And Here’s The News
July 15, 2004
Anchorman is, at times, pee your pants funny. The other parts go by fast enough that you can go back to peeing your pants in short order. There’s no plot to speak of, so I won’t pretend to speak of it. Look for producer Judd Apatow’s cameo during the “sex panther” scene. The other cameos are bit more obvious, although just as funny. While everyone in the movie pulls their weight, Steve Carrill’s portrayal of BRICK, Retard Weatherman, made my abs burn with laughter.
Control Room deals with news of a completely different sort. It’s a behind-the-scenes documentary about the Al-Jazeera broadcasting networking during the Iraq war. Content-wise, the documentary is fascinating. While it’s mostly based on Al-Jazeera and its controversial (well, in America at least) coverage of the war and occupation, it also covers CentCom in totale, where the military held its press conferences and doled out information to US networks, the BBC and Al-Jazeera alike. What you see isn’t really a traditional media outlet as much as constant game of propaganda, where the military played the press as much as it could. Some of the best parts of the doc are when they cover events like the Jessica Lynch episode or the Saddam statue toppling in the middle of the Baghdad square, and you get to see the backstage hustle of the reporters and military as they jockey for position and information. The big weakness of the movie is that it’s very dryly presented, little more than a collection of talking heads. The doc almost presents Al-Jazeera as a freedom fighting organization, a source of truth and justice. One of the lessons of the film is that there is no objectivity in war, so I wish they could have extended that thematically a bit more, rather than go for the more obvious presentation.
On a completely different sidenote: CentCom would make for a great workplace drama, with the different network reporters as characters. Braver souls could even shape it into a M*A*S*H like comedy!
Posted in Moving Pictures
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August 2nd, 2004 at 10:01 pm
You say that the “collection of talking heads” made Control Room “dry” and “weak,” but my friend and I thought that that was its greatest strength. Unlike, say, Fahrenheit 9/11 (which, even though there was less Moore, still had a lot of Moore), Control Room pretty much left the majority of the decision-making processes up to you, the viewer, with very little in the way of narratorial intrusion (is that a word, “narratorial”? well, it is now!). I even found myself sympathizing to a degree with one of the members of CentCom, much to my surprise and chagrin, and if you saw it then you know who I mean. I think his name was Josh, but I’m not sure.
That said, I want to be that guy in charge of Al-Jazeera when I grow up. He was awesome.
August 6th, 2004 at 10:58 am
When I talk about Control Room’s dryness, it’s more a style issue than anything else. It’s just repeated interviews with little else to break it up.
You can present something in an interesting way and still be objective. Take something like Capturing the Friedmans, where the director virtually has no opinion while presenting a pretty compelling documentary.