Argo is the story of a film that never existed, a Star Wars rip-off set in a sci-fi world with a conveniently Middle Eastern feel. If the movie ever actually made it into production, it looks like the kind of thing you’d stumble upon while doing some insomnia-fueled TV-channel flipping in the small hours of the morning: a forgotten space opera featuring sparkly costumes and melodramatic dialogue. But when CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) options this script, what he has in mind is not a genre movie but a rescue operation. Argo, Affleck’s third outing as a director, heads far away from the Boston crime stories of Gone Baby Gone and The Town — to Tehran in 1980, where six American diplomats who escaped from the taking of the American embassy have been hiding out in the home of the Canadian ambassador in an increasingly perilous situation. There are no good ways of getting them out of a country roiling with rage against the U.S. decision to grant asylum to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the recently overthrown Shah of Iran. The State Department suggests giving the six bicycles and pointing them toward the Turkish border, or passing them off as NGO workers in the country to inspect crops that aren’t growing because it’s winter. The plan Tony comes up with, to pass them off as a Canadian film crew, is as his boss Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) puts it “the best bad idea” the agency has. Argo plays out like an unlikely heist movie in which all the suspense comes from unexpected corners. It’s a con in which the ultimate tense sequence involves getting through airport security, in which we root for the American “house guests” to escape while never being allowed to forget that the mess they’re in is a consequence of U.S. actions. It’s more fine filmmaking from Affleck, though it feels less personal and soulful than his previous hometown genre exercises. The movie’s poignance comes primarily from the opportunity it provides for show business to save the day, and John Goodman and Alan Arkin as Hollywood vets John Chambers and Lester Siegel provide a wry, seen-it-all counterpoint to the aura of melancholy that colors the main storyline. The primary weakness of Affleck’s film is the actor himself, who can’t seem to find much in “exfiltration” specialist Tony aside from a dedication to his work and sorrow over the potential breakup of his family. He is separated from his wife, who has taken their son with her to Virginia. The ’70s shaggy Tony is the protagonist of the story (and the real life Mendez provided some of the film’s source material in his book The Master of Disguise ), but the film places him as the too-still center, as if it would be in bad taste to give too much color to his character. “The whole country is watching you, they just don’t know it,” he’s told early in the runtime, and that sense of his being a secret hero seems to extend into Argo as well. It’s left to the rest of the cast to fill in the liveliness, and Cranston and Chris Messina manage that well in the CIA, while Kerry Bishé, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall and Scoot McNairy do an able job fleshing out the six American stowaways. As Joe Stafford, the ambitious embassy worker who challenges Tony’s plan as unsafe, McNairy is a stand-out, portraying a character in denial about how few options their group now has and filled with guilt about placing his wife in danger. But it’s Goodman and Arkin who are uncomplicated great fun, and the scenes in which Tony travels around Burbank arranging a fake production with their characters are the movie’s most enjoyable outside of the taut finale. Beneath a crumbled Hollywood sign, Tony dips his toe into the film world, quaffing wine at a press event for his nonexistence movie as costumed actors do a table read. That scene, which cuts between the lavish event and the situation in Iran, would suggest a critique of the entertainment industry and the escapism it represents. But a later sequence finds one of the characters giving the pitch of his life to members of the Revolutionary Guard, and inadvertently affirming the power that the movies hold over everyone. On a studio lot thousands of miles away from Iran, Chambers and Siegel may be joking about Groucho Marx while the world is in turmoil, but the power of show business holds sway even amidst Iran’s militants, whose own actions demonstrate an awareness of the importance of theatricality. Argo is a subdued thriller about a small triumph in a troubled moment in time, but it’s not without its sting. The side storyline of a local girl who was employed at the embassy provides a biting reminder of what it really means to be an unacknowledged hero. Not every gets to celebrate and drink champagne at the end. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Today in aint isht scumbag news… George Zimmerman Requests Trial Delay To Review School Records And Social Media Accounts Of Trayvon Martin Self-appointed neighborhood watchman scumbag George Zimmerman and his shady azz lawyers are still stalling. The trigger-happy murderer and his defense team are now requesting more time to obtain information from school records and social media accounts in a desperate attempt to paint slain teenager Trayvon Martin, who was hunted and gunned down by Zimmerman while walking home unarmed, in the worst light possible. The Grio reports: Neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman will ask a Florida judge to delay his murder trial and request that Trayvon Martin’s school records and information from the teen’s social media accounts be released. Zimmerman’s attorneys said in motions made public Monday that they expect to take between 50 and 75 depositions, and more time is needed to review all of the prosecution’s evidence. Zimmerman’s attorneys say they’ll also ask the judge to allow Martin’s school records to be subpoenaed, as well as information from his Twitter and Facebook accounts. Smh…justice for this young man and his family seems to be no where in sight.
We interrupt the latest Miley Cyrus hair hullabaloo – OMG, she looks just like Pink , people! – to give fans an update regarding this singer’s music career. First, the artist has updated her official website to include a wealth of promotional photos in honor of her upcoming studio album, which is expected to drop in early 2013. An example: Next, Cyrus has also released a cover of James Shelton‘s 1950s track “Lilac Wine” as part of the Backyard Sessions, which took place earlier this summer when the new blonde brought her band together to perform some of her favorite singles. Watch, listen and react below.
Welcome to THG’s Week in Review! Below, our staffers look back at the stories, stars and scandals that made the last seven days some of the craziest all year. If you don’t already, FOLLOW THG on Twitter , Google+ , Tumblr and Facebook for news 24/7/365. Let us be your celebrity gossip source across the board! Now, a rundown of the week that was at The Hollywood Gossip : Actor and all-around good guy Michael Clarke Duncan died at age 54. The iPhone 5 release date was totally announced! For next week! Amy Poehler and Will Arnett announced their separation. The world’s first Snooki baby photo was released!
Welcome to THG’s Week in Review! Below, our staffers look back at the stories, stars and scandals that made the last seven days some of the craziest all year. If you don’t already, FOLLOW THG on Twitter , Google+ , Tumblr and Facebook for news 24/7/365. Let us be your celebrity gossip source across the board! Now, a rundown of the week that was at The Hollywood Gossip : Actor and all-around good guy Michael Clarke Duncan died at age 54. The iPhone 5 release date was totally announced! For next week! Amy Poehler and Will Arnett announced their separation. The world’s first Snooki baby photo was released!
Rust and Bone is essential. It’s life and death. It’s like fucking at a funeral. It throws the grit of existence in your face and while you reel at our insubstantiality and balk at our crudity as human beings, it shows you that love is the only transcendent force we possess. What separates man from beast. There is no doubt it will polarize. There is nothing commercial here apart from the pulling power of Marion Cotillard . Cinematographically it is an expressionistic essay; intellectually, a two-hour conversation with its filmmaker. And physically it is a kick in the teeth, a depiction of poverty, sex and violence which crosses most known codes of acceptability. Spoilers follow. I would expect nothing less from director Jacques Audiard . From Read My Lips to The Beat My Heart Skipped to A Prophet , (the latter both also shot by Stephanie Fontaine) this is as ever courageous work. He is skilled at combining grainy realism with something esoteric — beyond romance. He creates criminal heroes within almost apocalyptic fairy tales. The premise of Rust and Bone is unbelievable — risible, even — and sounds more French farce than dramatic arc: A love story between a bare-knuckle street boxer and a woman who trains orca whales and loses her legs after a Seaworld accident. Adapted from a series of short stories by Craig Davidson, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), homeless and penniless with his five-year-old son Sam (Armand Cerdue) on his shoulders, turns up at his estranged sister’s in Antibes in the South of France. She houses them in her grimy garage, he gets a job as a bouncer in the local nightclub and rescues Stephanie (Cotillard), bloodied after a brawl. They don’t see each other again until after the accident; until after Stephanie has lost both legs to a killer whale. She calls him. He shows her no pity, and from there a relationship develops. As we move forward the stakes are raised and the scales turn. Audiard uses his common thematic – the juxtaposition of two characters, one the likeable criminal, the other the vulnerable — as Ali, involved in illegal street fighting and surveillance crime, compromises his relationships with Stephanie, his son and his sister. Simultaneously Stephanie begins to find her new identity and gets released back into her life, with or without him. Relative unknown Matthias Schoenaerts ( Bullhead ) is astonishing as Ali. He does nothing and everything, and, looking like a pit-bull, is at once a combination of unhealthy-yet-attractive and physically fit. And the bond between him and child actor Armand Cerdue is also extraordinary, almost symbiotic. This is also the best work I have seen Cotillard do. There are multiple moments in the film which are almost transcendent and indelibly stain the mind’s eye. Your heart leaps when Ali and Stephanie first have sex and you see that she has found renewed hope; a will to live, the will to return to work and confront her assailant. You feel empowered when you see her amputated legs resplendent with fresh tattoos (reading ‘Droite’ and ‘Gauche’). And you reel when she walks, prosthetic limbs on display, into the middle of a fistfight — possibly one of the coolest female character moments I have ever seen. It is all-physical. This is apt because Rust and Bone is corporeal. It tells you this in the opening shot sequence, when a montage of water and feet in sandals is accompanied by the overbearing sound of breathing and footsteps. The film is all about the body, about control and the loss of it. About the dichotomy between unwanted pain and pain sought — the accident and the bare knuckle boxing. The violence, the sex, is thus immediate and visceral. And whether you want to be or not, you are there — you can almost touch it, feel it, reach them with your hands. The fine lines between power and death are visible here too. The metaphors are clear; from the force of the whales leaping in and out of the water to the unseen dangers of ice and snow, we know that nature is bigger than us and in that terrifying reductivity there is love between father and son, man and woman. It is terribly intense, and French. There is no other way to describe it. And whereas I went out and bought the soundtrack (Bon Iver, Lykke Li, with score by Alexandre Desplat) and want to go back and see it again, the ferocity with which I liked it — was moved and haunted by it, and found it real and refreshing — could also be the ferocity with which it is loathed and eschewed for being pretentious and even sentimental. But like Audiard, Cotillard, Schoenaerts and I suspect everyone else who worked on the project, I’m happy to have that argument and suggest that this film is so good, it stands alone. This is not half-baked ennui — whatever anyone else thinks about it. Read more from the Toronto Film Festival. Follow Lorien Haynes on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Keep The Lights On director Ira Sachs ( Forty Shades of Blue , Delta ) tapped into his own experience in a tumultuous relationship that would eventually morph into the film that screened to accolades at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals earlier this year, winning the New York-based filmmaker a Teddy Award at the Berlinale. Keep The Lights On morphed out of the disintegration of a relationship he had with a man that spanned a number of years in New York around the turn of the century. Career demands, extra-relationship temptations, addictions, obsessions and more play into the rocky road experienced by the young couple. Sachs took inspiration for Keep The Lights On from the likes of Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right , Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances and Jacques Nolot’s confessional Before I Forget , constructing Keep The Lights On as a gay man in NYC while embracing at times details some may consider unflattering. Danish actor Thure Lindhardt plays documentary filmmaker Erik, while American Zachary Booth plays closeted lawyer Paul, a couple who embrace each other while passionately forming a dramatic relationship rife with sex, drugs, highs, lows and dysfunction. Ahead of Keep The Lights On ‘s theatrical release this weekend, Ira Sachs invited Movieline over to his NYC apartment, which, perhaps not so coincidentally served as a prime location for his film. He talks about embracing depictions of addiction and sexuality, the challenges of making indie film today, how making the film affected him personally and what his former partner, who helped inspire the project, thought of the film. When did you decide that you actually wanted to make this film? I saw a film called Before I Forget by Jacques Nolot at (New York’s) Cinema Village, which was programmed by Ed Arentz — who is now my distributor. And what I saw [was] a film that reflected sort of contemporary life — Parisian life — of a filmmaker who was gay, but also what his life in Paris is that looks like something specific. As a gay person how we live looks very specific today and different than it did 20 years ago. I felt like there was no film that looked like my life, and no film which really reflected the community that I live in which is very mixed. The boundaries between gay and straight, I think, for most of us in our everyday lives, though not in our psyche has dissipated. So I wanted to make a film about sort of what I had seen in the last many years here. But specifically I ended a relationship in 2008 and I had a sense that 10 years before that was an interesting story. I started writing and I put it away for a couple of years, and it was really Mauricio Zacharias, my co-writer who read that material and said, “Well clearly this is a story you have to tell.” And in a way because I was doing something so autobiographical, I think I needed someone else to give me the blessing that it would be relevant. So how much of it is similar and how much of it is a departure to your own life during a certain time period? We began with the journals, and diaries, so we began with the raw materials from my life, but then ultimately we were creating a screenplay, which is constructed around its own laws and orders. And in a way, all my films have begun with things that I feel like I know more than anyone else. They’ve begun in a very intimate place. So you’re creating it similarly to the approach you took in Forty Shades of Blue for instance? Forty Shades was kind of about my dad actually. I grew up in Memphis with this larger than life figure who always had these younger girlfriends. And my relationship to those girlfriends was my entry to the film, and that sort of thing. And then when you start making a movie [like Keep the Lights On ] and you’ve cast a Danish actor to play a character based on yourself, then you’re like off to the races because you’re making a film. So what made you decide to go that route with a Danish actor? Was it that the actor Thure Lindhardt personally that appealed to you? I sent the screenplay to an agent that I have worked with in Hollywood, and I got the response that no one in the agency would be available for this [project]. And I knew even before that I wanted to make this film different. I thought that this film needed to be a truly independent film, so it would be financed that way. It would be made that way. So I heard about Thure who I was told was the bravest actor In Denmark and one of the best, and I knew that he would be. I sent him the script and he was alone in a hotel room in Spain, and he ended up using up all the scenes one could shoot alone, which were a series of masturbation scenes. And I knew that he was both comfortable with the material, but also really amazingly interesting to watch. So I casted him. Is this a little reflection, perhaps, on American actors, that they’re less inclined to do this sort of thing? I have a Danish lead actor. I have a Greek cinematographer. I have a Brazilian co-writer. I have a Brazilian editor. I had a Romanian script supervisor. I surrounded myself with non-American sort of sensibilities. And I think that’s a big part of the film. It’s a film about New York, and it’s a very New York film, but I think it’s told in a way that’s not repressed, and it doesn’t look at sex as some foreign object that has to be viewed only in the dark. Do you agree that that’s sort of the American POV generally, that violence in movies is acceptable, but sex is taboo? I do, I do. I think when this film played in Berlin, it was the most ordinary movie you could see.It was extremely ordinary which is very different than how it played at Sundance. How did it play at Sundance then? The subject matter and the sexuality made people uncomfortable. I think there’s a fear of difference in American cinema. And I was thinking a lot about that when I made this film because there used to be an idea that independent cinema was independent cinema . And that production and the means of production were actually separate from commercial cinema. And that gave you certain rights and opportunities — and I had all those rights and opportunities. I am one of a number of filmmakers who started out making films about gay people who stopped. My whole generation, most of us stopped. We either couldn’t make films, or we had to make other kinds of films. And I think that that’s partially about the individual, but it’s mostly about the culture, and trying to figure out how to sustain a career. I think for me, ultimately, I feel now that in some ways my marginal voice is actually my most powerful. It’s also possibly economically my most fertile, because I’m the guy who can make these films. Is there still a pretty low glass ceiling for gay filmmakers generally in this country? It wasn’t any easier to make a film about a Russian woman living in Memphis ( Forty Shades of Blue ). When you’re trying to make non-broad character-driven stories, and I’m interested in documentary as forum, so I’m actually trying to get the details right, which makes it even more specific in a certain way. Going back to Keep the Lights On and Thure’s character Erik, I got the feeling he was a little bit a love junkie. Yeah, and I would agree. He was someone who didn’t feel complete without obsessing over something. I think, no one’s used that term, but I think it’s a good one. It’s better than a sex addict. I mean, I like love junkie… He is someone who just emotionally needs some attachment. I think that there’s a compulsive need to be connected to another person. And I think the film in a lot of ways is less about addiction and more about obsession. There was something, these two guys, both of them are obsessed with the idea of maintaining their life together. And I think with obsession, sometimes it seems like the most comfortable place to be, because it shuts out everything else because you think, “Well if I can control this situation, then I can control my life.” So was it emotional reliving this to a degree? It wasn’t. No? It wasn’t really. I mean, I think by the time that I made the film I really believe I’d done all the therapeutic work and transformation in a lot of ways. Occasionally it felt like déjà vu. It was like an odd sensation that occasionally I was creating fictional scenes that were replicating things that were close to my own life. But mostly I just really felt like my life was one of the drawers that we can open. And I was always very willing to share as much as I could with the actors. But I never felt like they needed to try to do anything other than what was natural to them as actors and as people living the story. I mean, a lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear. I mean, but the helms are their helms. The spaces are their spaces. I don’t rehearse with my actors. Then what’s your methodology of instruction? I talk to them individually, but I never talk to them together. So really in a certain way it’s more difficult for the actor because there’s a lot of risk, but actually that risk I think is the element that you could actually name in the performance in this film, and in my films in general. I think there’s something risky about it all. This is the moment. So I think to trying to capture the moment means that you’re really valuing the present, which includes the past, but it is about the present which is about the actors, it’s about flirtation, it’s what happens between them. Did you ever consider not emphasizing the drug use? Maybe there would be some other more acceptable vice like — alcoholism? An everyday addiction… Yeah, an everyday addiction, a “legal” addiction, yeah. You know, I really wanted to be unashamed and unabashed about the truth of my relationship and my behavior, and to not shy away from the details, and to not judge the action. So pot-head, crack addict, different kinds of distractions, different kinds of consequences, but the root of addiction is usually similar in lots of ways. And I feel like the drug use that the film talks about is really prevalent in the gay community at least. It’s something I feel like goes unspoken. So has your former partner seen this film? Yeah, he has seen the film. I showed him the film before Sundance. And he’s been very supportive. I mean, I think it’s not him. It’s a story about our relationship as seen through my eyes. Next: The New York filmmaker gives his personal Top 9 NYC films
The course of equal opportunity raunchy comedy never did run smooth. Like Bridesmaids , Bachelorette is a foray into proving that ladies are capable of wielding gross-out humor just as ably as the gentlemen, with the obvious comparison piece being Todd Phillips’ The Hangover . Written and directed by first-timer Leslye Headland (who previously worked as a writer on Terriers ) and produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, Bachelorette sends its trio of dysfunctional bridesmaids into all kinds of night-before-the-wedding misbehavior, including cocaine use, falling-down drunkenness, physical altercations, promiscuity, theft and general nastiness. But then, as if afraid that all of this misdeeds will drive the audience away, the film tries to add a last minute portion of heart, explaining away the actions of its three main characters as the result of damage and pairing them all up with guys to get them through to an at least temporary happy ending. Sometimes funny, sometimes shrill and wildly uneven, Bachelorette demonstrates film and television’s continuing struggle to provide a platform for funny women in the realms of R-rated comedy and the tug-of-war between the desire to push boundaries and fears about likability, about female characters still needing to be warm and pretty and matched up with someone romantically. Interestingly enough, the plot is based around the nuptials of a side character who doesn’t fit in any typical category — Becky (Australian actress Rebel Wilson) was the chubby sidekick of the “B-Faces” in high school, the one the other three held in mild, veiled contempt. Now happy, settled and about to marry a good-looking, stable guy, Becky’s unknowingly twisting the knife by asking her shocked friends (not one of whom is doing as well as she’d like in her early 30s) to be in her wedding party. Bachelorette feels at the start like it’s a version of Muriel’s Wedding that sides with the main characters mean frenemies instead of its unlikely heroine. Becky isn’t a major source of mockery, but she’s blissfully oblivious to how queen bee Regan (Kirsten Dunst), trampy Gene (Lizzy Caplan) and ditzy Katie (Isla Fisher) actually feel about the event in which they’ve promised to participate. The tightly wound Regan has a boyfriend in med school who won’t commit and a volunteer job she likes to talk about in which she reads to kids with cancer. Gene downs whatever drugs she can find and regularly wakes up in bed with strangers, while Katie can barely hold down her job in retail. The three seemed a little stunned that life has not delivered on the promise and popularity they showed in high school, and that happiness has eluded them while finding the one in their group they’ve deemed least worthy. Bachelorette seems uncertain as to what we’re supposed to think of Regan, Gene and Katie. The way they act in the outset, with Regan calling the other two to bitch about how she was obviously the one who was supposed to get married first, Gene monologuing about her blowjob technique to taunt a stranger on the plane and Katie failing to recognize Joe (Kyle Bornheimer), the guy who used to let her copy his homework (“I took French?” she exclaims in shock when he tells her) marks them as fairly awful. But the film seems exhilarated by their disastrousness, eager to shoo Becky out of the room after Gene makes a failed joke about the bride’s eating disorder and Katie orders a stripper who calls her by her old nickname of “Pig Face,” so that the three can get down to some serious drug use and then tear her wedding dress trying to fit two people inside it. These are inarguably mean girls, to the point where it’s difficult to invest their attempts to try to fix the gown in an all-night odyssey that takes them around the city and into an intersecting path with the groomsmen (led by a smarmy James Marsden as Trevor). But the film’s need to then turn around and soften them feels disappointingly like an excuse — see, they also hate themselves and think about suicide and are mournful over past abortions! These developments don’t humanize the characters, they apologize for them. Gene’s storyline in particular, in which she reunites with the high school boyfriend (Adam Scott, Caplan’s old “Party Down” romantic interest) who broke her heart, feels lurching and abrupt considering the depth of emotion it suddenly reaches for, a pity considering how smart and appealing the two actors are, both together and apart. There’s something to admire in Bachelorette ‘s initial flag-planting outrageousness, even if it goes too far and then sheepishly pulls back to a more conventional conclusion. Its contentment with acting out as a joke unto itself means it’s not often as funny as it needs to be, though it sets up and lands a few vicious punchlines — Regan’s triumphantly saving the day late in the film with her bulimia-perfected vomit-inducing technique is a dark joke indeed. But the film would be far more provocative if it let go of the need to always try to shock with content and tried to do so with form instead, and rather than solving its characters just let them be unabashedly imperfect. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
With the out-of-nowhere success of 2016: Obama’s America , the nation could finally have a conservative counterpart to Michael Moore . I say the nation rather than the Republicans, because a balanced box office is good for us all, at least as a reminder of our right to oppose the current government and make a profit in doing so. Similar to Moore’s release of Fahrenheit 9/11 during the summer of 2004, author-turned-filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza offers a one-sided, first-person documentary that challenges the incumbent President during his campaign for re-election. Unlike his liberal predecessor, however, D’Souza, who co-directs with writer/producer John Sullivan ( Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ), doesn’t have much to fall back on in the way of entertainment value and so only delivers a transient attraction for the anti-Obama crowd. You could say that a film like 2016 shouldn’t be entertaining, and maybe it is true that the left’s overdependence on jokesters and satire have hurt their efforts in the past. But while Fahrenheit 9/11 might not have influenced enough voters eight years ago, it remains a popular work of cinema in its own right primarily because of Moore’s appeal to a certain audience both personally and stylistically. D’Souza is neither engaging as a character nor as a storyteller, but even worse here is his lack of intensity. As a pressing piece of propaganda, the film could use a louder voice and edgier tone. To truly be an effective Moore equivalent, frankly, D’Souza could stand to be more of a nuisance. Basing the documentary on his best-selling books The Roots of Obama’s Rage and Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream , D’Souza, retains a very subjective angle for his exploration of the President’s true identity and political motives. In fact, before really even addressing the titular subject, the filmmaker takes the first portion of the film to set up his own biographical relevance, which aside from his being born outside the U.S. (oh, hush) corresponds quite uncannily as a way of comparing his own background to Barack Obama’s and then raising the question of how they ended up on such contrary idealistic paths. Through interpretation of passages from Obama’s book Dreams From My Father and an interview with a psychologist, D’Souza comes up with a thesis involving the President’s daddy issues. Paralleling the last administration’s critics, 2016 at times comes off like a slightly deeper kin to Oliver Stone’s W. without the fun of caricaturistic portrayals. More complex than Bush’s supposed need to make his still-living father proud, the deal with Obama is that he’s apparently impaired by a romanticized adoration of his never-there father as well as a desire to honor the elder Obama’s anti-colonial principles. On that track to expose the President’s ultimate goal of turning America into a flaccid, non-imperialistic country that is run with outdated collectivist policies, D’Souza’s intended ace in the hole is an appearance from Obama’s half-brother George, whose tiny abode in Kenya D’Souza refers to as “something out of Slumdog Millionaire .” The filmmaker fails to get the young man to talk negatively of his powerful brother’s neglect of poor family members abroad, even with literal attempts to “rephrase the question.” Finally, he settles on simply revealing George’s belief that the third world was better off under colonial rule. So what? Other than potentially inspiring an interesting and metaphorical novel about two brothers with divergent relationships to an unknown father in a long-post-colonial world, the disconnect between geographically and temporally distant siblings doesn’t provide much substance for the film’s argument that the President is the worst leader in U.S. history. And really neither does Obama’s presumed paternal problem, which borders on an obsession for D’Souza. Still, it’s a reflection of a certain concern Americans have with the singularity of the executive branch and our compulsion to focus on the individual character of our Presidents over the plans and actions of their overall administrations. Eventually, 2016 does get into real criticisms with Obama’s initial election, which is basically credited to white guilt and the allure for people to be a part of history, and with his first term, which, it’s claimed, shows hints of a larger anti-colonialist agenda. A shot at the relevancy of NASA seems especially misdirected given the excitement of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars earlier this month, however. And further speculation of the President’s full-on dismantling of the U.S. as a superpower once he’s over the hump of re-election is again too hypothetical. Meanwhile, given the concentration of the Romney/Ryan campaign, it’s unfortunate that only a couple minutes near the end of the film are devoted to Obama’s handling of the national deficit. Of course, this isn’t a documentary in support of Mitt Romney or any Republican candidate so much as it’s an extensive attack ad against Barack Obama. It should illuminate just how much of a repeat this election year is of 2004. Then, it wasn’t about voting for Kerry; it was about voting against Bush. Now it’s just politically reversed, not about voting for Romney but against Obama. And if Romney does win, someone, whether Michael Moore or another liberal filmmaker, will give us the next documentary in the cycle of opposition. If there is one major thing I’ll give 2016 credit for, it’s that much of the film plays almost as well to a pro-Obama audience as to those against him. It preaches to both choirs in that a lot of the intentions and policies of the President, which D’Souza sees as negative, are those which the leader’s fans see as positive. Much of the left would surely love it if Obama truly transformed the United States into a nuke-free nation with socialized medicine and education. Some might watch this documentary and think, “well, yes, that’s our Obama.” Of course, there is the occasional blast of clear vitriol, such as when the President is baselessly said to be less concerned with helping the poor than stripping the wealth of the rich. But that’s to be expected with these films, which are less concerned with what kind of President is good for America than what kind of President is not. And I’m sure it’s expected of me to be less focused on what would have made this a good film than what makes it a bad one. I can only say it’s not a very memorable one, and regardless of the outcome this November, after Election Day I guess it doesn’t need to be. Christopher Campbell is an Atlanta-based movie blogger specializing in documentary. Follow him on Twitter @thefilmcynic . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Demi Moore has reportedly moved on from Ashton Kutcher, as recent reports link her to actor Martin Henderson . But might the actress soon revisit her past in an explosive tell-all? Books & Review sources say Moore has agreed to a $2 million deal with HarperCollins to author a memoir. The question now remains: On what/whom will it focus? One insider says Moore pitched the idea herself and will center the book on her complicated relationship with her mother, but another tells The Daily Star : “She’s going to blow the lid on her six-year marriage to Ashton,” while a final mole reveals: “She’s planning to spill all the juicy details on her addictions, her meltdown and her marriages.” Regardless of the topic and the release date and really any details at all, the memoir is already generating a great deal of buzz. Unfortunately for Demi, the same can be said of Kutcher’s new relationship: He’s totally nailing Mila Kunis .
