Casino Jack and the United States of Money. (2010, MC-68) There’s a fine phalanx of committed documentary filmmakers working today, really making sense of vexed public issues, offering an antidote to Michael Moore. Along with two Jareckis and Charles Ferguson, Alex Gibney is one of the best. I found Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room both illuminating and infuriating, and Taxi to Dark Side definitely earned its Oscar, for its patient, thorough evisceration of Cheneyism. Now he turns his attention to the most pressing issue of current American politics, the complete takeover of the electoral landscape by the power of concentrated wealth, the insidious and pervasive influence of campaign contributions. Following the cohort of Abramoff, Rove, Reed, and Norquist from their College Republican days though their rise as idealogues of the Right to their full realization of the complete identity between their ideology and their own financial benefit. If you want some idea of how the vortex of money and power swirls in Washington, flushing our democracy down the drain, this film is an excellent place to start – informative, inventive, funny, and well-paced. I will warn you, however, that at the end of it, my first reaction was, “That movie makes me want to go out and burn something down.” The competing feature, also called Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey, will be out by the end of the year, and will have to go some to better this documentary.
Gibney also directs My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010, now on HBO, dvd date as yet unknown), which he turns into much more than a simple recording of Lawrence Wright’s stage piece of the same name, based in turn on Wright’s research for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a Pulitzer Prize winner which certainly informed my understanding of its subject more than anything else I have ever read. On stage and on film, Wright is every bit as convincing as he is in print, and the film does an excellent job of marshalling images in support of his argument.
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