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Control Room isn't the only movie that explores the media's role in the present political climate -- there's also the straight-to-DVD Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism, which debuted last July yet still ranks on Amazon's Top 100 list. One scene in director-producer Robert Greenwald's film is a real blood-boiler: odious FOX News commentator Bill O'Reilly verbally lashing out at an amiable young man who had lost his dad on 9/11 but who disagrees with the warmongers in the White House -- an unpardonable sin in O'Reilly's beady eyes. It's a disturbing sequence, just one of countless in this film that hammers home the point that media mogul Rupert Murdoch's FOX network has never been anything more than a mouthpiece for the Bush administration. Of course, any thinking American already knows this -- even more than Fahrenheit 9/11, this is a partisan piece that largely reiterates what's already been stated many times. Still, that doesn't diminish the impact of the film's message, which is that such blatant propaganda has no right being passed off as objective journalism. Incidentally, Greenwald has proven to be a one-man cottage industry when it comes to new DVD titles that lambast the present administration, as he's also behind three other current home theater hits: Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War; Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2004 Campaign Edition); and Unconstitutional: The War On Our Civil Liberties.
Moving the battle further behind the scenes, Bush's Brain focuses on the man who's often been tagged this nation's "co-President." Based on the book Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential by James C. Moore and Wayne Slater, this depressing yet worthwhile documentary examines the entire career arc of Bush's chief advisor -- and confirms the suspicion among many of us that Karl Rove is indeed the most morally decrepit member of an administration that's bursting at the seams with vile characters. Rove has never met a nasty campaign tactic he didn't like, and this film shows how he used the foulest methods available to discredit various candidates' opponents (Ann Richards, Max Cleland, John McCain, among others) without any regard for the careers -- and, in some cases, lives -- he destroyed along the way. Both Democrats and Republicans alike line up in this film to diss Rove, and the movie concludes with a powerful 10-minute episode that eloquently focuses on one American family that lost a loved one to this ill-advised war. In short, this segment does something that Bush, Rove and their lackeys have repeatedly failed to do: treat the US casualties as individual human beings rather than as statistical fodder for the re-election campaign.
The aforementioned titles should appease plenty of Democrats and open-minded Independents. But standing on the other side of the political spectrum is George W. Bush: Faith In the White House, which was released on DVD the same day as Fahrenheit 9/11 but which hasn't come close to matching the popularity or success of Michael Moore's film. Billed on the DVD case itself as "An Alternative Program To Fahrenheit 9/11," the movie portrays Dubya as an emissary from God, handed the presidency by the Lord (rather than his Supreme Court cronies) so that he may rally the nation against evildoers of all stripes (presumably, that includes Democrats). A screener wasn't available before deadline, but in a New York Times piece, Frank Rich concludes that the film's most startling revelation is "the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil' from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring to a second term is left to the imagination, and Faith In the White House gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh."
As for other right-wing movies beyond Faith In the White House, they've primarily only been screened at Republican fundraisers, though I imagine a couple might be available through direct-mail from the distributors. Some have championed Bush while others have denigrated John Kerry; many, however, have ignored both men in favor of blasting Michael Moore. Reviews for these films were difficult to track down, though one person did state on his website, "They were all so bad, so boring, so right-wing, no one wanted to watch them... a sad waste of good videotape."
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