2002) and Part II Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties (2004) Completing a trilogy that should be required viewing for all Americans, Unconstitutional explicitly reveals how the USA Patriot Act violates numerous civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Following the equally persuasive documentaries Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, this film presents powerful and tragic examples of how the USA Patriot Act--passed with virtually no Congressional debate just 45 days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01--has been used to justify the unconstitutional arrest of innocent immigrants based on Arab stereotyping; the illegal detention of vaguely defined "suspects" and their improper treatment (including beatings and torture) during extended confinement; prisoner abuse of alleged terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay military prison; the allowance of improper search and seizure without due cause; prohibited travel based on racial profiling; bully tactics employed with impunity by local police in efforts to undermine free speech; and other clear indications of the Patriot Act's unconstitutional enforcement. The more personal these stories of violation are, the more gut-wrenching is the realization that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft--and by extension, the George W. Bush administration--have used the Patriot Act to justify what is essentially a dictatorial police state. Sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and full of bipartisan testimony by lawyers, politicians, and victims of Patriot Act abuse, Unconstitutional makes an eloquent case for the careful interpretation of Constitutional law, exploring rising opposition to Patriot Act abuses while exposing how many of our freedoms have been undermined in the name of post-9/11 security. Regardless of your political affiliation, this is a chilling reminder of how seemingly good intentions can corrupt even our most cherished American values. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Uncovered - The Whole Truth About the Iraq War

2004-11-20T10:07:30-08:00

Robert Greenwald

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire

2004-09-27T20:15:42-08:00

I enjoyed this film, learned a fair bit and upped the termperature in my righteous indignation thermometer by several degrees centigrade. From the VIFF 2004 film guide: A short, sharp addition to the fast-growing body of documentaries indicting the current Bush administration, Hijacking Catastrophe goes beyond simple Bush-bashing to paint a horrifying portrait of organized US imperialist expansion and public deception stretching back to the early Reagan era... Well-documented premise is that a few radical neo-conservatives first hatched theoretical foreign and domestic policies too extreme to be revealed--let alone fully implemented--during Reagan's first term. Their wish list included such goals as the US no longer honouring certain international treaties or the UN; an offensive, "pre-emptive" military approach toward invading other countries found problematic or desirable; artfully scaling back civil liberties and Constitutional rights; vast increases in defense spending... The point is that this way lies creeping fascism, not to mention catastrophic national debt (projected as $7 trillion by this year's end) that could eventually lower living standards for every citizen, save the very rich. Noted en route is the status of various Bush Jr. honchos (Chaney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, the prez himself) as "chicken hawks" who avoided their own military service in younger years... Commentators run a gamut that includes international diplomats and activists, leftist intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer), investigative journalists, and appalled (if safely retired) military personnel. Iraq civilian casualty photos provide the stomach-churning reality that's been largely airbrushed from popular American reportage.

Jeremy Earp

The Corporation

2004-02-14T15:26:11-08:00

This is a film co-directed by Mark Achbar, who also co-directed Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Manufacturing Consent is arguably the most important documentary ever made about the Media. The Corporation may be the most important film made about corporations. A corporation, by legal definition, is considered a person, with all the rights and legal status that implies. This documentary, The Corporation, analsyses just what kind of a person a corporation is. The conclusion? A psychopath, with all the destrutive, self-interested often sadistic behaviour that implies. This is a pretty well-made film, though its intended formatting for television is often visible in a weak, jaggy picture. Also, after fully developing its thesis (corporate psychopaths) the film loses focus for a bit. Understandably so, perhaps, given the breadth and depth of information about the nature and significance of corporate psychopathy it is attempting to present. The early going is the most compelling portion of the film, while the film-makers tick off a World Health Organisation checklist of a psychopathic behavioural traits, all exhibited by corporations. The second half begins by emphasising and supporting the thesis with case histories. A disturbing litany of abuse, certainly, but the film's narrative thrust stalls. It does finish strongly by pulling the loose ends together in a hopeful message. Ultimately, real flesh and blood people can win out over bloodless corporate beings. There is one important logical point The Corporation side-steps. If we subject the human race, as a species, to the psychopathy checklist the same way the film subjects corporations to it, that is, as a "species" of non-flesh-and-blood beings, then humanity could be judged psychopathic. I think most of us are misguided to a lesser or greater degree, and many of us are dangerous in our ignorance and hubris. However, the vast majority of human beings are not psychopaths. Is it necessarily true that all, most or even a significant number of corporations are? The film does highlilght certain structures which force a corporation to behave in ways which are certainly anti-social. For example, a corporation's charter legally binds it to grow as quickly as possible and maximise its short-term profit. All other considerations are secondary at best, including the environment, the conditions of its workers, etc. If we transfer this kind of behaviour to a human being, we end up with someone who thinks primarily of their own material well-being. American Libertarians argue that one individual's material well-being benefits all other individuals in their sphere. That is, there is a virtue in selfishness. Most of us, however, look at that kind of behaviour as simply selfish. It's not the kind of person who makes a loyal friend. These are not arguments made in the film, and it leaves a hole in the film's thesis. A small but not insignificant one. On the other hand, this observation in no way diminishes the conclusion that the current set of rules and structures which corporations operate under direct them toward certain behaviours, behaviours that are easily definable as dysfunctional, destructive and self-serving. More about this important and highly regarded documentary at The Corporation website.

Mark Achbar

The Fog of War

2004-01-27T05:17:42-08:00

I saw this Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival this past fall. Splendid. But don't just take my word for it: New York Times review: FRANK RICH Oldest Living Whiz Kid Tells All Published: January 25, 2004 There has been no more unlikely movie star this season than Robert McNamara, the only living character in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War." The 87-year-old Mr. McNamara -- who, as the Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter pointed out, is a dead ringer for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" -- has been as surprised as anyone by his new-found audience. "I don't know a damn thing about films and TV," he said when we spoke last weekend. He can't remember the title of the one other movie he saw in the past decade and has "never seen a DVD." He hasn't watched any other film about Vietnam, period, having made a particular point of avoiding those by Oliver Stone. As secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Mr. McNamara presided over the most disastrous foreign adventure in American history and refused to speak out against it even after his own private doubts helped fuel L.B.J.'s decision to fire him. Mr. McNamara still lives in Washington, minutes away from the memorial to the 58,000-plus American dead. Are strangers nice when they approach him to talk about the movie? I asked. Yes, he said, but he acknowledged that the sample may be skewed: "People who hate you don't come up to you on the street and say you're a son of a bitch." Since its release, "The Fog of War" has generated plenty of debate on two fronts. Should Mr. McNamara, who freely admits to making errors about Vietnam but stops well short of outright contrition, rot in hell? The verdicts on his confessions in Mr. Morris's film range from mild praise (he's conceding fallibility, however belatedly) to utter rage (Roger Rosenblatt, on "The NewsHour," likened him to the self-justifying bureaucrats of Treblinka). The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq. Such analogies can be pushed only so far, however, and Mr. McNamara refuses to draw them publicly, despite repeated badgering by interviewers like me to do so. But if it is inexact, not to mention wildly premature, to declare that Iraq is Vietnam, it is not too soon to mine a related and pressing resonance of the McNamara story. When President-elect John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. McNamara to his cabinet, he was lionized as the very model, indeed the very shiny new model, of the modern star business executive: famously, the first non-Ford to be president of the Ford Motor Company, the most brilliant of the 10 so-called Whiz Kids whom Ford had recruited en masse from the Air Force brain trust of World War II, and the first M.B.A. from Harvard Business School to ascend so high in government. As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty -- but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself." "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new best-selling expose of the inner workings of the Bush White House, reads like an as-told-to book by its principal source, Mr. O'Neill, a C.E.O./cabinet officer fired by another Texan wartime president. It casts the former treasury secretary in the same role of protagonist that Mr. McNamara plays in "The Fog of War." When Mr. O'Neill was first appointed, he was hailed for his successful tenure at Alcoa, where, like Mr. McNamara at Ford, he was prized for his humanistic concern with safety as well as his can-do resuscitation of a sinking bottom line. The parallels end there. Whatever one thinks of Mr. O'Neill's White House tenure, he is of footnote stature in American history, if that. And unlike Mr. McNamara, a loyal courtier to presidents to the bitter end and beyond, Mr. O'Neill hardly waited a moment before trashing George W. Bush. Consistent to a fault, Mr. McNamara doesn't approve of Mr. O'Neill's behavior. "I think it's terrible," he says. "It's wrong for a cabinet officer after he's out to blacken the reputation of the president." He finds it "particularly bad" that Mr. O'Neill has since retreated a bit from his criticisms: "If you're going to do it, don't shift!" But the former treasury secretary's cooperation with Mr. Suskind's book is useful in a way Mr. McNamara might have been had he spoken out when it could have made a difference. (Our involvement in Vietnam lasted another seven years after his seven years in office.) "The Price of Loyalty" is valuable not so much for its few specific headline revelations, or for its gratingly adoring portrait of the na?ve and often hapless Mr. O'Neill, as for its atmospheric impressions of a White House where a C.E.O. mentality all too reminiscent of Mr. McNamara's shows signs of poisoning governance. In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history -- as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A. These resumes were commended by the press when Mr. Bush took office, much as Mr. McNamara's had been 40 years earlier. But what Mr. O'Neill describes in Mr. Suskind's book is not the executive branch of a democratic government so much as an old-school dictatorial corporate monolith where any serious debate, whether about economic or foreign policy, is stifled from the top. In "The Best and the Brightest," Mr. Halberstam summarizes how Mr. McNamara, his mind already made up on any subject, would run meetings at Ford (and later at the Pentagon): "Despite the appearance of give-and-take, the whole thing would become something of a sham, the classic Harvard Business School approach with loaded dice." The sentence could be grafted as is into Mr. O'Neill's descriptions of the Bush White House meetings in "The Price of Loyalty," where the McNamara-style C.E.O. enforcing his will and quashing debate often seems to be Mr. Cheney, freshly arrived from Halliburton. As Mr. McNamara's wielding of charts, statistics and unassailable rapid-fire logic mowed down internal dissent to Vietnam policy, so a similar intellectual arrogance at the very top of the Bush administration loads the dice for its rush into gaping budget deficits and ill-planned, excessively optimistic scenarios for post-Saddam Iraq. I asked Mr. McNamara to identify any bad Ford habits that might have led him astray once in public service. He didn't concede much, noting only that he arrived in Washington having no sense of the role of the press in public life ("We had nothing like that in Detroit!") or the possibility that reporters might try (and succeed) in uncovering governmental activities that the administration wanted off the record. This corporate tic is duplicated exponentially in the Bush administration, which is shrouded in secrecy to the point where the public's right to know has been deftly supplanted by the small shareholder's right to receive an unfailingly upbeat annual report. "The Fog of War" shows where this can lead. We see the vintage clips of Mr. McNamara promoting good news and suppressing the bad as the war turns sour -- a "credibility gap" echoed by this administration's "Mission Accomplished" happy talk after the fall of Saddam. We learn that there was no real White House debate of the domino theory, which as a premise for pre-emptive war in Vietnam was as intellectually suspect as the pre-emptive doctrine the Bush administration has applied selectively to justify its invasion of Iraq. "We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mind-set that led to that action," Mr. McNamara says in "The Fog of War" when he recalls how Vietnam spiraled after the Tonkin incident. Errol Morris is not a historian or an ideologue but a profound student of the quirks of human nature. As he dramatizes Mr. McNamara's efforts to make sense of his own history, we see that it is the man's vanity, his narcissistic overestimation of his own "skill set" (to use current C.E.O. lingo), that leads him into a mental fog and his government into a quagmire. Such a classic tragic flaw is personal, not political, which is why "The Fog of War" is moving in the end. We see its protagonist inexorably heading toward disaster, in his case taking a country with him, and we are powerless to stop it. At Ford, Mr. McNamara was eventually succeeded by Lee Iacocca, who more than anyone rehabilitated the image of the corporate star. It wasn't long after Mr. Bush and his C.E.O. team arrived in Washington that that image took its biggest hit in years, thanks to the new corporate whiz kids of the dot-com bubble, "The Smartest Guys in the Room," as the recent book by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind calls Enron's executives. But the economy is up a bit now, and memories in this country are short. The new runaway hit of prime-time television is not "Arrested Development," the well-received sitcom about an incarcerated Enronesque C.E.O. and his family. It is instead "The Apprentice," in which Donald Trump, the first C.E.O. with his own reality show, is glorified for behaving in the imperial manner of Mr. McNamara in his heyday and Mr. Bush in "The Price of Loyalty": his executives speak only to second his motions. It's all terribly entertaining, and at the very least, the star's hair deserves its own Golden Globe nomination. As a businessman serving his stockholders, Mr. Trump may even be as good as he thinks he is. But imagine him bringing the same management style into government at wartime, and you can picture his boardroom table of underlings nodding in agreement at the idea of donning a uniform for a premature victory jig on an aircraft carrier. That's why "The Apprentice" is, in its own farcical way, a valuable cautionary tale in its own right. Call it a "Fog of War" for dummies.

Errol Morris