I reviewed the new documentary War Game for Slant:
Much of the criticism thrown at Alex Garland’s Civil War centered on it presenting the titular conflict without really explaining its origins. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary War Game goes the other way by showing in very specific ways not how a modern-day American civil war might be fought but how one might start…
Here’s the trailer:
I wrote about the great new John Ganz book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, for The Millions:
Americans are good talkers these days. Prodigious at least. Our screens and links and tabs are filled with it. Talk, talk, talk. Streams of mouthy TikTokers and YouTubers. News channels transformed into neverending panel discussions. Novels dictated by insistent first-person narrators. Besides the economics of an easily replicable product—talk is cheap, we’re always told, usually in prelude to a fight—what accounts for all the blather? Is it because everyone has something to say? Or is it because regardless of the question—gaping income inequality, an increasingly irritable biosphere, or the appeal of a red-faced demagogue promising retribution to red-hatted crowds—nobody seems to have a good answer?…
You can read an excerpt from Ganz’s book here.
The Great Hack is a new documentary about how Cambridge Analytica worked with private user data happily served up by Facebook in order to minutely target propaganda that helped win the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
Not available on Netflix until this Wednesday, it is already stirring up legal issues in the UK.
It’s a sign of how quickly it feels like the world is being torn apart around us that even a ripped-from-the-headlines documentary, such as Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s “The Great Hack,” can feel almost dated…
Here’s the trailer:
The Final Year, which tracks Barack Obama’s foreign policy team in his presidency’s pell-mell final year as the shadow of the Trump victory looms darkly, is opening in wider release this week.
My review is at Film Journal International:
…[Director Greg Barker] highlights three key players: chief speechwriter Ben Rhodes, United Nations ambassador Samantha Powers and Secretary of State John Kerry. Although Obama offers a few to-the-camera remarks, for the most part he remains in the background as the leader whose policies these three power players need to mesh with their own beliefs and wrestle into some coherent and actionable policy. Powers and Kerry perform their jobs with such a sense of can-do urgency that even when the frequently hubristic Rhodes says that they “felt like a pickup team…to change the world,” one’s eyes don’t even necessarily roll…
Here’s the trailer:
The documentary The Final Year, which tracks Barack Obama’s foreign policy team in the pell-mell last year of his presidency, opens this week in limited release for Oscar consideration.
My review is at Film Journal International:
…[Director Greg Barker] highlights three key players: chief speechwriter Ben Rhodes, United Nations ambassador Samantha Powers and Secretary of State John Kerry. Although Obama offers a few to-the-camera remarks, for the most part he remains in the background as the leader whose policies these three power players need to mesh with their own beliefs and wrestle into some coherent and actionable policy. Powers and Kerry perform their jobs with such a sense of can-do urgency that even when the frequently hubristic Rhodes says that they “felt like a pickup team…to change the world,” one’s eyes don’t even necessarily roll…
Here’s the trailer:
Remember Election Day last year? Feel like living through it all again? If you have the constitution for it, check out the new documentary 11/8/16, opening this week in limited release.
My review is at Film Journal International:
The disputatious and fractured omnibus documentary 11/8/16 nibbles at too many stories in too short a time to make the one great American tale it seems to be aiming for. There are glimmers of larger import here, various signifiers of this or that impulse from a certain slice of the electorate. But much like the news media in its breathless coverage of the 2016 presidential election, its onslaught of 16 points of view creates more of a cacophony than anything else…
Here’s the trailer:
As the D.C. news circuit scrambles to dissect the court turmoil in the White House to see how long Steve Bannon may or may not survive, it’s instructive to read Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.
My review is at PopMatters:
Years from now—assuming that books are still being published and we aren’t just wandering dazedly through a burnt-out cultural void of screaming memes—the books written about the 2016 US Presidential election will fill even more shelves than those written about Watergate. They will discuss the strategies, the major players, and the trendlines that led to this decision or that. Some books will also analyze how, in 2016, a fury-fueled flim-flam man broke almost every rule about presidential campaigns and became the most powerful man in the world. Those authors will argue with good reason that 2016 was the election that changed everything…
And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.
That was Hillary Rodham Clinton, winner of the popular vote to become the 45th President of the United States of America.
With the election, and (who knows?) maybe a gut-punch to democracy itself, just around the corner, it seems like the right time to get some writing advice from people who have to churn out a lot of words on demand at high velocity and with extreme precision: Speechwriters.
Scholastic gathered together a bunch of them, from Paul Begala to Bob Shrum, and boiled down their advice to a few points, explained at length here. Here’s the upshot:
There’s no writer out there who couldn’t stand to get to the point quickly and effectively while making it seem effortless. And the occasional gag never hurt anybody.
As reported in the July 12, 1999 New York Post, Donald Trump on Hardball:
People want me to [run for president] all the time … I don’t like it … Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about him [Clinton] and the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?
(h/t: Political Wire)
By the time the July 4th weekend comes along, the primary season will be over and the media electoral circus will be gearing up for the conventions. In other words, it’ll be the perfect time for The Purge: Election Night.
My article on the Purge films and the current election cycle ran at Little White Lies:
What we’ve seen over the past year on the scorched-earth plains of American electioneering resembles less a return to the grand old days of two-fisted retail politics than another entry in the subversively political Purge series, set in a near-future America where every year all laws are suspended for a 12-hour-long spree of supposedly cathartic violence called “The Purge”…
Here’s the trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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